Even Lovers Drown CH 15

Sitting alone in the shadows of the Oval Office, Fitz leaned forward to set the phone down carefully. Those moments of calm he had just experienced fled beyond his ability to call it back.

He fumbled with the receiver briefly, nearly blinded by the hurt and pain rising back up to churn painfully inside him. The sound of her voice had done this to him. He tried to summon back his righteous anger towards her. He had every right to it after what she’d done.

So he reached for it. He tried and failed. The pain won.

Fitz drew in a deep breath as he leaned back into his chair and let it out in a shuddering exhale. What had he been thinking?

That was the problem - he hadn’t been thinking at all. Fitz had been lost, just as lost inside as the day Cyrus had sent him running down the campaign headquarter’s hall to keep Olivia Pope from resigning - right after he’d tried to fire her.

With good reason, she’d laid into him with sharp words. He heard every one of them. But beyond hearing her words, something else happened to him.

Looking down into those beautiful, lushly lashed brown eyes, Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III fell in love for the first and last time in his life.

And it was only because of her did Fitz begin to see how truly dead his marriage had been for years. They fit together - as they were meant to be. After all, Big Jerry, his father, had approved. Mellie had had class, she had breeding and came from old money. As an added bonus, she had been raised to be the perfect political wife - always perfectly groomed, in public always the devoted wife and mother - never mind that most of that was a sham.

That had bothered him in the first years of their marriage. But it wasn’t like he’d been raised to expect any sort of grand love affair in the first place. Not with a man like his father to show him what was what. Reality was a whole different animal than from what was put out there concerning love.

It might work in the movies and in romance novels, but they were fiction, and his life was anything but.

He and Mellie, well, they were real life. Each of them could provide what the other one needed. Stability, the picture of a good marriage - two kids and the white picket fence. Their goals were the same - a rise in political circles, the desire for political power. And for years, he had told himself that these things were enough.

He had also told himself that compared to some of the horror stories he had either heard about or witnessed, he actually had it pretty good. Plenty of people were actually envious of what they saw in the Grants. But they never were able to see past the facade. Their act had gotten so good that everyone believed the fairytale.

Their act had gotten so good that he thought sometimes he even believed it.

He and Mellie had become experts in hiding the truth. The truth was that whatever newly rooted connection they had had in the very beginning had withered quickly and died. Sacrificed on the altar of political necessity.

Over the years Fitz had come to realize that Mellie had been too young to realize that she’d agreed to forfeit her own needs and desires for his and began to resent him - and he, in turn, began to resent her - without either one of them quite knowing why.

And then Olivia Pope had entered his life one day with all the force of a hurricane and blew away the blinders he’d put on his life.

His attraction to her went so far beyond simple physical desire that it had terrified him at first. Her intellect, the power of her spirit - her inner strength along with her undeniable feminity had overwhelmed him. He had lost the war for his heart before he could find any defense against it. The first shot fired had disintegrated any defense his heart and mind might have made.

“You’re right - I would be lucky to have you.” He’d blurted it out without thinking, but he’d meant every word of it, in every sense of the word.

And Olivia had heard every word of it, in every sense of the word. Fitz could see in his mind’s eye how she’d gone very still; eyes and lips parting in wonder.

Still, she tried to deny it for as long as she could. He tried to deny it for as long as he could.

“I can’t...”

“I don’t want you to...”

“Just stand here with me for one minute...”

“One minute...”

She could have told him no and walked away. But she didn’t. Instead Olivia Pope had stood there, returning his gaze. It was all in her eyes; without saying a word, she admitted to knowing every word he could not bring himself to say. And still, she didn’t cut and run. In that one minute Fitz saw with a clarity he’d never forgotten - sure with everything in him - that she knew.

He remembered his heart singing. She felt what he felt - and it wasn’t his imagination or his libido working overtime. Only then did he see what he’d been missing all the years of his life. Only then did he see what could have been in his life.

Instead, he had Mellie - who promptly went on to remind him just who it was he had married. Without telling him, she presented herself as a lie for their campaign, telling the lie of a miscarriage that had never happened in front of television cameras and a live audience. Leaving him no choice but to join her in the lie or watch it all come tumbling down.

Neither was their time for a confrontation; Mellie was an instant hit and she’d been offered several speaking engagements on her own merits. She’d made it clear years ago that after it was “his” turn, she intended to have a political career all her own. So off she went, smiling happily at what she had accomplished, not thinking for one second about what her lies might have done to him.

Leaving Olivia to offer comfort. She had that night, come to sit with him as their bus sped along the darkened highways. Thinking he was hurting from a painful memory, she came to help. He could feel her emotions as she grieved for his unborn child and then as she grieved for him when he had told her that Mellie’s words had been a lie.

“How did I get here?”  He had never realized until that very moment, how much of a lie his life really was. “Why didn’t I meet you sooner?”

Somehow he knew that his heart was safe with her and that allowed him to open it to her, to say the words he’d only dared to dream of.

In the end, when her fingers slipped down between his own, that was the beginning of everything. They’d made love that night; it was more than flesh calling to flesh - it was mind to mind, heart to heart; in truth it was soul to soul.

It was everything in him. It was everything the fairy tale romances had said it was. And everything he thought that could never be was suddenly right in front of him - just beyond his grasp. For the first time in his life he’d found heaven in a woman’s arms and his life had never been the same since.

How did they get from there to here?

He knew the answer. He couldn’t bear the thought of it; the utter betrayal of all that was in him, contained in a single word.

Defiance.

As the pain grew almost too much to bear, Fitz’s anguish threatened to spill over the dam of his defenses. He reached for the glass of scotch and gulped it down, hoping to deaden the pain before it took ahold of him first.

He set his elbows on his desk and let his head sink into his hands. Fitz struggled to get back the memory of peace that he’d just held to him. All of that was just from the sound of her breathing.

He held himself very, very still. From somewhere deep inside him, Fitz searched for and finally found the last few threads of those moments, wrapping them around him like a warm blanket in the middle of a cold, cold night.

For those few minutes, it hadn’t mattered why he had called her. That was a thought for another day - or night. All Fitz knew was that there had been peace.

He hadn’t expected that when he’d made the call. Fitz hadn’t even known what to expect when he’d dialed her number. He almost hadn’t dialed the number at all.

All he knew now was that the familiar ache in his chest; the burning of eyes that could not cry and the searing wound in his soul that would never heal had withdrawn for a little while.

All of it would be back tomorrow; the pain and the anger - Fitz had no doubt of that. But for tonight, for right now, all he’d heard was the sound of her breathing; his breathing.

In sync.

But tomorrow, he wouldn’t think about it.