“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.
NINE
Olivia 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.”
She
looked down at an unfinished email to her sister. The half-written e-mails seemed to pile up these days. She wanted to talk to her family and friends, but there was just never the time. And when there was the time, she didn’t know what to say. Her sister’s emails had gone from annoyed to passive-aggressive, to worried, and right back to annoyed. I don’t understand, read the last email, how it is possible you don’t have five minutes in your day to call me. And if I hear one more “all good” from you I’ll come to your campaign office and scream! She read it again, to formulate a reply, but decided she was too tired to deal with her sister.
As she took the shuttle from the plane to her hotel, she called Jacob so he could fill her in on the intricacies of Taylor’s relationships in Florida, as she did at the start of all her stops.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said in her best Cameron Diaz voice, which, Jacob had pointed out many times, was not good.
“Hello, angel,” he said, playing along. Then he added, “We gotta stop doing this. One day I’m going to answer the phone like that around Sophie, and she’s going to freak.”
“Oh, please. She knows us well enough by now to not care!”
“True.”
“How are things going with her anyway?”
“All good.”
“Right.” She recognized the response and continued on. “Okay, so, Florida. I have Paul and Milo hosting the two big events but I was thinking of just putting them together.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea if you’re looking to shorten your life. A bullet to the brain would be less messy.”
“Um, not such good friends?”
“Paul was married to Milo’s sister and now he dates some twenty-two-year-old. Plus, now they are finance chairs of opposing sides in the gubernatorial primary down there, so it’s basically devolved into color wars, with each of them at the helm.”
“Got it.” She thought for a minute. “Where do we fall politically on the race?”
“We’re Switzerland.”
“Perfect. So I can offer our support based on which team raises more?”
“Yeah, brilliant, Liv,” he shot back sarcastically. “Screw up the second-most important state for us for a few extra dollars.”
“Kidding, Jacob. Chill.”
“Florida is a delicate freakin’ balance. I’m petrified we’ll have to actually pick a side in the primary. That would majorly cut into our base there. Senator Kramer would be all over it. One false move and the dominos fall.”
“Got it, got it. So we do one from five to seven and one from seven to nine. What else?”
“That’s it on Florida. Unless you want to put in a YP event late-night.”
“Also messier than a bullet to the head. Not doing those until we need them politically.” A YP, or young professional, event was a euphemism for an event with a low ticket price. “You raise five hundred dollars for every ten hours of work you put in.”
“Good. Okay, so I’m emailing you the list of past Florida donors. Also check in with Theresa Chambers; she used to be our consultant down there.”
“Wow. I haven’t heard that name in a while.”
“Yeah, she’s laying low since that whole thing with Senator Traxton.”
“Right.” Olivia had heard rumblings of the story but had never heard someone say anything about it plainly. She tried not to sound as surprised as she was that it was clearly true. She always thought the rumor that had Senator Traxton’s chief of staff driving Theresa across the state border for an abortion had to have been a campaign myth, but Jacob had known Theresa forever. He was stating it as fact.
“You know that asshole voted on the floor against a choice bill two weeks after she aborted his baby?”
“Yuck, that’s outrageous. It’s amazing that story never got out.”
“Yeah. You know I worked on that campaign for a month, right?”
“You did? How did I not know?”
“I don’t tell anyone about it. I try to forget it myself. What a freakin’ mess that was. Everyone knew what was going on. I mean, he slept with every female staffer. I got right out. I’m not working for someone like that. That could ruin your career forever.”
“Yeah.” Olivia rolled her neck down, cracking it as it moved. He is not like that. It was a kiss. Taylor is not Senator Traxton. He is not someone like that.
“I mean look at the Edwards staffers—all of them have more subpoenas than the Madoff family. Doesn’t even matter if they knew anything. Just being around for it won them each a lifetime of debt in legal bills.”
Olivia squirmed, hoping he would stop talking. Lawyers’ bills. She didn’t even have money to pay her cable bill. What if someone found out? What if Landon told Aubrey? She’d be the downfall of everyone. Of Jacob. She would lie. No one could prove anything. They wouldn’t ask if she had kissed him, only if she was sleeping with him. And she was not sleeping with him. Thank God.
“Ah. I gotta go, Liv. Can you start with that and then we’ll go through Texas later?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Later.”
“Later.”
When she got into her room, Olivia bounced down on the bed, thrilled to be there. The hotel was a sister hotel to the Brinmore and since the Brinmore was her other family—her actual family would probably rightly say she spent more time there than with them these days—they comped her a room for two days while she set up the events. She looked around. The room was decidedly bigger than her apartment. And nicer. And considerably cleaner.
Before she could get comfortable, not that she would have even considered it, her phone began to ring—Jacob calling back with more background information on more donors. She talked while throwing her bag into a corner of the room, gathering up her materials, and heading back out.
Fortunately the Brinmore Miami was just as popular and convenient as the one in New York, so almost all of her meetings were right there in the lounge. Even her meals would be comped. Most likely the people she was meeting would pay the bills, all of them people who had more in their change pockets than she had in her bank account. Still, there was Campaign Lesson #4: Always have a backup plan—particularly on weeks like this when she couldn’t be entirely sure her credit cards wouldn’t be rejected.
She moved her meeting with the brother-in-law donor, Paul, back so as to make sure he wouldn’t run into Milo and added on a meeting with the two college students, Peter and Mira, who wanted to talk about the young professional event she would not be doing. That coffee I’ll definitely have to pay for, she thought, making sure to schedule it at a time that was decidedly not during a meal. She sat waiting for her first meeting—Wendy and Jason Silverman, also known as the apex of Florida society—drinking a coffee and wondering if she could go the full two days without ever leaving the hotel.
After her first two meetings, Olivia went back to her room, relishing the idea of having twenty minutes to herself and scheming to escape in a nice bath, something she hadn’t had since she moved into her studio with just a shower only a few years ago. Once in the room, she started running the warm water, throwing in some of the hotel’s soap to make it sudsy. It hadn’t gotten more than a few inches high when her cell phone rang.
“Curses,” she muttered, seeing Alek’s name come up and knowing that she not only needed to take the call, but that, despite its larger-than-her-apartment status, this room was not big enough to conceal the sound of running water in the background. She begrudgingly turned off the water and answered the phone.
“Hi, Alek!”
“Se princess.”
She smiled, enjoying his nickname for her. “How are you?”
“Good. Good. I have question for you.”
“Yup?”
“Did se governor, he change his number?”
“His number? Umm . . . You know, Alek, I don’t actually know. I never call him on his cell and when he calls me, it comes up as private.” She could tell Alek was in the mood to talk for at least ten minutes, if not twenty. He was always in t
he mood to talk. She balanced the phone on her shoulder, pulled up the drain in the bathtub, and watched the bubbles dissipate. Just as well. Who takes a bath in the middle of the day anyway?
“Oh.” Alek thought for a minute, sounding dejected. “I just call him and haven’t heard back. I thought maybe . . .”
“Really?” She tried to sound totally surprised, even though she knew how bad Taylor was at calling people back. And they’ve been so busy lately. I mean I don’t even get to my calls these days. She thought about her sister’s message waiting for her on voicemail. Landon must have a million times more. “I’m sure he didn’t get the message! You know how awful he is at checking his phone!”
Alek quickly agreed to the not-complete lie, as donors always did for fear of seeming like they didn’t know him well.
“You know,” she said, “the best thing is to call Jacob, and he’ll get him for you. You have his number, right?”
“Um, yes. Actually, you give it to me one more time.”
“Sure, of course.” She scrolled through her phone looking for Jacob’s number, which the ease of technology had spared her from having to memorize.
“You know Landon is my oldest political friend,” Alek said as she searched.
“I know, Alek. He always talks about how long you guys have known each other. It’s so great.” The governor did talk about him frequently and Olivia knew, despite the fact that Alek could be annoying to talk to, that Taylor genuinely liked him. She had heard him say so plenty of times. They were friends.
“I haven’t seen him in ages. I know he’s very busy, but, you know, I see him only now when he ask for money.”
That stung. Not just for Alek, but for her own confidence. It was her job to make sure donors didn’t feel like Taylor’s personal ATM machine. To do her job well—the way she wanted to do it, where donors raised because they were part of something—Olivia had to make them feel a connection to the governor. It was one of the reasons she loved working for Taylor. He really had those friendships; she just needed to maintain them a bit while he was busy campaigning. She thought back to Adams, for whom she needed to actually forge the friendships. This was easier. Well, it was supposed to be.
Domestic Affairs Page 17
