It's the second week after the election and Josh is losing his mind a little, at this point being held together entirely by coffee, neckties, and Donna Moss's nicely manicured fingers.
They're going to the fucking White House in just three months and there's way too much to do and yet still Leo is making him go home by six and not come in til seven thirty. He's literally told the Secret Service not to let Josh into their offices until seven thirty in the morning.
This does not please him.
The President Elect has declared that this is, insofar as it's possible, "vacation" for the staff. "No twelve hour days, no Sundays, and definitely no working holidays until after Christmas," were his exact words, and someone's taken the liberty of printing them out and taping them up in various places around the office. Josh's desk has a copy with illuminated capitals. Donna has threatened to have it framed.
Donna is part of why Josh is losing his mind.
On the campaign he'd been able to sublimate his Donna-related urges into work, keeping his mind spinning eighteen hours a day and shutting it down completely from midnight to six.
Now he's got free time. Free time and not enough actual work to do, since he can't hire people at three AM in his living room.
It's getting harder not to touch her, even casually. When they're near each other he just wants to keep a finger on her, hold her hand, stroke her arm, cuddle her. What used to be an occasional chivalrous hand on the lower back, reserved for chivvying her into fundraisers and through doors he was already holding, is now developing into a constant fixture, his fingers lighting automatically in the dip of her spine when they're enroute to anywhere.
He wants to brush her hair out of her eyes. When she smiles he wants to stroke her cheek. When her expression goes blank but for the sorrowful widening of her eyes, he wants to pull her close and kiss her temple, hug her happy again. And it's more than just touch; he wants to spoil her, provide for her, take her out and feed her, help her fix her car. He wants to take care of her in a way he's never taken care of another human being, not even himself.
Those urges are hard to resist, when it seems so, so easy. He knows she's looking for an apartment, and he knows every one she's seen has been tiny, dirty, or in a bad area. It would be the work of an instant to hand her a key and clear out his spare room, and then he would know that she was safe, comfortable, and close. He knows she's on some kind of crash diet so her dress for the inaugural balls will somehow fit better than it already does, and he wants to make her a burger, red and juicy the way she likes them, with cheese and mayo and all the gloriously tasty things she's starving herself of.
Holding back is strange, a feeling like a hook in his guts, and it's not a feeling he likes. It's starting to show, every time he misses a beat in the rhythmic staccato of their banter, or has to pull his hand back, faking an itch or a yawn to try and cover for himself. He's never been one of those people who can tell how well they're faking it, but now he's starting to be sure; his feelings have never been more obvious.
When the strand of hair falls into her eyes, they both reach to tuck it back behind her ear, hands moving synchronously, until Josh freezes, drops his to the desk, and clears his throat, visibly uncomfortable, avoiding her gaze.
It's something like the third time today she's seen him take a step back from her, and every time he does, it hurts a little in her stomach.
"We have to talk," Donna tells him, warily. He obliges her with a gratifyingly nervous expression, wide eyes and lowered brows.
"About what?" he asks, in his most deliberately casual tone.
It's sort of impossible for her to put into words—what would she say, our mutual and unacknowledged sexual and romantic passion?—so Donna does the best thing she can think of. She reaches out and lays her hand over his, lets her fingers trail a little, watches him shiver and flex his digits against hers, before he flips his palm to meet hers. There's a distinct, thunderous pulsing under her ribs as she watches Josh take hold of her hand. "This," she says, very, very quietly.
They're alone in the office, because at seven-thirty it's an hour and a half past the President Elect's curfew. Leo gave them special dispensation to stay late, entirely so Josh can catch Donna up on the stupid and antiquated governmental software she's going to have to use at the White House. Donna had pretty quickly grasped the basics, which is more than Josh can say for himself, and now they're sitting side-by-side with an order of Chinese take-away spread over the desk in front of them, holding hands.
They're alone, and she's holding his hand and he's looking at her, as he so often does, like he wants to kiss her.
"This," Josh repeats, and sweeps his thumb over the soft underside of her wrist.
"That," Donna agrees, shakily.
Josh swallows, squeezes her hand. "What's there to talk about?" he asks, sounding choked. Nervous. Conflicted.
"Plenty." Donna twists her hand til their fingers are all threaded together, stares at them, balanced on the arm of his chair. "Do you really want to spend four years pretending—just watching and—I mean—"
"Do I want to spend four years pretending I don't like you?" he asks, surprisingly calm. "No—but I also don't wanna get fired for embarrassing the administration."
"Because you're my boss?"
"Because I'm your boss. And also cause I hired you basically on faith alone, which looks like you got your job on your back, if we ever..."
"That's flattering," Donna snarks. Josh shrugs, his expression perfectly communicating his resignation and annoyance.
"We can't have a thing, Donna," he says, definitely. "I can't date you. For one thing, if I did, you'd never get another decent job in the District."
"So we don't date."
"Right." Josh looks like he's swallowed a lemon, even as he agrees with her. Donna smiles softly.
Her thumb is the one moving now, stroking gently over his index finger. "We never go out together alone, we never do anything in public that looks like we're together. Only in private."
He has to take a shuddering breath before he can speak, and he shakes his head from side to side as though to clear it like an Etch-a-Sketch. "You're right, that's not dating. That's having an affair. And you can't be coming and going from my apartment. I can't go to yours. Eventually someone would catch on and take a picture."
"Okay," she says. "Only in private…this is where my argument breaks down."
"There is no in private, Donna. There's nowhere to be alone together where we can't also be accosted by reporters," Josh summarizes, dolefully. "We cannot have a thing, Donnatella."
"I refuse to accept that. What about the office," she muses aloud. "I mean, doors that lock, restricted press access, I spend lots of time alone with you here anyway. It's perfect."
"Except that in like two months it's going to bethe White House," Josh asserts, aghast. "Have you completely lost your mind?"
"No," Donna tells him, and then she leans forward and captures his mouth with her own.
Josh stays still for maybe half a second before he falls to temptation, inhaling through his nose and bringing a hand up to the back of her neck, kissing her deeply. It's wonderful and frightening at the same time, both hot and inexorable. Even as he sighs into her warm, wet mouth and tastes her tongue against his, he's facing a rising feeling that this is bigger than either of them.
When he pulls away, she leans as though to follow him, lids fluttering over her clear blue eyes. "I don't wanna wait four years to do that again," she breathes.
"Me neither," Josh agrees, and if his voice is little high, neither of them feels the need to comment on it.
For a long few minutes it's enough to be nose to nose, reveling in a closer intimacy than they've had in months. Ever since the convention, when they and the campaign as a whole were thrown into the public eye, they've been careful to keep their distance, not pushing too far or flirting too blatantly. They've missed it, the closeness. Both of them are affectionate people, and in the brief heady days before anyone cared they'd recognized that in one another, and been as openly cuddly as two professionals could possibly be.
It's maybe slightly pathetic, how much Josh enjoys the feeling of Donna's fingertips resting lightly on his cheek.
"I'm not having sex with you in the White House," Josh tells her, frank.
Donna snorts, then giggles, and then she's leaning away, laughing so hard her fair skin is turning tomato red, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. It's too hard not to laugh along with her; everything about this situation is absurd. Every time one of them begins to wind down, clutching their aching stomachs and puffing out huge, deep breaths, they catch each other's eye again and are sent into fresh gales of hilarity.
Finally, Donna manages to choke out, "I didn't mean we should—at work," and that's enough to sober them a bit. Josh is still smiling widely, though, when he reaches for her hand again.
"So, what did you mean?" he asks, as she laces her fingers through his.
Donna glances down at their hands, up at his face. "We'll be able to talk. And, you know, hug. Kiss, if we're feeling especially daring."
Josh takes a minute to process that. "Middle school dating," he summarizes, raising both eyebrows.
"I don't hear any better ideas from you," she points out, but she squeezes his hand, and the smile in her big blue eyes is enough to reassure him she's not actually mad. "And I don't want to keep fighting this."
"I don't want to trap you in anything," Josh says, again in his deliberately casual voice, the one that tells Donna he's uncomfortable and possibly baring a little bit of his closely guarded and somewhat battered soul. "No sex, no real dating, just occasional drive-by cuddles with your grumpy and otherwise unpleasant boss...doesn't sound like any girl's dream."
"Maybe you're not meeting the right girls," Donna quips. "I can live without sex."
"But can I?" He inflects it like some great philosophical quandry, which has the delightful effect of sending Donna into giggles again, but he already knows the answer. Of course he can live without sex, anyone can, and he might want Donna badly, but there's no chance he wants her badly enough to destroy her future prospects by actually sleeping with her.
He thinks longingly of a world where it wouldn't matter to anyone in Washington if he happened to fall in love with his assistant, where no one would use that fact to imply that he's slimy or she's easy. This isn't like John Hoynes' questionable sexual history, this is two people who happened to meet under the least convenient circumstances possible and discovered that they clicked. This is bigger than just a campaign fling.
And Donnatella Moss is sighing a happy, sleepy sigh, and leaning her head on his shoulder. "If you're willing, I am," she tells him, comfortably. "Exclusive not-dating. It's the hip new thing."
"Ha ha," Josh responds, automatically. "I'm in if you are."
"Excellent." She turns her head just a little and presses a kiss against his jaw, and his heart rate leaps at the feeling.
He grins, turns his cheek to lie flush against her warm, soft hair. "Yeah," he says, softly. "It is."
"Donna," Josh calls, storming past her desk and into his office. He's got that tightly-strung thing going on, the one where his shoulders are tense and nearly up around his ears. She hurries after him, and even as she closes the door, she knows what's coming.
No sooner has the latch clicked, than he's spinning her around and wrapping his arms around her, his face tucked against her hair.
"Bad meeting?" she asks, folding her arms around his back and closing her eyes. He'll hold on to her for a minute, or five, probably not ten because that would strain his ego too far, and put their fledgling thing at risk, and so that's exactly how much time she has to convince him to talk about it.
"These people make me want to scream," he mutters. "Shouldn't have the first amendment cause kids can buy porn on the street, gotta have prayer in school, let's protect the kids from the big bad world, but someone shoots up an elementary school and they all just—"
He actually, physically shudders in her arms, and Donna revises her estimate up to ten, fifteen minutes.
"No joy?" she guesses, and he shakes his head, buries his nose further into her hair.
"Apparently the founding fathers meant for every six year old to take an AR-15 to school every day."
There's not a single thing she can think of to say to that, no joke for Comedy Relief Girl to crack, no way to diffuse the tension, so Donna just tucks her face into Josh's shoulder and holds on.
They're both learning that their job can be terrible, sometimes. When they're trying to save lives, save children, and the lobbyists and the corporations and the general pettiness of Congress get in the way and then people have the effrontery to stand in front of the Capitol and say things like, "We have to wonder why the President isn't doing more," days like this one, sometimes it's more than they can take. More than Josh can take.
So he goes into his office and Donna shuts the door, and they hold each other together while the world falls apart.
The night his father died, he'd left the party and gone to throw a change of clothes into his backpack, and Donna had followed him, impulsively taken him into her arms. It had taken nearly thirty minutes for him to let go, and if the shoulder of her sweater had been a little damp as she saw him into a cab, no one knew but the two of them. Comfort isn't new, between them, but there's more call for it than ever.
"God," Josh says, softly, giving her a softer squeeze. "I just don't….Donna..."
And then he's pulling away, tilting her jaw up so he can cover her mouth with a soft, slow kiss, one that lasts and lasts. She pushes back, slides a hand into his flyaway hair and tightens her fingers, til he's gasping a little, staring at her with slightly-too bright eyes.
"Maybe not so much with the..." He gestures expressively. "All things considered."
"All things considered," Donna echoes, smooths her palms over the curve of his skull. "You've got five minutes before your two o'clock gets here."
"Definitely not long enough for that," Josh points out, giving her his very best lecherous grin, only to drop it in favor of a soft-eyed smile. His hand is big and warm on her cheek, and he swipes his thumb down the line of her nose. "Thanks."
"I love you," Donna reminds him, very quietly.
"I love you," Josh agrees.
They are in California, and Donna has spent the day dreaming of sunbathing and running the office by phone, and Josh has spent the day running around and keeping the fundraiser on the tracks. At the party Josh flirts a little with Joey Lucas, and Donna moons over a variety of men who are both substantially more tan and much better paid than Josh could ever hope to be. And then the White House delegation goes back to the hotel, the hotel where Josh and Donna happen to have received rooms with a connecting door between them. The hotel, where they have about forty minutes to get all their stuff together and get out.
"So she's seeing somebody?" Donna asks, flat on her back, while Josh gathers his things from the bathroom and crams them into his suitcase. He's changed into one of his shlubbier flannel shirts, this one a nondescript reddish-brownish plaid, and he's very obligingly forgotten to fasten the top three buttons, so Donna finds herself ogling three exposed inches of bare chest and daydreaming of opening those buttons one by one, maybe with her teeth.
"I guess," Josh confirms absently, lifting his discarded tie and blinking at it as though he's not quite sure of its function. "She said she was with somebody."
"Maybe she was just saying that," Donna muses, more concerned with Josh's open collar than Joey Lucas' putative interest in him.
"Why would she just be saying that?" he asks, with one half of a smile in his voice.
"For the allure," Donna informs him, and drags a lazy hand up her stomach to aerate the point.
"Oh." His gaze is suddenly hungry, fixed on her abdomen, and then he gives her a long, lingering once-over that makes her skin feel too tight.
"Go see her before we leave," Donna tells him, but her voice and her face—and her body, as she rolls up onto her side and props her head on one hand, hips arched back a little, knees tucked demurely together—are saying something entirely different.
"You're funny," Josh observes, dropping the tie into his bag and climbing onto the bed, rolling her onto her back so he's got his knees bracketing her hips, his hands on her face. "You're just-" he interrupts himself by kissing her, speaking in between deep, quick kisses, "-absolutely...the funniest...mmmph."
He's not laying on her the way she might like, more crouched over her body, but this is still new, still exciting. This is the first time they've managed to get horizontal, and considering they don't have the time, or likely the protection, to take full advantage, it's worth savouring.
Donna runs her hands up over his shoulders as he licks her bottom lip, pushes her fingers down the back of his collar, runs them back up to his skull and pulls gently on his hair the way she knows he likes. He breaks off the kiss with a groan, leaving her feeling jittery and molten and very female, staring from lidded eyes at Josh, who looks very much as though he'd be willing to damn the consequences and take her right now.
She still has something to learn about reading him, though, because he ducks, presses a final, close-mouthed kiss on her lips, and then he's rolling off of her. "We gotta be down in a minute," he tells her, and holds out a hand to pull her up.
"I've found a loophole," Donna tells him, as she's gripping his hand and letting him tow her to her feet. "Or, rather, a place that meets all our criteria."
"Our criteria?" Josh frowns, tries to drop her hand.
"Mmm. Somewhere where we can be private, and there's no press, and a door that locks." She's absolutely smouldering at him now, channeling twenty-four hours of exhaustion and two years' sexual frustration into faintly fluttering, lowered lids, and the perfect amount of pouty lip. Her thumb runs lightly along the hollow of his palm, and Josh swallows, breathes out hard.
"Yeah?" he asks, voice abruptly low and gravelly.
"Yeah," Donna says, slowly. "Here."
And then she's dropping his hand, shouldering him aside, and zipping his suitcase shut. "You're right," she says, not looking at him. "We've only got a minute."
Donna spends a week sleeping on a cot that the nurses bring into his room for her, waking every time someone walks past the door, or one of the battalion of machines beeps, or Josh mutters in his drugged-up sleep. She's hollow-eyed and living with a constant, mild nausea by the end of four days, her skin prickling with unease.
Hospitals have never been high on her list of fun and enjoyable places. There's this omnipresent sense that people are suffering all around her, that every surface she touches might once have been smeared with blood, and that, combined with the emotional exhaustion of fearing for Josh's life, the odd feeling that her feet are dangling over a fathomless chasm, is enough to make her downright paranoid.
Mrs Lyman tries—when she arrives, several hours after Josh has been moved from recovery to an actual room—to send Donna home, promising to call if anything changes, but she finds in her son's assistant the immovable object to Joshua's irresistible force.
Riva Lyman is an imminently practical woman, and one who, despite nervous tendencies, performs with grace under fire. Her son is in God's hands, as well as the capable staff at GW, and besides prayer there's little to nothing she can do for him. Except, of course, he's spent hours on the phone with her, telling her about his beautiful, smart, funny, impossibly nerdy assistant, waxing poetic about her filing system and her notecards and her laugh. There is, maybe, something she can do for her boy, and to keep herself sane, and so she decides quickly to take charge of Donna's care and feeding, bringing her meals from outside the hospital, sitting with her during the day, holding her hands and letting Donna talk about the man lying, unconscious, between them.
It's early on the fifth day after the shooting that Donna tells his mother that she and Josh are together, after a fashion. The words are malformed and awkward on her tongue, as she tries to give voice to what it is exactly that they share. No one else knows anything about it, and on some level, Donna tells her so that, if Josh dies, she's not the only person in the whole world who remembers what he'd been to her.
Which is awfully grim, she realizes, but her secret boyfriend got shot in the chest and isn't quite out of the woods yet, so maybe she can be forgiven her pessimism.
Riva laughs, when Donna finally gets it out, because of course they're together, and of course they're in love, she's known that since he came home for his father's funeral.
Donna breaks down and cries, then, for the first time since she'd heard the news, pressing her forehead into his blankets and sobbing, while Riva rubs her back in slow, soothing circles.
Josh sits in his office and stews in his own misery, while Donnatella Moss, his devoted assistant and part-time girlfriend is out to dinner with some Republican, courtesy of Ainsley Hayes, Life-Ruiner Extraordinaire.
She'd agreed to be set up basically by accident, and although she'd offered to break the date Josh had—then in a more rational frame of mind—assured her it was fine. He trusted her, and a free dinner was a free dinner.
In her usual fashion she'd fretted a while longer before deciding that it might lend some cover to their own strange little liason, and decided to go. Josh had cheered her on, doing his very best imitation of a supportive boyfriend.
And now he's paying for it, imagining Donna alternately trapped with some terrible hobgoblin, or schmoozing it up with Sam's evil twin. She'd been running late to meet the guy, and she'd promised to be back in the office by ten-thirty, but he still finds himself begrudging every second that passes, scowling at his discarded salad, now wilted and pale. "The hell with this," he says, finally, and goes to bother Sam.
The world is still wobbly all around them, their faith in the President shaken, his marriage visibly strained, and the reelection prospects far from rosy, but they still have their friendships and their work, and each other.
And, Donna muses with great satisfaction, a hotel room.
The hotel in Manchester is antique and warm and smells like oversteeped tea and fresh sheets. It's one of Donna's favorite places to stay, other than her own home or Josh's, and luckily it's also the hotel they spend the most time in, especially during the early primary season.
The campaign is kicking off, and for several glorious nights, they'll be living out of the Manchester Arms.
Donnatella Moss, strategic genius that she is, has got plans.
In her suitcase she has two sets of nice underwear, her favorite body lotion, a bottle of bubblebath that has a pleasing and relatively neutral scent, and a pack of condoms, these in addition to the usual repertoire of work clothes in varying degrees of Federal frumpiness.
Josh is unspooling right now, probably about the tobacco lawsuit, and so Donna's already applied for and been granted permission to give him two evenings off.
Which is not to say there's nothing on his schedule. Starting at five PM tonight Josh has a meeting penciled in as "Philately". She knows he hasn't seen it because if he had, she might already be in bed right now, instead of hustling Josh into a car and driving them back to Manchester proper from the farm. She might already be awash in his glorious naked body, rather than trying to figure out which marginally healthy food she has half a hope of convincing him to partake in. Instead she's pulling into the parking lot of a Panera and looking over at her secret boyfriend, who is staring out the window in a hypnotic stupor, a fixed, vaguely nauseous look on his face.
"Hey," she calls, softly. He doesn't respond, keeps staring out the window, and his eyes don't even flicker in her direction. It's as though he can't hear her at all. "Josh, hey," she says, more loudly, and deliberately places her hand on his thigh. High up on his thigh, almost on the inside of it, in fact. He takes notice straight away this time, swallowing and looking at her with wide, scandalized eyes.
"Donna!" he squeaks, and she obligingly runs her hand down the length of his leg to his knee. That doesn't seem to help him, though, and he stares at her slim fingers against the denim of his jeans for a long moment, swallowing reflexively and breathing through his nose.
"Why aren't we eating with everyone else?" he asks, finally, and Donna strokes her thumb along his kneecap, an oddly edged shape under his pants. "Because we have the evening off," she reveals, and as she smoulderingly meets his gaze, she can see he's already cottoned on.
"We...both…have the night off," Josh reiterates, and Donna nods, slowly. "While the rest of the staff-"
"Argues about the speech at the farm," Donna summarizes. "Yep."
"Huh." He lifts her hand off his leg and holds it, examining her fingers minutely. "So we're here to get dinner..."
"And then we'll go back to the hotel," Donna adds, softly.
Josh looks at her with the dark, intense eyes she's been seeing more and more of lately, as sexual frustration has begun to underline their every interaction. "Might need to make a stop before we get to the hotel part of the evening," he warns her.
"I don't think you will," she teases. "I also don't think that'll be an issue if you don't eat some kind of a salad with dinner."
"See, now," Josh gripes, releasing her hand and reaching for his seatbelt, "That's what we call blackmail in the great state of Connecticut."
"We call it aggressive negotiation, in the great state of Wisconsin." She gives him her very best winning smile, but he still snorts at her.
"You really are just the biggest nerd I know," he reminds her, but his tone is warm, indulgent. "So big, I can't understand why you like that movie."
"I just do," she dismisses him. "I never thought I was going to get to see one, you know? In a theater, when it was new? I always loved them, but I never thought I'd get to be part of one. So yeah, I love it." The car door opens to a gust of frigid wind, stinging her eyes and whipping at her hair.
"It's a complete piece of crap," Josh declares, brooking no disagreement.
"Salad," Donna tells him, "Or guess what? We might just be watching that piece of crap."
Josh eats his salad.
He also steals the car keys, and only gives them back once they're comfortably ensconced in his room, Donna's bag tucked under the bed.
She'd been the one to move her suitcase, and also the one to hide it, with the stated reasoning that their co-workers had so little understanding of privacy that they might well barge straight in, and were they to do so, there was no point in making it too obvious that Donna was actually sleeping there on purpose. Josh engages the deadbolt on the door and leaves her to her convoluted reasoning, wondering privately whether paranoia is supposed to be so attractive.
He takes Donna's coat from her and hangs it next to his, in his closet, takes a minute to appreciate the sight of them, side by side, and then turns back to his girlfriend, assistant, partner. She's already sitting on the bed, or rather, sprawled half-way back. Her feet are touching the floor but from the knees up she's prone, practically spread over the quilt. At the hem of her shirt, there's two inches of bare stomach showing, and Josh feels the inevitable tug of longing.
That tug has been his constant companion for nearly four years now, and for three he's been able to indulge it slightly, but he's never really let himself go around Donna, never let himself touch her the way he wants to or make her lose control the way he's sure he can.
Now, though…
She's still got her eyes closed, and she's stretching, now. Arching her back and making these incredible small noises that shoot straight to his groin. Her shirt rucks up a little more, enough to expose her navel, and Josh grins to himself, toeing off his shoes and padding silently over to her.
She squeals delightfully when he presses an open-mouthed kiss to her belly.
He takes his time there, nuzzling against the waist of her pants, kissing along her hipbones and stroking his hands over her thighs. Donna lets him, giggling and growing more flushed and breathless by the minute, propped up on her elbows, until finally she uses a well-placed toe to prod him in the ribs.
"Come on," she urges him, and to make her point she reaches out and digs her fingers into his hair.
Josh has never really understood why he likes having his hair pulled, it's just something that's always done it for him. The prickling of his scalp, the faint concentration on his partner's face, it's not the pain that feels good, exactly, but on the other hand it is. He doesn't understand it, but when Donna Moss gets her fingers into his hair his vision fuzzes a little, his breathing deepens, quickens.
He lets her tow him up her body, til they're nose to nose, breathing the same air. "Hi," he greets her, waveringly, and she giggles at him, takes his mouth with her own.
It's not the most comfortable position they've got going, too close to the edge of the bed for Josh to really get on top of her, too far for, well, other things, and his back is starting to cramp, so he rolls them, til Donna's sprawled over him, then wiggles back, dragging her along despite her good-natured struggles.
"Jo-osh!" she laughs, and convulses when his fingers dance along her ribs.
"Stop mocking me," he whines, playing up the childish tone, and then he draws her back up, and kisses her neck.
Lots of women like having their necks kissed, but for Donna it's somehow an extra-erogenous area. He never does anything that can leave a mark, sometimes only presses tiny butterfly kisses down the line of her throat, but without fail it leaves her gasping, writhing, looking for more. Her fingers stroke through his hair, and he lightly scrapes his teeth along the juncture of neck and shoulder, eyes closed, immersed in the sound of her, the feel. Her hips jerk against his in reaction, and she manages a really profound whimper, one that makes it sound like she's already inches from orgasm.
She might be, Josh realizes. He certainly is.
They're not even a little bit naked, and this is already the most sexual encounter they've had in all three years of their relationship. Three years of managing his own sexual frustration, of having to jerk off nearly every day, on special occasions whispering into the phone in his own apartment while across the city, Donna mewled in her own bed.
Masturbation's been enough to keep them sane and mostly presentable, but it's not the same as sex. Yeah, he's kind of already on the edge.
Donna's body is so, so warm, and she smells…
Well, she smells like a body, like her body. Undertones of her soaps and lotions, but mostly the heavy, familiar scent of her, with a new note of saltiness that probably means she's slippery wet already. It makes his breath catch in his lungs, and he groans into her shoulder as one of her roving hands ghosts over the front of his jeans.
Whatever else he is, and he knows he's earned quite a few derogatory if well-deserved labels over the years, he's a gentleman in bed. No matter how tempting it is, he's not about to let that hand work itself into his jeans and completely take him apart. Not yet anyway.
"Wait," he rasps at her, catching her wrists and rolling them again, til they're facing each other on their sides. "You gotta take it easy on me, okay?"
"Fuck, Josh," Donna whines, and she really does look like she's coming apart already. Her cheeks are red, the blush creeping down her throat, and the way she's looking at him makes his stomach knot up. "We can take our time later. Take your pants off already."
Well. That's an order he's willing to follow without question.
Josh starts with his shirt, working the buttons open with unsteady fingers as Donna whips her own top off and drops it on the floor, moving to her slacks in short order. She's so much more efficient than him at this that she's naked, totally naked, and working on the button of his jeans before he manages to strip off his undershirt. He catches up to her easily, eases his pants and boxers down his hips, and she takes them the rest of the way while he reaches for the condoms on the bedside table.
Their first round is not particularly protracted or interesting, though they enjoy it very much indeed. Donna pulls Josh down on top of her, and lasts all of three minutes before they're gasping, clenching, falling apart.
The second time comes about an hour later, after Josh gets down between Donna's thighs and indulges a particular fantasy of his, rendering her completely non-verbal over the course of about forty minutes.
The third round is slow and sleepy, an interlude of wakefulness in the middle of the night, in the dark, just their bodies rocking together until they shudder and sigh and fall asleep again, sated.
In the morning his alarm goes off at seven, and they have to face another long day, surrounded by people they only sort of like and other people they only sort of trust, but for five minutes they get to lie, cozy and intimate and looking into each other's eyes, murmuring their good mornings, their "I love you"s.
It's going to be a good day.