Work Text:
Donna’s lying on the floor of Josh’s apartment. He’s on the couch, legs hiked up over the arm, and she’s stretched out on the hardwood floor beneath him. They’re passing the same beer between them — a sweaty green Heniken. The six pack, along with some shredded cheese, half a carton of eggs, and some rice pudding make up the entire contents of Josh’s fridge.
The air con is out. It broke last summer and he hasn’t called the super to fix it yet. It’s not supposed to be this hot this early in May. But it is, so Donna’s lying on the floor in just her camisole and skirt, staring at the molding on the ceiling of Josh’s apartment. Even now, at 1 am with the bay windows of his living room open and a box fan shoved in one of the ledges, she’s damp, head and skin pulsing the way they do when you’re hot, and dehydrated, and have only put half a bottle of beer in your system in the past twelve hours.
“You know, when Toby first told me, I thought – You’re going to think this is stupid, but I asked if he was in pain. I forgot. I mean I work fifty feet from the Oval Office and I kind of forgot that he was the president. I asked like…”
Josh passes the bottle down. She takes it without looking.
“You asked like he was a friend, or your dad, or your grandfather.”
“Yeah,” Donna says and takes the last sip of the beer, which is half their mingled spit at this point. She remembers blinking and seeing Toby’s face. The normal buzz of the office strangely gone from her mind, that thing he does where he almost rocks with devotion. The steady depth of his eyes and wondering how he can stand caring so much, caring the way he does, which must be more pressure than the weight of the entire ocean.
Josh groans off the couch and gets them another beer. He’s also still in work clothes, though his tie is missing and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled to his elbows.
How could he do this to me? That was the first thing Josh thought when Leo told him.
And he remembers the way the tea light flickered at dinner, guttural, sputtering out deep within its metal tin. His parents had come to town and he, a grown up adult with money and connections and something approaching taste, had taken them out to dinner. It was easier to get nights off back then and the place was nice, supposed to be hard to get into. Twice someone had approached them to say hello to Josh. And they’d met his parents and asked a work question.
All night Josh had been filled with the same feeling he’d had on the day of his graduation from Harvard and then Yale. That he’d made the grade. No one had ever asked Josh to achieve things. He’d seen classmates and colleagues crushed under the weight of familial expectation and that sort of angst was unfamiliar to him. Josh had put the bar there himself, a half-conscious decision that if his parents were going to have one child instead of two, that he would have to fill the extra space by himself.
He’d sat there – power-broker and attentive son, watching the remaining creme brulee ooze out from its cracked shell, half-pleased with himself for a second, when his father informed him that he had cancer. He’d been diagnosed three months ago. It was responding well to treatment and the prognosis was cautiously optimistic. They hadn’t, his mother added, wanted to worry him prematurely.
There had been no candles in the Oval Office, but Josh swore the light had flickered in the same way. How could he do this to me, he thought. And he looked at Leo first, because the President seeing what was playing out on his face would have been an insult, heaped on top of a bleeding injury.
Donna is thinking about the delightful way that Josh’s shirt is unbuttoned – three buttons past acceptable in any professional setting, when he sits back down on the couch. Their bodies now forming perpendicular, rather than parallel lines.
“You thought that because you’re a good person, Donna.” He hands her the beer so that he can run his face through his hands. “Which I don’t think is stupid.”
“Wait until you hear the second thing I thought, which was: if I think that, what about the voters?”
“The voters,” Josh echoes. “Fuck the voters.”
“Here, here.”
They don’t talk like this. Hardly ever. Because there are families in Michigan and single moms in Utah and little old ladies in Missouri and they all can be helped. It’s their country and the Bartlet Administration serves at their pleasure; it’s an honor, really. But right now, fuck the voters, fuck the press, fuck the opposition, fuck well – a very tiny bit, fuck the President too.
“Donna,” Josh says, “There’s gonna be an investigation, probably hearings.”
“I know. I was there when CJ announced the special prosecutor.”
“I mean there’s going to be lawyers. I’m going to have to testify. You’re going to have to testify.
We’re going to have to –. I mean everything’s got to be –. We’ve gotta be above board, you know.”
All week Donna’s been unmoored – moving with a swift current from the moment that Toby said, There’s a codename. It’s Sagittarius, like the constellation. Now she falls back into her body onto the hard floor of Josh’s apartment, into the May aftermath of a thunderstorm. She knows what Josh is saying and why he’s saying it.
Because there are cracks in the thing between them. She tells him to date Joey Lucas and he spends two days asking her and everyone else why she said it. Because he doesn’t even pretend to call Joey Lucas, or make her agonize over the wording of a possible, theoretical email he might send her.
Because she spent the summer cleaning his chest sutures and falling asleep on his couch and then she spent Christmas Eve holding his right hand as the doctor stitched the left. There was a going away party for an assistant deputy who worked in EOEB and someone said, “You and Josh are dating right?” and for a moment she had just blinked and said, “Josh?” and forgot to say of course not, he’s her boss. So later, when Josh comes up and puts his hand on the small of her back, leads her away saying he always forgets how fucking dull these things are and CJ has a bottle of sake leftover from the Japan trip in her office, there’s the hard, thin, thrill of satisfaction running through her.
Only later, drunk and unlocking her apartment door, did she think, Oh, we shouldn’t have done that .
This means:
Tonight, she is not going to follow Josh into the kitchen. He will not take the half-full bottle from her hands – the last of the six pack, and place it on the counter. They’re both a little drunk, which will still probably happen, though the rest won’t.
He will not place his hands on her hips, thumbs resting just above the waistband and back her against his fridge. The stainless steel of the door would be cool and her skin would be hot and so would his hands.
He will not kiss her – though if he did it would taste like beer and sweat and the aftertaste of adrenaline. His mouth edging down her neck and his hands slipping into the waistband of her skirt, so that she can feel them directly against her skin. She would arch a little then, into his touch – shoulder blades against the stainless steel, hip bones pressed into Josh’s hands.
“Donna,” He would say against her neck, though he won’t.
“Josh,” She would say back, trying not to gasp.
And then he would slide his hands down to her thighs and slowly start hiking the hem of her skirt upwards and – Donna abruptly terminates the fantasy. Because the point of it is that it’s not going to happen now.
Somewhere, Toby is slowly and methodically shredding a draft of the reelection announcement speech he’s been secretly working on for months. Sam is dragging policy initiatives into a complex labyrinth of folders on his desktop – out of sight, out of mind. This won’t be the campaign that they wanted, won’t be the second term that they wanted. Everyone is giving something up.
Donna, tragically, is not going to get to open the rest of Josh’s unprofessionally unbuttoned shirt.
Tomorrow she’s going to wake up early and go on a jog for the first time in forever. She’s going to call Jannette, her friend from Wisconsin who works in private consulting and she’s going to ask for the number of that nice guy she knows, the one she mentioned way back who works at the Department of the Interior.
Donna is going to set herself up on a date and she’s not going to tell Josh. She won’t dangle it in front of him until he gets irritable and assertive. One day she’ll slip out sometime around seven – she’ll get halfway through two drinks and a salad when the tug of guilt (and Josh’s phone call) will bring her back to the office.
“Where were you?”
“I was on a date, Josh. Is this important? Important enough to doom me to a lifetime of loneliness and I don’t know, purebred cats? Because that’s what you’re doing right now, you know.”
“I didn’t know that you were going on a date.”
“I didn’t know that I had to tell you.”
“You, uh, don’t. A date, okay sure. Yeah, this is important. Listen–”
And Josh will stop actively sabotaging her boyfriends, though he still won’t like any of them. And if someone, somewhere asks the question: Have you ever witnessed any inappropriate behavior between Joshua Lyman and his assistant? They will be on the right side of a certain line.
She’d once heard the White House Counsel say that the second best way to avoid perjury was to listen to your lawyer. The first was to have nothing to hide. Legally speaking, there are a lot of different ways to tell the same story.
“Tomorrow I’m going to call your super and have them come fix your air conditioning.” She says and finishes half of the beer.
Better for there to be no excuses. No way for him to come to her apartment when her roomate is out of town and say — Donna, it’s hotter than hell at my place. I keep forgetting to call the someone to fix the air.
“Tomorrow, yeah. Listen, I know we’ve got a lot of stuff to do tomorrow and I’m not saying it’s not going to be hard and I’m not saying it’s not going to be worth it, but can we just…can we just let tonight be tonight?”
Because, goddamn, he thinks Bartlet is the best man for the job. That has to mean something, right? That he’s the best man for the job — that he’s kind, and principled, and so fucking smart that it hurts — makes Josh, who’s never been anything but the top of his class feel like he forgot to do the reading, all of it, for his entire school career.
He’s the best man for the job, so they’re going to keep him there for an extra four years. Donna knows this, or she wouldn’t do this. It’s a thankless job, all late nights and early morning, horrible mess food and old coffee. He’s close to being a terrible boss and that’s not even to mention the lawyer’s fees they’re both about to shell out for.
Four more years, he thinks, and then it will be…well, he imagines he and Donna will be back here, passing the same damn bottle between them.
“Okay.” Donna says.
They can let tonight be tonight.