Hate Me Better

Chapter 3: Cedar and Smoke and Stupid

POV: Amara



The building empties by eight.

I know because I watch it happen from my office window — the slow exodus of coats and bags and people with homes to go to — and I stay. Not because I have more work. I finished the brief two hours ago. I stay because leaving means taking the lift and the lift means a chance encounter and I have used up my entire daily quota of Rafael Voss.

By nine I'm the only one on the floor. I know this too.

So when the door opens, my whole body knows before I look up.

He's changed his jacket. Charcoal now, no tie, collar still open but further than before — three buttons this time, and I absolutely do not notice the triangle of bare chest or the chain that sits against it that I used to press my lips to when he was sleeping.

I look back at my screen.

"Still here," he says. Not a question.

"Clearly."

I hear him rather than see him — the soft sound of something being set on my desk. I look down. A coffee. Black, one sugar, the way I drink it when I'm working late. When I look up he's already moving to the window.

"You remembered," I say, before I can stop myself.

"I remember everything about you." He says it the same way he said it this morning. Like it's just a fact. Like it doesn't land in the centre of my chest and detonate.

I wrap both hands around the cup and say nothing.

Outside the window, London blinks and glitters forty floors below. Rafe stands with his hands in his pockets looking at it, giving me his profile, and I let myself look for exactly three seconds. The jaw. The throat. The way he breathes — slow, deliberate, like he decided once how to inhabit a room and never reconsidered.

Three seconds. Then I stop.

"Why are you still here?" I ask.

"Same reason you are."

I frown. "I'm here because I'm reviewing onboarding material."

He turns. One corner of his mouth moves — not quite a smile. "You finished that at seven. I could see your light from the corridor."

"You were watching my office?"

"I was walking past your office. Repeatedly." The almost-smile again. "It's a long corridor."

Despite everything — despite every wall I've built and every reason I have to keep them — I feel it. The pull. That specific Rafe thing where he says something that should be annoying and it somehow dismantles you instead.

I stand up.

Not toward him. I go to the window on the far side, put six feet of distance between us, and look out at a different section of skyline. I hear him shift. He doesn't close the distance and I hate that I notice.

"I looked it up," he says quietly. "Your portfolio. Before you were hired — I sat on the selection panel and I didn't know it was you until the final recommendation landed on my desk."

I turn. "And you said nothing."

"I recused myself from the vote." He meets my eyes. "You got this on your own, Amara. That's the only reason I'm telling you."

Something cracks, very slightly, in the wall. I hate it. I press my hand flat against the cool glass to stay steady.

"You should have told HR," I say. "Flagged the conflict of interest."

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

He's quiet for a moment. The skyline breathes between us.

"Because they would have pulled the offer," he says. "And you were the best candidate by a distance. And I—" He stops.

"And you what?"

He crosses the room. Not fast — slowly, the way you approach something you're not sure of — and he stops two feet away again. That same two feet from this afternoon. The specific distance that isn't close enough to be inappropriate and isn't far enough to be comfortable.

"I wanted you here," he says. Low. Honest. Horrible.

"Rafe—"

"I know that's not fair."

"It's not." My voice comes out unsteady and I hate myself for it. "You don't get to want things from me. You lost that."

"I know that too."

He's close enough that I can see the chain against his skin. Close enough that if I breathed out fully, we might touch. My heart is doing that loud, traitorous thing it started doing the moment I walked through the glass doors this morning, and two years of very deliberate healing feels suddenly, terrifyingly thin.

"The woman," I say. My voice goes flat. "The one I found in our bed."

Something moves across his face. Pain — fast and genuine and too late.

"I'm not doing this right now," I tell him. "Not in this building, not on my first day. But understand something, Rafael." I lift my chin. "I don't care what the reason was. I don't care if you have an explanation. You made a choice and I made one too, and mine was never to be someone's second thought again."

Silence.

He doesn't look away. He doesn't try to speak. And somehow that's worse than if he had — because the look on his face is not defensive or guilty or cornered. It's something rawer than all of those things. Something that looks, devastatingly, like a man who agrees with every word and still can't leave.

"Get out of my office," I whisper.

He goes.

I wait until the door closes. Then I sit on the floor with my back against the window and my coffee going cold in my hand and I breathe until my hands stop shaking.

It takes longer than it should.

That's the thing I can't tell anyone — that it takes longer than it should.