Domestic Affairs (33 page)

Everything about him was right. His white button-down shirt hung out over his suit pants, the bottom of it wrinkled from being tucked in all day. The top three buttons were undone and his white T-shirt underneath showed through. It was big on him but his shoulders pushed out against the top of the shirt. She reached up to them and put her arms around his neck, clasping her hands together behind his head.

He murmured into her ear, “You make me feel so alive.” His breath felt warm against her ear. “I haven't felt this way since . . .” His hand came up over her head and stroked her hair. “I haven't felt this way ever.”

Me neither
, she wanted to scream, but the words seemed stuck in her throat.

She lay her head on his shoulder, trying to collect herself, but as she looked out at the lights piercing the city night, she felt more alive than ever. She could see all the way to the bridge at the southern tip of the city. Her stomach flip-flopped with excitement.
I am in a gorgeous
hotel room with the man of my dreams. I have never felt this way either. Never.

The negative was there; she felt it. But the good was too good to let the questions seep in.

He slipped his arms tightly around her waist.

“How breathtaking is this?” she asked. She reached down to intertwine her hand in his.

“That's a good term for it.”

“It doesn't even seem real. It's more like someone dropped a movie set down just for us.”

She looked up at him. The blue lights outside seemed to illuminate his face. As they kissed, she closed her eyes tightly, almost in fear that if she opened them, she would wake to find this all a dream. One by one pieces of their clothing came off.

As he lay her down, both of them nearly naked, Olivia's mind almost stopped. Thoughts couldn't even be completed in between his kisses. As he moved on top of her, he stared straight into her eyes. Olivia tried to regain some sense of the world beyond them.

“Wait.” She attempted to shift a bit. “We can't.”

“Yes, we can.”

“No.” She laughed at his raised eyebrow. “I mean, we can't be unsafe.” It sounded so stupid to her. This was the least safe thing she had ever done.

“Huh?”

“Without protection. We can't . . .”

The governor let out a belly laugh that shook her body. He grabbed on to her.

“Sakes alaaahve,” he said, shaking his head back and forth and carrying out the “alive” with a twang.

“What?”

“Sorry, they're not the kind of thing I carry with me,” he said more softly.

Olivia laughed, happier than she would let on to know that this wasn't a common occurrence for him.

“Right.” She looked past his shoulder, wondering if he was as caught off guard by the mention of a condom as he seemed. He had to
be. This kind of thing really was rare for him. She was special. She looked at him, desperate to figure out more about him than the moment could possibly divulge.

“This isn't the kind of thing I do.”

“Really?” She stared up into his eyes, looking for a hint of a lie, aware of the troubling fact that she was worried about others when just his wife should have been enough to stop her.

He looked back with an absence of doubt and with an intimate rawness. “Really.”

She kissed him and rolled on top of him. She lifted her head up so that her hair hung down around them. She clasped his shoulders and stared at him, with a feeling she could stay right there forever.

She felt strangely relieved. “It's probably a good thing.”

“It is definitely not a good thing,” he said with a mischievous smile, “but I'll settle for holding you.”

She nuzzled her head into his shoulder, relishing the feel of his smooth skin against her cheek, feeling incomprehensibly safe in his arms.

“For now,” he added, as they drifted off to sleep together.

O
livia followed the governor out of the library-like restaurant area of the Brinmore hotel, trying to sneak past Jo and into the elevator bank.

“I have a dayroom,” the governor said as he guided her into the elevator and pushed the button for the sixth floor.

Olivia stood almost at attention, nervously stiff against the wood paneling of the elevator.
I wonder if that disgraced governor knew the courtesy was available when he brought that girl to the Days Inn, s
he thought.
Of course a reporter caught him there. That's where you go for a seedy affair, right? But the Brinmore? That's for high-powered meetings and big-dollar fundraisers. Ha. Another example of the growing gap between the rich and poor—wealthy politicians can get away with more scandal than underprivileged ones.
She laughed at the ridiculousness of it all.

Feeling sketchy, Olivia followed the governor off the elevator and into his room. “Governor, we can't do this. We can't be here.”

“First of all, stop calling me ‘Governor,' and second of all, how many times are we going to have this conversation?”

As he spoke, he grabbed her close and began to kiss her neck. She dropped her head back and looked at the ceiling. It was true; the conversation was getting a bit overplayed, even for her. They had been having it every night since the filing party twenty-six days ago. Most of the time it had been on the phone, but this week he had come in on Saturday
for the Sunday shows and somehow managed to stay until today, Tuesday. Each night began with Olivia saying, “Absolutely not,” as emphatically as she could, having spent most of the day thinking of a million reasons she could not be involved with him, and much to her chagrin, each and every conversation would end with her losing the argument. No matter where he started, he always ended up asking her the same things—“Don't you want to be with me?” and “Don't you feel something special here?” As much as she struggled to lie, or just leave his questions unanswered, he always got the “yes” he was looking for.

“I'll tell you what.” She put her finger up to his lips to stop him from kissing her. “We can stop having this conversation when you come up with a single logical reason why this is okay.”

“I have given you many.” He flicked away her finger and kissed her systematically down her neck. As had also become habitual over the last three days, he began to unbutton her top while she argued her points.

“This is so wrong.” As the words came out of her mouth, she succumbed to his touch and kissed him on the lips. It was a useless argument really. He could talk her into or out of anything, and it wasn't really fair to blame herself for it. There was statistical data that proved his ability to convince thousands and thousands of people to do things. It was his job. And, of course, there was the key fact that she wanted him too. He was everything she'd ever wanted in someone. He was brilliant, confident, handsome. He spoke with clarity and passion about all the issues she cared about. He took action. He was perfect. Actually, he was so much more than perfect.
And such a good kisser.

Forty-five minutes later, they were back downstairs for more meetings like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I will say this
, Olivia argued to herself,
the increase in trips to New York is great for fundraising. He is doing twice as many meetings these days
.

She liked her latest attempt at rationalization, or better yet, finding an upside to what she was doing. “What she was doing” was the term she used as she couldn't bring herself to say the word “affair,” even to herself. The fortunate thing about keeping something she shouldn't have been doing a secret was that she could use reasoning that wouldn't pass muster even with herself if she had been forced to speak it aloud.
Inner monologues make so much more sense when they are kept to your inner self. Maybe that's what Dad meant by “The heart has reason the mind knows nothing of.”

When the governor showed up at her door at ten thirty that night, after a day of important fundraising meetings and escapes upstairs, she again tried to talk herself into doing the right thing, but was overcome with the need to touch him and feel his touch. There was a desperation to be close to him, one she had never experienced before.
It's my heart
,
totally beyond my control
, she would continue to tell herself for the next month, even though she knew it was a complete lie.

“Liv, I need him back in Georgia!” Jacob roared into the phone. He didn't mean to take his frustration out on Olivia. It was the governor he wanted to scream at, but since it wasn't appropriate to berate the boss, Liv was in the line of fire.

“What do you mean?”

“Apparently we're sending him to do another freakin' Sunday-morning talk show, which is a whole other issue, and now he says you said there was some good event to go to Saturday night. Ahhhhh.” He let out a controlled yell that was actually more of a sigh than anything nearing a scream. “There are so many things wrong with this.”

Olivia sputtered an excuse on the line, sounding unsure of what he was talking about, which made him even more angry.

“Oh, um, Saturday. I . . . Sorry, Jacob, I just—”

“I can't have you guys all asking him to do things. Of course he wants to go to parties in New York and quench his newfound thirst for million-dollar wines. We all want to do that. But we have a campaign to run. And I am the only one watching out for him.”

Jacob heard Olivia trying to cut in but wouldn't let her. He was on a roll and needed to vent. He had spent the entire day, actually what seemed like an entire two weeks, defending schedule changes that he himself didn't even agree with. Three times now the governor had told Jacob they needed more fundraising dates on the calendar. Which was bullshit. Jacob had just figured out the perfect balance of what needed to be scheduled and when. He had dutifully turned things upside down
to make the changes the governor wanted and then defended them to the rest of the staff, who had meetings and events canceled for “more money time.”

Plus, Aubrey, who seemed to be throwing more tantrums than ever, canceled yet another campaign stop to stay in Atlanta. She had called Jacob at six thirty a.m., twenty minutes before she was supposed to be on a plane, to tell him she had “not been briefed properly for this trip,” so she “simply could not go.” And coincidentally the former secretary of state was scheduled to be in Atlanta.
Shocker. On top of all the other negatives, getting laid isn't even helping her mood.

“Peter has him on so many press shows we might as well be paid bookers. We're running for president, not vying for an Emmy!” He continued on for a good four or five minutes, at which point he started to feel worse about his own lack of verbal control than he did about the lack of control he had on the campaign. He took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

Olivia, in the calm monotone voice of either a therapist or someone who was paying no attention, broke her uncharacteristic silence. “It's okay.”

He repeated his apology, trying to regain some poise. “Sorry. I'm just frustrated.”

“I know. Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything to him directly.”

“I just need to regain some control,” he said, more to himself than to her.

“You haven't lost that.”

“Why are you talking so weirdly?”

“I'm not.”

Jacob didn't buy it for a second. He looked down at the clock on his computer screen and realized it was twenty past eleven at night and she had been at meetings with the governor all day.

“Shit, Liv, did I wake you up?”

“No! It's only like eleven o'clock. Sorry, I'm just tired today.”

“Oh, good. I mean, not good you're tired, good I didn't wake you up.” Jacob still wasn't convinced. “Wait! Is someone there with you?!”

“Please, you know the only relationship I'm in is the dysfunctional one I have with this campaign.” She said it with a laugh.

“Phew. We'll not have you sleeping around on us.”

“Please, I am well aware of the ‘no sleeping at all' rule on this campaign.”

Jacob laughed. “Yeah, clearly a rule I should break for myself today.”

“Jacob, you are doing an amazing job,” Olivia said. “Everyone knows how lucky we are to have you at the helm.”

“Thanks, Liv. Sorry for my tirade.” He really did start to feel better. “Oh, but really, on Saturday, I don't want him going to an event unless you really need him. We can't have him become a New York socialite. Those things don't go over well in places like Iowa.”

“No problem at all. I don't really need him there.” She paused with a weird laugh.

“Okay, cool. He's got to be in New York for the morning show Sunday, so he gets in Saturday night. I'm going to try to send him as late as possible. If he gets in early enough, maybe you guys could do call time or something? I just don't want him at another party. You know, AHAP—as hidden as possible.” Jacob snickered at himself. “Ironic since the trip is for him to do more press!”