Sit Still, Look Pretty
by: Daya
"Olivia Pope: are you the president's mistress?"
Olivia felt her chest tightening at the shouted question. Her breathing quickened, face flushed, as several reporters stood about. Photos were snapped and more questions were asked all in the time she was trying to think of an answer to give.
"I –" She stopped herself. 'No comment' was the wrong way to go in this situation. Someone would latch onto that phrase and before she made it home, it would be all over the news that she was Fiz's mistress.
And Olivia wasn't so sure that was something she wanted.
For a brief, terrifying second, life with the whole world knowing her relationship with Fitz flashed before her eyes. All the functions, assuming Fitz followed through with his promise to divorce Mellie, she would have to attend. The amount of times she would, undoubtedly, be asked who she was wearing. The tabloid headlines any time she made a fashion faux pas. Or said something that was taken entirely out of contact.
It really wasn't hard to imagine life with Fitz…if Olivia merely replaced Mellie.
"You should really double down on those sources, Brad." Olivia curled one side of her lip upward in a sneer as she addressed the nearest reporter - the one who had first uttered that asinine question. She grasped the strap of her bag a bit tighter in her hand and maneuvered around the ever growing crowd.
She wasn't able to breathe properly until she was safely in her car, windows tightly shut and doors locked. She placed as much distance between herself and those reporters as she could, as quickly as she could in the middle of a weekday in the Capitol. In an alley behind OPA, she parked -
and screamed.
Tears falling, she hit her hand against the leather steering wheel, curses dying on her lips. She had been unprepared and, for Olivia Pope, unprepared was essentially failing. Being blindsided with questions about her own life…it was unacceptable.
Taking a deep breath, drying her tears, she steeled herself as she prepared to leave her car. She didn't know who the source had been, but it was someone close to her or Fitz. Or both. Someone with real information who could do some real damage if she let them.
With the help of OPA, she had no intention of letting them.