Thank you to tarienmithuriel, aka hyacinthian, and Karen for her enthusiasm with this. It was greatly appreciated.

Sometimes, when she closes her eyes she sees the desert.

Sometimes, when she closes her eyes she sees the desert. It isn't as vast as she remembered it, whizzing by her in a beat up mustang with the top down. She doesn't feel the sunburn on her skin as they enjoy the daylight for one more hour before retreating to the air conditioning as they made their way out of Arizona.

Closing her eyes she can see the sand meeting the sky, recall the eerie, abandoned oil wells dotting the horizon. Donna thinks of all sorts of things now, long trains of thought that have everything to do with nothing that has to do with Washington D.C.

Somehow she thought this would be different; she thought it would be fireworks and... and... just not this.

The way he falls asleep next to her, it's like he doesn't even notice she's there, right there. There's no romantic flinging of limbs over limbs, his hand doesn't find hers in the middle of the bed as he slumbers. He doesn't speak her name or wake her in the morning by strategically kissing places on her body.

He's said the name "Amy" once in the throws of slumber and when she brought it up to him over coffee the next morning, he laughed it off. "It was a nightmare." She's a strong woman but she had wanted to ask him if he ever dreamt of her because something inside of her just needed to know.

And so in the dim light of their bedroom, she thinks about the desert and the sea and places she was so long ago, with people she barely remembers. Josh's light snoring distracts her sometimes and then she recalls (just for a second, only a second) how she used to find that to be a strangely-endearing trait. But if she thinks about him now, if she thinks about him like this, she'll just think about how wrong everything seems.

Sure there are some things that seem right, like the way he kisses her in the morning just before she gets out of the car, like he'll never get the chance to again. Or the way he just knows when she's had a bad day and uncorks her favorite bottle of wine. He knows her and she knows him but who knows if that's enough.

Beside her, he stirs and it's then that she realizes that rain has started to fall, lightning has started to crash, thunder has started to rumble. How apropos for the moment, how very perfect. Bright flashes peek through the slats in the blinds and highlight his face as he awakens, sleepy and confused, noticing her noticing him.

Something breaks inside, and it's so sharp and so palpable that Donna literally sucks in a breath to stave the tears, to stop the hiccoughs of emotion from eeking out and frightening him. "Why are you awake?" He's groggy but adorable and the feeling inside of her intensifies, the need to let it out, let something out so great that she has to swallow and give herself a moment to think.

Josh notices her face and the way it's placid but not, and shifts up so that his head is perched on his arm, elbow bent against the mattress. And he waits, waits like he always has, for her to be ready to tell him... whatever. It's too much for him and just as she's about to speak, he points his chin in an attention-grabbing gesture and says, "Hey, I love you."

Oh that's no good, and she cries a little, but just a little, tears rolling over her cheeks, being caught as glints by flashes of lightning.

They stare at one another for awhile, the slumber gone from his visage, the front gone from hers and they just, just stare at one another until she can't take it anymore. He won't look away of course, he has nothing to hide. "When did you know that... you were in love with me?"

For some reason this throws him off balance and he doesn't know what to say; he does that thing, when he's trying to come up with words, guppies his mouth and scrunches his forehead and fights with his mind for the proper sentence. But this time, all that comes out is, "What does it matter, when, if I'm in love with you now?"

A punch to the gut or something similar hits her, hard. "Forget it." With that she makes to get out of bed, feet searching next to the bed for her slippers (the ones he bought her when he noticed her others were fraying).

"I wanted pizza and couldn't find my wallet but you did-you always knew where I was leaving things-and you just walked up and slipped it into my back pocket."

It's almost too poetic that she can't remember that event exactly; it seems like such an innocuous thing, but he goes on, "And I was about to yell or something at you for doing that, but I noticed that... no one else noticed you doing that. That it wasn't a big deal to anyone else but me that you would do that. And that's when I knew, when I realized I wanted to hide it from everyone, that I didn't want anyone to know what I thought might be going on."

Ashamed, ashamed at forgetting the moment that he remembers, she asks, "When was that?"

Josh blows out a full breath and falls back against the pillow, fingers scrubbing through his hair. "It was... I wanted to buy dinner for... the day after we had that dinner for the president of Indonesia? Yeah, that sounds right."

She wracks her mind for a moment, trying to place that event in time. And it comes to her, "Josh that was, that was ten years ago."

Hands still in his hair, he looks at her, his eyes wide, as though he realizes what a long time ago that is. "Yeah, I guess it was."

The admission floors her, that he'd loved her for that long, had managed to keep it a secret for that long... until she realizes that she fell in love with him before that. Her own admission rushes out of her, "I fell in love with you the night that you stopped by my apartment to pick up some files I'd been working on and fell asleep right on my couch." Donna paused and lays back down beside him in bed, "That was the first time I seriously thought about quitting, Josh."

"The first of what I believe had to be many" he tries to joke, but his voice slides out a whisper.

So she stares at him as he stares at the ceiling and they listen to the rain slide down the window pane and when she lays her head on his chest and he holds her, she closes her eyes and forgets the desert but remembers the moment that she slipped his wallet into his back pocket so that he could go out and buy pizza.