They pulled into the parking lot. Max turned off the car, and they looked at each other.
Olivia smiled at him.
“I’m glad we’re doing this, too,” she said. Despite all her fears, she was.
Max took her hand as they got out of the car. Olivia tried to look straight ahead as they walked into the Hollywood Bowl, when all she wanted to do was to look around for the photographer in the crowd. But no, she was trying to look as natural as possible, so she just kept a smile on her face and her hand in Max’s and kept walking. The whole crowd was amped up tonight—it was mostly lots of women of all ages who seemed just as excited to see Dolly Parton as Olivia would have been if she weren’t vibrating with anxiety about everything else going on tonight.
They walked through the first level, up the stairs, and to the box seats, where Max waved her in front of him into their seats. As soon as she sat down, she let herself relax. No one would probably take a picture of them up there, right?
“So is this what it’s going to be like, then, going out in public with you?” Max asked under his breath. “Complete silence except for periodic sighs of relief?”
She realized she hadn’t said a word to him since they got out of the car, which was at least ten minutes ago.
“Give it some time, okay? I’m just trying to figure out how to do this.”
He touched her elbow with his.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I was just teasing you.” He stood up. “I think we both need a drink. Wine?”
She looked around for the first time—really looked, instead of surveying the crowd.
“Oh wow, we’re in the fancy seats, aren’t we?” She let herself grin. She found it sort of hilarious that her first time at the Hollywood Bowl was with a damn millionaire senator. “God yes, a glass of wine is exactly what I need. Rosé if they have it, whatever white they have if not. Normally I’d be a lot more picky than that, but tonight isn’t a night to be picky about the wine selection.”
While Max was gone, Olivia forced herself to relax. She just had to pretend that this was simply a fun outdoor concert on a beautiful night with her boyfriend, which, technically, it was. None of the rest of that stuff mattered.
“Glass of rosé for the lady, beer for me, and I couldn’t resist a cone of french fries. One for each of us.”
See, this is why she’d fallen in love with him. He not only got her french fries without her asking for them but had gotten one for each of them.
Damn it. Even french fries made her all gooey.
She took the fries in one hand and the rosé in the other as he sat down.
“Thanks. I needed this.” She smelled the hot, salty, greasy goodness of the fries and smiled.
He sat down next to her and took a sip of his beer. She took a sip of her wine. They each slowly ate their fries. She looked around the amphitheater, careful not to look right at Max.
He leaned in close to her.
“I’m so happy to be here with you right now, I hope you know that.” He looked straight at her. “I really hope you know that.”
Warmth spread through her body. She couldn’t quite trust herself to talk, so she just nodded.
“Good,” he said.
The lights onstage went up, and it seemed like every single one of the thousands of people there cheered wildly. Including both her and Max. And thank God for that—she was delighted Max was the kind of guy who would yell at a Dolly Parton concert before Dolly even came out onstage.
As soon as the opening act started, Olivia felt her whole body relax. She didn’t know if it was the music itself, or the way the whole crowd swayed back and forth as they listened, or the energy in the crowd, or Max’s hand in hers, but she felt calm and happy, and like she could—and would—conquer the world. And when Dolly finally came out onstage, there was an explosion of noise like Olivia wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced. Pure, loud, joyful screams and yells and cheers rang out and kept on ringing until Dolly started singing, and then they all shut up so they could hear her.
In the middle of “9 to 5,” Max took her hand. She turned to him and smiled so hard her face hurt.
“I love you,” he said in a low voice, but she could hear him as clear as if he’d shouted it from the stage.
“I love you, too,” she said.
Max was relieved as they walked back to the car. Olivia walked with the bounce back in her step, and didn’t seem as skittish or closed off as she had on their way in. Maybe they’d be able to have fun like this all summer—especially in August when Congress was in recess and he’d be back in California for five fantastic weeks.
“Olivia! Hey, Olivia!”
Max shook himself out of his daydreams when Olivia stopped. They both turned toward the direction of the shouts.
“Jamila! Hi!” Olivia greeted the woman walking toward them, but her whole body was tense again.
“Hey, I thought that was you!” the other woman said. “You look great, I love this dress.”
“Were you just at the concert?” Olivia asked. She shook her head in answer to her own question. “Of course you were just at the concert—did you have fun? Wasn’t it great?”
He’d never seen Olivia babble like this before. Was this how she got when she was nervous? She’d said she was fine, but he knew she wasn’t—at first she’d been stiff and silent, and now she couldn’t stop talking.
“Yeah, it was so fun, right? We got tickets last minute, otherwise I would have texted you to see if you wanted to come with us.” Jamila looked back and forth from Olivia to him and back again, and smirked slightly at Olivia. “Glad you made it anyway.”
Olivia glanced at him, and he could tell she was gearing herself up to introduce him. After a few too many seconds of silence, she turned back to Jamila.
“Oh, I’m sorry—Jamila, this is Max, Max, Jamila.”
First names only; that was a nice compromise.
He reached out to shake Jamila’s hand.
“Nice to meet you, Jamila,” he said.
She shook his hand.
“Nice to meet you, too . . .” She looked up at him, and recognition dawned over her face. He winked at her as her mouth gaped open.
“Um. Max. Nice to meet you, Max,” she said.
Jamila turned back to Olivia, her eyes still wide. He couldn’t see the look on Olivia’s face, but after a few seconds, Jamila smiled at her.
“We should probably get out of here; it’ll take forever to get home,” Jamila said. “And I have to find my friend, she was supposed to meet me out here, but . . .” She looked down at the phone gripped in her hand. “Oh, she says she’s already at the car, what the hell? Okay, I should run. See you on Wednesday, Olivia?”
Olivia nodded.
“I’ll be there,” Olivia said. “Maybe we can get dinner after?”
Jamila glanced back and forth from her to Max. Max tried to pretend he didn’t know exactly what was going on.
“Mmmm, definitely,” Jamila said.
Jamila dashed off into the crowd, and Olivia and Max walked off toward the car.
They didn’t say anything to each other until they were in the car and a block away from the stadium.
“So,” Max started.
Olivia burst out laughing, and then he did, and they laughed so hard he almost pulled over.
“No offense,” she said through gasps, “but that was one of the weirdest dates I’ve ever been on. The middle part was good, the part with Dolly Parton and holding hands and all of that. But the beginning and the end were very stressful! I thought dating a famous person was supposed to be glamorous!”
He poked her in the arm.
“Oh, you think you were stressed? You didn’t have to stand there and take it while your friend Jamila looked me over like I was a piece of meat and she was measuring me up to see if I was good enough for you. Or try not to react when she was looking straight at me and made that face when she suddenly realized who I was!”
Thank God there was
so much traffic that he didn’t really have to pay attention to the road, because when he thought about Jamila’s face at that moment, it set him off again.
Olivia reached for her phone, connected it to his car Bluetooth, and cranked up a Dolly Parton playlist.
“Thank God for Dolly,” she said. “See, she was the best part of the night.”
They spent the rest of the drive back to her house singing along with Dolly, and they could tell a bunch of the cars around them were doing the same thing.
They didn’t talk about any of the other events of the night until they got back to her house. He parked around the corner, and as they walked down the sidewalk, he reached for her hand. She hesitated, and looked around her quiet street before sliding her fingers through his.
“Sorry,” she said as they walked up to her door. “I guess I’m just not used to this yet. And still a little—or maybe a lot—paranoid.”
He shrugged.
“You have reason to be paranoid, don’t apologize. You notice that I’m still not parking in your driveway.”
She unlocked her front door and he followed her inside.
“I noticed.” She kicked her shoes off and walked into the kitchen. Max grinned and followed her. “I was terrified when Jamila saw us together. I felt like a teenager again, like I’d been caught. Then I remembered I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and also that Jamila is my friend, not my mom.”
Olivia turned to look at him and finally saw the box in his hands.
“What’s that?”
He looked down and pretended to be surprised.
“This? Oh God, I don’t know. What is this? I just saw it on the counter, what could it be?”
He flipped open the top and turned the box toward her.
“CAKE!” She stared at the cake then back up at him. “Is that for me?”
He grinned at her and opened the sides of the box so he could slide the cake out onto the counter.
“Who do you think it’s for? I got it this afternoon. I had a feeling tonight might be stressful—Dolly notwithstanding. I thought we both might need a pick-me-up afterward.” He picked up the cake cutter from where he’d left it on the counter, cut a fat slice, and slid it onto a plate.
“Yellow cake with chocolate frosting!” Olivia took a fork out of the drawer and took a big bite of the cake.
“Oh God. Oh God, this is just what I needed.”
She dropped the fork on the counter and wrapped her arms around him.
“I love you,” she said.
He tasted the sugar and butter and chocolate as he kissed her.
“I love you, too,” he said.
She stepped back and picked up the fork.
“And I really, really love yellow cake with chocolate frosting.”
He cut another slice and grabbed his own fork.
“So do I.”
Olivia woke up absurdly early the next morning to find Max standing over her.
“What’s wrong?” she said as she squinted up at him.
He bent down to kiss her.
“Nothing, I just have an early flight this morning back to DC, remember? I’m sorry I woke you up, but I have to go and I didn’t want to leave before saying good-bye.”
She sat up and kissed him again.
“I’m glad you woke me up.” She touched a finger to his cheek and brushed down his hair. “Have a good week. I’ll miss you.”
He kissed her hard on the lips, then stood up all the way.
“I’ll miss you so much. I’ll be in touch. About everything.”
He kissed her again and left. When she heard her front door open and close a few seconds later, she flopped back down on her bed with a long sigh.
She tried to drift back into sleep again, but even though it was just after six a.m. and she almost never woke up before seven thirty, she was wide awake. She missed Max’s warm, comfortable, soothing body next to her, and now all she could think about was the “everything” he’d meant. Maybe all hell had already broken loose and he hadn’t told her? No, Max would have told her, that wasn’t his style.
The problem was, this was a hell of a bigger deal to her than it was to Max. Max was already famous—this wasn’t going to change his life that much, maybe even at all. But it was going to change hers, at least somewhat. She just had no idea how much. Or what was going to happen next.
She threw back the covers with a sigh—there was no point in staying in bed and pretending she’d go back to sleep. She might as well drink some coffee and eat some leftover cake for breakfast.
Ten minutes later, she was back in her bedroom with a cup of very strong coffee and a big slice of cake. She took a sip of coffee and a bite of cake and smiled—the super chocolatey frosting cut through the bitterness of her coffee perfectly. She should definitely have cake for breakfast more often.
She reached for her phone and laughed out loud when she saw Jamila’s text, sent approximately one minute after they’d said good-bye last night:
THE MYSTERY MAN YOU ARE DATING IS MAX POWELL THE MAX POWELL WAS I JUST IMAGINING THINGS HOLY SHIT OLIVIA I NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING
Olivia laughed out loud again and took another big bite of cake. THE Max Powell indeed.
She shrugged. She had no choice here but to go all in, did she?
You free tonight? Come over for dinner. This is a story that has to be told over a bottle of wine—for me, not you—and also not in public
Jamila texted back a lot faster than Olivia thought she would this early in the morning.
Just tell me what time and I’m there
At 6:03 that night, Olivia finished making a cheese and charcuterie plate that even her sister would be proud of her for, and opened one of the bottles of wine she’d picked up along with the cheese. Thank God Jamila was one of those people who was always five to ten minutes late, which Olivia considered to be perfect timing. The worst people were the five-to-ten-minutes-early people—half the time she wasn’t even dressed ten minutes before someone was supposed to arrive at her house.
At exactly 6:10, the doorbell rang. Olivia swung open the door and handed Jamila a wineglass full of sparkling water.
“Come on in. I hope you’re hungry, I got us a ton of food.”
Jamila was smiling from ear to ear when she followed Olivia inside.
“Starving—I haven’t eaten since brunch, and that was at eleven. Brunch always throws me off for the rest of the day—it makes me want to eat again at like three, and then again at nine. But I refrained from doing so because I knew I was coming over here and why the hell am I still talking about brunch when all I care about is what the HELL IS GOING ON BETWEEN YOU AND SENATOR MAX POWELL?”
Olivia laughed as she poured herself a glass of wine.
“I was waiting for you to get there. Come into the living room so we can get comfortable; this story will take a while.”
They sat down on the couch, and Jamila looked at Olivia expectantly. Olivia took a sip of wine and started with that first night at the bar, giving her an edited version of the past few months.
“And that’s why I went up to the Bay Area a few weeks ago—yes, to see my sister, but also because Max was there instead of in L.A. that weekend, and we . . .”
Jamila put her hand to her heart.
“You didn’t want to go two weeks without seeing each other!” Olivia hadn’t planned to put it exactly that way, but it was the truth. She nodded. “Oh my God, that’s adorable!”
Olivia reached for more cheese as she absorbed that. She wasn’t used to being one half of an adorable couple. It didn’t feel like her—the Olivia who had worked her ass off for years and had kept relationships at bay, the Olivia who never took a plus-one to a wedding, the Olivia who rolled her eyes at a guy clearly trying to hit on her at a bar, the Olivia who men found intimidating, or too closed off, or too self-assured, the Olivia who had hardened herself against the world because of all that and refused to let herself hope. Was she still that Olivia?
Sh
e poured Jamila more sparkling water.
“Anyway, we decided we were tired of being a secret, so last night was our first semipublic night out.” She bit her lip. “It’ll be actually public soon—his chief of staff leaked it to a photographer that we’d be there, so pictures should pop up online of us any minute.”
Jamila opened her eyes wide.
“Wow, that’s a big deal. How are you feeling? About all of this, I mean. You looked kind of . . . shell-shocked last night.”
Yeah, that was a good description of how she’d felt.
“Last night was kind of overwhelming, to be honest. I did—I do—want to be public with him, I’m getting tired of sneaking around. But when we got to the Hollywood Bowl, and he wasn’t in any kind of disguise, and there were so many people there, and they all had their phones out . . .” She let out a deep breath. “I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. I’d relaxed a lot during the concert; Dolly Parton can make anyone feel better, I think, but then I saw you, and it all hit me again. Sorry if I looked like I was mad at you or something, that wasn’t it.”
Jamila shook her head.
“No, I get it. I’m sure this is all a lot.”
It sure was. It had all happened so fast, and Max had become such a fixture in her life so quickly that she hadn’t stopped to think about just how wild this whole thing was.
“It feels totally normal most of the time, when we’re together. But sometimes I’ll be flipping channels and hear my boyfriend’s voice, and it feels really fucking weird.” They both laughed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I really wanted to, but . . .”
Jamila brushed that aside.
“Of course you couldn’t tell me. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone until you give me specific clearance to do so.”
Olivia let out a deep breath.
“Thanks. I really appreciate you saying that. I have no idea what’s going to happen here—which is not a phrase I enjoy saying, trust me—but I just hope whatever happens, I can handle it.”
Jamila clinked her glass of sparkling water against Olivia’s glass of wine.
“I’ll toast to that, but then I’ve only known you for a few months, and I have full confidence that you can handle anything.”
Party of Two: The brilliant opposites-attract rom-com from the author of The Proposal! Page 19