Love You Always

I stop at the reception desk. “Did a girl go running from here?” I ask Ruth. “She has blue eyes and dark hair. She is in jeans and a sweater.”

“Crying?” I close my eyes, sucking in a breath to pull it together before I go back upstairs and do something I regret. “She grabbed a cab.”

“Thanks.” Ruth, who’s been working the front desk since before I even bought this building, gives me a soft comforting smile.

“You’ll get her back. No one cries that hard over a man unless they’re in love.”

I nod, unable to say anything. My throat closes up thinking about my always bubbly angel hurting. I head out to my car, telling Smith the address to her place. I try and text her but she doesn’t respond. After I talked to Amelia last night I used her phone to call mine so I have her number.

Message after message starts coming through with responses to all of the orders I fired off. I go over them as we pull up to her apartment building, knowing that there is no way in hell that I’m leaving this place without my angel.

17

Mia

“I saw it printed in the paper, Amelia,” I tell her. She is pacing back and forth in front of the sofa where I’ve planted myself. My eyes hurt from all of the tears that I’ve shed over this and I know if I look in the mirror I’ll see a hot mess staring back at me.

“I’m going to kill him.” Her hands are clenched into fists at her sides. She is a mama bear. She can go from Let me do your hair to I’ll fuck someone up in about .2 seconds.

I sniffle. I’ve calmed down some since I got here. Something about watching Amelia be mad for me has gotten me to stop crying. At least for the moment.

“What did Kim say?” I ask. It’s so hard to believe that he’d do this. The way he touched me. The way he made love to me. It felt so real. I can’t imagine that it was fake. Maybe I was his last fling before he got married. I feel mortified at being the other woman. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that he’s made me that. I may not have liked the catty blonde in his office but even she didn’t deserve this.

“I’m not talking to her right now.” She stops pacing to look at me. “She shouldn't have set you up with him when I suggested it.”

“Maybe she doesn't know?”

“Ha! She is always on his ass about his dating life. Those two are best friends at the end of the day. Their fights are just how they play together. If he is dating someone she knows about it.”

“She might hate the girl?” I try again. Still there’s no excuse for her setting me up with him if she knew that he was already with someone else. Again, I know the woman is cold. I picked up on it as soon as I saw her. She’d slipped from one person to another. It was strange to watch. I was only now putting together how odd her behavior was. I’ve been so upset that I haven’t had a chance to process everything that happened. I’m sitting here playing it all over and over in my head. Maybe the blonde was upset too, which made her act oddly. I couldn't imagine being engaged to Max and finding out that he’d spent a night with another woman. Not only that but he had the audacity to bring me into the office for everyone to see. It’s probably the real reason he took me into his office so early. That way no one would see us together and we wouldn't run into her.

“It’s still not okay.” Amelia agrees with my silent thought.

“What did he say to you on the phone?” I tuck my feet under me, reaching for a tissue.

“That’s what I don’t understand. I’m good at reading people. When I talked to him last night he was so smitten with you. It was adorable. So I decided to let him live. I’m second-guessing that decision now.” I have to fight a laugh because it’s really not the time. “It’s not adding up to me. Tell me again everything that happened.”

I start from the beginning, trying not to leave out any important details except for the part about Max having me for breakfast on his desk. I let her know that the woman heard us fooling around. Besides that, I give her every detail that I can think of. My phone keeps ringing from all the calls and messages from Max. He programmed his number into my phone and now he’s blowing it up. I continue to ignore it.

“So she was a bitch and then she suddenly got upset?” She cocks her head to the side. “’Cause if I came at you being a bitch, you’d lock up.” Probably. I was ready to bolt back into Max’s office. “But if I started to cry. Told you I was hurting.”