LOVE ME OR HATE ME のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

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

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

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

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

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