W.W. –Thursday night

Donna looked out the window at the dark airport runways, with pools of light surrounding each gate. The plane had been delayed in Atlanta, and she was bone tired and nervous and sad and proud and happy.

She was also hungry, and needed a long hot shower. Or she needed a bath, with bubbles and oils and lotions and something suitable girly to wear after. Most of all, she needed to see Josh.

When the plane finally arrived she had to leave the JetWay and go to a tram that would take her to the terminal. The two-minute ride seemed to take forever, and he leaned against the door and bit her lip against screaming.

Today had been too much. She had awoken looking for the man who belonged in her bed. She'd then met his mother again, and her 'gigolo' gentleman friend. She'd been rushed to DC and graduated from college and called into a meeting with Leo where they'd discussed not only her briefing paper, but also her feelings for her boss, the man who had been missing from her bed hours earlier. She'd missed dinner, and missed most of breakfast, and she wasn't sure she'd had anything but a nodding acquaintance with lunch. Today had, simply, been too much.

The doors to the tram opened and she saw the security barrier. Pressed against the tensa-barrier rope line stood Josh Lyman. He had bags under his eyes and a rumpled shirt on with his tie a ruin around his neck. His lips looked dry and his eyes were red, but he was smiling, a smile that said more than the roses he held in one hand.

They weren't red roses. They were long-stemmed cream roses, with a blush of pink at their tips, but as pale and lovely as the woman he waited for. There must have been over a dozen of them, and they were wrapped in dark green paper with sprays of baby's breath flowers among the stems.

In his other hand, Josh held a box. As she got closer, she could see that it was a to-go box from a pizzeria, with a very large cup of coffee perched on top. She could smell the dark roasted goodness from ten feet away.

"Hey," he said as she approached.

She reached the barrier, and took the coffee in one hand. She ducked between the roses and the pizza, and pressed her body against his. Her lips found his mouth, and she tasted coffee and something else, maybe cinnamon. He must have been popping those hard cinnamon candies again to stay awake, something he told her he'd done in college to stay awake during vital study sessions with Sam.

She kissed him a while, and tasted the coffee and the cinnamon and enjoyed the smell and feel of him. After a long while, she pulled back slightly.

"Hey," she replied.

He carried her bag and the pizza, and she sipped a large coffee with double cream and double sugar as they walked to his car. She had her flowers in her hand and was wondering where he had found fresh cut flowers after 2:00 AM. She nibbled her pizza, and offered some to Josh. They were really both too tired and stressed to eat, but she made herself put some calories in to settle the coffee and sugars.

By unspoken consent, they did not talk much in the car on the way balk to the resort. She leaned over a bit in her seat, and put a hand on his thigh as she sipped her coffee and looked out the window. He drove with one hand while reaching out a long arm from time to time to run his hand across the back of her neck, caressing the skin and letting her hair slip through his fingers.

When they finally reached the suite, she noticed that he had moved all the packages off her bed. He had also laid out a nightshirt that she liked and a dressing gown, but they were on his bed, which was turned down.

"I didn't know," he said softly, shrugging, "you know, what you might want to do about sleeping tonight."

"I want to sleep with you tonight," she said. It seemed like those words should have meant more.

"Want me to run you a bath?"

"In the morning?" she asked. He nodded. "Thank you. I want to get changed before we talk, is that okay?"

"Sure. I will too then, if that's okay." He was so respectful it was almost unnerving. She almost missed egotistical self-concerned Josh.

"Sure." Twenty minutes later, both changed for bed and with cleaned teeth, they sat across from each other on the bed.

"First," she told him, "let me tell you about my meeting with the President. I understand why you weren't there, but you'll wish you could have seen it." She reached into her bag by the bed and brought out her diploma, still tied with a ribbon, and began to describe how she'd graduated from college without really trying.

He laughed, and reached over to give her a hug and kiss. She enjoyed it, but then she told him about her meeting with Leo. He was quiet for a long time as she explained what Leo had asked her.

W.W.

Ruth Lyman sat at the edge of a double bed at the Hyatt, with a curtain partly open so she could look out at the early predawn skyline below. She wore an old flannel gown, with a high collar, but her iron-grey hair, still with streaks of rusty red, was combed out and flowed down over her shoulders. She sat erect and quiet in the darkness.

From the other bed she heard Avi sitting up, and putting on his glasses from the night table. When he spoke his voice was deep and rumbling in his chest like a bear's.

"You don't sleep, Ruth?" he asked softly.

"Not so much," she replied, still looking out the window.

"Do you hurt, Bubbeleh? Your pills…?"

"Don't, Avi. The ones that help with the pain, they make me shvitz like I'm in a steam room. The ones that don't make me shvitz also don't make me feel any better. I want to just sit a while. Go back to sleep."

He was getting heavily to his feet. Once a very physical man, Avi Maxwell was finding it harder and harder to keep up with his nephew on their annual walk around the new car show. He knew the day would come when his eyes or his reflexes would take the keys to his new Chrysler from him. Till then, he was determined to live his life, and to come out each day swinging.

He came around to Ruth's bed, and pulled up the chair next to her. From his bag, he'd brought the lotion his nephew's wife made for him, for his shoulder and his wrists when he had been too hard polishing the Chrysler. He grinned at Ruth in the predawn light.

"Your foot, Ruth, give it to me."

She looked at him, and the way he was rubbing cream on his palms. "I don't think so, Avi Maxwell. And here I am, telling my Josh what a gentleman you are." There was a smile in her voice that she managed to keep off her face, but he heard it.

"If you don't put your foot in my lap here, Bubbeleh, I will have to come and get it." He growled like a great big balding bear, and she could see in the morning twilight how broad his shoulders were. He must have been quite a sight in his day. She slowly raised a foot to the edge of his chair, stoic but pained by the feeling in her joints.

Avi waited till she was settled, then began to slowly rub the lotion across her instep, around her ankle, and over her toes. His hands were large and strong, and the cream had mint oil that felt cool as a Connecticut stream on her bare foot. She breathed deeply, letting the breath out in one long sigh as he began to massage the cream into her foot and her tender ankle.

Her eyes closed, and she relaxed, letting the feelings of his hands on her take all the pain and the loneliness and the grief and pull it from her body through the sole of her foot. When he finished, she did not wait to be asked. She raised the other foot, and leaned back till she was lying on her bed with both feet in Avi's lap.

As he worked, he sang a low song under his breath. At first she thought it was something he was just making up as he worked, but then she caught the chorus. It was something her Noah had once brought home, on a Jackie Gleason record called, scandalously, Music to Change Her Mind.

"Some call it madness…" Avi sang softly, allowing his hands to run over her legs as the medicated lotion worked its wonders, along with the long-overdue touch of a man's hands against her skin. The lyrics of Russ Columbo brought a smile to his lips.

"..,I call it love," she sang quietly with him. "You're a meshegguner, Avi Maxwell."

"This we both know, Ruth." He patted her leg, and ran his fingers one more time across her toes. They curled in a way that would have pleased her doctor, but for a very different reason.

She reached out with her foot, sliding it across his cotton pajamas, and was rewarded with what she'd hoped to find.

"Avi, dear," she said quietly to him.

"Yes, Ruth?" His eyes were closed and his voice was strained but soft in the morning light.

"Close the curtains." She rubbed her foot against him as he stood. She sat, carefully, to unbutton her gown as he went to the window and savagely threw the curtain closed. He turned, and saw her holding her gown against her pale bosom with one elegant hand, tapered fingers sliding the garment down as he watched till she sat, almost naked before him.

"So are you coming to bed, Mr. Maxwell, or should I find a nice book to read?"

He laughed, and soon he had her laughing too. He meant to put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, but events soon overtook him. He kissed Ruth, and she him, and other things went on that would have shocked his nephew and her son, but not anyone their age who still knew what passion was.

Afterwards, he lay in her bed, her rusty hair fanned across the white curls covering his chest. He looked at the clock.

"Ruth." He looked at her smiling cheek, so pale. He ran a hand through her hair and she stirred. "Ruth, I need to tell my nephew… well, I need to tell him I'm not coming home today."

She looked up at him, savoring the relaxed feeling and the way it made her body feel, and still tingling to her toes from much more than just peppermint lotion. "That's a good idea, Avi. I always knew you were a smart man." She lay her head back down, and they both fell asleep as the sun rose outside their window, greeting another perfect central Florida morning.

W.W.

"Donna."

She rolled over and looked at him. He looked tired, and serious, and sad. She didn't like seeing him that way, and she didn't like that he felt that way at all.

He looked at her, beautiful in the morning light despite the long day and long night before. She'd told him all about the graduation ceremony, and he'd been upset that he'd missed it. He understood why they'd kept him out of the loop- he would have been unable to resist trying to help, and probably just made things harder for her. It seemed to be his talent, if you asked him.

"We have to talk over what happened. With you and Leo, I mean."

"We did talk," she told him, "But you insisted on arguing with me. I just wasn't going to argue with you after the day we both had."

"Well, storming off to bed in the middle of my questions didn't accomplish much."

"You might note that it was your bed I stormed off to, Josh." She propped up on one elbow to look at him. "That should count for something."

"It does. You do." He sat up and shrugged, looking for the words. "You count tremendously. I just need to know why you told Leo that you wouldn't accept reassignment."

"I should think it's obvious, Josh. I'm sure everyone would think it was my feelings for you, but that's not it. It's the team, you and me. I told him, you and I work too well together for me to pack up and move to some new position they haven't even defined yet." She sighed. "Of course, I was hoping he was going to tell me that I was being silly and there was no way we were going to be split up. Instead, he told me to come back down here and talk to you. I get the impression you are supposed to be noble and tell me to leave for my own good."

"Like either one of us thinks that's going to happen," Josh scoffed. "Leo knows it too, Donna. He knows about Alan Parker's offer, and about you and me. I'm not sure how he knew about Alan, but he knew about you and me because I called him. I called him and told him I wanted you reassigned."

"You'd split us up?" She looked at him in disbelief. "But you said there was no way…"

"There's no way that I would split us up just to make some busybody in Government Oversight or the White House Council's Office happy. Donna, I'm a political operative, and there are politics everywhere. I want you to go where you're needed. Chances are I'll find a way to follow you."

She sighed and lay back down, staring at the ceiling. "Chances are? That's not good enough."

"Let me get this straight," she said after a while. "I won't take a new position because I won't leave you, professionally speaking. You won't let me stay because, based on your personal feelings, you want me to succeed. I told Leo I wouldn't leave and you told him you wouldn't let me stay. Is that about right?"

"Yeah, if you want to put it like that." He lay down next to her, and reached over to hold her hand as they lay, staring at the hotel suite ceiling together.

"It's like some perverse 'Gift of the Magi' gone horribly wrong," she said after a while.

"I'm not really up on my O Henry, but didn't the actual 'Gift of the Magi' story go horribly wrong?"

"Shut up, Josh."

"Sorry." He waited a moment before asking, "So, did you also try to sell Leo your hair in exchange for a watch chain?"

"You're not going to let this go, are you?" She was frowning to avoid laughing.

"I'm just saying, it's ironic, because I was really hoping to surprise you with these beautiful combs, and if you've spoiled it, the irony would be…" He looked for the right phrase.

"Exactly like us?" She turned and watched him chuckling. "Do you really want me to take the job? And not work together any more?"

"Well, I want you to be happy. And I want you to be with me. And I want us to find some way of doing both of those things at once." He took her hands to his lips, and brushed a kiss across her palm. "I'm tired of things going the way they were, and the way they have been. I'm ready to start having a life where things with you go the way they ought to go."

"If you took the UCF job, you'd leave when?"

"I'd give Leo my notice, and he'd take it to the President. If the President doesn't object, I'd probably be back here in a month or so. They like to make changes quickly in the West Wing. I hadn't really thought that much about it."

"The job, the thing they wanted me to do… The President and Leo are setting up a council to monitor policy interactions with national and international NGOs. They wanted someone with a history with the administration to be the President's representative. I said they should give it to someone more experienced."

He looked at her and shook his head, "Nah! You'd be great for something like that. Lot's of apparently trivial information, the need to think on your feet, yet weeks going by with nothing to do but read journals and go to conferences. If I was your age I'd do it."

"You're not that much older than me, you know. The thing is, one of the sticking points has been, how do we have any real credibility with NGOs if we're based out of the West Wing. They'd think it was just another policy back channel."

"That's a good point. And may I say, you are a smart girl and not merely decorative after all. Ow!" She had bitten him on a tender spot. "I said you weren't decorative!"

"That wasn't for 'decorative.' That was for 'merely.' And don't be such a sissy. I can't have you getting all girly on me every time I bite you. I plan on getting years and years of use out of you yet."

"Ow! Okay, now stop that. I still say you'd be great at this, and you're crazy to turn it down."

"Yes sir, Professor Lyman. Speaking of crazy."

"Where would the offices be? I mean, budget could come from State, and some from the Executive budget for research. But where are they going to put you?" He was doing federal budget in his head, something that always made his eyebrows waggle and ripple in a way that she found adorable if slightly grotesque.

"They said I could share something over in the OEOB, or maybe even home office if I get decent communications. I can't even get broadband in my apartment now."

Josh sat up again in bed suddenly. "You don't have broadband. Donna, you can't home office because you don't get broadband!"

She sat up too, and pulled the sheet up around her. Josh wasn't wearing a shirt, and she was wearing a sleeveless tee that showed rather a lot of her. It hadn't mattered, tired as they had both been last night. She looked at him, his smile at full force, dimples deep and his hair in chaos. She thought, for just a second that he was the most gorgeous thing she had ever seen. Too bad he was crazy.

"Yeah, poor Donna. What's your point, Josh?"

He turned, and the effect of that beaming grin made her lower lip quiver for a moment. He looked at her, then took her by the shoulder and kissed her hard on the mouth. It lasted just a moment, and then he pulled back.

"Alan's offer. I'd have an office, and a small budget for staff, plus a work area for research, projects, and whatever else I need to grow the prestige of the Leadership Program in the School of Government. Say, for example…"

"Broadband internet access. And I could still be your assistant?" She was starting to see where he was going, and felt her face flushing.

"No!" He corrected her incredulously. "You could be a researcher… oh I don't know, call it the President's Advisor to the NGO liaison office, only something that makes a cool acronym. When I was at Yale, this guy across the hall was on a labor-relations board appointment. He went to like, two union meetings and maybe four conferences in three years, but he mostly did it so he could be on campus and hang out in the student union."

"But the thing, Josh, the important thing, is that we'd still work in the same office, right? You'd do your classes, and I'd make some trips, but whatever, we'd still be working in the same place." It made sense. Too much sense, surely, or they'd be doing it by now.

"Well, I'd have to keep you in shouting distance." He ran a hand down her side as he teased her, and when he got to her hip he gave a little squeeze. "Let's call Leo and see if that would work for the President. I'm sure Alan and I can work it out if the President will sign off on it."

"You really do love me? And you want to keep being around me and working with me, even if I don't work for you?" She wanted to hear it, the insecure part of her wanted to hear this was something other than a way to keep her at his beck and call.

"God, Donna, what do I have to do? Of course I love you. How can you even ask me that after this week?"

"Well, because ever since I got back last night, you haven't even once called me Donnatella." She looked down, and when she looked back up, he was almost crying. He grabbed her in a huge hug, pulling her body to his and rocking them both back and forth.

"Stupid woman," he said without bluster. "I thought I was going to have to send you away. It was for your own good but I was still afraid I couldn't do it. I don't want you to go away, not at all."

"Josh?" she asked, her eyes closed and feeling his arms around her and his breath on her neck.

"Yes, my Donnatella?" He was running his hands over her back and along her shoulders as he hugged her. His touch was making her excited, but his words sent a burst of fireworks off behind her eyes.

There it was, she thought, the one thing she'd needed to hear. Not love, not promises. Just her name, the name only he used, and to be called his. It was fair, as he was hers, after all. She leaned in and put her lips against his ear.

"I wasn't going to let you out of this bed till you had worked this out. And I knew you would, too. My sweet, crazy Josh."

"Really," he moaned softly at her whispering. "You're not just saying that you knew, to take credit? You really knew? How can I know you're not just saying that?"

She ran the tip of her tongue over the edge of his ear, slowly down to his earlobe, which she briefly captured in her lips. After a moment she released his ear and breathed her words to him with a smirk.

"Of course I knew you'd figure something out, Josh. That's why I'm not wearing panties." She tugged at the sheet between them, and then stretched a long, limber leg over him. She pulled herself up, so that he was sitting up and she was straddling him. He wound up with his face between her breasts and his arms around her waist.

"Oh, my God," came his muffled voice as he began nuzzling her. His hands reached down to cup her bottom, supporting her on his lap and easing the pressure as he rapidly hardened beneath her. He looked up, suddenly very wary, almost afraid.

"Donnatella, are you sure? We can wait…" His voice trailed off unconvincingly. Her laughter made her breasts bounce and sway under the thin tee and he groaned again.

"Josh, if you don't make love to me right now, I'm turning on the TV and finding a story on that biopic!"

"Ah! That breaks today! I completely forgot." As he was speaking his hands were caressing her bottom and he was slowly rocking her back and forth over his lap, driving them both mad, well, more mad, with anticipation. "So, you want to go get the papers? Maybe there's something good about us."

"You are an evil old man, Josh Lyman, and you'll come to a bad end I'm sure." She was trying to ignore what he was doing with his hands. His mouth, even through the tee shirt, was teasing her nipples past the point of hardness and to the edge of painful.

"No, little girl, I think I'm coming to a very good end," he teased, doing something to her bottom with his thumbs. She wasn't sure what it was, but she made a note to sure as hell find out. Later. "A very good end indeed," he chuckled.

As she arched her back, moaning loudly and flexing her thigh muscles, she pulled briefly up and away from him. He took the moment to release her sex from his hand ('Hey! Where are you going!' she thought wildly) and do something in the slight gap between their bodies.

When she rocked back towards him, she realized he'd parted the fly of his boxers, and without the slightest extra effort, he slipped inside her. It was filling, shocking, an electric moment. She lost control of her muscles briefly and so she lowered herself even more heavily on to him.

Inside her, she could feel her body reacting, accepting. He didn't thrust into her, he just held her as her eyes flew wide with the total sensation, the totality of making love to him. He held her, surrounding her body with his loving arms. She held him, surrounding him more intimately with her body. Even through her tee shirt, the friction of her nipples against his chest as her heart beat was delirious, a riot of over-stimulation.

Through clenched teeth, she hissed a whispered plea to him.

"Say it," she begged. Oh God, she thought, please get this right.

"I love you," he said looking her right in the eye, without the slightest hesitation. His voice was warm and strong, and without him moving so much as another muscle, his voice was enough.

She closed her eyes, and an orgasm began somewhere behind her navel and washed in slow moving waves over her whole body. She felt it in her diaphragm as she tried to breath in, in her knees and ankles, in her throat. She felt the muscles of her jaw tighten and then relax, leaving her to loll her head in slack-jawed wonder, and still she felt it. She felt it in her eyelids and her hands, her fingers wrapped in his hair, she felt it to her scalp and the roots of her hair.

He didn't move another muscle, yet she felt like a tuning fork struck, like a bell ringing clear, like she was suspended from a string that went in at the top of her head and connected all the way down to her toes. For how many heartbeats she hung suspended she did not know, but as it receded she panted and swayed, holding on to him as though she was afraid she'd be spun off in to space.

"Donnatella?" His voice was soft. He was pretty sure he knew what had happened, but it wasn't something that occurred every day, and he wanted to be sure whatever had just happened was as good for her as it looked. "Donna, you okay?"

"Gravity," she breathed. She took another breath, and every muscle that moved sang with the memory of what had just happened, and also reminded her that he was still inside her, still pressing against her all over in a way that must be what they mean when they say Tantric, but she wasn't sure. Even in her head she knew she was babbling.

She tried again to explain. "Gravity fails," she said.

He waited, but that was all she could tell him. He ventured a small movement, and they rocked together and apart slightly in a slow and gentle motion, like the surf lapping at the shore. They retreated a bit from that amazing communion of bodies, and it became merely fabulous sex, but at the edges there was a memory of something more. He felt no urge to push, to rush to an ending. He didn't need to recite Mets statistics, or the Bill of Rights.

He enjoyed her, and she enjoyed him, and after a time he was spent, and she was tired, and they moved apart just enough to lie back down. They slept, and dreamed, bodies still entwined, and it was good.