The touch was like fire, silken and strong, over her skin. It was strong, so strong that the breath was stolen completely from her body, left her lungs screaming for air, sore for life.

It had never been like that before, never that intense. His eyes had never been that dark, grip so firm, body so close and open. She wasn't quite sure how to react to such a show of emotion, and there was a fine, blurry line between what she knew she wanted to do and what would actually be wise to do.

A task to look at him, but she managed, raising blue eyes beneath a veil of blonde hair. Either he had known she would look or was simply waiting for her to, but his eyes connected with hers immediately.

Another touch of fire, a burn and Donna pulled back, squeezed her eyes shut instead of dropping her gaze. If she kept her eyes open, she'd be tempted to look at him, dissect his secrets.

He was a politician, he had many she was sure.

Walking away from him, disengaging from his warmth, pulling back, leaving… was easier to do than she thought it would be this time. She'd done it many times before, had become an expert. But no amount of expertise would prepare her synapses to cope with him following her. "Stop," she half whispered, half pleaded, as he caught up to her and moved to grab her arm. Even with all the people around them, they were still the only two people who mattered.

It was cold outside on the steps to the Capitol, and upon glancing up the scalable distance to the white building, Donna felt incredibly dwarfed. His hands big on her small arm, his sentences long and full of meaning, his intentions monumental in their coming.

Wind whipped through the naked trees, tossed her hair up, over, all around, skewing his view of her face. If he'd chosen that moment to reach out and push it away, she might have let him, but he waited a fraction of a second two long and her face went stony, lips pressing into a thin line. "You can't tell me all of that and expect me to be happy about it."

His hands were on his hips, sunglasses now covering his gaze, lips turned into an amused smirk. "I've never been a beat-around-the-bush type of guy," he shrugged and took a step closer to her.

She backed up a step.

The wind continued to whip in the distance between them, making it feel as if they were each a canyon wall, had let a long river of uncomfortable ignorance create a giant fissure between them. "Yeah, well, you can't just say something like that," Donna decided, setting her jaw after speaking her piece.

Again, Josh smiled a little, "Says who?"

Donna's face shook with rage, color building up in her cheeks, eyes strengthening in their sharp gaze. "Says me; says me, Josh. This is about me too, not just what you feel."

The smile that had been so at home on his lips, faded from his cheeks as his mouth fell; the hands that had been at his hips slipped into his pockets, fingers digging into the seams at the bottom. "I don't think I asked for anything back, Donna," he said, voice just low enough to be heard, slightly above a whisper.

A hissing in her ears, whether it was wind or blood, she couldn't tell. The silence that had taken up residence like cotton in her mouth and no amount of swiping at it with her tongue could unblock the words that needed to be said.

"I really don't need you to say anything back about it, I just thought it would be time, it felt like the time for me to say it."

"I… can't say anything… about that," Donna managed to utter, anger melting away as suddenly as it had come, long fingers tucking her hair as best she could behind her ears.

Josh stood stock still in front of her, waiting for something to come from his mouth. When nothing did, he slowly sat down on the nearest step, his body chilling when it touched the cold stone.

Donna, beside him, looked back up at the Capitol building and down at him. She too sat down, a mere four inches separating them. Both sets of knees kept closed in on their partner, both sets of hands coming to clasp around the front of their shins. "It's chilly," Josh breathed, finding talking about the weather to be the only safe thing to say.

He looked around as if he could divine something to speak to her, something that would come out so universally right that he wouldn't have to second guess himself, so that he wouldn't have to say something more… and then something more. He wanted to say the right thing simply so that he could stop saying so many of the wrong.

Josh ended up glancing at her hands out of the corner of the eye, thinking he would sneak under her radar. That was a long shot, and a failure it seemed as her head snapped up to look at him.

"Let me look at you," she said suddenly, her voice neutral, hands trembling as she reached out to slide the glasses off of his face. Josh's lips, cracked and thin, quirked up just a little, attempting not to shudder as her cool fingers slid over his cheekbones. "I didn't mean I didn't know what to say, Josh," Donna claimed as she folded the sunglasses up and placed them onto the ground beside her.

A senator walking up the stairs recognized Josh and Donna and said hello. It gave Donna just enough time to muster the courage to say to him, "And it's not that I don't feel the same exact way."

"Yeah," Josh sighed, in the way he did when he was either severely disinterested or was simply worried about the words that would come next.

Donna licked her lips, the wind cooling them, drying them, "And really, there's nothing I would like to do more than to just… go somewhere and…"

"And?"

She sighed smiled a little, "There were times, you know, I'd be sitting outside your office and you'd have the door closed and I wondered…" She sighed again and glanced up at the gray sky. "If anyone would notice me slip inside."

A laugh bubbled out of him and he leaned over into her personal space, "Can't say I would have cared," and he laughed again.

Silence fell between them again. It wasn't quite as thick as it was before and for that, she was grateful. Small favors, she mused, as she picked his sunglasses back up and began toying with the plastic earpieces of them. Josh reached over to steal them from her but accidentally grabbed her hand.

She dropped the glasses onto the stone and he stroked her hand open, palm up. In it, he clasped hers and then they were sitting there, hand in hand, watching the important people scamper up and down the steps, off to do important things.

It dawned on her, subtly as not to hit her upside the head, that what they were doing there, under the dark March sky, was important. "Josh, really, I want to-"

"Donna, maybe we shouldn't talk about it," his voice was withdrawn, a touch of sadness etching itself around the edges. A nod was her answer as tears began pricking in her peripheral. Blinking kept them at bay for a moment but did nothing to stop them as her eyes fluttered shut when his lips reached out to brush hers.

The sound of footfalls made its way into her ears but was washed away by the sound of his easy breathing tickling over her skin. In a moment, their mouthes had relaxed and opened and he tasted her for the first time and she him, and it didn't matter what they had to do after they left those stairs or what had happened before or what might happen down the road.

In that moment, in that time on the cold marble they were in the middle of an extraordinarily important thing.