There's a moment where they make eye contact, consider making a fuss, and decide, silently, mutually, that they can endure for the sake of dignity a six-hour bus ride sitting side by side, just like old times.
Donna slides into the window seat, on autopilot, and Josh reaches out to take her backpack, to stow it in the overhead. Their hands meet for a fraction of a second and they both freeze, discomfited, before Josh clears his throat and pulls her bag out of her grasp. She settles awkwardly in her seat, looking subtly for an arm rest folded up between their seats.
There isn't one.
Josh swings himself into his seat, with a little of the leonine swagger she's rarely seen in him, since the campaign threw them together again. He meets her eye for another long, weird moment, and the corners of his mouth push down ever so slightly, betraying his feelings of discomfort, resentment even.
Then he opens the briefing book on his lap and ignores her.
Donna doesn't read. She can't read in moving vehicles, hasn't been able to since she was small. It makes her sick to her stomach, and she'd abandoned every attempt to catch up on policy reading after her second sojourn vomiting in the pokey, terrible bus bathroom, back in 1998.
Even once she'd given up on that, her motion sickness still reared its head from time to time. Sometimes it isn't bad, but sometimes, particularly on days when she's been up all night writing policy memos, it is. Josh had taken to carrying peppermints in his pockets during the first campaign, and during the second she'd started to turn a little green in her seat on the first trip from the airstrip to Manchester, only to have him press a ginger hard candy into her palm.
She rests her cheek against the cool pane of the glass and breathes deeply, counting a slow in two, out three. They've been on the road for less than ten minutes and she's already battling the roil of her stomach. Today is a bad day.
Josh can't quite decide how he feels about sitting next to Donna. On the one hand, he's not about to kick up a fuss and make someone switch seats with him—there've been enough rumors about them over the years, and they certainly don't need Washington gossip-mongers speculating on why the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and his former assistant couldn't sit next to one another on the Santos campaign bus—but he doesn't want to be close to her.
Or rather, he does, and therein lies the problem.
It's classic angst, two sets of contrary desires pitted against one another, and Josh is maybe a little sick of it. He loves her, loves her with his heart and his mind and his body, aches and yearns for her, wants nothing more than to fold her in his arms and keep her there forever. He also wants to rail at her, scream and scare her, weep for her, because she walked out of his life without warning, when he was already unsteady from the wound of her near-death. He wants to accuse her, condemn her. He wants to blame her for the vehicle she chose to take herself away from him, the idiot Bingo Bob.
And still, he wants to hold her.
It's not a particularly comfortable way to live.
It proves almost too easy to fall into routine, as they lock eyes and grit their teeth. He takes her bag, flinching as their fingers make contact, and she slips into her seat, the window seat, so she can see the horizon and maybe not throw up. Josh pretends not to notice how she looks, in vain, for an armrest hiding between their seat backs. He settles into his seat, leaning slightly away from her, and opens his briefing book as the bus lurches into motion.
In the corner of his eye, he can see Donna staring out the window, taking the deep measured breaths that mean today is a bad day, re: her motion sickness.
He doesn't have any candies.
The page is blurring a little as he stares through it, because he isn't carrying peppermints or the ginger things the shop clerk had assured him were a good stomach remedy. He isn't carrying anything at all that he could give her, and she's looking pale and sad and there's not a damn thing he can do for her.
Stomach tight with guilt, he bites his lips and forced himself to focus on the print in his lap.
She walked away. It's not his problem anymore.
An hour passes, an hour of measured breathing and intensely boring tax policy, and then the bus jolts over some bad pavement and a warm, heavy weight lands on Josh's shoulder, redolent of Donna's sweet-smelling shampoo.
It freezes him, stops his breathing, the movement of his eyes on the page.
"Donna?" he asks, very softly, but he knows she's out. It's her primary defense mechanism against sickness of any kind; go to sleep and at least you won't be feeling it anymore. Once, what feels like a very long time ago, they'd settle into their seats, Josh putting up the armrest between them, and, peppermint dissolving on her tongue, Donna snuggling into his shoulder to pass out as he read quietly aloud from whatever intensely boring memo he had to occupy himself.
Once, this had been usual.
Turning his head feels like a titanic act, like he's struggling against a thousand years of rust and gunk, like the gears in his neck are frozen with buildup. Her face is still and pale, but the lines of unhappiness are smoothed. She looks almost as she had back at the beginning, an aspiring young woman with many hopes and few real cares.
He tries not to jostle her as he puts his arm around her shoulders, even though he knows she'll sleep like the dead.
A not insubstantial part of him is gibbering, guilty since he's well aware she hates him now, and wouldn't allow this contact if she were awake, annoyed with himself since this will only make it harder in the long run to let her go about her day, let her ignore him so completely. He doesn't care. For the next five hours, he can hold Donna Moss and pretend that maybe everything can be okay between them again.
Donna is feeling distinctly warm and calm as she rises gently from the depths of sleep. Her head is pillowed on some familiar surface, her face tucked into the crook of someone's neck, a wool sweater under her cheek. There's an arm around her, and her arm is numb, trapped under a warm, heavy body.
Someone is leaning their face on the crown of her head, and it doesn't even take the smell of him to tell her who.
Because of course she's waking up in Josh's arms.
It takes a few more comfortable moments before her brain remembers that this isn't them any more, this isn't normal. She'd ended up sitting beside him because the second campaign bus had broken down and the whole staff had, just barely, managed to pile into this one, leaving only two seats open for the two people who had, coincidentally, been the last on the bus.
And, surprise surprise, she'd fallen asleep.
She can tell from the looseness of him, the soft breathing, that Josh is unconscious. Also the fact that she's curled up with him like this, tangled up, breathing together, actually—now she notices with a hot pang of mixed guilt and desire—holding hands, his fingers laced delicately through hers.
She's cuddling with Josh, effectively in public, has been for hours based on the white blare of the overhead lights, the ones normally kept off while there's daylight, and he despises her.
Also she can't disentangle herself without waking him.
She's a heavy sleeper, unlikely to be woken by anything less than the full volume shriek of her cellphone once she's settled in for a nap. Josh is not like her. Josh can sleep through some noises if he's tired enough, things like the omnipresent faint sirens of city life and the cleaning lady's vacuum in his office, and the morning after a few drinks it might take an actual siren at close range, but under normal circumstances all but the slightest shifting and fidgeting will send him to wakefulness.
And he needs the rest.
She's seen it and wondered how angry he'd be if she blackmailed him into taking nights off, or at least gave poor Otto the kind of leverage he'd need to force Josh to rest. His face is thin and hard and grey, these days, and he moves now with a quiet economy of energy, even his pacing and his flailing more contained to her practiced eye.
It's hard not to hate herself for that, that even having left him and in danger of being seen like this, having her career derailed, she's more concerned about waking him up inopportunely. Part of her brain is plotting to use this to make him eat some real food when they land, a salad, maybe with chicken and kale. She wants to turn it off, wishes she could, but she's also learned that the part of her that had driven her to start taking care of him hadn't been the professional assistant. It's the part of her that's irreversibly in love with him, and that's one part she can't seem to shed.
His heart is sounding under her ear, a strong, steady thumping, and she bites her lip against the rush of emotion as she remembers waiting, once, to see if it would ever beat again.
When she thinks of Roslyn she wonders how she can stomach what she's done, how she walked away from the man she loves when she is so, so lucky to have him alive at all.
She tells herself that she did the right thing, knows that she needed to do it, but by no means is she beyond regret.
A particularly egregious jolt of the wheels lifts everyone up and slaps them down a few inches, leading to whoops of surprise and a shout of apology from the driver, things that should be more than enough to wake Josh from his torpor, but even after a few frozen minutes of Donna listening to startled, newly energized staffers giggling and talking, his breathing is still utterly deep and slow beneath her.
He must, she muses guilty, be hugely exhausted.
"Oh, hey, look at that," Bram says, suddenly, pitched loud enough for the surrounding seats to hear, but with a shade of false whisper. "Puppy pile." The words issue from the row immediately ahead of them, and cold terror seeps into Donna's veins.
Several options occur to her, options for damage control, from a slow and obvious awakening to a sudden flying leap over the seat back with murder in her eye, but she knows her goal; don't wake Josh. There's really only one option, to keep her breathing deep and slow and try to match it to Josh's as the young staffers and the bus at large start to take notice.
"Cute," Lou's voice puts in, sounding vaguely disapproving. "Quiet," Otto admonishes everyone. "Everyone's better off if he's, y'know, asleep."
"Yeah, okay," Bram puts in, "But I'm getting a picture. Jo's putting together a campaign scrapbook, I think this deserves a place."
"What's going on?" Congressman Santos's voice sounds amused, and he'd clearly left his seat to investigate the furor.
"Josh and Donna seem to have settled their differences," Lou tells him, repressively.
"I thought they hated each other," some young woman comments.
"They didn't when I met them," Santos muses aloud, and Donna prays quietly for the strength to keep lying quiet, rather than screaming at the bus as a whole and killing their candidate with her bare hands.
"When you met them, sir?" The same young female voice.
"They worked at the White House together. Everyone in Congress knew about Josh and his better half." The smile is audible in his voice. "Glad they're getting along again."
Well if that wasn't everything she'd broken her own heart to get away from, nothing was.
Donna seethes silently, turning the words over in her mind. His better half. It's simultaneously everything she aspires to and everything she wants to escape. On the one hand, his partner, lover, equal, friend, the calmer, prettier, better organized counterpart to his rumpled, bounding, brilliant self. On the other hand, the woman who does his menial taskwork, the person who babysits the intern, who gets sent to the Middle East as a useless attache in order to get her to shut up.
"Seriously," Bram says, more quietly, "I'm getting a picture. This is too cute not to save."
"The grandbabies will thank you," the girl jokes.
"Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm thinking," he agrees, seriously.
There's a long pause while Donna breathes through her frustration, a short, two-note electronic tone, and then the girl says, very softly, "Wow. That's a good picture."
"Mmhm," Bram agrees.
And because God is being cruel, today, this is the moment when Josh inhales suddenly in a way that sends a shock of terrified adrenaline straight to Donna's heart, a sure sign that he's moving towards consciousness.
Why now, and not ten minutes earlier, before some debonair young creep snapped a perfect blackmail shot on his damned digital camera, Donna wonders bitterly, and recommits to her decision to play possum.
The reasoning behind her strategy is this; she's already got a reputation for sleeping like a corpse, so this way at least Josh can wake up and push her away without forcing her to react or, subsequently, acknowledge that this ever happened. Conveniently, the plan allows her to escape all the attendant mortification.
It would be a solid plan, if Josh would cooperate.
His breathing is returning to a shallower, wakeful cadence, punctuated with an enormous yawn and a slight shifting of hips, a minute stretching of his back and shoulders. "Hm," he says, nearly silently. Then, "Donna?"
It's soft and a little nervous, like he's checking to see if she's awake, and it's so much easier to keep loose and breathing than it is to answer. He sighs, shoulders slumping, and then he turns his face against her hair and lays a kiss on the crown of her head. He doesn't push her away; he kisses her hair.
Donna is a woman of ironclad willpower, every facet of her relationship with Josh is proof of that. There is, however, no amount of character strength or restraint that can halt the shudder than runs through her body, from her stomach to her lungs, the subterranean quiver heralding the hot flood of tears. That kiss, given unknowingly, without expectation, feels like forgiveness, like a benediction. She doesn't believe, intellectually, that she needs his absolution, feels that if anyone needs forgiving it's probably him, but her heart has still been hurting for months now.
Her whole body is being wracked with silent, juddering sobs, and for the first time in forever Donna lets herself believe that Josh doesn't hate her after all.
He wakes up feeling a little cramped but mostly sort of content, an emotion he has to examine for a while before he can identify it, because it's not really something he spends a lot of time feeling these days. The smell of Donna's hair is still in his nose, and he's got a warm, angular body in his arms, a head tucked into the notch of his shoulder. His right hand is curled over and through someone's left. Donna's left.
Donnatella Moss is still asleep in his arms.
Josh opens his eyes, blinking blearily against the bright overhead lights, and a glance out the window confirms it; it's black night now, and he must have been asleep for hours. Nearly the whole ride. Half the bus still looks to be asleep, including their neighbors across the aisle. It's quiet, with only the low murmur of a few lowered voices running above the grey sound of the wheels and engine.
Donna's breath is still ghosting low and slow against his throat, and he relishes the feel of her, so relaxed against him. He can't remember the last time he saw her genuinely laid-back. Some time before the MS scandal, maybe, when the worst things she'd had to worry about personally were finding dates and doing battle with Mandy Hampton. The times before she'd learned that there was a lot more to their world than good people doing good work.
He smiles a little at those memories, and can't quite stop himself from pressing a kiss, a lingering one, to her hair, where his cheek has been resting.
He isn't expecting a response.
To be fair, the full-body shiver of involuntary tears is just that, involuntary, not a studied reply to his ill-considered action, but it speaks, even as she makes a tiny snuffling gasp and his collar starts to feel damp and hot.
Donna's awake, and crying.
Crying Donna is one of those things that redefines Josh's world every time he encounters her. Without exception, his brain insists that Donna, crying, is wrong, and that the wrongness must be fixed. It's usually more complicated than that, though, and so Josh has on many an occasion been left feeling useless and uncomfortable while his processor overloaded with unhelpful panic.
Several years' experience has honed his skills, though.
"Donna," he breathes, and he pulls her closer, presses his lips to the crown of her head again, and holds her, heart jogging painfully as her hands twist into his shirt.
It's pretty hard not to shed a few tears himself, but he manages.
She's not making any noise, which is unsettling. Donna is as much a babbler as Josh himself, and in the past her tears had mostly been delivered with a side-dish of incoherent rambling, pitched with sobs. This silence is not normal, not Donna as Josh knows her, and it only makes him hold her tighter.
It might have something to do with how they're on a full-to-the-gills campaign bus, too, but it's still freaking him out.
"Donna," he whispers again, down by her ear, "I don't know what's wrong, but it's probably going to be okay."
She giggles a little hysterically into his neck, and he smiles in tender victory. "See, if I'd known all it took to cheer you up was me, being a dumbass..."
"Shut up, Joshua," she prompts him, sounding waterlogged.
"Make me, Donnatella."
His heart is racing, and he still hates that she's crying, but she's laughing, too, and she called him by his full name, a name he's never really liked in anyone's voice but hers.
The metaphorical ground still feels watery under his feet, but it feels like a reclamation.
"I might," Donna fires back, pulling away slightly so he can finally see her face again, her dear, precious, blotchy alabaster face set with red-rimmed blue eyes. "If we weren't, you know, in public."
"Well, Donnatella, I see a hotel in our future," he quips, more playful than he's felt in months, years.
"Keep dreaming," she tells him, but she's smiling and he's still holding her.
Dreaming suddenly seems like a great idea again.
Hours of co-napping has slid them down til their knees butt up against the seat backs head of them, so the readjust, sit themselves up, and haltingly, Josh slips his arm back around Donna's shoulders. She leans into him, totally and unsublty.
"How's your stomach?" he queries softly.
"Better." It's a relief to close her eyes against the harsh lights and loll her head against his shoulder again. Slowly, luxuriantly, Donna takes a deep breath of the smell of him, and feels him stir in response, his arm tightening around her, pulling her closer. "This is nice," he tells her, his voice barely sounding but rather vibrating in his chest.
"Mmm," Donna replies, slightly swollen eyes still blissfully closed against the motion of the bus. Josh laughs at her, softly, through his nose, and the puff of air tickles all the way down her spine.
The little itching shiver drives her to pull back, untuck her head from its wonderfully comfortable niche on Josh's shoulder, suddenly awake, and she stares at his relaxed, vaguely happy face with wide, devouring eyes for roughly a second and a half, before he opens his eyes—those dark, emotive eyes she's always told herself she doesn't adore—ducks forward, and kisses her lightly on the lips.
On some level Donna'd always thought that the first kiss would be like a dam breaking, a rushing, downhill start to something instantaneous and sweeping, at least until she'd stopped believing that they'd even make it that far.
This is not that.
It's a gentle, intimate kind of kiss, neither particularly romantic nor overtly sexual, with the easiness and looseness of a good morning kiss shared a thousand sleepy Mondays. His mouth is a little open, enough that she feels the moisture from his lips on her own as she jerks with surprise, pulls away. Instinctively, her tongue darts out, tasting nothing but the salt of her own skin.
His grows infinitely still as she watches him, and the happiness, the soft, contented expression evaporates, leaving the grey, granite face with its graven lines of exhaustion. Josh's eyes open, and he stares at her, expressionless.
"Sorry," she says, because out of all the things she could say—that was all you, I didn't mean to fall asleep on you, oh please god don't shout at me here, right now, when all I did was get trapped in this seat, I didn't mean to stop kissing you—it's the least demeaning and the most diplomatic, and gently, she tries to push out of his embrace.
The loose yoke of his arm around her abruptly hardens, trapping her against him as his jaw works, a faintly fevered look coming into his eye.
And he's leaning forward again, his free hand coming up to her jaw, fingertips skimming along like anchors. His eyes are still hooded and devastatingly neutral, but he tilts his head a little, lines up their mouths, and stops maybe half a centimeter from impact, still-open eyes trained on her.
That's too much temptation to possibly resist.
No matter what Donna told herself she would never sacrifice, no matter how resolutely she once walked away, nothing in the world could stop her from closing that distance and finally, properly tasting him.
Her eyes slide shut before his do, an involuntary reaction as she opens her mouth to his, turns her head to a complementary angle, sucks his bottom lip into her mouth. It lasts less than fifteen seconds, but in those seconds they kiss deeply, softly, lightly, passionately.
And then he's leaning away again, still with a guiding hand cupping her face, and his face is still but rather than grey and hard, he seems lit from within somehow. His voice is warm when he speaks her name, little more than a whisper, and when she gives him a small, unsure smile, he gives her back a timid but sunny grin.
The kind of face she hasn't seen on him since before the MS scandal.
"Wow," she says, in part because she's feeling it and in part because it gives Josh an opening to remark, "So I can bring the woo, after all," with a smug little pout.
"I bow before your sexual prowess, o handsome and powerful one," she shoots back, in an undertone. The last thing she needs is people here starting to question her professionalism because they overheard her flirting with the campaign manager. Bram's digital camera aside, some of these people don't know what they used to be like, and ideally Donna wants to keep it that way.
"You think that was the extent of my sexual prowess..." Josh trails off suggestively, matching her hushed tone.
"I didn't say anything about extent," Donna demurs, taking a golden opportunity to lower her eyes to his chest and ogle. "But if you're trying to tell me something, lower expectations..."
"Expectations?" Josh asks, and his voice is suddenly low as well as hushed, with a husky edge to it. "So you have expectations of my sexual prowess?"
"Well, maybe not anymore," she sighs, riding a thrilling wave of adrenaline with each word. This always feels like surfing, to her, her feet gripping a vaguely solid surface while beneath her the tides and currents of their feelings and the unending tick of their minds surge and swell and drive her forward, grasping.
His next words are rasped directly into her ear, only barely loud enough for her to hear them. "I'd say, give me five minutes to change that, only I don't think five minutes is long enough for all the things I'd like to do to you."
It's a combination of his nearness, the warmth of him and the scent, his breath hot on her ear, and the heady eroticism implied in his words that send a shiver directly up her spine.
"Ten? Twenty?"
"Gimme half a chance, I'll keep you up all night," he promises, getting that gloriously smug grin on his face. "Or," he abruptly amends, frowning a little, "I mean, not all night, since we need to sleep. Campaign isn't gonna run itself. But definitely a couple of hours."
"Romantic," Donna comments, dryly. "Consider me swept off my feet."
"Pretty sure neither of us has time for any substantial sweeping until we're in—oh, thank god, I think that's the hotel."
The look of pure beatitude that suffuses Josh's face as the bus slows and turns into the Hampton Inn parking lot is echoed in the quiet exclamations of the staff up and down the bus, as people stretch and yawn and poke their sleeping neighbors awake. As soon as the engine dies, everyone's standing and jostling, and Josh leaps to his feet to remind everyone that Staff is at six-thirty in the morning, don't be late, remember to program your coffee makers everybody. Santos calls for Josh from his spot down the bus, and Lou hails Donna from her seat all the way in the back.
They're caught for a moment in a locked gaze, each equal parts wistful and apologetic. It lengthens oddly, as Josh lets himself stare for a distended second at her lips, but then he's shaking his head and pulling down her bag.
"I have to walk the Congressman through the rally one more time," he explains, and Donna shakes her head.
"No, I get it."
"I'm sorry."
"No, Josh. It's your job." She favors him with her quietest, warmest smile, the one with no teeth but one hundred percent of her heart.
"I'll find you," he says. "I mean, if—"
"I know you will," she promises.
He passes her her bag.
Their fingers touch.