Chapter Text
There was a time, way back when Josh was recovering from Rosslyn, when the power had gone out.
It was late September, past when the temperatures ought to have started to drop, but it was unreasonably hot and muggy still, the air outside–not that Donna allowed Josh outside yet–thick and sticky, the way it always got in the dregs of summer.
But it was raining that day, the kind of downpour when the skies just can’t hold back the humidity any longer, and the rain finally breaks through the mugginess. It was just rain–no thunder or lightning, no violence–and so it was surprising when, in the midst of the rain, the power went out.
The first sign, of course, was the quiet, steady hum of the air conditioning grinding to a stop. It wasn’t yet dusk, so there weren’t many lights on in his apartment yet. He might not have otherwise noticed the small lamp on his bedside table going out, since it didn’t offer much light with the late afternoon light still streaming through his window.
Which is probably why Donna didn’t notice right away. He was used to Donna’s watchfulness, the way she was always aware of what was going on with him, usually before he was. And she was there, already–in his apartment–having come home–well, back to his place, he had to stop thinking about it as her coming home , so it wouldn’t hurt so much when she eventually moved back out–earlier than usual, to make sure that he was doing okay, but she didn’t come into his bedroom to check on him right away.
When she does come into his room, she’s frantic, and he recognizes in her the guilt that he’s seen only glimpses of, from time to time, the thought that–impossibly, from his perspective–she might not be doing enough for him, the fear that he still sees in her eyes that maybe he’s still not out of the woods.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize the power went out, because it was still light enough in here. It just got so quiet, and I realized the AC must have kicked off, and when I went to reset it, I saw the oven clock flashing. Let me open a window, let’s get it cooled down in here.”
Josh gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “It only just went out a few minutes ago, Donna. I’m fine. I haven’t even had time to feel warmer. Look,” he says, motioning down at his t-shirt, “I haven’t even started sweating or anything.”
Donna goes straight to the windows, halfway across the room, by his desk, and begins to open them. Even from his bed, he can see her hands still shaking a little, can still see the stress coming off of her in waves.
It’s only once she’s cracked the windows that she turns around, seeming to calm down a little when the light breeze from the rain outside starts to make its way into his room.
“Do you need anything?” she asks, the calm she’s trying to display belied by a little tremble in her voice. “The window should keep it from getting too hot while the power’s out. Hopefully it’ll be back soon.”
“Donna,” he says softly, “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.”
She just stands there, nodding, and then takes a deep breath, like she’s still trying to come down from the anxiety, still trying to believe him.
“Come here,” he says gently, patting the bed next to him.
She doesn’t move for a moment, but he keeps looking at her. “Come on, Donna, it’s okay.”
She’s tentative at first, leaving a respectable amount of room from where she crawls in on the side of the bed that he now thinks of as hers, to where he’s lying on the other side, but he reaches out, tugging on her arm to pull her closer, and it doesn’t take much more than that for her to cuddle against him, her head falling into the crook of his neck as he wraps his arm around her.
She’s careful, as always, not to jostle him too much, not to accidentally graze the wounds she painstakingly cleans for him every night, but after a moment, her arm snakes around him, too, settling low–but not too low–against his middle, warm through his t-shirt, so that her hand–still a little shaky– curls around his hip to pull him closer to her.
He wonders if she knows that her hand is placed directly over his mark, even with the thin fabrics of his boxers and t-shirt preventing them from skin-to-skin contact. He wonders if she, nonetheless, can feel the warm burn his mark seems to radiate, a pleasant warmth, unlike its usual sting, as though his mark knows that the fingerprint that his mark displays belongs to the hand poised just above it.
Donna does, after all, know that the mark is there, having inadvertently discovered it a few days earlier, but he can’t be sure whether the position of her hand in this moment is intentional or not. It could be purely coincidental, after all–it’s not like Donna has probably spent much time thinking about his mark since she glimpsed the edge of it the other day–but in the times that they’ve cuddled together in the past, he can’t remember her hand ever finding his hip like this, almost as though she sought it out.
He knows it’s probably impossible that that’s the case, especially since it’s not like he’s Donna’s soulmate, anyhow, since her mark hasn’t changed, but the thought of Donna touching his mark–however unintentionally–emboldens him a little bit.
He pulls her a little tighter to him, and presses a kiss into her hair, something he’s never allowed himself to do in waking hours. She seems to respond in kind, nestling her head a little further into the crook of his neck, the hand curling around his hip tightening a little, finally stilling, like she, too, is soothed by placing her hand in precisely that spot.
They don’t say anything, for a while. They don’t need to.
It’s enough to just be close like this, to hold each other as the room grows darker and the rain grows louder, and pretend that the power outage somehow excuses all of it, makes whatever happens here, together, okay, in a way that it wouldn’t be in the west wing, in a way that’s somehow deeper than the way they’ve already bent the rules the whole time that Donna’s been living with him.
It’s the most peaceful moment Josh has had since the shooting, just lying there, listening to the rain outside, holding Donna, saying nothing at all, but feeling her heartbeat next to his, feeling the warm weight of her hand, heavy on his hip, stroking his own hand through her soft hair and down her back.
If only it could be like this all the time, if only it all felt as simple as it did right then, his soulmate’s heart beating in time with his, his soulmate’s hand pressed soothingly against his mark.
But it can’t be, he knows it can’t be.
And it’s then that the feeling of peace that had washed over him starts to falter. Because what can he possibly do next? How can he possibly give up the peace of a moment like this, when he knows what it feels like to hold her so close to him?
Not for the first time, he wondered if he could really do this, if he could really never have her the way he wanted to, if he could watch her go on to find her real soulmate one day, if he could find a way to be happy for her.
He wonders if, when the power comes back on and she eventually leaves his bed, he’ll ever stop missing this moment with her, if he’ll ever stop longing for that peace.
Nearly two years later, the next time the power goes off in his apartment, he knows for sure: the longing lingers on.
–
What Josh doesn’t know–at least at first–is that there’s a whole section of the forum on lemonlyman.com dedicated solely to the topic of Josh’s potential soulmate.
All things considered, it’s not that surprising–there seem to be few Josh-related topics that don’t warrant their own sections of the website–but Donna still almost gasps when the soulmate tab catches her eye as she looks over the website with Margaret, Bonnie, and Ginger.
She doesn’t dare click on it when they’re all still gathered around her desk–not wanting to call any attention to the fact that she ever even thinks about Josh potentially having a soulmate at all–but she knows she’ll return to the website to look at it later.
To look for what , she’s not entirely sure. It’s just that maybe there’s a part of her that wants to find something soothing there, something to make her believe that the situation with Josh’s soulmate isn’t nearly as dire as the last several months with Amy have made it seem.
When she does look at the website again, it’s later that evening, the bullpen all but empty, and Josh is away in a late meeting with a senator from North Carolina.
The comments start out fairly predictably–speculating on if Josh has a mark, if it’s turned red yet, and a few posts positing some very, ahem, creative spots on his body in which said mark might be found.
Naturally, the comments move from where the mark might be to whether or not it’s changed, and if it has, who might be the person who caused the change. Several comments digress from the general discussion, declaring that it’s impossible that Josh’s mark has changed, since he hasn’t yet met them, specifically, and their own marks have yet to change.
When the diversions trickle out and the comments get back on course, the real speculation begins.
For all of Josh’s bravado to those he’s close to about his knowledge of women, he actually keeps his personal relationships pretty private. A few odd comments–older ones, mostly–mention his former relationship with Mandy, and then begins several comments about his relationship with Amy, most of them declaring more forcefully than Donna is entirely comfortable with–regardless of her personal agreement with the sentiment–that Amy is the only potential soulmate that seems to make any sense.
It’s just as she’s reading a comment–which, glancing down to the comments beneath it, seems to be a rare dissenting opinion from the pro-Amy comments–that speculates that Josh’s soulmate could be someone they don’t know of yet, when the lobby door bangs open and Josh returns from his meeting.
Quickly, she closes the website, vowing to herself not to open it again, and tries to lose herself in Josh’s rant about the meeting. By the time they finally leave the office, close to midnight, she’s too tired to think of it again, so it’s not until the next day, when Josh calls her into his office to type something for him, that she remembers the website even exists.
When Josh has finished dictating his retort to the latest inane accusation from his fansite, and she’s begged him for the millionth time not to engage with the fanatics again, thinking maybe this time she’s finally gotten through to him, something goes wrong.
“What’s that tab?” He asks, his head leaning in closer to her face as he looks over her shoulder. “The soulmate one. Click on that.”
“Josh, please. The last thing we need is to be giving these people one more second of our attention.”
Josh ignores her. “Click on it, I want to read it.”
“Josh, I really don’t think–”
“ Donna ,” he whines.
She sighs, relenting, and taking her hand off the mouse so that Josh can scroll himself.
“At your own peril,” she says.
He waves her off. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, his eyes already moving back and forth across the page.
Donna closes her eyes for a long moment and then opens them, watching his face as he reads. When he gets to the more imaginative comments about the placement of his mark that she’d blushed at the day before, his eyes nearly bug out of his head.
“I told you,” Donna says, “they’re deranged.”
“It’s just,” he says, his voice a little strangled. “I don’t–how would that even work, like, physically?”
“Those of us with a more pedestrian relationship with reality are trying not to think about it,” Donna responds drily.
Josh doesn’t answer, reading the comment again, his face flaming and his eyes rounder than Donna has ever seen them.
Donna rolls her eyes. “Josh, I told you, these people are nutty. Unhinged. This is actually probably one of the cleaner tabs on this site, if what Margaret told me at lunch yesterday is true–.” She takes Josh’s frozen hand off the mouse and manipulates the mouse herself, moving to close the window, when Josh clears his throat.
“Hang on, I want to see what else they say.”
“Josh–.”
“It’s about me, I want to see it.”
“Josh, looking at more of this website hasn’t exactly boded well for you so far. This isn’t a good idea. It’s just a bunch of crackpots speculating because they don’t have any, I don’t know, jobs, or useful hobbies, to occupy their time.”
The truth is that Donna doesn’t know what else Josh might find on that page. She’d only scrolled down so far, having stopped when Josh came back from his meeting, after seeing enough comments opining that, obviously, Josh’s soulmate was none-other than Amy Gardner, that she wasn’t exactly enticed to return to the website again, and then the night before had gotten so late and so busy, that she never returned to keep reading. She didn’t know what came next.
She watches Josh carefully as he continues to scroll and keep reading, hoping against hope that she might learn something from his reaction to the comments.
He snorts and hoots, as she expected, at the comments from women (and more than one man) who still believe that they might be Josh’s soulmate, since he hasn’t met them yet, but his face displays nothing as he scrolls through the comments about Amy, about the rumors about their relationship, about how all the signs seem to point to the idea that Amy might just be the one that Josh is fated for, if he, in fact, has a soulmate mark.
She watches him intently as he reads the comments carefully, but his face doesn’t betray him. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, and that almost scares her. Even though she knows that there are things between them that are secret, obviously, based on the fact that he doesn’t even know that he’s her soulmate, for one thing, they’ve always been able to read each other’s minds in an almost uncanny way, always been privy to each other’s thoughts in an almost telepathic manner.
But whenever soulmates come up in conversation, it brings out something in him that she’s never seen, something that she can’t read, can’t understand.
She’s thinking of this as she mindlessly watches him scroll, through comments about Amy, the diversion into comments about Josh’s soulmate being someone yet unknown, and back through more comments about Amy, when suddenly he gasps, and his face goes white.
Immediately, she feels panicked. Maybe something triggered him, maybe he’s having a panic attack, maybe one of the comments somehow mentioned the shooting in an insensitive way and he wasn’t expecting it.
“Josh?” she asks. “Josh? Are you okay?”
Josh doesn’t say anything for a moment, and she grows more panicked, wondering if she should go grab someone–Sam, CJ, maybe even get Stanley on the phone.
But then he speaks, and she understands immediately why he’s gone so pale.
“This comment,” he says. “This one is about you.”
_
Josh and Amy start to drift apart after the First Lady’s birthday party. It’s not an all at once sort of thing, but Donna notices it, all the same. It’s not like there’s a big breakup, or anything that dramatic, but things just seem to cool slightly.
When Josh had first started dating Amy, he’d seemed to try to find a little bit more of a balance between his work life and his personal life. It’s not like he went home early every day–or ever went home early at all, really, he was still Josh–but he seemed to try to leave at a decent hour a few times a week.
When he called Donna in the evenings, a few hours after they’d both gone home, it was often from Amy’s place, or from his place, where she could hear Amy in the background.
But after the First Lady’s birthday party, the reasonable-hour nights seemed fewer and farther between. Sometimes, it even seemed like Josh was looking for reasons not to leave work, like maybe he wasn’t as excited to make it home to Amy as he had been before.
She tells herself that it’s all in her head. There’s no reason to think that anything has changed between Josh and Amy. Their fight at the birthday party had seemed to blow over, the way their fights always do, and she’d even heard some of the other assistants talking about them, about how some couples just fought, how that was a sign that they were actually more passionate, rather than less, and how Josh and Amy seemed to be a good example of that.
The rest of the evening of the birthday party, after all, had blown over, in a way that Donna hadn’t expected it to. What she’d said to CJ and Dr. Bartlet, later in the evening when Amy wasn’t with them, seems forgotten, and it’s possible that they’d understood it the way that she’d wanted them to, that it wasn’t so much that she has feelings for Josh, or he for her, but that he had given her everything, and that she would never do anything to jeopardize that trust.
And besides, Josh and Amy are still together, regardless of how much time they actually spend together these days. There are parts of the administration, parts of Josh’s day-to-day, that Donna isn’t privy to, so maybe it’s just that he’s busier at work than he used to be. There’s an election that seems to be rapidly approaching, it isn’t necessarily the case that things have cooled for him and Amy.
And even if they had, it doesn’t change anything, does it? If Amy is his soulmate, they’ll find each other, and they’ll work it out. They have to, that’s how it works. No matter what Donna thinks, no matter what she wants, no matter how badly she hopes that the way that Amy treats Josh isn’t what he’s fated for for the rest of his life, she knows one thing for sure: what the fates have set in motion, nothing can stop.
And so she tells herself there’s nothing different about Josh and Amy. She tells herself that it’s all in her head.
—
Actually, it’s not in her head at all.
Things had changed after the First Lady’s birthday party, for Josh at least.
It’s not exactly like he’d gained any new information about Amy. He’d known her a long time, he knew exactly what she was like, and he always had. Even what Donna had said about her–surprising as it was, coming from Donna–hadn’t actually been new information to him, it had just been what he already knew, rephrased in a better way than he could have said it himself.
And he’d already known that Amy wasn’t his soulmate, anyway, had already known that–regardless of how long this thing between them went on–Amy wasn’t it for him, would never be it for him, because he could never make his heart belong to anyone but Donna, even though she would never want him the way that he wanted her.
It’s just that, before the birthday party, it had been kind of working well enough to pretend it wasn’t all temporary. It’s not like it wasn’t fun, being with Amy. She was fiery and smart, and he liked her, he did.
But he didn’t like her enough. He didn’t like her enough for it to be worthwhile, when she went around him to Dr. Bartlet, humiliating him in front of his boss, or when she treated him in the same derisive manner that he’d seen her regard other men. It was never going to be worthwhile, he was starting to realize, when he would always, always belong to someone else.
And so he does start cooling things off, in little pieces. He stays later at work, calls Amy late in the evenings when he finally gets home, choosing not to invite her over so that he can call Donna after he hangs up with Amy, if he needs to, if he can’t sleep or any of the other litany of excuses he’s invented before.
He doesn’t even really notice all the ways he begins to choose Donna over Amy, even when Donna doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
Still, he does spend some time with Amy. They haven’t broken up or anything, and Amy, at least, seems to be making something of an effort.
She invites herself over one night, suggesting a casual night in. Takeout and a movie, maybe, and maybe something a little more strenuous later on.
As it happens, he’s leaving work fairly early. A storm is set to roll in, and he’d walked to work that day, so he wanted to make it home before it hit. He’d sent Donna home half an hour earlier–she’d taken the metro to work, and when she wouldn’t take cab fare from him, he’d just sent her home, since the metro was known to get stuck and delayed when the weather got especially bad.
He hears the first crack of thunder just as he’s hanging his coat on the rack by his door, and Amy arrives a few minutes later with pizza, looking a little drizzled on, but not quite damp.
The rain builds as they eat, and they’ve only made it through half an hour of the movie when he hears a little buzzing sound, and all at once, the television clicks off, along with all of the lights in his apartment.
Neither he nor Amy says anything for a moment, and he remembers the last time this happened, how Donna had rushed into his room, almost shaking, worried for him.
Amy laughs, after a second. “I guess that’s the universe’s way of telling us to move on to the other stuff a little earlier,” she says, and she grabs his hand, tugging him up off the couch so she can pull him towards the bedroom.
She must sense his hesitation, because she stops when he doesn’t immediately follow her lead. “Josh?” she asks in confusion.
It hits him like a wave, how different this moment is from the last time the power went out in his apartment, and how badly, in this moment, he suddenly misses Donna, misses that perfect moment with her, the sound of the rain outside his apartment, holding her close to him in his bed, the way her hand had felt pressed to his hip, against his mark.
In this moment, he doesn’t want to be there, in that same bed with Amy. He knows it will fall short of his time with Donna, that no matter what plans Amy has for him, it will never, ever measure up to the perfection of the last storm, with Donna.
And all at once, he knows that it will never be enough. All at once, he gets the answer to the question he’d pondered when the power went out the last time. He will never stop missing her, he will never stop wishing for more of her, more than he has.
“I’m going to call Donna,” he says, releasing her hand and turning towards the coat rack, where he’d left his cell phone in his pocket. “I just want to–I’m just gonna make sure she’s okay.”
–
Donna’s heart sinks the second the words leave Josh’s mouth.
“This comment is about you,” he repeats, but he says it so quietly that he almost seems–oddly–to be saying it to himself, rather than to her, although he must know that she’s there, since his words are directed at her.
The color hasn’t returned to his face, and she feels frozen, too, unable to form words.
It’s that horrible, that unfathomable, of a prospect , she thinks, that I might be his soulmate .
She’s not sure how she’s possibly going to recover from this, how she’s ever going to feel okay again, knowing that the mere suggestion that she could be Josh’s soulmate–which they both know isn’t true, anyway– has caused him to lose the power of speech, lose the ability to even look at her.
She’s not sure that he’s even breathing.
He reads over the comment aloud, softly, and once again, she has the strange feeling that Josh isn’t even fully aware that she’s in the room. “Has anyone mentioned his assistant, Diane Moss?” he reads quietly, and Donna snorts.
“Your soulmate’s named Diane Moss?” Donna jokes. “I’d love to meet her.” Her heart is pounding as she says it, and it’s not her best work, but she’s white-knuckling the edge of his desk, now, and she can salvage this, she can .
Josh doesn’t seem to hear her. “I work on the Hill–who the hell is writing these comments from the Hill ?” he asks, his voice rising, and his color almost returning to normal. “I’m not allowed to comment from the White House, but anyone can post from the Hill ?”
While he’s busy being indignant, Donna reads the rest of the comment. “I work on the Hill, and there are all kinds of rumors about Josh and his assistant. He never goes anywhere without her, and everyone knows that if you want to get to him, you have to get through her. Most people just think they’re sleeping together, but maybe there’s more to it than we think.”
“Okay,” Josh says finally, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Here’s what we say: I’m not sure about the credibility of this comment, since her name is Donna Moss, and maybe if you spent more time on, I don’t know, policy , we might not be dealing with such a–!”
His voice has risen unnaturally high, and Donna puts her hand on his arm to stop him. For the first time since he laid eyes on the comment, he looks at her, his face looking too pale again.
“Josh,” she says slowly, carefully. “Like I said, these people are making you crazy. Obviously, we’re not going to say anything to them, you can’t weigh in on a conversation like this. You know that, right?”
Josh sighs, but doesn’t look away from her. She doesn’t take her hand off his arm.
“Looking at this page of the website at all was a bad idea,” she says. “We can’t spend any more time on this, okay?”
He nods, slowly, but the color hasn’t returned to his face, and he’s still staring at her, like he’s searching for something on her face, but isn’t finding it.
She does her best to look as composed as she can, to look like this conversation hasn’t just ripped her heart–the heart that belongs to him, that always has–right out of her chest.
“It’s not what you think,” he says softly. “I know people talk. I know…I know what they say. About us. And it’s not that it’s you that they mentioned, okay? It’s just that this kind of thing…this is different. I just– I’m afraid that–I don’t want–I don’t know–.” He trails off, seeming unsure of exactly how to say whatever it is that he’s afraid of.
So Donna squeezes his arm gently, doing her best to give him a soft smile, to try to tell him that it’s okay, even though she feels like screaming, and it’s not okay.
It’s not okay at all.
“I know,” she says.
Except, she doesn’t.
She doesn’t know what he means at all.
–
He’d never really thought about it before, about how, although they’d talked about soulmates a handful of times over the years, they’d never come close to approaching the topic of Donna as his soulmate, not even in a joking manner.
Of course, he would never have joked about it, but for all he knew, Donna could see the whole thing as so blatantly absurd that maybe she might.
In a way, he kind of wishes it had come up at some point, because if it had, maybe he would have known how to react, maybe he would have figured out how to respond to the very idea in a better way than he had.
He’d just been so surprised when it had come up, is all. In retrospect, he shouldn’t have been–Donna was right, the people on the website were truly off their rockers–but it shocked him to see it written down, all the same.
He didn’t know what to do, when he realized the comments were going in a different direction than merely placing his soulmate mark in an anatomically ludicrous spot.
He knows that he’s panicking, that his reaction is way over the top, that Donna can see quite plainly that something with him has gone terribly wrong, but he doesn’t know what to say about the comment that brings Donna (even as ‘Diane’) into the conversation for the first time.
He tries to make it about something else, about the person claiming to work on the Hill, which Josh, frankly, doubts–more likely, they have a friend or a cousin or something on the Hill, and are borrowing their job to claim some credibility–but he knows that Donna sees right through him as always, that Donna knows that the fact that he’s freaking out has absolutely nothing to do with workplace decorum.
He’s just not ready to have the conversation about what it would mean if she was his soulmate. He’s not ready to lay it all out and have Donna, undoubtedly, reject him, albeit in the extremely kind way he’s sure that she would come up with.
And he hadn’t thought anyone else knew ! It’s not that the stupid commenter actually knows , he knows, but it’s the first time anyone has really said it in front of him, let alone said it in front of Donna, and he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t ready for all the implications of that, the implications about how Donna got hired in the first place, about how their relationship is different, about how Donna isn’t actually Senior Staff, but how everyone treats her as as good as, anyway.
But when he looks at Donna, he sees hurt in her eyes, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Of course, they both know that people have talked about them. They’ve both heard the gossip over the years, although the gossip mill has never once mentioned soulmates, not to him.
They both know that people have guessed that they’re sleeping together, that people think their unnatural closeness has something to do with that–he’s been warned about the gossip by CJ several times over, anyway, and for all he knows, Donna has as well–but if Donna’s hurt that he’s reacting this way, there must be something else going on.
He wonders if she thinks that he’s scoffing at her, that he would never be with her, even though that thought is so absurd that it almost makes him laugh, because Donna is so clearly out of his league that he doesn’t know how she could ever not see that.
But then he remembers that Donna thinks that Amy is his soulmate, and Donna must think that he’s offended by the mere notion that his soulmate could be anyone but Amy.
So he stammers out something that doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t close any loops and doesn’t explain anything, starting and stopping sentence after sentence, without really saying anything at all. “It’s not what you think, I know people talk,” he says.“I know…I know what they say. About us. And it’s not that it’s you that they mentioned, okay? It’s just that this kind of thing…this is different. I just– I’m afraid that–I don’t want–I don’t know–.”
It’s not what you think, Amy was never my soulmate, he wishes he could say. It’s not that they’re talking about you, because Amy has never meant a fraction of what you mean to me .
But this is different, they’ve never gossiped about something that was actually true, he almost says. They’ve never come so close to printing, for the whole world to see, that the fates made me with you in mind.
I just didn’t think that I was that obvious, that anyone suspected the truth , he wants to say.
I’m afraid that people would think that all of this has something to do with you getting hired, and I don’t want you to ever lose any credit for what you do in this administration, because you deserve everything you’ve earned here and a lot more, besides.
I don’t know how to tell you any of this, when you’ll never feel the same way.
Donna just squeezes his arm, looking at him with a pain in her eyes that he thinks must match his, although he doesn’t understand quite why, and a tight-lipped, sad smile that isn’t her, that doesn’t reach her eyes.
“I know,” she says, and he knows that she doesn’t.
But he just looks at her sadly, and lets the moment pass.
–
It wasn’t going to be moose, the gift that he’d brought Donna from Helsinki. Actually, the moose had been gifted to each member of the White House staff that had been on the trip, and he’d thought–initially–that it’d be funny to bring it back to her, pretend that that’s what he’d brought her from Finland, before pawning it off on Ed or Larry or Ainsley or someone, and giving her her real gift.
It wasn’t like he’d forgotten to pick out a real gift, either. He’d actually spent most of the trip thinking about Donna, wishing that Donna was with him, the way that he always did when he had to spend more than a few hours away from her.
On this trip, he’d been thinking about Donna after he’d written the memo on Molly Morello for the President, the way she’d come back to his office, beaming at him, before throwing her arms around him, whispering, “thank you,” into the crook of his neck.
(He’d known from the moment that she’d mentioned the Molly Morello thing that he’d write a memo about it. He’d known that she wouldn’t get a presidential proclamation–and that really couldn’t be helped–but he’d also known that he’d do everything in his power to make sure something special happened for her, that her teacher was acknowledged in some way. Donna asked for so little from him, and besides, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard her mention Mrs. Morello. He knew that Donna was sometimes insecure about having not finished college, so he liked when she talked about the education that had shaped her, the teachers that had made her one of the smartest people he knew.)
(Aside from that, he just–he just wanted to make her happy, okay? She deserved that. If there was one thing he knew above all, it was that, if knew of anything in his power that could make Donna happy, he would choose to do it.)
When they’d had time, on the second day of the trip, to go look through some of the shops (except for CJ, who was protesting Simon Donovan’s “persistent tailing” by refusing to go anywhere unless he wasn’t going with her. “It’s the second safest city in the world!” she’d exclaimed, more than a few times. “Can you not leave me alone for ten minutes?”), he’d split off from the others, finding himself in a small shop by the water, which had drawn him in with the little pine wood figurines in the window that looked hand-carved.
Inside, there was much more than the figurines, and he’d found an extensive collection of jewelry at a counter in the back, all of which seemed to be packaged in beautiful, hand-carved and painted wooden boxes, in the same style as the figurines he’d noticed in the window.
It’s a set of earrings that immediately catches his eye, beautiful blue-gray stones with flecks of green. They make him think of Donna at once, and he pauses as he looks at them, thinking about how beautiful her eyes would look when she wore them.
Spectrolite, the clerk tells him, is what the gemstones are called. It can be expensive, but it’s only found in Finland, and like most gems that are hard to find, that can show up on the price tag.
Josh is buying them before he even realizes what he’s doing, and he doesn’t realize until he’s leaving the shop that the souvenir tour had taken longer than he expected, and he’s late for a meeting.
It’s not until he finally returns to his hotel room that night, pulling the small wooden box from his pocket, that he realizes several things at once, and embarrassment washes over him, even though he’s alone in his room.
He can’t give the earrings to Donna, he knows. Not now , anyway. Not while he’s her boss and she’s his assistant and she doesn’t know how he feels about her, doesn’t know that she means more to him than anyone in the world, that the fates have tied him to her, that there will never be anyone else.
He can’t give her a gift like that, a gift that’s far more extravagant and expensive than any he’s ever given any girlfriend in the past.
It’s that that makes shame wash over him again, because he hadn’t thought about Amy at all. Not when they went looking for souvenirs, not when he’d been standing at the jewelry counter, and not until he’d realized that he couldn’t give the earrings to Donna.
But he can’t give the earrings to Amy, either.
Because–and this is almost fitting, after everything–the earrings really belong to Donna, and no one else. He can’t give them away like they weren’t meant for her.
So he gives Donna the complimentary moose, and he brings nothing at all to Amy, who doesn’t ask and didn’t really seem to have missed him, let alone have expected him to bring her a gift.
“I missed you so much,” Donna says, as she frowns at the box of moose meat on his desk, and even he can see her genuine disappointment.
He tries not to think about the earrings that he tucked into the back of his sock drawer when he got home the night before.
He tries not to think about everything else that belongs to Donna that he keeps hiding from her, everything else he keeps almost giving away.