The whole 'Olitz Takes New York' segment was originally going to be a 2-part but since there's so much more that needs to be said/written and a lot of you have been badgering me to get this chapter out like a pack of hungry wolves (jk lol), I decided to split the second part into 2, so now there will be 3 parts in all. So, this chapter includes A LOT of present-day stuff which some of you will like. From this point in the story and moving forward, there will be more switching between past and present until we're completely in the present so just be prepared for that.

Chapter 18: Olitz Takes New York Pt 2

"Hi," she croaks out.

"Hi," Fitz says with an uneasy smile. Something had told him that he should come to this beach at this moment and now he knew exactly why. Here was the love of his life, standing just five feet away from him, within his arms' reach. He was amazed by how much more beautiful she had become and just looking at her was reigniting the love that once burned bright for her in him. For such a long time he hadn't known how to approach her and even if he did, he didn't know what he would say but now that time had come and this was he chance to make things right.

She stands up to face him directly and stares back at him like she's seeing a ghost. "Wh-what are you doing here?"

"I don't know…I kind of just wound up here, just like I always do whenever I visit New York. I didn't know you'd be here," he says truthfully, every time he had come to New York, whether it was for business or to visit friends, he would come down to this beach and sit down on the sand just as she was only a moment ago and reminisce about their good ol' days while also thinking about how she now was.

She looks away from him and dusts her jeans off. "Well, I'm here for a charity event."

He nods and glances away awkwardly, remembering the last time they had seen each other which happened to also be at this same charity event. "Me, too."

They stand in an uncomfortable silence, the both of them having and wanting to say so much but not knowing where to start. Fitz knows that this is the best opportunity to talk things over between them so he decides to just go for it. "Well, I wasn't going to really hang out here for that long, I guess I just wanted to see the beach. But if you're planning on leaving soon, would you like to get a bite to eat? If you haven't already."

"I don't know if I should…" She says warily.

"I just want to talk and catch up over a meal. No funny business, I promise."

"What about your wife?" She grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest and slightly glaring at him.

He sighs. "I'm not even married anymore. I haven't been for a few years now," he says, showing her his left hand to show her there was no ring. "And I know that you aren't, either…not that that matters. This is just lunch. Please, Olivia?"

A look of surprise and something else comes over her face when he said that he's no longer married, making him wonder if she was having the same thoughts of hope for them or not. She stares back him, deliberating further in her head, but it's her eyes that soften and give into him first before she finally nods and says, "Okay."

They take a taxi to some bistro that Fitz was familiar with and visited every time he came to New York. It was fancy but a little too quiet for Olivia's liking since she was hoping they would've gone to a noisier place to keep the space between them less awkward. As she sat down she was tempted to make a break for it because she felt that she was in no way ready to talk to him and she wasn't sure she ever would be, but at the same time she never wanted to leave his side again. Just being in his presence and having him smile at her even if it was a bit forced, made her feel a certain kind of good inside and she missed that.

They both order glasses of water for drinks and she gets a salad while he orders a steak dish.

"So, are you still a vegetarian?" He asks, deciding to start the conversation out light. She could work with that.

She nods. "Yep…and I can see that you're still a meat-lover."

He chuckles. "Yeah, that never really changed, I guess." He pauses shortly before continuing, "So, how have you been? You look great."

She looks away, feeling her cheeks heat up just like they would any time he'd give her a compliment. Her attraction towards him had not diminished one bit and had in fact increased. If she thought that he was handsome before, time had only made him grow sexier. He seemed to have become even more muscular and his chocolate curls looked even more luscious and full than before, but his eyes were a little different. They were still that stormy blue but they looked dull and…sad. "Um, thanks. I'm good. And you look great yourself."

"Thanks. So…how's your son?"

Olivia smiles lightly. "Good. He's the sweetest kid…and he's growing up so fast. He'll be starting kindergarten in September."

"Really? Wow, and he's only three, right?"

Olivia nods slowly, avoiding eye contact. "Yes, he, um, he just turned 3. He's incredibly smart. I tried to enroll him in pre-school but after a short evaluation, the school said he was more than ready for kindergarten. He's very artistic and he loves to write…" just like his father. "He wants to be a writer when he grows up."

"He sounds like an amazing kid. You must be so proud."

"Immensely. He's everything I could've hoped for and more in a son. Do you have any kids?" She asks, taking a sip as of her water as her nerves start to calm a bit.

Fitz shakes his head. "Ah, no…I wanted some but it just never really worked out with Virginia. I could've adopted but with work and everything I'm always traveling and it wouldn't be fair to them."

"I know what you mean. Sometimes I think I work too much, so I don't get to spend time with my son as much as I'd like to, but I guess you just have to do what you have to do," she says, but deep down she knows that that's not the only reason she engulfs herself in her work. Work served as an outlet for her to keep her mind occupied and busy so that she wouldn't dwell on her desolate personal life. She had Danny, and of course she loved him with everything in her, but even he couldn't feel the hole that had been left in her heart for so many years.

He nods as their waiter comes and serves them their food. "How is work, by the way? I saw in the news that your company just opened up five more restaurants on the east coast."

"Yeah, the business is really flourishing now. Sometimes it feels like it all happened so fast but it's exciting," she says dryly. It was exciting but before she even started the restaurant chain, she had thought that she'd be able to share all of her thoughts and dreams and ideas with him along the way. He had been the one to convince her to chase after her dream so it was a shame that he now wasn't involved in anyway. She decides to steer the conversation away from her and towards him, wanting to know about what he was up to. "How about you?"

"Well, like I said, I've been doing a lot of travelling. You wouldn't believe the places I've been to. It's such a big world out there. There's so much adventure," he says, making her smile at the way his eyes lit up.

"Tell me," she says, missing the look on his face when something made him happy or intrigued him.

He looks back at her seeming surprised but she reassures him with a genuine smile and he matches her expression as a grin spreads across his face. He spends the next hour recounting several of his experiences overseas as part of his career as a journalist, something she had known already but he was hardly on TV and worked more in the background. He had started off dirt broke but he quickly climbed the ranks and now he was making almost a million dollars a year going around the world and putting these stories out there for the public to hear.

By time they leave the restaurant and catch a taxi back to their hotels, Olivia feels completely relaxed and light and is smiling and laughing so much that her cheeks hurt. "You had to run in the forest half-naked? Are you serious?" She asks skeptically as he tells her a story of how he had been chased out of his cabin during a trip to Romania by a bear that had broken in.

"Yes! I'm not joking. I had been feeling extremely hot that night so I had stripped down to basically just boxers and then I wake up to this loud banging on my door and think it's the guy I was working with who was right next door but then a second later the door breaks down and I see this eight foot-tall bear coming towards me. I had no time to put any clothes on!"

They break out in laughter again as Olivia pictures him running for his life with nothing but boxers on and even though he had been in danger at the time, she still can't help but want to see the image of him half-naked.

"Well, um, thanks for lunch…it was a lot of fun," she says, remembering how entertaining and enjoyable being around him could be.

He smiles widely. "I'm glad you enjoyed it." He stares back into her eyes for a long moment and sees a longing and desire in them, that probably matched hers. She was so tempted to just spill out everything she had been harboring inside for so many years, including the secret that she knew would break him, but she wasn't sure she was ready to finally face her fears or hurt him in the process.

He tears his eyes away from hers first and throws his gaze to the ground, nervously sinking his hands deep inside the pockets of his pants. "My hotel's about a block down…and I guess I'll see you tonight—at the charity event."

She nods and smiles lightly. "Right. Bye, Fitz."

"Goodbye, Olivia," he says, and then brushes past her with one last pleasant look before he starts strolling down the street. She watches him until he rounds a corner and disappears from her sight before slowly walking into her hotel, feeling like she was about to break down any moment. As soon as she makes it to her room, she pulls out her phone and calls Abby.

2015

"Livvie, why are you hanging back so far away?" Fitz says as he walks through the doors of the theater into the lobby, just noticing that Olivia was a good ten feet behind him.

"I'm just…not ready to go in there yet. Doesn't the play start at 7, anyway? What's the rush?" She says defensively.

She had been in this weird mood all day, but it had been worsening the closer they got to the time of the play. He didn't know what was up with her but he wanted to make sure she was okay since they would most likely be out partying until the early morning hours.

He turns back and slowly goes to her. "There's no rush, I'm sorry, but are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay?" She asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

He shrugs. "I don't know, you've just been acting a little weird and sort of peeved today…"

"Just because I'm not always smiling and happy-go-lucky doesn't mean there's something weird going on with me," she retorts.

"First of all, there's nothing happy-go-lucky about your personality and secondly, pushing me away and getting defensive isn't going to stop me from asking. You should know me better."

She sighs and glances away from him before admitting, "I'm just nervous…about your friends. Normally, I don't give a crap about what anyone thinks of me but they're your friends and I want them to like me, so I'm just afraid that they won't and it'll cause trouble and eventually…"

"You think I'll break up with you?" He asks incredulously. "Liv, I wouldn't give a damn if not a single person in the world liked you because I'm in love with you, I want to be with you, and that's all that matters," he says, hooking his arm around her waist pulling her into his chest then tilting her head up for a kiss.

"You're mine, Livvie, and I'm not letting something stupid like what my friends say, especially friends I don't see on a regular basis, break us apart no matter what they think. But I have a feeling that they're going to love you."

He feels her finally relax in his arms as she smiles apologetically up at him. She nods. "I'm sorry for blowing things out of proportion…and for also giving you a hard time today."

He reconnects their lips and fervently kisses her, eliciting a moan from her mouth as she laces her fingers together around the back of his neck and returns his intensity.

They continue until they hear a slow clap coming from only a few feet away. They pull away and Fitz turns to see his friend Stephen with a goofy grin on his face as his eyes dart between he and Olivia.

"Normally I would tell a couple showing so much PDA to get a room, but that right there was a Broadway-class act. You know there is a bit of a love scene in the play and you two would fit in just splendidly!"

Olivia gives Fitz a questioning look, and he quickly introduces the two. "Olivia, this is Stephen, one of my theater buddies from NYU and the orchestrator of the play we'll be seeing tonight. And Stephen, this is Olivia, my girlfriend."

"It's great to meet you, Stephen," Olivia says, extending her hand forward, probably expecting him to shake but instead he gingerly lifts up her hand to his mouth and softly pecks the back it.

"It's my pleasure."

"Alright, Stephen, you can cut the charismatic crap…" Fitz says, holding Olivia closer and feeling a bit irked at the hand kiss but he quickly gets over it, glad to finally see his friend again.

After they all exchange greetings and acquaintances, Stephen says, "Well, everyone will be glad to see you again, Fitz, and especially your new lady friend. They might be in a bit of a frenzy like they are before they're about to perform, but don't let their craziness scare you. They're truly nice people. Shall we?"

Fitz and Olivia nod then she hooks her arm around his and he kisses her forehead as Stephen leads the way.

2026 - Olivia

"I should've told him. I should've, and now it's come back to bite me in the ass. What am I going to do? He's going to find out eventually, and then…and then he'll hate me. He'll never forgive me," Olivia says to Abby, pressing her phone to her ear as she paces around her hotel room.

"Okay…Liv, you need to calm down because right now you're making me anxious and I don't even know what the hell you're talking about," Abby says in the calmest voice possible. It amazed Olivia how much things had changed in the course of a decade. Both she and Olivia had grown out of their crazy, immature days, but Abby had been more of a surprise to everyone. After finally getting her shit together and getting motivated to do something with her life, a couple years after high school she decided to go to community college like she had original planned, just without Olivia, and within two years she transferred to Stanford to earn a degree in psychology and was now well on her way to becoming a psychiatrist as soon as she finished medical school. But even though she wasn't working in the real world quite yet, she was getting more than enough practice dealing with Olivia's problems.

Olivia takes a deep breath and tries to explain. "I saw him, Abby, today. I talked with him, I even had lunch with him."

"'Him"? You mean, him him?"

"Yes, him him! I was just relaxing at Manhattan Beach and then he comes out of nowhere and asks me if I want to go to lunch with him and then I, of course, say yes because I could never say no to that face and those eyes. You should've seen him, Abby, if you thought he was handsome before, you'll never believe how attractive he is now. I don't get how it's even possible."

"So what, Liv? Who cares if he's even more of a hunk than before? Don't you think it would be unwise to go running back to him after all the pain he's put you through, especially after the last time you guys saw each other?"

"It wasn't that bad…" Olivia says unconvincingly.

"Really, Liv?"

"I'm partially to blame here, too, Abby, but like I said, he won't even feel guilty once he finds out that I lied to him for so long about something so important. It's just that…in the decade that we've been apart, besides the day Danny was born, I don't think that I've ever been so genuinely happy or smiled as much as I did in the hour and a half that I just spent with Fitz. I miss that, Abby, I miss him…"

"Isn't he married?"

"No, he and his wife divorced a few years ago, at least that's what he told me, but I believe him."

Abby remains quiet on the other end and Olivia can sense that her BS-meter is going haywire but that doesn't stop Olivia.

"You know, he wrote me a book?" The book somehow hadn't come up in her conversation at lunch with Fitz but she knew that would eventually and that would probably be when the real talking began.

"Just right now?"

Olivia rolls her eyes. "No, I mean, a legit, published novel that is a New York Times number one best seller. It's called 'The Girl in the White Dress'."

"Oh, yeah, I've heard of that…but what do you mean by 'he wrote it for you'."

"I mean, that it's about us, our story, how we met and fell in love and then…I don't know how it ends, I haven't read that far yet." And she quite honestly wasn't sure she wanted to.

"I just bought it on my nook right…now," Abby says distractedly but focuses back on the conversation as she continues, "Okay, so you miss him and you want to be with him again but does he feel the same way?"

"I-I don't know. I think so. He seemed happy to see me, he was quick to tell me that he was no longer married, and it didn't really take us that much time to hit it off again, not to mention dedicating an entire novel to me. I would say that maybe we have a chance but…then there's—"

"Danny," Abby says knowingly.

Olivia nods to herself and bites her lip anxiously. "How am I supposed to tell him he has a son that I kept hidden from him for over four years?"

"I don't know, Liv, but if you really want to be with him, the truth will have to come out one way or another, and rather sooner than later."

"I don't know if I can do this, Abby. I don't think I can handle him rejecting me for good."

"You and I both know that it'll hurt him and your chances of being together again even more if he finds out from you than on his own."

Olivia sighs, knowing this will be one of the hardest things she's ever done.

"One of my professors always used to say that the truth is like the sun. You can shut it out, but it's not going away. That's the same case here."

So, Fitz is Danny's father which was pretty obvious by a few clues I dropped and just plain speculation, but how will Liv break it to Fitz, especially if she wants to get back together with him? By the way, there may have been confusion about Danny's age so let me just clear that up. Danny is 4 years old but Liv told Fitz he was 3 to steer him from believing that he was their son since they slept together a little under 5 years ago and she wants him to believe that Danny was conceived a year after their encounter so that there's no way it could be his—but this will soon backfire on her, which you will see in due time. The whole scene in the past may have seemed a little random but it was to introduce Stephen and for other stuff that will come up later. So tell me your thoughts please. Thanks for reading!