All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

149 Chapters

LUNCH WITH MY SISTER

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

SOMETHING FEELS WRONG

Daniel's POVI found the file at half past two.Not because I had been looking for it. I had not been looking for it. I had been doing what I had told myself I was going to do after I hung up the phone and sat with the lobby and the cold and the something that lived below thought. I had been working. The Singapore correspondence. The Henderson amendment. The specific productive efficiency of a man who had decided that the work was where he was going to put his attention and was putting it there.For forty minutes I had been putting it there successfully.And then I had opened the bottom drawer of my desk to find the quarterly review notes and found the file instead.It was not labeled. I had not labeled it because labeling it would have meant acknowledging it in a way that giving it a drawer had not. It was just a manila folder. Thin. The specific thinness of a file that contained more absence than presence. More the record of what had not been found than what had.I looked at it.I l

VIVIENNE MOVES IN

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

THE MAN SHE RUINED

Vivienne's POVThe ring was smaller than I expected.That was the first thing I noticed when Aria set the tea on the counter and the light caught it. Not ostentatious. Not the specific category of ring that a man bought to communicate his wealth to everyone in the room. Something quieter than that. More considered. The kind of thing you chose when you understood the person you were choosing it for well enough to know that the size of the gesture was not what made it significant.He had always been like that.I had forgotten.I stood in my sister's kitchen in my sister's apartment on a Thursday evening with my suitcase in the spare room and my coat on the hook by the door and I looked at the ring on my sister's finger and I felt the collision of it arrive in my chest like something I had not fully prepared for even though I had been preparing for weeks.Daniel Cole.I had left him with nothing.That was the specific true thing I had been living with for two years and four months in the

THE RING

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

HE WANTS TO MEET HER

Daniel's POVShe asked on Thursday evening.We were at her kitchen table. The corner place containers. The jacket on the back of the chair. The specific domestic ease of a Wednesday that had become a Thursday because neither of us had noticed the time moving and neither of us had wanted to."Vivienne wants to meet you properly," she said. "Dinner Saturday?"I looked at my coffee.One second."Of course," I said.She looked at me."You hesitated," she said."I didn't," I said."Daniel."My name in her mouth. The specific register. The careful attentive one. The one she used when she had read something correctly and was giving me the opportunity to confirm the reading before she decided what to do with it.I looked at her.At the ring on her finger and the steady eyes and the woman who did not pretend and did not allow pretending in the people she loved."Saturday is fine Aria," I said. "I want to meet her."She looked at me for one moment longer than the sentence required.Then she nod

SATURDAY DINNER

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

HE KNOWS

Daniel's POVI knew before the dinner plates were cleared.Not from the first moment. The first moment had been the lobby and three seconds with her back to me and the cold that arrived before the thought. The first moment had been inconclusive. The body registering something the mind had refused to confirm.This was confirmation.I sat across the dinner table from Vivienne Blackwood and I looked at her properly for the first time and I understood with the slow devastating certainty of a man whose body had been right all along what he was looking at.The eyes.The specific quality of them. The warmth that was real and was also a tool and had always been both simultaneously. I had once believed the warmth was the whole thing. I knew now that the warmth was the instrument and something else entirely was the hand that held it.The way she held her wine glass.The particular angle of her smile when she thought nobody was looking directly at her. The fractional shift in the expression that

ALONE IN THE KITCHEN

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

THE MORNING HE DOESN'T CALL

Aria's POVHe did not call.I woke at seven and lay in the specific quiet of a Sunday morning that was supposed to belong entirely to me and listened to the apartment and thought about tomorrow and the promise it contained and checked my phone and put it face down and picked it up again.Nothing.I made coffee.I sat at the kitchen table where we had eaten dinner the night before. The corner place containers were gone. The wine glasses were washed and on the drying rack. Vivienne had done it before she went to bed. The specific neat efficiency of a woman who understood the value of leaving a space the way she had found it.The kitchen was exactly as it always was.I sat in it and drank my coffee and waited.At nine I went for a walk.At ten I came back.At ten thirty I checked my phone for the fourth time and told myself that I need a little more time was a promise and Daniel kept his promises and the morning was still the morning and tomorrow was a relative term and I was not going t

...

3 4 5 6 7

...

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP