19. Sienna
19
SIENNA
T his was new, feeling like I had to tiptoe around my own company on Tuesday morning after spending Monday wandering my apartment like a zombie, hiding from the world. I was the first person to arrive, hell-bent on doing damage control inside and outside the business. Jules had sent out a call to get everybody in and at their desks as early as they could manage this morning. All hands on deck.
And all because of me.
Beating myself up wouldn’t help anything, but at the moment, it was all I could do. Stupid, so stupid, what was I thinking? That had not been the time or the place to go down on him, but I had done it anyway. I knew better than that. It was my job to know better.
It didn’t matter. Now, I could only try to make it up to the people I had inadvertently hurt. First on the list was my business partner, who barely looked at me as she took a seat in my office without stopping at her desk first to remove her jacket or leave her purse. That might have been the toughest part of all, the way she refused to meet my gaze .
“I’ve been doing some digging,” I told her while she arranged herself in the chair across from mine. “You know, Noah has been convinced all along that it was Drake Thomas behind that article. But after going through his social media posts this morning, I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t him.”
She tipped her head to the side, eyes narrowing as she regarded me the way she would regard a suspicious stranger. Was this how far we had fallen? “What has that got to do with anything?” she asked.
“I’m operating under the assumption that whoever took and shared these photos is the same person trying to take Noah down. Drake is out of the country.”
“I see.” She didn’t say anything more than that. I had no way of knowing what was going on in her head.
I had done this to myself, right? A chilly attitude was the least of what I deserved.
“I sent a request to the photographers yesterday. They sent the photos from the clinic over to me. I’ve been combing through them all morning, but I haven’t found anything necessarily suspicious.”
“Okay, can we drop this for a second?” She tucked her chin close to her chest, her brows raised. “How could you do this? You, of all people. You’re supposed to be the one person I can trust because we’ve both sacrificed so much for this company.”
“I know, and I am so sorry.” If anything, I was glad she had brought it up since there was no ignoring the elephant in the room. It took up all the space and the oxygen. “It was stupid, and I have no excuse. I don’t blame you if you never forgive me, but please, let’s not throw everything away.”
“I wouldn’t be the one throwing it away,” she countered, almost slamming her iced coffee on my desk. “It would be you. You are the one who did this. All I can do now is deal with the fallout. Do you understand how much credibility we’ve lost?”
“Do you have any idea how much I’ve beaten myself up because of that?” I countered in a fierce whisper. “Yes, I’m completely aware. And I am sorry. I wish I could go back and do it differently, but I can’t. All I can do is try to clean up the mess. And I am trying, I really am.”
“I know you are.” But it doesn’t make a difference . She didn’t have to say it. I felt it, and it hurt. It made me wonder if we could ever get back to where we started. Back when she trusted me.
“Was it worth it?” she whispered. Her voice was shaking, and tears were in her eyes when she finally bothered meeting my gaze.
“It’s so much more complicated than that.” Normally, that would be her cue to wave it off and tell me not to bother, that she wasn’t going to pry. Except, she didn’t do that. She merely settled back in the chair, coffee in hand again, wearing an expectant look.
I had already swallowed my pride so many times. Why not once more? “You’re the only person who knows this,” I warned before launching into the story of how I had accidentally ended up getting involved with Noah. She didn’t need the details, of course, so I left them out. It was enough to explain how it all started out accidentally, thanks to her invitation to the party at Club Caramel.
Her mouth hung open by the time I finished. Somewhere along the line, she had gone from sitting back with her arms folded to leaning in, hanging on to every word. “And it was him all along? Holy shit. What are the chances?”
“Believe me. You’re not asking yourself anything I haven’t already asked myself a hundred times, and I still haven’t figured it out.” There was something refreshing about coming clean. I felt lighter, having unburdened myself.
“That doesn’t absolve you,” she pointed out, though she was no longer as chilly and detached. “You know that, right?”
“Of course it doesn’t. I was stupid to sneak off with him on Saturday. And I’m so sorry to bring any of this down on us. It’s going to be all right,” I insisted.
She didn’t look convinced. “I guess you won’t want to hear about the call I got from Jacob Dalton first thing this morning, or rather, from his agent.” She was angry again, nostrils flaring with every breath. “He asked me point-blank if Jacob could get out of the contract because they aren’t sure we’re the right fit.”
“That son of a bitch!” I slammed a hand against my desk because out of everything, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. “He fucking hits on me at lunch, then has the nerve to act like he can’t believe I get involved with a client?”
“Maybe that’s exactly why he did it,” she pointed out, sounding tired. “If you were going to abandon your ethics, you should’ve abandoned them with him. You know how these things go down.” At least there was sympathy in her voice.
“I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry,” I mumbled, folding my arms on the desk and resting my head on top. “I will never stop hating myself for this.”
She kept me hanging for a moment or two before sighing. “I don’t want you to hate yourself forever. We’ll get through this. I know we will. It’s just… a lot.”
That was putting it mildly. She sounded less like she wanted to kill me, anyway, which was a huge relief. I could hold onto that.
“I’m going to go out there to see if anybody has any questions or concerns.”
No, don’t worry about it,” she insisted when I began to rise from my chair. “Keep combing through those photos. Maybe send them over to Noah. He might be able to recognize somebody you would otherwise overlook.”
It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered that yet. I had already run through countless options in my head. For twenty-four hours, I had worried myself sick, answering phone calls from my parents, from Rose, the twins. There was a point when I wanted to throw my hands into the air and give up, to tell everybody to check in with each other rather than bothering me. But I was an adult, and as such, I had to face the music.
That didn’t mean, however, that I wanted to reach out to Noah. It wasn’t exactly like he had kicked me out of his penthouse, but that didn’t make the aftermath any easier to swallow. I had heard Ari. At least I had heard how angry he was, even if I couldn’t make out the exact words he used before Jules called me in a panic after seeing the photos online. I was sure when he looked at me, he saw the origin of all of his troubles. He had taken a huge risk with me, and it had blown up in our faces. And now, all the work we had done to clear up his image may as well have never happened.
That was how it felt, anyway. Time would tell if it was true. In the meantime, there was nothing I could do but put on my big girl panties and type up an email to him.
Got some photos from the sports clinic. Thought maybe you could recognize somebody who might have taken those shots of us …
That didn’t feel like enough. What could I say? Should I thank him? No, that would come off so corny, not to mention a little patronizing. Thanks for the best sex ever. Yeah, that would make everything better. What was I thinking?
… I hope things have calmed down a little from yesterday. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Sienna Black
CEO
Momentum Public Relations
I sent the message before I could overthink it any further, then resolved to step out of my office for the first time since my arrival. I needed to face the team. I needed to be a leader, no matter how much I wanted to crawl under a blanket and never come back out.
I stood, straightening out my suit jacket, smoothing down any errant flyaways before stepping away from my desk, only to be halted by my ringing phone. Even now, my heart leaped when I saw Noah’s name on the screen. Was I trying to have my heart broken? I took a single, shaky breath before answering. “Don’t tell me you already saw somebody in those photos.”
There was a brief pause before he replied. “I haven’t opened the file yet. I wanted to talk to you. Yesterday went all wrong.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. No, I couldn’t do this. There was no giving in. No working things out. “It went the way it had to. We’re both adults with big responsibilities. You were right.”
“What about everything else?”
“There is no everything else,” I reminded him as gently as I could while my heart twisted and burned. This was so fucking unfair, but then life wasn’t fair. “We both worked too hard and too long to be irresponsible now. I think all of this can be handled and cleaned up, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend none of it happened and go back to how things were before those photos came out.”
“Can we at least talk?” he asked, quiet, hesitant.
So unlike the Noah I thought I knew.
So unlike the Noah who’d broken my heart all over again by letting me down gently yesterday morning.
I looked out the window at the view I loved so much, willing myself to get through this without breaking down. “We’re talking now.” He was determined to kill me, wasn’t he? How many times had I wished he would regret hurting me? How many times did I imagine him at my mercy, begging for a chance to be understood, asking for my forgiveness? Reality wasn’t nearly as satisfying as my fantasies, but then a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then.
“I have to go,” I told him, biting my lip, fighting through the regret that threatened to steal my voice. “I need to do a little damage control around the office. Do yourself a favor and look through the photos. Drake Thomas is out of the country,” I added. “So I doubt he was behind this.”
“All right.” Disappointment hung heavy in his voice, but that wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t manage the way he dealt with this. I could only manage myself.
And I was having a hard enough time of that without taking on the burden of his feelings. I was having such a hard time, in fact, that it took a few minutes to catch my breath after ending the call. There was something terribly final about it, and painful too. Somewhere along the line, I had gotten much too involved with him, so much so, there were tears threatening to spill onto my cheeks when I imagined never touching him again.
But it was for the best. One of us had to be smart about this, and it looked like it was going to be me. No matter how much misery I’d have to wade through to get to the other side.