Chapter 55 CHAPTER 55

Chapter 55 CHAPTER 55
Chapter 55
Enough
Aria Hartwell.

I heard muffled voices from outside my office, and I already knew who they belonged to. I didn't look up from the stack of files that were heaped in front of me, neither did I acknowledge my assistant when she came in for the third time today to tell me that Cassian wanted to speak to me.

I had been avoiding him for nine days, ignoring his calls and text messages. I had always made sure I wasn't ever alone so he could walk up to me and strike a conversation with me for whatever reason he was bringing up.

My assistant stepped in front of me, and I looked up. I felt bad in seeing the weariness on her face, but where Cassian was involved, everyone was always exhausted. "Mr. Kent is here." She pursed her lips, her eyes pleading for me to let him come in.

"Tell him I'm in a call." I gave my normal excuse to have him off my back.

"He said to tell you he knows you're not in a call."

I looked up from my screen at the same time that the door opened before I could say anything else, and Cassian walked in and closed it behind him. He looked like a man who had made a decision and was not interested in being argued out of it.

"I've had enough, Aria," he said, his eyes blazing hot as he adjusted his tie.

"Of what? You've barely seen me."I responded nonchalantly.

"Exactly." He crossed the floor and sat in the chair across from my desk without being invited to. "Nine days, Aria."

"I've been busy."

"You've been avoiding me."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive." I looked up to Priya who was watching the exchange. "You can go, Priya. If you wish, you can sign out early today. I wouldn't blame you. God knows you're stressed."

She murmured a "thank you" and was out of the office, leaving Cassian and I alone for the first time in a really long while. His presence was both suffocating and something else... Something I couldn't quite place. Maybe it was the fact that he was now a married man, but I knew it was more than that.

He looked at me steadily. "What did I do? Beyond what you already know about. What exactly are you punishing me for right now?"

I laughed and it came out sharper than I intended. "Punishing you?" I let my pen down and shook my head. "If punishing you meant not talking to you, then I would have been doing that for a long time since we were younger."

He still held my gaze, not caring about the last statement I made. "Tell me what it is, then."

"I have no issues with you, Mr. Kent. I'm just trying to do my job—"

"Mr. Kent?" He cocked his head to the side. "Is that how you're addressing me now? Is it because of the motion or the fact that I'm married now that...?"

"It's me doing my job." I responded tiredly and looked back at my screen. "It's me trying to run a company that your board spent an entire afternoon trying to destroy my career while you were in Paris on your honeymoon. It's me sitting in that room alone while Pemberton smiled at me like he'd already won and not one person—" My voice cracked slightly and I hated it. I pressed on. "Not one person in that room was on my side."

"I came back—"

"You came back after." I finally looked at him. "You left me in the middle of it. You married someone else and you left and they used the fact that you were gone to tear me apart in that boardroom and you want to know why I'm cold?" I stood up. "Because I am tired, Cassian. I have been tired since my father got sick. I have been tired since the funeral and the will and the board and the apartment and..." My throat closed. I hated this. I hated that it was happening in front of him. "I haven't slept. I haven't eaten a proper meal in I don't know how many days. I don't know when last I did something that wasn't damage control and I'm just—"

I stopped. I pressed both hands flat on my desk and looked at them and breathed.

"I'm tired," I said again, more quiet this time. "That's all. I'm just very tired and I don't need anything else to compound my problems like you always do."

The room went quiet and I heard the scraping of the chair, heard him stand, come around the desk, and before I knew it, his arms were wrapping around me from behind in a warm embrace, and he didn't say a single word. I was too exhausted to even push him away, and right now, I didn't care if anyone saw us. I was just tired. Pained. Broken. Every depressing word one could think of.

I didn't move for a long moment before I regained myself.

"You should go," I said.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Cassian—"

"Let me stay." His voice was low. "Just for a minute. Let me stay."

I didn't have the energy to fight it. That was the honest truth — I simply didn't have anything left to fight it with. So I turned into him instead, and I pressed my face into his chest, and I let him hold me the way no one had held me in months, and the relief of it was so overwhelming that I felt my knees soften.

"I'm for you," he said quietly, into my hair. "Whatever you think of me right now, I need you to know that. I am for you."

I didn't answer, but I stopped fighting the weight of my own exhaustion, and somewhere between one breath and the next, with my cheek against his shirt and his arms steady around me, I felt the nine days and the weeks before them and the months before that pull me under like a tide. I didn't even feel myself go.

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