Domestic Affairs (23 page)

The next thing she knew, the buzzing of her BlackBerry on the night table woke Olivia. Her eyes opened, seemingly one at a time.

Dreaming. Still dreaming?
The back of his head lay in front of her, still as could be. She closed and reopened her eyes, making sure it wasn't an illusion. She flashed back to his kiss. And to falling onto the bed, locked in his embrace. She remembered his arms wrapped around her, his breath on her neck.
Hours ago. Maybe minutes ago.
She couldn't be sure. She checked her shirt and confirmed the memory that all her clothes had been left on. She breathed a sigh of relief. His shirt was crumpled up, so that a bit of his back could be seen.

God, the skin on his back looks soft.
She couldn't actually remember touching it.
I wonder if he has some Brooks Brothers wrinkle-free shirts. I wonder if they'd withstand this type of thing.
Shit.
Omigod, Olivia
. She gave herself an inner-monologue bitch slap.
This man. Can't be here. He's married. He's my boss. This cannot have happened. Campaign Lesson #1. This is Campaign Lesson #1.

Her bitch slap must have reverberated, because he flinched and turned to her. His eyes seemed even bluer than before.
Do not look.

“You have to leave.” She whispered fiercely, still unaware of even what time it was.

“What?” He showed her the naïve smile of someone not awake enough to recognize the situation for what it was.

“You. Me. You have to—Someone will—” She couldn't get the
words to form a sentence.
Why does he have to be so good looking? He has to go.

“And the translation of that is, beautiful?” He kept his incongruously calm smile and brushed back her hair.

He called me beautiful. He thinks I'm beautiful.
She began to tilt her head toward her shoulder and then quickly picked it back up.
He can't call me beautiful.
“Ohmygod, crazy man. This is insane, and you can't be here!” She pushed him nearly off the bed.

“Do you always look this pretty when you wake up?”

“Leave. Leave. Leave. Go to your room or your house. Are you even staying here? Ohmygod.”

He smiled. “Okay, okay, I'm going. I'm staying a few doors down. Knew it would be a late night.” He went to kiss her, but she swiftly interrupted his move with a shove. He stumbled off the bed, pulling his shirt down, with a smug grin that seemed a response to her assertiveness.

As he left the room, he turned and looked back at her.

“You're amazing, Olivia. Amazing.”

As the door shut, she fell backward onto the bed, turned her head into the pillow, and silently screamed.

She flipped back over, smiling. She held on to a pillow, unsure of what to do with herself. She rested her hand on her neck, remembering how he had held it so tenderly while they kissed.
Amazing. He thinks I am amazing.

“We kissed. Oh my God, we kissed. Landon Taylor. I kissed Landon Taylor,” she whispered to the ceiling. She had to say it out loud, as if to confirm that it had actually happened. It took a good seven or eight repetitions of that phrase before the excitement turned back to fear and guilt.

“Ohmigod, I kissed Landon Taylor. He's married. He has kids. He's my new boss. He's Landon Taylor.” The trauma began to hit her like a brick wall.
Jacob is going to kill me.
What had she just done? What had
he
just done? Her breathing got tighter. She could feel every exhale press against her chest. She sat up on the corner of the bed and put her head on her knees. Her thoughts spun like one of those paint-splatter machines that people used to use to make sweatshirts in SoHo. The spinning core spattered totally incongruous and inappropriate thoughts. She flopped back down and tumultuously twisted and turned, trying
to escape the shame. The worst part of it all was, despite the guilt, which she knew she should—and did—feel, more overwhelming was a feeling of happiness. She lay in bed, drowning in complete, reprehensible bliss.

Olivia hated early flights but relished the chance to leave for the airport at six a.m. and avoid seeing anyone, especially the governor, in the hotel. She spent every second of the cab ride, the waiting at the gate, and the entire flight going over in detail what had happened, in an effort to make some sense of it. For the last two weeks she had been envisioning that kiss. And it was even better than her fantasized version. It was real. Every time she thought of that kiss, those arms around her waist, she had to close her eyes and remind herself to breathe. But more alarmingly, the black and white picture of a perfect candidate had turned gray. She was disappointed, which was less comprehensible than anything. This was her dream. She should have been thrilled, but the truth was a part of her wanted him to be better than the man who kisses someone who is not his wife.

Back in her office she tried to distract herself with work. When, at eight the next morning, her phone finally rang with a private number, Olivia lost her breath a bit. She had had twenty-four hours to figure out what to say and she had not even settled on a greeting.

“Hello?”

“Hello there.”

“Hi, Governor.” She mumbled the word “governor,” worried it was not the right way to go.

“Hiya. How y'all doing today?”

That voice. That same voice that called me “amazing.”

“Ummm . . . I'm okay. I'm good. I mean I'm just getting back to stuff here. You know. I mean, following up on things . . .” Thankfully he cut off the painfully awkward conversation before she had time to stutter through another sentence.

“Olivia, I'm so sorry.”

She felt a stream of relief wash over her as she let out a breath. “Oh my God.” She said. “Me too.”
Sorry?
She wasn't even sure what she was
saying. What was he sorry for? Did he tell someone? Did she ruin everything? Would she be fired? It was a mistake.

“I mean, I don't know what came over me. I have never done that before.” He emphasized every word.

“Obviously!” She felt like she had jumped outside of her body and was left without control of the words emerging.
Obviously? What am I, a Valley Girl? What's obvious? Nothing's obvious!

He breathed a laugh, almost a sigh of relief, and Olivia followed suit. “That bad?”

“No! Bad, no! I just . . .”
More like the best kiss of my entire life.

“I'm kidding.” This time he was giving the breath back to her.

“Right.” She felt the pressure to figure out the situation before uttering any other words. How was she supposed to play this? Magazine covers and quizzes whirled through her head, but nothing helped.
Why hasn't anyone written the article on what to say to your new boss whom you are madly in love with after he apologizes for hooking up with you? Okay, “madly in love” is an overstatement. An exaggeration. I'm not madly in love. Olivia Greenley, lock it up!

The governor continued his stream of consciousness. “The thing is, I have spent the last six years in a frenzy of different worlds. Worlds that don't make sense even in context. And then you come along, and you just get it. With a charm that's just so mesmerizing. I was really taken aback.”

“I—Thank you.”
Fine, madly in love.

“It's not a compliment. It's just the truth.”

She wanted to tell him something, but there wasn't a word in her mind that didn't seem dumb and incongruous at the moment.

He stepped in. “But it was wrong of me.”

“It was wrong of me too.” She hurried to take some blame.

“No, I'm responsible. I'm sorry. Do you think we can move forward? I have to make this right.” He suddenly seemed to have an unnatural desperation in his voice.

“No. I mean yes. I mean it's already right. It's okay. Really. I just—I've never done anything like that either.” She stumbled on. “I'm sorry. I don't know what to say, you know?”

“I know,” he said, the reassuring tone returning. “But look, you
need to think about this—if you don't want to work for me, if you feel like you need to tell someone, I respect your need to do that.”

Tell someone?!
She remembered clearly how her sister and Katherine reacted just to his showing up in her room. She very decisively would not be telling a soul. This was ridiculous. It was a mistake and he was clearing it up and this was how it should be.
This is the job of a lifetime. My lifetime. My job. My candidate.

“Governor Taylor”—she straightened up in her chair with a new directive—“this is the campaign of a lifetime. You are the candidate of a lifetime. Not only would I not do that to you and me, I wouldn't do it to the world. We made a mistake. It happens. You're going to change this world. Literally. And I get to be part of that and for that I am so grateful.” As she spoke, her insecurity crashed over her like a wave. “I mean, that is, if you're still okay with me being here.”

He jumped in. “Yes. Yes. Olivia, you are not like anyone I've ever met. I'm more than okay with you being here. You fill a hole on this campaign that I'm not sure I even knew we had.”

“Wow—I—Thank you. I'm . . .” Now she really couldn't form words. “I want to fill it.”

“Uh . . .” For a man known for not employing “uh” or “um” in his vocabulary it was a rare moment.

“That made more sense in my head. It really did.”

And just like that he moved on.

“Okay. So it's settled. We move forward, win this thing, and change the world.”

“Easy enough,” she said. She found herself smiling but her head was spinning.

“All right, I'm going to run into this staff meeting. We'll talk later?”

“Yep. Yes.” She corrected herself. “Yes, talk to you later.” And then, “Governor?” she said reflexively before he ended the call.

“Hmmm?”

“Thank you.” She wasn't even sure why she said it.

“Yes, you too.”

She listened to the silence of the ended call for a good thirty seconds before putting down her BlackBerry, her body feeling drained and
frozen in the moment. When her arm finally moved, slapping the BlackBerry onto the desk, she shook her head, attempting to shake some reality into it. The combination of emotions was impossible to decipher.
It was right. This is good. Pretend it didn't happen.
What was she even thinking? That he would leave his wife for her? That they'd fall in love and live happily ever after? That the press would be okay with it because they'd be able to see how in love they were? Yes. That's what she had thought. For at least a few fleeting moments.
Okay, more than a few.
She laughed at herself.

“Thank God,” she said aloud.
Phew.

O
livia squished into her window seat in the last row of the Jet-Blue plane. She grumbled at getting another seat that didn't tilt back at all.
What does the campaign get, five dollars off for putting me in the last row of every flight?
The campaign treasurer, on whose card all these economy flights were billed, probably had enough miles to go around the world first-class. She leaned her head on the window and thought of how Jacob used to say campaign years were like dog years. It must have been true since she felt sure months had passed, though the calendar said it had only been three weeks since the finance committee meeting.

She had already been in Texas and California setting up temporary offices and now she was going to Florida to do the same. Franchising, Jacob had told her. It seemed an appropriate term. She would have three days at most for each state. Best-case scenario was to get a cubby or two in the offices of one of the fundraising event hosts. If someone had the means to host an event, they usually had a pretty nice office too.

Although the “incident of the kiss,” as she liked to refer to it internally, played in her mind every night as her eyes closed, it was a distant memory during the day. Stress and money-raising dominated her waking thoughts. Texas, she was sure, could do two hundred if Henley were pressured enough. California would do three hundred. She would
set up two to three events a night in other cities. Add on Yanni's, Florida, and then the big shebang—Bronler's event in Martha's Vineyard that she would somehow get to six hundred.

With mail, online, and small events in Georgia she knew she could cover any drop-off and maybe even get the campaign between one and one point five million. The numbers, which she knew like the back of her hand, stood in stark contrast to her emotions about the campaign and Taylor, so she tried to focus only on them.

She leaned back on her immovable seat, pressing her head against the top of the headrest, in an attempt to stretch her neck. She looked down at her BlackBerry, which was still on. That was the one upside of the last row—the attendants barely came to offer water, much less check if devices were turned off. It used to make her nervous, the idea of going against the rule, and she would hide her BlackBerry in her pocket, sneaking looks at it whenever she was sure no one could see her. But now, the BlackBerry sat out on her tray in clear sight. She thought about her friend who always said, “If it really had any effect on the plane every terrorist in the world would buy an iPhone and a ticket.”