The Wrong Heathcliff
Pairing: Josh/Donna
Spoilers:
Rating: PG
Word Count: 475
Notes: For Christine’s first line drabble challenge. Bekki, I did it!!!
Donna leans against the wall, staring at Josh's sleeping frame. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get tired of doing this, of actually being allowed to do this, after all the years of dreaming, all the years of longing, all the years of denial that fooled absolutely no-one.
She can’t help but think of the last time
she stayed across the room, watching a man sleep. Colin, in
She can smile, because no matter what she went through in Gaza, it was that which brought her and Josh together, his trip from Washington to Germany – and no, he’d joked to her the first time they lay in bed together, his fingers tracing a path over her body, he hadn’t stopped for red lights – letting him know what she’d known, had discovered in much the same way four years previously.
She smiles, because she remembers how jealous he was when Colin visited her, how Josh admitted Colin was sexy “in a bodice-ripping, Heathcliff on the moors kind of way.”
She smiles, because she knows that Josh was wrong.
Colin was dark and handsome and passionate, and in another time and place, she could really love him. Certainly, all her other friends loved him, CJ and Margaret making several comments about how perfect they were for one another. They’d been more upset then she had when she’d broken up with Colin, because she’d known it was the right thing to do.
Because Colin wasn’t her Heathcliff.
He was her Edgar; someone that people thought she should be with, someone she liked being with, someone she could see herself married to. Someone who would love her, and be there for her, caring and solicitous, someone she could have a family with.
But he wasn’t her Heathcliff.
He wasn’t the one who made her heart pound in her chest, made her blood rush through her veins. He wasn’t the one who would die for her, the one she would die for. He wasn’t the one who made her complete.
Her Heathcliff was the man asleep in the bed across from her, the man who, even as she watched, stirred and rolled over, arm casting out for her. A frown crossed his face when he realised that she wasn’t there, his sleepy voice enquiring, “Donna?”
Smiling, she moved towards him. “I’m here,” she whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder both to prove it to him and to steady herself. “Go back to sleep.”
“Mmmm-kay,” he mumbled, for once doing as he was told, and she grinned to herself as she pressed her body against his, closing her eyes and waiting for sleep to come.