Chapter 29: Davis
Something’s wrong.
It doesn’t take business instincts to recognize it. Something is wrong with Olivia.
Our trip to London and Amsterdam felt like a fast-forward into a dream. For more than a week, we were able to exist in this blissful, parallel universe where we could work together and sleep together and the lingering pressure of contracts and payments and revenge didn’t exist.
Fuck me like you hate me. That’s what I want.
It’s two steps back, at least—back to a place where both of us dance around intimacy and affection like they’re a greater taboo than the reality of me paying her for sex.
You’re just a hole that I get to fuck whenever I feel. A thing I pay for, Olivia. Just some slut I’ve used for the summer.
I said those things because she asked. Because she begged. Because she pleaded. Because I would give her anything that she asked for. But there was something eating away at her, lurking at the back of her mind the entire time she was in my office. I could see it in the distant look in her eyes when she left without a word. I’ve spent far too long thinking about this woman over the last eight years to be oblivious to her temperaments.
It has to be Kieran, I figure. There’s no way that it could be anything else. The internship is fine, things with Charlie are apparently better than ever, and we were on the tail-end of a breakthrough with her project, so it has to be my whirling dervish of a brother. Try as I might though, I can’t figure out what he did to her between Sunday night when she and I spoke on the phone, and Monday morning when she came to my office.
She’s slow to respond to my text messages throughout the week, which is out of character. Usually, she responds to me immediately—like any adorable brownnoser trying to impress a VP would—even if we’re not talking about work. When she does text back, her messages are brief and stilted. Like I’m any other person in her life and not a guy who has all but admitted to losing his mind over her.
Maybe she just needs to remember that. Maybe she needs to remember that I’m falling for her—that I’ve already fallen for her. Hard. Maybe for once, I need to follow through with my plans and try to make her fall for me in return. With that single-minded objective, I get to work.
On Friday night, she arrives at my apartment at seven as requested, right as I’m finishing up the dinner I cooked for us. She lets me kiss her when she enters my apartment, but she doesn’t let the kiss linger.
“Dinner smells amazing,” she mentions as we part.
It sounds like a distraction to me, but I play along and lead her to the kitchen. She looks over the spread of food on the counter. “You cooked all this?”
“I feel stupid saying that I cooked a salad, but yeah. The pasta, the chicken—all me. Impressed?”
“Maybe. Shouldn’t I taste it first?”
I pull back her chair and set her up with a glass of wine and a salad plate. I serve her before I serve myself, and then we begin to eat in silence.
As we eat, I watch her from the other side of the table. All she’s doing is eating a salad, but she looks incomparable while she does it. It occurs to me at that moment, the same way it has a hundred times before, that if my future was this—and only this—then I would die a happy man. That if given the opportunity to eat dinner with this woman every night for the next sixty years, I would take it in a heartbeat.
Olivia notices me watching her and she raises an eyebrow. “Now what?” she asks smartly.
“Nothing.”
“Clearly.”
I take a deep breath and steel myself before I say, “My father’s birthday party is next weekend in Boston. I’m heading over there on Saturday morning. You and I have the end-of-summer internship event that we’ll be going to on Friday night, so I’m going to miss the smaller family dinner he’s doing. The party on Saturday will be a bigger event though, which might actually be better.”
“That’s great.” She takes a bite of her salad and chews and swallows before she says, “How old will he be?”
I blink as I realize that she thinks I’m making small talk. “Old as hell. I don’t know,” I answer hastily. “Olivia, I’m asking you to come with me.”
She stops with another forkful halfway to her mouth and slowly lowers her hand until the fork comes to rest on the table, salad and all still spiked on the tips of the prongs. Her expression starts at confusion but quickly fades to a blank, unreadable state. “You’re…what?”
“I’d like you to come to Boston with me so you can meet my family and go to my father’s party. It would mean a lot to me.”
The silence that follows is unbearable, even though it only lasts for a few seconds. Somehow though, in that brief lull in the conversation, I can feel my pulse throbbing in my ears and my heart rate starts to speed up.
“Oh,” she finally murmurs, her brow tightening into one of her little frowns. “Why would you want me there though?”
“Because I want to introduce them to you. To us. To us as…”
“As what?” Her voice comes out soft, almost like she knows the answer but wants me to say it aloud.
“Be with me,” I say instead, putting it out there as simply and as clearly as I can. “No transactions. No contracts. Just us.”
“Davis…”