Page 59 of Not As Advertised

Never having been this direct with Aiden before, I saw the impact of my words hit him. He’d gone from leaning forward with his elbows on his knees to sitting straight and grasping the arms of the chair with his hands.

“You need to tell me right now if someone has hurt you. If someone put their hands on you or said something to you that made you feel scared, I’ll make them wish they’d never been born.”

I could see how my withdrawal might make him wary that something had happened to me. I’d done my best to hide the depth of what I was feeling on the way home from San Jose on Saturday night. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for him to assume something worse had happened to me in the interim.

His protective side had me instantly reaching out to pull one of his hands with both of mine.

“No, Aiden. Nothing like that at all. No one has bothered me in any way. The team is great.” I attempted a smile, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was harder to lie to someone I trusted.

Giving his hand a quick squeeze to reassure him, I pressed him to assure my privacy.

“I’m going to explain. But please promise you won’t tell anyone first.”

“If no one is bothering you, then yes. Everything you say in this office will just be between us. I promise.”

Seeing the intensity of his honesty reflected in his gaze, I decided I believed him. He had never acted in a way that showed I couldn’t trust him.

Unable to hold eye contact while I confessed my secrets, I considered what to say. Rationally, I knew I shouldn’t feel bad about it, but there was always the ever-present fear that he would see me as “less” or “flawed” the way some people who misunderstood mental illness could.

“So I guess the reason Ethan said I haven’t been myself lately was probably because I’ve been going through something personally.”

To his credit, he waited for me to speak instead of jumping in with a lot of questions. God, why was this so hard to force out? Gripping onto his hand to reassure myself now, I continued.

“So, when there’s a lot of stress, I get anxious. The fundraiser was a lot. When we saw my mother, I was horrified and embarrassed. My whole system got overloaded, and I didn’t want to be there. She said some critical things to me, and even though I know she’s not right, I can’t stop it from making me feel really bad. Her criticisms go round and round my brain until it’s hard not to believe them. So I had to take two days off just to take care of myself. I know I’ve been off a bit before this week because of what was going on with us, so Ethan must have noticed that. Today is the first day I feel almost back to my normal self.”

Chancing a quick look at his face, I saw him struggling to keep his expression neutral. I could see worry in his eyes, but this time, he nodded for me to keep going. I looked back down at our joined hands.

“Aiden, I have chronic anxiety. Not the kind of worry that someone might have where they are concerned about something for a little while and it goes away. I get so anxious that it affects my ability to communicate with people and socialize. Even though I take medication every day to help me manage it, sometimes, life just has more stress than I can handle. Then I get too overwhelmed to cope.”

Needing to see his reaction, I lifted my head fully. He let go of my hands to swipe his fingers through his hair and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. I could see that he was trying to figure out what to say. At least he didn’t look angry or disappointed, but it would remain to be seen if he still wanted anything to do with me romantically after this.

“I can tell that was really hard for you to say…” he began.

Oh no, the brush-off is coming… Shit!I pushed my chair back. Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear him reject me after all. I had to get out of his office.

My panic must have shown on my face because he grabbed both my hands to prevent me from moving.

“No, sweetheart. Wait. I’m not done. I calmed down and listened just now. I need you to listen to me too, okay?” The look he gave me said he meant business.

“As I was saying, it couldn’t have been easy for you to share that, especially because I’m your boss. So thank you for trusting me that we will keep this information between us. I need you close to me. I don’t feel like I can have this conversation with you over there.”

He got up and walked to the office door and turned the lock before coming back to his seat. Once he was sitting again, he took my hands and guided me into his lap. I was as graceful as a newborn giraffe, so I landed on him in a pile of limbs. He quickly took hold of my hips and righted me so that I was sitting on one of his hard thighs (he clearly never missed leg day). Wrapping his arm around my waist, he leaned forward to put his nose in my hair and took a deep breath.

“That’s much better,” he said while he cuddled me closer to him.

He was right. Being this close to him helped me relax my tense muscles. The churning in my stomach abated slightly asI let myself lean back into him. His hand at my waist started making slow strokes on my hip.

“I know why you wouldn’t want to say anything. Having been in the corporate world for so many years, I’ve seen the way employers sometimes deal with mental illness, and it can be unfair. Being a younger person in the company must have also made this more of a risk to you. Thank you for being so brave.”

I didn’t have the words to tell him how powerful it was to be called brave when worry had insidiously stripped away so many of the good things I could believe about myself. I held his gaze, hoping my expression could say what my lips could not.

“As hard as it is for me to admit, sweetheart, I don’t know much about what it’s like to feel how you feel on a daily basis. But it doesn’t scare me or make me think less of you. I lived with three women growing up and welcomed a fourth into the family, so I like to think I’ve seen a lot of female emotions. But this is going to be all new to me. You’ll have to have patience with me.”

I was floored by his sense of calm. Not only that, but he wasn’t giving me the brush-off either. He could have easily gone back on what he said about seeing each other and gone with the “it’s against the rules, and I’ve thought about it” excuse. But he didn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Aiden had never done a predictable thing since I’d known him, other than his choice of lunch.

“Okay, um, I’m not really sure what else to say right now. I wasn’t expecting you to want to continue whatever it is between us after I told you…” I spoke into his throat as I buried my face in his warm skin, muffling my words.

“Abigail, let me clear up two things right away. First, ‘whatever this is’ is a relationship. An exclusive one. You are mine. And I am yours. Since you’ve taken such a risk, I’ll be honest in return. I don’t know the first thing about being someone’s boyfriend, nor have I ever wanted to. But with you,I’d like to try. The hitch in the plan is that we must keep it to ourselves. Do you still want to?”

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