I Hate That I Still Want Her

Chapter 1: The Woman Who Ruined Me Ethan Reyes had learned, over five long years, that hatred could be trained the way a body was trained. You fed it. You disciplined it. You woke it up every morning and reminded it what it was for. He had built an empire on that discipline, had turned Reyes Holdings from a company hemorrhaging money after his father's death into one of the most feared logistics conglomerates on the eastern seaboard, and he had done all of it with a single name buried under the floorboards of his chest. Amelia. He did not let himself think it often. He had rules about that, quiet, private rules that no one else knew existed. He did not drive past the gallery where she used to show her paintings. He did not listen to the radio station that had played at their engagement party. He dated women who looked nothing like her, dark hair instead of gold, tall instead of small, loud instead of that maddening, knowing quiet she used to fall into right before she said something that would flay him open. He had perfected the art of almost forgetting her. Almost. Tonight, none of that mattered, because tonight he was standing in the private elevator of the Vale Tower, dressed in a suit that cost more than most people's monthly rent, on his way to sign the single most complicated joint venture of his career, and he had absolutely no reason to think about her at all. So of course he was thinking about her. It was the anniversary, he realized grimly, watching the floor numbers climb. Five years ago tonight, in a ballroom two miles from where he now stood, Amelia Cross had put her mouth on another man's mouth in front of two hundred guests, in front of his mother, in front of the string quartet his sister had hired as a surprise, and had done it with the calm, deliberate cruelty of a woman flicking ash off a cigarette. He had asked her why, afterward, in the coat room, his voice cracking in a way he had never allowed it to c***k again since. And she had looked at him with those pale, glittering eyes and said, You were never enough to hold my attention, Ethan. Did you really think you were? He had believed her. That was the part that still made his jaw tighten when he let himself remember it. He had believed every syllable, had let it rewire something fundamental in the way he understood love, understood women, understood himself. He had spent five years being furious at a nineteen year old girl instead of the twenty six year old man who could not, even now, fully let her go. The elevator chimed. Ethan straightened his cuffs, exhaled once, and walked into the glass conference room at the top of Vale Tower like a man who owned the building instead of a man about to sign half his company away to secure it. Marcus Vale rose to greet him with the easy, white toothed warmth of a man who had never once in his life doubted his own charm. Come on in, Reyes. Drinks are on the sideboard. We're just waiting on one more signature before we start. One more signature. Ethan frowned faintly. His legal team had told him this was a two party negotiation, Reyes Holdings and Vale Capital, structured around the port redevelopment neither company could afford to finish alone. No one had mentioned a third party. Ah, said Marcus, glancing toward the door with something unreadable flickering behind his eyes. Here she is now. Ethan turned. For one full second, his mind simply refused to process what he was seeing, the way a person's mind sometimes refuses a blow before the pain arrives. Then it arrived all at once, a slow, devastating collapse of five years of careful, disciplined forgetting. Amelia Cross stood in the doorway of the conference room in a charcoal suit that made her look older, sharper, harder than the girl he remembered, her golden hair cut shorter, cheekbones more pronounced than they used to be, as though something had carved away every soft edge she once had. She was still, unmistakably, unbearably, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her eyes found his and something moved behind them, quick and involuntary, gone before he could name it. Then her expression smoothed into a polished, professional nothing, the exact same nothing she had worn the night she destroyed him. Mr. Reyes, she said, as though they had never shared a bed, a ring, a future. As though he had not once memorized the exact sound of her laugh in the dark. It's been a while. Ethan's voice, when it finally arrived, came out colder than he intended, colder than he felt, which was somewhere between drowning and combusting. Ms. Cross. I didn't realize Cross Designs was part of this deal. Marcus answered before she could, sliding smoothly into the space between them like a man conducting an orchestra. Cross Designs is handling the residential and retail interiors for the entire redevelopment. It made sense to bring Amelia in from the beginning. Her father built half the waterfront district before he passed. She knows that land better than anyone alive. Ethan barely heard him. He was watching the small, telltale things his memory had apparently kept perfect records of despite five years of trying to burn the files, the way she squared her shoulders when she was uncomfortable, the way her left hand found the hem of her jacket and smoothed it once, twice, a nervous tic she had never fully outgrown from childhood piano recitals she used to tell him about in the dark, laughing at herself. She was thinner than she used to be. Sharper in the face in a way that did not read as fashionable so much as it read as something else, something he could not name and did not like the shape of. Shall we sit, Marcus said, gesturing at the long glass table, and the moment shattered into logistics, contracts, terms Ethan's legal brain processed on autopilot while the rest of him sat frozen three feet away from the woman who had once promised to marry him and then laughed while she called him disposable. The meeting lasted ninety minutes. Ethan spoke perhaps a dozen sentences, all of them about shipping timelines, tariff structures, insurance liabilities, and not one word of what actually roared inside his skull the entire time, which was some incoherent, humiliating loop of her, her, her, still her, after everything, still her. He remembered, unbidden, the last time he had watched her speak this fluently in a room full of powerful people, a fundraiser eight months before everything ended, when she had stood up unprompted and argued down two city councilmen twice her age about a zoning variance that would have gutted a community garden her mother volunteered at. He had watched her from across the room that night with an expression he was fairly certain his own face was making right now, something between pride and disbelief that a woman could be that fearless and still choose, every single time, to come home to him afterward. He had not known, watching her now across a different table in a different life, that the fearlessness he had always mistaken for confidence might have been something closer to a woman who had already stopped being afraid of anything except one particular kind of loss. Amelia, for her part, was flawless. She spoke about zoning variances and material sourcing with crisp, unbothered authority, never once glancing at him longer than professional necessity required, never once letting her voice catch, and it made something ugly twist in his chest, watching how easily she performed indifference, as though the woman in the coat room five years ago had never existed at all, as though she had simply filed him away in some drawer labeled handled and moved on with her life. When the meeting finally ended, when contracts were stacked and hands were shaken and Marcus was already pouring congratulatory scotch nobody had asked for, Ethan found himself standing at the elevator bank beside her, the two of them alone for the first time in five years, because fate apparently had a cruel sense of comedic timing. Neither of them spoke as the numbers climbed. Ethan stared straight ahead at the brushed steel doors, jaw tight, hands shoved into his pockets to keep them from doing something humiliating, like reaching for her. It was Amelia who broke first, though her voice was so quiet he almost missed it. You look well, she said. It sounded like an accusation. He turned his head slowly. Do I. It wasn't a question. Her mouth pressed into something that was not quite a smile. Successful. Cold. Exactly what you always wanted to become. There it was, that particular gift she had always had for finding the softest part of him and pressing directly on the bruise. Something snapped loose in his chest, five years of discipline unraveling in a single elevator ride. You want to talk about what I wanted, Amelia? He kept his voice low, controlled, dangerous in a way he rarely let himself sound. Because I remember exactly what I wanted five years ago. I wanted a wife. I wanted the life we planned on that rooftop. I wanted you. Ethan, don't, she said, and for the first time all night, something cracked in that careful, polished mask, something that looked almost like fear. The elevator doors opened onto the parking garage. She stepped forward to leave. He caught her wrist, not hard, not cruel, just enough to stop her, his fingers finding skin that felt thinner, colder than he remembered, and something about that small physical detail made his stomach drop in a way he could not explain. Amelia. She turned, and for one unguarded second her eyes were glassy, bright, terrified, before she blinked it away and yanked her wrist free. Say it, then, she snapped, chin lifting in that old, familiar defiance he used to find devastating and now found devastating for entirely different reasons. Say whatever it is you've been standing there dying to say. Get it over with. For a moment he almost obeyed the old rules, the ones he had lived by for five years, the ones that said nod politely, wish her well, walk to your car, and never once let her see what her face still does to the machinery inside your chest. He had performed that particular discipline in front of dozens of women who reminded him of her in some small, cruel way, a laugh, a tilt of the head, a shade of blonde that caught the light wrong and sent him straight back to a rooftop with string lights. He had always managed the discipline before. It had never once cost him anything to walk away. It cost him now. Standing three feet from the real thing instead of some pale imitation his memory had been settling for, he understood, with the sudden clarity of a man watching a building he designed collapse in real time, that discipline had never actually healed him. It had only ever been a very expensive way of postponing this exact moment. Ethan looked at her, really looked, at the hollows under her eyes that concealer could not quite erase, at the way her hand trembled almost imperceptibly at her side, and five years of carefully cultivated hatred simply refused to hold its shape for one more second. I still want you, he said. He had not planned to say it. He had spent the drive over rehearsing a dozen versions of a polite, businesslike greeting, had told himself in the elevator that whatever happened tonight, he would give her nothing, not a flicker, not a syllable that would let her know she still had any power over the architecture of his life. He had failed spectacularly, and some small, exhausted part of him felt an almost dizzying relief at the failure, as though he had been holding his breath for five years and had only just now remembered how lungs worked. The words landed in the concrete silence of the parking garage like a confession made in a church, quiet, final, impossible to take back. Amelia went perfectly, terribly still. And then, before he could say another word, before he could brace for whatever came next, her expression fractured into something raw and furious and devastated all at once, and she said, in a voice that shook far more than her face did, What is wrong with you?