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It’s because she likes you, and she knows it’s beginning to show, and she has to cover herself with misdirection.
Joey’s words echo in Josh’s head as he tries to fall asleep. He should have fallen asleep the second his head hit his pillow; he hadn’t made it home until a little after three in the morning, and before he’d met with Joey, he’d been almost falling asleep on his feet.
Actually, what he should be doing instead of sleeping is thinking about what Joey had said about the polling.
Dial it up, she’d said, and that was something that he should be thinking about, something that he really needed to be considering, because maybe she was right, after all.
It's just that he can’t get what she said about Donna out of his head, he can’t stop being distracted by it. Out of all the things he’d learned tonight—all the numbers, all the stats, all the districts that aren’t performing the way that he wants them to be—it’s what Joey had said about Donna that he just can’t get out of his head.
And, ordinarily, Joey is an extremely credible woman. There’s a reason that she’s regarded as one of the best in the field, there’s a reason they bother flying her out all the way from California on nights like this. Joey, however much she enjoys teasing him, enjoys arguing with him, enjoys telling him that his predictions are wrong, is very rarely wrong herself.
Which means that she wouldn’t have said what she said about Donna if she didn’t genuinely believe it; she wouldn’t have said anything about Donna, in fact, if she weren’t almost certain of it, because it wasn’t like she spent a lot of time with Donna, not in the grand scheme of things. And it wasn’t like she’d spent a lot of time with Josh and Donna together, either.
Well, and maybe that was the point. Maybe Joey wasn’t wrong so much as she was simply missing context. Because Josh wasn’t…well, he wasn’t always sure exactly how he would articulate his relationship with Donna. Because she was his assistant, yes, but to refer to her as his assistant felt like cheapening their relationship, felt like disrespecting Donna in some way, denying all that she was to him, which was so, so much more than that.
Because she was his best friend. She was the first person he wanted to tell when he had good news (provided he was allowed to share it—but Donna was often the exception to the line between senior staff and assistants; no one working under senior staff level was trusted more than Donna was) and she was the first person that he wanted to vent to when things were going wrong, because only Donna knew how to calm him down, only Donna knew how to make the world make sense again when it felt like it was spinning too fast for him.
And, besides all of that, it had been Donna that had nursed him back to health after he’d been shot; it had been Donna who had been there with him, every day, cleaning and re-bandaging his wounds, letting him squeeze her hand when it stung, curling up next to him when he needed to not be alone after a nightmare, staying with him, night after night, somehow knowing what he needed before he did. Donna knows him better than anyone else does; Donna has seen him at his worst--seen him at his worst several times over, in fact--and when someone knows you that well, it's only natural to bond, to build a closeness that might seem strange to everyone else, that other people might have to invent an explanation for.
Joey didn’t have that context for Donna; Joey couldn’t possibly understand all of that, couldn’t possibly know who Donna was to him, how close they were. Maybe Joey just simply didn’t understand, and so she’d projected, so she'd said something that wasn't really true.
Yes, that had to be it.
Because when he’d asked Donna, earlier, why she kept trying to set him up with Joey, she hadn’t hesitated, she hadn’t flinched. I think you’d make a nice couple, she’d said, and then she’d said something about towels or something, something very Donna, something that she couldn’t have possibly just made up right then and there, and that had been that.
And so Joey was wrong. She had to be. That was all there was to it.
But if Joey was wrong, why can’t he stop being distracted from everything that she'd said that ought to matter much more, everything about the polling and what they should do next, by what she’d said about Donna?
And if Joey was wrong, why had he felt a thrill of hope rise up in him as she'd spoken?
If Joey was wrong, why did he have the sudden, sinking feeling that he might want very badly for Joey to be right?
---
Donna had frozen, when Josh had asked her.
Why do you keep trying to get me to go out with Joey Lucas?
I think you’d make a nice couple, she said, and her whole heart, her whole body seemed to scream in protest.
But it was screaming for more than simply that reason, too, because Josh is still looking at her curiously, studying her, some kind of bewildered almost-hopefulness in his eyes that she has no idea how to interpret, and so she knows that she has to say something else.
She has to say something that will distract him, because he’s still on hold, on the phone, and if he keeps looking at her like this, it will be her undoing; if he keeps looking at her like this, in the warm lighting, affection in his eyes, trying for all the world to look like he’s teasing her, but having something encouraging, something almost like sincerity, in them too, threatening to overtake him.
If he asks her again, she will open her mouth, and it will all spill out. She has a sudden flashback to a moment in Sunday School, decades ago, now, a lesson about lying, a lesson about consequences. Be sure your sin will find you out, her teacher had read aloud from the Bible, before explaining what it meant, explaining that lies can grow bigger and bigger, like a hole stretched in a sweater, until one pull on a loose thread will unravel the entire thing.
If you got married, you’d be Joshua and Josephine Lucas-Lyman, she says, at last. You wouldn’t even have to get your towels re-monogrammed.
It works; it provides the distraction she’d been hoping for, because Josh is buying it, Josh is turning back to the phone, Josh probably isn’t even listening anymore.
Okay, is all he says.
She should feel happy that he's dropping it, that he's moving on, that he's not going to ask any further questions; she certainly shouldn't feel suddenly disappointed, like she'd lost an opportunity she hadn't even known that she was having.
And so Donna keeps her mouth closed for the moment, feeling bizarrely defeated.
She wonders if he’ll ever tug on the thread again.
She wonders if there will be any sweater left by the time he does.