Story written for the Darvey Secret Santa, originally posted on suitsxmasfics
Prompt: Harvey marries Paula and Donna marries Thomas, a year later Harvey and Donna realize what a grave mistake they've both made.
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High Fidelity
Rain clatters against the pavement in their path to the house. The downpour isn't too strong, but constant. It's been raining all day, as if the sky is attempting to wash off the mess and sorrow of the last three hundred and sixty four days in preparation for the new year. It's going to be near impossible to see the fireworks in the skyline tomorrow with the weather like this.
Paula takes Harvey's hand after he rings the doorbell and he winces apologetically at her. They've had this argument before and she hates that he never remembers to hold her hand. It makes her feel "dispensable", as she puts it.
The moment Louis lets them in, Harvey knows something is up. There's an unnatural over-politeness in the way the man greets his wife. A poker face, if Louis was ever capable of holding one. And with Harvey himself, it's like Louis is already trying to appease him. So, Harvey hangs behind while Paula strolls inside the house to greet Sheila.
"Come on in," Louis beckons. "Let me get you a drink before Samantha claims the entire bottle."
"Is it really that bad that you have to get me drunk before you spill it?"
Louis pays him the dignity of not denying there is something to be spilled.
"No no, relax, it's really good actually," he answers, trying to guide Harvey to join the party in the living room, but when he doesn't budge, Louis sighs, deciding to bite the bullet. He stares cautiously at Harvey. Meaningfully, he says, "She's here."
It's all it takes. Harvey doesn't need to ask who the topic of the conversation is for his entire body to react. Tension crawling up the back of his neck, blood rushing to his head, fingers clenching up in sweaty fists. And his chest – tightening painfully, thundering against his ribcage.
His dismay must last longer than he realizes, busy with his breathless internal riot – he's never needed so desperately to run in two opposite directions – because then Louis is back to appeasing him, verbally this time.
"Come on, it's been a year."
A year since she got married.
A year since the last time he saw Donna.
Louis insists, "There's so much water under that bridge. I'm sure you can be civil."
Harvey's voice forces its way out in a growl. "What is she doing here?"
"I invited her. I always invite her. This just so happens to be the first time both of you accepted the invitation…" Louis half justifies, half apologizes.
"And you didn't think to warn me she was going to be here?!"
"To be strictly honest I didn't know she would, because she usually… Well, avoids these kinds of run-ins with you. But she showed up tonight and I'm really glad she did. It's well past the time you two stop living separate lives."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Harvey barks in a low tone, as if there was still any possibility he could run away from the precipice ahead unheard and unseen.
The prospect of turning on his heels and heading out seems tempting. But then the reality that he hasn't seen Donna's face in an entire year falls over him with a crushing weight, a solidity to the realization that makes his bones ache.
He realizes, with alarming, calamitous pain, that he doesn't know what she looks like. She could have changed so much in all this time. She could have cut her hair, dyed it dark, she could have wrinkles and an array of new freckles and new habits and he wouldn't even know. He wouldn't know a thing about the person who, for thirteen years, was his entire world and, to this day, showed up in his dreams in the early mornings, waking him up to a reality where another woman was lying beside him.
She could be pregnant, for all he knows, and that's one of the scariest thoughts he's ever had in his life.
"Harvey?" Paula's voice calls him by the foyer and then he has to stop contemplating an alternate reality where he could turn his back and leave, or where this wasn't his life in the first place, and join the rest of the guests inside.
Louis' relieved exhale at his back sounds like a bad omen.
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...
It's a small gathering of people, just big enough to be considered a party, but still intimate. He knows each of the faces he glances at while frantically searching for the one he doesn't know if he'll recognize.
At the far side of the room, a pair of hazel eyes catches his gaze and his entire world flashes in white, blazing light.
Three seconds later, the crashing noise of a thunder clarifies it was just a lightning strike, and not actually his whole world turning on its axis – as much as it felt like it.
He moves around the room in an anxious stupor while Paula greets people here and there, until they make their way to where Donna and Katrina are chatting with Alex and his wife.
It's the first time he sees Donna since the day before her wedding.
She looks the same. Exactly the same. And that's even more painful, because he spent a year trying to convince himself she was a whole different person, that the version of Donna he felt belonged to him didn't exist anymore, just so that he could get out of bed each morning… but here she is.
She doesn't try to smile at him, but there's a softness in her expression that's only his. It looks like a sigh of relief and sorrow all in one. He relates to the feeling, as hard and stiff as his expression may be.
"Hey," Donna says, and it suddenly feels silly that he was worried he would forget the sound of her voice. He could never forget her sweet lilt.
Harvey nods stiffly in response.
Paula interjects. "It's good seeing you, Donna. It's been a while."
"Yes, you too. Congratulations on the wedding, by the way."
His wife grins. "Thank you! It was a small ceremony, but a lovely one."
It's recent. Harvey and Paula only made things official a little over three months ago: signed the papers and celebrated with a dinner party for family only. Her polite, and truthful, excuse of it having been a small ceremony is as much to Donna's benefit as the others – neither Katrina nor Alex had been invited.
The others exchange pleasantries, but he can't take his eyes off of Donna. She's wearing a deep, silvery-green dress, and the silk looks slippery, like night waters. He's trying to spot anything he might have missed, to catalog any change, to make sure he still knows every bit of her. To makeup for so long without laying eyes on her.
Donna gazes back at him, wordlessly.
Sheila waltzes in to dissipate the tension with animated chatter that doesn't penetrate his addled mind in the slightest.
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...
Leaving the small group of people to get his hands on some much needed alcohol, Alex's question reaches him before he's even aware of the man's presence by his elbow.
"Don't tell me this is the first time you two see each other since she left the firm?"
Harvey works his jaw at the loaded question, pondering how much he's capable of talking about the topic without exploding. If last year's history is any indication, not much.
"I won't," he replies then.
"Harvey. Come on."
He sighs. "I saw her before the wedding."
"Okay, so it wasn't that long ago, I don–"
"Not my wedding. Her wedding."
Alex's eyes widen in an undignified manner. "You haven't seen Donna in a year?!"
Harvey feels the astonishment is warranted enough, but silence is the only answer he's got at the moment.
The quietness stretches and he avoids the other man's gaze, feigning disinterest into his drink. Alex's pity is unbearable.
"Her leaving really broke you, didn't it?"
It's a rhetorical question, just an expression of his friend's understanding of his situation. But he's wrong.
Donna leaving couldn't have broken him, because he was already completely destroyed the moment she decided to marry Kessler.
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...
It's torture. Watching Donna a few steps away, feeling as far as she's felt all year; glancing around the room waiting for the moment Thomas will show up and put his hands on her; and wondering, just wondering, at each second with an obsessive need… Is she happy?
She looks okay. Beautiful, as always. She listens to her friends with the same caring attentiveness; she smiles fondly at them and the smile reaches her eyes, but she doesn't laugh. He notices that from afar. Even when everyone around her shakes with laughter at some anecdote Samantha tells them or when baby Lucy spits food right in Louis' face, Donna just smiles – gentle, but nowhere near the pure spark of sunlight her laughter used to be.
"She seems to be doing well."
"Hm?"
Paula doesn't buy him playing dumb, but she repeats herself anyway. "Donna. She seems well."
"I guess."
"I wonder where her husband is."
He doesn't say anything.
"It's fine if you want to catch up with her, Harvey. I know you haven't seen each other in a long time."
"I'm fine."
"Then it would be wise to quit staring at her. You're giving the wrong impression."
His face hardens at Paula's sarcasm, but she doesn't wait around for his reaction, walking away to talk to Sheila and leaving him alone.
He and Paula don't talk about Donna. Ever. The last time they did, Harvey told her Donna had kissed him and denied having any feelings for her. After Paula forgave him, they both avoided mentioning Donna's name.
From then on, Harvey watched from afar, an unwilling spectator, as Donna started dating Thomas Kessler. As their relationship quickly got serious. As months of this crippling reality passed by him like a freight train – so fast it was blurred around the edges and made his chest constrict painfully in fearful anticipation. As bothered as he was about the situation, it didn't feel real. He disassociated. Like an out-of-body experience – watching his life happen away from himself, having no control over events unfolding whatsoever.
Until one day Donna showed up at the office bearing a diamond on her finger. Until she told him Kessler's company was expanding its business to Brussels, and he was moving there, and asked her to marry him and move to a different fucking continent with him. And she said yes.
After Donna got married and moved away, Paula seemed relieved, content, while he was grasping at straws just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Deep down, he always resented her for it. In time, he slowly came to accept the life he had gotten knocked into, and resented Donna instead.
At that point, he and Paula had been together for over a year – longer than Donna even knew Kessler by the time they got married – and Paula kept making very reasonable arguments about how two adults who cared about each other and had been together that long should make things official. The status of still being someone's "girlfriend" in her forties didn't please her and by every definition of the term they were already living together – at her place, because she felt more comfortable there, though he still kept his apartment.
So, because that seemed like the inevitable path of life, a few months ago, they became husband and wife.
He thinks, even if nothing technically changed, life used to make more sense before that.
"Scotch for your thoughts?"
A way too familiar voice sounds low near him. Donna offers him a glass and the tiniest curve at the corner of her lips. Not quite a smile, but his body doesn't mind and he feels the hairs at the nape of his neck standing on end.
He accepts the glass. Takes a much needed taste. He doesn't know how to be around her, unsure if he should own up to the unrelenting feelings that are coursing through his veins or if he's got restraint enough to pretend her presence doesn't affect him the way it does.
He ignores her question, asking one of his own. "So, you've decided to come to the States for the New Year?"
"Yeah, I needed to see some old friends." His face reacts to her words and she smirks, sadly. "Don't worry, I didn't mean you," she says.
He thinks it's surprisingly comforting that the year apart didn't mess with her ability to read the disdain on his face clear as day. It's also surprising he can even show disdain when being near her only highlights how much he misses her.
"I got the message the last time I was around and you didn't answer my calls," she adds.
He couldn't. He was too mad at her and too in love with her to risk even listening to her voice. God only knows what he would've done if he had seen her at the time. Afterwards, he spent months regretting passing on the chance of seeing her, but still unable to call her back. He regrets it to this day, but figures it's just another little thing on the long list of his wrong doings.
Then, because he can't bear not knowing anymore, he asks her, softer and more earnestly than he wishes he sounded, "How are you, Donna?"
She smiles at him. It's a little melancholic, but honest enough. "I'm good. Better than I've been in a long time."
He doesn't know what to make of that. He looks at her wishing he had mastered reading her like she does him but, more than ever, Donna's a closed book.
"And how are you?" she asks, her voice tender and careful.
"I…"
He wouldn't know how to answer that question as much as he tried. So he gives up and shrugs.
Donna's head slants to the side, observing him in the way she used to do back when she'd fight the world just to make sure he was okay and a wave of affection engulfs him whole, bigger than any other conflicting feeling her presence evoques.
Her scent is still the same. He sighs, deeply.
"It's really good seeing you," he confesses.
"Is it?"
"Not that I wasn't ready to turn back around at the door when Louis told me you were here," he says and she grins. He thinks it's the first honest reaction he's seen from her all night. "But yes. It is."
The lightness of her smile disappears just as quickly as it came. "I wouldn't have judged you. You've been running away for so long, it's what I've come to expect."
It feels like a slap in the face. He doesn't let it show.
"Says the woman who moved to the other side of the map."
"The woman who was living her life, Harvey, and not trying to cut you out of it. You're the one who decided you didn't want me in your life unless it was on your terms."
He looks at Donna, not shying away from her hard stare. His jaw clenches, nostrils flaring to breathe out the tension inside. She has no fucking idea what the hell she's talking about.
What fucking life? He's been barely existing since she left.
They stare at each other for a long time. He listens to the taps of the raindrops on the window behind them while he calms himself down. He looks away, eventually. Takes a sip of his scotch.
"Will your husband be joining us?" he asks.
She's still looking at him. He can feel her eyes burning holes into his skin.
In a low, calm voice, she says, "No, he's not coming."
His eyes snap back at her, but then she's already walking away, leaving him standing alone and depleted. He watches the copper strands of her hair falling down her partly exposed back, the soft curve of her hips moving under the silk, the delicate shape of her ankles…
When reality snaps back in place, he realizes a pair of blue eyes have been spying his every thought from a few steps away.
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...
The rain grew heavier, its noise louder under the chatter of guests and the music playing.
Harvey's half immersed in a conversation when he notices Donna leaving the room. It's the first time since their brief conversation that he catches her alone. Paula's nowhere to be seen. He excuses himself from the small circle of people and follows her into the hall.
He never explored that part of the house before. The hallway is darkened, but there's a door to his right leading to a pantry and, further ahead, stairs leading down to a basement, a low glow shining up.
He steps down the stairs quietly enough that Donna's startled when she hears him pulling the sliding door after himself. They're in Louis' wine cellar. The room isn't too spacious and it's dimly lit in warm light. Bottles of wine cover most of the three walls around them in organized oak racks.
"I was wondering why you would sneak out of a party, but this makes perfect sense." He tries lightly, smirking at all the bottles of wine around her.
"I could be either restocking the party or robbing Louis' stash. It's anyone's guess." She shrugs, humorously.
"Luckily, you know a good lawyer."
"My lawyer hasn't called me back in a year. I could be in prison for all he cares." Her tone suggests she's still trying for playful, but neither of them find the humor in it at all.
"Why did you come here if you're just going to throw that in my face everytime I try talking to you?"
"Everytime? That implies you've been trying, Harvey, which is not the case. But it doesn't matter. I didn't come here for you."
She turns her back on him and pulls a bottle out of its place, studying the label. She puts it back and grabs another one. He stares at her, glued to the floor like a statue, feeling the emotions coming to a boil and not knowing what the escape valve is going to be.
He huffs, frustrated with the lack of lenience she's showing when he believes he had good reason to keep his distance. Even more frustrated by his unavoidable need to talk to her now, even if it's going to inevitably lead to a fight. "What would you have me do, Donna?"
"Depends. When? Three months ago? A year ago? Thirteen years ago?" She shrugs, then lets her arms fall to her sides. "There's a lot of things you could've done differently."
"And you did everything right," he goads.
"No, Harvey… I didn't." She sounds tired, fragile even. "But I did the best I could."
He could say the same, but it would be a lie. She was the one who always brought up the best in him, and she wasn't around.
When he doesn't say anything, Donna gives up the futile attempt of choosing a wine bottle and walks closer to him. She shakes her head tiredly, her voice taking on a softer tone.
"Listen, I don't want to fight with you. I guess there's just too much stuff built up from all this time and it's hard to…" She sighs, giving up once more. Then, she looks deep into his eyes. Her eyes are liquid, yearning, and he missed the familiarity of them so much. "It really is nice seeing you, Harvey." She smiles, and steps away to the exit, putting an end to whatever was brewing between them.
His voice halts her in place.
"Why did you give up on us Donna?"
She turns back to face him, slowly, incredulity painting her features.
"Are you kidding me?"
"No. I need to know that. At what point did you decide that what we had wasn't worth it anymore?"
"What did we have, Harvey?"
"I don't know what we had, Donna. But I know I sure as hell would never have given up on you."
She stands there and watches him for a lingering moment. Her tongue wets her lips and he watches the movement. Quietly, she says, "It's been so long… It's been a year since we've even been around each other and you… still… can't tell me." Her eyebrows furrow slightly in thought. "I guess that was the point. If you need to know, that was the point: when I realized you would never let yourself feel…" She doesn't allow herself to say the words and shakes her head instead, avoiding his eyes.
His face is twisted in shock and anger and frustration, words escaping impulsively. "I did tell you! I told you I loved you."
At this point, he really doesn't care to be cautious anymore.
Donna finds his eyes again. His words seem to bring her more pain than if he had denied it.
"You said it… and didn't mean anything by it."
She's being unfair. He would lay his life on the line for her, drop to his knees and put her first every single time it counted. Everything he ever did was to try and make sure that nothing could ruin her happiness – not even himself.
His chin juts out in defiance. "What about all the things I did? They count for nothing?"
"They were pretty hard to interpret while you insisted you didn't want more and slept around with half of New York."
He's defenseless against the accusation. Anything he could say – I couldn't access how I felt, I was too afraid to lose you, you deserved better… – sounds weak and pathetic.
"So all the years we've been together meant nothing?" he asks instead.
"That was just loyalty, Harvey. That's not all I needed. Eventually, I had to figure out that if it was so hard for you... you just really didn't feel anything."
He's not used to Donna being so off the mark, so blind to the facts. But, more pressingly, he wants to know what it was that she needed back then. Because she told him she wanted more, but what more consisted of was always a mystery and that seemed to him like the point where their whole relationship started to collapse.
"And what did you need, Donna?"
"Don't act stupid, Harvey. That's the one thing you're not. And if you couldn't give me what I needed back then, now that you're married it really doesn't matter anymore."
"You got married first, Donna! Remember that. You decided to give up on us, get married and leave me."
"What us?! What the hell are you talking about? You got yourself in a relationship with your therapist the second I told you I wanted more–"
"You never said you wanted me!" He interrupts desperately, but to no avail.
"– and afterwards you set me down and told me you were with her. I mean, you couldn't have made yourself any more clear that you were officially putting an end to whatever unresolved, blurred lines there was between us. What was I supposed to do, Harvey?! Crawl, beg, kiss you out of the blue?! Oh, wait, I did that! I still tried to find out if the feelings were there and your reaction couldn't have been worse."
He winces. He made a lot of mistakes in life and he could pinpoint a hundred corner paths where he could've turned a different direction and pulled Donna into his arms and been perfectly happy. But that one still felt like the most defining moment. Probably because it had been his last chance. And he had missed it.
When she kissed him, knowing he was in a relationship with someone else, all of his trauma engulfed him. He couldn't see past the fact that he was, in that moment, doing to someone else what his mother had done to his father and how, even in the face of infidelity, he still wanted Donna so much. He was blind to anything else and he thought the only solution was being resolutely loyal to Paula and denying everything else he was feeling.
By the time his shame and fear tampered down enough to question his actions, Thomas Kessler was already a permanent reality in Donna's life and he couldn't do anything about his feelings without, once again, becoming someone capable of such disloyalty.
So, he waited it out until it passed – except it didn't. Instead, Donna got engaged to a man who wasn't him while he watched, powerless and bitter.
"I met someone nice," she adds in face of his silence. "Someone who somehow pulled me out of the hole I found myself in. So I did everything I could to move on with my life, feeling like half a person because of all the parts of me that would always belong to you."
Her words tear him in half and he lashes out, like he's used to. "You should've goddamn said something."
"Like you did?!" Donna all but screams. "Like you did when you came into my house the day before my wedding, drunk out of your mind and insisting you just wanted to make sure I was happy, and still, still, in that moment you couldn't just tell me?!"
His face hardens at the memory, humiliation aching inside of him. Another stormy night like this one where he begged without saying a single word that counted, hoping Donna would be brave when he wasn't – she had always been better than him. But she still went ahead with the wedding.
The disappointment in her eyes when she closed the door on his drunken state was enough to keep him away from the ceremony the next day. Along with a pounding headache and the feeling that his life had ended.
She breathes out heavily. "I had to come to terms with the fact that if it was so goddamn hard for you to tell me that you loved me, and mean it, it was because you didn't, Harvey. It was that simple."
"No, it's not! It's not that fucking simple and you should've known it."
"Oh, Harvey… If there was one thing I didn't miss in all this time we've been apart, it was you demanding that I know things you don't have the guts to tell me."
"That's good for you, Donna. You had at least that. Because there wasn't one single thing I didn't miss about you, every fucking second of my life, for the past goddamn year."
Her breath catches, a tear finally, bravely, escaping the prison of her lids and streaming down her cheek. She quickly dries it off with shaky fingers, as another one falls on its path.
And that's when he notices it: pale, freckly… bare.
"Where is it, Donna?"
She's confused.
He glances down at her hand. "Where's your wedding ring? Where's your husband?"
Donna's silence stretches too long and his lungs refuse to work until he hears her voice again.
"My ring is in a ring box, in a drawer, at home. And I don't have a husband anymore. We're separated."
A thunder roars low from the ceiling above. After that, he doesn't hear anything else. No music or voices filtering inside through the walls, no more of the deafening sound of his heart constantly breaking. It's all silence, and Donna.
Then, he hears his own footsteps on the hardwood floors. Just three of them and Donna is within reach. Finally within his reach.
Harvey holds her face in both hands, his breath thready and unstable. Her skin is soft, warm. He dries off the mark of tears on her left cheek, his thumb then catching at the corner of her mouth. His heart is beating so fast he can hear it. Donna looks up at him through watery lashes, eyes wide, frightened. But she clutches at the fabric of his jacket, chest rising and falling in rapid, desperate breathing.
He's almost scared of closing his eyes and Donna disappearing like she's grown the habit of doing over and over again in his dreams. But then he brushes the softness of her lips with his own and he has no control over his body anymore.
All he can feel, and think, and want is her. In his mouth, in his arms, under his skin. He pours himself heavily into her lips, his chest pressing into hers as his mouth begs for forgiveness.
She lets him in immediately, wanting. The taste of her mouth is an obsession to him. His hands fist at her hair and he kisses her deeply, desperately. A growl escapes his lips when Donna digs her fingertips into his back, under his jacket.
He's completely, desperately in love with her. He's known that for a long, long time. But in this moment Harvey realizes just how futile and catastrophically wrong the attempt to live on despite his love for Donna had been. Any relationship, not even a marriage, any attempt at happiness… It could never work. He loved her just too damn much.
His hands still firmly locked in her hair, he leans a breath way, just enough to look into her eyes. She looks shocked and hazy and thoroughly kissed. And she looks so beautiful.
"Donna…" he breathes out her name into her lips. "I love you, I have always loved you."
A watery laugh leaves her lips in a sob, her fingertips clinging into him. He presses himself harder into her in response, his mouth descending into the column of her throat as his eyes close.
"You're everything to me, Donna," he mumbles into the warmth of her skin. "I'm sorry it's taken so long, but there hasn't been a day when I wasn't completely in love with you."
Her hands find their way to his head, fingers weaving through his hair. He looks up at her.
"I love you so much, Harvey."
The words fall softly, all around him, breathing life to a happiness he thought was lost forever. He smiles brightly, pressing his grinning lips into hers. He never wants to stop for a second, for the rest of his life.
The fabric of her dress slips under his palms as he strokes every curve of her body, drunk on Donna's taste and the thready gasps that escape into his mouth. He grips her waist, guiding her back and pressing her into the door so he can lean against her heavily. Sucking her lips into his mouth and feeling the length of her body under his, from chest to thighs, and he still couldn't have her close enough.
There's a softness he didn't even know he possessed in the way his mouth trails kisses down her neck, wanting to feel her skin and her scent and kiss her endlessly all at once. He drops a kiss to her shoulder, nips the delicate skin, his fingers working on slipping the strap of her dress down so he has more access.
His hips press into hers, demanding. There's a muffled moan and her ankle twists around his calf, granting space between her legs and asking for closeness. His palm catches her thigh, pulling it upwards and caressing the underside of the tender flesh.
He's pressing hard between her thighs, grinding into her and more than ready to jump any precipice as long as she's with him. Her tongue is drawing hectic patterns on the side of his neck and his hand strokes up her thigh until he finds her warm and wet. He groans.
When he moves between her legs, she gasps, trying to grasp onto sanity. "Harvey– Are you sure?"
He looks at her – at her beautiful, beautiful eyes, that are dark with want; at her flushed cheeks and the redness of her mouth. He doesn't have an ounce of hesitation in him. "Donna, you're the only thing I'm sure about in this life."
He kisses her again. It's slow, wet, intense. Much the same as he thrusts into her. Her head bumps back against the wall; his mouth falls down to the top of her breasts.
Her soft, throaty moan is the best thing he's ever heard, her arms are the best place he's ever been and it doesn't take long for both of them to buckle under the weight of their feelings.
...
...
"You should go up first," she says, her voice still weak and raspy, smoothing down his lapel.
He shakes his head. "No. We can go up together."
Donna's eyes widen at the suggestion. "Harvey."
"Donna. I'm not going to pretend this didn't happen." He's resolute. "I'm not going to lie to her and I'm not going to pretend you're not the love of my life, ever again."
She blinks up at him. Bites her lips. "Isn't that a little cruel?"
"I think being dishonest would be worse."
She nods. She didn't expect him to lie, but this is an impossible situation.
Harvey takes her fingers into his hand, gently, like he can barely believe she's his to touch. "I know I cheated on her," he says. "But I was already being unfaithful through our whole relationship, because the truth is, Donna... I've always only been yours. We never should've gone ahead with the marriage, but I was so desperate to stop feeling like half a person. And Paula... I don't know, I think she really thought she could fill that void."
He tugs her closer, his hand sliding around her waist. His voice gets lower, raspier when he tells her, "You didn't just take a piece of me when you left, you took everything and I was left empty. I've put fidelity above anything else before and it was the biggest regret of my life. Everything is not black and white. I've had to walk a long path through the gray to find you back, and I'm at peace with this."
Donna cups his face, pressing her lips tenderly to his cheek, her thumb caressing his skin. "We never stood a chance with other people, did we?"
He shakes his head, almost chuckling at the mess they made out of things.
She squeezes his hand and nods once, ready to face anything by his side.
They walk up the stairs together, a respectable distance between them.
They'll have to meet again in a couple hours – he's in for a difficult conversation, one she can't participate in, as much of an integral part of the subject as she's going to be. But the weight is finally out of their weary, tired hearts.
The storm had passed.