"Josh, you have got to stop," she tells me, exasperated, and I finally find a parking spot after circling CJ's block three times.

"Stop what?" I ask, vaguely distracted as I concentrate on parallel parking.

"The moving in together thing! It was one thing this morning in your kitchen but when we're out in public—"

"You just looked so adorable—"

"I was ordering donuts and muffins!"

"I know. You were adorable, and I couldn't help myself. It just fell out."

"Well, try to keep it in, would you?"

"I make no promises," I answer with a shrug as I get the car just right. Really, I hadn't meant to ask again at that moment, but we'd been standing in line at Dunkin Donuts—I'd offered to buy her an actual meal, but she was content with something quick—and she mentioned that we should get some stuff to bring to CJ's. I was actually overcome with love for her and blurted out, as she was telling the guy behind the counter what she wanted, that she should move in with me. I thought she was going to kill me. Several people in line looked like they could swoon, but Donna looked like she was considering dumping coffee on my head.

I really hope she doesn't put up this much fight when I ask her to marry me.

That thought actually makes me stop in my tracks for a moment, long enough for her to get out of the car and head up the front stairs of CJ's building without me. Am I going to propose to her at some point? I wait, expecting that oppressive, suffocating feeling I get whenever someone so much as mentions marriage when I'm in the general vicinity, but it doesn't happen. Huh.

Who am I kidding? Of course I'm going to ask her. Probably not any time soon, but it'll happen. If I want to be completely honest with myself, Donna is the only person I've ever really been able to picture spending my life with, in any capacity. A week of little else but sex will give you some clarity about the direction of your life.

I snap myself out of my stupor and hurry after her, catching up as we make our way into the building. CJ must have alerted her detail that we were coming because they don't give us too much grief, though I do mentally cringe when it occurs to me that this going to my life soon.

The door flies open, CJ's broad grin greeting us just before she yanks Donna in for a hug. "You're so tan!" she exclaims, and I suppose she is, at least compared to how fair she is normally. Mostly, it's just freckles that have bunched together. Looks good on her, though.

I'm being pulled in a moment later, clumped into a group hug. "Look at you, Sunshine! You finally unwound a little, huh? Thanks, guys," she calls out, pulling us all the way into her apartment and pushing the door shut behind us.

"We brought sustenance," Donna says, holding up the bag as she disentangles herself.

"Great!" CJ answers, putting the food down unceremoniously on the coffee table. "How was Hawaii?"

"Amazing. It was amazing."

"But how much of the island did you see?"

I can actually see Donna's cheeks turn pink, and it's possibly the cutest thing I've ever seen. "We saw a lot of things, CJ."

"That what the kids are calling it these days?"

I can feel myself flush a little, though I'm not entirely sure why. There's no shame in two people taking a vacation together, or in them having a lot of sex. We deserved it. Maybe it's the fact that CJ's taking such joy in it—that's a little unsettling. "No, seriously. We hiked up a volcano, swam with dolphins, Donna learned how to surf a little."

"But not you?"

"Are you kidding? One wipeout and I would have been in traction the rest of the trip. She was pretty good at it, though."

Donna shrugs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, and CJ gives her a funny look. "What's going on?"

"What?" I ask.

CJ squints her eyes. "Something's weird."

I look at Donna in confusion. "Maybe it's because we're not stressed to the breaking point right now?"

"That's not it."

"Is it the whole 'together' thing? I could see how that would throw people off after all this time."

"No, that seems normal. I don't know—something's off with you two."

Donna tenses beside me, her eyes wider than normal, but she doesn't say anything. I shrug, trying to appear casual, but I can feel myself a little on edge all of a sudden.

"Everything fine, CJ," Donna finally says, edging toward the kitchen. "You want some coffee with the donuts? I can make coffee if you don't have any coffee brewed." Great—now she's babbling.

"There's coffee," she answers slowly, looking back and forth between us. "Did you two already break up?"

"What?!" I exclaim, almost choking at the thought. "No, of course not!"

"Did you have a fight?"

Donna and I both answer "no," but apparently not at the right time; I answer almost before the question leaves CJ's lips, and Donna pauses for just a second too long.

"Seriously, what the hell is going on? I can't handle the things you two are tossing around." I frequently forget how good she is at reading a room, and how after almost seven years as Press Secretary, she's picked up on body language and facial cues almost better than someone who's actually trained in the field. "Are you pregnant?"

I actually choke this time—I don't know why. Between the condoms and whatever it is she told me she uses—Depo something—and the fact that we've been sleeping together for less than a month, the odds of pregnancy are fairly slim. Still, I wasn't expecting her to say it.

Donna snickers, though, but I suspect mostly at my reaction. "No, not hardly. Anyway," she says, wandering back in with two cups of coffee, and I can tell by the tone of her voice that she's trying to change the subject. "I just wanted to grab my laundry."

"So you said on the phone," CJ answers, accepting her mug cautiously.

"Right. I need to grab my dry-cleaning, too, and find somewhere to take it." She takes a tiny sip of the coffee, and I open my mouth to protest about being the only one going without, when she hands me her cup, offering to share. If that's not the definition of true love, I don't know what is.

"Don't worry about that stuff," CJ says, grabbing a donut out of the bag. "I sent your suits and things with mine."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I had to get my own stuff cleaned; no big deal. I figured it'd be one less thing to worry about when you got back." I pass the mug back to Donna, and CJ's eyes go back and forth between us. "Seriously—what's going on?"

"Nothing at all," Donna assures her, smiling broadly. "I've got to drag him to a grocery store after this because he has less than nothing on hand."

"Not true," I disagree. "I have a wide variety of coffee and creamers."

Her arm slides around my back, her hand slipping under my coat, and her fingers tickle at me playfully. "Charming, isn't he?" she asks CJ, though Donna looks pretty charmed right now. "I'm just gonna grab my stuff," she tells me.

"Need any help?"

"No, it shouldn't take me long."

She starts to move away but I can't help pulling her back and giving her a quick kiss. She looks a little surprised, and I'll admit that I am, too. I'm not usually one for public displays of affection, but I can't seem to help it with her. In Hawaii, we held hands and kissed and did all the coupley things people do on vacation. I never gave much thought as to how that would play out at home. Turns out I want to touch her in some way at all times. It seems I'm the clingy sort.

CJ's eyes go wide at the display; it's one of those things that would throw off anyone who's known us for a while. Donna just grins at me as she walks away, and I'm overcome with that intense love for her again.

"I asked her to move in with me," I say to our friend, whose eyes nearly fall out of her head.

"What?!" she yelps. At the same time, Donna stops in her tracks, whipping around to stare at me.

"Josh!"

I'm still trying to figure out what I did wrong. "She won't do it, though." That actually makes my insides twist painfully. I'm finding that I really, really want to live with her.

"Oh, my God!" Donna exclaims.

"Oh, my God!" CJ echoes, though a smile is pulling at her lips.

"You've really got to knock it off," Donna tells me, her face oddly flushed.

I just shrug at her, not at all sorry. She stares at me for a while before turning with a sigh, disappearing down the hall.

CJ's smile has become a full-on grin. "You asked Donna to move in with you?"

"I did."

"Like an actual grownup?"

"So it would seem."

"Kind of fast, isn't it, slugger?"

I cross my arms over my chest, glaring at her. "After almost nine years, I don't think so."

"It's not like the two of you have been dating for nine years."

"No, but I want to live with her. I know that after spending a week with her."

CJ just smiles at me goofily, all of her teeth showing. "Why Josh Lyman…"

"Look, Ceej, I love her. I'm completely crazy about her. I don't think that's any big secret. I really don't see any point in dancing around each other for another decade, pretending we don't want the things we want. We've wasted too much time pretending. I'm completely ready to start life with her. She belongs with me. I belong with her. It's stupid for us to be apart."

She looks a little taken aback by my declaration, and I don't know if I can blame her. "Wow, Josh. That was almost romantic."

"I'm in full-on boyfriend mode right now. I'm in this for the long haul."

"I can see that. But, she doesn't want to live with you?"

I shrug then run my hands through my hair in frustration. "Apparently not. I have no idea why. She said it's too soon, which is crazy. I could understand if we'd just met. Hell, even if she'd never lived on her own, but she's been doing that for a while now. It doesn't make sense for her to stay here with you if she's really just going to be at my place. Same with the woman who's subletting Donna's apartment—why kick her out when Donna's not going to be there much?"

"You're awfully confident about how much time she wants to spend with you."

"Yeah, maybe. I don't feel like I'm being cocky, though. I think she wants to be there with me, too."

"Well, keep trying. You'll wear her down eventually. You're a politician, as I recall. You're pretty good with the convincing arguments."

"I don't exactly want to wear her down. This would be preferable if she actually wanted to cohabitate."

"You'll figure it out."

"I hope so."

CJ glances down the hall, but there's no evidence of Donna. "I can't believe after all this time, though, it's finally happened."

"You didn't see it coming?"

"I don't know that I gave it that much thought, to be honest."

That surprises me a little. "C'mon—you're telling me that even when you were Press Secretary you never worried about something happening with me and Donna?"

"When I wasn't worried about real news and politics, sure, it might have crossed my mind occasionally. I didn't worry about it, though."

"Really? There was no plan in place in case I ever decided to schtup my assistant?"

She rolls her eyes, looking disgusted. "Again, we were more concerned with real problems. Your love life was very rarely a factor."

"Well, that's a little disappointing."

"That's quite the ego you've got on yourself, there, Josh."

"Hey, I'm just thinking how it would have looked for the administration."

"I don't think people cared nearly as much you want to believe they did. If you'd been married to someone else and something happened with her, yeah, it would have been a thing, but you were both single. There's no strict policy at the White House that says a boss can't date their assistant, though I don't think it's encouraged. We spent most of our time there—it seemed more likely for us to comingle than to meet people outside of work."

I shove my hands in my pockets. "Humph."

She shakes her head at how put out I seem. "I don't know—maybe some people would have talked, but certainly not anyone you worked with. And all those people who'd have talked…well, they were already talking. They always had something to say about us. The White House would have backed you up, if need be. If nothing else, we would have told anyone asking that we don't comment on staffers' lives. No one who matters—no one who cares about either of you—would have cared."

"That's comforting, I guess."

"For what it's worth, I think we all kind of expected it to happen for sure."

"Oh, yeah?"

She shrugs, taking a long drink of her coffee. "Seemed inevitable, but we didn't place bets or anything."

"You're really crushing my spirit here, CJ."

She lets out a deep, long-suffering sigh. "I suppose it might have caused a stir of some sort, at least for her. You know how people like to talk. But if you'd hooked up at some point during a crisis, like when all that stuff happened with Zoey, no one would have ever known. Truthfully, we all figured it was happening after Gaza. I assumed that when you came back, you were together. I mean, who drops everything to fly across the globe for someone who's 'only' an assistant?"

In all the time that's passed since then, I don't know that I've ever quite thought about it in that way. I went to Donna at that point because there was nowhere else I could possibly be. I suppose to anyone paying attention, flying across the world to your coworker's bedside would look…questionable. "I guess that's fair."

She shuffles her feet for a second, looking mildly uncomfortable, before she quirks up the corner of her mouth. "I have to know—why didn't you two get together then?"

"I'm an idiot," I answer immediately. "Instead of saying anything when it happened, I let everything go back to normal and tried not to think about it too much. Worked out real well, huh?"

"Well, one could argue that you might not be here now if you'd done anything about it back then. There are a lot of things that would be wildly different right now."

Before I can ask what she's talking about, Donna comes shuffling down the hall, overstuffed laundry basket under her arm, dry cleaning bags tossed on top of it. She has what looks like an overnight bag slung over her shoulder. Without thinking, I hurry over to her and grab the stuff out of her arms.

"Chivalry's not dead," CJ says with a smile. "You have everything?"

"Everything?" Donna repeats, blanching a little, even though her fingers automatically reach out to stroke my hip, a little gesture of thanks that I've found she likes to do.

"Yeah, you know—your stuff. Any of your clean clothes stuffed in the drawers, shampoo, that sort of thing."

"You're kicking me out?"

CJ gives her an odd look, tilting her head. "You're not exactly homeless, Donna. Don't you want to stay with your boyfriend?"

"Yeah, don't you want to stay with your boyfriend?" I ask, knowing I'm pushing it.

She shoots me a death glare. "At the moment…"

"You really want to leave a few bits and pieces here when we all know you have no intention of spending any time here? I'm supposed to believe that you're going to sleep here alone instead of having copious amounts of sex—sex, I might add, that you two of all people deserve to be having lots and lots of."

I'll be damned—CJ's on my side with this. Not that I want Donna to feel like she's backed into a corner with living with me, but it's nice to know CJ's apparently going to help in any way she can.

Donna, for her part, looks a bit more like she's on the fence. I lean in and kiss her cheek. "I'll just take this stuff down to the car."

I try to keep my pace slow, giving them time to talk or for CJ to work her magic or whatever needs to happen. I pop open the trunk of my car and pause, trying to make myself be honest about why Donna moving in with me is such a big deal right now, and also why she's fighting it so much.

The first part is easy—I want to live with her because I truly and deeply love her. Admitting it to myself was a lot harder than telling her, but being with Donna is the only thing in my life that has ever felt this right. I want her next to me when I wake up, I want her voice to be the last thing I hear before I go to sleep. I want the stupid fights we're going to have because she's stolen yet another article of my clothing, or I've left everything lying around after coming in from work and I've been a bachelor too long, or because she's cold and I'm hot and we'll never get the temperature right. We really have wasted too much time apart. We've been friends, we've watched each other date other people and have despised it, we've been through hell and back repeatedly and now we're at this point. I don't want to blow it. I want her to know that I'm all in.

That just leaves me with wondering why she's so freaked out right now. Under normal circumstances, if we'd just met a few weeks ago, living together would be extreme. But…it's been almost ten years. I know her. She knows me even better. There's absolutely no need for that stuff in between because we've already done it. I meant it before when I told her I still want to take her out places, but I don't think we need to do the traditional "dating" just to find out if we're compatible. We already know we are. We work together on every level.

I close the trunk and head back to the building. There's a certain irony in all this—just a couple of weeks ago at Leo's funeral, she accused me of finding this thing with us awkward and hard to navigate, and she wasn't wrong. I wasn't sure where to go or what to do, and she was so confident. Now, she's unsure and almost timid, nearly panicking at the mere suggestion of moving in with me.

The security detail only harasses me for a few minutes this time, probably more because they have nothing to do than they think I'm suddenly planning an attack on the nation's Chief of Staff. Yet another reason for Donna to live with me—if she's just a "guest," she's probably going to have to deal with this nonsense every single time she leaves the front door, whereas if she's a resident, no one will be able to question her presence.

I find Donna and CJ standing together in the kitchen, speaking in hushed tones. I probably don't want to know what they're talking about; with the two of them, it could be anything, co-conspirators that they are. I recognize the suitcase Donna dragged with her for months on the campaign trail parked right in the middle of the living room. I pick it up and look at her, my eyebrows going up in question. She never pauses her conversation, but her lip quirks up at me, her eyes twinkling a little, and I take that as a good sign. I drag the suitcase downstairs; she's taking her belongings from CJ's, she still hasn't let what's-her-face know she wants her apartment back. I can work with this stuff.

I can't help but wonder, though, if what CJ said is true—that no one ever cared if something happened between Donna and myself. All this time I've been telling myself it would have been a "thing" if we'd gotten together while working under President Bartlet, but to know now that no one was paying attention, to know that we fought it for so long, that we caused ourselves and each other so much pain and aggravation, and all of that could have been avoided. We wasted so much time.

One of the many things we talked about on vacation was that these were not new feelings for each other. In fact, these are decidedly old feelings we have for each other. She wasn't able to pinpoint when exactly she started to care for me anymore than I could figure out when I started to feel things for her. All I do know is that if I'd had any idea that falling for my assistant wouldn't have meant the end of the world, I can't imagine we would have waited more than a year or two for this to happen.

So much time, just gone. It does make me appreciate being with Donna more than ever, though.

When I get back inside—with just as much harassment from the security detail this time as before—Donna and CJ are laughing, and I'm positive that I don't know want to know what they're talking about. I've found that, typically, when a male walks back in on a conversation where women are now laughing, they're usually laughing at the male's expense. In this case, ignorance is bliss and I can imagine they're talking about literally anything else.

"Don't sit down," Donna says, and I freeze mid-sit. She's not even facing me, and no matter how many times she does it—even how many times she's done it today already—it never ceases to fascinate me.

"But—"

"Josh."

"I just want a donut," I tell her, aware that comes out closer to a whine than a statement of fact.

"I'm not stopping you," she answers, finally facing me. "Just take it to go."

"Aren't we—"

"CJ has to go into work."

I stand up again, wincing in sympathy. "That sucks." As someone who is now on his second consecutive Saturday off, and as someone who hasn't had a Saturday off before this in more than a year, I can relate.

"Yeah, well, my tour of duty is almost over. You're willingly starting all over again. Working Saturdays are all yours."

I grimace again, but mostly because now that I've gotten a taste of freedom, going back to that grind is going to be tough. Though, that's something else Donna and I talked about in Hawaii—we both want to take some time to be humans; independently, but mostly with each other. We're both aware that relationships take work, and how quickly things can deteriorate in this town when you let your work consume you. We know that in our jobs, leaving at five or six or even seven isn't going to be possible all the time, nor can we guarantee weekends off, but we're going to do our best to try. I know it's going to be different with Santos—he has young kids he's going to want to spend time with, not to mention his wife, who'll have no trouble laying down the law where work is concerned. Still, it's going to be tough and it's going to be an adjustment, though there is one bright spot. If Donna doesn't move in with me, we'll never see each other, despite working in the same building. That's got to be a point in the "live together" column.

"I won't let him work too hard," Donna tells her, moving over to slide her arm around my waist. "I have ways to de-stress him, too."

"And that's all the detail I need about that," CJ says, making a disgusted face.

"Are you sure?" Donna asks, grinning broadly. "Because I've done—"

"Donna!" I exclaim, the hand I'd had draped across her shoulders coming up to clamp over her mouth. She laughs at me, though CJ looks disturbed.

"Please just get out of here," she tells us, pointing at the door. "We'll make time to catch up soon, I promise. And Donna, you know you're always welcome here when he pisses you off."

"Gee, thanks, Ceej," I grumble sarcastically, though I know it's inevitable that I'll make Donna that mad before too long.

"Thank you for everything, CJ" Donna says, moving my hand.

"Anything, anytime, anywhere. You're the little sister I never got to have." I'm a little surprised—and honestly touched—at the declaration, and she pulls Donna in for a hug. I could swear I hear her whisper, "Be happy," in Donna's ear, and Donna nods. "And you," she says to me, reaching out to ruffle my hair as Donna disentangles herself. "If you ever hurt her, I'll kill you and no one will ever find the pieces." She grins at me, though it's menacing and predatory. "Got it?"

I nod vigorously, my voice caught in my throat. Despite the horrifyingly graphic threat, she's wishing us happiness and giving us her blessing. I didn't know how much I needed that from her until she said it.

We make our way out of the building, pausing so I can open the car door for her. Instead of getting in, Donna wraps her arms around me, leaning up a little to plant a kiss on my lips. "Thank you for bringing my stuff down here. You didn't have to schlep back and forth, but I appreciate that you did anyway."

I press my forehead to hers. I've never been as happy in my life as I am in this moment. "Donna, please move in with me."

"Josh!"


Most likely, there would have been some sort of stink about a Deputy Chief of Staff dating his assistant, but it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see a different take on it. Like, what if no one really cared?