Hate Me Better

Chapter 2: I Remember Everything

POV: Rafe



I give her forty minutes before I go to her office.

Forty minutes because James told me that's how long it takes a person to settle into a new space and start feeling safe. James is my CFO and reads too many psychology books and is almost always right, which I find consistently irritating.

I stand outside her door and I do not knock immediately.

Through the glass panel I can see her at the desk — shoes off, feet tucked beneath her in the chair, the way she always sat when she thought no one was watching. Red blazer draped over the back. She's reading something on her laptop with the focused intensity she gives to everything, the kind that used to make me feel like the luckiest man alive when it was pointed at me.

That was before I destroyed it.

I knock.

She doesn't look up. "Tom, just leave it on the—"

"It's not Tom."

The typing stops.

She looks up slowly. I watch her rebuild the armour in real time — the careful settling of her expression, shoulders pulling back, chin lifting. She's extraordinary at it now. Two years ago she used to wear every feeling on her face like she had nothing to hide.

I did that. I took that from her.

"I thought I made myself clear," she says.

"You did." I open the door anyway. "May I come in?"

"You're already in."

Fair point. I close it behind me and she watches me cross the room with the particular look she's perfected — like I'm mildly interesting and deeply inconvenient, like a fire alarm during lunch. I pull out the chair across from her desk and sit without being invited.

Something flickers across her face. She remembers. I can see her remembering — that I always did this, made myself at home in her spaces, and that she used to love it.

"I didn't know they'd hired you," I say. "I want you to know that."

"It doesn't matter."

"It does. If I'd known, I would have—"

"What?" She tilts her head. Her eyes are very dark and very still. "Warned me? Blocked the hire? What exactly would you have done, Rafe?"

The way she says my name now. Like she's holding it at arm's length.

"I would have called you," I say. "Before you walked in blind."

She laughs — a single, quiet sound with no warmth in it at all. "You would have called me." She leans back in her chair. "You have my number?"

"No."

"Right." She opens her laptop again. "Then we're done here."

I don't move.

She looks up.

"I'm not leaving until you let me say one thing," I tell her.

The air between us does something. Tightens. She feels it too — I know she does because her jaw shifts and she looks away first, toward the window, and that small surrender costs her. I can see it cost her.

"Say it then," she says quietly. "And go."

I lean forward. Elbows on my knees, close enough that I catch it — the perfume she's always worn, something warm and floral that I have spent two years trying to forget the name of. My jaw tightens.

"What happened—" I start.

"Don't." Her voice drops to something dangerous.

"Amara—"

"Do not sit in my office on my first day and talk to me about what happened." She's looking at me now. Fully. And it's worse than the armour — it's something raw underneath it, something she's only half-managing. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to come in here and make it make sense, because it doesn't make sense, and I am at work, and I am—"

She stops.

Presses her lips together.

Breathes.

"I'm fine," she says. Quieter now. "I am completely fine. And I need you to respect that and let me be fine."

I watch her. The slight rise and fall of her chest. The way she's holding herself very still the way you do when you're afraid of what moves if you don't.

"You're not fine," I say softly.

"Rafe."

"Neither am I."

That lands differently. I watch it move through her — the small betrayal of her expression before she locks it down again. She stands up, and I stand too, and suddenly we're on the same side of the desk with about two feet of charged air between us and this was not the plan.

"You need to leave," she says.

"I know."

"Now."

"I know." I don't move. Neither does she. Two feet. I could close it in one step and I think we both know that and I think that is precisely why neither of us breathes too deeply right now.

Her eyes drop. Just for a second — half a second — to my mouth. And back up.

There it is.

"Amara." My voice comes out lower than I mean it to.

"Don't you dare," she whispers.

I take a step back. Then another. I find the door behind me without looking for it and I hold her gaze the whole time because I am a man who has made one catastrophic mistake and I am not going to make another one.

Not yet.

"Goodnight, Ms. Osei."

Her nostrils flare.

I close the door quietly behind me and stand in the corridor for a moment, eyes closed, heart doing something loud and inconvenient against my ribs.

She looked at my mouth.

That one half-second.

Two years of silence and walls and cold professionalism and she couldn't hold it for thirty minutes.

I start walking. I'm smiling before I reach the lift and I know it's wrong, know it's dangerous, know there is an entire history of wreckage between us that I have no right to touch.

I smile anyway.

She's not fine either.