All In Love Is Fair:
Part VI, Finale
'We Belong'
#
Early January
Having dropped off Teddy and Karen at Mellie's place, Fitz was now heading back to the White House. Because this trip was personal, Fitz negotiated his way down to one SUV, three agents, and a partridge in a pear tree, which followed behind him with its emergency alarm ready to blare if he were harmed with so much as a paper cut. He would not miss the fact that, as President, he would be committing a crime were he to leave the White House without protection. Soon, he would have more freedom as a person again. In just two weeks his life would be simpler, away from the fishbowl of Washington. Living in Vermont, alone, felt increasingly appealing. He and Angela had not made it to the end of the year. Had not made it much past Olivia's last visit to the White House. The separation was mutual.
In Rutland, Fitz would be setting the agenda for his presidential library, with Marcus being his most frequent collaborator and visitor. Their working together had been a complete revelation, to him and to Marcus. That it was Oliva's suggestion was both surprising and not. A part of him wondered if Marcus was Olivia's way of having an absent presence in Vermont. For that he did not need Marcus. Thoughts of Olivia in Vermont was a territory into which he did not wade. It led him to imagining things that would never be, possibilities long since quashed. There was nowhere in that house he could go without feeling the absence of her presence, loud and resonant. Particularly the living room. Now decorated as he liked, the once empty space was first filled with their memories, their breaths, their tears, their laughter, their fears. He would have those to hold even if she would never be there again. Erected in symbolic dedication to a woman who deserved the world, 'Primrose Valley' would endure. Fitz would live in the place he made for them, and from there build something great and useful for many more people.
All did not have to be lost. What irony that as Fitz thought of this, the city lost its power. Things went black. Pitch black for several minutes, save the lights on the cars. Some generators in the stateless half diamond of Washington, DC took their time before turning on, lending emergency luminescence to small pockets of the city. Fitz was relieved to know his children were safe. The Presidents vehicle pulled over to a quiet corner as soon as it could.
"This is Agent Kendrick. Falcon is secured." His hand stayed at his earpiece listening for more.
"How extensive is the blackout?", Fitz asked.
"Just Washington, Sir. No indication yet as to when full power will be restored."
They would be back on the road in a few minutes, he was reassured. Fitz requested to be let out for fresh air. As he stood under a canopy of midnight blue, the silver moon sparkled more intensely. The air was kinetic and charged. People milled around in the distance, many of them seeming almost liberated by the darkness, instead of fearsome, as shadows draped the vastly unilluminated parts D.C.
"Sir?"
Fitz had wandered too far from the vehicle, but not before listening to the sounds, a chance he is not often allowed. The view from the Truman balcony is so much more removed, not like being on the ground in the middle of everything. The very place he should not be. Or, perhaps, exactly the opposite. Turing on his heels, he headed back toward the car. An opened door awaited him. More generators began to come to life.
"Gentlemen, change of plans."
In a city of darkness, Fitz headed towards the light.
#
"Fitz? What are you doing here?" Olivia's torch pointed towards Fitz, obscuring the puzzled, but pleasantly surprised look on her face as she stood in the darkened corridor of the Grant administration's interim offices.
"I thought you might be here working." His impulse to check on her had not waned.
A reluctant smile pulled at Olivia's face. "Look at you, being right for a change."
The unwavering affinity for each other glistened on the hem of their laughter, bouncing off the narrow corridor, lodging in their ears. The flashlight now illuminating her face washes out her features, contrasting even more with blackness behind her.
"Let me guess, your generator bailed on you? It's happening all over town. Maybe I can help?"
"One of the perks of loving older, charming buildings." She sighed whimsically, crossing her arms as a sobering thought comes to her as she looks him up and down. He is casually dressed, but not so casual that she has forgotten his pedigree. "What do you know about generators anyway, Mr. President?"
His face was a picture of conceit, punctuated by a crooked smile. "Not a damn thing, but for you, I'll try." His agents stand behind him, their eyes everywhere at once. "I just came to make sure you're OK."
"I am." She smiled. "Really."
Her words escaped freely before she could fashion a defense. And for what felt like a full minute they were all sparkling teeth and gleaming eyes trained on each other. The January air pouring through the open door was no match for the month of May feeling they held for each other.
"I haven't seen you since…"
"I know…." It had been a month since they talked. Really talked. They had started down a road that was reluctantly cut short by Angela's arrival. Her presence forced Olivia to acknowledge that it was she, not Angela, who was intruding that day. Intruding on Fitz's endeavor to move forward. That Fitz's mind, his time, did not belong to her anymore. Intellectually, she governed herself this way after leaving that day. But inside her DNA held on to a code her mind tried to recover.
"It was for the best, I think. Strangely, you have a life without me."
Their playfulness was electric tonight.
"It's smaller now," he said.
Smaller. Smaller. Like a window closing. Olivia was stuck there.
"Do you need to be somewhere?"
#
The back of the ground floor suite, where Olivia led Fitz, held the conference room that was added on to the 19th century brick building. The room was capacious and featured two floor length windows, which extended onto part of the roof, creating a skylight.
"You're really going to Vermont." It was a statement Olivia said aloud, wrapped around a question she'd been asking herself, internally, for weeks. The 'without me' was silent but present between them. "Time has been passing so quickly since November."
"I know." Fitz had started thinking about time a lot since his tenure in the White House was coming to an end in just two weeks. So much of his relationship with Olivia has been measured by time. Right time. Wrong time. No time. Daytime. Nighttime. So little time. Counting down, always, to the next moment of coming together, or being forced apart. Time: its passage, its anticipation, was something Fitz began holding as a miracle and gift instead of as a countdown to disappointment or relief. The day is not a failure because night arrives, nor the night a waste when a new day dawns. Every relationship, no matter the foundation, is seen as a failure when it ends, except when that end is death. How tragic for life and love to come down to that. In some ways, death is a human success story because it is proof of life. Whether it was Fitz's own mortality, or all the looking back he's been forced to do as part of this impending transition, he has left no aspect of his world unexamined. Including Olivia and learning to see her in ways far beyond his attachment to her. Between obsession and detachment was the kaleidoscopic truth of her existence. The lynchpin in his transition into and out of the White House, Fitz thought of how many roles she has played there—Communications Director, Advisor, Fixer, Campaign Manager, First Girlfriend, and now the first Black and female Chief of Staff to the first female president. What a ride she has had. What a person she is.
"Livvie, I'm so proud of you," he offered.
Olivia's head swiveled toward Fitz as she squeezed his hand. She appreciated the sentiment. "I'm proud of me, too."
They were leaning against the short end of the conference table, its multiple grains of wood brought together in a seamless tapestry.
Side by side thy stood as their gaze fixed on the vista outside. Two of the three agents roamed the periphery of the building; the other secured the interior but stayed out of the conference room.
"You do belong in that Oval, not that I have ever doubted it." His face crinkled into a fond, but toothless smile. "If our undoing led you here, then it was for the greater good."
Olivia chose to see maturity in Fitz's words. But for her, this 'great' of this good began to weigh on her. Was it necessary to sublimate the self with religious flagellation to the benefit of some? Had sacrifice overplayed its role as a precursor to greatness. Her whole life has seemed like an endless string of sacrifices for a greater good. Their relationship was one of many things offered up to the flaming pyre of power.
"I want my own good, Fitz."
"What do you mean?"
"From the moment we met, you've been so…big in my life." There was no other way to convey his presence. "Overwhelmingly big, sometimes."
"I Know. I don't—"
Olivia jutted out a palm to stop him. "No, no, no. I don't need you to fall on your sword—"
"That's not what I'm doing," he said, standing up so that he could face her shadowy form. "I've been doing a lot of reflecting, as you can imagine. You're right. My love for you has been big. But also reckless and inconvenient to you. You had less to support you through the hardest parts of our relationship. I couldn't always be there for you when you needed shelter. For that, I am sorry. I wanted to love you better because it's what you deserve." Sword laid to rest. "I just needed you to know that if nothing else."
Why does he always do this, she thought. Fill her with things for which she's woefully unprepared to feel. Still perched at the edge of the table, her arms sprang out, waiting for him to erase the space between them. And when they embrace, it brought back for her the habit of his presence. How he filled up a space. Big.
"I'm…I've been thinking, too. Thinking a lot about you…me…us. I don't know when I'll get the chance to explain—"
"I don't need—"
She wanted to find her way through the swirling thoughts that filled her mind over the last few weeks. Maybe she did not understand it all yet, but if she started talking to him, she could find her way. But not if he interrupted her.
"This isn't about what you need," Olivia said evenly. "It's about me, and what I need to say to you. Just…listen. Please. Remember you asked me about that?" Her words were wrapped in a velvet bow of sincerity, not a zip tie seeking to impose her power by wrangling him to submission.
His face conceded. "OK," Fitz said, as he pantomimed locking up his lips and throwing away the key. He sat as her anticipating audience.
Though the impetus was not hers, between Christmas and New Year, Olivia unplugged for three days. Mellie had insisted on a five-day ski trip, in Vail, with her children, before the affordance of such time was swallowed up by the rigor of the her first 100 days in office. Olivia compromised by offering Mellie three days. Whilst Mellie slalomed; Olivia slept. She sampled the best of her wine collection, and she read. Frivolous things, like tabloid magazines, which told her of the end of the President's short union with Angela Webster. When that nugget brought about a whirlwind of feelings she did not expect, like anxiety, she put away frivolity and sought escape in fiction. It had been ages since she had indulged in fiction. For many, that genre is simply for passing time whilst laying on a beach or waiting for one's flight. Real information, true knowledge, purposefulness, and self-development lie with non-fiction. So it is said. But it is fiction which has the most of offer to one looking to understand the human experience. Even when one is not consciously looking, it is there. A short story that took Olivia 45 minutes to read lodged itself in her brain, making its way down to her heart, spreading arteries of relevance throughout her body.
Inez, the protagonist, missed out on goodness in her life though it had come to her. Mistaking the bitterness of her mother for pearls of wisdom had been the main culprit. Something better always existed somewhere else, though she had never seen it. Real, genuine love and reciprocal friendship were just two of the things Inez let elude her. It was too late before Inez could see that she spent a lifetime twisting and stretching the truth broad enough to cover and justify her own fears and mistakes.
"You know, it's a fact and I seen it, sometimes when you think you taking a bite out of life, chewing it hard, life be done taken a bite out of you and done already swallowed. Sho is a shame, sho is."
"Sho is a shame." More than anything else, that phrase lodged in Olivia's head. Shame, in its many forms, was not new to Olivia. But Inez, even after the three days, tugged at the hidden-away parts of her like a squawking tell-tale heart. Sho is a shame! Sho is a shame! It beat inside her chest in times conscious and unconscious, demanding recognition, seeking resolution.
It beat inside her now as Olivia thought about where to begin with Fitz. The last time they were alone together, their conversation was left to float away off that balcony. There. She could begin there.
"I wasn't afraid of you, Fitz. Not afraid that you would make me do anything. That's not who you are. We both know that. I didn't tell you I was pregnant because telling you would have made it real. Us, a family, Vermont. That whole thing. Telling you would have made it too real. I…didn't want… Things felt safer when they weren't too real."
"You mean when we weren't real."
Olivia stilled. Holding on to the table's edge. Holding on to breath, to thought.
Fitz continued. "When we existed in stolen moments and 'in another life.' You hated me for saying that to you because it hurt you when you thought it was a promise I could never keep. And if we were both under the illusion that it could never materialize, then there'd be nothing to be disappointed about. When I tried…" Fitz trailed off. The flap of a bird's wing in a golden cage flashed before his eyes. That any part of her saw him as caging her meant he had failed them both. Emotionally possessive of her, that he would never deny. Had he not let her own him, too, in that way. Olivia was a hurdle Angela soon recognize she could not jump over, go under or around. Though she had tried.
"She's here all the time. Even when she's not."
Another thing he did not deny when her ultimatum came.
"It was a bitter pill to swallow that when you had an up-close look at the real me—day in and day out—all the mundane, ugly, ordinary parts, you rejected that, Liv. I am not a perfect man by any stretch. I know. I spent more than twenty years being told this. It wasn't easy to see some of the same things come up in a relationship with a different woman and the same me. I guess I can understand why you'd want to end things before they get real." He paused, his head swiveling to her attentive presence beside him. "But why does real mean the end for you? I'm struggling with that."
Olivia unfolded the arms hugging her torso. "When I learned that I was pregnant, I started to think about what that would mean for me, for you, for the country. All the expectations there would be. Everything I had even considered accomplishing, I started obsessing over. Considering if I had done everything I wanted to do with my life. Had I reached my full, or even true potential? How would I know?"
"It felt like the end of the world to you?" Fitz tried to understand, not accuse. "Or did you think a baby would deflate that potential?"
"Maybe." She paused to consider, aware that she was using that nothing of a word to get around the uncertainty of the existential threat she felt back then. "Maybe it did feel like a sort of end. I panicked and went into fixer mode instead of talking to you. I don't know how to describe it…it's like I can't stop myself. It's a compulsion once I've determined the problem. Then I have to get to a resolution. I wasn't ready. We weren't ready."
Olivia knew that, objectively, her life would not end if she had a family with Fitz. That she did not have to be imprisoned by the patriarchal expectations of traditional femininity. No one had ever expected that of her, including herself. Her own father conditioned her away from those things. Such a position was beneath her. A waste of potential.
"After three children, I don't know what it's like, and I understand that I will never truly know…"
"What are you asking?"
"I've never talked about this with you. Not realistically. Do you see having a family as a sacrifice…a kind of death…of your own life? As in…your life wouldn't be completely yours anymore?"
Fitz had hit a nail. Not on a cross, but on a box holding together all the stuff she had been trying to unpack alone. She had not got very far. She was quiet for so long, and the night stood so still. He nervously intervened.
"Maybe that's too much," he offered.
"Not too much. I was thinking about it. But you're right. It's not the same for you. Fitz, you've spent most of your life with people doing so much to make that life possible for you, that I'm not sure that you register how different it is for you." She had been conditioned to see family as a threat, unless that family was her father or anyone he approved as 'family'. She could keep going down this road, giving universal replies where the moment called for a pouring out of herself. The truth was that the pregnancy forced Olivia to consider what she wanted at a time when she was already unhappy and feeling contained. How could a person who felt trapped incubate a life? It did not seem fair.
"You know how they say to put on your oxygen mask first before you help others? I spent so much of my life doing the opposite, thinking it was going to save me. But I couldn't breathe, Fitz. I had to put on my mask first." Ending her pregnancy was saving herself. "We were in a relationship, and maybe I should have told you. I didn't feel capable of taking on your fears when I had so many of my own."
"How can I know your fears, or you know mine if you don't talk to me? You have to talk to me, Liv."
"Fitz, I could say the same for you. If you thought I would run, then why didn't you voice that fear? Instead of moving in my things and acting like it was only for my protection?"
Fitz bowed his head. "I think you misunderstand my protection. The intention, anyway."
"You're not the first man whose intent," she enunciated, "felt like a prison rather than safety."
"I am not your father, Olivia."
"I didn't… Let's not."
They were breathing such rare conversational air. Fitz did not want Olivia to put on that mask and bail before they could safely land this talk. But when, if not now, could he ask her the things he wished to know?
Olivia recalibrated.
"You stopped seeing me," she lamented. "I stopped existing as the woman you knew. I felt abandoned to your needs in that place. Maybe it was subconscious, or maybe it was the pressure I felt from living there, but what Mellie said about life inside that place being all about you…I started to see everything that way."
"Including having our child."
She turned to look at him, grateful that the night obscured the full truths on their faces.
"That's not an accusation," he said. "I'm trying to understand. You said you weren't ready…was that about my needs, too?"
"Maybe…yes." There was something else there she was finding it difficult to articulate."
Fitz, for his part, had been so preoccupied with trying to stop what had always been the inevitability—her running—that he could not see her emotional alienation in a role that did not suit her. He was trying too hard because he, too, was scared. All the things she said. All the things she said, running through his head.
"How can we make it work in public when we can barely make it work in private. [Going public] is not a solution, Fitz. It's just another complication."
He had blocked them out before, convinced that if she could just be here with him, inside the White House, they would have each other and could make it all work. That, too, combusted.
"I regret how we began," he said.
"I thought we talked about this." feeling a sense of déjà vu. "How we met?"
Not the begin of their beginning, but the start of their last end. "I mean regret that you felt publicly forced to say you were my mistress because Elizabeth leaked our relationship. That should never have been your coming out, or ours." It was true that he hated that word, 'mistress.' Hated hearing it on the news, reading it in papers, hearing it spat out of the mouths of sons of bitches in his own party who treated women worse than the suits they dry cleaned every week. Hated the tawdry cast it threw on the patina-ed love he had for her. Worst of all, he hated that she had to pretend the media weren't talking about her, but some distant entity from which she had separated herself.
"You and me both," Olivia chimed. "But after I said it, I felt relieved. That weight had been lifted. I wanted our life to be private, not a secret."
Nothing could erase that the leak happened. And that so much of what he did after sought to make up for that fact. He tried what he could, given the circumstance. But they, like everything, else became victim to that place, that office. And he had not done enough. She was right. They never had a chance. Not in that place, which had taken so much from him, personally, in exchange for all the power he was handed.
"You know what I think a lot about a sometimes?"
"What?"
"The day we were supposed to get married in the Oval. You looked like a woman I didn't know. Beautiful—you're always beautiful. But also not you. The hair, the dress. How sad you looked." His eyes looked off into a dark recess of the room as his mind pulled him back to that day. "Your sadness was reason enough not to do it. It was the antithesis of everything I had pictured our day to be."
Olivia turned to him in sweet surprise. "You've thought about our wedding?"
"I have. Many times."
"I have too. Well, I thought about what would have happened if I said 'no' to Defiance."
"And I became a loser."
"Not a loser. You lost, yes." Olivia's brows knit together as she recalled the detail of her father leaving during the wedding ceremony, and that dream-cast Fitz became a reflection of everything she so desperately feared about losing. About never reaching a pre-ordained potential. "But eventually, we won."
At this he smiled, and they both enjoyed the moment of levity. Fantasy, again, had made them possible.
"Did you mean everything you said?
"When?
"That night we argued, and you left."
"I said a lot of things, Fitz. I can't remember it all," she obscured. The truth was she spent a lot of time removing the lingering shards of his words from her skin. Some were sharp and thick, burrowing into that beating fist beath the scaffolding of her lungs. "Do you?"
"I've been haunted by a few of the things you've forgotten." He was always surprised how well she cut his feelings to the bone.
"What was worse for you, Fitz? When I let my father go, or when I asked you not to kill him? Do I owe you now, Fitz? Do I get to show how worthy I am of your sacrifices now, Fitz? Do I get to talk to wives at cocktail parties for you? Trade recipes for you? Plan dinners for you? Live in this cage for you, and not breathe for you?! Tell me, what must I do to prove I am forever indebted to you for saving my father's life?!"
"That whole spiel about me punishing you for letting your father go and taking you as prisoner in exchange. That's the one that made me feel sick and confused at the same time, especially because I can't think of it without the disgust on your face. I'll never unsee it. Olivia…you put your father in prison, not me."
There was that thing tugging away at her again. The thing she had been struggling to articulate to him. The thing that caught like a lump in her throat on the balcony continued hanging around her neck. Tightening and scratching at her skin, making it impossible to ignore. The irony of her own words a specter in her ears.
"You have to talk to me, Fitz."
"You're right," she conceded. "I did do that. I put him in prison, and I freed him. I freed my father…and your son's murderer."
A mournful breath escaped Fitz's mouth upon hearing the stark reality flow from Olivia's mouth. With his eyes dazed, he moved away from her side, his feet unmoored by her words. The night they littered his bedroom with hurt and harm, he had not thought to bring this up. There was a story he kept telling himself: it wasn't' Olivia's father that killed his son; it was Command. But the truth was Rowan and Eli are the same man. The same person that committed atrocities is the same person who made the woman his love could never do without. That most inconvenient truth permeated the air now. Sitting down on the Narwana ribbed leather lounger, Fitz did not respond immediately. A stunned silence into which his every thought tumbled.
Olivia had made her opening salvo on the matter. She wanted to look Fitz in the eyes when she said this next part, despite the lack of light in the room. The failed generator never did sputter with life. The sliver of moonlight shining through the skylights was more than she needed. Grabbing a chair from the table, she rolled in front of where Fitz sat. Reaching for one of his hands, she whispered, "Fitz, will you look at me?" A few moments passed before she could see his eyes. His gaze rendered her naked, not with lust but with gratitude for the man that he is. For in his eyes she saw the effort to receive the unknown, simply because it would come from her.
"He was my father before I met…" Olivia reconsidered her words. "I put him in jail because of what he did to you…to us…to me. You were right, I freed him because of what he could do for me. But B6-13 agents really were after him. And I—"
Fitz scoffed, withdrawing his hand from hers. "B6-13," he said with potent disgust. "That agency has been taking from me for twenty-five years."
"But it's also given you the presidency," she made plain.
"But at what cost, Olivia? Do you ever think about the cost? I know…I know…no one wanted me to win this way, including you. And I know a lot of people with more to lose than me risked their necks, but that doesn't make the question less true. At what cost? Sometimes I'm disgusted with myself because I know death and destruction are part of what lined my path to glory. Part of the legacy I inherited with this office. And I think we're never supposed to stop, zoom out and think about it that way. We're never supposed to stop long enough to consider the toll and ask at what cost?" Fitz wiped the passionate righteousness from the sides of his mouth. "Think about what it took, who it took away just to get here. To stay here. I remember, once, Mellie, when she was still grieving and trying to find new purpose after Jerry…" He hated saying the word because his son didn't die; he was murdered. "I uh…I told her that Jerry's death wasn't an accident. That he was taken so that I could win. And, somehow, she found sense in that. He became a martyr to her, and she was determined for us to live up to his sacrifice. That he was taken so I could win." Fitz's face felt hot with the flush of tears he tried to hold back. The levies broke and he kept pushing. Olivia's thumb intervened, wiping wetness from his cheeks. "Sacrifice," he spat, "as if he had the choice. If you don't choose it, then it's not your sacrifice. You were sacrificed, like some animal to be feasted on. Mellie was OK with that. Initially, I was repulsed. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't much better. I wanted to win. And when you told me I was going to lose, I was devastated. For a brief time, between the impending loss and the win because of my son's death, I let myself think about what else existed beyond the presidency." He used the free hand that wasn't covered by Olivia's delicate grip to wipe tears away. He wanted to look at her with clarity. "I thought of you. The life we could have. Well, the life I wanted with you. The minute it became clear, after Jerry's death, that I would win—"
Confession is good for the soul; however monstrous one feels. "I thought about it, too" Olivia confessed, handing him a tissue. The Fitz that was spilling out in front of her was so raw, so real. She realized this is what she missed, what she ran from back then, avoiding it like flames threatening to engulf her. So, she ran to the sea, submerging herself and coming out on the other side of the world as someone else. Pretending to, anyway. In the absence of real, there is only pretend. How different she felt now as he processed his pain before her. This pain was real. This grief was real, an enduring companion in a way she had not been back then. She felt closer to him.
Fitz breathed a relieved sigh before continuing. "I could have resigned like I had threatened times before. But I didn't. I didn't. Even before I knew you were gone, I knew I would stay. I battened down the hatches because I wanted to make him proud. To make you proud. I imagined doing things that would make him want to vote for me." At this he smiled thinking of Jerry's anonymous Twitter page that did nothing but disparage his administration. "In all my impotence, I thought the least I could do is make him proud, and you, too. What I was given became my highest duty. I could make myself worthy of this office even if I wasn't supposed to be here. That's what I kept telling myself when you were gone."
Olivia held back her own tears. "You did belong there, Fitz. And I was proud of you. Am proud of you."
"I care so much what you think of me. Sometimes it was hard to separate when you were disappointed in me as President from your disappointment in me as a man. I thought that's why you wouldn't marry me. You didn't want to be married to the guy who was President." Fitz realized that the realization he had about Rowan and Eli must be similar for Olivia. His shoulders pushed back with the thought. "I guess that's how you see your father."
"What?" Olivia frowned.
"His agents and I know him as Command, as Rowan. To you, he's Eli Pope, your father. A man. But you can't deny that he's also acted as Command in your life, too. With Jerry…where did Command stop, and Eli begin? I'm not sure. Are you?"
He was pushing her now, and any defensiveness Olivia felt was needled by her conscience. Fitz was not wrong, but was he right? For so much of her life Olivia tried to see her father as just a man, but he refused to stay in that box. And her psyche twisted and justified so much just to push away the cognitive dissonance of his two roles, especially when they converged in an unforgiving vengeance that reigned over her life, and her loved ones.
"My father…he faked being sick. He learned that as Command and probably taught it to his agents. I think deep down I knew that he was faking. But I wanted it to be true because it made it easier for me to see him as vulnerable. It made it easier to justify freeing him. I didn't have to admit—to myself or you—that I did it to make the committee go away. Because without them breathing down our necks, you wouldn't need to marry me." Olivia exhaled. "No, Fitz, I didn't want to be married to President Grant. Besides the fact that the ink on your divorce papers was barely dry, all of it felt so fast, so…transactional. That's not who we are. I don't ever want that for us."
"Maybe you don't want to be married at all," Fitz interjected.
Olivia shook her head as her face composed itself of solace and yearning. "Fitz, in my darkest moment when I thought I was going to die, I dreamed of us being married, far away from this town. In a more realistic version, when you weren't president, I dreamed of us being married. In both cases, you were not president. What does that tell you? I didn't want you and me to become the job. I liked what we had for that brief moment between my coming out interview and my father… It wasn't perfect, given the circumstances. But I had you. And I still had me. The freedom I had coming and going, having it both ways…yes, I liked it. What do you want me to say?" Olivia's conscience stopped her in her tracks as multiple thoughts came together producing a truth, she sought to obscure even from herself. Her actions led to the very thing she feared. Her eyes grew wide, the whites of them neon with clarity in the dark. "I see now that pulling that lever to let my father out ultimately led to our end. Maybe I knew that on some level. I'm not sure."
"I don't understand."
"The night I came to you. The night we talked on the balcony into the early morning?" Among other things.
"I remember."
"I told you that I didn't think we could ever survive my father killing your child so that he could give me, what I wanted. That somewhere inside you, even if you weren't conscious of it, that resentment would be aimed at me one day. I never thought you could…. or would punish him. He's too good, too smart. That's not an insult; it's experience. I've had a lifetime of trying to outmaneuver him. You couldn't punish him, but you could punish me. Not by letting me rot in jail. No, that would deprive you of me," she reasoned. "You could imprison me right under your nose. And I thought I deserved it—your punishment. Initially, that's what I told myself. When I was detained, and you showed up, I thought he's never going to forgive this. When you stormed out, I thought that was it. I was right. When you moved me in instead of leaving me in custody, I thought…oh, this is the punishment. House arrest." Silence filled the gap until Olivia was ready to admit the narrative she created in the absence of communication. "It didn't matter why I did it. I went behind your back when I could have let you in on the plan to save us from what would have been a farce of a marriage." She huffed with irony, thinking of what he had said to her before.
"Without trust, Olivia…"
"I didn't trust you enough to tell you because I didn't want to be stopped. I wanted to avoid being married, no matter the cost. I guess we paid it in the end."
Had he stopped breathing? No. The steady calm air slid over the finger held between his nostrils and his lips. Clenched so he would not be tempted to interrupt. But he had stopped blinking. Salty pools of misunderstanding welling up in the corners of his eyes once more. Whether it was the result of psychology or physiology, he let the rivers run down the side of his face. His next words chased their current. "Sometimes, I think where did we go so profoundly off base? Where did I go so wrong that you would think my love was a prison? That telling you there's nothing you could do that I wouldn't forgive became a mission to disprove."
Olivia held her nerve because they were here now. In a moment where time felt like it was standing still for them. Giving them the floor. She wasn't ready to yield back her time.
"You have to talk to me, Liv."
"Fitz, I wish you had asked me instead of presented me with a decision you had made about me without me."
Dipping his head, he said, "I hated when you would do that to me. I…I didn't think that's what I was doing. Not at the time. But from your perspective, I guess…I can see how you felt. I wasn't trying to…trap you or cage you. Who benefits from that?"
"I know…I know. And you weren't wrong. I was looking for a door marked exit. Too quickly everything I didn't want superseded all the little things I had come to love about being with you. Like was trapped in a nightmare I hadn't ask for."
She could go on blaming him, but had she not already done that? They both had. Here was an opportunity to be vulnerable in places where they had earlier poured cement. To admit uncertainty where there had been pride. To see what they had feigned blindness to before. She had a responsibility then and now. She was the only one who could advocate for herself. So, why didn't she? It had been easier only to consider herself abandoned by Fitz in the White House. The worst kind of abandonment. The kind she had grown used to, expected. The kind that became such comfortable pain that, at times, she leaned on its companionship instead of communication. The emotional kind of abandonment where the one you needed was always visible, but to whom you seemed invisible. A form, an other instead of the person she sometimes saw reflected in the cornflower blue of his eyes. "And when I thought you were punishing me for my father, it made sense to become someone else. A ghost of myself, your Mellie replacement."
"Livvie—" he said, his voice filled with the sorrow of hearing the worst of what he desperately tried to avoid.
Pre-emptively Olivia squeezed his hand. "Please…I. Just listen. I'm trying to explain what I was going through, trying to make sense of how I fell apart. Even if I wasn't aware, at the time, of this tempest inside me. I'm not blaming you entirely, but it's how I felt." Olivia rose from her chair, the urge to be closer propelling her to sit next to him, though there was barely room. Fitz crossed a leg to create space for her comfort.
"I thought it would be easier to become that replacement. To do the tours, socialize with the kept spouses, oversee the planning of events. All the soft politics…if I wasn't me. And if I wasn't me, then you weren't really punishing me. But then, that also meant you weren't seeing me either. I'm not used to that with you. I think it hurt me more than pretending to myself." On that island she had pretended to herself, and that wasn't hard. The man with whom she had absconded had long been pretending to be someone else. They were false together in a place where life was a string of never-ending sun-filled fantasies. Until the realness of death destroyed that bubble, and she went home to face reality.
"I needed you, Fitz, but it felt like you…me, we were consumed by the demands of that place. I was sinking, and you let me." Olivia huffed with ironic awareness of her time in Mellie cosplay. "I think that whole period made me more sympathetic to her—Mellie."
"What you want doesn't matter anymore."
"She warned me about living there. That it swallows you up. I didn't start to understand until you didn't want me in the Oval anymore. That hurt me the most. That, I do blame you for."
Here Fitz had to intervene. Olivia had put her puzzle pieces on the board, but there would be no complete picture without his contributions. No one person could make sense of what two people had built and razed. Even if it was ugly, the picture would, at least, be complete.
"Did you think I wanted that? To not have you there in the Oval?"
"What else was I supposed to think about me and my 'power capes'?" she deadpanned using air quotes."
Sitting there, side by side, shrouded in darkness, the past was fully present. Becoming clearer as the night went on. As a cloak, darkness is often used to obscure, to hide. Its most prevalent identity is not the complete picture. Darkness can be an equalizer. It can create possibilities to reveal when the starkness of the light threatens to expose, leading to withholding. Where once they had both used nights to escape through other people's bodies, or to numb their pain through drinking, working, or diving headfirst into challenges much larger than themselves, none of those distractions existed in this moment. It was just them, with only time and space to fill. Choices to make.
Fitz's choice began with a movement. A search for Olivia's hand. Having found it, he felt her fingers yield to his, entwining them. Shifting himself toward her as much as he could as threads of understanding wove themselves together in his head.
"I'm sorry that I abandoned you in that way, and that you felt it so profoundly. I am. Hear me when I say it was the last thing I wanted."
He felt Olivia give his hand a squeeze. Soon the other was a gentle touch sliding down the side of his face. "Then why did you?"
"Do you remember the first Clinton administration? Not literally, of course, but about that shift when the country started to resent Hillary." Olivia and Fitz were adults when they met, but Fitz's question made him uncomfortably aware that the period to which he called her attention was one in which she was an adolescent, and he was an adult whose processing of the world around would have been entirely different.
Olivia was twelve when Clinton was elected, and not long after was consumed by life-altering shifts of her own. She knew about the early part of the Clinton White House in the way she knew the Vietnam war dated back to Truman, or the true pettiness that undercut Carter's diligent efforts to free the last group of American hostages in Iran before he left office. Because she was a student of American politics who was exceedingly good at her job. It was not because she lived through those moments. Olivia answered tentatively, unsure of where Fitz was headed. "Yes…"
The very early part of Clinton's first administration, when it became clear that Hillary did not intend on being a traditional First Lady who stuck to cultivating soft politics, but instead was a regular fixture and influence in the Oval, helping to guide the direction of the country with her husband and his frat house of advisors, the nation was agog. The First Lady? Steering the direction of universal healthcare policy? Boo. Tomato, tomato, tomato, proverbially thrown at her with little mercy for not following the tacit rules and traditions to which everyone but the Clintons had agreed. Helped toward this conclusion by a press conditioned only to accept male leadership, not only was Mrs. Rodham-Clinton urged out of domestic policy and into domestication, her husband's masculinity and suitability as Commander in Chief was called into question. The demand for gendered order in the presidential court was overwhelming and inescapable at the time.
"Once you moved in, and you and Abby devised that strategy to make America fall in love with you, it was working. I thought I was doing my part to help that along. Just a few months before those same people and media thought nothing of demeaning you as a homewrecking wh…." Another term he disliked. He collected himself, noting the rising tension in his body just thinking back to that time when he tried following Olivia's orders to let Abby throw her to the wolves. An American public shaped by centuries of misogyny and racism would not have given Olivia even half the grace they bestowed on Hillary. The knowledge that had always existed right under his nose was unavoidable once Olivia lived there. Things she had told him. Things Mellie had told him.
"You placed Olivia in a dangerous position…She's not just a mistress now. She's America's mistress. History will preserve her as such."
Though motivated by her own denial of defeat in her marriage, Mellie's ominous words came back to him now. The fault of his actions lay not with his press secretary, and certainly not with the woman he loved. It was because of him, who he was, who America was, that Olivia was made to suffer those slings and arrows. Ones she did not deserve, let alone because he loved her. Never again did he want to see, hear Olivia be treated in such a déclassé way.
"It killed me to hear the way they talked about you; those coded headlines full of dog whistles. They were so threatened by you already…I couldn't let them turn around and Hillary you, too. I didn't want it to be a distraction from all the things that were going right. I barely escaped being impeached. When the press, the country…and even my own party members feel more stable with you being here, once they saw how serious I am about you and how amazing you are, then we could get back to us. That's what I imagined. But I guess…" He trailed off with the stark awareness that his unconscious fears had made her feel the exact alienation he tried to avoid. Made worse, perhaps, because it was not from the press; it was personal. He did this.
"I know you're more than a First Lady, Olivia. I was trying to protect you." The irony hit him then. That he, too, had been guilty of the thing for which he accused her. "I should have been honest about my fears, too."
"Thank you." The simplicity of her response contrasted with the fullness of his explanation, and yet it was enough.
Sometimes protection feels like a harbor away from the storm, and sometimes it just feels like a cage. They had both, each in their own way given themselves over to the pressures—real and imagined—of what the White House demanded of them. Demands that loomed bigger than them. Demands that were needy, and never in short supply. Demands that they let come between who they were to each other. Hindsight is twenty-twenty in clarity, and Fitz could see now that he played into the very fears he sought to avoid with Olivia.
"Maybe that's why you felt like a ghost to me. You thought I stopped seeing you. And maybe you're right." How did their time together turn into opposite land? "I was trying to make sure you wouldn't run but lost you anyway. I lost sight of us, and you tried to become someone else I expected to see. But you also stopped looking at me. It's like you were looking through me, sometimes. Like that last day we were together, do you know that you never once looked me in the eyes? The only time I remember you truly looking at me was when we were being the worst versions of ourselves."
They sat there, one side of their bodies flush against the other on that leather chair. Connected physically, trying to connect with their separate pain, hoping to transform them into something more than apologies.
"Some of the things I said, Fitz…" Olivia began, her voice scratchy. "I was trying to hurt you because I was already hurting. If I could get you to feel the same thing, then the pain would be ours, not only mine."
"Were you in any physical pain that night? After…."
"No, not from the procedure. Emotionally, I was somewhere else. I wish I felt numb that night. That would have been so much better that feeling so conflicted. Not about having the abortion but about times when you asked me what was wrong, and I just couldn't bring myself to tell you. I think that's why I couldn't look you in the eyes at times. I was scared that if I told you I didn't want this child, you'd think I didn't want you, or us. You were always the sensitive one," she cajoled, her body gently colliding with his.
They both found momentary reprieve, chuckling over this truth. Time never seemed to be on their side no matter how long they were together, or apart.
Fitz brought the back of Olivia's hand to his lips. "I know."
"Things were going so wrong; a child wasn't going to help. Day to day living with you turned me inside out. All your flaws became more visible to me. I'm sure mine did, too. It was easier to focus on yours so that I didn't have to look at mine. I worked myself into such a state of discomfort, everything felt like a threat, a danger, a trap. Even your hopefulness." At that she squeezed his thigh gently, her hand remaining there. "If I had—"
"Wait, is that another deficit of mine? Hope?"
"No, Fitz," she said, making soothing motions up and down his thigh. "As naïve as it can be sometimes, I love how hopeful you are. But I'm trying to explain that I was in such a…a hole, that I could only see one way out, and it wasn't through motherhood. If I had told you…If you knew... Even briefest flicker of hope in your eyes, would have devastated me because I already knew that it wasn't right for me, or us. Not then."
Fitz processed her reasoning before inartfully asking, "Was that your door marked exit? The abortion?"
There it was. But was it true?
"I… wouldn't put it that way. I tried to claw back some control, yes. Over my body and my life. Leaving was the last card I had left to play, so to speak. I was afraid to tell you before the procedure. Strangely, keeping it to myself was also a way of gaining some control when so much felt out of control. And that night…when I came back. I wanted to tell you, but then you were so angry with me for not showing up to the dinner… it pissed me off. I couldn't talk to you at that point, could I?" She chose rage over revelation. Fomented resentment came rushing back like acid reflux, regurgitating in caustic spurts. Being there in service to him, to his presidential agenda. As a foot soldier and not a leader. Getting her pregnant. Domesticating her. Anger became her shield. "At some point in our fight, leaving the Whitehouse was the only answer."
Fitz ran a hand over his face, thinking about that night when she came into the bedroom. His anger, his fears had made him righteously blind with assumptions. So blind, he couldn't see her distress, only her failings.
"You were upset, and I couldn't see past you missing a damn dinner. Had I known…I could kick myself. I'm sorry."
"I was upset. Partly at myself because nothing was how I wanted it to be. And I knew I was partly responsible for fixing that." She laughed at the irony. "I'm a fixer and I couldn't fix us."
"Good," Fitz said. "because we," he pointed between them "are not your job. In that same way you don't want us to be part of my job."
In Olivia's eyes were recognition and sorrow. The candor with which they were addressing the topic was refreshing to her, perhaps made less difficult by the witching hour. That this conversation was taking place felt like magic. A spell cast on time, creating for them a pause in which to stay a spell and tell. Tell, tell, tell each other all the things they previously denied to one another because they had denied it to themselves. Rapt with a quiet, intimate terror, Olivia listened to her body as she tried to access bravest parts of herself. The parts she had been too afraid to confront. Truth, no matter how inconvenient, was at least revealing. What she did with the revelation would be up to her. Wishing and hoping and planning and praying would get her nowhere.
"It's easy for me to say what I don't want. After doing that for so long, I realized it's not the same as being clear about what you want. It's not a process of elimination. I think I'm terrified of getting what I want. The deep, important desires. If I never articulate them, then I don't have to be disappointed if they don't come true. Or, what if I get what I want and feel unfulfilled by it, or worse…destroy it. Then it's my fault when that happens, and…" she trailed off. "That's hard."
Fitz remembered something then about wanting. "Wait, 'I want you. I want us. That's what you said to me."
"And look what happened when I said it out loud." She went on. "The things that intimidate most people—running a country, international crises—they don't scare me. I've been kidnapped for Christ's sake! But…having to contend with my own internal crises is…difficult, to say the least. I feel out of my depth, and I hate feeling that way. That loss of control. All the uncertainty makes me feel trapped and I have to fight to get out of it. Chaos…is comforting for me. That's when I get calm and clear, and I can set order to things." Olivia had an epiphany mid-monologue. "I…once there's order, I usually move on to the next crisis. That's where the thrill is—creating the order, not the order itself."
"I've never been to therapy, but I think they would call this a breakthrough. See, talking is good," Fitz said. The tense, bruising grip she now had on his thigh reflected the intensity of thought happening for Olivia.
"I did want you, Fitz." She needed him to know that was real. "Those nights…on the phone or in bed, dreaming of a future together…It felt good to be in that fantasy with you because I loved how happy we felt dreaming together. And because…"
"It wasn't real?" Fitz finished.
"Yeah," she confessed emotionally, sans tears. "And if it wasn't real, it was safe. From me…and from my father. I've been living for him my whole life." Olivia thought back to Christmas dinner weeks ago. Back to the things she'd grown up thinking were worthy of her and the things that were ordinary. The things she's been told strong, independent, 'badass' women don't want because of the ways they would compromise her: a husband, children. A family all her own. Just like those things had compromised her father. He let himself love her mother and blew up his life. Had her existence been a wrinkle in the goals and mission of her parents? They had both ended up sacrificing her, each to their own ambition and pursuit of power. That is what they modeled for her, even in absentia. Maybe she had been heading in the same direction and did not know it. Because stopping to consider might have revealed a more complicated and inconvenient truth than she was prepared to confront. She may never know the full truth of who her parents are, but she could endeavor to know Olivia—what she wants and deserves outside of other people's fantasies of her.
How many years had he spent trying not to be his father. Making all the same mistakes until he realized he had to search for Fitz, not the Big Gerry antithesis. "It took me a long time to see that trying to prove my father wrong was still me playing by his rules. Just the opposite side of the same coin. Throw out the coin, Liv. I promise you'll find more currency. You can change whenever you decide you've had enough of the cycle you've been through."
"Sounds like a washing machine," she humored, but she had absorbed what he said.
"I've got some quarters you can borrow."
"I don't need your money, Mister."
He missed hearing her call him by that name. Suddenly the rush of impending separation overwhelmed him. He was leaving soon. Opportunities like these would be few and far between.
"I'm going to miss you, Livvie. "
"Don't say it like that. It's not like you're going into hibernation."
"It is, though. I will be laying low like most of presidents before me. At least for a time. I'll be in Vermont, planning my presidential library, deciding what's next for me. There's so much I didn't get to do." Then it hits him that they will be working separately, living hundreds of miles apart. He would not get to witness the early, exciting days of her new White House venture. "I know you'll do an amazing job keeping that ship to its course, he chuckled. "But seriously, I'm happy for you. You'll finally have the role that you deserve in the White House, and a whole new connection."
"Not that different. The new President is your ex-wife, the mother of your children."
"She will always be those things. Your connection will be more intimate, for all that's worth."
"Not that intimate."
He laughed with her, pulling her into his side, and she rested her head on his shoulder. Her arm draped languidly across his body, at once forgetting and remembering themselves. "You know what I mean, silly." Old habits die hard and before he could think, he planted a brief kiss on the top of her head. "But I won't know her as President the way you will. I won't have that view."
It was in that moment that an understanding of her time with Mellie and the narrow reality she had convinced herself of came bounding forward for Olivia, in a way she had not explicitly considered before. Her fears and resentments had blinded her to the fact that for the last two years, she had not been working with rose-dying-on-a-vine Mellie. That version of her resented Fitz because the better person and politician she imagine herself to be was hidden behind Fitz's imposing figure. He was in her way. Olivia had taken for granted that she watched Mellie go on a different journey, one that included juggling motherhood and running for President. With Olivia's guidance, Mellie changed her story; changed her cycle of resentments, the heart of which was fear. The irony was that being a mother, and even her relationship to Fitz had become bona fides of a woman the country decided could be Commander in Chief. Whether or not Mellie acknowledged things this way, Olivia's observation held true. Olivia was not Mellie. They had things in common, but their experiences, frames of reference, perceptions of life were different. But If Mellie had forged a path forward, one Olivia was instrumental in unfurling, she could do the same for herself, What about Olivia Carolyn Pope? The fuller, more complex tapestry, did she believe she could create that for herself?
"Are you OK?" Their silences were comfortable, but this one was exceptionally long.
Sill deciding the order of her next words, Olivia did not register his kiss to her temple for she, too, was sinking into him. Relaxing.
"It wasn't all bad, the White House."
"I'm relieved to hear you say that."
"Why?"
"Because it means you didn't completely hate me. I was the reason you were there, and you were unhappy."
"What have I told you, Fitzgerald?"
Using his proper name, she was serious.
"Hating you is impossible. Believe me, I've tried."
"Ouch."
"I think…I think living with you showed me things about myself that were new for me. Different from who I perceived myself to be."
"Like what?"
"I'm really fantastic at planning parties and home décor." She laughed. "Not that those skills weren't already there, I was just using them in a different way. I'm multitalented, obviously."
Before she knew it, Olivia was hoisted from her seat, sidesaddle on Fitz's lap being tickled. "Is that so?" he said as his fingers continued a playful assault on her rib cage, underneath her open, long cardigan. Their laughter was evergreen and bright.
"Since we're confessing things…" he whispered.
"Why are we whispering," Olivia said in the same hushed tone. She had registered the change in position and did not object. She made herself more comfortable on his lap. She couldn't not see the color of his face in the blue light streaming in from the sky, but she watch Fitz scrunch his nose and smile in that way he does when he blushes.
"Because I shouldn't tell you this since…I know you weren't fond of them." He paused. "I liked seeing you in some of those dresses."
Olivia adjusted herself so that she was straddling Fitz's thighs, placing her feet back on solid ground. She leaned back and placed a hand on his chest, which he covered with one of his own.
"I took some of them with me."
She fell against his chest, collapsing in laughter, neither of them thinking they would be able to laugh about that era. But here they were. How things could change, if they allowed it. Olivia's laughter subsided, rolling into a big sigh.
"Tell me," Fitz led, his hand stroking her back.
"More than losing myself, I was afraid to like some of it. The domestic parts. I'm not supposed to like it. I wasn't raised to value any of that, only to appreciate when other women did it so that I could run with the big dogs and be who I wanted to be. Which is a bit perverse…But the more time I spend in this world, I think maybe I'm just losing myself in another way. Maybe I've adopted values and goals that I thought I was supposed to want. I'm not saying that I want to withdraw. I just think…is this the only way? Maybe I've only tapped the surface."
"Don't be hard on yourself. We've all been doing the best we can with the tools we've been given. The chapters you've written don't have to be your last. That's why I'm mostly excited to be leaving the White House. I know that there's more that I can do. Working from that place isn't the only answer for me. You've got plenty of time. You're much younger than me."
"I don't need reminding."
Fitz moved to tickle her again and Olivia squealed. It wasn't long before she turned serious again, pushing herself off his chest so that she could look at him. Time was on her mind again. Yes, she had plenty of it in some ways, but it was still closing in other ways that she needed him to know of. The moon's light gave her celestial assist.
Sometimes fear keeps us safe; sometimes it holds us back.
"Fitz, I think I've been beating back this conflict for a long time. Maybe since that day that I met you. I…" she struggled not with saying but the admission of her next words "I don't have all the answers. I may never have them all. I have a lot to figure out about myself. And…I want to do that with you in my life. I could imagine life without you, but I don't want to. I know that now, and I want you to know. Life is better with you than without." What is painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love between two people if they themselves are not changed by its impact. His love had changed her, and that was hard to admit. Because what it takes to embrace change is a process, not a mathematical equation. The process begins, always, with admission.
"What are you asking me, Ms. Pope?" he said as his hands slid up and down her arms in support. As much love as they have for each other, every version of their relationship had been beset by miscommunication, secrets, assumptions. After the last time he built a scaffolding over his heart to. Now did not have to be then. They could be clear.
Olivia could see the sparkle of his eyes, emitting intrigue, playfulness but also protectiveness. If dreams show us what is possible, then Olivia's dreams had taught her that whatever life she dreamed of—DC or Vermont—Fitz was there.
"I love what I do, but I don't want it to be who I am. But I've been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about how what I do and who I am. I am my father's daughter, but I'm not him. I want more for my life. He's given me a lot that I'm grateful for, but I don't want to see the world though an endless lens of threat with my name on it. I've got much to work on…"
"More than me?"
She smiled knowingly. "Can we do it together? I know we said we tried to make it work, but do you have it in you to try again?"
Fitz paused before giving an answer. He looked into her moonlit eyes. "No. There is no try with you and me. We do or we don't."
She nodded her head. "I want to do life with you, Fitz."
"Good, because I want to do life with you, too. You have altered my life in a cosmic way."
"Like a comet?"
"A ball of fire…sounds about right. But comets blaze and burn out so quickly. You're more like the sun, a constant source of light." Now midnight, the sun still blazed in the sky even if it was not visible to them. In another part of their spinning orb, the sun shone brightly, making life possible. What a magical, beautiful, and dangerous creation. "Livvie, you thrill me, motivate me, and confound me all at once. Nothing would make me happier than to have you light up my life".
"Is that a yes, Mister?"
He slid his hands down from her waist running them over her pant covered thighs. "Do you want you find out?" he whispered; his eyes now fixed on her mouth.
Olivia grabbed the side of his face, sweeping her lips across his, savoring the feel of them, and how long it had been since she had captured them in hers.
"Yes," he spoke against her mouth, breathing life back into them.
#
Olivia knew well the topography of his kiss. The way his tongue felt against hers. How he liked to move so slowly, softly, gently at first before sucking her in like a riptide. To be consumed in his depths, pleasurably drawing in him. No one had ever kissed her like that until him. And no one after. They needed no artificial light; their energy was kinetic, their clothed bodies rubbing together generating its own spark. They surrendered to each other, to their belonging.
His mouth was slick, and soon other parts of her were, too. At first a summer breeze of movement felt fine, but as the sounds their mouths made together—the sucking, licking, smacking, and the moans—the hot zephyrs emanating from each other, warming their skin, mercury rose inside the incomparable lovers.
"I've miss you like this," Olivia said.
"I've missed you like this, too." And it became her undoing. The undoing of her cardigan. The removing of the sleeveless mohair shell underneath. The unleashing of her painfully firm nipple into his mouth. His tongue was as greedy as her breast is petite, trying as he did to consume the entirety of her. And she let him. She loved it, cradling his head there. Her hips told the story of every feeling her body held, as Olivia's hips rocked gently back and forth against Fitz's groin.
They pant, moan, gyrate in this fashion, thinking only of the immediacy of their feelings. His hands on her ass are strong and she squeezes them signaling him to push her further into him, onto him, against him. As she felt the firm swell of his manhood beneath his pants, her hips moved faster with purpose. God, he felt good against her. Even through her pants and his, Fitz's ampleness could not be denied.
"Fitz, ohhhh. Don't stop. Pleaaasse"
"Never" he whispers against her skin, rubbing the shadowy late-night stubble of his face against her sensitive nipple.
Her plea, his promise, their passion all persist until Olivia reaches her peak, surprising her, though it should not. She groans, satisfied, biting her lip. His pants are thick and firm with desire for her that he holds in, lest it be more than she wants. Did she want more?
Still tremulous and tender from the aftershocks of her orgasm, Olivia continued holding her beloved close, kissing all over his face. Her hips still gently swaying with reverberating tingles. "Did you?" She asked.
"No…I thought…" Awkward was not the thing he felt. They may have dry humped like a couple of teenagers, but this aftermath was filled with the stuff of two mature people who knew every inch of the other—inside, and out. Especially after tonight. "How embarrassing would it be to leave here having stained my pants like some horny schoolboy." His laughter, full and genuine, made him forget the genuine discomfort he felt in the need for release, even if it was not with her.
She rose and rid herself of pants and underwear. He followed her lead before sitting again, his flag at full mast.
Fitz followed her lead and stripped his bottom half, sitting back the chair, flag at full mast. He watched her, carefully.
Olivia wet Fitz's dick with her center before sliding back on his thighs. "You are most definitely not a boy." And she was no schoolgirl. Olivia looks down at him and the whites from her eyes can be seen in the dark, as her hand pumped at his length, savoring the ample feel of him in her petite fist. When his head flew back at the feeling, Olivia hovered over his saddle, expectantly. She searched his face, his eyes with her own, praying to see, hear that he felt as she did.
"Yes."
That most beautiful sound fell from his lips, filling the small, small space between their bodies. Olivia fell into the gap, capturing his lips with hers. And the place where she was open began closing around him. He filled her empty spaces in the way only he could. Thumping heartbeats, ragged breaths, and wet kisses, a cornucopia of lust consumed them both. A confirmation whispered against her skin. A silken dirty plea only he would understand. Their bodies moved together with indiscriminate need until she felt him pulsing inside her, his pleasure runneth over in that way she had allowed no other man to do.
Olivia and Fitz had an elastic love. The shape of it yielded and contracted in the summers of their joy and the winters of their discontent. Or, perhaps, it was made of stronger stuff like liquid metal. Coming apart in blobs, but always finding itself again, creating something stronger with each coming together.
#
Inauguration Day
The remaining two weeks of Fitz's presidency found him with Olivia every night. No matter how late it was, whether he came to bed first, or she did, they woke up to each other, refusing to take for granted that the other was there, inches within reach. Their days were largely separate, overlapping for short bursts of time. They made the effort at least twice a week to have dinner together, if not a late-night dalliance with wine and Scotch. Olivia was busy with overseeing Mellie's inauguration and keeping tight reign over the identity of the second Grant administration. Fitz planned his next chapter; assisting the incoming administration where it made sense; worked with Quinn and Marcus to use his plenary powers for those denied justice, doling out pardons, or commutations to more than three dozen prisoners. More than eighty percent of those were people of color. This made him the record holder of this Constitutional power which had been bestowed on every U.S. president since Washington. He would have been filled with regret for not having done more while in office but knew his effectiveness in this arena would be more significant beyond these white walls. That was one of the few things he looked forward to about leaving Washington for a time.
Marine One awaited Fitz on the South Lawn for the last time. He strode across the grass, still slightly damp with dew, as the sun had only just come out of hiding after the day's earlier ceremonies. He waved at the crowd, feeling thankful to have seen out his time instead of fulfilling his more than one threat to quit in his first term. In a huff of a laugh to himself, Fitz thought she always did know what was best.
Fitz turned his head.
"Mr. President!"
It was the 'she' of his recent thought. Her. Olivia. And now she was running toward him as the crowd of supporters and media looked on, rapt with bated breath at what might unfold. Fitz held firm as she approached, unable to tell from her face what she might say, what problem she would lay at his feet in this moment of departure. But he need not have worried, for she barreled into him taking hold of his body and his mouth before he could process what was happening. A kiss for goodbye! Not a good-bye kiss. Those watching would easily mistake it for the former, as if they would never see each other again. Its sincerity, intensity and interval lasted so long that anyone would think that.
"The cameras," Fitz suddenly realized.
"I don't care."
The small laugh they shared was one of lovers who remembered kissing under involuntary observation in the Oval. Now here they were kissing before the world to see. Outside, in the light, without shame or guilt. Most of all, they kissed with the promise of reuniting.
"It has been an honor, Mr. President," Olivia said after their mouths parted for the second time, though their bodies remained attached. She would not let him go until she had to.
"The honor has been all mine," Fitz returned.
Certain were they now that his leaving was a transition to the rest of their time together, however long that future may last. But the length of the immediate future was very clear. So many people will do, but once you have been in love, you can no longer live with 'will do'. All in love may not be fair, but it is true.
"One hundred days?" She said, looking into his eyes for one last confirmation as her small fingers refused to stop flirting with his curls.
He smirked as he saw the need for reassurance in her eyes. "I think maybe you're the sensitive one."
Her smile was no match for the sun. "Say it."
"One hundred days," he confirmed.
With the assurance of their reunion on the horizon, Olivia released him to his Vermont excursion, knowing that he was still hers. And she, his. For worse or for better, they belonged. To the light, to each other.
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A/N: Well, girlies, we have come to the end of this series! This is the first story that I have finished. I'm feeling proud of myself. I'm also emotionally spent after this thorough autopsy and revival of the Olitz relationship. I'll save all my writer bullshit and just say I sincerely hoped you enjoyed the journey. What did you think of this end? Do you feel like they've earned this end. And do you want a lil' cherry on top? I have a challenge: As of posting this, we are at 55 reviews. If this story gets to 75 reviews, I will post an epilogue. I outlined it after posting Part II, but Idk if it's necessary.
References:
*The story I mentioned is called "Sho Is A Shame', in a collection called Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime by J. California Cooper.
*All In Love is Fair is written to be a companion to 'No Sun on the Horizon' (much shorter than this!). That short story takes place later the same night of 422 when Olitz reunite. Olivia and Fitz in this story have referred to that night a few times.
Thanks for the support. Review, review, review!
Next time I come back, it will be to update 'As Always'. If you haven't read that story, start now. It's so cute. Don't let the first chapter throw you off. It was meant to be a one-shot originally.
Bye! :)