There must be some mistake.
“Why am I on flights to and from San Francisco on Friday and Sunday? Was that some mistake?”
Kara gave him that look he hated, the one he always tried to avoid getting. The “why am I working for this man when I’m so much smarter than him?” look.
“Because, sir, you have two events this weekend in the Bay Area, remember? Friday afternoon right after you get in you have a meeting with a group of teachers and students in Oakland, then that dinner with the tech people, and Saturday night you’re doing the big party fundraiser in San Francisco.”
Kara was right, she was so much smarter than him. How the hell had he managed to forget this? He and Wes had even had conversations about it—Wes was going to be at the fundraiser, too. But this would mean he’d spend the entire weekend away from L.A. Which would mean he would have two whole weeks away from Olivia.
“Shit. Yeah, now I remember.” What if he flew down to L.A. after the fundraiser on Saturday night, and then back to DC from there on Sunday afternoon? That was, if there was a flight late enough Saturday night from San Francisco to L.A., and if the fundraiser didn’t go too long for him to get on that flight, and if Olivia didn’t mind that he’d get to her house after midnight on a Saturday night and fly out again twelve hours later. But he couldn’t make a plan like that without telling his staff why he needed a twelve-hour detour to L.A.
“Is something wrong, sir?” Kara asked him.
He shook his head.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just completely forgot I wasn’t going to be in L.A. this weekend. I left my good pair of running shoes at my house, and I was looking forward to picking them up.”
He had left his good pair of running shoes at his house, but he almost always left them in L.A.
“Oh, we can get someone in the L.A. office to pick them up and send them to meet you in the Bay Area, that’s easy.”
He brushed that away.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m sure the L.A. staff has better things to do than pick up my shoes. I should just order another pair to leave here in DC anyway. Okay, what else do we need to talk about?”
They ran through the rest of his schedule for the week, but the whole time he could feel the emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t going to get to see Olivia this weekend. He pretended he was looking up something else and flipped through his calendar, and realized he’d seen her at least once a week for the past three months. He only wished it had been more.
The past few weeks they’d spent as much time together as possible. He almost always had at least one event to attend while he was in L.A. for the weekend, often more, but other than that, he was with her almost the whole time. They’d been at her place and at his, at the movies and at the beach, and one rainy Saturday night when they were both in bad moods, he’d ditched his previous idea for a date, told her to put on all the rain gear she had, and drove them out to Anaheim for four glorious hours at Disneyland, where the rain cleared up just in time for the fireworks. They got in the car afterward, soaking wet and freezing cold and both smiling from ear to ear.
He’d kept waiting for her to respond in some way to what he’d said that night at the bowling alley, but she hadn’t. Their night at Disneyland had been the perfect time for it—they’d held hands on the roller coasters, they’d walked around with huge smiles on their faces, they’d stood, arms wrapped around each other, during the fireworks, and he’d known the entire time that he was no longer falling in love with her—he’d fallen completely. But she hadn’t said anything, so he didn’t bring it up again.
Did she feel the same way? He had no idea. He tried to be mature about this, to not feel hurt, but he couldn’t help it. Sometimes he just wanted to say “I love you, Olivia! Do you love me?” When he’d shown up at her house wearing a red wig, she laughed so hard she’d cried, and then she looked at him with this tender, loving look in her eyes,