All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

104 Chapters

THE DINNER HE ALMOST REFUSED

Daniel's POVSloane Whitfield had been making the same suggestion in different clothes for three weeks.The first time it was coffee to discuss the Meridian projections. The second time it was a working lunch to align on the Q4 strategy. Today it was dinner. Each iteration arrived wrapped in professional language and reasonable justification and each one carried underneath it the same meaning that Sloane had never been subtle enough to fully conceal from someone who had spent two years learning to read the thing beneath the thing.She came into my office at half past eleven with the Meridian file and a smile that had decided today was the day."The Meridian dinner would be more productive with just the two of us Daniel," she said. She set the file on my desk and stood at the angle she always stood. Calculated. Deliberate. Close enough to be noticed.I looked at the file."Monday meeting covers it Sloane," I said."The full board doesn't need to be involved at this stage. A smaller con

THE WARNING

Daniel's POVMarcus Reed sat across from me with his hands resting on his knees and his expression professionally composed and I looked at him for a moment before I spoke.He was a good man.I had known that before today. I had known it in the abstract way you know things about people who work well and cause no problems and exist competently in the peripheral vision of your professional life. Marcus Reed was reliable. His numbers were consistently strong. His team respected him. He had been with Cole Enterprises for four years without a single performance concern.He was also sitting in my office because twenty minutes ago he had been leaning against Aria Blackwood's desk making her laugh in a way I had watched from a window above and felt in a place that had nothing to do with professional oversight.I was clear with myself about that.I opened the Q3 file on my desk."Your Q3 numbers are down Reed," I said.He did not flinch. I gave him credit for that. He absorbed the opening the w

THE LATE NIGHT

Aria's POVThe crisis arrived at four fifty seven on a Thursday afternoon in the form of a single email from the Singapore team that caused Daniel to go very still at his desk in a way I had learned to read as serious before the words had finished loading on my own screen.I read them.Then I understood the stillness.The Meridian contract had a clause that nobody had caught. A deadline buried in the supplementary documentation that expired at midnight tonight and if it expired unsigned the entire eighteen month negotiation collapsed with it. Legal was already involved. The Singapore team was on a call. And Daniel was standing at the glass wall of his office looking at the floor with the focused cold clarity of a man who had been in worse situations than this and had rebuilt from worse than this and was already three steps into solving it before most people would have finished panicking.I was already pulling the relevant files before he opened his door."Miss Blackwood.""Already hav

FIRST NAME

Aria's POVI did not sleep well.This was becoming a pattern I had no solution for. The ceiling of my apartment had seen more of me in the past two weeks than it had in the eight months before them combined and I was beginning to suspect that sleep and the 34th floor of Cole Enterprises had entered into some kind of arrangement where one could not fully coexist with the other.I arrived at work at seven forty five.The floor was quiet at this hour. The kind of quiet that belonged to the building itself before the day filled it with the noise of people doing important things. I liked this hour. The coffee machine. The morning light coming through the east windows at an angle that made the grey office look almost warm. The particular peace of a space that had not yet become what it was going to be today.I sat down at my desk.And I saw it.A folded piece of paper sitting precisely in the center of my desk where nothing had been when I left last night. White. Small. Folded once. My name

HE ASKS ABOUT HER LIFE

Daniel's POVThe document review ran late.This was not unusual. The Henderson amendment had more layers than it had any right to have for a contract of its size and I had learned through two rounds of legal revisions that reading it quickly was the same as not reading it at all. I had asked Aria to stay. Not because I needed her to. Because the alternative was asking her to leave and I had noticed recently that asking her to leave had begun to require a specific kind of effort that asking her to stay did not.I had noticed a great many things recently.The floor had emptied by seven. The cleaning staff had come and gone quietly. The building had settled into its after hours version of itself and the desk lamp between us cast its warm circle over the papers and the two coffee cups and the particular atmosphere that only existed on this floor after dark.She was reading through the third clause of the amendment with her reading glasses on and her pen moving occasionally in the margin a

THE ALMOST MOMENT

Aria's POVThe Henderson final draft came through from legal at half past two on a Friday afternoon.I printed it. Checked it against the amendment notes. Found one formatting error on the third page that legal had missed and corrected it before printing again because Daniel Cole did not receive documents with errors on the third page. Not on my watch. Not on any page.I gathered the pages and stood up.His office door was open which meant he was not on a call and not in a meeting and was available for interruption of the professional variety. I had learned to read the door like a language in eight months. Open fully meant available. Open halfway meant available but focused. Closed meant do not unless the building is on fire or Singapore is calling.Today it was open fully.I knocked twice on the frame out of habit and stepped inside.He was at the window.This was not unusual. Daniel spent more time at that window than anywhere else in the office except his desk and I had come to und

WHAT MARCUS KNOWS

Aria's POVThe break room at lunch on a Friday had a different energy from the rest of the week.Looser. Warmer. The particular collective exhale of people who had made it through another five days and were allowing themselves to believe the weekend was real and close and actually coming. Conversations ran longer. Laughter arrived more easily. The professional surface thinned just enough for the actual people underneath to show through.I sat at the corner table with my lunch and my thoughts and tried to be present in the room instead of three floors above it in a glass office standing at a window with my heart completely beyond my control.I was not entirely succeeding.The Henderson draft was still on my desk where I had set it when I came back from his office. He had finished his call by the time I left for lunch and I had not gone back in. I had not trusted myself to go back in. The professional version of me that was supposed to live full time on the 34th floor had been operating

SLOANE TURNS DANGEROUS

Aria's POVI had been back from lunch for eleven minutes when Becca appeared at my desk.She did not bring coffee this time. She did not bring the usual warm conspiratorial energy she carried when she had something interesting to share. She came with her hands empty and her expression carrying the particular careful weight of someone who had information they did not want to deliver but had decided you needed to have.I looked up from my screen."Sit down," she said quietly."I'm working Becca.""Aria." She said my name the way she said it when she needed me to stop what I was doing and pay full attention. Low. Serious. The voice she reserved for things that could not be handled from behind a laptop screen. "Please sit down."I was already sitting. I think she meant stop moving internally. Stop the professional forward momentum and be still for a moment because what she was about to say required stillness to land correctly.I put my pen down."People are talking," she said."People alw

SHE SEES THE SCAR

Daniel's POVThe floor had been empty for two hours.I had noticed the emptying the way I always noticed it. Not with relief exactly. With the particular settling that happened when the performance requirements of the day reduced themselves to just the work and the person across the desk and the honest quiet of a building after hours that did not require anything from you except presence.Aria was across the desk.She had been here since seven this morning. I had watched her work through the day with the consistency that had defined every day she had been on this floor. Focused. Thorough. Moving through the afternoon's crisis and the Sloane situation and the Henderson revisions and the Singapore correspondence without losing her composure once.She had walked into my office that afternoon and told me about the rumor with a steady voice and a straight back and eyes that were angry and clear and not asking me to fix it so much as informing me that she expected me to.I had fixed it.I w

THE FIRST REAL SMILE

Aria's POVThe fire alarm went off at eleven forty three on a Tuesday morning with the particular aggressive certainty of a system that had decided whatever was happening on every floor of Cole Enterprises was significantly less important than what it had to say.I was mid sentence in an email to the Singapore team.I saved it. Closed my laptop. Reached for my coat because eleven forty three in November meant the outside temperature had opinions about people who left buildings without adequate preparation. Then I stood and looked toward Daniel's office.He was already at his door.He had his jacket on and his phone in his hand and the expression of a man who had been interrupted in the middle of something that mattered and was containing his feelings about that with the iron professional composure he brought to everything including apparently unscheduled evacuations of his own building."Miss Blackwood," he said."Already logging off sir," I said.We joined the stream of people moving

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