Afraid of Love

CHAPTER 4

It started with the Johnson file.

The Johnson account was one of FrankSimon Enterprises' oldest clients — complicated, demanding, and worth a significant portion of the firm's annual revenue. Frank had been managing it personally for years. When Khloe noticed an error in the filing system that had caused two important communications to be missed, she corrected it, flagged it in her report, and said nothing further.

She had not expected Frank to come to her desk about it.

"You found the Johnson gap," he said.

"It was in the filing notes."

"Three people reviewed those files before you. None of them caught it." He set the folder on her desk. "How did you see it?"

She looked at him evenly. "Because I was looking for what was missing, not just what was there."

He studied her. "That is an unusual approach."

"Most problems hide in what people forget to include."

He nodded slowly. Then he said, "I'd like you in the Johnson meeting on Friday ."

She blinked. "That is a senior account meeting."

"Yes."

"I am your assistant."

"You are also the only person who caught a gap that three senior staff missed." He picked up the folder. "Friday. Nine AM."

He walked away.

Khloe stared at the space he had left and felt something that was not entirely professional — something that was warm and inconvenient and entirely unwelcome.

She stamped it down immediately.

That evening, she was short with him.

She did not plan it. It arrived like weather — the awareness that she was feeling too much, followed by the instinct to create distance before it grew. When he asked her to reschedule a call, she answered in clipped, minimal words. When he paused at her desk to share a detail about the Johnson prep, she kept her eyes on her screen and responded with yesses and brief acknowledgements.

She felt him pause.

"Is everything alright, Miss William?"

"Perfectly fine."

A silence. She did not look up.

"You seem —"

"I have a lot to finish before tomorrow," she said, firmly but politely. "Was there something else you needed?"

Another pause. Longer.

"No," he said quietly. "That's everything."

He returned to his office. The door closed, not loudly, but with a kind of finality that she felt in her chest like pressure.

She stared at her screen and hated herself a little.

This was what she did. She knew it. The moment something felt too close, too warm, too real — she sharpened her edges and held them outward like armor.

She knew he would have been feeling really bad with the way she acted towards him, and the thought of this made her uncomfortable.

The next morning she arrived to find a coffee on her desk. Her order, exact and perfect, from the café three blocks away that she mentioned once two months ago.

No note. No acknowledgement. Just the coffee, still warm.

She sat down. She looked at it. She thought about the man behind those double doors who noticed everything about her without ever making her feel watched.

She thought about the way she had shut down last night, and the way he had retreated without making her feel guilty for it.

She picked up the coffee.

Her walls held firm.

But that morning, for the first time, she hated them a little.

Khloe had told himself one hundred times that she was his employee.

He had told himself that whatever this was — this pull, this attention he could not seem to redirect — it was inappropriate and unproductive and needed to stop.

He had told himself all of this very firmly.

Then she walked through the door in the morning, and he felt the entire room shift slightly, the way a room shifts when light comes in.

He poured himself a coffee and made peace with the fact that he was in serious trouble.

The Johnson meeting changed things.

Khloe had entered the boardroom expecting to observe. She had not expected Frank to gesture to the seat directly beside him, or for the senior partners to look at her with anything other than polite confusion about why the assistant was present.

But Frank had said, "Khloe identified the gap in our filing system that was affecting Johnson communications. She'll be contributing to today's discussion, he said. In the meeting, she pointed out a pattern in the client's response times that suggested a preference for morning communications over afternoon. Two senior partners had exchanged glances, and one had said, " She's right.

Frank had said nothing. He had simply looked at her with an expression she could not fully read, and continued the meeting.

Afterward, in the hallway, he said, "Good work today."

"I only said what the data showed."

"Most people see the data and say what they think the room wants to hear." He paused. "You said what was true. That is rarer than you think."

She almost said something real then. Something unguarded. She felt it rise in her throat — gratitude, yes, but also something deeper, something that had to do with the fact that she had spent years feeling overlooked and here was this man, this impossible man, making her feel seen without even trying.

She swallowed it.

"Thank you," she said simply, and walked back to her desk.

But the armor had shifted. Just slightly. Just enough for her to notice.

That Friday, the office held its quarterly team lunch — a catered affair in the large meeting room that everyone attended. Frank had planned to eat quickly and return to her desk. She was not good at company social events. She never knew quite where to place herself.

But Priscilla pulled her into a seat, and then Serena from the legal team joined, and somehow she was laughing at an office story that Priscilla told with tremendous dramatic effect, and she forgot, for a little while, to be guarded.

She looked up from laughing and found Frank watching her from across the room.

He was standing with two senior partners, ostensibly in conversation. But his eyes were on her.

He did not look away when she caught him.

She did.

Her laughter faded. She looked down at her plate.

"He's been watching you for about ten minutes," Priscilla said cheerfully beside her.

"Please stop," Khloe said.

"I'm just reporting the facts."

"Please stop reporting the facts."

Priscilla smiled and said nothing more.

That night, alone in her apartment, Khloe sat at her small kitchen table and did something she had not done in years.

She allowed herself, just for a moment, to

think about Frank and how he had been nice to her.

She sat with that

image for exactly sixty seconds; she found herself smiling and blushing.