"Sarah's a great idea?" Josh repeats, many, many hours later.
They're in his apartment, naked, in bed together, still blissfully post-coital, and his voice is a little hoarse as he says the words. It had been late when Donna had appeared at his door, very late, and she'd been bright-eyed with wine and the secrets she'd been sharing with CJ, telling him they'd both had somewhere better to be, so here she was.
It's a testament to their deep and enduring brand of near-telepathy that she's able to remember what he's on about in an instant, formulate a reply. "What, I was supposed to tell Amy, sorry, your ex is having sex with me now?" To aerate the point, she reaches out and lays her hand on his naked thigh. "You think that'd go over well?"
"You didn't have to back her up," he points out, taking her roaming hand and holding it.
"Sarah is a sweetheart, and she probably would be good for you," Donna states, dispassionately.
Josh rolls over on his side, so he can look at her. "Maybe she would, but I'm not exactly single." The words are a challenge, frankly almost passive-aggressive, and he watches her expression like a hawk, searching for her reaction.
The past year has taught Donna a lot about her feelings and how to hide them effectively, so she manages not to flinch or frown or giggle, just blink calmly. "You're not?"
"I don't know," he shoots back, suddenly brisk and cold. "You tell me."
She stares back at him in stony silence, processing. "I don't know what you want from me, here," she says, finally. Josh blinks, swallows. "Nothing, I guess," he says, his voice oddly strangled, and rolls straight out of bed, pulling on his boxers and seizing a Yale sweatshirt off the dresser as he makes his way out of the bedroom.
Donna's left, slightly chilly and not entirely sure what's happened, flat on her back in Josh's bed, alone.
She hadn't been trying to hurt him, but as seems so common these days, she hadn't really had to try. Maybe it had been careless, pretending she doesn't think of them as an exclusive unit to try and force him to be the first one to go there, but there's still too much that she's feeling, too much vulnerability, for her to risk herself in pursuit of making him feel better. Josh is the guy who's crashed sideways into another relationship with a smart, strong career woman, from which he will, statistically, take no damage, and Donna is the woman who's been in love with her boss for ten years. For her to bare her soul to him is profoundly dangerous, because if he goes in with the knife, he can damage so much more than any other man.
On the other hand, though, it's looking like maybe she just took the knife to him.
The Wisconsin Dairy Princess naïf in her soul revels at the thought of Amy's face, if she had revealed her relationship with Josh. At the time she'd been stamping down her jealousy, trying to play it cool—the words looping in her head, are you in love with Josh—too busy being an adult to sling witty retorts, and even now she doesn't know what she'd say. Probably just, "no." Better still, tell Amy, "no," and then sidle up to Josh, settle into Josh's side. He'd have cooperated enough to wrap his arm around her, because he's tactile like that. It would have been concise, speaking, almost elegant.
Also enormously bitchy.
But it would have shown Josh her hand, and that would have constituted an unacceptable risk. Except he clearly wants her to have said something, done something. He considered it her right and responsibility, so it would have been no risk at all.
Hindsight is, as always, a bastard.
It's ironic how, after so many years of reading his mind, anticipating his every request and quirk, her sixth sense has begun to fail her. Ever since Jack, really, the calibrations had started to slip, but now she's truly out to sea, can't begin to read his face when it goes immobile and stiff. She doesn't know how he feels about her anymore, maybe never did to begin with.
Now her brain is spinning to figure out how she can fix whatever damage she's just managed to do to their fledgling relationship. Does she walk out into the living room, throw herself at his feet, and beg forgiveness? Of course not, although maybe an apology of some kind is warranted. She should tell him what she wants from him, give him a chance to articulate what he wants, then they should find the common ground.
What they really need to do is have the Talk, but the thought of that increases her heart rate almost to the thundering tempo of a panic attack.
And Josh is still out in his living room in his boxers, feeling like she doesn't want him.
The air of his bedroom is frigid on the skin of her back, and she rushes to find her underwear as goosepimples form all over her body. Once she's restored her panties to their rightful place—she finds herself incapable of having life-altering conversations with no undies on—she picks up Josh's discarded shirt and contemplates it.
From a negotiating perspective, it could give her an edge, soften him a little. There's hardly a man on earth who doesn't like to see a woman in his clothes the morning after, and it would send him a message; I'm yours.
On the other hand, it's November, and she doesn't want to get naked again once she's persuaded Josh to come back to bed. His drawers haven't changed even a little since the last time she'd been in a position to ferret through them, and she locates his oversized pajamas with little trouble.
If they'd looked hilariously large on Josh, they hang like curtains on Donna's frame, but the blue cotton fabric is both cozier and comfier than the discarded dress shirt. She pulls the top over her head, and takes a deep, bracing breath.
Josh is sitting on the couch in the dark.
From what Donna can see, by the weak light of the street lamp glimmering through his window, he's sitting with his head in his hands, totally unmoving. If she'd had to take a picture and title it, she would have called it Defeat.
There are no words in her heart, looking at him. Today has been long, and hard, personally and professionally, and although she's making her bread talking these days, she doesn't have anything to say.
Instead she makes her way over to him, smooths her hands over his shoulders again, and pulls his head to rest on her stomach, a comforting embrace.
He resists for only a moment before he's wrapping his arms around her hips and pulling her whole body close to him.
"It's fine if you don't wanna be with me," he tells her, softly. "I shouldn't have made assumptions."
"I should have told Amy you weren't available," Donna counters, quietly. It's hard to hold on to that largely self-constructed notion of dignity when Josh is blaming everything on himself. His nose skims along her stomach as he shakes his head.
"It's not your job to fend off my exes," he disagrees. "Specially if you don't feel-"
"I feel." Never has Donna claimed to be a particularly articulate woman. Her rhetoric is pithy and meaningful, but not frequently eloquent. He's got a decade's translating experience, though, and his grip on her waist tightens.
"You do?"
His voice sounds tremulous in the dark, cold air, and his thumbs are stroking over her hips, quietly affectionate.
"You're not allowed to call Sarah for a date," Donna informs him. "And you have my permission to tell Amy why."
"So we're…?"
This time she doesn't have an answer, just a shiver as she runs her fingers through his hair. "Donna?" Josh asks, but she shakes her head.
"I don't know what we're doing, Josh," she says. "But I do know that it's freezing. Come back to bed."
He takes another deep breath, and then she feels the tip of his nose, his mouth, pressing against her stomach, through the cotton of his pajamas. The kiss he lays there is warm, tender, and the feeling of it sends a jittering, itching jolt into her bones. "I wanna be with you," he tells her, softly, his breath hot on her skin. "I wanna be able to hold you in public and tell Amy not to set me up with women, and I want to wake up with you in the mornings and go to bed with you at night."
In ten years of friendship and flirtation, Donna's never known Josh to be the kind of man who instigates this discussion. Maybe, she reflects, dizzy, he hasn't had it with any of the women she's seen him with, because he wanted her the whole time. "Okay," she agrees. "I...okay."
"That's real reassuring, Donnatella," he prods, but his voice is bubbling with suppressed mirth.
"I want to be with you, too," Donna admits. "And all that stuff about waking up and being together...I want that, too."
"Okay," he says, sounding smug. And then, following a prompt smack upside the head, in more apologetic tones, "Okay! Okay!"
"Bed," Donna reminds him. "We have too much work to do to catch hypothermia."
"You don't catch hypothermia," he points out, keeping his hands on her hips and steering her carefully backwards as he stands. "You catch pneumonia, you develop hypothermia."
"Whatever." Her hands are starting to feel icy, so she slips them comfortably up the back of his sweatshirt.
"Jesus! Donna!"
"Bed, Joshua."
Five minutes later, they're tucked up under the down comforter of his bed, Donna burrowed cozily into Josh's armpit-"Why do you do that? It can't possibly smell good."-drifting off into a warm, comfortable sleep.
"Donna?" Josh calls, softly.
"Mmmph?"
"I meant what I said. I want you to stay."
Donna spreads her palm against his stomach, feels his breathing and his skin and the echo of his miraculously strong heart. "Me, too," she tells him. "Go to sleep."