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The first time it happens, it’s an accident.
“Fuck,” she hisses as she tries to untangle herself from his lap, all sweaty pink-flushed knees and shaky thighs and knobby ankles. She trips over her jeans, the majority of them still trapped around her feet.
“We just did,” Don reminds her, in no hurry whatsoever to get up—in fact, he has the nerve to lean back in his desk chair with his knees open, pantsless, mind you, pantsless—and wrap his hands behind his head. Smug little grin on his face. “And I don’t think that was the solution you were looking for.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” she barks, now hopping around the better part of his office trying to get her jeans up past her knees, “because the solution to a problem can’t be the problem itself.”
“Wow,” Don nods, buttoning his blue dress shirt up over his gross chest hair. His gross chest hair which Sloan just now ran her fingers through. Anyway. “That’s really deep. What is that, Lao Tze?”
“Sloan Sabbith.”
“Yeah, um, believe it or not, I know your name, I screamed it just a second ago.”
“No, I—I said that.”
“No you didn’t, you said my name.”
“I’m saying—you know what? Fuck this.” Sloan stands up, one hand steadying herself on the corner of his desk, and triumphantly zips up her pants.
“I just did.”
“You made that joke already, about . . . ” Sloan checks her wrist, where a watch would be if she wore one “ . . . twenty seconds ago.”
“It’s good enough to use again.”
“I’m gonna have to disagree. Next time consult me.”
“I’ll be sure to,” Don says, and he grins at her.
“Fuck,” she says again.
But that wasn’t the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Or the—you know what? Never mind.
After like the third time, Sloan slides off of him in a huff, sits him down cold on the middle cushion of the sofa, turns around briskly, storms off into the bathroom, slams the door and flushes the toilet. She looks at her face in the mirror. Mussed hair, blown pupils, swollen mouth. Don is a good kisser. He’s a good everything else, too, except decent human being.
Sloan comes forth out of the bathroom and marches back into the living room, promptly tripping over one leg of her coffee table. The salesman at Crate & Barrel had said it’d be super cool and trendy to have a coffee table with legs that emerge not just straight down but at forty-five degree angles. Sloan had believed that jerk.
“Don,” she says to him, after he’s choked back the majority of his laughter. “We need to talk.”
“Oh,” he says, eyebrows up, looking up at her from his spot on the couch from which she’d ordered him not to budge. “Can I put on a shirt first?”
“No.”
“Can I put on pants first?”
“No.”
“At the very least can you put on pants first?” Sloan looks down past her arms akimbo and her oversized Goonies t-shirt: he makes a valid point. Anyone is at risk of getting distracted from a serious conversation when Sloan has these babies on—the lady at Victoria’s Secret: now she knew what she was talking about.
“Fine,” she sighs, stomping off to her bedroom to cover her black lace panties with some men’s basketball shorts.
“Oh god,” Don says when he sees her. “Now I think we’ve gone too far to the opposite side of the spectrum.”
“You know what, Don? I don’t give a shit.” She smooths her tangled hair. “We need to talk.”
“Okay,” he says. “Go ahead.”
Sloan shifts, opens her mouth to say something—inexplicably, nothing comes out. She shifts again. A siren trills outside her window. She listens to that for a while. Then she shifts again.
“I said we need to talk,” she finally blurts, throwing out her arms. “Why should I have to say something first?”
“Hey, man, you call the forum, you introduce the topic,” Don explains with a shrugging hand gesture.
“Okay, well—I hereby call this forum to discuss the topic of our wrongful fucking.”
“Wish we got to hear that more often on the House floor.”
Sloan thinks that over for a minute. “It’d probably yield more effective discussion than immigration reform and the deficit combined.”
“And produce seventy-five percent more salacious details.”
“Only seventy-five percent?”
“Sloan, we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors in those Senate offices.”
“We don’t—hey!” Sloan throws her hands up in the air, pointing an accusing finger at Don. “Hey! No distracting me!”
“I’m sorry, Jesu—I’m sorry!” Don shouts, eyes going wide and shoulders shooting up. “Go ahead, wrongful fucking, go on!”
“Wrongful fucking,” Sloan repeats, pressing an exasperated hand to her brow. This is something she’s seen Mack do quite often when Sloan is talking. About almost anything. “Right. You have a girlfriend.”
“Kind of,” Don responds, pulling a face. “I mean, technically we’re on a break.”
“Oh. Great. Now you’re taking relationship lessons from Ross and Rachel.”
“I’ll be honest,” Don levels with her, “I’m not going to pretend I don’t get that reference.”
“That’s fucking right you aren’t. Subpoint number two: we work together.”
“As do I with Maggie. As does Will with Mack.”
“Will and Mack aren’t together.”
“Oh, riiiight,” Don hits his palm against his forehead, “which renders their relationship one hundred percent professional. In fact, I think we should all take a page out of their book on the science of pure, unsoiled professionalism. Just look at them—beacons of unbiased decision-making and professional—”
Sloan puts a hand out to stop him. “All right,” she says. “Touché, I get it. They still aren’t together though.”
“Neither are we.”
That takes a minute. Sloan can tell the surprise kind of shows on her face, because Don’s eyes immediately widen, and his hands come out to reach for her but she’s standing too far away.
“I didn’t mean—” he starts to say.
“No,” Sloan nods. “No, it’s all right. You’re completely right. We are not together.”
Don doesn’t say anything this time.
“We’re just . . . fucking around. Just wrongful-fucking around.”
He’s silent again, his face plaintive.
“C’mere,” he finally says, and she sits down next to him on the couch, her elbows pressed into her knees.
The second time, it happens after a date, during which Sloan was charming and intelligent and painstakingly normal, and the guy was clever and sweet and funny enough, and after which he kisses her on the bottom step of her apartment building, all Sex-and-the-City-style (Sloan wouldn’t tell Maggie), and continues to kiss her all Sex-and-the-City-style until Sloan’s phone vibrates with a text from Don saying there’s been a video leak of romney; kyle machler likes weird stuff in bed.
Sloan steps back a minute, frowns at her phone.
“What is it?” Kyle asks, breathless.
“Hang on a minute,” she tells him, and texts back what kind of video leak; how do you know?
Three seconds later: the ‘poor people are freeloaders’ kind; tess dated him last year and has been telling the whole staff.
“What is it?” Kyle repeats, blinking heavily in pure confusion.
“Work,” says Sloan. “Can I call you tomorrow?”
Up in her apartment building Don calls her after one.
“You at home?”
“Yeah.”
“You alone?”
“Yeah.”
“No Kyle Machler?”
Sloan rolls her eyes—unfortunate that Don can’t see it from across a phone line. “It was the first date, Don.”
“I don’t know your style, Madam Sabbith. You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“Yeah,” Sloan agrees. “You do.”
“You left your wallet at the office. Want me to bring it by?”
“Yeah,” she sighs, “Yeah, sure.”
Afterward Don lets out a big exhalation, throws his hand over his naked chest and says, “So I guess this wasn’t a one-time thing, then.”
Sloan winces, throwing her hands up over her head on the mattress and breathing heavily. “Is there any way you can make a two-time thing into a one-time thing?”
“I don’t think so,” Don replies. “I think you can only make a two-time thing into a three-time thing.”
“Well, we’re not going to.”
“I agree,” says Don, but he grins at her.
The first time it happens, it’s an accident.
Neither of them are expecting it—not even Don, this time around. It’s late, like, really late, and Don is in his office, and Sloan is stumbling out of Charlie’s reeling from the latest fifteen-minute scolding.
“I’ll see you Monday, Ms. Sabbith,” Charlie’s beaming, jovial as ever, and Sloan grins back in agreement, her face the picture of angelic warmth: “Yep, see you later, dickhole.” Charlie laughs, throws his coat over his shoulder. Hums on his way out.
She’s headed into the newsroom to grab her coat and her keys—Next time my comeback will be waaay better—when she spots Don alone in his office, slamming away at his keyboard.
She knocks on the door and opens without waiting for a response. “Don?” she questions, just to be sure. He looks up and meets her eyes—he looks absolutely awful. She surveys his desk, the scrambled papers, the open food containers, the one pinkish lamp on by his desk; his red-rimmed eyes, his glazed stare, his mouth hanging open from exhaustion. There’s a bottle of wine next to his computer, almost halfway gone. “Are you . . . drinking alone?” she asks him.
“No,” Don shoots back immediately, “Nigel, my imaginary friend, is here. You sure do have a taste for the vintage red, don’t you, Nigel.”
Sloan rolls her eyes and slumps into the chair opposite him. “Drunk and exhausted at two in the morning and you still won’t pass up a chance at sarcasm.”
“You know me,” Don says distractedly, his focus already back on his computer. Sloan looks at him a minute, frowning deeply, then grabs the bottle and takes a swig, grimacing.
“Oh my—God, Don, that is—that is terrible!”
“Is it?” Don wonders.
“What the fuck is that stuff?”
“I don’t know. It’s Maggie’s. She can’t afford expensive wine.”
Sloan sets down the bottle, careful and silent. “. . . Oh,” she says. She looks him up and down once more, his disheveled hair and tired eyes and slumped-over shoulders. It’s obvious, above all, that there’s been another breakup today. Just like that, she slides off her coat and settles in. “That’s it—I’m not letting you drink alone. Seriously, Don, that is just sad.”
“It’s not sad, it’s . . . dignified.”
“Not like this it isn’t,” Sloan grumbles, gesturing to him and downing another four gulps in pain. “You’re like some lonely, middle-aged dad. Looking for solace at the bottom of a bottle.”
“Call me Lester Burnham.”
Sloan frowns, tilts her head. “Um, he was looking for solace in illicit sex with a sixteen-year-old.”
“Don’t call me Lester Burnham.”
Sloan smiles. “Don,” she says, after a moment. “Are you okay?”
He looks up, surprised. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course I am.” Goes back to his typing.
“Don,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Nope.”
She can’t think of anything to say; she’s never been very good at this stuff. Mack is always telling her that while her economic knowledge is off the NASDAQ charts her social comforting skills are drowning in the deep-end. Her face is slightly pained as she looks at Don again, this completely empty stare on his face while he types and types and types, whatever the fuck it is that he’s doing. He works hard, though he’d never want anyone to know it. And he desperately wants to be a part of what Will and Mack are doing, though he’d want people to know that even less. He’s a good guy. He’s a good guy, and she realizes suddenly that she really, really likes him.
It’s an accident when she reaches across his desk and slides her hand over his knuckles to stop the frantic typing. He looks, dazedly, at her hand, then up at her, surprise and wonder written there.
“Don,” she says again.