Semua Bab LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Aria's POVShe chose the restaurant.I had not planned for that. I had been the one standing in the lobby when she suggested lunch and I had assumed in the automatic way that I assumed things in my own city that I would be the one who knew where we were going. But Vivienne had a name ready before I had finished forming the thought. A place two blocks from Cole Enterprises that I had walked past and never been inside. Good lighting. The kind of menu that suggested someone had thought carefully about it.She had researched it.I told myself that was just Vivienne. Vivienne always researched. Vivienne always arrived at things prepared in the specific way of a woman who did not like being caught without information. It was one of the things about her that I had grown up watching and had filed under Vivienne being Vivienne long before I had the vocabulary to describe it more precisely.We were shown to a table by the window.She ordered without looking at the menu for long.I ordered and l

Aria's POVShe called on Tuesday evening.I was at my kitchen table with the Tuscany brochure that Daniel had sent home with me and a notepad where I had been writing things down in the specific organized way I approached everything that required organizing. Venues. Dates. The particular logistics of two private people deciding how publicly to celebrate the most personal thing either of them had ever done.October was becoming real.The brochure was open to the hillside page. The one with the afternoon light and the specific warm quality of an Italian autumn that looked in photographs exactly like the way certain feelings felt from the inside. I had been looking at it for twenty minutes and writing things down and thinking about vows and whether Daniel would write his own or whether asking him to write his own was asking for the version of him that was still learning to say things out loud to perform beyond his current range.He would write them.I already knew that.He would write th

Aria's POVShe saw it properly on Friday morning.Not the way she had seen it in the lobby on Monday with the distance of a building between us and the specific distraction of the space around us. Properly. Up close. In the specific unhurried Friday morning light of my kitchen with the coffee on and her hair still down and the specific domestic ease of two sisters sharing a space in the way they had shared spaces before cities and distance had made sharing a space something that required planning.She had been in the apartment for one night.One night and she already occupied it in the Vivienne way. The specific quality of her presence that made whatever space she was in feel slightly rearranged around her. Not her things. She had been careful with her things. The suitcase in the spare room and her toiletries in the specific organized row on the bathroom shelf and her coat on the hook by the door. Nothing displaced. Nothing imposed.Just her.Present in the way she had always been pre

Aria's POVHe arrived at seven exactly.Of course he did.I opened the door and he was standing in the hallway with wine and the composed unhurried certainty he carried everywhere and the dark jacket that was not the office jacket and the specific quality of his presence that still did to the inside of my chest what it had always done regardless of how many times I had opened a door to find him on the other side of it.He looked at me."You look beautiful," he said."Vivienne is already here," I said."I know," he said. "I'm talking to you."Something in my chest did the thing.I stepped back and let him in.....The apartment smelled like the pasta I had been making for two hours and the specific warm quality of a space that had been prepared for an evening with intention. Vivienne had helped. That was the right word for it. She had stood at the counter and handed me things and offered opinions about seasoning with the specific Vivienne authority she brought to things she had decided

Aria's POVI heard it from the kitchen.Not words. The absence of them. The specific quality of a room that had been producing the warm easy sounds of dinner conversation and had stopped producing them. The particular silence that existed when two people who had been talking had ceased talking in a way that was not the comfortable silence of a shared meal but something with a different texture entirely.I stood at the counter with the dessert plates in my hands.I listened.Nothing.I walked back in.They were sitting exactly where I had left them.Vivienne on the couch. Daniel in the chair across from her. The wine glasses on the table. Everything in the correct position.And between them the specific quality of silence that had no warmth in it.Daniel looked at me when I came in.His face was exactly what it always was.Which meant something was wrong."Everything okay?" I said."Fine," he said.He stood.The movement clean and immediate. The specific decisive quality of a man who h