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Lahat ng Kabanata ng LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

149 Kabanata

THE WAITING GAME

Aria's POVEight months.Eight months of walking through these glass doors every morning telling myself the same lie. That today would be different. That today I would stop feeling what I had been feeling since the very first morning Daniel Cole walked past my desk without looking at me and somehow still managed to take up every single thought I had for the rest of that day.I was still telling myself that lie.I set my bag down at my desk and smoothed my skirt before pulling up the morning schedule. The 34th floor of Cole Enterprises was already alive with the quiet focused energy that I had grown to love. Keyboards clicking. Phones humming. The smell of fresh coffee threading through the cool conditioned air. I loved this place. I loved this job. I was also painfully aware that loving this job and loving the man who owned this building were two very different things and I had somehow managed to confuse them completely.I opened his calendar.Board debrief. Singapore call. Meridian

THE CRIME OF BEING HANDSOME

Daniel's POVI arrived at Cole Enterprises at exactly 10AM.Not because I was late. I was never late. The CEO. But because I had spent the first two hours of my morning in a meeting across town that could have been an email and I had sat through every unnecessary minute of it with the particular patience of a man who had learned that controlling his expression was sometimes the most powerful thing in the room.I stepped off the elevator onto the 34th floor and the floor responded the way it always did. Backs straightened. Conversations dropped to appropriate volumes. Eyes found suddenly urgent things to focus on. I had grown used to this. The way a room rearranged itself around my arrival. The way people became their most professional selves the moment they heard my footsteps in the hallway.I did not find it flattering anymore.I found it efficient.I walked toward my office with my jacket folded over one arm and my phone in my hand, scanning the overnight messages from the Singapore

NOT IN FRONT OF EVERYONE

Aria's POVThe break room at noon was always the loudest part of the day.Laughter spilling over lunch containers. Conversations overlapping. The smell of heated food mixing with fresh coffee and the particular energy of people who had been holding their professional faces in place since morning and were finally allowed to exhale. I usually loved this part of the day. The few minutes where the 34th floor stopped being a machine and remembered it was made of human beings.Today I walked into that noise and felt nothing but the dull familiar ache that had been sitting in my chest since morning.I had thought about what happened at my desk all day. The way I had stood in front of Daniel Cole and forgotten every word in the English language. The way he had looked at me in that moment with those dark focused eyes that missed absolutely nothing and I had felt completely and terrifyingly exposed. Like every feeling I had spent eight months carefully folding and hiding behind professionalism

THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH

Daniel's POVThe question left my mouth before I had fully decided to ask it.I was not a man who spoke before thinking. Every word I had ever used in a boardroom, in a negotiation, in any room that mattered had been measured and deliberate and chosen with the precision of someone who understood that words were not just sounds. They were commitments. They were revelations. They were the kind of thing that once released could not be recalled no matter how badly you needed them back.And yet I had just asked Blackwood if she loved another man.In my own office.With the door closed.I stood behind my desk and kept my face completely still the way I had trained myself to do in every situation that threatened to show me for what I actually was underneath all of this. Composed. Unreachable. The man who had rebuilt himself from nothing and made sure the foundation this time was concrete instead of trust.But my heart was not behaving like concrete right now.My heart was doing something I h

HE HAD ALREADY DECIDES

Daniel's POVShe had been gone for exactly four minutes when I stopped pretending to read the Meridian file.I pushed it aside and stood and walked to the window the way I always did when something needed thinking through that my desk could not contain. The city stretched below me in its usual indifferent vastness. Glass buildings catching afternoon light. Traffic moving in patterns that made sense from up here even when they felt like chaos from the middle of them. I had stood at this window a hundred times and found the view clarifying.Today it gave me nothing.Because the thing I was thinking about had nothing to do with the city or the contracts or the forty seven unread emails sitting in my inbox demanding the kind of focused attention that I was completely incapable of giving right now.I was thinking about Aria Blackwood walking out of my office.The way she had stood there and asked me quietly if everything was okay with a voice that carried something underneath the professio

THE MORNING AFTER

Aria's POVI did not sleep well.I had told myself I would. I had gone through the whole routine deliberately. Tea. Book. Lights off at ten. All the things a sensible woman does when she needs to reset her mind and approach the next morning like a professional with her feelings completely under control.I stared at my ceiling until past midnight instead.The problem was not the two minutes in his office. The problem was not the question he had asked or the answer I had given. The problem was what happened after. The way he had said *it's okay Aria* like those three words were carrying something heavier than their surface. Like a man lifting something carefully because he knows it might break if he puts it down wrong.I had replayed those three words approximately forty seven times before I finally fell asleep.....I arrived at Cole Enterprises at eight fifteen the next morning with my portfolio pressed against my chest and a very firm internal speech already prepared about professiona

PATIENT MAN

Aria's POVThe break room at noon was the one place on the 34th floor where the building's carefully maintained professionalism loosened slightly around the edges. Conversations got louder. Shoulders dropped. People remembered they were human beings and not just extensions of their job titles for approximately forty five minutes before everything tightened back up again.I usually loved this part of the day.Today I carried my lunch to the corner table by the window and sat down with the specific intention of eating quietly and thinking about absolutely nothing and giving my overworked mind the kind of rest it had been refusing since yesterday morning when Daniel Cole set a cup of coffee on my desk and said same as yours like it was a simple unremarkable thing.It was not a simple unremarkable thing.I had thought about it through the rest of yesterday. Through the drive home. Through the ceiling staring that had replaced actual sleep. Through this morning's commute and the elevator ri

HE SAID HER NAME

Daniel's POVI had a rule about names.Not a written rule. Not something I had ever said out loud to anyone. Just a quiet internal boundary that I had maintained without exception for two years. I called people by their titles. Miss. Mr. Reed. The Singaporean investors by their surnames. My lawyer by his last name even after six years of working together. Names were personal. Personal was dangerous. I had learned that lesson at a cost I was still occasionally calculating.Miss Blackwood had been Miss Blackwood for eight months.It was a perfectly functional arrangement.I called her in at half past two for the afternoon schedule review. This was routine. She came through the door with her tablet and her composed professional bearing and stood at the appropriate distance from my desk and went through the afternoon with the quiet efficiency that I had come to rely on in the particular way you rely on things you have stopped consciously noticing because they have simply become part of how

THE DRIVE

Daniel's POVI had told her to go home.Not in those words exactly. I had cleared her schedule at half past three and added a note in the system that her afternoon tasks were complete and she was free to leave at four. It was not something I had done before. It was not something I had planned to do. I had simply looked up from the Henderson file at three twenty and seen her through the glass wall of my office working through what I knew was her third consecutive ten hour day and something in me had made a quiet unilateral decision before my professional judgement had the opportunity to review it.That had been happening more frequently lately.It was now six fifteen and she was still at her desk.I stood at my office door for a moment and looked at her. She was not working frantically. She was not the kind of person who performed busyness for an audience. She was simply sitting with her laptop open and her reading glasses on and a half finished bottle of water beside her keyboard worki

SLOANE WATCHES

Aria's POVI arrived at work the next morning having made myself a promise.It was a simple promise. Practical. The kind a sensible woman makes when she has spent an entire evening sitting on her bed in her coat replaying two syllables over and over in her mind like they contained some kind of answer she had not yet fully decoded.The promise was this. Whatever was happening on the 34th floor of Cole Enterprises between me and the man who owned it was going to stay exactly where it was. In the quiet spaces. In the silences. In the back seat of a car and the almost moments and the name said once in the dark like something released rather than spoken. It was going to stay there and I was going to come to work and do my job and be the person I had always been in this building.Professional. Steady. Completely in control of every feeling that did not belong in this office.I believed that promise sincerely for approximately the first hour.Then Sloane Whitfield appeared at my desk.Sloane

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