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The car was quiet.
Too quiet. Deathly quiet. Donna Moss was never one for a quiet car. She had a plethora of CDs she kept in her glove compartment, taking the time to choose a song even when her drive to work was no more than fifteen minutes. When she didn’t want to listen to music, she inevitably had the radio tuned to some news station giving the latest stock market indexes or updates on the Hill.
But her car was silent tonight, and Josh knows it’s for him, and while some part of him feels guilty for it, he mainly feels an overwhelming gratitude for the woman beside him.
The whole night feels so fuzzy. Talking to Stanley had been good, had been helpful, but in the aftermath of it he just feels drained. Stanley had said he’d get better, slowly, and Josh has to believe it’s true. So he lets himself be driven to the ER, staring at the lights that flash by and feeling an odd sort of detachment from the world around him.
Everything feels cold. His sense of touch seems delayed somehow, like his mind takes just a few seconds too long to catch up with his body. The only constant he feels is Donna’s warm hand wrapped around his as she drives. He thinks that if she were to let go, he’d dissolve like smoke.
As they check in at the front desk of the hospital, doctors and nurses rushing past them to the cries of other sick and injured patients, Josh struggles to force down a surge of fear and nausea. The sirens outside had already made him shaky, but being back inside a hospital was nearly paralyzing. He was clutching Donna’s hand at this point, squeezing himself as close as he physically could into her side as though he could hide in her if he tried hard enough. She spoke for him when the doctor asked for his medical history, giving a neat list of all his medications and diagnoses that Josh would appreciate more if his vision wasn’t so blurry.
He doesn’t realize just how much his hand is throbbing until he’s sitting on a paper-covered bed, barred from the gruesome sights of the ER by a thin blue curtain. The smell of antiseptic makes him feel dizzy, and he thinks he might pass out if it weren’t for Donna sitting beside him, squeezing his hand tightly as a doctor stitches up his cut. He whimpers with each stitch, and each time Donna squeezes his hand just a little tighter. If he drops his head to her shoulder so he doesn’t have to watch, well nobody has to know.
When the doctor hands them a prescription for pain medications, it's Donna he gives the instructions to. Watching her nod purposefully in the dim light of the ER, still holding his hand, Josh thinks it would be easy to pretend she wasn’t just his assistant. Wishes she was more than that. Maybe, just for tonight, he can pretend.
It’s not a question, when she drives them back to her apartment. He knows the right, appropriate thing to do would be to protest and insist he can go home by himself. But the truth is he knows he can’t, not right now. Not when everything’s blurry and raw and every movement is like swimming through molasses. He can barely remember being stitched up in the ER, let alone how he got into Donna’s car in the first place. His only guide is her warm hand and warmer voice, telling him he’s staying the night in her bed and she won’t take no for an answer.
He’s sitting on her bed, fingers holding her sheets in a death grip as his eyes follow her around the room. She pulls off his shoes and jacket, and throws some of his own sweatpants and a shirt on the bed beside him. If he were more aware he’d ask where she’d gotten them. If he was fully aware, he’d know he’d left them at her apartment.
She moves to leave, to give him privacy to change, but the idea of being separated from her, even if it’s just by a door, is terrifying. He knows it’s bad for him to be so dependent on her, knows it’s selfish of him to ask anything of her. But he’s so, so tired and her hands are so, so warm.
“Stay,” he manages to choke out, and he’s lucky Donna knows him well enough to understand everything he’s trying to say in one word. She gives him a soft, warm smile, and he thinks for a moment that everything might be okay.
She gently undoes the buttons of his shirt, her fingers quick and thoughtless as she helps him out of it. She pulls off the undershirt next, and is quick to replace it with a worn sweatshirt that smells so comfortingly like her.
It isn’t the first time she’s helped him change clothes. In the direct aftermath of Rosslyn, she’d helped him with it almost everyday, when he was too weak to move his arms let alone pull on a shirt. So it isn’t even awkward when she helps him pull on the sweatpants and a pair of fuzzy socks, her hands purposeful and warm and everything he needs right now. Her sheets smell like her perfume, a scent he associates with hugs that are just a little too close and linger for just a little too long, and he lets himself be enveloped in it as she helps him lie down, her hands ghosting along his shoulders.
“I’m going to make us some tea,” she says softly, smoothing the hair back from his sweaty forehead and giving him a warm smile. Josh nods, and gets up to follow her to the kitchen. She balks for just a moment, smiling again as he trails behind her. He just doesn’t think he can deal with being alone right now, even if it’s just for a moment, and he’s lucky she knows him well enough to wordlessly understand him.
She starts the electric kettle and waits for the water to boil, busying herself with grabbing mugs and tea bags in the meantime. When she no longer has anything to do, she stands in front of the counter, staring at the kettle and occasionally glancing at him, like she’s worried what he’ll do if she’s not looking. Josh hates that it’s justified.
The lack of contact has his hands shaking again, so he moves across the kitchen to Donna, brushing his fingers against hers in a silent question. She smiles at him, surprising him when she tugs his hand around her waist so he’s hugging her from behind, burying his face in her hair as the kettle whistles and she’s pouring the mugs of tea. She’s warm and soft and so, so different from his cold, harsh reality, and he wishes he could lose himself in her here, forever, just like this.
She laughs when he tries to cling to her as she moves to walk away, and he settles for holding her hand as they walk back to her bedroom. Not for the first time that night, Josh feels the nagging thought that they shouldn’t be doing this, that he should leave now before he does something they’ll both regret. Not for the first time, he feels too good to care. He feels more relaxed than he has in weeks, more calm than he has in months, and he knows it’s because of her.
In her room, they sit on the bed cross-legged and sip their tea like they’re teenagers sneaking into each other’s bunks at camp. Donna has lamps in her room that bathe them in a warm glow, making him feel sleepy and comforted as the stress of the day turns to exhaustion.
“Josh?” she asks, breaking their companionable silence, and he hums in response.
“Let’s go to bed,” she says simply, leaving no room in her tone for opposition, and quite frankly he’s too tired to try. He follows her lead as she pulls down the covers and crawls under them, taking his respective place on the bed like he’d done so many times before during his recovery.
Donna is a warm, comforting weight as she pulls him to her, making him rest his head on her chest so he can feel her heart beat reassuringly underneath him. She threads her hands through his hair, and Josh knows that, cuddled with her like this, he will sleep better than he has in weeks.
He falls asleep with her hands in his hair, and wakes up still clinging to her, the sunlight from windows she never bothered to cover streaming through the room, making her hair shine golden. He moves to look up at her, and sees she’s already awake and smiling at him, a soft grin on her face that makes his heart flutter.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispers, her hair messy with sleep and her fingers soft as they thread through his, and for a moment Josh can imagine that this is his life. That he wakes up every morning and comes home every evening to Donna waiting for him with a smile on her lips and a glint in her eye that promises something more. That he would never have to give up this comfortable spell of peace and safety and warmth they find themselves under.
He knows it’s not possible. He knows that tomorrow morning they’ll be back at work and busy with the next new policy agenda or national crisis and they won’t have time for holding hands or messy feelings they shouldn’t be having in the first place. He knows there’d be a media circus if he so much held hands with Donna in public, that CJ would likely crucify him if he dared make any sort of move while she was still his assistant.
But he doesn’t have to think about that just yet, so he pushes all the why nots out of his mind and focuses on the way Donna sits up on the bed, still holding his hand, and comments on how the weather isn’t letting up this year. How her mom used to make all four Moss kids french toast on Christmas morning, and how her recreations never turn out quite right, and before he knows it Josh is being dragged out of the warm bed into the kitchen, a mug of black coffee pushed into his hand.
He watches from the door frame as Donna prepares the eggs and the cinnamon sugar, humming Christmas carols by herself since she wouldn’t dare turn on the radio while he was still there. She laughs when she sees him staring, and implores him to help her.
“What, you think you can get away with eating breakfast but not helping make it? Who do you think you’re talking to, freeride?” she laughs, and Josh thinks he hasn’t felt this alive in a long time. One smile from Donna, he thinks, could cure any ailment.
Begrudgingly, he allows himself to be roped into flipping the toast, good-naturedly grumbling as he goes along but pushing her away when she offers to do it herself.
They eat french toast on the floor of her apartment, syrup making their hands sticky and making Josh feel younger than he has in years, and Donna comments that it’s almost as good as her mother’s. He can’t remember the last time he spent a Christmas like this, usually content to spend the government holiday alone in his apartment with Chinese takeout, having spent Hanukkah with his mother the week before. But there’s something about Donna’s overwhelming enthusiasm and insistence upon watching both Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life that makes him all too happy to go along with her plans of spending the day together.
Stanley said he would get better, slowly.
He’s starting to believe he was right.