TITLE: Burning Buildings, Burning Bridges
AUTHOR: CazQ
RATED: PG
CATEGORY: J/D
DISTRIBUTION: please ask first for archiving/linking permission.
SPOILERS: Not much. Set in some pleasant imaginary season 1
springtime.
DISCLAIMER: C.J., Josh, Toby, Sam, POTUS, Donna and anyone else
you recognise here belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions,
Warner Bros., and NBC. I'm just playing with 'em.
SUMMARY: "What would you save from a burning building?"
FEEDBACK: Yes please - it's my first time <coy smile>. CazQ@tesco.net
NOTES: at end. Now read on...
*******
Burning Buildings, Burning Bridges (1/1) by CazQ
*******
"Come to lunch with me, Josh," she says, standing in
his doorway with a paper bag in one hand and a magazine in the
other.
"Well, I don't know," he replies, looking up from the
brain-achingly dull briefing memo he's been sent on the Kreutzer
Amendment to HR839. He waves at the stacks of papers on his desk.
"If you and I are both out of the office, who's gonna run
the country?"
Donna gives him a wide, warm smile and says, "Josh, it's the
first really pleasant day of spring, I might just possibly have
dropped by Dunkin' Donuts after I went to Subway, and you should
get some fresh air."
He rocks back in his chair, pushing away from the desk and
looking up at her. She stands there, clutching her paper sack as
if she were a kid on the way to the lunchroom at school. Her suit
is the powdery blue of a spring sky, early in the morning on a
clear day.
"I guess we could trust Mrs. Landingham and Margaret to keep
an eye on the country while we're gone," he says, and sees
her smile get a little wider.
*******
She's right, it really is a pleasant day. There's still a chill
and a fresh tang of rain on the breeze, but the cherry trees on
the Mall are starting to bud, the very slightest haze of green
appearing on the tips of the branches. He can't remember the last
time he sat out here and looked at those trees. He can't remember
the last time he played hooky from the office to sit out on a
bench in the weak spring sunshine and eat sub sandwiches with a
pretty woman.
" 'Is He Seeing Someone Else? Ten Surefire Signs',"
Donna reads out, flicking to the next page of her magazine.
"I can't believe you got me to leave my desk and have lunch
with you just so you could ignore me in favour of Glamour,"
he complains.
"Would you be more accepting of this if I were reading
Newsweek? Because I have that in my bag too," she says,
before nibbling at her Seafood and Crab Classic.
"No, because I already read that and I don't want Donna's
Reader's Digest version of Newsweek any more than I want edited
highlights of Glamour magazine."
" '1. Does he work late at the office on the slightest
pretext or even claim he had to stay there the whole night to
finish an urgent project?'."
"You know I would never hire another assistant on the side.
You'd notice as soon as she interfered with your filing system,"
he says, finishing his Subway Club and aiming the scrunched-up
wrapper at the trash can nearby. He pokes around in the paper
sack sitting on the bench between them and discovers that she did
indeed stop off at Dunkin' Donuts.
"Okay, fine," she says, turning a few pages. " 'Take
The Ultimate Glamour Personality Profile Quiz'."
"No. Absolutely not. Let me eat my donut in peace, woman,
for the love of God."
"Did you know Dunkin' Donuts sells 6.4 million donuts a year,
on average? That's enough donuts to circle the earth twice."
"Is that knowledge supposed to enhance my enjoyment of this
particular donut?" he asks, hiding his smile by taking
another bite.
"I think it's interesting," she says, still scanning
the magazine quiz. "Hey, Josh? '1. On that special one-year
anniversary, do you want him to a) take you out for a romantic
night of dinner and dancing somewhere classy, b) make you a
gourmet meal at home and serve it to you by candlelight, c) whisk
you away for a weekend somewhere foreign and exotic?"
"Who is this man and why have I been dating him for a year?"
he asks, licking donut sugar off his fingers. "CJ's gonna be
pissed if someone from the press sees me and my secret gay lover
of a year's standing out dining and dancing."
She squints over at him, trying for stern but just looking like
there's a giggle under the surface trying to break free. "Is
that b), then?"
He shrugs easily and goes back to work on his donut. Donna is
still nibbling away at her sandwich as if it's going to be her
only meal for days and she wants to make it last.
"2. What would you save from a burning building? a) your pet,
b) your Palmpilot, c) your favourite outfit, d) your journal?"
She looks up, startled, as he pushes himself up off the bench and
tosses the last chunk of donut towards the trash can. It falls at
least three feet wide.
"Josh, what -"
"What would I save from a burning building?"
She stares up at him as he takes a couple of steps back and forth,
snapping his fingers absently and bouncing a little too high on
the balls of his feet. She looks a little scared, but some little
bit of him he usually keeps a tight rein on still remembers the
acrid smell of smoke and how cold and wet the grass in the yard
was under his feet when he ran out there in his pajamas. The same
little bit that memorised the fire drills, escape routes and
muster points the same day they moved into the West Wing, the
same little bit that still can't watch 'Towering Inferno' or 'Backdraft',
the same little bit that always notices whether a room has smoke
alarms, a ground-floor window, a sprinkler system.
"It's just a question..."
He comes to a halt in front of her, runs a hand through his hair.
"You," he says, the word escaping him before he can
think about it. She looks up at him, her eyes wide, her mouth
slightly open, but she doesn't say anything.
He turns on his heel and sets off back to the White House. He
hears her shout his name, once, but she doesn't follow him, and
he doesn't look back. All the way back to the West Wing,
picturing her behind him, sitting under the green-misted cherry
trees with her magazine, her half-eaten sandwich and those big,
scared eyes.
*******
For once, Donna is late back from lunch. He has a feeling he has
something scheduled for 2:15. A conference call? A meeting? One
of the nebulous, important 'things' Donna keeps track of for him,
anyways. As she isn't there to badger him about it, though, he
feels he can get away with wandering the halls.
He doesn't feel like sitting still. He's rattled, uncomfortable
in his skin. It's like he left the door to a dark room unlocked
by accident and Donna slipped in and flicked on all the lights,
the glare hurting his eyes. He doesn't even know why he said that
to her. Actually, he thinks that maybe he *does* know, and the
implications of that are...things could get out of his control
here, easily, so easily. He's just managed to scare the crap out
of her and simultaneously reveal something better left unsaid,
hasn't he? Josh Lyman, multi-tasker extraordinaire.
When he reaches Sam's office, Sam's sitting there with his
gleaming wingtips up on the desk, mouthing sentences to himself
and waving a pen in the air like he's conducting a symphony. Josh
stands there and watches the show for a minute.
"We should include you in the tour," he says,
eventually, when there's no sign that Sam's ever going to notice
him. "Come see one of the crazies in daily contact with your
President!"
Sam curses and the pen goes flying. At least he doesn't fall out
of his chair. "Could you not, you know, do that when I'm in
the middle of writing?" he says, gracefully swinging his
legs down off the desk and ducking under the desk to look for his
pen.
"Didn't look like writing to me," Josh points out,
coming in to pace up and down the room, still clicking his
fingers as his hands swing at his sides.
Sam's head appears over the edge of the desk, glaring at him.
"I was *composing*," he says coldly. "In the
compositional stage of a delicate writerly process." The
last two words are muffled as Sam dives back under the desk again.
"Well, since you're not composing now anyway, what would you
save from a burning building?" The question feels thick and
difficult to get out in his throat, beneath the careful air of
nonchalance. He wants to hear Sam say something like "Cathy",
or even "my sister" - just not "my Palmpilot"
or "my favourite suit".
There's a yelp of pain as the top of Sam's head connects with the
edge of the desk on the way up. He slumps in his chair, rubbing
his head with one hand and holding the pen aloft in the other.
"This pen," he announces.
"No, really."
"Yes, really."
"You would save a cheap, plastic fountain pen you could
replace for two bucks from a blazing building? Not, like, your
laptop? Not even a real pen? You must have a Mont Blanc or
something somewhere."
Sam looks wounded. "This pen cost me at least three dollars,
I'll have you know. And as a matter of fact, I do have a silver
Mont Blanc my grandmother gave me when I graduated Duke. But this
is a good pen. My best ideas begin with this pen. Toby and I
wrote down the first draft of the Inaugural Address using this
pen."
"You have a lucky pen?"
"You have any more annoying questions you want to ask?"
Josh holds up his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay. I'm going."
As he swings out of Sam's door and into Toby's he hears Sam yell,
"Don't you have a thing in ten minutes? Josh?"
******
Toby is sitting at his desk, bowed over his laptop, fingers
steepled against his temples. He looks like he's praying.
"Toby, what would you save from a burning building?"
Toby glances up at him and then assumes his meditative position
again. "Go away. I am a busy man. I busy myself with the
business of this administration."
"You don't look busy," Josh points out, slouching
against the doorframe, stuffing his hands in his pockets to try
and still them. He finds what feels like a wrapped piece of hard
candy in his left pocket, and starts jingling it around with the
small change in there without even thinking about it.
"Busier than you," Toby replies, without looking up.
"I'll leave if you answer the question."
"Fine. Any building in particular?"
"Your apartment, I guess."
"I'd call 911, and be glad I keep everything valuable in a
safety deposit box at the bank," Toby answers.
"Well. You're no fun," Josh complains.
"No, I'm not. I am a person devoid of fun. A person focused
on the speech the President is going to give at the reception for
the Chilean ambassador on Monday night, to the exclusion of all
fun things. Now go *away*."
Toby rouses himself as Josh leaves and he hears the sound of
fingers rattling over a keyboard as he goes back to his own
office via the candy machine. On the way, Josh crosses paths with
the President and the ever-present bevy of Secret Service agents
- headed out to Manchester, he realises. That's right, tomorrow
is a Saturday.
"Josh," the President cries, beckoning him. Bartlet
appears to be in full Cheery Avuncular mode, judging by the grin
and the truly horrible golf sweater. "Josh, what do you
think I'm going to do this weekend?" He claps Josh on the
back and then rubs his hands together like a kid about to get his
Christmas presents. The grin gets even wider.
"Blind your golf partner with that sweater, thus ensuring a
win, sir?" he ventures.
Bartlet raises his eyebrows. "No. I am going to go and
please CJ by having my picture taken playing golf with Tiger
Woods and some people from Sports For Inner Cities. Mr. Woods
will hopefully refrain from kicking my ass on the grounds that I
am his President. Then I am going to spend the weekend in God's
own state, New Hampshire, with my lovely wife, and we're going to
enjoy the company of our youngest daughter for a couple of days.
It's the perfect opportunity for her mother and I to work on
grilling her and find out just what she's been up to lately in
that pit of vice and sin that men call Georgetown."
"Sir, doesn't the Secret Service keep Zoey away from all
Georgetown's dens of vice for you anyway?"
Bartlet winks at him. "I think Charlie has that covered,
actually, but it never hurts to put a little of the fear of God
into one's daughters just when they're starting to enjoy being
out of the nest."
They turn a corner and Josh hesitates for a second, but this
appears to be official Presidential down time, and there's that
itch inside him again that he can't rid himself of, a need to get
things straight in his mind, so...
"Sir, may I ask you a question?" Bartlet nods, glancing
over at him curiously. "What would you save from a burning
building?"
The eyebrows go up again, but Bartlet's been asked weirder
questions. "The First Lady," he answers, smiling now
rather than grinning. "I can replace everything else. Have a
good weekend, Josh," and with that he's gone, the cluster of
agents around him gently sidelining Josh and hustling Bartlet
through a door towards the back of the White House and the
waiting chopper.
Josh trails to a halt in the Presidential wake, and then wanders
back towards his office, the candy machine all but forgotten. It
floors him every time, the way Bartlet can say something that
would sound cornball in anyone else's mouth and make it sound so
right, so honest. The way the man can pierce right to the heart
of whatever's bothering you, by sheer chance or intuition, as
casually and as easily as if he's offering you a sandwich and a
beer instead of an important truth.
He blinks hard, and concentrates on his walk, on keeping the
right amount of swaggering energy in it so no one who passes him
in the halls looks twice. She didn't know, he reminds himself.
She couldn't have known what she was asking. She thought it was
just a...a question.
The phone is ringing as he walks in the door and it turns out the
thing he had scheduled was a call from Congressman Ackerman about
the steel imports thing. He swings his feet up onto the desk, a
la Sam, and talks, and when he gets off the phone and notices
that Donna's back, for once he doesn't call her in to arrange,
research or find anything for him. Instead he watches her,
craning his neck to see her at her desk, and notices that her
eyes look slightly watery, and that even though she never looks
up to see him watching her, there are two spots of colour high on
her cheekbones.
She blushes. He watches. And so the afternoon goes on.
*****
Donna leaves at 8:30. She comes in, coat already on, purse in
hand, to check that he's all set before she goes. She draws a
breath and opens her mouth like she's about to say something, and
then huffs it out like she's blowing away a bothersome fly and
disappears.
He hauls himself out of his chair and sticks his head out of the
door to watch her go. She and Ginger are walking briskly down the
hall together, their strides crisp and measured, hips swinging.
He realises Donna had looked like she'd touched up her lipstick
and combed her hair out, and wonders if they're going out
someplace.
He's meant to be going over the briefing he's been sent on how
their proposed white-collar fraud legislation is polling. Instead
he plays a little wastepaper basket b-ball, hops back and forth
between C-SPAN and CNN for a half-hour or so, makes paper
airplanes out of the front covers of the Wall Street Journal and
the Washington Post, and, when he can't think of anything else to
do in the way of disassociative behaviour, he goes to pester CJ.
She's watching CNN with one eye while the other's on whatever she's
typing up at her desk when he shows up, which isn't promising,
but he comes in and flops down bonelessly on her couch anyway and
waits for her to notice him.
"Something I can do for you, Josh?" she asks after a
minute or two, when Christiane Amanpour and her flak jacket have
disappeared and the anchor's moved on to an interest rate cut by
the Bank of Japan.
"CJ, would you like to be Christiane Amanpour when you grow
up?"
She pauses for a second. "Sure, why not? You think they sell
flak jackets at Tall and Elegant?"
He fiddles idly with his tie for a moment and then says, "Have
you noticed your fish is swimming backwards? I mean, fish aren't
meant to do that, are they? Is there, like, something wrong with
her?"
CJ clicks her tongue at him. "Don't say things like that in
front of her. We prefer to refer to it as her 'special' way of
swimming."
He watches Gail's stately retrograde progression round the bowl.
CJ watches him. "CJ, what are you afraid of?"
She spins her chair idly round, back and forth in half-circles,
leaning back away from the desk. "Right now? Never getting
to put the lid on and go home tonight because you're in here
being rude to my fish and asking dumb questions."
He pushes himself up off the couch in one movement. "Forget
it. I, I got a thing to do anyway -"
"Josh." Halfway to the door, he turns back towards her.
Her voice is gentler, tinged with contrition. "Seriously?"
"Seriously".
She spins a full circle this time before answering. "Screwing
up."
He coughs quietly with laughter. "You and everybody else in
this building. Nothing else?"
"Heights. Hate 'em."
"Yeah?"
She nods, goes back to swinging the chair back and forth in half-circles.
"Oh yeah. There's a reason I never sit near the windows on
Air Force One. You remember that photo opp we arranged up the
Empire State Building during the campaign?" She pauses, her
eyes flicking away from his face. "I, uh, didn't really have
a migraine that morning." Her fax starts to chirrup and beep
in the corner, but she ignores the sheets emerging from it.
"What about you?"
He shrugs, fiddles with his tie again, looking down at the silk
weave - maroon with little navy blue dots today. "Fire."
"I guess we both have pretty pedestrian phobias, huh? You'd
think one of us could come up with something more interesting. I
met a guy at a party at the leadership conference who said he had
a clinically confirmed phobia of knees. Or possibly bees. It was
a noisy party. Is something up with you?"
"No. I was just, you know, thinking about it today. Donna
had some ridiculous quiz she was making me do at lunch. It asked
what I'd save from a burning building."
CJ gives up on her half-turns and starts rocking the chair gently
backwards and forwards, eliciting a rhythmic protesting squeak
from it. "So? What did you save from the proverbial house on
fire?"
He takes a step forward to the desk, dabbles his fingertips in
the water in the goldfish bowl. Gail moves out of reverse gear
and comes up to the surface, nosing around expectantly for fish
flakes. "I, uh...myself," he says.
CJ looks at him blankly. "Okay. And what did the quiz have
to say about that?"
He shakes the water off his fingers and wipes his hand on his
suit pants. "I didn't put that as my answer," he tells
her, wandering back out of her office. Behind him, CJ sits
upright, the chair groaning loudly, and calls after him, but he
isn't listening. He turns back along the hall to his office,
shuts the door and turns out the lights. In the flickering glare
from the TV, which is showing a bunch of venerable Japanese guys
in suits, he sits down carefully and starts spinning slow circles
in his desk chair.
******
Days go by. He contemplates calling Stanley, but doesn't pick up
the phone. He eats, and sleeps when he can, and works, works,
works. He contemplates being gentler than usual to Donna, but
decides that would only freak her out more. Instead he is
deliberately difficult and shouts more than usual for a day or
two, which stops her looking at him all the time as if she's
trying to diagnose an illness.
Days go by. He roams the West Wing, looking for Donna. "Why
is it," he complains to the air as he passes through the
bullpen, "that Donna can always find *me* when she has work
for me to do, and I can never find her?"
Sam, who is standing outside his office holding a large package
and having a heated three-way argument with Cathy and a roller-blading
courier about something, nods at him. "They have *ways*,"
he says darkly, making a face at Cathy. "They know secret
assistant things. Things that ordinary man was not meant to wot
of."
"What?" says Josh, momentarily diverted.
"That's what I said. Wot of," says Sam, turning on his
heel and vanishing into his office clutching the package, Cathy
in tow and the courier gliding along behind.
He finds her in the copy room, having hunted her down through a
detection process involving Margaret, Charlie and an intern from
HR. She's leaning her hands on the machine, watching as it hums
and whirs and spits out sheet after sheet. The tiny room smells
overwhelmingly of hot copies and toner. She's singing to herself
as she does a little shuffling on-the-spot dance to kill the time,
but he can't make out the tune over the noise from the copier. He
walks up behind her, until he's just inches away.
"So *this* is what I pay you for. Copying. You know, I've
often wondered."
She actually jumps in the air. Not only that, she squeaks with
surprise. He's fascinated.
"Josh," she says crossly, spinning round, "could
you *not* do that to me?"
"Oh, Donna, we're running a superpower here. I have to get
my kicks where I can," he says. Then he realises he can
smell her over the acrid scent of copier toner. That's how close
they're standing. She looks up at him, her mouth still loose and
slightly open with shock, and he can smell her, a clean scent
like the budding cherry trees on the Mall after a rain shower,
and he kisses her.
She squeaks into his mouth again in astonishment, but it's too
late then, he's forgotten whatever it was he came to find her for
and can only think that *this* is what he came looking for. He
presses her up against the copier, which is still whirring away,
and he can feel the vibrations from the machine going through her
body and into him. She tastes of wintergreen Lifesavers, and for
a few seconds she kisses back, her tongue sliding against his as
her hands tighten round handfuls of his hair.
The copier beeps loudly behind her back as it finishes the job,
and then there's just silence and the sound of their rapid
breathing as she pulls her mouth away and slides her body out
from between him and the machine.
"Kicks?" she says, clutching with one hand at the
nearest solid object, a stack of paper refill boxes. His mind's a
blank for one awful moment.
"Donna, no. I...I didn't mean to, you know, do --"
"But you did," she interrupts, smoothing down her suit
with a shaking hand. "In the copy room? You've finally lost
your mind, right?"
"You participated!" he hisses, looking over his
shoulder at the half-open door.
She keeps running a hand over her clothes and her hair, as though
determined to get rid of the slightest wrinkle he might have
caused.
"You're my boss," she says finally.
"Really? 'Cause I always thought you were, I don't know,
Toby's spare assistant or something, I thought you just helped me
out 'cause you liked me." He's babbling and he doesn't know
what to say to her that will be the one right thing. He wants a
roll of wintergreen Lifesavers.
"You're my boss," she repeats, edging over to grab her
stack of copies off the tray and holding them to her chest, like
Joan of Arc with her shield raised. "You're the Deputy Chief
of Staff at the White House, and I'm your assistant. You were
graduating college when I was still in grade school. And you're
often a real jerk."
"Um...yes?" He stuffs his hands in his pockets and
starts playing with the loose change - no candy this time -
because otherwise he's scared he might touch her again.
She stands there and stares at him, biting her bottom lip.
"You have a meeting on the oil exploration thing in the
Roosevelt Room in four minutes," she says, and slips past
him and out the door.
Oh God. He doesn't want to spend the next two hours talking about
drilling test sites and Alaskan wilderness reserves. He wants -
he doesn't know quite what he wants. He wants to be able to think
about this clearly and want this without being afraid. He wants
to have *not* just made a colossal screw-up.
He'd save her from a burning building, he thinks, as he makes his
way out of the copy room and down the hall, trying not to meet
anyone's eye. The trouble is, she wouldn't need saving. She'd
probably do a pretty good job of saving herself and then chew him
out for being stupid enough to go back into the flames for her.
He really, really wants those Lifesavers now.
*****
Days go by. Days in which they do not, at any point, discuss what
he's come to think of as That Copy Room Thing.
His buzzer wakes him at 6:00 one Thursday morning, and when he
looks through the peephole he sees her, distorted by the fish-eye
lens, dressed all in black and holding a paper cup and a blue
folder.
He opens the door and waits for her to say something.
"You have a breakfast meeting with Senators Adelman, Jackson
and Weiss at 7:15," she says briskly. "You said you
wanted the new numbers on Kreutzer before you met with them?"
She steps past him and into his apartment and all he can do is
spin round to look at her, clutching his robe around him. She's
wearing a heavy winter coat and the spring weather must have
turned again while he slept - the door's still open behind him
and a cold breeze scurries in and winds round his bare legs,
raising goosebumps. He turns to shut it, looks back at her and
notices that her hair is darkened, the colour of ripe wheat and
flat against her skull.
"It's raining?" he asks.
She huffs exasperatedly. "Yes, Josh, you get an A for
observational skills. Here." She thrusts the cup she's
holding into his right hand and the folder into his left.
"You brought me coffee?" he says, his voice ragged with
confusion, sleep and disbelief.
"No, I brought you tea. It's herbal. It has ginseng in it.
Or possibly ginkgo? Whatever it is, it's meant to make you alert
without caffeine."
"I *like* caffeine," he says, but sees the frown lines
forming on her forehead and adds, "but thank you." She
nods and starts undoing the big black buttons on her coat. "Donna,
you couldn't have just had the stuff couriered over here? Or have
come in early and given me the numbers at the office before the
meeting?"
She shakes her head, pausing as she toys with the third button
down. "I guess so, but I just...wanted to make really sure
you'd have them in time to look them over."
"Oh," he says, at a loss for anything else. He sets the
Kreutzer folder down on a chair, takes the lid off the cup and
sniffs at the steaming liquid gingerly. It smells disgusting, but
he takes a sip anyway to humour her. It's sweet at first, but
with a sharp aftertaste when he swallows. He'd kill for a nice
oily, black espresso now. He needs it to deal with this.
It also occurs to him that he really wishes he was wearing more
clothes. "Stay there," he says vaguely to Donna, who is
still working clumsily at the buttons with her gloved fingers. He
shuffles into his bedroom and pulls on a pair of sweatpants so
that he's at least semi-decent under his robe.
When he emerges from his bedroom, revolting herbal tea in hand,
Donna has managed to unbutton her coat and take her gloves off,
but she hasn't taken the coat off. She's sitting on his couch,
hands folded neatly in her lap. She's also crying.
He sits down beside her, carefully not touching her, sets his cup
down on the end table and watches her cry. She's not at all noisy
or messy about it. She just sits there with the occasional
sniffle and gulp for breath, while big glossy tears run slowly
down her face and drip onto her wet overcoat.
"You're, uh, you're sorta leaking there, Donna," he
says, very gently, laying one of his hands over her two joined
hands.
"Josh," she says, pulling her hands out from under his,
"why'd you have to go and kiss me? We were doing just fine."
"Because...I wanted to? And because I thought you might want
me to too?" Oh God, he really is a jerk. A jerk who forced
unwanted sexual attentions on his subordinate in the copy room of
the White House. A jerk who's made Donna cry. Oh God...
"Of *course* I wanted you to too!" she wails, twisting
her fingers together anxiously. "But you still shouldn't
have, because...because of all those reasons I said in the copy
room!"
"Oh. Okay. Uh...does it matter to you that I'm older than
you?" he asks, wishing she'd look him in the eye instead of
staring at her hands.
"No..."
"Does it matter to you that I'm an incredibly arrogant
jackass on occasion?"
She thinks for a moment. "No. Although I reserve the right
to get mad at you when you are."
"And - just so I can be clear on this, 'cause it's pretty
early and I do my best thinking after sun-up - you wouldn't
describe that thing where I, you know, kissed you as a
disagreeable experience?"
"No. It was very...agreeable." She blushes again.
"Okay. So, the only *real* problem here is that I'm your
boss, and we work for the President of the United States."
"That was pretty much the gist of it, yes," she says,
scrubbing at her eyes with the backs of her hands.
He reaches over and brushes the tears off her face with the pads
of his thumbs. "I could fire you," he suggests.
"No you couldn't. You don't even know what meetings you have
scheduled for this afternoon, do you?"
"That's true," he admits. "Maybe I could trade you?
You know, you could go work for Sam and I could take Cathy?"
"I don't want to work for Sam," she mumbles. "I
like working for you. Sam's used to Cathy bringing him mochas in
the mornings, even if she does steal his donuts. And he knows too
many bizarre factoids of his own."
"Well, that pretty much closes off all available avenues. I'd
just better not kiss you again, I guess."
"Right," she says, turning her head to look at him
through the curtain of her water-sleek hair. There's a strand
sticking to her cheek, and he leans in to pull it off her skin.
That's when she kisses him. He combs his fingers through her
heavy, cold mass of wet hair and feels her cool little fingers
stroking the nape of his neck. He strokes his tongue against hers
and hears her make a little sweet sighing sound deep in her
throat.
"Oh this is so, so" - she breaks off to bite lightly at
his lower lip - "*stupid*, Josh, I mean, really
catastrophically dumb..."
"Yeah," he agrees, dotting little light kisses along
her jawline in a way that makes her shiver, although it could
just be the cold. "Leo's gonna decapitate us and put our
heads on poles in the Rose Garden as a warning to others."
"I'm not sure you're taking this seriously enough," she
complains, although she gasps as he flicks the tip of his tongue
lightly against her earlobe. "I shouldn't have come over, I
-"
"Donna Moss," he says, sitting back a little and
placing a hand on either side of her face, "we are smart
people. Or rather, you are smart people and you keep me in check.
We'll find a way. There's gotta be a way."
Her eyes are too big for her face, and he can feel her cheekbones
close to the surface of her skin as he touches her. She shakes
her head slightly. "No, Josh. There really isn't." She
says "There really isn't" the way he imagines she might
say "I love you", and he gets it. There really isn't a
way, but she came here anyway. There really isn't a way, but this
thing between them, that really is there, and it's no less real
and urgent just for being impossible too.
He sits back against the couch cushions, but he slides the
fingers of his right hand between the fingers of her left. There
really isn't a way, but he wants to think up a way to make one.
"Josh," she says very carefully, "you really would
save me from a fire, wouldn't you?"
"I'd try," he says, looking down at their joined hands
where his class ring gleams gold against her pale skin and
squared-off nails. He's dreamed about it a couple of times this
past week - running down hallways wearing pajamas, shouting her
name, smoke curling up under closed doors, the door handles hot
enough to burn his hand when he touches them - but this doesn't
seem like the right moment to say that out loud. The last thing
he wants is to scare her again.
"Trying is enough," she says, sighing and letting her
head fall to the side to lean against his shoulder. He feels the
cloth of his robe get damp against his shoulder where the water
seeps through from her hair. She looks younger than she is like
this, hair wet and slick to her head, her colour high, her eyes
still watery. He doesn't mind that. She isn't too young for him
underneath all that. She's picked up a lot of extra years,
somehow, under her skin. And then she says it. "Don't tell
anyone, but I think I might have a thing for my boss," she
says. She says it like she'd tell him some useless fact about the
principal exports of Mauritius.
"Well, that's convenient," he says, stroking his thumb
across the back of her hand, thinking about the day she turned up
in New Hampshire, all bloody-minded, wounded determination in a
crappy car, with fifteen bucks in her pocket. "Seeing as I
guess I might have...y'know...too. I mean, imagine if we'd been
stupid enough to fall for the wrong people. Can you imagine if
you were having to have this conversation with, I dunno, Toby?"
"There's a lot of people who'd say we were that stupid.
There's a lot of people who would enjoy reading about this in the
papers. People who'd call what you did in the copy room sexual
harassment and abuse of power. People who would *use* this."
"Do you feel harassed?" He waits for her to answer,
feeling an odd tightening in his chest. He's never felt this
urgent fear about a woman before. With Mandy it had been easy,
too easy. He'd bought her dry martinis and made her get into
arguments with him in bars, and the first time she called him an
arrogant fuck he knew they'd end up in bed together that same
night. There hadn't been this delicate flutter of fear, this
terror of making an irreparable mistake.
"Frequently, usually when you're yelling at me to find
something out for you five minutes ago and I've been at work for
twelve hours already. But no, I'm not planning on filing a sexual
harassment suit anytime soon. Even if the money would make up for
that non-existent raise I deserve."
"Well, that's gonna come as a relief to the White House
Counsel's office. And Donna, I know I have more enemies than is
at all healthy, but a lot of people don't know that we were. That
stupid, I mean. They still think we're just two incredibly smart
people who have a healthy, bantering working dynamic."
"I just...don't think I could keep this a secret until there's
a new administration."
"I could sabotage the re-election campaign so we don't have
a second term."
She looks at her watch. "You have that meeting in forty-five
minutes. I'm not calling three senators later today to explain
that you blew them off because we were discussing the
impracticality of you and me being...together." He notices
how she hesitates over the last word and wants nothing more than
to take her to bed, curl up with her under the blankets while the
rain falls outside and senators wait over stale croissants and
cooling coffee.
At the door, she looks down to get her coat-buttons through the
correct holes and says, "I'd go through a fire for you too,
Josh." He hears her say that the way she wants to, without
the indefinite article, inside his head, and wants again to make
her stay.
"Donnatella. Are we going to talk about this?"
She looks up, coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. "There's
nothing much to talk about, is there?" she says, all matter-of-fact,
the very model of the modern political assistant.
Shit. He feels a quick, painful constriction in his throat. This
is why he was satisfied to keep things with Mandy on the level of
fighting, fucking and politics. Because then there's nothing to
lose when you make your mistakes.
"So I guess we should just stop talking about it and get on
with it, for as long as we can," she continues, smiling
shyly now. "Because we're smart people. Can I come over here
tonight? We could get some take-out, watch Leo's thing about the
UPS strikes on Letterman, which I'm sure will be very romantic."
She leans in and kisses him as her words sink in, quick and sweet,
and that tightness in his throat melts away. "This way works
for me," he whispers, and she smiles and is gone.
He goes to the window and watches her run through the sheets of
rain to her car, and the thought of making their way *this* way
through the thickets of impossibilities ahead feels nothing like
a fire inside and everything like being saved.
*****
FINIS
*****
Wow, I never did that before. Does this mean I can no longer
pretend not to be a multi-fandom ho? <g>
My thanks to the Punkensab Two-Headed Monster and August, for
getting me hooked on the fic before I even saw the show; to EPur,
who inspired me to give it a go and loaned me Rollerblade Guy; to
Lena, EPur, Luperkal, Marguerite and Maria Nicole for boarding
the beta bus. And, as always, to YV, for existing. Thanks to *you*
for reading. I'd love to know what you thought. CazQ@tesco.net
http://cazq.freeservers.com
