All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

104 Chapters

THE CONFESSION THAT WASN'T

Daniel's POVI had been thinking about the phone call since yesterday.Not constantly. I was not a man who allowed one thing to occupy the entirety of his attention when there were other things requiring it. I had the Singapore final documentation. The Henderson amendment sign off. The quarterly presentation that needed my review before the board meeting on Monday. I had a full professional day arranged in front of me and I moved through it with the same focused efficiency I brought to every full professional day.But underneath all of it.The phone call.A single vibration on a November pavement during a fire drill. A name on a screen that I had not seen in two years. No message. Just the name. Just the fact of it existing in my phone after two years of silence like something that had been waiting patiently in the dark for the right moment to remind me it was still there.I had not answered.I had put the phone in my pocket and walked back into the building and gone to my office and

HE SHOWS UP

Aria's POVI ran on Sunday mornings because Sunday mornings were the one part of the week that belonged entirely to me.Not to the 34th floor. Not to Daniel Cole's schedule or the Singapore team's time zone or the Henderson amendment or the quarterly presentation or any of the legitimate professional content that occupied the rest of my existence. Just me and the pavement and whatever the city looked like at seven in the morning when most of it was still deciding whether to wake up.I had been running this route for eight months.Same streets. Same turns. Same coffee cart on the corner of fifth that was always open and always had the same man behind it who never asked what I wanted because I always wanted the same thing. The route was familiar in the way that routines become familiar when you do them long enough. Not exciting. Comfortable. Mine.I was forty minutes in when the problem announced itself.Not dramatically. Just a small sound from the direction of the bicycle lane beside

SUNDAY MORNING

Daniel's POVI sat in my apartment for a long time after I got back.Not doing anything specific. Not reading. Not working. Not standing at the window the way I usually stood when something needed thinking through. Just sitting in the Sunday morning quiet of my apartment with my jacket still on and my keys on the table beside me and the particular stillness of a man who has just done something and is now sitting with the full weight of having done it.I had seen her from the window.That was where it had started. Seven fourteen in the morning and I was standing at my kitchen window with my coffee the way I stood there most mornings because the window faced east and the morning light came through it at an angle that made the starting of a day feel like a considered thing rather than an automatic one.I had been looking at nothing specific.And then she was there.Four blocks away on the Sunday morning pavement in her running clothes with her hair pulled back and her particular way of m

THE FIRST MEAL

Aria's POVHe knocked at eleven fifty three.I know the exact time because I had been looking at my phone since his message arrived and the twenty minutes he had promised had become twenty two and I had spent both extra minutes having a very firm conversation with myself about the appropriate level of composure for a woman whose boss was coming to her apartment on a Sunday with no explanation beyond the fact that she had not eaten.The composure I had arrived at was functional but not convincing.I opened the door.He was standing in the hallway with two paper bags from the place on the corner of my street that I had mentioned once in passing three weeks ago during a late night when we had both been working through dinner and I had said I wish I had ordered from the corner place and he had said which corner place and I had described it and that had been the entirety of that conversation.He had remembered.He had remembered the corner place I had mentioned once in passing three weeks

THE CONVERSATION

Daniel's POVI did not sleep on Sunday night.Not because of anxiety exactly. Not the restless unsettled sleeplessness of a man who does not know what he is going to do. The opposite of that. The particular wakefulness of a man who has made a decision and is lying in the dark with it and feeling the full weight of its realness now that it exists somewhere outside his own head.I had made the decision at my door.Not when I turned back. The decision had already been made when I turned back. It had been made somewhere between sitting across from her at that kitchen table and watching her describe a painting she kept in a folder under her bed because showing it to anyone felt like more exposure than she was prepared for.She had said that and looked at me with those steady eyes and I had thought about exposure.About what it cost.About what it cost to withhold it.I lay in the dark until four in the morning and then I got up and made coffee and stood at the window and watched the city e

THE NAME ON THE PHONE

Daniel's POVI did not answer it while Aria was still in the room.I looked at the screen. Unknown number. The phone rang twice more while she stood across from me and I stood behind my desk with the six words still in the air between us and something cold moving through me that I was working very hard to keep off my face.I was not entirely succeeding.She was watching me the way she always watched me when something was happening beneath the surface. With the quiet focused attention of a woman who had learned to read the thing underneath the thing and was currently reading it with more accuracy than I was comfortable with."I need to take this," I said.My voice was exactly what it always was. Measured. Level. The voice that ran boardrooms and closed deals and communicated complete control of any given situation.She looked at me for one moment longer than the professional situation required.Then she nodded once.Walked to the door.Opened it.And paused with her hand on the frame t

HE GOES QUIET

Aria's POVSomething was wrong.Not dramatically wrong. Not the kind of wrong that announced itself in raised voices or broken things or any of the visible evidence that most people used to identify that a situation had changed. The kind of wrong that only existed in the space between what a person showed and what they were carrying underneath it.I had spent twenty three weeks learning the difference between Daniel Cole working and Daniel Cole carrying something.He was carrying something.It had started Monday afternoon. After the phone call. After I had walked out of his office with six words rearranging everything inside me and sat at my desk and spent forty five minutes looking at the Singapore correspondence without reading a single word of it because I want to be with you Aria was not the kind of sentence that shared space easily with quarterly projections.I had expected him to come out.He had not come out.He had stayed in his office for the rest of Monday with the door clos

THE DECISION

Daniel's POVI blocked the number on Thursday morning.Not because I had decided the problem did not exist. The problem existed. I was not a man who resolved things by pretending they had not happened. I had learned that particular lesson in the same classroom where I had learned everything else about the cost of willful blindness and I had no intention of repeating the curriculum.I blocked it because I had made a decision.The decision had not arrived cleanly or quickly. It had taken from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning. Three days of carrying the phone call the way you carry something you have not yet figured out how to set down. Three days of the 34th floor and the Singapore correspondence and Aria's quiet steady presence on the other side of my office door and the particular weight of a past that had reappeared at the exact moment I had chosen to stop letting it define what was possible.Three days.And then Thursday morning I had stood at my window with my coffee in the pre

THE FIRST DATE

Aria's POVHe picked me up at exactly seven.Not seven oh two. Not six fifty eight. Seven. The knock at my door arriving with the same composed punctuality he brought to everything including apparently the collection of his secretary for a Saturday evening that was not professionally categorized as anything at all.I had been ready since six forty five.This was information I was taking to my grave.I opened the door.He was standing in my hallway in a dark jacket that was not the office jacket and not the Sunday morning jacket but something in between. Something that existed in the specific category of Daniel Cole dressed for an evening that mattered without performing the fact that it mattered. His hair was the same. His posture was the same. The composed unhurried certainty was the same.Everything was the same.Everything was completely different.He looked at me.And for three full seconds he did not say anything.Just looked. With those dark focused eyes that I had spent twenty

THE KISS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Daniel's POVI sat in my car for a long time.Not driving. Not doing anything that required the car to move or the engine to run or any of the functional purposes a car was designed to serve. Just sitting. Outside Aria's building on a Saturday night with my hands on the wheel and the city doing its Saturday night things around me and the particular stillness of a man who has just done something and is now sitting with the full weight of having done it.I had kissed her.Once. Softly. At her door in the quiet of her building's hallway after a night that had been warm and honest and full of things that had been waiting for a space large enough to hold them. I had said goodnight and turned to leave and made it approximately three steps before the turning back happened with the same absence of conscious decision that the coming down from my apartment had happened three weeks ago on a Sunday morning.No decision.Just the thing.The kiss had lasted four seconds.I had counted them the way

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