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Josh Lyman falls in love with Samantha Seaborn on a bright sunny day in DC. He’s visiting a Congressman’s office, and he arrives just in time to witness one of the interns lose her temper spectacularly.
“Seriously!” she shouts, tossing her hands in the air. “If you quit prancing around the issue and just gave an honest statement--”
“Sam--” the Senator says, trying to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m telling you, that’s all it would take!” the intern insists. She puts her hands on her hips and glares. The Senator sighs.
“Sam, I understand what you’re saying but-- Josh!”
“Hi!” Josh says with a careless wave of his hand, but he isn’t looking at the Senator. He’s looking at Sam Seaborn’s long dark hair and her piercing eyes and the way her mouth twists in disappointment when the Senator turns away from her. She’s a gem; anyone should be able to see that.
So Josh steals her.
---
Sam quits her internship and takes a job as Josh’s assistant. Getting paid while working for the Floor Manager for House Minority Whip is better than making photocopies for a smalltime Senator with little political power and no guts. She’s funny and smart and her memos are better than his by a mile. There are rumors about the two of them, but Sam never indicates that she’s interested in anything other than a job and a friendship.
Josh doesn’t push. Not only because he doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who harasses his employees, but also because he likes Sam. He really does. He doesn’t want to scare her off.
So Sam works for him for the summer, and when that ends, she goes back to Duke for her final year at law school, and Josh is left hopelessly in love with a woman way out of his league.
---
They keep in touch through the years. They write letters, as old fashioned as that sounds. Josh keeps them all in a box, tied together with ribbon. (He’s secretly a romantic.) He doesn’t know what Sam does with his letters. They write once or twice a week, big, long rambling notes that cover everything from their jobs (Chief of Staff for Congressman Earl Brennan and new associate at some big shot law firm Josh can never remember the name of, respectively) to what’s going on in the world.
They never talk about their love lives. Sam doesn’t mention any boyfriends, and Josh doesn’t talk about any of the women he’s gone on dates with. None of them are Sam, of course, but she’s a hard act to follow. Even if she didn’t know she was on stage at the time, or even that there was a stage.
Josh has a picture of Sam that he keeps in his office. It’s of the two them, arms slung around each other and beaming at the camera, faces on the edge of blurry with motion. Almost every part of them was touching, hip to hip, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder. They’d been at a bar, getting drunk after a big political event, when a coworker had snapped the shot with his new camera. Josh had nagged him until he got a copy of his own.
When people see that photo, they make assumptions. Josh doesn’t do as much as he should correcting them.
---
Hoynes is good. He’s not great; he’s not what Josh imagined he’d be working for, but he’s a viable candidate, the only one they have. Josh throws himself into the campaign because it’s better than sitting around, thinking of his father. Thinking of the chemo and the treatments and how sick he’s getting.
Then Leo McGarry gives him a call.
Then he swings by New York on his way to New Hampshire.
Then he finds the Real Thing.
Then he steals Sam again.
---
Introducing Sam to Leo is nerve-wracking. Sam’s met his parents; she’s even stayed over at their house a few times. But somehow, this is different. This is Leo McGarry, and he’s the new boss, and Sam is, well. Sam is Sam.
She trips on her way into the New Hampshire headquarters.
“So, you’re Samantha,” Leo says neutrally when she rights herself. She blushes and pushes the hair out of her face.
“Yes sir,” she says. She holds out her hand formally. “I’d be honored if you accepted me on your staff.”
“We’re not exactly in a position to turn people away,” Leo snorts, and that’s that.
---
Sam’s mysterious relationship ends during the second week. She doesn’t come into work, and she doesn’t come into work, and she doesn’t come into work, and eventually he becomes so agitated that Leo sends him and the grumpy speechwriter out to her hotel to fetch her.
They find her in the hallway outside her room, big mascara tracks down her face and her skin blotchy from crying.
“What happened?” Josh says. His mind jumps to the worst case scenario -- had she been mugged? Attacked? Were there security cameras -- was she hurt?
Sam laughs hoarsely. “It’s okay, Josh,” she says in a voice completely unlike her. “I just--I just got dumped. Over the phone.”
What kind of asshole breaks up with someone over the phone?
What kind of idiot breaks up with Samantha Seaborn?
Josh and Toby get her to her feet and herd her back into her hotel room. She splashes water on her face and reapplies her make up. They wait, two awkward men sitting in a woman’s hotel room. There’s a bra thrown over the headboard; Josh tries not to look at it.
---
Words fly through the air: homosexual, lesbian, abomination, dyke. Josh wants to brushes them aside, wants to recoil, wants to rail against the unfairness, but he’s frozen.
He can’t tear his eyes away from Sam’s picture on the TV, hanging over the words ‘Lesbian Speech Writer On Bartlet Staff.’
---
She never told him. The words repeat in his head as the scandal takes over the headquarters, takes over conversation and damage control. Sam keeps herself locked in her office; Donna abandons Josh and takes to mothering her, running her errands so that she doesn’t have to show her face. CJ tears the press a new one every chance she gets, and Toby has taken to growling dangerously at the volunteers and interns that seem to clump together every time the news comes on.
She never told him. They’ve been friends for years, a decade even, and he never knew. She never told him. Never mentioned it, never even hinted at it.
He feels like a fool. That lasts until Toby smacks some sense into him with the fury of God’s own thunder. Then he feels like an even bigger fool. He tries to fix it, but he just breaks them a part further. He can’t find the right words, the right tone.
She throws him out of her office, anger flashing in her eyes like lightning. He goes, his heart heavy with the thought that he’s destroyed the best friendship he’s ever had.
---
When the vote’s called, the room erupts into wild cheers. Papers are thrown in the air, tears are shed, and Josh, unthinkingly, grabs Sam and pulls her into a fierce hug.
She hugs him back, and Josh feels relief like a brick wall standing in the way of his speeding car. It jolts him, sends him flying, and then he’s smashed into an immovable object, secure against its solidity.
---
“Stop looking so worried,” Leo says at two in the morning. Josh blinks, startled out of his thoughts. The victory party hasn’t wound down yet, but Sam had excused herself to the ladies room an hour ago and not come back. Donna is allowing herself to be chatted up by that junior speech writer Toby despises, and CJ may or may not be making out with Danny Concannon in the corner while Toby glares at them.
“I’m not worried,” Josh says, plastering a grin on his face. It smooths into a more natural smile as he remembers what they’ve won. “Why would I be worried?”
“Sam’s going to get a job, Josh,” Leo tells him. “We’re not going to abandon her now that we’ve won. One way or another, she’s going to be in the White House with us.” Leo smiles, his face kind. “Just where she belongs.”
“It’s going to be hell,” Josh says quietly. “The backlash alone -- giving her a job will--”
“The President-elect is well aware of the potential backlash,” Leo interrupts, cutting off his rambling. “The thing is, he doesn’t care. Sam’s like a daughter to him now; she’s a part of the family. We all are. And if there’s one thing Jed Bartlet won’t allow, one thing guaranteed to piss him off and incur his wrath, it’s anyone messing with his family.”
Josh allows himself to relax slowly. Sam won’t turn down a position if one’s offered to her, even if that position was nothing more than a glorified internship -- she’d still take it. And then she’d make everyone around her listen to her, because that’s what she does. She did it when Josh met her, when she was shouting down a Senator about a speech she shouldn’t have been involved in, and she did it to her new boss’s face.
It’s why he fell in love with her in the first place.