I had that feeling again in my gut. But that time, it was because of me. I was causing that feeling.
I sat in my office, waiting for Isabella to arrive. Things were not going to be a smooth day. It was the first day that she and I were going to be working together after the whole scandal broke. The tricky thing was the fact that I couldn’t fire her because it would look just like what my father had done. You can’t have a romantic relationship with your assistant and then call her loose when things hit the fan. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t debating it or trying to figure out a way how to get her out of my office because I didn’t want to look at her anymore.
Tick, tick, tick. The clock made that noise extra loud for me that morning. She was to arrive in fifteen minutes. It was going to be the longest fifteen minutes I had ever experienced.
Trust was a tricky thing. I spent my entire life playing myself on a pedestal and trying to protect everyone that I loved, but I never truly learned how to deal with trust. I never practiced letting people in. That part of my brain didn’t know how to act. So when I did get betrayed, it hurt extra bad. It’s solidified the walls even more so. It made me build moats and every other mechanism in my mental arsenal to keep the thread away. I knew that deep down, my father also had a role in my anger towards Isabella. Because he was dead, I couldn’t remove anything I felt about him. The situation that he had caused me made me angry beyond belief. But he was in a coffin. And there was no way for me to vent or tell him how I felt. So that went out the window. Maybe a little bit of that was put towards being angry with Isabella. It was all coming out at once.
The absolute truth of the matter is that I loved her. I hadn’t said that to her yet, and I was getting close. But I loved her. And if she had really recorded me and got me at my most vulnerable, how was I supposed to navigate that? Was I supposed to open my heart to her and let her into a world I never let anyone else into?
The door opened. It opened slowly, so I had a few seconds of wondering who the hell was coming into my office. Then I saw Isabella. The second that we locked eyes, I took mine back. She didn’t deserve my eye contact. I should have probably found a different role for her within the company, but there was something inside me that couldn’t do that just yet. Maybe I needed to get mad at her a little bit. Perhaps I needed to get things off my chest. I couldn’t really tell.
“If we’re just going to stay here in silence the whole day, then I don’t want to work today,” Isabella said before sitting down. It had occurred to me that she probably noticed my lack of eye contact and stern posture.
“We have to work together. I can’t fire you because everyone will just say I’m firing you because of what happened. So we have to sit here and work together.”
She pursed her lips. When she put her perfect ass in her seat, I could feel the tension rise in my chest. It wasn’t going to be a leisurely eight hours. Coexisting with someone who betrayed you was never an easy thing.
I clicked my keyboard a little bit louder that day. Whenever I took a phone call, I hung up the office phone a little bit harder than usual. Every now and then, I would look at her, but she wasn’t looking at me. It’s all going to have to come to a head at some point. She was my assistant. There was going to need to be communication. She was going to have to take orders for me at some point. And that was going to have to happen without me thinking about her in bed telling me what to do. In hindsight, I wish I had never told her about my dominance kink. When it came to that stuff, I couldn’t take any of it back. But I could do something to change the future and make the end a little bit easier on myself.
It was time to flip the switch.
“You know we have to work together, but I think that when it comes to everything else, we should break up.”
Isabella had been in the middle of typing something when I said that. She completely stopped and gave me her eyes. It was almost instantly that they watered up. I did feel wrong about that. But at the same time, it needed to be done. There was nothing I could do to undo how I felt. Could I possibly be in a relationship with her when she betrayed me? That was just common sense.
“So that’s it?” She asked. “You’re not even going to give me any chances; you’re just going to listen to what everyone is telling you and believe their word over mine. After everything that we’ve been through? Do you think that I would really just record you and then continue to have a relationship with you after that? And then why would I leak it after all the time we spent together? None of it makes any sense; you’re thinking with emotion.
Did she have a point? Maybe. But I don’t know. There was still something preventing me from opening up my heart. Those walls were too thick to break down. “I have nothing left to say to Isabella. Not about that, at least. From this moment on, it’s all about work.”
She stared at me for far longer than I had anticipated. Then, she shut her laptop and left the office. I presumed that she was going to cry somewhere. And it wasn’t me being cold; I was just trying to do the right thing.
I was livid, though. And when my brother Leo entered the office, I just had no patience. “Hey, bro, I hope this is a bad time, but I really have to talk to you about something important.”
“Leo, I don’t have time for this. I’m having a rough day already. It’s going to have to wait right now.”
I only looked at Leo for a second and noticed his face was pure shock. I had no idea what he was going to talk to me about. I was in the right mind to deal with anything serious after what had just happened with Bella.
When my brother left, I got to work debating whether I should fire Isabella altogether.