Page 8 of Kissing Kayley
Does it make me a horrible person to say I did want to keep working? I’d earned my promotions and assignments due to my skills and seniority, not because I was dating the First Sister-in-Law. This was the golden ring I’d dreamed of grabbing throughout my entire career, and I didn’t want to quit now when I was still eligible to work. I also recognized that part of me hesitated to leave behind the only career I’d ever known, excellent pension or not.
We didn’t advertise our relationship and somehow managed to keep it out of the gossip columns. While my family knew I was seeing someone on an exclusive basis, I’d never told them who that person was. I mean, they knew her first name, but not her familial status as the only and little sister to the First Gentleman.
Not because I didn’t trust them, but because I didn’t want to create additional vulnerabilities. Besides, we weren’t public and weren’t married. If we reached that point, absolutely I planned to tell them the full story.
Until then, it was easier not to, even knowing my parents and most of my siblings would likely give me hell for keeping them in the dark so long.
I’d be lying if I said retiring to be with Kayley full-time worried me. Sure, I wished we could be together more often, but the times we spent together?
Magic.
That’s no bullshit exaggeration, either.
Yet I was more than self-aware enough to recognize that if I retired and we crashed and burned a few months in, I would hate myself.
During our initial time in Yellowstone we didn’t just fuck, we’d also talked. A lot.
I’d admitted to her that when it came to relationships I needed to be completely in charge in the bedroom and preferred to be in charge out of it as well, within reason.
For the scavenged time we pulled together, it worked.
But as the end of my career and making a decision about what I should do next converged with making a decision about my future with Kayley, it all morphed into a conversation I willfully avoided out of fear of what it would mean.
Tous.
Giving me what I wanted for a weekend was one thing, but I could not in good conscience ask her to turn her life completely upside down when she was an independent woman used to making her own decisions. We needed to test those waters to make sure neither of us would be miserable, and a weekend wouldn’t cut it.
Kayley’s fiftieth birthday landed during one of her teaching breaks, so I put in for three weeks of long overdue vacation time.
At least being in a relationship with an accomplished psychologist had its benefits, such as being able to have nuanced conversations with her about our relationship.
Once I sacked up to have them, that was.
I’d made reservations at an exclusive luxury resort near the coast in Washington State, south of Seattle, while Leo intervened with the head of her detail, allowing us to be alone.
No shadows discreetly following us.
No press hounding us, thanks to the resort’s stringent security to protect its rich and famous clientele.
Nobody but us with well-needed and long overdue time to have important conversations.
I mean, yes, there would be other agents there as well, purely as a precaution, but Kayley would never know they were there.
I met her that morning at a private airport forty miles east of the resort, where the two agents who’d accompanied her on the small, chartered jet Leo paid for handed her off to me.
I pulled her in for a long, deep kiss. Closing my eyes, for the first time in my life I dared to hope I might have something approaching a “normal” life with this woman.
Maybe.
I opened my eyes to find her smiling up at me. “What?” I asked.
“You know as well as I do this is make-or-break time,” she observed. “Yet here you stand, chill as ever.” Thankfully, she acted completely sober. She wasnota good flier and until we’d started dating, she’d dealt with it using Xanax and alcohol. But knowing she’d be flying frequently had prodded her—without me even asking—into working on that issue.
I think the fact that she made frequent jumps onMarine Oneplayed into that, too. Despite her grousing about Elliot, I knew she’d never do anything to make him look bad, even at her own discomfort.
Like learning how not to panic while flying.
I shrugged. “Lots of practice standing around looking chill.”
