Love Affair With Ficti

He walked around the chair he’d been leaning on and took a seat in front of my desk.  I expected him to lean back and assume an arrogant position of detachment, but instead he rested his elbows on my desk like he was anxiously awaiting a quick response from me.  I felt my brow furrow as I tried to read his expression.

“What do you want me to say?” I finally spoke. His lips formed a seam and I watched him sigh.  “Do you want me to beg you to stay? To ask you to be with me instead of marrying her? Because I’m not going to make that mistake again,” I added. “There’s nothing between us besides a business relationship. You made that perfectly clear when you left me alone and in tears for the umpteenth time.”

I’d done some serious soul searching since our last interaction and, slowly but surely, I was seeing that Trent Crawford was not the right man for me.

“I would never expect you to beg, Hannah,” he confessed. “I just wanted to let you know.”

“Well, thanks, I guess.” When he saw that I was unaffected by his words, he let his back fall against the chair.  “Does that mean that you are backing out of the running for C.O.O. or are you still planning on stealing that from me too?”

“It’s not that simple, Han–” he started, but quickly changed the subject. “Exactly what else did I steal from you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My sanity for one thing.”

“You know that I never set out to do that.” As much as I didn’t want to believe him, I did.  A fact that pissed me off. I had every reason to believe that the game he’d been playing was intentional. “If it makes you feel any better, I feel the same way. Like I’m losing my mind when I’m around you. I think we’ve both let our emotions get the best of us.”

A week ago I would have spoken up and tried to get him to see that the way we felt around each other was more than coincidence—that it was the universe’s way of telling us we should be together, but the universe was apparently off its meds.  For whatever reason, Trent was still marrying Alison this weekend and nothing I said was going to change that.

“This is why I have to go,” he reiterated. Staring into his eyes, I knew just how easy it would be to climb across that desk and get him to put his hands on me. To kiss me. Hell, to probably even get him to clear it off and have sex with me. But, I knew that it would just end with him walking away.  It seemed to always end that way with us.