Chapter 25: Davis
Thursday and Friday, we spend more time working. As much as we both want to spend the rest of the week getting lost in Amsterdam, neither of us can resist the draw of our inboxes. Olivia builds projection models and I edit drafts of contracts from our legal team, all of which we owe Gus Winter. She gets faster at it every hour, I swear—like she has a knack for it that I didn’t even have when I was an intern.
Long afternoons at our laptops shift into evenings where we get into spirited debates about whether or not we would have had the instincts to invest in companies like Google or Apple back in the day. Only Olivia would have these conversations with me. A year ago, I was seeing another woman casually and the reason we never got more serious was because she couldn’t handle how much I worked. “It’s the job or me, Davis,” she had delivered with overwhelming confidence one day when I was standing at my kitchen counter with one hand on my laptop and the other stirring the dinner that I was trying to make for her. That confidence that I would pick her over work was all it took for me to know that she wasn’t the right one.
Olivia and I eat frites for dinner for the rest of the week, work in the mornings, and sleep together in the evenings. We don’t talk about money—not anymore. We will when we get back to New York, but I don’t need to worry about it when Olivia is gleefully riding me every night while I tell her that she’s the most gorgeous woman on the entire planet. I don’t call her a slut anymore. I don’t look away from her to keep her from seeing the adoration that spreads unfettered across my face. It feels like a do-over—like this is what would have happened that summer if Kieran had never gotten involved.
On our flight home, I can’t help but admire her as she types quietly on her laptop, drinking coffee instead of champagne and beaming at the hot towel that the flight attendant gives her before dinner. I don’t know why she pretends that she’s an interloper; she belongs here with me. She fits perfectly. We fit perfectly.
I want to love this woman. I want to watch her work until the late hours of the night and I want to walk to work with her in the morning. I want to take her around the world. I want to buy her diamonds and gold and to have her coat herself in them—and nothing else—while I take her in a bed that we share.
I want her to be mine for real. Not because of a contract. Not because I can afford it. Mine—mine for real. Mine because I love her. Hers because she loves me back.
The logistics are complicated, but they’re nothing I can’t handle. She’ll need to graduate from Wharton first, but then she can come back to the city to work at D-R. That, of course, will require finessing. My father has a PR team who can handle the optics. After all, they did such a stellar job handling Kieran’s breakup with Elizabeth Davenport that the stock price actually went up afterwards. I’m sure they could figure out how to spin Olivia and me—assuming that nobody ever finds out about our arrangement.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asks without looking up from her screen. She lets me break out a goofy, lovestruck smile before she turns to face me.
“No reason.”
“Creep,” she murmurs as she pretends to be annoyed with me.
“Nope. Just a guy who appreciates the finer things in life.”
Olivia rolls her eyes, but she can’t suppress the smile that arises.
Forget number thirty in the Ridgeway Guide to Success: Stop smiling so goddamn much. In fact, forget the entire guide. Seven weeks with Olivia was all it took for me to feel better about my life than I have in years.
Which means I have three weeks left. Three weeks for me to come up with a new plan: to get Olivia Nolan to fall in love with me.