Wanted All Along

Chapter Seven

Kian’s idea of “figuring out something better” turned out to be exactly as thorough as everything else he did, which Amara discovered two weeks later when he called her on a Tuesday evening instead of texting, something he rarely did outside of their planned weekends.

“I have a proposition,” he said, without preamble, the way he probably opened every important meeting.

“That sounds ominous.”

“It’s not. I promise.” She could hear him settling into a chair, the particular quiet of his apartment behind him. “My company’s opening a satellite office. Regional marketing and brand strategy, reporting directly to the executive team. It’s a real position, Amara, not something I invented. We’ve needed someone in that role for months.”

She sat up straighter on her own couch, four hundred miles away, understanding exactly what he was building toward before he said it outright. “Where’s the office?”

“Here.” A pause, like he was bracing for her reaction. “In my city.”

“Kian—”

“Let me finish.” His voice was steady, but there was an edge of urgency underneath it she hadn’t heard from him before, not even in their most honest late-night conversations. “I’m not asking you to uproot your entire life for me. I know how that sounds. I know it’s a lot. But the position is real, and you’re qualified for it—more than qualified, based on everything you’ve told me about the accounts you run now—and if you wanted to apply, I could put your name forward. That’s all. Just an option.”

Amara sat with that for a long moment, turning it over from every angle she could think of. Part of her—the part that had spent two years shrinking herself into whatever shape kept a relationship comfortable—wanted to say yes immediately, wanted to hand him the decision and let it prove how much he wanted her. But she’d learned something on that beach three months ago, something about not becoming smaller for anyone, even someone who made her feel as seen as Kian did.

“I need you to understand something,” she said carefully. “If I did this—and I’m not saying I would—it can’t be because you asked. It has to be my decision. My career. I’m not moving cities to be convenient for your schedule.”

“I know that.” He said it immediately, without defensiveness, like he’d expected the pushback and respected it. “That’s exactly why I said if you wanted to apply. I’m not trying to make this decision for you. I just didn’t want you finding out about the opening from someone else and wondering why I hadn’t mentioned it.”

That landed harder than she expected. “You really thought about this.”

“I think about you more than is probably healthy for a man with my calendar,” he admitted, dry humor threading through something that sounded, underneath it, entirely sincere. “I looked at flights, actually. Calculated how many more weekends we could realistically manage a year at this pace, factoring in both our travel schedules. The number wasn’t good, Amara. It’s not sustainable, not if either of us wants this to keep being something real.”

“So you built a business case for us.”

“I build business cases for everything. It’s how I think.” A small laugh, self-aware. “But this is the first time I’ve built one where the outcome I wanted wasn’t obvious from the numbers. It’s the first time the numbers didn’t actually matter as much as just—wanting it.”

Amara felt something in her chest loosen, warm and a little frightening. “That’s very unlike you.”

“You’re having that effect on several parts of my life lately.”

She didn’t decide that night. She told him as much, and he accepted it without pushing, which she noticed and appreciated more than she said out loud. But the idea lodged itself somewhere she couldn’t easily dislodge it, surfacing at odd moments over the following days—in a meeting where her current manager mentioned budget cuts likely coming to her department, in a quiet evening where she caught herself scrolling apartment listings in his city without fully deciding to.

She called her sister that weekend, needing someone to talk her through it who wasn’t Kian and wasn’t emotionally invested in the outcome the way he clearly was.

“Say it out loud,” Jade said, when Amara had finished explaining. “Not what you think you should want. What you actually want.”

Amara was quiet for a moment. “I want it,” she admitted, surprising herself with how easily the words came once she let herself say them. “Not just for him. For me too. I’ve been at my company four years, Jade. I like my job fine, but I don’t love it. This would be a step up. More responsibility. More money. A whole new city I’ve never lived in.”

“So what’s stopping you?”

“What if it doesn’t work? What if I move my entire life for a relationship we haven’t even put a name to yet, and it falls apart in six months, and I’m stuck in a city I moved to for a man who doesn’t want me anymore?”

Jade didn’t answer right away, letting the question sit. “You could ask yourself that about literally any risk worth taking,” she said finally. “The job could fall apart even if he doesn’t. The relationship could work even if the job doesn’t. You’re not actually asking me whether it’s safe, Amara. Nothing worth doing is safe. You’re asking whether you trust yourself enough to handle it if it goes wrong.”

Amara thought about that long after they hung up—about the version of herself who’d stayed with Daniel because leaving felt riskier than staying unhappy, who’d confused safety with something that had actually just been smallness dressed up as caution. She didn’t want to make that mistake again, in either direction. She didn’t want to leap recklessly just because a handsome man had asked her to, and she didn’t want to shrink from something good just because it scared her.

She opened her laptop that night, pulled up the job listing Kian had sent her—real, detailed, exactly as described—and started drafting an application she wasn’t sure yet she’d submit.

She fell asleep before finishing it, the cursor blinking in an unfinished cover letter, the decision still hers to make and no one else’s, exactly the way she’d insisted it should be.

She woke to a text from Kian, sent at some hour she hadn’t been awake to see. No pressure. Just wanted you to know the posting closes in three weeks. Whatever you decide, I meant what I said. This isn’t about convenience for me.

She read it twice, then a third time, before setting the phone face-down on her nightstand and getting ready for work like it was an ordinary Monday, though nothing about the week ahead felt ordinary anymore. At the office, she found herself watching her manager during the budget meeting with a new kind of clarity, noticing for the first time how little the job actually asked of her beyond competence, how rarely anyone there seemed interested in what she wanted beyond hitting quarterly targets.

She thought about the market in Kian’s city, the oranges, the way he’d looked when he admitted being busy wasn’t a life sentence. She thought about her own life, four years deep into a comfortable routine that had started, somewhere along the way, to feel a great deal like settling wearing a different outfit.

By Thursday, she’d finished the cover letter. By Friday, she’d sent it, before she could talk herself out of it, before the careful, cautious part of her could build one more argument for staying exactly where she was.

She didn’t tell Kian right away. She wanted, for a little while longer, to hold the decision as something entirely her own—proof to herself, if no one else, that she’d chosen this because she wanted it, not because a man with a persuasive business case had asked her to.