Donna woke up first, a few minutes before her alarm, the way she always did. She turned it off so it wouldn't wake Josh and propped herself up on her elbow, looking down at the man beside her, wondering what she should do. She hadn't had a chance to talk to Will yet, and obviously wasn't going to get an opportunity any time soon now. She still wasn't sure how this would play with him anyway; she'd been exaggerating her confidence to Josh on the phone the other night. She would have stalled for more time again if she hadn't been feeling so fed up with the situation herself, and if Josh hadn't sounded so unexpectedly forlorn when he'd asked her when she thought she might bring it up with Will. She'd planned a couple of times to take a chance and slip away for the weekend, but both times something had come up at work. She wondered how big a chance they were taking, being together now.

On the one hand, everyone from the reporters to the White House Chief of Staff had much more important things to think about after yesterday than the White House Press Secretary's romantic liasons. On the other hand, this would be the worst possible time for the administration's critics to get hold of something they could use to make a member of the White House Senior Staff—the most visible representative of the administration, after the President himself—look bad. But how bad would it really make her look? Donna wasn't sure. She and Josh were both unmarried; it wasn't a question of adultery. They'd known each other a long time, which would make it easier to argue that the relationship was serious—but which opened them up to claims that they'd been together secretly for a long time too, claims that would be hard to refute, even though anyone who knew them would know they weren't true. Josh had been stinging in his criticism of the President, both during the Santos campaign and since Russell had taken office, but he'd kept a low profile for the last six weeks, saying and doing nothing that might make this harder for her.

Was it enough? She just didn't know. The real problem wasn't the press or the far right, but Will, Harold Porter—who had known the President for a long time, and seemed to have a lot of influence with him—and Russell himself. She knew Will hadn't liked it when Josh had refused to help with the campaign; she doubted Josh had been tactful in whatever he'd said. Both Will and Porter had been furious with Josh for the things he'd been saying about their performance since they'd taken office, and she imagined the President had been too. She wanted to think that Will was mature enough to see past his differences with Josh and not hold them against him, or her. She wanted to think that about Porter and the President, too. She wasn't at all certain of any of them, but she'd have placed more money on Will to be reasonable about things than she would on either of the other men. And that was a deeply disturbing thought, since one of those men was President of the United States.

She felt no personal loyalty to Bob Russell himself, only to the office he held and to the job she'd been given as his chief publicist and representative to the press and the world. She'd gone to work for his campaign mainly because Will had hired her, and she'd gone to Will because she'd heard that he was hiring and she'd wanted—needed—another job, something away from Josh so she could begin to get over him and get on with her life, something more challenging where she could find out what she could really do. Will had given her that chance, and then some. She hadn't stopped to think very carefully about the man she was really working for, and whether or not it was a good idea to make him the President of the United States. She'd never had any illusions that Bob Russell was another Jed Bartlet, but as Vice-President it had seemed almost a foregone conclusion that he would be the Democratic choice to run, and she'd been excited by the prospect of being on his team. She'd been even more excited by the position she'd ended up in on that team. She wondered now if that was really all she'd thought about, because running Bob Russell as the Democratic candidate hadn't prepared her at all for the experience of watching Bob Russell govern, or trying to help him do it.

He wasn't actually a stupid man. If anything he exaggerated his intellectual limitations in public, probably because he'd found in his political career that the average voter responded better to dumb jokes about Vice-Presidential seals than to bookish witticisms with a Latinate tang. Not that he would have been capable of the bookish witticisms; he read very little, and took a kind of perverse pride in getting other people to do his reading for him. Donna had never seen him do more than glance at a newspaper; he expected his staff to keep him briefed on whatever they thought he needed to know. He was singularly lacking in curiosity, tended to be dismissive of academics and intellectuals, and was fond of saying that he trusted common sense more than uncommon learning.

But he wasn't actually stupid. He had a wry sense of humor and knew enough to direct it against himself at times—usually, Donna realized now, times when it would help him in the public eye. She'd found that willingness to laugh at himself rather attractive when she'd first started working for him, a reassuring sign of modesty and geniality that suggested he'd take direction well and be, if not brilliant, then at least harmless if the almost-unthinkable happened and he actually became President—something she'd never really thought was going to happen, when they had such a formidable opponent as Arnold Vinick. But Vinick had been weakened by the nuclear power disaster in southern California and by problems with his conservative base, Bob Russell had been strengthened by Bartlet's enduring popularity, and if the Democratic candidate had ever possessed any real modesty or geniality, he'd abandoned them when he'd stepped across the threshold of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and taken possession of the Oval Office.

After five months in the White House Donna had become painfully aware that President Russell's most noticeable qualities were ambition and vanity, shot through with a streak of calculation and even slyness that she knew shouldn't have surprised her, but somehow did. His views on many issues were surprisingly conservative, he tended to listen to people who reinforced things he already believed, didn't like opposition or even discussion much, and was proving to be quite capable of harboring a grudge. It was an unsettling combination: simple stupidity would have been much easier to deal with, particularly in the situation she found herself in now, in bed with a man the President had considerable reason to hold a grudge against. The most sensible thing for her to do would be to tell Josh to go back to Connecticut and keep her contact with him to a minimum until she was much more certain that her relationship with him wouldn't cause trouble with either the Chief of Staff or the President himself.

But she didn't feel as if she could go on being sensible any longer. Yesterday's events had shaken her deeply. Life was unpredictable and all too short—she'd learned that before; why was it so easily forgotten? Josh had seemed willing to support her in taking her time to find the right way to balance a relationship with him with the demands of her job, but after seeing him last night she wondered if she'd been asking too much. He hadn't complained—which, now that she thought about it, she realized was in itself a bad sign with Josh—and he'd given no real hint on the telephone or in their emails that anything was bothering him, but when he'd arrived at her house last night he'd looked tired and thin in a way that worried her. She realized she had no idea how much of his hard-won equilibrium Josh could afford to lose these days, or how difficult it would be for him to get it back.

She wondered what else was going to surprise her about him; it had never occurred to her, for instance, that he'd be wondering these past six weeks if she'd changed her mind about him. It amazed her that he hadn't understood her better than that, hadn't realized how deep her feelings for him went, how deep they'd always gone. How could two people know each other as well as she knew him and he knew her, and yet miss so much about each other? It was a sobering thought. She would have to be more careful in the future to make sure he did understand her, and she understood him. Sending him back to Connecticut hardly seemed like the best way of assuring that, even if she could have brought herself to do it. Which she really couldn't. It was all she could do to pull herself out of bed away from him now, to start getting dressed and ready for the day; she had to know she could see him again at the end of it.

When she got back from the bathroom Josh was sitting on the edge of the bed dressed in his jeans and shirt from last night, pulling on his socks. "Don't you want a shower?" she asked him, surprised. "I'll get one at my place," he said. "I should get going before it gets any later, or someone will see me here. I'd meant to get up an hour ago." It was 5:30; Donna liked to get to the office early.

"You kept your house?"

"Yeah, I wanted to hang on to it. I could have leased it out, but I get down here often enough that I figured I'd just keep it going and the Westport place too." It hadn't been an easy decision. After paying his bills at the clinic in Virginia—Leo had tried to do that for him, but Josh wouldn't let him—buying the house in Westport had pretty much cleaned out his bank accounts, and yet he hadn't wanted to let the Georgetown house go. He'd needed to feel he could come back to the city any time, and his work at the Foundation and the President's library, with his newspaper articles and television appearances, had been giving him enough money to let him get away with it.

"Will I—see you tonight?"

He looked up from tying his shoe, surprise on his face. "Do you want to?"

"Of course I do, Josh."

"Your wish is my command," he said, grinning then. "Do you want to come to my place, or have me come here? I could make dinner."

She hesitated. "I'm not sure when I'll get back. It's going to be a long day."

He made a face. "Yeah, it is. Call me when you get in, and I'll come over."

"Okay. Can I take a rain check on the dinner, though?"

"Any time." He kissed her, and headed towards the door, grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Donna shook her head, smiling a little. If there was one thing she had never in her wildest dreams imagined when she was working for Josh, it was this: she, Donna Moss, leaving a house in Georgetown for her job as the White House Press Secretary, and Josh offering to have dinner waiting for her when she got home.

An hour later she walked into her temporary office at the Pentagon and was told that the President had ordered air strikes against terrorist bases identified by the C.I.A. in Qari'stan, a neighbor of Qumar. The President went on t.v. that night to announce that the country was at war.

What with prepping him for that, and the planning session afterwards for the next day, Donna didn't get home until almost midnight. Josh had been and gone, leaving a note on her kitchen counter: "Leo's had a heart attack. I'm going to G.W., to wait with Annabeth and Mal." A little while later her Blackberry buzzed. The White House had just been informed that former President Bartlet had had another attack of M.S., and was in the hospital, paralyzed, in New Hampshire. For both men it must have been the stress of the last two days, she thought sadly, of watching and not being able to do anything anymore, and she wondered what other reverberations the terrorist attacks would end up having in her world.

oooooo