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Part I: Decisions and revisions (which a minute will reverse)
For the record, he never asked her to bring him coffee.
To start with, he hadn’t had an assistant before—not in this role, anyway—and it didn’t actually occur to him that he could ask her to bring him coffee.
But in any case, he didn’t.
He didn’t actually know if Donna would have brought him coffee, if he’d asked her to. (And maybe that was something that he should have paid a little attention to—the idea that, if he asked his brand-new assistant to bring him coffee, she might very well refuse, and that would just be that. Perhaps if he had thought about that, if he had taken a second to think of it, he would have recognized from the very beginning that their arrangement wasn’t entirely typical.)
It's just that he thought a lot about the moment in which she became his assistant, when she was sitting there in his office, her eyes wide and hopeful, begging him to give her a chance, to let her be a part of the campaign, a part of this office, a part of his life. “I think I could be good at this,” she’d said. “I think you might find me valuable.”
It was only as she said those words that he realized that he wanted to. He wanted her to be right.
And it just didn’t seem like asking her to bring him coffee would be making her feel valuable. Because even from that very first day, when she’d hired herself without him even realizing that she’d done it, when she’d wormed her way into the trip that half of the more senior employees weren’t even going on, he’d sort of started to realize that she was right. She could be good at this.
And he had no doubt at all that he would find her valuable.
And so she didn’t bring him coffee, and he didn’t ask her to.
In fact, sometimes, if he got to the office before she did—and it was never very long before, if he did—he’d pour her a cup of coffee instead, have it waiting for her when she arrived. She liked two creams and one sugar, and it’s only as he’s fixing it for her that he realizes that he’s not even sure how he knows that, not even sure when he would have learned that.
It’s just that he’s found himself staring at her a little, now and again, watching her, her look of concentration as she helps him sort through the Governor’s past policies, figuring out which issues to emphasize and which stances they should let remain in the shadows. He likes to watch her chew the end of her pen as she works, likes to watch her tuck her hair behind her ear, or lick her finger before turning a page.
And, apparently, he likes to watch her make her coffee, because he doesn’t remember learning how she liked it, so he must have just absorbed it by osmosis, somehow, memorizing the way that Donna looks as she fixes a cup of coffee, the way he’s memorized her look of concentration, the vaguely musical patterns she makes when she taps the end of her pen against his desk as she works.
It’s a funny thing, having an assistant. He’d sort of had one when he worked for Hoynes—he’d had people who worked underneath him, anyway—but it was never like this, it was never like it is with Donna.
Because Donna doesn’t feel like an assistant. It doesn’t feel like Donna works for him, it feels like Donna works with him, like she was the missing piece the campaign hadn’t realized it was waiting for, expecting, until she had arrived. She hasn’t been there longer than a few days before he stops remembering what it was like to work without her, how he ever managed to get anything done.
And the others have noticed, too. Leo and Toby and CJ and Sam—they’ve all said something, since Donna arrived, something about how much easier it’s been to work with him since Donna came into the picture, and maybe he would have been offended by that, if they hadn’t been right.
Everything is easier with Donna, but more than that, everything just feels better with her, it feels more right. It feels hopeful, the way he’d felt when he’d gone to see the Governor speak for the first time and realized—this was it, this was the guy, this was the only person who would make any sense in the White House. It was like Donna had walked through the door one day, invited herself in, and brought all of that hope, all of that confidence, back with her, ushering it in like a fresh spring breeze, lifting the stagnant spirits in the office, especially his own.
It felt the way it was supposed to feel again, and he wondered if Donna was even aware that she’d done that, was even aware of the way that things felt so different with her here than they had before she arrived.
(Probably not, since Donna had no way of knowing how anyone had felt before she’d been there—but he was sure that the others had noticed that something had shifted around them since she’d joined the campaign, something had fallen into place, something had changed the nature of their work irrevocably and completely.)
And maybe that’s why he takes it so hard when she leaves.
The day had started out like any other—he’d gotten to the office before Donna had, and before he’d made his way to his cubicle, he’d stopped at the coffee pot, towards the front of the office, fixing two cups on autopilot, and carrying them carefully back towards his cubicle.
He was excited to see her, in a strange way. It was something that he didn’t let himself think about too much, the way that he almost…missed her, sometimes. And he hadn’t really seen her much yesterday, having been in Boston most of the day with the Governor.
For some reason he can’t really explain or articulate, it felt a lot longer than one day.
By the time he’d gotten back to the office, it had been early evening, and Donna had been on her way out. She had a friend in town, staying nearby, she’d said, and she wanted to grab a drink with him while he was in town.
She hadn’t met his eyes as she’d said it, which hadn’t escaped his notice.
Neither had the fact that the “friend” she was seeing was apparently a man, and he found himself wondering—with a strange, sort of itchy, uncomfortable feeling—whether the drinks they were having were, in fact, a date.
But he’d just smiled at her, told her to have a good time, pushed any thoughts, any questions, about Donna and this “friend” out of his head. It had been a long day, he told himself. It had been a long day, and he was tired, and the itchy feeling was probably nothing more than a function of the fact that he could really use a long, hot shower, after the hectic day that he’d had with the Governor.
He'd tried not to think about her after that, tried not to let himself wonder, as he got ready for bed that night, whether Donna was still out with her “friend”, whether she’d come in in the morning looking like she’d been out all night.
It didn’t occur to him to give the identity of her “friend” much thought, beyond the fact that he was a man and so it was therefore maybe—probably—a date.
Which is probably why it comes as such a surprise, when he gets to the door of the cubicle he calls his office, and finds that he hadn’t made it in to work before Donna had after all. He’s almost startled to see her sitting there, and it takes him a second to understand why.
After all, Donna works in his office, maybe more than he does, so it shouldn’t surprise him to see her there. But something feels off, somehow, like there’s a tension in the air that he can’t quite name.
It takes him another second to realize that it’s because Donna isn’t working.
Instead, Donna’s sitting there, so still, her back to him, as he hesitates on the threshold. He realizes, as he stands there, just before entering, the coffee in the mugs he’s carrying sloshing onto his hands from the sudden stop he made in the doorway, that if Donna isn’t working, that means that Donna is just…waiting for him.
He hesitates for a moment longer, suddenly and inexplicably unwilling to enter his own office, because he can’t explain why seeing Donna sitting there, so still, just waiting for him, sends a chill through him.
If Donna’s not working, then something is wrong.
Because Donna is never not working; Donna never sits anywhere like that, silent and still, like a statue. Hell, Donna never sits, period, unless they’re on the campaign bus, and she is physically not allowed to move. Donna is always rushing around, answering his phone, drumming her foot on the floor, tapping her pen on the desk.
His whole office moves to the rhythm of Donna, Donna, Donna, and he thinks he understands, suddenly, what Don McLean meant about the day the music died.
“Uh, hi,” he says at last, taking a shaky step into his office, and setting Donna’s coffee down on the desk in front of her. “I didn’t think you’d be here already—how was last night? Seeing your friend?”
(This is how he can play this, he decides. If he pretends that everything is normal, that nothing is wrong, then Donna doesn’t have to know how anxious he suddenly feels, seeing her sitting there. Donna doesn’t have to know that he knows that something is wrong, and maybe if he just pretends that it isn’t, whatever problem they’re having will just go away.)
“You brought me coffee?” Donna asks, looking up at him.
There’s something unreadable in her eyes—something a little like wistfulness, a little like regret—and her bottom lip is quivering just a little, while she tries to still it by worrying it with her teeth. Even her voice is a little different, a little softer, lacking the confidence that is so Donna, and it’s that that worries him the most.
Whatever’s wrong with Donna, she seems afraid to tell him about it, and he doesn’t know what to do with that, doesn’t know how to tell her that everything is okay, that she doesn’t have to worry, when his own worry is rising within him with every passing second, when he feels like something is really, deeply, horribly, desperately wrong, when he feels like whatever is happening here, he can’t fix it.
“Yeah,” he says, and he keeps playing along, just like he planned. “Two creams and one sugar, just like you like it.”
She smiles at him, then, but it isn’t her usual smile—it’s not a grin; she doesn’t show her teeth. She just smiles, soft and sad and slow, and he doesn’t think it’s the harsh fluorescent lights of the office that are making her eyes look vaguely glassy. “You remembered,” she says, so quietly that he almost misses it.
Feeling as though she said that more for herself than for him, and feeling vaguely intrusive in a strange way for having heard it anyway, he doesn’t reply.
But if he had, he might have reassured her—he might have told her that of course he remembers, how could he not remember? How could he not notice these things about her, how she likes her coffee, the way she grins when she’s really happy, the rhythm of the way she works? How could he simply not remember the very things that have breathed life into his tired body, into his weary mind?
Instead, he takes a sip of his coffee—and recognizes that, in being thrown off by the fact that something is clearly amiss with Donna, he gave her his cup, and he drank hers.
“Uh,” he says, awkwardly, clearing his throat. “Don’t let this take away from my incredibly charming and gentlemanly gesture, but I gave you the wrong cup.”
Donna laughs, and it’s that that finally confirms that something is wrong, because the motion causes a tear to slip down her cheek, clearly without her permission, if the way she swipes at it immediately, as if to stop him from seeing it, is any indication.
“Donna,” he breathes, taking a half a step towards her.
She waves him away. “Don’t, it’s--,” she pauses, taking a ragged breath. “I knew this was going to be hard, I just didn’t know it was going to be this hard. I didn’t know you were going to…,” she pauses, looking at the mug—the wrong mug—in front of her. “Well, sort of bring me coffee.”
“I--.” He’s confused, he doesn’t know what to say. Should he apologize for whatever he’s done? Clearly, from the way that she’s reacting to the coffee, whatever’s going on has something to do with him, but he can’t understand what he did to make her so sad. “I’m sorry, Donna—whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, and another tear falls down her cheek. She wipes it away as she stands up, gives him a watery smile. “I just…I came to tell you that I’m leaving,” she says.
“Leaving?” His chest feels suddenly tight, because whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that.
Donna nods. “The friend I saw yesterday, he’s…he was my—well, we’re getting back together.”
Josh can only look at her, dumbfounded. “Dr. Freeride?” he chokes out, knowing full well that that’s the wrong thing to say, and yet unable to stop himself from saying anything else.
Donna makes a spluttering sound that sounds a bit like a laugh, but her face is all wrong—she looks torn, and he doesn’t know what to say to soothe her, what to say to make her realize that he needs her, he needs her here, he needs her to stay.
“He’s waiting for me in the car,” she says softly, looking down at her feet. “I have to go.”
She starts to move, then, past him—quicker than he can reach out and touch her, which he doesn’t, though he wants to--and as she’s about to reach the doorway, he asks, if only because he’d hate himself if he didn’t, and he’s already clearly said enough, said something to make her want to leave in the first place, so there’s nothing holding him back now, “is there anything I can do to make you stay?”
He almost closes his eyes, waiting for her answer, like that would give him the concentration he needs to make a wish, like a child, or maybe to pray. He wishes it were enough, bringing her coffee. As stupid as that sounds, he wishes there was a way to make it be enough, like maybe if he brought her coffee every single day from here on out, that would be enough to make her stay.
(He knows very little about Donna’s—ex? Current?—boyfriend, but the little he knows about Dr. Freeride makes him inclined to believe that he is not in the habit of bringing Donna coffee, and he wonders if Donna is thinking about that, now. He wonders if the way Donna looked at him, something like regret in her eyes, when he first walked in and set her coffee in front of her, was the moment that she’d considered that.)
But Donna just shakes her head. “I have to go,” she says, and he can’t decide if it’s apologetic or regretful or a mix of both, but she stands there for a long, silent moment, in the doorway, looking at him, like she knows that this is the last time she’ll ever see him.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says, finally. “Leave, I mean.”
Donna looks as though she’s about to start sobbing in earnest, and that makes his heart ache in a way that he doesn’t know how to express. Because he doesn’t want Donna to cry, he doesn’t want Donna to have to feel guilty for trying to do what’s best for herself.
But he also doesn’t want her to leave him; he doesn’t want to walk into this office tomorrow and have her not be there, doesn’t want to go to the diner across the road when the New Hampshire spring feels too brutal, still feels like winter, and not see Donna sitting across from him, beaming, at the table, a smudge of whipped cream from her hot chocolate on her nose.
“I know you do,” Donna says softly, and, just for a second, she looks like she might be considering it, it looks like there’s a chance that she might change her mind, might sit back down, take a sip of coffee and tell him to pretend she never said anything, what’s next?
But instead she pats the doorframe gently and says softly, “thanks for everything.”
And then she’s gone.
Part II: At times, indeed, almost ridiculous (almost, at times, the Fool)
For the record, Dr. Freeride doesn’t bring her coffee.
For the record, Donna’s not even sure that he knows how the coffee pot works. (Not that it matters, necessarily—if he did, she thinks, she’d still be the one getting up, preparing it, placing it on the nightstand while he sleeps in, his cup the first in a long series of cups that she’ll serve all day. I have measured out my life with coffee cups, she thinks, like a poor man’s T.S. Eliot.)
She’s a poor man’s everything, these days.
(And it doesn’t help to think of poor men, of Prufrock, because it reminds her that if she’d made that joke, in another life, to Josh, rather than in her mind, he would’ve laughed, made some crack about Poet Laureate Donnatella Moss, maybe, and she would have felt like somebody, would have been reminded that she was somebody, somebody more than this—someone smart, capable, valuable—rather than a walking percolator.)
For the record, Josh was the only one who ever did.
(Bring her coffee, that is.)
Even though he switched the mugs, and he sometimes carelessly dumped a little more sugar into her coffee than she needed (especially that one time one of the interns had mistakenly ordered sugar cubes rather than the packets—Josh had really gone to town that day), still, Josh brought her coffee, as though he were the assistant, not her.
He was always doing things like that, things that told her that she meant something, that he valued her, and it’s really only in leaving that she’s come to understand how very much that mattered, what it meant to her to be valued by somebody.
Because no one tells her she’s doing a good job, here. No one makes her coffee in the morning. No one calls out to her, when she hops on the bus in the early morning, after a long night shift, to call when she gets back to her place, just so that they know that she made it back safely.
No one takes her lunch order, no one lets her pick at their french fries, instead of her ordering some of her own.
(Not that she’s actually tried that, but then, she’s not trying to get fired from the diner.)
No one asks her how she slept in the morning—not that she sleeps at night, or ever, really—and no one tells her to sit down when she looks tired. No one tucks their coat around her when she shivers on the bus ride home from a shift.
And, most of all, no one tells her that they wish she would stay.
Even her boyfriend never says that to her. She can’t count the number of times she’s asked him for something, something small, like for him to remember to turn the lights off in the kitchen when he went to bed, so their electricity bill wouldn’t be quite so high, and he’d mocked her for it immediately. “If I’m so awful,” he’d asked, “why don’t you just leave?”
That had been bad enough, but he’d finished with something even harsher. “Oh, that’s right,” he’d said. “You have nowhere to go, Donnatella. No degree, no nothing. You have nowhere to go.” Then, he’d laughed, flipping all the kitchen light switches on, just to spite her, and left the room.
It was different, when he said things like that—when he said her name like that. It was so different than when Josh said it. Josh had discovered that her full name was Donnatella with pure delight, and every time he said it, he did so with warmth in his voice, with joy, with affection. She loved when Josh said her name, loved the way it washed over her, like being bathed in pure light. He would never spit it at her; he would never say it with such derision.
And maybe that difference should have clued her in to something. Maybe she ought to have thought about that before she left the campaign, before she threw away the place—and the people—where she truly belonged.
Because here, she worked nonstop, but there was no meaning to it, no grand, larger purpose. Here, there was no appreciation for her, there was only derision, resentment, to be found in her relationship. Like the time she told her boyfriend (whom she’s referring to as “Dr. Freeride” in her own mind with increasing regularity, thank you Josh) that they needed to save more money, instead of him going out to the bars with his friends all the time, so that she could get the tired brakes on her car fixed, to get to and from work, and he’d said, “take the bus, then. I’m not paying for your car.”
You’re not paying for anything, she wanted to reply, and she almost cried, suddenly, thinking about the time that her battery had died when she was driving with Josh up in Maine, and he’d called AAA, gotten them towed to a repair shop, and put a new battery for her on his credit card without a single word of complaint, waving away her offer to pay him back by pointing out, “We wouldn’t even be in Maine if I hadn’t made you drive me, it’s the least I could do.”
(It wasn’t necessarily true, but the tips of his ears had flushed as he said it, and she knew he’d be embarrassed if she made a big deal about it, so she let it go, and she savored his gentleness, his kindness, later, as she fell asleep, remembering the soft way he’d looked at her as he told her not to worry.)
And that’s another thing—no one tells her not to worry, here, either.
In fact, she does enough worrying for herself and her boyfriend, a fact that becomes abundantly clear the night he stops for a beer with his friends, while she waits in an empty emergency room with a heavily bandaged ankle.
She leaves him the next morning, and unlike the time she left Josh, she doesn’t hesitate on the threshold, doesn’t wait for anyone to ask her to stay, doesn’t even turn the coffee pot on—and that, she thinks sadly, will probably be the first thing he notices, before he even recognizes her absence.
When she makes her way back to Josh, she doesn’t bring him coffee, either.
Instead, she gets him a blueberry muffin—his favorite muffin--from the bakery down the road, before she takes a deep breath and heads back in to the campaign office.
When she gets to his cubicle, she hesitates in the doorway, just like she did when she left, taking a moment just to look at him, just to savor the fact that she’s seeing him again—when she left, she hadn’t been sure that she ever would again.
And then he sees her, and he smiles—just the way she’s imagined, every night that she was gone, his dimples carving into his cheeks, his eyes warm and soft and inviting. “Thank God,” he says, “there’s a pile of stuff on the desk.”
And she almost laughs, almost laughs out of pure joy, because nothing has ever felt more right than being here, being here with him, and how could she have ever thought that there was more than this to be found in Wisconsin?
But she doesn’t laugh; she just hands him the muffin.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he mumbles softly, looking up at her, vaguely dazed, like he’s not sure whether or not to believe it’s really her.
“Me too,” she says, grinning back, and then she pulls up a chair and gets to work, like she never left.
They split the muffin.
And, that afternoon, he brings her a cup of coffee—two creams, one sugar—and he hands her the right mug, this time.
(The coffee is nice, but it’s the brush of his fingertips against hers, as he hands her the mug, that really warms her from head to toe.)
Part III: After the cups, the marmalade, the tea (among the porcelain, among the talk of you and me)
For the record, she did bring Josh tea.
Herbal tea, no caffeine.
(For some reason she couldn’t quite explain, the difference between being someone who brought Josh coffee and someone who absolutely did not bring Josh coffee boiled down to whether or not the hot liquid she supplied contained a stimulant or not, and if Josh had felt up to it, he might have found a joke in there somewhere, something about the Mormons, maybe, but the very fact that he wasn’t was why she was bringing him tea to begin with.)
First of all, it wasn’t as though she brought him herbal tea every day that he was recovering, and it wasn’t as though he was always all that grateful when she did bring it, anyway. Although, to be fair, in those days, he had a hard time being grateful for most things, and she couldn’t blame him for that, not when the very act of sitting up in bed still evaded him most of the time.
In any case, she brought him herbal tea, and she would smooth his hair back from his forehead and check to see if he was feverish—always terrified of the possibility that the wounds she painstakingly cleaned and bandaged twice a day could get infected--and when he looked up at her, his eyes sleepy--despite, or maybe by virtue of, the fact that he slept most of the day--she would tell him that she brought him herbal tea.
Half the time, it was left to cool on his nightstand without being touched—half the time, he simply wasn’t up to it—but sometimes, he would grasp her hand gratefully and ask her to help him sit up, and he would drink the whole cup as though he was doing her a favor, while she perched on the edge of his bed and watched him, and those times made all the others—the times when she would pour an untouched mug of tea down his kitchen sink, and then rub at the porcelain so it wouldn’t stain—worth it.
On the days when he did drink the tea, she’d watch the color return, ever so slightly, to his face, as he sipped at it, and sometimes he’d thank her, sometimes he’d tell her that it had been exactly what he needed, that she was exactly what he needed.
(She told herself that it was the medicine talking, more than anything—but Josh never seemed anything less than fully coherent when he said it, and she couldn’t help noticing that.)
But she never brings him coffee, and a part of her wonders why she still holds back on that—why, when she’s living with him, sleeping in his bed, letting him curl up next to her, press his sweaty forehead to her chest when he’s having a nightmare—she won’t bring him coffee.
But then again, maybe it’s exactly that. Because assistants bring coffee.
And working for Josh has never felt precisely like being his assistant. (She is, of course, aware that she’s his assistant, aware that she’s beneath him in every way that matters to everyone else—aware, even, of the fact that it’s the power differential that keeps her from being truly with him in the way that she wants to be.) But working for Josh feels like working with Josh, like they’re partners, and moreover, when she’s with Josh like this, taking care of him like this, it’s not at all like he’s her boss, it’s like he’s her best friend (which he is), like he’s her whole world.
And assistants bring coffee. So she won’t be doing that.
(What she forgets, of course, when she thinks of this, is that wives also bring coffee, husbands bring coffee; lovers bring morning coffee to their beloved. Or maybe she doesn’t forget. Maybe that, too, is precisely the point.)
One very particular Christmas Eve, she brings him hot chocolate. He takes the mug, shakily, with the hand that isn’t bandaged, and sips at it just to be polite—she knows him well enough to know that—but he sips at it all the same, and then she brings him to her bed and curls up beside him, and falls asleep thinking that the next morning, she might make him coffee after all.
Part IV: And this, and so much more--?
For the record, he should have brought her coffee, the night of Bartlet’s second inauguration, but he brings her champagne instead.
(In his defense, it’s not like there was a ton of coffee to be had at the inaugural balls—or at least not to be had as readily as there was champagne to be had; there were no waiters working the room with trays of coffee, anyway, or if there were, he simply chose not to see them.)
And, furthermore, he can’t help it—there’s a delicate blush in her cheeks and a light in her eyes as she looks at him, and he grabs a champagne flute for her so as to stop himself from reaching out, touching one of her golden curls, just to see if her hair is as soft as it looks, or do something even more forward than that, like reach out to stroke her flushed cheeks with the pad of his thumb, or—even worse—just cup her face in his hands and pull her towards him, just to finally, finally know what it’s like to kiss Donnatella Moss, after all those years of imagining it.
But he can’t do any of that, and so he grabs a couple of champagne flutes, shoves them into her hands.
For the record, at the time, he didn’t know that they’d end up working in his office later that night.
He didn’t know that it ought to have been coffee he brought her, ought to have been coffee that they both drank, so that they might actually get something done.
But he doesn’t regret it, because later, in his office, they end up sitting on the floor, and at one point, when it’s way too late to be doing much of anything—even without so much champagne—and the intelligence briefings on the situation in Khundu lay scattered around them, long-forgotten, they end up laughing, and Donna leans into his chest, and he lets her, wrapping his arms around her, burying his face in her hair, just for a moment (it is as soft as it looks, for the record), and as they sit there, savoring the moment together, enjoying the victorious day as they were meant to all along, he thinks to himself, Well, this might not have happened if it had been coffee, and the champagne feels fortuitous.
He thinks the same thing at the Hawk ‘n’ Dove, that weekend, when her shoulder is pressed against his in a booth, and he buys her a beer. He’s thinking about the other night for a lot of reasons—not the least of which is the memory of her sitting on his lap in the cab, which he just can’t get out of his head—but mostly, he’s thinking about all the drinks he’s bought her over the years, all the nights he’s spent just like this, Donna beside him, tipsy enough to lean into him, rest her head on his shoulder, but not drunk enough for anyone to bother to notice.
He loves moments like this with Donna—moments where there is no Jack Reese and no Amy Gardner and no eyes even on them, really, not when everyone else is preoccupied with their own drinks and conversations. These moments feel quiet, in a weird way, because the bar around them couldn’t be louder, but there’s just a…peacefulness, when Donna’s head is on his shoulder, when he can smell her shampoo, feel the tickle of her hair on his cheek, the vibrations of her laughter reverberating throughout his body.
It should always be like this, he thinks, and he doesn’t even think about coffee until CJ announces a round of Irish coffees for the table, and he opens his wallet, pulling out enough cash to cover his and Donna’s.
Like he always does.
Part V: Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
Or, In short, I was afraid.
For the record, he never asked her to bring him coffee.
She just did.
And maybe it was a part of her that knew that if he didn’t notice, if he didn’t see this, if he didn’t recognize what it meant for them—that she never brought him coffee, except that one time, years ago now, when there was a very real possibility that he might get fired—it was all over.
And she didn’t want it to end this way. (Granted, she didn’t want it to end precisely with her bringing him coffee, either, but it seemed that perhaps if it did end like this, if this was the very last thing that she ever did for him, she might be able to make her peace with it, with the notion that she’d tried, at the very least, to end with a bang, or maybe on a high note, or, if nothing else, at least with one final gesture for him, depending on how you looked at it.)
She made his coffee with shaking hands, that morning.
She never thought that it would feel like this, the day that she decided to leave. She thought it would be more settled than this, less abrupt. Or maybe she just thought it wouldn’t be something that was still up in the air by the time she got there in the morning—that she could be gone by lunch. She hadn’t ever pictured it this way, standing at the coffee pot outside Josh’s office, stirring his coffee, watching the seconds tick by before she pulled the rug out from under his feet, and held her breath while she waited to see if he’d even bother to notice that he’d fallen to the floor.
In the old days, Josh would have noticed. In the old days, she never would have had to bring him coffee in the first place, because he would have seen her, would have taken one look at her face, and known immediately that she was not okay, that she hadn’t been okay in a long time.
But she’d been waiting for him to see her, really see her, since June, and now it’s nearing the end of October, and she can’t wait any longer, not when she’d thought they’d finally come to some kind of (if unspoken) understanding in Germany, not when she’s been waiting for more, itching for more, both at work, and, more importantly, with him.
She needs to do more; after what happened in Gaza, she needs something—she needs to feel like she’s making a difference, and this job stopped feeling like that longer ago than she can remember.
And so she asked him for lunch.
What she was really asking him for, of course, was time, and if he’d granted it, she knows it would all come spilling out of her, how she needed more, but she didn’t want to leave him. In fact, if he’d let her, she’d like to stay very close to him, closer than they’d been before.
She’d like to belong to him in a way she never had. (Except, of course, that she always has, since that day he’d placed his badge in her hand on the campaign and she wrapped herself, inadvertently, around his little finger.)
But she’s been waiting all week for Josh to recognize that cancelling lunch on her is taking a significant toll, and if he can’t be bothered to see that, she can hardly hope that he’ll notice something as simple as the fact that she’d made him coffee today, even after all these years.
She’s terrified, today. She’s terrified because she doesn’t know how to leave him, doesn’t know how to walk away, but she does know that she can’t do this anymore. She’s been ready for more—more, meaning, her job, and also, more, meaning, him—for way too long, and she’d thought—she’d really, really thought; in fact, she might’ve staked her life on it, if you’d asked her in a hospital in Germany—that things would be different by now.
“Tomorrow,” he says, today. “I promise. Wherever you want, we’ll go.”
She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask him what his promise is worth, after all this time, after all these promises, each one emptier than the last.
He doesn’t even have the decency to look apologetic, this time, and she wonders bitterly if he knows as well as she does how useless his promise is. And so, she doesn’t bother to react, doesn’t bother to smile at him like she has every other day.
“Okay,” she says, and she sets the coffee on his desk in front of him and turns to walk away.
It’s not okay, is the thing.
It’s not okay at all, and when she goes back out to the bullpen, to her desk, she’ll take the empty box she got out of one of the storage closets, and she’ll pack her things in it, and Josh won’t notice, because he never does, and she’ll pause on the way out—the box of years of laughter and life and love balanced on her hip, and it will bother her hip, bother her leg, but she’ll hardly notice, because she’ll be too blinded by the ache in her heart to think of anything else, and she’ll stop in his doorway, take one last look at him, and then, before she has time to cry—because she’ll want to, she knows that she’ll want to, just like she does now—she’ll tell him she’s leaving, and then she’ll go.
He won’t follow. He won’t understand.
In fact, he probably won’t even think anything of it, until the next time he shouts her name to a vacant bullpen and she doesn’t immediately respond.
She’s not entirely merciless—she’ll get a temp in there by tomorrow morning. But if he doesn’t see her, doesn’t notice that she’s walking away, despite the fact that he still holds her beating heart, right there in the palm of his hand, as he always has, as he always will—then there’s really no point in staying there in the first place.
“Donna, don’t--.” He pauses, and she knows that if she turns around just now, if she looks at him, she’ll be able to practically see the wheels turning in his head, see him weighing his options for what to do next, see him decide, unwittingly, how their future will play out.
So she doesn’t turn around, not yet.
Not until he says, with a sort of breathy, surprised voice, like he’s just put something together that surprises even him, “you brought me coffee.”
She turns around, and she wants to smile, but she can’t, not yet, because that was the easy part, that was the cue.
And one semester as a drama major taught her that you can catch your cue, and still miss your mark. Your timing can be off, still—just because you see your opportunity coming doesn’t mean that you’ll grab hold of it, that you won’t let it sail gently by without another word.
(And Josh was never a drama major, so she wonders if he even knows that.)
Josh takes a deep breath. “The last time you brought me coffee was that day I almost got fired,” he says.
“Technically, I brought you coffee the day you met Joey Lucas, too,” she points out, and she hates herself for being tempted to banter with him now, being tempted to fall back into their old habits. It’s a survival instinct, she thinks. Most people have fight or flight; she simply teases her boss.
He pauses, thinking. “I don’t remember that,” he admits.
“You wouldn’t,” she agrees, “that’s why I brought it.”
Josh gives her a tiny smile, but she doesn’t return it—somehow, she knows, if she tries, that that will be the death of her.
“Is there anything else?” she asks, just to give him one more chance, because looking at him with that sad, little smile on his face, she wants him to know, she wants him to make her stay. (And that was something she’d never felt, with the last man she’d brought coffee to.)
But Josh just shakes his head sadly, and she turns again to leave.
It’s only when she turns, on the threshold between this life—the life she loved, the man she loved—and the next, for one last look at him, that she notices his lip is quivering, like he’s trying very badly not to cry.
“God, Donna, just please don’t leave,” he says, and it’s that that makes her freeze, that makes her question everything, because it means he didn’t miss his mark—it means he saw his cue and knew exactly what to do with it.
It means he knows that she wants to leave, and if he knows that, he must know why.
“The coffee,” he says, swallowing, regaining composure. “I know you’re—I know you want to leave.”
“You know I want to leave?”
Josh hesitates. “That’s what…that’s what lunch was going to be about, wasn’t it?”
Donna doesn’t say anything. He’s doing well so far.
“I thought maybe if—if everything was normal--,” his voice trails off, and he looks unsure of what to say next.
“But everything isn’t normal, Josh,” she says gently. “Don’t you—you of all people, I thought, would see that.”
Josh takes a deep, shuddering breath, looking down at his desk, and then back at her, his eyes choked with tears. “I did see,” he says softly. “But I didn’t want—I didn’t know how to—and it didn’t seem like you wanted--,” he keeps pausing as he speaks, as his throat gets choked up, and the look on his face is so devastated that it takes everything in her not to run to him, not to throw her arms around him, not to forget herself and just make sure that Josh never has to look like that again.
But she always does that, and she can’t do it now.
So she takes a different approach, a more direct approach, and it feels, in a strange way, like a different night, years ago now, when the direct approach hadn’t done either of them any good. What did you mean when you said it’s not what it looks like all over again, but this time, instead, she asks, “Why did you tell me not to leave?”
He opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, she has more to say. Because by Why did you tell me not to leave?, she means something like, Why did you keep cancelling on me? Why are you keeping me here? Is there any end in sight, for us? Is there ever more than this? And, even more than that, all of that, any of that, she means something like, Why didn’t you see me? or, If you did see me, if you, of all people, saw what was happening, why didn’t you save me?
But she can’t ask those things; she can’t ask Josh to save her—she learned, long ago, in a relationship with a man who didn’t fix his own coffee and couldn’t be bothered to turn out the kitchen light, that she had to save herself.
“You didn’t want me to leave,” she tells him, “but that means that you didn’t want me to flourish. You didn’t want me to do anything that didn’t have to do with you. You wanted me stuck under you, forever, and I can’t—I can’t—I need more than that, Josh. I can do more than that, you know I can!”
Josh looks at her as though she’s hacked his heart right out of his chest, and the look on his face makes her flash back to a different time, back to a time of herbal tea, a time when he’d wake up with a fever and a whimper, and he’d look so agonized, so lost, that she’d wrap herself around him until she could get him to sleep, until she could find a way to make him not look like that anymore.
“Of course I know you can,” he says, finally. “Of course I know that. But I had to—I had to protect you, Donna, don’t you get that? After I sent you away and you—I almost lost you.”
“Josh,” she says, because this is something she’s never thought about, this is an angle she hadn’t seen, and she wonders, for the first time, if she’s been as blind to him as he has to her. Because Josh has cared for her, has proven it, time and time again, has always, always looked out for her, and in everything that’s happened, she’s forgotten about this part of him, the part of him that’s disarmed, destroyed, by the very idea of anything hurting the people he loves, hurting her.
“It was my fault,” he continues. “What happened to you. It was all my fault, and I know you were…I know you are…I know it’s still hard, but I couldn’t let you go, not after that. I couldn’t risk letting you leave me again, because what if I lost you for good, this time?”
Donna’s frozen to the floor, and she knows, all at once she knows, she should have seen this. She should have seen this, because this is the very thing she’d said to Amy Gardner, You have to get Josh, only she maybe had forgotten that, before all of this, she used to be the one that got him, just like he used to be the one that got her.
Josh is taking a shaky step towards her, and she doesn’t move. “I was so scared, Donna,” he says, and his hands are almost reaching for her, but he’s just too far away, still. “I was so scared because I--,” he pauses, looking down at the ground, and then seeming to decide that he wants to look at her. “I love you,” he finishes.
Whatever Donna had been expecting, it wasn’t that. Because on some level—on the level that thinks about things like red lights and flights across the world with nothing but the clothes on your back—she knows that Josh loves her. Of course he does. But she doesn’t know what that means, doesn’t know how much, doesn’t know what he wants from her.
Because what if he means that he loves working with her, what if this is a way to get her to stay? They’ve worked together long enough without ever saying this, and she still can’t really believe that it’s true, can’t believe that Josh would love her like she loves him, not when they’ve spent so long avoiding it, avoiding this entirely, saying everything in the world to each other, to the world, except this.
“You love me,” she says slowly, and he nods so eagerly, so earnestly, that she almost laughs.
“Yes.”
But it doesn’t feel real, still, it can’t be real, it can’t be this easy. “But you just mean—you mean, you don’t want me to leave you.”
“Of course not,” he says. “But this isn’t about that."
It’s still not sinking in, and she feels like it’s all happening in slow motion, because she can’t really be standing here with Josh, Josh the man she’s loved for years, the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with, the man whose ability to drive her crazy is only eclipsed by his ability to make her laugh, make her feel safe, valued, at home.
“You love me like you love… the President,” she amends for him, “Or like you love CJ, or…Sam.”
He does laugh, then, but he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I love you like I love you, only you. It’s always been you, Donna, you have to know that. And in Germany I almost—but then, I got so scared, and Colin was there, and when you got back, everything was wrong, and I never got a chance to tell you, and if this is my last chance, I want you to know.”
She doesn’t say anything, then, because before she can think of what to say, she’s moving towards him, cupping his face in her hands, pressing her lips to his at last.
Josh lets out a surprised squeak, but it doesn’t take any longer than that for him to adjust, before he’s kissing her back in earnest, and just as she’s beginning to feel like she could melt into him, he’s pulling away, so he can kiss her on each of her cheeks, on her forehead, on her eyelids, peppering little kisses all over her face.
When he at last pulls away, to look at her, deep affection in his eyes, his dimples out in full force, he says, “for the record, I’ve never done that to the President.”
She laughs, pulling him into her arms, wrapping him tightly in a hug, because this is what it was supposed to be like—this is what she always hoped it would be like, Josh making her laugh after everything has changed, because before she went away to Gaza, he was her best friend, he was the person who could always make her laugh, even on the nights when they didn’t know if the next day would find them still gainfully employed, or find the country at war.
It’s always been Josh, and she presses her face into his chest, as she feels his lips in her hair, and she can’t believe that this is happening, that on the day she thought she might be leaving him forever, she’s holding him in her arms, and he loves her.
“You know that thing you said to Will, that night of the Inauguration?” she asks. “About the buzzing sound in your ear?”
He looks confused, then smirks in recognition. “Aren’t you forgetting a crucial part of that question?”
Now it’s her turn to be confused, but then she rolls her eyes. “Fine. Wild Thing, you know that thing you said to Will, the night of the Inauguration?”
Josh’s grin stretches so wide across his face that she has a sudden memory of that old Christmas cartoon, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. “Yeah?”
“I think I’m experiencing that, just now,” she says, and then she leans up to kiss him again.
There’s more to say—of course, there’s more to say, and the coffee’s gone cold—but all of that can wait, can wait until the buzzing sound isn’t ringing in her ears, can wait until later, because she’s here now, and Josh loves her, and she doesn’t have to leave him, and the coffee doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean quite so much, anymore.
Part VI: That is not what I meant, at all.
They go away for Christmas, that year that she almost walked away, to a snowy cabin in Connecticut that Josh knows, not too far from where he grew up, and when they wake up, tangled together under a pile of quilts, she’s not thinking about coffee or herbal tea or champagne or beer or even hot chocolate.
They stay in bed, most of the morning—drifting in and out of sleep, kissing lazily, idly, holding each other closer than she ever would have thought—only a few months ago—that they’d be able to.
At last, when they’ve both been awake for a while, wrapped around each other, quietly watching the snow fall softly outside the window, Josh presses a kiss to her bare shoulder. “You want some coffee?” he asks, at last.
She smiles. “I’ll get it.”
He hesitates. “You sure?” he asks, and she knows he’s thinking about before, about the day that she thought she was leaving him, and she can see his forehead start to wrinkle with worry.
She kisses his brow to soothe him, watching his eyes flutter closed, feeling happier—and safer, and more loved—than she ever has. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise,” she says.
This time, when she brings him coffee, it’s not because assistants bring coffee, and it’s not in spite of the fact that assistants bring coffee.
It’s purely out of love for him, purely out of the fact that she’s never loved anyone, anything, more than she loves the man in bed beside her, and she knows that she never will.
This time, for the first time, the coffee is a sign of stability, a sign of commitment, a sign of devotion.
But then, if she’s honest with herself, maybe bringing him anything always has been.
And maybe assistants do bring coffee; in any case, it doesn’t matter now. Because she’s not Josh’s assistant. But she is Josh’s, as she always was and always wanted and always will be.
But, for the record, he never asked her to bring him coffee.