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Chapter Text

Josh met Donna in the winter. February, to be exact. It was New Hampshire, which meant that snow had piled up outside the headquarters and clouds were draped across the sky overhead, temperatures low and biting. As he walked her to the campaign bus that very first day, she pulled her puffy jacket tight around her body and buried her face in her scarf.

“You are from Wisconsin, right?” he asked.

“I am,” she said, muffled.

“And isn’t it, like, cold there?”

She looked at him from beneath the rim of her hat. “Your point being?”

He grinned. “Shouldn’t you be used to this?”

“Yes, which is why I’ve dressed appropriately,” she said. “You have to guard against the temperature, Josh. Frostbite is no joke. ”

“Yeah, but—” Josh blew into his hands. They were standing outside the bus now, waiting even though no one else was going in. “You don’t have any sense of, I don’t know, Midwestern pride or something?”

She rolled her eyes. “Midwestern pride means not acting like a baby about having to wear a coat, that way you can keep your dignity instead of bouncing up and down to stay warm.”

Josh made himself stop bouncing. His mouth may have fallen open a little.

“See,” Donna said, “that’s the problem with you—where are you from?”

“Connecticut.”

“—you Connecticut people,” she continued without a breath. “Your pride makes you do dumb things like coming outside without a jacket or scarf; my pride makes me take my mortality seriously.”

“I take my mortality seriously!” Josh scoffed. “Case in point, I’m flying to Charleston when the skies clear, instead of driving on icy roads in a bus for fifteen hours, like some people.”

“And whose fault is it that I’m on the bus?” Donna asked.

“Yours!” Josh answered, nonplussed. “You literally showed up to work the campaign today, of course you’re going on the bus and not the plane. And not for nothing,” he added, “but a lot of bosses wouldn’t have put you on that bus at all.”

“And I’m very grateful that you are not those bosses,” Donna supplied, a faint smile showing above her scarf. Josh tried not to notice that the tip of her nose had turned pink. “Does this mean I’m officially working for you?”

“It means—” Josh sputtered for a second. “I mean, I gave you my campaign badge, so—” Not that he had the authority to hire someone without campaign finances officially knowing—how was he going to get out of this one?

The doors of the bus swooshed open. Thank god; otherwise Josh would’ve hired her on the spot for the second time that day.

“We’re heading out in a minute,” the driver called down. “Already arriving late as is. Are you getting on or not?”

“I am!” Donna said. She turned back to Josh, pulled the scarf off from around her neck, and held it out to him until he grabbed it, blinking dumbly. She smiled. “See you in Charleston.”

Josh watched as she climbed the steps into the bus and disappeared down its aisle without looking back.

“Sir?” the driver prompted.

“Yeah, I’m staying here,” Josh said. He breathed out, shook his head, then turned on his heel and walked back towards the office, scarf still clutched in his hands.

They’d spent countless winters together since then. Although that’s not true, actually—Josh counted every single one.

Sometimes, in D.C., she would borrow his coat, slipping it on to go outside. “It’s warmer than mine,” she told him, and once he responded, “You can’t buy your own warm coat?”

“I can,” she said, gathering up papers from her desk and bringing them to his to sort.

Josh followed her. “So why don’t you?”

“Because I like wearing yours,” she answered, then set the papers down. “I’ll be back soon with lunch.”

“I want a hamburger,” Josh told her, again trailing behind her as she left his office.

“I know,” she said over her shoulder. “Extra burnt.”

“Hey, I like ‘em well done,” Josh said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Donna replied. “Positive thoughts, champ.”

“Okay, now you’re making me feel dumb.” Josh swung in front of her, stepping into the doorway so that she couldn’t cross.

“I wonder why,” she said blandly.

“I’m just saying—”

“Excuse me, you’re in the way of our lunch,” she interrupted. She pressed a hand to his chest and he moved aside accordingly, his mind suddenly empty of thoughts or faux-annoyance, washed of everything except hand hand hand and the fact that she smelled like a mixture of her shampoo and the cologne from his coat.

“Right,” he breathed, already feeling out of earshot as she went on down the hallway. He lingered in the doorway a minute, giving his brain a second for necessary recalibration before glimpsing Toby hustling by.

“Hey, Toby!” Josh called out, intercepting him.

“If Ashman doesn’t get his act together, I swear to god I’m this close—this close—to finding a primary challenger for him,” Toby muttered, pinching his fingers together.

“Yeah,” Josh said.

“I mean it,” Toby continued. “We don’t need any of that wishy-washy stuff right now ‘cause what some people might not realize is that we’re actually trying to run a country here!”

“Okay,” Josh agreed, walking with him. “Donna’s getting me lunch.”

“Well, I’ve got three more meetings before lunch,” Toby said, “one of which is with Ashman’s idiotic co-conspirator.”

“She’s wearing my coat right now.”

“Who is?” Toby glanced at him.

“Donna.”

“And what am I supposed to do with that information?” They were at Toby’s office now, and Josh hovered by the doorframe as Toby scanned a file on his desk.

“I dunno,” he said honestly.

“Ginger!” Toby shouted. “Ginger, I need the—the thing!”

“She has her own coat,” Josh said.

“What are you—Ginger, the NEA thing!”

“She said she likes wearing mine.”

“Honest to god, Josh, do you have work to do?” Toby asked.

“Yeah.” Toby stared at him, and Josh exhaled, running a hand through his hair. “I guess I’ll go do that, then.”

“You guess? Swear to god—Ginger! The NEA! My guy’s coming in two minutes, I need the—” Josh pushed himself off the doorframe and headed back to his office. Behind him, he heard Toby shout, “Real country we’re trying to run here!”

Winters were dreary, sometimes. Gray skies and short tempers, new congresspeople to get used to and, always, the feeling of another year slipping them by. But then—then—there was this:

Holidays with Donna, Christmas morning phone calls that fell into nights together with takeout Chinese, blinking lights strung up around all the doorways but his. Drinking together on New Year’s Eve, sprawled out on couches at one staff member’s place or another’s; dancing closer than they ever mentioned come morning. Some years they exchanged gifts, wrote inscriptions in antique books; others, Donna gently turned the radio down outside his office, tugging him past lines of carolers warbling beyond.

There was the way Donna’s cheeks flushed in the cold. How, once, when they were leaving work together, he put his arm around her and she slipped her hand into his pocket. The days when snow had fallen too high, too fast, so he drove her home, waiting until she’d gotten safely inside before pulling away. The second inauguration, snowballs exploding against the window, the cramped car ride to the ball. There was winter, and there was Donna in winter, and always, tucked away somewhere, was the fact that as each winter passed and passed, Josh only fell for her harder.

Chapter Text

Donna came back in April. She walked through the door with a pink blouse and widened eyes, and all Josh could think was Thank god. He told her that there was a pile of stuff on the desk, but while it was true that her presence was absolutely necessary to keep his office from imploding, it was also true that that wasn’t the reason he was suddenly taking his first full breath in days.

“The newest poll just came in for Ohio,” Donna called out to him one afternoon, six days after she’d come back.

Josh looked up from his desk. “How’s it looking?”

“It’s from the AP, they just put it out.” She leaned next to his chair, and he caught a sudden hint of a flowery scent that hadn’t been in the office for— “We’ve gained four percent,” she said.

His eyebrows shot up. “Yeah?”

“And it’s from all over, not just the cities.” Donna beamed. “Hang on, I wrote down the exact breakdown—”

“You know what this means, Donna?” Josh asked, standing up. 

“We’ve moved up in Highland County, Mercer, Jackson—and obviously Dayton and Columbus—”

“Oh yes, we have,” Josh said. “The good people of Ohio are here for us, Donna! You know why? Because we—” he thumped his chest— “are here for them!”

Donna laughed faintly, shaking her head. “We’re down in Belmont, though—”

“Yeah, that’s where the idiots are.” 

She glanced up. “Do you even know where Belmont County is?”

“It’s in Ohio,” he said. “Come on, Donna! This is good!”

“It is.” She grinned, and he slung an arm around her shoulders, pulling her away from the desk. “C’mon, let’s see if Sam ate all the pizza.”

She followed him easily. “Did you order the one I asked for, with the mushrooms and spinach?”

“Do you like punishing yourself?” he asked.

“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to eat vegetables every once in a while.”

“Okay, okay,” Josh said, holding his hands up. “I ordered it for you, just don’t make me eat it.” He opened the door for her, feeling a kind of warmth spreading in his chest as she passed him, saying something about the importance of the vitamins in spinach. His cheeks hurt from smiling. But it wasn’t—honestly, he’d been fine when she was gone, and so it wasn’t like the energy buzzing through him had anything to do with her laugh, or the light sweater she wore to fit the April breeze. He was just happy about Ohio, that was all.

At the big table in the middle of headquarters, she handed him a slice of spinach-and-mushroom, and he ignored the way their hands touched each other on the bottom of the paper plate, the way his stomach twisted at the feeling. Ohio and the good weather. That was all.

The next year, on the anniversary of her return, he gave her flowers. A big bouquet, with bright green stems and wide blossoms that were purple and white and pink. It was more of a struggle buying them than he had anticipated. He’d initially planned to swing by a florist shop either after work the day before or in the morning on the day of, but, as it turned out, most stores were only open from nine to five—normal hours, that is, and Josh decidedly did not work normal hours.

He’d mentioned the conundrum to Sam, who’d said, “Couldn’t you just get her flowers from a grocery store? I mean, the one by your place is open basically 24/7, right?”

“I’m not getting her grocery store flowers,” Josh scoffed. “That would defeat the whole purpose.”

“The purpose being…?”

“You know,” Josh said. “That she left and then she came back. Her assistant anniversary!”

“Right.” Sam frowned. “How do grocery store flowers defeat that? They’re cheap, they’re easy to buy… isn’t the prime criteria that they’re still, you know, flowers?”

“It’s different,” Josh said. “Anyone can buy grocery store flowers.”

Sam glanced at him. “And you don’t want to be anyone to her?”

“What? No, that’s not what I—” Josh shook his head, laughing. “C’mon, Sam, that’s not what I meant.”

“Okay. It’s just what you said, so…”

“It’s Donna,” Josh said. “I’m getting her flowers as a joke! ‘Cause she left and then she came back and I know it’s going to piss her off that I’m reminding her about it.”

Sam nodded. “And grocery flowers wouldn’t do that?”

“Nah,” Josh said, biting his lip. “I’m gonna go back to my office now.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Good luck with the flowers.”

“Thanks.” He laughed again, then headed off, still rolling his eyes internally over Sam’s suggestion. The flowers didn’t mean anything, was the point, and, yeah, maybe it looked a certain way to people who didn’t know them—and Sam, too, apparently—but that didn’t actually say anything. Or, like, even if it did, it was just flowers. Which was probably more effort than her actual boyfriend at the time had put in, but if that’s what she extrapolated from this whole thing, that wasn’t his fault. And if Sam read into it too, well, it’s not like Sam had any real luck in this category either. He’d been with a call girl for god’s sake.

Josh blinked hard. Not that he was thinking about Donna like Sam thought about Laurie. He was Donna’s boss. He was getting her flowers because he knew that would bother her. If a small part of him did still think of that April day as the time he got her back, the time he realized there was a chance, a real chance, that she could stay?

Then no one would realize but him and her, and chances were she’d be too pissed off to think about it. (Only late at night, after the big bouquet had been delivered to his door and he was putting it in a vase he didn’t even know he owned in order to keep the flowers fresh the next morning, did he allow himself to imagine her expression if she did think about it. If she smelled the flowers and kept them on her desk and considered what they might really say.)

So that was April, and it stayed that way, year after year. The cherry blossoms would bloom and a faint breeze would blow through the stale air of the West Wing, and Josh would give Donna flowers.

The beginning of spring, before April, could be hard. The beginning meant March, and March was tied hugely, inextricably, to the day he lost his father. The Illinois primary that cut to a desolate flight to Connecticut, tear tracks drying across his cheeks; the cemetery where the grass was newly softening as birds flew shrieking overhead. Gone at just the start of the season and just the moment that Josh had begun to really make it, every spring after that year marked yet another new beginning his father would never quite see.

But March passed, as it always did, and after it came April, with its flowers and perfume and blazing red lights. April, with his first full breath in days.

As the weather grew warmer, Donna sometimes took off her cardigan and left it draped against the back of her chair—or, just as often, stranded in his office, where it would catch his attention enough that he’d get distracted and end up having to claw his mind belatedly back towards the strategy meetings he was in the middle of.

Spring with Donna meant her sneaking him allergy medicine despite his protests that his sneezing had nothing to do with the pollen count; it meant standing by the window together to watch a bird building its nest, and arriving at his desk one morning to find her dropping little crumbs out onto the sill.

Spring rains, and she would come in shaking her umbrella over the carpet, little droplets of water beading her hair. In May thunderstorms, they’d walk out of the office together and sprint to his car with their heads ducked low; as the rain poured down, she’d stay in the passenger’s seat long after they arrived at her place, laughing loud enough to drown out the thunder.

Donna, slipping a flower from his bouquet behind her ear after she thought he was gone for the day; he never told her he saw.  Her face golden in the lengthening days, the way she unfailingly changed his clock for Daylight Savings, how she complained about the D.C. mud and squelched it across his office with the back of her shoe. He’d hoped she’d come back, that first April, and every spring after that he was just glad that she’d stayed. The trees flowered and the grass shot up, and spring after spring he saw her and was able to breathe.

Chapter Text

Summers in D.C. were hot and humid. Stale air settled in the corridors, fans whirring atop desks and air conditioning units rattling in the windows. It would’ve been a relief to leave the stickiness of the West Wing if the whole region outside hadn’t been worse, campaigning through the countryside as the sun beat down around them.

“Could it get any more miserable out here?” Josh said one July day, during their re-election bid, as he perched on a folding chair in the middle of a Virginian town square. “I think I can actually feel my skin melting off.”

“Did you put on the sunscreen your mom sent you?” Donna asked. She was next to him, fanning herself with the paper itinerary she’d been carrying around all day.

“I left it in the package,” Josh said.

She swatted his shoulder with the schedule. “Josh! You could’ve given it to me if you weren’t going to use it.”

“How was I supposed to know you wanted it?” he asked.

“I have alabaster skin. I always want sunscreen.” She settled back into her chair, still looking at him reproachfully. “And your mom has good taste in these things, too.”

Josh rubbed at his forehead for a second. “Are we not going to talk about how it’s weird that you know that?”

“It’s not my fault if I know what she sends you after you ask me to, and I quote, ‘deal with all the crap on the desk.’”

Josh could argue that “deal with” didn’t mean “look through, judge (albeit positively), and commit to memory.” He could argue that it was, in fact, objectively weird that she knew these things (though it was far from the weirdest thing about their relationship, and he didn’t have any desire—or rather, he had a distinctly negative desire—to delve into that). He could argue a lot of things. Instead, he sat there in the July sun, somewhere in Virginia, and he made phone calls through her cell (his was dead), trading whispered comments with her about the President’s speech, and the day after they returned to the White House she found a bottle of good sunscreen on her desk.

That was another thing they didn’t talk about.

The first summer they’d spent together was during the initial campaign, finally having sealed up the Democratic nomination in all but actuality, their sights now firmly set on the real opposition. Donna was a part of the team intrinsically by then, her unconventional joining and brief disappearance so far gone from everyone else’s memory that Josh—though he remembered, how could he not?—felt justified in his automatic reliance on her, his unquestioning assumption of her continual presence. Each morning the first rays of sunlight glinted molten in her hair, and every evening the crickets outside whatever hotel they were at that night thrummed a chorus to the beat of their laughter as she lay curled up amid the forgotten polling papers strewn around his room.

That summer was sticky and exhilarating and exhausting, spilling with photo ops in charming downtown ice cream parlors and afternoons spent packed in the sweating campaign bus as it heaved its way from one state to the next. Later, Josh could never say he missed the campaign, and he would certainly never trade it for actual governing—although that seemed to involve a fair amount of campaigning too, somehow—but he would also remember parts of that summer with a clarity and burst of fondness that far exceeded the usual blur of such things.

There was the way his thighs stuck to the seats of the bus in the heat, and he would’ve stood up, peeled himself off to pace the aisles like he always had before, but Donna’s head rested on his shoulder, and so he stayed stuck to that seat for three more hours, watching her breaths land upon his shirt. There was the way she piled her hair on the top of her head when the humidity got to be too high, and once, lying next to him in a hotel bed that neither of them had truly claimed, she tried to braid his too-short hair, wheezing with laughter and knocking his hands away until he lay back and let it happen.

One afternoon, hands slick with the condensation of an icy water glass at a diner in South Carolina, he blew his straw wrapper at her, missing terribly, hitting C.J. in the ear, and igniting such a battle among staffers that Leo threatened to fire them all. (“I’ve done it before,” he’d growled, and then Toby blew his own wrapper right into Leo’s forehead, a rare smile on his face. None of the staff made eye contact with each other for the rest of lunch, fearing laughter that would drown out Bartlet’s campaigning.)

“You know,” his mother said to him that August, as he rambled on to her from the comfort of the New Hampshire headquarters on one blissful night off the road, “all I ever heard from you when you worked for Hoynes was the numbers. It’s nice to hear about the rest of it.”

“What rest of it?” he asked, bewildered. “I just told you the numbers. We moved up three points in Colorado, but Pennsylvania—”

“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “Of course you know the numbers. I just meant—” She paused for a second, and he could nearly see her, back in Connecticut, eyes crinkled, scanning the ceiling as she worked out her words. She started again. “You’ve never told me before about the other things when you’re campaigning, everything you were describing just now. The hotel breakfasts and the singalongs and the pick-up basketball games…”

“I didn’t know you wanted to know that kind of stuff,” Josh said slowly, shaking his head. He had no idea what was happening. “And, Mom, obviously you know more this time around, I’m with Sam and Leo; it would be weirder—scratch that, it would be concerning—if you didn’t.”

She laughed. “I’m saying I’m happy for you, Joshua.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t heard his mother laugh very much recently, not since his father had gone in March, and it lightened something in him now, made him want to keep making her laugh, keep making her happy, keep somehow muddling through the role he had strangely been cast in, the solid half of the family unit that he held now atop his shoulders. He was one half and she the other, as if the two of them on their own could ever make it whole. “Okay. Thanks, then.”

“It’s been ten minutes since you’ve mentioned the polling data,” his mom continued. “And in those ten minutes I’ve heard about Donna and C.J. and Toby and, yes, obviously Leo and Sam, and the Governor, too, and what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t know a single name besides Hoynes back when you were working his campaign.”

“Well,” Josh said, “that’s, you know—” But then Sam rapped on the partition next to his desk, and he looked up to see him holding out a sheaf of papers, and the window for this strange conversation was past. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’ve got to go.”

“Say hi to Donna for me,” she said, and he absentmindedly agreed, going on to exchange their goodbye’s, talk soon’s, I love you’s, and hanging up before it occurred to him to wonder why, of all the new names she had apparently heard from him, that was the one she chose.

Donna’s favorite ice cream was fudge swirl, or chocolate chip cookie dough, or black raspberry. She had loose linen pants that she liked to wear when it was hot out, and she was always losing her sunglasses, even when she swore she wouldn’t take them off her head. She burnt easily in the sun, got sleepy in the heat, and played a mean game of cornhole.

Donna in the summer was a balm, Josh thought once, as she somehow stayed clear-eyed above the mire, unaffected by the fresh-faced politicians making promises they couldn’t keep as the warmth of June buoyed spirits up only to sink them down by the end of August, when Congressmen and White House staffers ran ragged and trigger-happy under the sultry sun.

Donna in the summer was always shining, too, he felt, and a few times she even managed to drag him out of the office to see the late-setting sun sink beneath the clouds. Later on they sat with beers on his stoop, watching moths flit close around the street lamps and finding remnants of constellations overhead. She was bright and laughing and somehow always there—or maybe it was him, keeping near to her even as he told himself not to care—and she seemed to make each summer month swoop by, year after year, the days melting like glass across her smile.

Chapter Text

Josh was a nightmare in the fall, and he knew there was no one who saw that more than Donna. The season was about elections: campaigning, polling, and winning; endorsing others and waiting with bated breath to see which way Congress would swing. The days would darken and the leaves would change, and Josh would whirl from room to room, bluster and nerves, energy ratcheting up in time with the cooling weather.

“Donna!” Josh yelled from his office one day, as the night grew larger behind him.

Her face peeked around the door. “What is it?”

“I need new numbers,” he said. “The ones on CA-18, the Times already called it a toss-up, but Sam said that Sabato has new info.”

Donna raised her eyebrows. “The Sabato report? It’s on your desk already.”

“No, I—” Josh squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them. “I know it’s on my desk, I’m saying that I need the data that backs it up! I mean, what, you think I’m going to listen to any numbnut who says they’ve got a new prediction? I—”

“I’ll get you the numbers,” Donna said, cutting him off.

He exhaled. “Thank you.” His hands were somehow in the air, the frozen product of now-useless gesticulations, so he dropped them to the desk, staring back down at his memo.

“I’ll get them for you,” Donna continued, “in the morning.”

“Wh—that’s not—look, I’m telling you to—”

She held up a hand, but Josh barreled through, because he needed the numbers, the race was in question here, and they couldn’t back up the guy without knowing what his chances were, so—
Donna raised her voice. “I will do it in the morning, because it’s 10 P.M. right now, and somehow I don’t think Sabato is waiting for a call.”

Josh paused, recalibrating. His mouth was still open.

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Donna said. She did not need to recalibrate. “You’re going to finish reading the memo; you’re going to tell me what to pass on to Carol to give to C.J. for tomorrow’s briefing; and you’re not going to yell at me for things that I’ve already got a handle on.”

“I—” Josh blinked up at her, suddenly registering the darkness of the office, the way her hair shone in the shadows, the headache throbbing behind his eyes. “You’re going to call him tomorrow?”

“Josh.”

“Yeah. Yes. You’re right. Let me—I’ll finish this thing, and then turn in.” He craned to look out the window. “God. It’s already ten?”

Donna met his eyes for a second, then turned and walked out the door, fingertips trailing the frame.

Fifteen minutes later, Josh dropped a sheet of paper on her desk, notes scribbled halfway down the page. “You ready to head out?” he asked.

She glanced up. “The next train isn’t for half an hour.”

“I’ll drive you home.”

Donna bent back down, silent, and shuffled some papers neatly into place.

“Look.” Josh bounced up and down on his toes. “I’m sorry. I was in my head earlier, I shouldn’t have argued with you about something you were already on top of.”
“Tell me that I know what I’m doing and you’re always going to listen to me.”

A laugh blew out of him. “Donna.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he shook his head, hands sliding into his pockets. “You know what you’re doing, and I’m always going to listen to you.”

“Thank you, Josh, you’re so kind,” she said. The seal was broken, thank god, and she stood up, swinging her purse across her shoulder. “You’ll drive me home?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “C’mon, apparently it’s past ten already.”

She rolled her eyes, lips tugging into a smile. He grabbed her jacket from the chair. “Did you shut your window?” she asked.

“It’s October.”

“It’s getting below fifty tonight!” Donna crossed to his office, pulled the window down as a gust of cool air breezed into the room. “You’ll camp out in Sam’s office all day tomorrow if yours is chilly when you come in.” 

“A chilly October, and who believes global warming is real?” Josh said, following her.

“The President and your entire party.” Donna accepted the jacket from him, and they began the walk down the dimmed hallway, hands swaying beside each other.

“Also, hang on,” Josh said. “Who says camping out in Sam’s office all day is a bad thing?”

“A bad thing for him,” Donna clarified. “Great for the rest of us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Josh said. “Who’s driving you home again? Is it Sam? Or—wait, I think—it’s”

“My kind and generous boss who only yelled at me five times today,” she offered.

“It’s worse when you keep count like that,” Josh told her.

They slid into his car, and Josh pretended not to notice the way she nestled herself into the passenger’s seat, which was already adjusted just the way she liked; or how her eyes caught on the bobble-head Bambi bouncing on the dashboard, a joke gift she had given him after the whole missile-silo disaster.

He keyed the ignition and was just about to peel out of the lot when she laid her hand against his arm. Shut up, he told his heart as it jumped into high-gear.

Donna smiled at him, her fingers splayed on his sleeve. “Just a warning,” she said, and he could actually feel his pulse skyrocketing. “My neighbors really like their Halloween decorations.”

He laughed despite himself, throat strangely dry. “You think I’m gonna be scared of a couple of cobwebs?”

“They light up in the dark, Josh! You know how many times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night to a blow-up ghost cackling?”

“Too many times?” he guessed.

“Way too many,” she said. “My road is not for the faint of heart.” She took her hand back, folded it into her lap.

Josh backed the car up. His forearm, absent her touch, felt oddly cold now, which he steadfastly ignored. “Good thing I’m not faint of heart.”

They drove off, into the October night, and the moon shone high above them, and plastic Halloween decorations lined the buildings by the road, and Donna’s laugh sank smoke-like into the air. Josh wondered briefly, stupidly, inevitably, if he could bottle the wisps.

Fall was crackling leaves in front of the White House, plane rides over swaths of red-gold forest, the bite that entered the air when twilight fell. Election stress piled high as weeks dwindled to days, and then—once judgement had been passed—that strange period of relief or resignation, governing still to be done, lame ducks waiting to be put out to pasture. Apple cider and donuts in the lobby, clasped sticky in their hands as they rushed through their day, the time she thoughtlessly—delicately—brushed a leftover sugar granule from his chin.

“You know,” said C.J. one Thanksgiving night, three glasses of wine gone and the stem of another twirling between her fingers, “I don’t think it would kill you to ease up on it a bit.”

“What?” Josh glanced over from his spot on the couch. “I’m not even—you see Sam?”

“Not the game, idiot.” C.J. knocked Josh’s foot with her own and shifted to face him fully, turning her back to Toby, who was sitting beside her.

“I don’t follow,” Josh said. Sam shoved his shoulder then, cheering as the football spiraled into a daunting catch on screen, and Josh let out a whoop. “That’s how we do it!”

“I thought you were supporting the other team,” said Toby.

“Neither of them are the Giants, so neither of them truly have my heart,” Josh explained. “But that right there, that was a beauty, I mean, did you see—”

“I did.” Toby swigged his beer. “And I also see that your allegiance to the Giants is no less than Connecticut co-opting my team.”

“That’s not even—and I thought you didn’t like football,” Josh shot back.

Toby cracked the lid to another bottle. “I don’t.”

“I’m just saying,” C.J. continued, ignoring both the game and the conversation she was actively sitting in the middle of, “would it really be so hard to stop being fodder for the most basic page in the game?”

“Your language is a little mixed there, C.J.,” Toby offered helpfully, which earned him a kick too.

“I’m speaking to Josh,” C.J. informed him. “Watch your game.”

“C.J., I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Josh said. “Like, not even a little.”

“Would you think a little here, I’m talking about Donna.”

Josh blinked. “We’re sitting here watching a game and drinking to give our thanks to the people we colonized, just like true Americans,” he said. “What the hell does Donna have to do with any of this?”

“Carol told me she’s gotten questions about it.”

“About Donna?”

“About you and Donna. And look—” C.J. held up her glass as if to stop him from interrupting. “I’m not saying you have to admit or deny anything here, I’m just saying maybe you could, you know, tone it down a little.”

Josh leaned forward, set his beer down on the table. He could sense Sam and Toby fastidiously not looking. “Honest, C.J., there’s nothing to tone down. She’s my assistant, she’s my friend, she’s my—” He paused, because what was she? He didn’t want to know what anybody was asking, didn’t want to hear the questions Carol had gotten, and yet something in him desperately wondered what angle these strange sources were coming from, whether it was him who had been noticed or—somehow, maybe, just possibly—her, which would mean that there was something about her, in regards to him, that could be noticed, which would mean—

“Right,” C.J. said. “Let’s leave it at those two things, shall we?”

“Already done,” Josh muttered. Head spinning, he stared at the TV, the players dashing back and forth atop the artificial green. It was Thanksgiving, and his mom had sent him an orange-leafed wreath, and he was sitting in Sam’s living room to watch a football game before the world went to hell tomorrow, as it always did. He needed more beer, and he needed to never know what those reporters had been asking, and he absolutely needed to not think about Donna and the conversation they’d had earlier.

(“What are you most grateful for?” she asked. He groaned, and she said, “I’m serious, Josh!”

“You go first then,” he told her.

“My family,” she said, certain and strong as if that was the answer she gave any time the question was posed, as if she was regularly asked to list her thanks and so had developed a standard response.

“Same,” he agreed. “My mom.” He swallowed against the rest of it, the rest of the family that was left out, now.

She swatted his shoulder. “You can’t copy me.”

“I didn’t know gratitude had rules,” he replied, knowing she’d lightened the mood on purpose. “Way to get into the Thanksgiving spirit.”

“I’m also thankful,” she continued primly, “for my cat and my friends and my job.”

“In that order?”

“Killjoy.” Donna stood up. “You’ve got your one o’clock with Leo in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he said. Turning back to his work, he didn’t look up until he sensed her footsteps pause at the doorway.

Donna was glancing over her shoulder, and she said, quietly, clearly, “I’m also grateful for you.” Her eyes flickered across his face. Before he could respond, she continued: “Don’t forget to bring that report from Schulster for Leo to look at,” and then she was gone, back at her desk.

Josh sat there, memo open before him. Donna was grateful for her friends, and she was grateful for her job, and somehow her gratitude for Josh—her boss, her friend—fell outside of both those categories.

When he stumbled five minutes later into his meeting with Leo, his head was still spinning and his cheeks were damningly pink.)

Now, Josh sloshed his beer in its bottle and heard C.J.’s voice echoing in his mind, nowhere near strong enough to drown out the flame Donna’s words had coaxed, the warmth it was still spreading.

“Let’s go!” Sam shouted at the television. “You see that, Toby? Nothing like that happens in baseball.”

“You’d do well,” Toby said, “to shut up.” But his tone was soft and Josh knew, without looking, that the edges of his mouth would be curled up, eyes bright.

C.J. leaned closer to Josh and rested her head on his shoulder. “You know,” she whispered, just for him, “you could do a whole lot worse, too.” She squeezed his hand.

Each year on the day after Thanksgiving, as they hit the ground running again, the brief lapse into gratitude and pardoned-turkeys and singing choirs of children thoroughly forgotten, Josh and Donna would exchange leftovers, hers dished neatly into a Tupperware container, his stuffed into a reused take-out box. They would eat each other’s food for lunch, the one time Donna didn’t steal from his plate. Every year, Josh wondered how hers would have tasted fresh out of the oven, served at the dining room table day-of. Every year, he would count himself grateful he even got to have this.

Fall brought pumpkins stacked at every entrance to the White House and Donna asking Josh if she could take one home, just to brighten her place up. It was the orange sweater she wore, and the time she ordered a nutmeg-spiced latte and the smell lingered in his office for days.

Josh was keyed up in the fall, the whole team running on nerves and numbers and fumes, and somehow Donna could convince a spit-shined Republican to swap votes with her. Walkways were crowded with fallen leaves, the bane of the landscaping crew, the slippery reason for too many near-stumbles that ended in Josh and Donna’s arms around each other.  The wind blew in the fall, and Donna’s hair blustered across her face, and Josh busied his hands to stop himself from fixing it.

The fall came with busy schedules and desperate meetings, longer nights pent-up in the West Wing together as dusk fell early outside, stupid bets and silent six-month anniversaries.

Fall with Donna was loud and soft and bursting with color, the political cycle of the world tilting slowly, inexorably, towards another round with all the previous ones still left unfinished, the same wish burning in Josh season after season that some things, please, some things could just stay the same.