“Max Powell, as I live and breathe.” A woman with a very large hairdo and a lot of makeup pulled him into a hug, and he laughed and hugged her back.
“Congresswoman Strong! I didn’t know you were going to be here!” This was a benefit of events like this; he got to see some friends he didn’t get to see much of anymore.
“Well, you know, I’m retired now, so I get to pick and choose which of these things I go to, but I couldn’t miss tonight.”
Twenty minutes later, as Max chatted with the mayor of San Francisco, an older white man and a cheerful-looking Black woman joined their group.
“Senator, have you met the mayor of Berkeley?” The mayor of San Francisco gestured toward the older white man. “Mayor Emmitt, Senator Powell.”
He and the mayor shook hands, and then the Black woman behind the mayor held out her hand to him.
“Senator, a pleasure to meet you. I’m Alexa Monroe, the mayor’s chief of staff.”
“Nice to meet you, Alexa,” he said automatically. He turned back to the mayor, and then his head snapped back to Alexa.
Alexa . . . Monroe?
If he had any doubts, the knowing smile in her eyes removed them. He’d been so focused over the last hour, he’d completely forgotten Olivia’s sister would be here.
“Great speech tonight,” she said.
He grinned at her.
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” They smiled at each other for a second, though she had a slight measuring-him-up look on her face. He suddenly felt nervous. Did he pass muster?
He made himself turn back to her boss.
“I’ve heard you’re doing excellent things in the Berkeley school system with restorative justice,” he said. “It’s a good example for others who think it may not work.”
The mayor smiled as Zachary snapped a picture of the four of them.
“I hope that’s the case,” the mayor said. “Though there’s often such a bias against programs like that. I have high hopes for your criminal justice reform bill, you know.”
Olivia’s sister smiled and nodded behind him. Why did he feel so much pressure on how he answered her boss?
“I have high hopes for it, too,” he said. “I’m not sure if the rest of Congress is where we are yet, but it’s our job to convince them, isn’t it? But I’m not sure if anyone in my office has talked to you about my town hall plan for the summer—I want to hear from youths themselves about what they need to recover and thrive. I want this to be about them, not the politicians, but I’ll make sure we consult you about plans.” He glanced at Alexa. “My office will be in touch soon.”
She handed him her card.
“Just in case you don’t know how to find me,” she said to Max with a straight face.
Georgia tapped him on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I have to pull the senator away for a moment; he’s needed in the photo line.”
There was another round of handshakes as he said good-bye.
“I hope I get to talk to all of you again, and soon.” He let his eyes twinkle at Alexa as they shook hands, and her smile widened.
He walked away with Georgia toward the photo area.
Had Alexa liked him? He hoped she liked him. He knew Olivia and her sister were close, and it would matter to Olivia if Alexa thought he was some pompous douchebag.
He walked by Wes on the way to the photos, but Wes was in the middle of a conversation, so all they had time for in passing was a quick fist bump. Even that, though, felt like a respite. To see someone who actually knew him, whom he could be real with, in the midst of this need to constantly be on, was like for one brief second someone had opened a window in a hot, stuffy room. The relief he felt even walking by Wes made him realize how great it would be to have Olivia here with him tonight. If she were here by his side, he could nudge her when he wanted to—but couldn’t—roll his eyes, he could exchange “we’ll talk about this later” looks with her when someone said something wild, or he could laugh with her when something ridiculous happened. It was incredible to even think about that.
He didn’t see Alexa again for the rest of the night, until he ran into her and the mayor just as he was leaving.
“Mayor Emmitt, and . . . Alexa, right? I hope you had a good night.”
They all shook hands again.
“It was a great night,” Alexa said. “The speeches weren’t too long, some of them gave me a lot of hope for the future, and I got to meet some really interesting people, so I’d call that a winner.”
He smiled at her as he turned to walk out the door.
“I got to meet some people I’ve wanted to meet for a while, so it was a great night for me, too. Have a safe drive back to Berkeley.”
Max walked back into the hotel room twenty minutes later to find Olivia sitting on the bed, fully dressed, with her laptop on her lap.
“So.” He kicked off his shoes and flopped down onto the bed next to her. “What did your sister think of me?”
Olivia’s eyes widened. They widened just a little too much, as a matter of fact.
“Oh, you got to meet her? I wasn’t sure if that would happen, I thought the fundraiser might be too big for . . .”
He waved his finger at her.
“I’m not buying a single second of this, you know. I am one hundred percent certain your sister texted you before she even left the ballroom. I had to meet a member of your family, and I had to do it without you by my side, so I deserve to know what she said.” He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. “Come on, I’m dying here.”
She shook her head and laughed.
“Damn it, you’re giving me those puppy dog eyes again. Fine, she liked you.”
He waited, but she didn’t say anything else.
“ ‘She liked you’? That’s all I get? No, absolutely not, I know there was more to it.” Olivia glanced toward her phone, and he reached for it.
“Come on, there was a lot more. Just for that ‘she liked you,’ you have to show me the texts!”
Olivia laughed and unlocked her phone.
“There was just one text, right after she met you, and fine, you can see it.”
Just met you know who! You probably figured out that I was a little skeptical of him, but I was impressed; good speech, not an asshole behind the scenes like most people like him would be, was polite to me even before he realized I was your sister (and then gave me a big smile once he did realize). As hot as he is on TV, too.
Oh, but I know what you meant about his shoes.
Saw him again on the way out! Can’t wait to meet him again, this time with you there too!
“What about my shoes?”
Olivia snatched the phone back from him.
“Shit, there was only one text the last time I looked! I was working and I didn’t see the other two come in!”
He frowned at her.
“I believe you, but what does she mean, she knows what you meant about my shoes? What’s wrong with my shoes?”
Olivia sighed and pointed at his shoes.
“Those brown suede shoes of yours. They’re terrible, Max. I’m sorry you had to find out this way, but I keep wanting to sneak into your closet and throw them away. How is it that you have such great suits and such terrible shoes?”
He turned to look at the shoes in question and then back to Olivia.
“My, um . . . mom helped me buy my suits. She didn’t pay for them,” he said over Olivia’s giggles, “but once I became DA she told me I had to start dressing the part, so she found me a guy at a store she knows and I went in and he measured me and had me try on a bunch of stuff and then I gave him my credit card number and then he sent four suits, ten ties, and twenty shirts to my house, with firm instructions on what went with what. Once a year I go back for him to measure me again and he sends over more clothes. But whenever I go there, I go in sneakers and use his shoes to try on the clothes; no one ever told me what to do about shoes, so I just kept wearing what I’d been wearing.”
Olivia stared at him, an expression he couldn’t decipher on her face.
“What is it?” he asked. “I can get new shoes, just tell me what to buy.”
She took his hand.
“I love you.” She looked down at their hands, then back up at him. “And it still feels early, but I can’t ignore it anymore. I love you.”
He hadn’t felt this explosion of joy since the night he’d won his Senate race, a year and a half before. He wanted to jump off the bed and throw his arms in the air; he wanted to run around the hotel shouting. But instead, he took her face in his hands.
“I love you, too.”
She leaned forward and kissed him softly.
“And you don’t have to buy new shoes, I’ll love you anyway. But . . . please do.”
He tackled her onto the bed, and she laughed and laughed.
Chapter Thirteen
When Olivia got home from work the next Friday, Max was already there. She’d had a late afternoon meeting on the Westside, and by the time she’d battled traffic to get back home, Max had landed at LAX, so she’d told him to just let himself into her place. She’d given him her extra key a few weeks back so he could easily meet her at her house after an event. But he hadn’t given her back her key, and she hadn’t asked for it.
She couldn’t believe she’d told him she loved him. And she’d meant it then and meant it more with every day that went by. Yes, it hadn’t even been five months since they’d met, but by this time in her life, she was a pretty good judge of character. And she knew she loved Max, even though she never would have expected it. It made her so happy to let herself into her house and know he was there.
When she walked in, she heard banging coming from the direction of the kitchen.
“Max?” It must be him; that was his car she’d driven by on the way here. He tended to park a block or two away, and in a slightly different place every time so no one would notice his car in front of her house.
“I’m in the kitchen!”
Was he . . . cooking? Max had many strengths, but she’d never seen him do anything in the kitchen other than move takeout from boxes to plates.
She walked down the hallway and saw him leaning over the counter, a lump of dough in front of him and a rolling pin in his hands.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
He looked up at her and made a face.
“Well, I was trying to make you a pie. Strawberry rhubarb, your favorite. But . . . I’ve run into some difficulties.”
She moved closer to the counter.
“I can see that.”
He stuck out his tongue at her.
“I didn’t do a . . . great job of reading the recipe before I started—I thought I’d be able to surprise you with a pie when you got home, but I didn’t realize the dough had to rest in the fridge for an hour after I made it. And now I’m trying to roll it out, and it’s rock hard!” He banged the rolling pin in the middle of the dough again and tried to move it from side to side. It didn’t budge.
Olivia held in her laughter.
“Where’d you get the rolling pin?” she asked. “I don’t have one.”
He gestured to the bag on the other end of the counter.
“Yes, I realize that now. I bought it, along with a pie pan.” He smiled sheepishly at her. “Also, um. I’m sorry about the mess. I promise I’ll clean all of . . . that up once I’m done with this part. And I swear, I absolutely did not kill anyone in your house this afternoon!”
Olivia walked around him and saw the bowl of cut-up strawberries and rhubarb next to the sink . . . and the bright red spatter everywhere around it.
Now she laughed so hard tears streamed from her eyes. After a few seconds, Max joined her.
“It does indeed look like you committed a murder in this kitchen,” she said as she gasped for air.
Max smashed the dough again with the rolling pin. Olivia thought she saw tentative movement.
“I knew conceptually that strawberries had lots of red juice, but I didn’t quite understand what that meant in practice until today.” He rolled again. “Oh, look, it’s moving! Thank God.”
Olivia opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of wine. This felt like the kind of thing where she should stand back and watch instead of offering to help out.
Plus, no one had ever made her a pie before. She didn’t even care how it turned out; she wanted to enjoy this.
“There!” Max said, forty minutes and two glasses of wine later, when he slid the pie into her oven. “It should bake for . . . an hour? It takes that long for pies to bake? Damn, okay, good thing I’m not going anywhere for a while.”
She grinned at him.
“And good thing I ordered dinner while you were occupied with the pie. Food should be here any minute.”
He went over to the sink to wash his hands. That apron looked far too sexy on him, even though it looked like he’d stabbed someone in it.
“Oh thank God you’re the smart one in this relationship,” he said. He grabbed a sponge to clean up the counters. “I’m starving. Pie making is hard work, you know.”
Olivia sipped her wine and smiled at him. She couldn’t believe he’d done this, just to make her happy.
“It looked like it,” she said.
After the food came, they went into the living room to eat, and he looked around and smiled.
“You got new bookshelves! No more stacks of books on the floor.”
She put the food down on the coffee table.
“Yeah, I’d had them for a while, and I finally put them together last night. I knew I couldn’t prep for the pitch today any more than I had, and I needed to do something to get out all of that nervous energy.”
Max put the napkins and plates down on the table.
“How did the pitch go?”
Olivia put spring rolls onto both of their plates and sighed.
“I don’t know. I mean, it felt like it went well; I know we did a fantastic job. But that doesn’t seem to really matter—the one client that we got so far from a pitch was the one I thought hated us, and all of the other pitches have felt great and we haven’t gotten them. They say they like us, but they want people with more experience, or a bigger firm, and even though our rates are on the low end, that doesn’t matter.”
“Is that code for ‘they want to hire white men instead’?” Max asked.
She glanced up at him, surprised and pleased she didn’t have to spell that out.
“Sometimes, definitely. Probably most of the time, even. Which I should be used to by now in my career, but still feels crappy.”
“That’s because it’s fucked up,” Max said. He put his hand on her knee. “How much . . . Are you . . . I mean, do you need . . .” He stopped, and she laughed.
“If you’re trying to ask if I’m okay financially, I am, really. Ellie thinks I’m irrational for stressing this much—she says we both knew it would be slow going in the beginning, but we started with a few anchor clients and we have money coming in and we both saved up a lot before we started this.” But she’d feel like such a failure if she had to dig even deeper into her savings. “And she’s right, but I guess I didn’t quite realize how uncertain it would all feel. Like all of it could disappear in an instant. I thought I’d feel more comfortable once we got our first new client, but it was for such a small case it didn’t make me feel much better. If only we could get a case from a bigger company—all we need is to get our foot in the door. I know we’d do a great job; we’re both excellent lawyers. We’ll see what happens with the pitch from today, but . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not feeling that optimistic.”
Max dished noodles on her plate and handed it to her.
“Here. Your favorite spicy noodles will help—the spice high will make you feel like a superhero.”
One of the things she liked so much about Max was that he didn’t try to give her a pep talk unless she asked for one, and he didn’t try to reassure her that everything would
be fine. He just handed her spicy noodles. Which was exactly what she needed.
“Thanks,” she said. Which felt inadequate, for the noodles and the pie and the sympathy, but she knew he understood.
He picked up a spring roll and turned to her.
“So. I wanted to talk to you about something.”
That never meant good news.
“Okay. What is it?” She braced herself.
“I know we talked about this some a while ago—not specifics, but just in general—but that was when things were different and I feel like things have changed, so I wanted to ask about it again— ”
Okay, now she needed him to cut to the chase. He was usually way more articulate than this. Was he breaking up with her?
“Max. What are you getting at?”
He rubbed his face and put his plate down onto the coffee table.
“I guess I’d better just say it: have you given any more thought—or any at all, actually—to us going public about this?”
Oh. Not a breakup.
The opposite of a breakup, really.
“Oh. I didn’t expect . . . that’s not what I thought you were . . .” She laughed out loud. “Max Powell, please do me a favor and never say ‘I have to talk to you about something’ again to me like that. Because I thought you were about to break up with me.”
Max sat back, his mouth wide open, then leaned forward and grabbed her hands.
“First, I’ll never say that again. Second, breaking up with you is the last thing I want to do.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“Same here. But . . . you want to go public?”
He squeezed her hands.
“I understand if you’re not ready for that yet, just say the word, and it’s fine. But the thing is, I was thinking all week about last weekend. How we ran into that reporter, and part of me—a lot of me—wondered if it really would be the end of the world if she recognized me with you. And then I killed it in my speech—not to be arrogant, but . . .” He grinned at her, and she grinned back. “And when I finished, and I knew it had been great, I looked around the room, and I realized I was looking for you out there. Even though I knew you weren’t there, I wanted to be able to introduce you to people I’ve known for years, and meet your sister with you by my side instead of with knowing glances on both of our parts. And . . . it was more than that. Those things are a lot sometimes, and I wished so much that you were there. That I’d have you with me for a boost, or a smirk, or some sympathy.”
Party of Two: The brilliant opposites-attract rom-com from the author of The Proposal! Page 17
