by Claire Adams
But I could not shake off the feeling that I was currently spending tens of thousands of dollars to help out the very same family that had already cost me quite a lot. I didn’t want to be irked by it, but when Aria and her mother reappeared from the room I felt another flash of annoyance and decided that before I did something I would regret I needed to get out of there.
“I’m sorry for taking so much of Aria’s time.” Molly smiled at me politely. “But dinner can resume now. Would you like another glass of—”
“Actually,” I said, looking at my watch as though it would indicate some sort of honesty in my story. “I have to get going. Unfortunately, something has come up at the bank and I need to rush right away.”
“But Zayden,” Aria started protesting, looking rather disappointed. “What could have possibly come up at this hour? Surely you could postpone it until the morning without any consequences?”
“And lose more money? No thank you, I think I better get ahead,” I snapped and regretted immediately as I watched Aria’s face fall.
“Did you hear us talking?” Aria asked beginning to tear up.
“I really have to go, Aria,” I said, trying to sound slightly kinder. “Ned will come pick you up after he drops me off at the bank. It won’t be very long.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said, still looking sad. “I can manage on my own.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Aria.” I frowned. “It’s too late at night for you to be…whatever… Ned will be here and he will take you home safely and I really, really have to go. Thanks a lot for dinner, Molly,” I said, trying to be polite despite the circumstances. “See you, Aria.”
I turned around and walked out without thinking twice. Had I not gotten out of there, I would have suffocated with the knowledge. To Aria’s defense, it did sound like she planned on telling me everything, so she had no poor intention. Yet, it hardly changed the facts. Whether or not Aria had been directly involved in the situation, what had happened had happened.
---
The next day, I sat in my office playing with my stress ball, still unable to shake off the feelings of betrayal from everything I had heard the past day. No matter what way I looked at it, I couldn’t help but feel like this family had scammed me. I knew that Aria didn’t know of her dad’s connection to the bank and how he had caused me such a loss before signing the contract. However, the fact remained that the Roberts owed me a lot and instead of me getting paid back, I was spending even more on their behalf. Did intentions even matter in situations such as these? I thought not, as I bitterly thought back yet again to the conversation I had overheard.
I thought of Aria and how much I cared about her. It was true. I cared for her almost more than was acceptable, which is why I hated feeling like she was some kind of a manipulative scammer. She wasn’t and I knew that, but I still could not shake off this feeling. I wondered, had she known about her dad and my bank beforehand, would it have changed how receptive she was to the contract? Would she have still agreed to take so much money from me?
She had been desperate in the situation. There was no doubt about that. The fact that she had agreed to the contract to begin with meant that she was willing to go through some lengths for her mom’s hospital bills. But would this have made things different? Changed her mind? There really was no way of knowing as it was already too late now. I had already made half the payments. Shaking my head, I sighed deeply as I saw Aria’s head wrapped around my door. How long had she been standing there?
“Do you have a minute?” she asked me nervously.
“Sure, come on in,” I said, despite still feeling some irrational anger towards her family and Aria too. “What can I do for you?” I asked bitingly as she sat across from me. “Besides what I have already done, I mean.”
Aria looked taken aback. She opened her mouth and closed it again, as though unsure how she was going to communicate with me.
“I don’t…I mean I just came in to check if,” she paused momentarily and added, “You have been acting rather strange since last night.”
“Oh, is that right?” I asked, getting more and more annoyed. “How so?”
“Well first of all, you ran out of my mom’s house without so much as a warning and a very poor excuse,” she snapped.
“Don’t take that tone with me. Not when your family—” I stopped mid-sentence. “Nevermind.”
“You overheard us last night, didn’t you?” she asked, looking resigned all of a sudden.
I shrugged. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. You and your mother simply weren’t as quiet as you obviously thought you were.”
Her face took on a deep shade of red as she looked away from me, breaking eye-contact. “Well, if you heard everything, you must have also heard that I had no idea that South National Bank had anything to do with my father’s bankruptcy. And that as soon as I found out, I had the full intention of telling you!”
“But you didn’t, did you?” I demanded angrily.
“Yeah, because it would have been so easy to tell you considering you stormed out of my mother’s house last night and haven’t spoken to me since!”
She was right. I hadn’t even given her a chance to come clean about the whole situation since I had been so angry. Why should I give her a chance? Why should I give her anything more when I had already given so much to her family? A fresh surge of anger began to bubble up inside me so I reached for the stress ball, hoping Aria wouldn’t notice.
“Why are you so angry with me?” she asked after a few minutes of complete silence where neither of us so much as looked at one another. “I’m sorry, Zayden! Had I known about this at any point before the contract, I would have made full disclosure before letting you…I’m just…I’m sorry that you had to suffer financial loss because of my father. As a direct victim of his shenanigans, I can safely say I understand how you must be feeling right now.”
“Oh, have you lost five hundred thousand dollars to a man only to later find out you were paying his ex-wife’s hospital bills in order to help out his daughter who you had just happened to fall for?”
“That’s oddly specific. I’m going to go with no.” She attempted a weak smile, trying to change the mood of the conversation. It worked slightly as the look on her face made me want to kiss her. But I was still angry and looking at Aria’s face, I wished I wasn’t.
“Look, I know you didn’t know about any of this,” I said, exasperated with her, the entire situation and myself. “But it doesn’t change the facts, does it? And I can’t help feeling…and I’m sorry for what I am about to say, Aria, because it’s really not your fault directly… but I can’t help feeling like I’ve been scammed by your family.”
She looked like I had just slapped her across the face as tears began to visibly surface in her eyes.
“You don’t know how much your dad cost me. And on top of that, I am paying for your mother’s hospital bills…like what the actual—”
“But I am paying you back for it,” she snapped, fighting back tears. Aria was never one to show weakness, that much had been firmly established. “I am not sure you have actually read this contract you keep referring to because if you had then you would remember a very important clause at the end of it, which I might remind you. I insisted we add to the contract and even refused to sign the whole thing without the clause that states as soon as I graduate from college, I will begin paying you back for the hospital bills in installments. Or have you forgotten that entire encounter where this deal would not even have existed if you hadn’t agreed to let me pay you back!”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said, getting more annoyed. “But that still puts me at a loss of, let’s see, about five hundred thousand dollars!”
“There is nothing I can do about that!” she exclaimed, clearly starting to get very frustrated. Her answer pissed me off too. What did she mean she couldn’t do anything about it? It was her father, after all, who owed me the money. And after all that I had done for her and af
ter finding out what her father caused my bank, she could just sit there and act all helpless like there is no way for her to rectify the situation?
“Yes there is,” I said, more out of anger than anything else. “You can pay me back the five hundred thousand dollars after you graduate too. Installments are okay.”
For the second time that afternoon, Aria looked like I had slapped her across the face, which was unfair from where I stood, considering I was just asking for my own money back. And not even right away.
She looked like she had been searching for an appropriate response for a while when she finally just said, “Wow.” She was clearly dumbfounded.
“Just because I don’t actually need the money, Aria,” I prodded after her lack of response. “Does not mean it is okay for people to run off with what is mine, no matter the circumstances. I don’t care how rich I am or how much money I have, I am not okay with any business I run facing any sort of a loss. It’s part of being a businessman. If I didn’t learn to care about every single penny that flowed towards me where my businesses are concerned, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today. So you have two options from here on. You can take this personally, get really offended and start another fight, which you know how that is going to end. We have already been through that motion. You’ll get angry, show me a lot of attitude and haughtily walk out of here only to return in a couple of weeks when your mom’s hospital bills are due because you realize in the last minute that you need me more than you care to admit. Or, we could go for the simpler option, which is you take this with a stride – just like one business oriented person to another – and agree to pay me back and we move on, picking up where we left off. So which option will it be then?”
Instead of speaking, she allowed the tears to fall freely. This made me even angrier. It was easier to be a stern asshole when she was snapping back with all her might. Her tears just made me feel guilty, which was not something I deserved or needed to feel in the current situation.
“Aria, say something,” I said in what I thought was a much gentler tone.
She, however, continued to stare at me with tears covering her entire face, making me wish I could punch a hole through the wall.
Chapter 6
Aria
I couldn’t believe what Zayden had been saying and wished I could stop the damn tears from pouring all over my face. The last thing I needed was to show weakness in this situation, yet I felt completely lost in terms of words to produce from my mouth. Scammed. He had said he felt scammed. That I had somehow, unintentionally scammed him!
My gut felt like it was falling low on a downward spiral of a dangerous roller coaster when I had heard him use that word. How could he? In the time we had gotten to know each other, he had most certainly gotten some idea of the kind of person that I was? If not, then this whole relationship itself was a scam. After how much I had insisted that he add the clause about me paying him back to the contract, how dare he question my character.
He had overheard the whole conversation between me and mom, which meant that he knew very damn well that I was completely clueless about this and intended on telling him everything. He found out as soon as I found out.
It was not good enough though! None of it was apparently good enough for him. He had decided what I was doing was my fault even when I wasn’t and demanded payment – literal and figurative – even though he knew the insinuations would hurt me. It wasn’t that I minded the idea of paying his bank the money my dad owed it. After all, if things all went as planned, I was going to be successful in a couple of years and it would only make me feel good to know that I cleared up the mess my dad left behind. This was regardless of whether I had ever found out South National Bank’s involvement. No, the money was not what hurt me so much. It was the fact that he sat there, looking me straight in the eye and asked me to pay him that money as though I had personally stolen it from him.
The fact that he could make me feel so low made me furious!
To think I was coming to believe our relationship had been making progress. Maybe it had. To Zayden’s credit he had gone out of his way to make me feel like our relationship was, at last, real, even going so far as to asking to meet my mom. Obviously, when he had asked for that he wasn’t expecting all these revelations and neither was I. It wasn’t some trick or an effort to make me feel as shitty as I was feeling right now. He was genuinely interested in my life and getting to know my mom.
I tried imagining myself in his place when he overheard the conversation, from the point of view of a guy who had just gone against all his reservations and jumped into a serious relationship with me. After all that he had been doing for me these past few months, a part of me understood why hearing about my dad must have completely ticked him off. His running off last night was completely justified. I would have run out of there myself if I could have, given what I had heard.
I couldn’t run every time things didn’t go the way I wanted to. Perhaps it would take more time to earn Zayden’s complete respect and if I wanted to keep this relationship, I was going to have to be okay with that. As angry as I was, I was not willing to give up what we had built over the past few months. It would be much easier and respectful to just agree to pay him the money that my dad owed.
“Option two,” I spoke after what felt like an eternity, wiping off my tears. “One business-oriented person to another, I will pay you every single penny back. Happy?”
“Far from,” he snapped, somehow looking even angrier for getting what he had wanted. He had expected me to put up a fight, or argue in some way, or most likely of all, walk away. I had thrown him off with my response, undoubtedly, and it felt oddly like the ball was in my court all of the sudden.
“But well, good,” he said, standing up from his chair. “That’s settled then. Is that all you wanted?”
“Are you kicking me out?” I looked at him quizzically, now beginning to feel amused.
“I don’t know, last time I checked, it was still my office.”
“So you are kicking me out?” I pressed, trying not to laugh out loud.
“I have a bank to run, Aria, so if there isn’t anything else you need from me today—”
“My paper,” I cut him off. “Remember the paper I was telling you about? That you so nicely volunteered to help work me on? Well, the deadline for that is coming up, so I was wondering if you were up to helping me out?”
“I seem to be making a career out of helping you out.” He snarled at me trying to look menacing, but simply appeared comical to me.
“I mean you don’t have to help me. I was just reminding you because you volunteered.”
He sat back down and played with his stress ball for a bit before speaking. “We will do it tonight,” he eventually said. “Now for the rest of the day, please just let me be okay?”
“Gladly.” I smiled and walked out of his office.
---
Later that night, I told the whole story to Nick and Stacey, who for some reason found it hilarious and burst into a chorus of laughter.
“Oh my supportive best friends,” I said sarcastically. “It wouldn’t be so funny if you were in my place, would it?”
“No,” Nick said, trying to straighten up his face. “It wouldn’t at all. And it’s not funny that this is happening to you, Aria. Not at all!”
“That’s not the impression one would get based on your uncontrollable laughter,” I snapped.
“It’s just that,” Stacey, who had finally managed to catch a breath, spoke. “What are the odds you know? Very, very low. But then, you’re not going to believe,” she started laughing again. “I can’t, Nick, you tell her.”
“Well, after you and Zayden had gotten over your last set of – uh – complications, Stacey and I were talking about it – we were glad!” he added immediately upon seeing the expression on my face, which wasn’t exactly that of glee. “We are always happy to see you happy, Aria, you know this. But Stacey and I were talking about how, we
ll, theatrical this whole thing between you and him has been. So full of twists and turns and popcorn worthy. He’s a handsome billionaire and your boss. How often does stuff like this happen in real life?”
“I don’t understand why any of it is funny yet,” I said, still annoyed. “Enlighten me?”
“Okay, okay.” Nick sighed. “So Stacey and I were talking about it and she jokingly said ‘what’s next, we find out that Aria’s dad banked with South National before he went bankrupt?’ and we just laughed about it.”
“That is eerie,” I said with my mouth hanging open, and then burst out laughing myself. If this hadn’t been so utterly bizarre, perhaps I would have been really pissed. “My goodness, Stacey, you should become a fortune teller!”
“No,” she gasped. “It’s not like I was predicting this or would ever wish for something like this to happen to you. The reason I had even said it was because it seemed so absurdly far-fetched to be true.”
“It is. Too absurdly far-fetched to be true. And yet it’s true. If this wasn’t all happening to me, I wouldn’t believe it could happen to anyone in real life.”
“Are you okay though, Aria?” Stacey now looked serious, as though only just registering the full implications of what I had told them. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going to pay him back.” I shrugged. “Eventually.”
“Oh god, Aria. This is ridiculous! You shouldn’t have to. You’re not the one that lost him all that money!”
“He knows that. He is just angry right now and you can’t exactly blame him. I did for a bit but then I put myself in his shoes and it kind of makes sense why he is so frustrated, with the money he is paying for my mom and everything.”
“You are so mature about this, Aria,” Stacey said in amazement and looked at Nick. “If you ever made me pay you five hundred thousand dollars for something I didn’t do, I would dump your ass.”
“That is never going to be a problem since I doubt either one of us will have that kind of money any time soon. And if we do in the far, far future, it won’t matter cause it will be both our money since we’ll be marri—” he immediately stopped talking. His cheeks flushed hard. I turned to look at Stacey, who seemed to be about ready to pass out.