All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

149 Chapters

THE PHOTO

Aria's POVI saw it at six forty seven in the morning.Before coffee. Before the commute. Before any of the professional armor I put on between my apartment and the 34th floor had been properly assembled. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the specific half awake state of a woman who had not slept particularly well because she had spent a considerable portion of the night thinking about a kiss at a door and the *goodnight Daniel* she had typed eleven seconds after receiving a message that had made something in her chest do something she did not have clinical language for.My phone lit up.A notification. Then another. Then four more arriving in the time it took me to sit up properly and register that the quantity was unusual for six forty seven on a Sunday morning.I opened the first one.And sat very still.The photograph was clear.That was the first thing I registered before anything else. Not that it existed. Not what it meant or what it would do to Monday morning on the 34th

HE MAKES IT OFFICIAL

Daniel's POVI called the meeting at nine fifteen.Not because I had planned it the night before or mapped it out with the deliberate strategic intention I brought to most things that happened on the 34th floor. Because I had stood in my office for eleven minutes after Aria walked out and thought about what she had said and understood with complete clarity what the next thing was.*I don't need to be a secret.*She had said it quietly and directly and without the specific weight of accusation that it could have carried. Just the truth. Delivered the way she delivered everything. Clean and honest and entirely without apology for its existence.I had spent eleven minutes with it.Then I had picked up my phone and told my assistant to gather the floor at nine fifteen.I did not call a lawyer first. I did not consult HR or the communications team or any of the professional infrastructure that existed specifically to manage situations like this one. I did not draft a statement or approve a

LEARNING EACH OTHER

Aria's POVTwo weeks in and I was learning the shape of him.Not the professional shape. I had known that one for twenty three weeks. The boardroom version and the window version and the composed unhurried certainty that he carried into every room he entered like a second jacket. I knew that shape the way you knew the layout of a building you had worked in long enough that you stopped needing to think about where the doors were.This was different.This was the shape of Daniel Cole in the specific private space that existed between two people who had decided to stop pretending and had not yet figured out what the not pretending looked like in practice. The edges of him. The places where he was more comfortable than I had expected and the places where he was less. The specific topography of a man who had spent two years behind a wall and was now standing on the other side of it without the wall and was learning what standing felt like without it.It was not always smooth.That was the

THE PAST HE SHARES

Daniel's POVI had been carrying it for three weeks.Not the fact of it. I had been carrying the fact of it for two years and four months and the specific number of days I had decided not to count because counting gave the number significance and I had sworn against significance where Vivienne James was concerned. I had been carrying the decision to tell her. The specific weight of knowing that the telling was the next thing and sitting with that knowledge while I found the right version of how to do it.There was no right version.I had understood that by the end of the second week. The particular thing I needed to tell Aria did not have a right version because it was not the kind of story that had a right version. It was just the story. The true one. The one that explained the framed document and the wall and the twenty three weeks of professional distance maintained past the point where professional distance was the honest thing to maintain.She deserved the story.That was what it

VIVIENNE BLACKWOOD

Aria's POVI called her at nine thirty.Same as every Saturday night for the past three years. Not because we had formally agreed to it. Not because either of us had looked at the other one and said this is what we do now. Just because it had happened enough times in a row that it had become the shape of us. The weekly check in. The specific reliable rhythm of two sisters who had grown up in the same house and ended up in different cities and had found that Saturday evenings were the time when the week had finished and the next one had not yet started and there was finally space to be just the two of them without the noise of everything else.I loved these calls.That was the simple true thing about Vivienne that existed alongside everything else that was complicated about her. I loved talking to my sister. I loved the specific ease of a conversation with someone who had known you before you had a professional surface to maintain. Who had seen you at every version of yourself and did

THE PROPOSAL

Daniel's POVI knew on a Tuesday morning.Not dramatically. Not with the specific arrival of a single moment that announced itself as the moment and demanded to be recognized as such. Just a Tuesday morning at seven forty two with Aria at her desk and her reading glasses on and her coffee in the white cup and the small notebook open to a page I had still never seen the contents of.She was reading something on her laptop.Her brow was slightly furrowed. The specific furrow she produced when she was reading something she disagreed with and was deciding whether the disagreement was worth documenting. I had catalogued that furrow. I had catalogued most of her expressions over the past three months with the specific involuntary attention of a man who had stopped pretending he was not paying it.She reached for her coffee without looking away from the screen.Missed the cup.Looked down. Found it. Drank.Looked back at the screen.The furrow deepened.She picked up the pen from beside the

THE MORNING EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT

Aria's POVI walked onto the 34th floor on a Saturday morning with a ring on my finger and no plan for what happened next.Not professionally. Professionally I had a plan. I always had a plan. The plan was the same as every other Saturday morning that had ever existed in my working life. Coffee. Laptop. The specific organized efficiency of a woman who had decided that weekends were for catching up on the things the week had not had room for and was catching up on them.The personal plan was less developed.Specifically the part of the personal plan that involved thirty seven people who worked on this floor and had opinions about everything that happened on it and had been provided with considerable material over the past three weeks and were now going to be provided with more.I had told Daniel this.He had looked at my hand and said they will find out either way and that had been the entirety of his contribution to the strategic planning of the morning.He was not wrong.He was also

THE WOMAN DOWNSTAIRS

Daniel's POVI made the call in twelve seconds.Not because I had deliberated and arrived at a decision. Because the decision was immediate and complete and required no deliberation. The name had arrived in the room and done what it always did to the air in my chest and I had looked at it for exactly as long as I needed to look at it and then I had picked up the phone."Tell her I'm unavailable," I said. "If she returns call security.""Yes sir."I put the phone down.Clean. Final. The specific efficiency of a man who had handled something and was now returning to the thing he had been doing before the something had required handling.I looked at Aria.She was watching me with the careful attentive expression she wore when she was reading the thing underneath the thing. The expression I had learned meant she had already arrived at a conclusion and was simply waiting to see whether I was going to offer her the information that confirmed it or whether she was going to have to decide how

SHE COMES BACK

Aria's POVShe was already there when I arrived.I did not see her immediately. The lobby of Cole Enterprises on a Monday morning had its own particular energy. The specific purposeful movement of people who knew where they were going and were going there with the efficiency of a building that ran on precision. The front desk. The security turnstiles. The elevator bank where people gathered in the specific patient clusters of professionals who had somewhere to be and were getting there in the correct order.I walked through it the way I walked through it every morning.Head up. Bag over my shoulder. The white coffee cup from the cart on the corner. The particular composure of a woman who had spent twenty three weeks learning to walk onto this floor like she belonged here and had long since stopped needing to remind herself that she did.I was halfway to the elevator when something made me look left.The waiting area. The low chairs arranged in the specific careful way of a lobby that

THE LOBBY MOMENT

Daniel's POVI saw Aria first.That was always how it happened in a room. Whatever else was present. Whatever else was moving or demanding attention or occupying the professional foreground of a space I was walking through. I saw her first. I had stopped pretending that this was anything other than what it was approximately three months ago and the not pretending had not made it less true. If anything it had made it more.She was walking toward the exit with her bag and her coffee cup and the Monday morning composure she carried everywhere. The ring on her finger catching the lobby light the way it had been catching light for forty eight hours and that I had not stopped noticing.She looked back.Found me.And smiled.The specific smile. The brief warm unguarded one that arrived when she was not performing anything and was simply glad and was letting the gladness exist on her face because she had decided it did not need to be hidden. I had been collecting instances of that smile for s

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