Author's Notes: After the shitshow that is 7.12 let's just appreciate that eventually Donna and Harvey are gonna be cute AF together, and he's going to forever be trying to pay her back. Small Fluff Piece to say hang on in there…
. . .
Sunday Morning and Thereafter
By Atheniandream
. . .
They had made a pact, early on, that he wouldn't leave to run, and she wouldn't go to yoga, on Sunday mornings.
Sunday mornings, was their time, alone, and no one else's.
And it fit. He always woke before her, his hand, a fist full of her many parts and his nose tickled by auburn locks in a way that would make him smirk thoroughly against the promise of the day. He always made the mistake of snuggling into her then, which of course would rouse her like an alarm clock, straightening against his back as she bedded down once more, never one for an early rise now that they were finally in the same place, physically, mentally and more importantly, emotionally. She had little to stir her now that he was tucked there beside her.
It often led to her, falling back to sleep, and him drifting into thought. Musing, and mulling things over. One thing….in particular, that pulled his insides and reminded him.
He didn't deserve her...at all. Not for a second. And part of him still beguiled at the fact, that she, the exact opposite of nameless, allowed him the one thing he thought she'd never ever, in million years, let him have to hold.
And that thing...was...Her.
Donna.
He still shudders at the six months previous to this very day.
The anguish. The fighting. His sudden unnaturalness, born out of fear and stupidity, and her trademarked polarising actions that gutted him clean with every word. How everything became so entangled on top of such a simple concept. That he loved her. And that it had always been her. And that he would rather run in the complete opposite direction than confront the very simple fact.
He doesn't fully understand what happened, in the past year, but he knows this: He had fallen into a routine with someone that he had built up to mean things that didn't match the face of the person he'd unknowingly chosen. Ideals that were formed from one person, and then spread unnaturally onto the facade of another. Distorted. Confusing. A muddled mess.
He reasons...that he was just...terrified. Of being so simplistic at his very core, and in turn, he had fought stupidly against it for too long.
At the crux of it, he had fallen completely in love with a woman who had kept herself from him. All because of one innocent request, over a decade ago, two rising stars in orbit of something they hadn't grown big enough to fully comprehend. And instead of chipping away at her resolve, as most men in his stead would have eagerly done for a women as rare as her, he grew cold and tired and resentful of it. Slept his way through the need and banished his feeling into the arms of a woman who was made up of parts that didn't fit her.
A frankensteinian amalgamation of two women in place of just one.
He had hurt her, hurt both of them, in a compounded and wholly immeasurable way.
If the world was right, he'd be lying in his bed alone, this morning, and for several moments after that. He'd be licking his wounds and realising that where he went wrong, was not a place that he could ever revisit.
But there was another person to consider in all of this,
Her.
Her feeling. Her decisions. And as much as she agreed with him, about his strange behaviour and how very badly he had treated her. She also loved him back. And until recently had understood him almost completely. It came about that, to her, six months with another woman was naturally dwarfed by a more important thirteen years of theirs. That and the request that she herself had made, never to be broken, only to finally see how it had in turn, hurt him. Stunting him. Stopping him from making them more than they had been.
And for that realisation of hers, and the grace with which she acknowledged her own part, he was one very lucky son of an artist and a jazz musician.
But that's not to say that their past, their recent one more than anything, hadn't left a mark, still. A mark that he now carried with him everywhere as penance..
He felt her stir against him. Finally. It always took her about a half hour to relinquish her hold on the night and welcome the day. He always sensed her smile before he actually saw it, loosening his grip on her with a practised ease, as she stretched, before turning left and over into his waiting arms.
She was always makeupless and freckled, sleep laden and adorable by all accounts, when in his - theoretically their - bed.
He loved every single second of seeing her there.
"Morning," She smiled lazily, her leg draping over his hip, bending at the knee to flop over his ass, her foot dancing on the rippled white sheet surrounding them.
"Morning," He replied warmly, his hand sliding over her hip to pull her to his liking, fully against him, as she hummed at the contact, a delicious caramel coloured sound that slid out from her long throat all over his body in a wave, laying the groundwork of his immediate need of her.
Only one thing stopped him. She could see it coming now, like some ritual of his very own.
She waited, never pushing now that she knew as the things that had been missing from her understanding.
"I'm sorry." He said quietly, his eyes bending at the slight anguish in his features and the sick feeling in his gut had hadn't lessened in as much as a month.
He could never be sorry enough for all that he put her through.
And how very precious she was to his rather fragile world.
Her features bent into a rather piteous look, a fraction of an expression that opened into a gesture, her hand sliding up to the plane of his right cheek.
"It's okay." She told him, sounding like him, from a moment very much like that as her thumb brushed over his cheekbone and across his morning stubble, feeling his arms tighten around her.
"No." He insisted. "It's not." He assured her, shaking his head slowly. "But...it will be." He told her, a grounding reaching the foundations of his voice.
For a second her eyebrows twitched and she grew the sudden urge to further explore the vestiges of guilt radiating in his onyx eyes, until he grabbed her, surprising her and flipping her onto her back, towering above her, with a suddenly purposeful look, a touch excited as he unfolded her carefully, piece by piece like a complicated flower.
"Right now...I have still have….hmmm… ten of the thirteen years still to make up for." He reasoned lightly, a worn in smirk fleeting crookedly across his face.
She laughed then, seeing that potent sheen of cockiness flood through him.
"Well," She remarked, pulling him by the shoulders up to hover over her form. "Who am I to argue with that, Counsellor?" She reasoned, their faces gravitating towards one another like two lone fireflies.
He smirked, claiming her lips, feeling that blossom of union as he melted happily into her.
It was strictly their Sunday Morning,
And theirs, thereafter...
Fin.
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