"Ahh Liv, there you are. You've really got to look at what they have me wearing at the Town Hall tonight. I really think it's too much," Mellie rambled the moment she appeared in the hallway. As soon as their eye contact broke, Fitz could almost feel the tenuous connection between himself and Olivia snap. Instantly sliding back into professional mode with a quickness that should've impressed him, she headed indoors, leaving him frowning at the space she had been occupying. The look Mellie threw him was loaded, but he barely noticed.

He turned and thanked the wall silently for its support as his back pressed against it. The sigh slid out of his mouth thoughtlessly and for a moment, he closed his eyes. He could almost pretend that she was still here. Her scent, strong yet feminine, nothing obvious or common, lingered in the air and he could still see the way she had looked at himself as he had attempted to explain, attempted to make her understand the jumble of thoughts, desires, wants, needs swirling inside of his mind. How could she comprehend what he was going through when he himself wasn't sure of what it was. He'd never before felt something so…overwhelming before. He felt something inside of himself shifting, some distant feeling unearthed as her eyes had looked back up at him, open, vulnerable, honest.

Inhaling slowly, he closed his eyes for a moment and straightened, shaking himself mentally before heading back into the office, telling himself that he could focus on the campaign even as his eyes scanned the room for her, seeing her in the corner talking to Mellie and her assistant.

Olivia knew from the heat moving up over the back of her neck that he had returned to the room, knew without looking that he would be staring at her. She had felt him watching her more than a few times, but this time, everything felt different. Why had she let him tug her into the hallway, she thought, reprimanding herself silently as Mellie and her assistant chatted away about the appropriate outfit for the night. As his wife and his wife's assistant discussed wardrobe choices. She firmly glued the smile back onto her face and pointed to the dress and cardigan option that she knew Republican women were most likely to identify with.

"They love cardigans. With the medium length of pearls. It'll be perfect for a town hall, understated yet elegant."

"Oh Liv, you always know exactly how to deal with any crisis, even something as silly as this one," Mellie replied, her expected giggle sounding out before Olivia heard her name being called by another group in the office. Smoothly, she moved over to them and forced herself to focus on work, since there seemed to be logistics problems galore over the town hall later that night. She loved this, pushing everything aside and using her tunnel-vision to ensure that everything would be perfect for Governor Grant.

Governor Grant. The man she was going to help get elected to the highest office in the country. Governor Grant, who had stood on the other side of the door and looked at her with eyes the most ridiculous shade of blue. Olivia Pope was not the sort of woman who waxed poetic about the color of someone's irises, it was simple genetics. But she knew that she would remember the exact shade of them, light, clear, the exact way they had looked at her in that one minute. Things were changing inside of her too quickly for comfort, but she hadn't turned away from it, when he had been standing there in front of her. When the smell of his soap and aftershave invaded her senses, when she could feel the brush of his button-up shirt against the t-shirt she wore, the t-shirt with his name on it, when his face was so close to hers that his breath was a palpable caress against her skin. Turning away from him in that moment would've been a blatant lie, but more, she would've been turning away from herself.

She had tried to convince herself every day since the first that the moment they had shared, in yet another hallway in yet another strange town, had been some fluke. She had tried it again after the inching towards one another in an empty elevator, denying the nearly magnetic pull between them as they moved closer and closer. But even as she threw herself into her work, she knew that the window for denying him and protecting herself was getting smaller by the minute.

The day wound on, the office a flurry of activity and common tasks. Finally, the staff and interns began to leave for the town-hall meeting, with only a few tech aficionados remaining to keep their eyes on polling data, half the lights turned off except for their corner of the room. She was tempted to stay here, in this quiet place, where there was no potent threat to her emotional safety.

Fitz was nervous. He knew it was only a town-hall meeting, but it was a crucial moment in the campaign. Despite the hours of prep, he felt all the anxiety rushing inside of him. However much he harped at Mellie, he wanted this. He wanted to win. He wanted to make something more of his life than just being a governor. He wanted more.

He was attempting to collect his thoughts and make sense of them when he heard Cyrus ordering an intern to get Olivia when excused him and headed toward the office. And when he had opened the door, simply looking at the familiar fall of her hair along her shoulder, at the straight line of her spine, he knew that whatever this was, whatever was inside of him wasn't going to disappear.

He watched her for a few more seconds before she turned, and looked at him. Even here, in the half-light of evening, he could read her expression. He could see the surprise in her eyes, the uncertainty in them. He was sure that it was an incredibly rare thing for Olivia Pope to be unsure of anything in life. No, Olivia Pope was a woman who lived in certain terms that she controlled. Yet, here they were.

He simply cocked his head towards the door and she nodded, the exchange imperceptible to anyone but them. As she pulled her bag onto her shoulder and moved closer and closer, he couldn't stop looking at her. Finally, when she stood directly in front of him, and gingerly touched her delicate fingers to his lapel, meeting his eyes with a reassuring smile.

"Ready, Governor?"

"Yes," he replied. And there it was, the instant click. The single change of her beside him, offering him a smile, made everything inside him settle. He was no longer nervous or unsure. And that was it, he realized. A moment with her, here, was all he needed. As long as he had one minute with her, he could survive the other fifty nine.