26. Olivia #2
"I don't think I could get the time off," she said quietly. "I've been distracted for weeks, and I need to catch up. And I need to get this divorce started before anything else. Until it's done, I can't commit to anything."
"I understand." He didn't let go of her hand. "Don't worry too much about the grief Mark will give you. You'll have the best lawyer in the state on your side."
"I haven't called her yet." She looked at the table. "I know what you said about the money, but I still feel uncomfortable about it."
"Olivia." His voice took on a certain firmness, not harsh but completely sure.
"I told you I wouldn't let anything happen to you.
I'm not going to let Mark drag you through this.
You need to fight this, and you deserve to fight this.
You owe that to yourself." He held her gaze.
"The best way to do that is with the best attorney you can find.
And you've already found her. Decide and call her.
You'll feel better as soon as you talk to her. "
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded. "Okay. Let me think on it, please." He nodded and smiled.
The food arrived then—a parade of colors and textures that made her laugh despite herself. "I can't believe how much sushi appears every time you order."
"I find it addictive," he said, his eyes holding hers. "Just like you."
She squeezed his hand under the table and felt, briefly, like everything might actually be alright.
Outside, the night air was thick and warm. Olivia looked at the waiting SUV, then at Nicholas.
"Instead of going back to the suite," she said, her voice small, "can we go to my apartment? I don't want to sleep there alone for the first time. I'd feel better with you."
He didn't hesitate. "Your apartment it is."
They stopped at the hotel first so he could grab his things for the morning, then Jim and Dan dropped them at her building and rolled down the window.
"We'll be around," Jim said. "Call when you need us."
"Go have dinner," Nicholas told them. "Relax. I'll call when I need you."
Inside, they changed into comfortable clothes. Olivia moved through the rooms—adjusting a pillow, straightening a lamp—making the space feel like hers rather than a place she'd just arrived in. Nicholas watched her from the couch.
When she finally settled beside him, he said, "TV, or bed?"
"TV for a bit," she said. "Come sit with me."
They sat close, and the somber mood that had followed them all evening settled quietly over the room. Tomorrow morning was coming, and distance was coming with it. Neither of them said it out loud. They just let it move between them in the dark, like cold water rising.
When the movie ended, they went to the bedroom. Clothes came off in the dim light and fell in a heap on the ottoman. They slid under the sheets, and Nicholas pulled her against his chest, his arms a solid weight around her.
"Hey," he said quietly. "It's going to be okay."
She looked up at him. The tears she'd been holding back all night finally let go.
"Nicholas, I don't know what happened, but I feel like my heart is being ripped out." Saying it out loud made her feel exposed. "I know it sounds crazy, but I don't want to lose you. I feel like when you leave in the morning, whatever we had will just become nothing more than a memory."
He held her tighter. He didn't offer her empty comfort. He gave her the truth instead.
"Olivia, I don't have all the answers. I know what I feel when I'm with you. I know how empty I feel when I’m not.
The passion has been incredible. But I have to leave, and I'm only a phone call away.
Don't make this harder than it has to be.
" He paused, his voice dropping lower. "I love your body next to me, and you know you drive me crazy.
But I could hold you like this all night, and it would be enough.
I can't explain that to myself, let alone to you. "
She took a ragged breath. She looked at this man—this man who had walked into her nightmare and turned it into something else entirely. She didn't want his pity. She wanted him. All of him.
She wiped her eyes. A bit of the old Olivia returned to her expression, something dry, warm, and entirely her own.
"I love you, Nicholas. But if you think you're going to hold me all night without making me explode multiple times, you're out of your mind."
The tension snapped.
They both laughed, loud and genuine, the sound filling the quiet apartment and pushing the sadness aside for a moment.
Then he kissed her, and the night opened up around them.
It was different this time. She felt it right away, in the way his hands moved with purpose, as if he was trying to memorize her. It wasn't just desire. It was something more careful, more tender, like a man finally stepping into a place he'd been waiting to enter for weeks.
He took his time with her, slow and thorough and completely present. She came apart for him more than once, each time feeling more seen than before. By 3 AM, they were spent and heavy-limbed, and she fell asleep tangled around him, holding on as if that could keep the morning away.
It couldn't.
At nine, the sun came hard through the windows of her new apartment, and Nicholas's phone chimed.
She was already awake. She'd been awake for a while, watching him sleep, trying to store the details.
He reached for her before he reached for the phone. She pressed her face into his neck and breathed in his scent, which held traces of last night and everything the past week had meant.
"I don't want you to leave," she whispered.
"I know," he said, his chest warm against her face. "I don't want to leave either. But I have to get ready."
A tear slid down her cheek before she could catch it. Then another followed. Nicholas cupped her face gently and kissed them away, unhurried and deliberate with each one.
"I'll call you tonight," he said.
He got up. Gathered his clothes from the ottoman. Pulled on his shirt and then his jeans with the quiet efficiency of a man reconstructing himself for the world outside this room. She watched him from under the covers and felt the sheets go cold in the space where his body had been.
At the door, he stopped.
He came back. He leaned over her and kissed her one last time, soft and slow, letting it last just long enough to feel like a promise instead of a goodbye.
"I'll miss you too," he said.
Then he was gone.
The door closed.
The sound of the door closing moved through the apartment like something final. The silence that followed was enormous—not the comfortable quiet of the night before, but the kind that fills a space after something important has happened, leaving only its echo.
Olivia stopped pretending to be strong.
The tears came, all at once—grief, relief, and raw fear arriving together without warning. She cried until she was empty. Then she lay in the quiet of her new apartment, in the life she had chosen, and let the morning come.
Somewhere underneath the heartbreak, underneath the specific ache of watching him walk out a door she couldn't follow him through, she found something she hadn't expected.
Solid ground.
Nicholas had shown her who she was. Not given it to her—shown her.
The strength, the clarity, the woman who had walked out of her own front door with two suitcases and hadn't looked back.
The woman who had told Mark, calmly and without flinching, that she was done.
That woman had always been in there. Nicholas had simply refused to look away until she could see it too.
She would survive this. She knew that now with a certainty that had nothing to do with Nicholas and everything to do with what he'd helped her find.
But oh—how she wanted to survive it with him.