Hate me harder

flutters

She noticed his hands first.

That was how she knew she was in trouble — not the big things, not the moments that should have registered, but the small unremarkable detail of his hands. She was watching him sign something Clara had brought in during a meeting on Monday morning and she noticed the way he held the pen and something in her chest did a thing she immediately refused to acknowledge.

She looked back at her own notes.

She was fine. She was absolutely fine. She was a grown woman who had survived thirty-seven investor rejections and a hostile acquisition and a literal fire and she was not going to be undone by a man's hands.

She was not fine.

It had started on Saturday. She could trace it back to that with uncomfortable precision — the accidental market, the breakfast place with the chalkboard menu, the bookshop on Canter Street where they'd kept ending up in the same aisle without looking for each other. Something had shifted in the architecture of whatever this was between them and she'd felt it shift and done nothing about it and now it was Monday morning and she was noticing his hands in meetings.

She needed to get a grip.

The problem was the house. It was always the house. You couldn't maintain a clean sharp hatred for someone when you knew how they took their coffee and which news stories made them exhale through their nose and that they cooked badly on Wednesdays with a cookbook they'd clearly owned for years and barely used. You couldn't keep the enemy neatly in his box when he left a glass of water on your coffee table without being asked and moved the mugs back just to have something to push against.

She was furious at the mugs. Retrospectively, deeply furious.

She called Priya into her office on Tuesday morning under the pretense of a project update and spent fifteen minutes actually discussing the project and then sat back in her chair and said "I need to tell you something and you cannot react."

Priya sat very still. "That's never a good opening."

"I know."

"The last time you said that you told me we were losing the Henderson account."

"We got the Henderson account back."

"After three months of —" Priya stopped. Looked at her. "What happened."

Mara looked at the ceiling. Then at her desk. Then at Priya. "I think I might be experiencing feelings," she said, "in a direction that is extremely inconvenient."

Priya looked at her for a long moment.

"No," she said.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You don't have to." Priya set her tablet down on her desk with the careful precision of someone managing their own reaction. "Mara."

"I know."

"He took your company."

"I know."

"You are currently living in his house because your flat burned down."

"I am aware."

"And you are sitting here telling me —"

"I said inconvenient," Mara said. "I used the word inconvenient. I'm not acting on anything. I'm not even fully admitting to anything. I'm simply informing you that I noticed something and it was annoying and I needed to say it out loud to someone so I could hear how ridiculous it sounds and move on."

Priya looked at her. "Does it sound ridiculous?"

Mara picked up her pen. Put it down. "No," she said quietly. "That's the problem."

Priya was quiet for a moment. Then she said, carefully, "How long has this been happening."

"It hasn't been happening. It was one moment. A — a noticing."

"Of what."

"His hands," Mara said, and immediately regretted it.

Priya pressed her lips together. She was trying very hard not to smile and doing a mediocre job of it. "His hands," she repeated.

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing a face."

"This is just my face," Priya said, which was Mara's own line delivered back to her with devastating accuracy.

Mara pointed at the door. "Get out."

Priya stood and picked up her tablet and walked to the door and paused with her hand on the frame. "For what it's worth," she said, not turning around, "I've seen how he looks at you in meetings."

Mara kept her eyes on her screen. "Goodbye Priya."

"Just saying."

"Goodbye."

She was more careful after that.

Not cold — she'd tried cold and it lasted about forty minutes before the house made it impractical — but measured. She kept the evenings companionable and nothing more. She contributed to conversations without leaning into them. She was present without being available in the particular way she'd been available on Saturday, open and unguarded and walking through bookshops like she wasn't supposed to be his enemy.

She also redoubled her investigation efforts because she needed to remember what she was actually doing here.

She found Tobias Kane's personal email through a journalism alumni directory she accessed through a university connection. She drafted a message four times before she had one she was satisfied with — careful, professional, enough information to signal she was serious without revealing everything she knew. She sent it on Wednesday evening from her personal account and told herself not to expect a quick response.

He replied within the hour.

Two sentences: I know who you are. Don't contact me again.

She stared at the message.

Then she wrote back: He scared you. That's enough for me to keep looking.

No response.

But he hadn't blocked her.

She filed that away and kept going.

Thursday evening Ethan came home with takeaway — Thai, from the place two streets over that she'd mentioned once and clearly hadn't forgotten — and set it on the kitchen table without announcement and got two plates from the cabinet.

She was already at the table with her laptop.

She looked at the takeaway. Then at him.

"You remembered," she said.

"You mentioned it," he said simply, sitting down and opening the containers with the same efficiency he brought to everything.

She looked at the food. Pad thai, the specific one she'd described. Spring rolls because she'd said she always got spring rolls. A small container of extra sauce because she'd said the sauce was never enough.

He'd remembered all of it.

She looked at her plate and felt the flutter in her chest again — that inconvenient, unreasonable, completely unwelcome flutter — and said nothing about it and served herself and opened her laptop and pretended to read something important.

"How was your day," he said.

She looked up. He asked occasionally — not every evening, not as a routine pleasantry, just sometimes, when something about his demeanor suggested he actually wanted to know.

"Long," she said. "Yours?"

"Longer." He looked at his food. "The Henderson account —"

She looked up sharply. "What about it?"

"It's been flagged for review by the portfolio team." He met her eyes. "I wanted you to hear it from me first."

Her stomach tightened. The Henderson account was one of Nexara's oldest — three years, a relationship she'd built personally, the kind of client who stayed because of trust not contract.

"Why," she said carefully.

"Margin concerns. It's a standard review, not a decision." He held her gaze. "I'll push for a sixty day extension before any action is taken. That gives you time to make the case."

She looked at him across the takeaway containers and the kitchen table and thought about the fact that he hadn't had to tell her that. He could have let the portfolio team send the notification through official channels. He could have let her find out from Clara's email like everyone else.

He'd come home with her favourite food and told her himself.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded and looked back at his food and the kitchen was quiet around them and the flutter was still there, steadier now, less like a moment and more like a weather system she was going to have to learn to live inside.

She picked up her spring roll and told herself it was nothing.

She was getting very tired of telling herself things were nothing.