Kara was right, she was so much smarter than him. How the hell had he managed to forget this? He and Wes had even had conversations about it—Wes was going to be at the fundraiser, too. But this would mean he’d spend the entire weekend away from L.A. Which would mean he would have two whole weeks away from Olivia.

“Shit. Yeah, now I remember.” What if he flew down to L.A. after the fundraiser on Saturday night, and then back to DC from there on Sunday afternoon? That was, if there was a flight late enough Saturday night from San Francisco to L.A., and if the fundraiser didn’t go too long for him to get on that flight, and if Olivia didn’t mind that he’d get to her house after midnight on a Saturday night and fly out again twelve hours later. But he couldn’t make a plan like that without telling his staff why he needed a twelve-hour detour to L.A.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Kara asked him.

He shook his head.

“Nothing’s wrong. I just completely forgot I wasn’t going to be in L.A. this weekend. I left my good pair of running shoes at my house, and I was looking forward to picking them up.”

He had left his good pair of running shoes at his house, but he almost always left them in L.A.

“Oh, we can get someone in the L.A. office to pick them up and send them to meet you in the Bay Area, that’s easy.”

He brushed that away.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m sure the L.A. staff has better things to do than pick up my shoes. I should just order another pair to leave here in DC anyway. Okay, what else do we need to talk about?”

They ran through the rest of his schedule for the week, but the whole time he could feel the emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t going to get to see Olivia this weekend. He pretended he was looking up something else and flipped through his calendar, and realized he’d seen her at least once a week for the past three months. He only wished it had been more.