“I’m not the only one who’s aged well,” she admits, briefly biting her lip to hide her smile.
As she glances to the empty stools beside us, I try to break the tension by asking, “Is it okay that we all have a drink together?” No matter how much I want to spend time with her, I never expected to see her like this, and the last thing I want is for her to feel uncomfortable.
Livy nods once, and we all take a seat. I’m about to ask them what they’d like to drink to add to my tab when Todd gestures with his beer to Olivia and Aubrey. “I take it you know them?”
“Yeah, sorry. This is Olivia Harris and Aubrey Raine. We went to college together. Olivia is the new Governor of California, and Aubrey is her Chief of Staff. Livy, Bree, this is Todd, head of my security team.”
The bartender places a glass of water in front of him, and he lifts it in a cheers to the girls. “Pleasure to meet you both.”
“You too,” Aubrey answers with a twinkle in her eyes, though I can’t tell if it’s because she’s up to something or if she’s flirting with Todd.
Once the girls order, I quietly tell Livy, “You never told me what your plans are for the night.”
“Oh, um, we’re going to have dinner, then I guess we’ll see where the night takes us.”
“Want to join us?” Aubrey offers, not looking away from the game on the TV behind the bar. She cheers as the puck is stopped by the Sea Lions goalie. “Yes! That’s right, Campbell!” I glance up, recognizing the goalie as Russ Campbell, who used to play for a few Canadian teams before being traded.
“Oh, no, he wouldn’t want to?—”
“Of course,” I reply over Livy, desperate for any time she’ll give me tonight. I don’t give a fuck if all I get is watching hockey at a bar or sitting across a table from her and Aubrey for dinner. Dinner would probably be safer. Being mere inches from her right now, without being able to slide my hand onto her thigh or interlace her fingers with mine, is absolute torture.
“You don’t have to if you have other plans.” Her rebuttal is sheepish, but the heat in her eyes betrays her. Does she feel this as much as I do? Still suffering the ache from years ago that’s never fully gone away?
A man can dream.
I keep my response as platonic as possible, in case anyone overhears. “I’d love to have time to catch up with you and Aubrey. If we stay here at the hotel, I won’t have to worry about a full security team being my shadow. But if you’d like to go elsewhere, I hope you don’t mind if Todd’s privy to our conversations.”
The bartender slides two martinis in front of Aubrey and Livy, winking at Aubrey as his hand lingers on her glass a moment longer than necessary. Olivia sees it too, chuckling to herself. They both take a sip of their drinks, and as Livy sets hers down with a hum, she’s about to tell me something when Aubrey rushes out, “Actually, why don’t the two of you grab dinner at arestaurant here? There’s so much to discuss about the upcoming summit, and I’m exhausted from travel and need to adjust to the time difference. I’ll just grab a salad to bring up to our room or order room service.”
“Bree,” Olivia hisses quietly.
“I know we were supposed to have a girls’ night, but maybe tomorrow? Or we can go to a drag brunch before the inauguration?” She downs her dirty martini in four quick gulps. “You two have fun tonight.”
On a bar napkin, she scribbles something and slides it to the bartender. A smirk briefly tilts his lips as he pockets it. I can only assume it’s her room or phone number, and while I don’t know Aubrey well, in the past she usually dated men who had a trust fund, and her ex-husband is a billionaire. I shouldn’t judge—for all I know, she’s rebelling against family norms or rebounding after her divorce. I can’t say I blame her after how he publicly humiliated her by cheating with his assistant.
She whispers something to Olivia as she’s leaving, making Livy gasp, then claps me on the shoulder with a song in her voice. “See you tomorrow, Prime Minister.”
Once she’s gone, I ask Livy, “Everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s fine. I’d love to grab dinner with you, since I need to give Aubrey a few hours of”—she does a quick check for anyone within earshot—”alone time. But we would have to go somewhere that’s not…”
“Busy?”
“No.”
“Romantic?”
She offers a soft smile and a single nod. “Exactly. We don’t need another repeat of November.”
“I completely understand.”
We finish our drinks as we scroll through the hotel directory on our phones in search of a restaurant that’s casual enough we could play it off as friends catching up, but I’m also hoping for something quiet—I want her all to myself. We settle on Italian, and the pictures online appear to be formal, which will also allow us to spin the narrative that we’re meeting about the upcoming summit. It’s not dimly lit to give off the impression that it’s a date, even if that’s exactly what I wish it was.
We finish our drinks, and I charge them to my room, then the three of us make our way over. Todd agrees to wait at the restaurant bar, keeping eyes on us and the dining room while giving me space and privacy with Livy. I couldn’t have planned it better if I tried. Then again, it’s always been like this when it comes to her—the stars aligning a little too perfectly.
Once we’ve ordered another round of drinks, Olivia tells me about a few proposed pieces of state legislation that would help with water supply, and I share about an issue I’ve had with environmental protections recently. It’s no surprise we’ve fallen into easy banter, as if no time has passed. It helps that we’ve talked nearly every day for months. Except, this is different. To someone on the outside, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Anyone would assume we were just two politicians discussing local matters, but they’d be missing everything I love about her—how her eyes sparkle when she’s excited, how passionate she is about helping others, or even how her cheeks flush when I compliment her. It’s all bittersweet. For the first time in years, I have her back in my life… but she’s not mine.
After dinner, disappointment swirls in my gut as we share an elevator to our rooms. It takes everything in me to not reach for her. It’d be so easy to hide her away from the outside world for the night. But I know damn well I wouldn’t stop there. I’d give anything to have her pressed up against the cool metal wall while I claimed her lips for the first time since I made the biggest mistake of my life leaving her. With how she’s fidgeting, maybe she’d let me.
