After I shut the door to CJ's office, I unscrew the cap to the liquor bottle and hand it to CJ. She takes a generous swig and hands the bottle back to me. I take a half shot sized gulp and quickly remember how long it's been since I have done a shot of anything but cold medicine. I blink back the tears forming in my eyes, I need a chaser.

"Donnatella Moss, you're actually married?" CJ says with a hint of, dare I say, respect in her voice.

Well that was not the question I was expecting. "CJ, I told you several times that I was married. I even told you where to find the marriage certificate."

"Yeah, but I just assumed you got knocked up by some asshole lawyer who didn't want to leave his wife and Josh was helping you out of his weird sense of chivalry and his blinding fear that you will leave him."

I can only laugh at this. "Well I guess your assumption was kind of true. Josh is a married, and he did go to law school. You missed the part where it was Josh that did the knocking up, though, and I think his fears that I will leave him are pretty well assuaged now."

If she had been drinking something at the time, CJ would have done a spit take. It occurs to me that up until this point she really didn't explicitly know that Josh and I were together, together. I also realize that by keeping CJ this out of the loop, there is some penance I need to do, just as a girlfriend, not even as someone fessing up to the White House Press Secretary about her very secret and very political marriage. If my relationship had progressed normally with a non-White House employee, as my friends, CJ and the rest of the assistants would have been privy to some pretty specific details along the way. Since I was actively hiding my relationship with Josh, they got nothing, or they got what little I told them to stage things to look how I wanted them to look in order to obscure the truth.

"Go ahead, ask me what you want, but before you do, let's be honest that deep down you already knew about this," I spit out quickly. This is going to be miserable, but I already feel the alcohol taking the edge off.

CJ looks between me and the bottle in my hand. "Oh hell, this vote isn't coming in by my next scheduled briefing," CJ mutters and reaches for the whiskey bottle again. I willingly hand it to her and watch her poke her head of her office door.

"Carol, cancel the 10 pm briefing then bring us some water and come get drunk with us. You'll want to hear this too."

CJ returns to her office and reclines on her couch, motioning for me to join her. "Ok sister, spill. When did it start, was it any good, is he... you know...?"

"Whoa, whoa. Back up, alcohol and multiple questions don't mix."

"Ok start with the good in bed part."

"CJ are you asking me what it's like to have sex with Josh?"

She looks at me with pitiful eyes and blushes. I have actually made her blush. "Donna, I haven't had good sex in 4 years. FOUR YEARS."

I raise my eyebrows. "And you'll be using what I tell you about Josh to…what?"

"Any, ok, I mean any. The White House has been rough on me. It's been a bit of a dry spell," she says, still not maintaining eye contact. "Hearing that you've somehow overcome the White House curse is my only hope…"

I cut her off with a sigh, then I hold out my hand and wiggle my fingers at her. "I'm going to need more if we're going to have this conversation."

"I am just asking if the swagger is justified," she says, finally able to kind of meet my eye as she hands the whiskey bottle back to me.

"CJ you are seriously asking if my husband is good in bed? Would I have kept him around if he wasn't?"

"True, but you are dumb enough to believe in true love, and you got pregnant, so spill it." Well that turned around quickly.

"He's very good," I say almost dismissively, hoping that's all I have to say on the topic. She looks at me expectantly, as if she wants me to keep talking and motions with her hand for me to go on. I blush, it's weird to think about my own sex life in the White House, the very place it's been so off limits all these years. "I mean, the first time, that's always a little awkward and probably always faster than it should be," I add reluctantly. "But he's a quick and willing learner and well equipped for the job if you know what I mean," I finish with a sly smile, both because I'm thinking about it a little and because I see the look on CJ's face start to change as if she's imagining the last part and starting to regret asking. She motions for me to pass the bottle back and starts to take another slow sip.

Suddenly, feeling bold and wanting to stop this line of questioning, I go on, "I mean the baby has definitely taken some of the fun out of the bedroom lately, but we had some opportunities while campaigning. In fact, I thought it was a bold move how you came into Josh's room in New Hampshire. If I were you, I probably wouldn't have sat on the bed like you did, or the chair, or desk, or touched anywhere in the bathroom—"

CJ snorts whiskey out of her nose and starts yelping in pain. Fortunately Carol, pops her head into the office, saving me from having to perform any first aid on CJ as well as elaborating further about my sex life with Josh.

After handing CJ a bottle of water, Carol shuts the door and surveys the scene, "What's going on?"

"Where to start? I mean I feel like there's so much to unpack here, a marriage, a baby, confessions about campaign sex in hotel rooms," CJ says, having regained her composure, as Carol sets down a few granola bars and a bag of low fat potato chips to serve as snacks and then drops down into a free chair.

"CJ is interrogating me about my marriage," I volunteer to Carol. "Have some whiskey, she's asking graphic questions."

"Shut up, this is stuff you would have told me a long time ago. Although, I could have done without the thought I could have sat in the remnants of your love making. Now, where were we?"

"I think the question you want to ask next is when," I supply, mostly because it's the only question I feel the least bit eager to answer.

"Yeah," CJ says pointing her water bottle in my direction. "Let's start with when."

"Josh and I have been together-" I start nervously.

"Together in the biblical sense?" Carol asks, wide eyed. "You and JOSH?!"

"Together in the biblical sense for just shy of 3 years," I answer.

CJ looks confused, I can see she's working out the dates in her head.

"We'd been sleeping together for over a year when I got pregnant," I supply. I don't know why it's important to me to make that clear, but for some reason, I really don't like it when people think it might have just been a one-night stand. Yes, I definitely thing it's a self esteem thing, and no, I'm not ready to unpack it yet.

"It happened before Rosslyn?" CJ questions.

"Yes." I struggle to keep from smiling awkwardly. Part of me is immensely proud that we've gone this long without anyone suspecting that we were together, but even now that it's all coming out at a point where we have more legitimacy as a couple, I still feel very exposed.

"I always thought it would have been when you were spending so much time nursing him. Like you grew close and just…one day had sex," she says.

I laugh, "Don't you think that would have been inappropriate. Also, probably not the best way to start a relationship? I mean, no guy wants his first time with a girl to be when he still gets winded going up a flight of stairs. Doesn't represent him very well. I think Josh was very relieved he'd had plenty of time to establish his prowess in the bedroom BEFORE he was shot."

"I guess I never really thought about how that would happen," CJ admits.

Then I recount a joking conversation Josh and I had about it when his doctor cleared him for sex. "Like 'Hey, sorry about that gaping chest wound and the nightmares you have. I have devoted the past 3 months of my life to nursing you, I have needs. Looks like your little guy works just fine so I'll be on top.'" This has CJ and Carol hooting in laugher.

"Ok, then if not the hot nurse fantasy, the how the hell did this all start?"

"Oh God, a hot nurse? Don't say these things, Josh will find out and get ideas," I say, attempting deflection once again. This is the one thing I am absolutely not going to tell her. CJ can ask me about how big his car should (or in this case shouldn't) be all day long. But how this all started is between me and Josh.

It's not that I'm ashamed (ok, maybe I am a little ashamed), but in the beginning, we were just having sex because we wanted to have sex. And since we both wanted it, it might as well have been with each other so it was. And yes, it went both ways. Josh is and has always been a generous lover. Besides, for me there is a certain amount of trust needed to have a fulfilling sexual experience and Josh was able to provide that. It was a pretty good set up there for a while.

Here's where you think we hadn't talked about what was going on, but we had and we understood our arrangement and it worked for us and then Rosslyn happened. That was the point where something shifted on its axis for me. Suddenly it wasn't just scratching an itch of a sexual nature (Josh), keeping a bed warm until something more permanent came along (me) or a new extension of a friendship (me again, but maybe Josh, too). Josh became a need like breathing, and much like breathing, I didn't think too much about it until I almost lost him. I was in love with Josh and it was a revelation.

So, I did the only reasonable thing - I threw myself into his recovery. In doing so I quit keeping an overnight bag in my car (handy for when we had been feeling itchy) and started keeping my toothbrush in his bathroom and my clothes on one side of his closet. He got better and then, one day I looked up and realized I lived at his apartment, was pregnant with his baby, we were talking marriage and there was less to move out of my apartment than to move in to his. This is not whiskey on CJ's couch and girl talk kind of conversation. This is a story that makes me sound pathetic.

Fortunately Carol is still thinking about the last question and cuts in with a question of her own, "No wait, if you got together 3 years ago, how did you get pregnant? I mean…" I can see her doing the math in her head and I think she's falling into the same logic trap I used to fall into as well - that getting pregnant is something that only happens to young or otherwise inexperienced lovers or married couples who are actually trying to get pregnant. I think it's fairly clear here that we weren't any of those and yes, I know how contraceptives work thank you very much.

"I know, I know, right, I'm not 16? I blame Josh entirely for this."

"Well that much is certain." CJ blurts from the corner of the couch where she's got her head propped on her elbow. She appears to have a pretty good buzz going on now.

"So, if you think back to that time, it was a little crazy, Josh was still recovering, uh-" I stop myself, although I think CJ probably knows about his PTSD diagnosis Carol certainly doesn't and doesn't need to, "um, fully, from the shooting and then after that it was directly on to the Leadership Breakfast and then State of the Union and it was a lot. During that time my prescription ran out and so I got an extension but my gynecologist would only renew it for a month without seeing me for my annual appointment. Which I scheduled and then canceled 3 times because Josh always, always needed something more important. By the time the last pill pack ran out I bought a giant box of condoms and Josh finally understood the importance of letting me have just 1 hour off to go to that appointment, but by then the receptionist had had enough of me and claimed that they were booked solid for two months."

"That bitch!" Carol and CJ exclaim in unison.

I shrug. "Yeah, I was pissed, but looking back I probably would have done the same if it was some junior senator jerking with Josh's schedule."

Carol nods in agreement.

"You can probably guess what happened from there. We were drunk, he forgot the condom, and the rest is history. And that's how you can get pregnant a year into a secret relationship with your boss." I say with a sad smile. I love our daughter, but even as I try to pin the blame on Josh, I still look back on getting pregnant as not one of my finest moments.

CJ and Carol ask me several other questions of increasing levels of intimacy - some I choose to answer (What did you do when you realized you might be pregnant? I took a pregnancy test, duh, then I yelled at Josh and cried, a lot.) and some I choose to ignore - before we all fall quiet.

In a flash I think back to my first few years in the White House. Sure, I'd been a holdover from the campaign so I knew Josh, CJ and most of the rest of the senior staff, but I was in a new realm with all these new assistants. Assistants like Carol who had master's degrees and years of schooling and internships which gave them the resumes that entitled them to be in the desks they were in, doing the work they were doing. In contrast, there I was, just trying to cover up my lack of education and experience, convincing myself that I wasn't in my desk because I was also in Josh's bed.

Now I'm realizing that I had all of this self-doubt over my lack of education, but during that time I wasn't in school I was actually getting an education in life. It is crazy to me to think that neither of them has had the time, outside of their education and jobs to find themselves in a committed relationship where they could get pregnant and be sure the man would want to marry them. It certainly makes me feel less threatened by the likes of Amy Gardner.

"What do we do now?" I ask after a few minutes of quiet reflection.

CJ shrugs. "It looks like our prediction that the press would have a field day about this overshot the mark a bit. I guess you just go on being married and having a baby and working together. I want to be there when Leo and the President find out, though."

I nod. I half think Leo already knows. Probably the President, too. I'm sure Ron Butterfield knows. There are definitely a few IRS and background check forms out there somewhere in the ether that show us as married. Then I have the funniest thought that it's going to be weird to see Josh actually get to wear his wedding ring to work and it makes me smile to think about how far things have come. As I think back to this time not quite two years ago when everything in my life felt so scary. Josh, cranky and even more ill-tempered than usual, was about to put a hole in our living room window. Our relationship was in flux and suddenly felt tenuous and ill-defined and then just as it righted again, I didn't get my period. I can't even tell you what it was like to go buy that pregnancy test. We've come so far in even just this past year, made so many strange and difficult decisions based on the premise that our decision to see the pregnancy and parenthood through as a family would be detrimental to our working lives and yet, here we are, not quite two years later with a one year old and a secret marriage that really wasn't that secret after all. Maybe this all did turn out the way it was supposed to after all.

We're interrupted by Josh, sheepishly peeking his head in the door. "I didn't want to interrupt, but-" he motions to our sleeping daughter over his shoulder. "Apparently she finds Toby's voice strangely soothing. I can't imagine why."

"Ok, I'll take her," I say, rising to meet him at the door. He carefully shifts our sleeping toddler to my arms and I take the opportunity to remind him that he has an 8:30 appointment with a congressman that he'll have to retrieve from the lobby because as soon as I'm sober enough to drive I'll be taking the baby home. He nods and tells me he won't be home too late after that because he and Toby are just about wrapped up and he's just learned that CJ canceled the 10 pm briefing so he no longer has to stay around for that, gives me a quick kiss and tells me to drive safe. It's all very mundane, something we've done hundreds of times before, but never with an audience. CJ begins to make a comment, but stops, choosing instead to smile wistfully.

"Ok," I say as I close the door and sit back down on the couch. "What's next?"

AN: Want more on what Donna doesn't want to tell CJ? Want to know about how she and Josh ended up sleeping together? Read about their first time over at the JDPostEpisode Challenge Series. It's episode S1 E16 20 Hours in LA