Chapter 3

The alarm goes off at 7:20 and Josh reaches over and tries to turn it off. It's not the one he's used to, and he has no patience, so after about thirty seconds of attempting it, he reaches down and unplugs it from the wall.

"Morning, sweetheart," he says.

"You're having fun with this, aren't you?" I ask, eyes still closed, head resting on his chest, right hand somewhere down near his waist, right leg straddling his.

"You don't look like you're suffering too much yourself," he says, his fingers dancing up and down my spine slowly. Suffering? No. It's possible this is the most comfortable I've been in my life.

I drag my right hand up his abs to his chest and trace patterns on him with my fingernails, and then prop my chin up on him and look at him. "Somehow, I'm managing," I say with innocent eyes.

He smiles at me and our eyes lock, and for once in our lives, neither of us breaks the moment and looks away. I pick my head up off his chest and he traces my jaw and then my lips with his thumb, then rolls us over so I'm underneath him, and I've decided I was wrong before. This is the most comfortable I've been in my life.

He brushes a stray piece of hair away from my face with the tips of his fingers and looks at me with this look in his eyes that I've never seen before, and suddenly it's hard to breathe. He leans down, his lips centimeters from mine and … there's a knock at the door? You've got to be kidding me!

When he hears the knock, Josh gets the look of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Or you, the look of a boss about to get it on with the employee he accidentally married. "CJ and Toby," he whispers.

"Toast and coffee," I whisper back, smiling. Then I pull out from underneath him and sit up. "I'm going to bathroom, answer the door."

"But…" Now he has this pitiful look on his face and he's gesturing between the two of us.

"Go," I tell him, smiling as I get up and walk into the bathroom. I need to regroup.

I walk into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. This is not good. Let me rephrase that, because that was definitely good. This is not smart. Kissing Josh, making-out with Josh, certainly sleeping with Josh is not going to make this any easier. Nothing has changed. Nothing. He's still my boss, I'm still his employee, and we still have two and a half years left in office. We have to end this, and we both know it. Letting anything physical get in the way now would be like getting married because you're pregnant. You don't accidentally get married and then decide you might as well have sex. That's not the way it works.

I need to focus. And not on the way his eyes smoldered when he looked at me. And not on the way his thumb felt against my lips. And not on the way it felt so completely right to lie underneath him. And not on the way his voice took on this completely different sound. Damn it; there I go focusing on the wrong things again.

I splash some cold water on my face and brush my hair again, then walk back into the bedroom. Josh is sitting at the small table in the room pouring coffee for the two of us; he might also be staring at my bra, I'm not sure. I walk to the table and sit in the chair across from him, blocking his view of said bra. He hands me a cup of coffee and the look in his eyes is different, as though while I was in the bathroom making decisions and talking myself into being smart, he was out here doing the same thing. I'm a bit sad to see that he came to the same conclusions I did.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking coffee and eating dry toast. "So," I finally say. "What's the plan?"

He sighs and stands up. "We need to find out what the annulment laws are in New Jersey," he says in a kind of defeated voice, pacing back and forth in front of me.

I grab the hotel stationary and start taking notes. "How long the process takes, what can be used as grounds for annulment."

"Do we have to appear in person, how quiet can it be kept." I nod and jot it down.

"We should probably find out where we were married and by whom. We might need them to document to how drunk we were."

"Yeah, and we're going to have to talk to CJ at some point. Were she and Toby there?"

"I have no idea, but we're having brunch with them at eleven," I say standing up and following him around the small room.

"Let's see how far we get before then. I want to have a handle on this before getting my ass chewed out."

"I should get my own room," I say quietly, looking towards the corner of my room at my suitcase.

"Not yet. We're going to need to work together. I brought my laptop, we're going to have to make phone calls, I need you here."

I nod, but then say, "No more married activities." Touching each other does not help.

He looks at me and then down at the ground. "Agreed."

"Ok," I say sighing. "I'm going to take a shower. I wreak like smoke."

"I'm going to look over the marriage certificate. See if I can find anything on it that can clue us in to where we got married."

"See if you can read the writing of whoever signed it," I say, heading into the shower.

I walk back into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror again. I liked the married activities much more than the annulment activities, stupid or not. For a minute, it felt safe out there. Brainstorming, pacing, taking notes, feeding off each other, it felt like any other day in the office. But then, it just felt sad. My life, our lives, being layed out like a business plan. Quite frankly, it sucked.

I sit on the edge of the tub to turn the water on, but instead, I just sit there staring at the faucet for I don't know how long. I already miss the things I was focusing on earlier. I close my eyes and allow myself to take it all in one more time. The way his arms felt so strong around me, the feel of his fingertips on my spine, the beating of his heart under my cheek, his hand holding mine while he stared at these pitiful rings, the rapid breathing when he rolled us over and the exquisite feel of his hips against mine. I've never felt that way before in my life, and we didn't even kiss.

I take a deep breath and start to take off my shirt, but then I remember my bag out in the room. The last thing we need is me coming out into the bedroom wet, wearing only a towel. I've got to get it now. It's hard to actually make my feet move, so I sit there for another minute before actually standing up and opening the bathroom door. When I do open it, Josh is standing directly on the other side.

I stare at him for what feels like an hour. "I…I forgot my bag," I say, completely out of breath.

"Yeah." I look down in his hand and he's holding it. I reach for it, but just as my hand touches it, he lets it fall to the floor and the next thing I know, I'm up against the sink and Josh is kissing me. So much for the no more married activities rule.

This kiss is… unexplainable. It's slow but still hungry, forceful but still tender, so deep but not deep enough, and it feels like it will never end but will leave me wanting more. And at the same time, it's a kiss of things to come and things that can never be. It's a kiss that I can only share with him, because we're not just kissing, we're communicating. And we're saying things that only the two of us could understand.

And then I feel myself being lifted and I'm sitting on the sink, and my legs spread and he's standing between them but our lips still haven't broken contact. We stop kissing every now and then to breathe, but our lips stay connected and we pant against each other until we're both breathing fairly normally, then our tongues begin searching again. It's incredible.

Minutes, maybe hours later, I have no idea, I feel his hands on my sides, under my shirt and when he grazes my breasts, we both moan, and then he's lifting my shirt over my head and our lips part for the first time.

We look at each other for several seconds, but neither one of us says a thing for fear of ruining the moment. And then my shirt is gone and Josh's attention shifts down to my breasts. He still doesn't say anything, he doesn't touch them, he just stares, and I swear I've never felt more beautiful in my life. Finally, I reach forward and hold his face in my palms and he looks up at me and our gazes lock. And then, he leans in and kisses me again.

While we're kissing, I feel his palms on my breasts, his fingertips on my nipples, his thumbs massaging my flesh, and it feels absolutely amazing. I need him closer to me, so I wrap my legs around his waist and draw him in closer and now I can feel his erection between us and we're both moaning again.

And then I'm moving. Josh's arms are around my back squeezing me tight to him and he's carrying me somewhere, hopefully to the bed. I grip him tighter with my thighs and hang on, but still, our lips don't pull apart from each other even once.

Finally, he puts me down on the bed and leans over me, still kissing me and now I'm tugging on his shirt, pulling it as far as I can while staying attached to his mouth, and since I can't get it any higher and I'm not willing to let his lips go, I start working on the tie to his pajama bottoms. He's still standing, so once the tie is loose, they fall to the floor and I push his boxers over his hips and they follow. Then he lies down on top of me and rolls us over.

He sits up and I stand, but not so far up that we break lip contact, and somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder if our lips might actually be glued together, but then I feel his hand in the elastic of the sweats I'm wearing and in one motion, he has both the sweats and my underwear down at my ankles. I step out of them and lay back down on top of him and oh… I have to get his shirt off him.

He rolls us again, so that he's on top, and I start tugging on the shirt again. This time, he actually pulls away from my mouth, for only the second time since this all started and I can't help thinking that if we'd been wearing button-down shirts, our lips would never have needed to part again. But this time, when they do, I get his shirt over his head and then his lips are back on mine and we're connected from head to toe with nothing between us, and I'm certain this is where I was meant to be.

This kissing continues and continues and continues, and I start thinking that maybe we should be paying attention to other parts of the body, like the neck, collarbone, earlobes, chest… but we can't seem to let go of each other's lips, and although under different circumstances I might feel a bit neglected, right now I don't. Because right here, right now, Josh and I are making up for six years of missed kisses… late nights at the office, red lights comments, celebrated victories, suffered defeats, physical pain, emotional highs, emotional lows, dances, tuxedos, bow ties, formal dresses, Christmas gifts, anniversaries… every kiss there should have been is happening right now, and I don't want my lips anywhere else.

I kid you not, we've been kissing for I'm guessing a solid hour before it occurs to either one of us that we're naked and we got on this bed for reasons other than kissing. But finally, ever so slowly, Josh pulls his lips from mine and stares at me. Neither of us has said a word since the kissing started in the bathroom, and this is only the third time our lips have lost total contact, but he just stares at me with a questioning look on his face. I smile at him and nod, and then we're making love and it's the most intimate experience of my life.

Afterwards, we're lying on our sides, facing each other, and he's running his fingertips over my face, my jaw and my lips. We aren't quite ready to lose contact yet, because we both know that once we get up from this spot, we're going to have to do that research and make those phone calls and get that annulment, and the fact that we just made love doesn't change any of those things. We're smiling at each other, but our smiles are sad, and finally he whispers, "Two and a half years."

I close my eyes and fight tears that have been pooled there since this began. "And not a second longer," I whisper back.

"Marry me."

"Josh…"

"I mean it. President Bartlet leaves office January 19, 2006. The ceremony will be around ten. Marry me at noon."

Well, that does it, the tears are no longer pooled in my eyes, they're now streaming down my cheeks. Still, I manage a smile. "What if you work for the new guy?"

He smiles back at me and wipes tears from my face with his thumb. "He'll just have to do without me for the rest of the day." And then we're kissing again.