Authors: Claire Adams
With trembling fingers I typed: I’m out of
the contract. I can’t do this anymore.
My phone started ringing immediately
after. It was him.
“Hi,” I said, clutching my shirt tightly.
“What was that text about?” Zayden’s voice
was trembling and for a moment I wondered if he was as scared as I was. He was
probably just pissed. Then I remembered I was nothing but a commodity to him.
“You read it. I want out.” It took
everything I had to keep my voice straight. “I really cannot do this anymore,
Zayden. You are too controlling and it’s not something I can handle. I think
you are a decent person, and I always will. Thank you for helping me out and
everything, really. I have nothing against you whatsoever, but I cannot live my
life as somebody’s possession. I am just the wrong person for this deal. You
need someone who will do your bidding and let you control her life. You should
have probably figured that out by now. I really enjoyed spending time with you
before things got out of control. You don’t get nearly enough credit for just
how fun you can be. I am going to miss that, whatever we had, but this is not
worth my dignity and never will be.”
To my surprise and utter horror, he
started laughing hysterically, and after about a full minute of that insanity,
he said, “You are joking right? I mean you’ve read our contract. You signed
it.”
The truth was, I hadn’t fully read it as I
should have. I skimmed through it and got the basic gist of it – I was to spend
time with him, go on dates with him and owed him no sexual obligations. In
return, he would pay for my mom’s hospital bills, which I was to pay him back
as soon as I got a job out of college – and the rest seemed to just be legal
jibber jabber. I marveled at how stupid it was of me to not give it a more
thorough perusal, and feared that I had got myself in a situation I didn’t want
to be in.
“What are you talking about?” I asked very
carefully.
“Aria, you’re a really smart girl, don’t
play dumb now. Unless you have found a way to give me the twenty-thousand I
already paid back in—”
“Yes, I will pay it to you in installments
as soon as I can,” I cut him off.
“You can’t do that. Did you read the
contract?” He asked again, now sounding genuinely concerned. “You should never
sign things without reading them properly. Just advice for the future.”
“I skimmed it,” I snapped. “And have no
idea which part you are referring to!”
“The part where, if you break the
contract, you owe me the sum I have already paid on your mother’s behalf.
Within 10 days. Oh, and you lose your job, but I guess that’s the part you had
already figured out on your own.”
I felt the ground escape from my feet. How
could I have been stupid and gotten into something I couldn’t get out of,
without even reading the contract?
“You can’t do this to me,” I said, tears
running down my face.
“I don’t want to,” he said gently. “I want
us to enjoy each other and if you don’t it won’t be nearly as fun for me
either, believe me when I say that. I never wished to coerce you into anything,
but you are leaving me no choice. We were having a great time until you went
and fucked it up.”
“I fucked it up?” I yelled in anger. “I
did? Really? I don’t recall telling you who you could or could not speak to and
trying to control every aspect of your life!”
“I was looking out for you, god damn it!
Don’t you see that? That jerk hurt you and yet you were standing there being
nice and friendly, willing to go on coffee dates with him, as though he hadn’t
wronged you in any way.”
“It wasn’t a date and never was going to
be. You’re the one who doesn’t see it! Spending all that time with you was what
really helped me move on from Rick. This whole year I had been moping about how
hurt I was, never fully able to accept what he had done.” I was crying. “Then
you came along – and – and – I saw how much fun I could have and what I was
missing out on while nursing a heartache. You helped me get over him, and that
coffee was going to be a symbol of my new-found strength. To show I didn’t
care. But you just saw me smiling at another man and decided all on your own
that I was wronging you in some way. It was not okay for you to tell me to stop
talking to him, Zayden. Do you understand that?”
“We’ve already been over this. It doesn’t
matter anyway, Aria. You’re stuck in this contract, whether you like it or not.
It would be immensely helpful to the both of us if you just accepted it and
tried to enjoy yourself.”
I felt like I was trapped in a windowless
room with nowhere to go. How could he be okay doing this to me? There was no
way I could produce twenty-thousand dollars in such a short time, and he knew
it.
“I won’t enjoy any of it. I promise you
that. And I’ll try and make it so you don’t either,” I said with all the spite
I could muster, then hung up before he could reply.
For the next hour I sat in the teller’s
booth with my hands covering my face, bawling my eyes out, not even caring that
there were cameras set up here and Zayden would be able to see how miserable I
was. There was hardly any shred of my pride left anyway. I had sold all my
dignity for sixty-thousand dollars. I was that girl.
Chapter
10
Zayden
I angrily slammed the phone onto my bed. I
wasn’t controlling. That was a terrible excuse to get out of the contract. It
wouldn’t be a contract if she could just bail at any time. It felt for a bit
like I was being taken advantage of. I was getting the shabby end of the deal
anyway. In a fit of fury, I had failed to notice that Gina was watching me from
outside my open door.
“What was that about?” She asked with an
annoying smirk.
“Why do you care?”
“Cause you’ve been swearing uncontrollably
for the past five minutes. I am just curious,” she said.
I hadn’t even realized I was doing that.
Aria was capable of making me feel completely and utterly out of control.
“It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
Gina didn’t take the hint. Instead, she
made herself comfortable on my bed and extended her hand, which I refused.
“Zayden,” she said, looking at me sharply.
“If we are going to make this work, we have to learn to be friends.”
“I don’t have any interest in being your
fucking friend. Now get out,” I snapped.
She didn’t flinch. Instead smiled, which
annoyed me to no end. “Lady troubles I presume?”
“Did I not tell you I didn’t have any
‘ladies’ to worry about?” I asked, wishing she would just get out of my room.
“That’s not what it sounded like on the
phone. You haven’t seemed so passionate since we first met. Come on, you can
talk to me. I know you better than you know yourself.”
“Bullshit. If you knew me you wouldn’t be
here in my room when I just want you to leave me the fuck alone.”
“I’m just trying to help. I don’t suppose
you have had the chance to consider my offer yet?”
“Clearly I’m dealing with much more
important shit right now. If only you saw beyond yourself for just a second.”
She got up and approached me, while I
clenched my fists, still burning with anger.
“Do not touch me,” I said, glaring at her.
“I wasn’t going to.” She shrugged and
walked towards my liquor cabinet. “I am way past any pretenses. I told you what
I wanted and I am not going to make futile and needless attempts to try and
sleep with you anymore.”
She walked towards me with a glass.
“Scotch on the rocks. You look like you need a drink.”
“You think you know me so well because you
know what I like to drink?” I scoffed. “Guess what? So does ever teenage girl
in the country who reads ZEN magazine.”
“Just take the drink and relax. I can draw
you up a nice bath if you want. I’m here for you. Although you don’t think
that’s possible, obviously.”
I begrudgingly accepted the drink and took
a large swig, surprised by how much better it made me feel. “Happy?”
“Not yet. Who were you speaking to? What’s
bothering you so much?”
“It’s work,” I lied. “A very important
deal might be falling through but I won’t know until tomorrow. It’s a takeover
of a boutique bank that would have really helped our expansion strategies.”
“Is the boutique bank named Aria?” She
said, probably feeling clever. “I heard you use that name.”
“Aria is an employee helping me with the
paperwork. Do you want to see her employee profile from the bank? You probably
don’t believe she is actually working for me do you?”
“Oh, I believe she’s working for you
alright, but in more ways than one.”
“You want to be friends?” I snapped. “Then
don’t fucking push it and trust me. I don’t know if I will be accepting your
offer yet, but if you want me to then you really need to do better than
whatever this is.”
“I made you a drink!” She exclaimed as
though she had just built me the Eiffel Tower.
“And now I am asking that you get out.”
“Fine. I tried.” She marched away, leaving
me alone with my thoughts again.
I had no idea how I was going to deal with
the Aria situation. I had two options. The first was completely unacceptable: I
could terminate the contract on her terms. No, that was not happening. I would
have to be really weak in order to let a twenty year old girl win like that.
Letting her off easy would be admitting defeat, something I had never done in
my life, and I wasn’t going to start now. This was why I wanted to continue the
contract. Plus, I craved her body. I slept every night dreaming of the times we
had sex and thinking of all the ways in which I could please her and she could
please me. I wasn’t going to sit there and pretend that the sex part didn’t
matter; it did and it was quite a significant part of why I enjoyed our
dalliance so much.
But there was more…
There were the sassy conversations we had.
There was her intelligence. There was her stubborn defiance that at once made
me so fond of her and so frustrated with her. There was the way she laughed: so
contagious. And the way she removed her perfectly red hair from her eyes,
slightly frowning through the side of her mouth, assuming nobody would notice
her annoyance with the strand that dared to interfere with her vision. There
was also the way she fucked me: with so much passion and effort. For someone
who had only had sex once before me, she was more talented than any woman I had
ever slept with. She just knew how to drive me completely and utterly insane,
in and out of bed.
Somewhere between the contract and the
dates in my office and all the talks about her Economics paper, Aria Roberts
had managed to penetrate a part of my being that I believed had long ceased to
exist. This wasn’t something I was proud of, but it was, unfortunately, a fact
that I could no longer ignore. I cared about Aria, more than I had cared about
any girl or woman in a long time. It mattered to me that she was happy and it
mattered to me that she was happy with me. The way things had taken a turn, she
was not going to be happy with me if I forced her to stay in the contract. But
the alternative was to let her go, and that was not something I would allow
happen.
The second option was to force her to
continue the contract – the option I had already inadvertently chosen, the
minute she talked of possibly breaking it – but to find a way to make her happy
with me again. No matter what I had said to her about my reaction to her
ex-boyfriend, truth was it was pure jealously.
Something I really needed to keep in
control, at least around her, even if I felt it inside. She had said I had
gotten too controlling. I wasn’t sure how I could fix that. That was the side
effect of my entire existence: being on top of the food chain all my life
involved the ability to get everyone around me to do as I say at all times.
Mesmerized by my wealth and power, not a single person – other than my mother,
and she too had to use emotionally manipulative tactics to defy me – had ever
felt the need to criticize my approach. People usually just resigned to
accepting me as a superior and did as I said.
Aria was obviously different from most
people I knew, so I had to find a new approach. I didn’t have to, technically.
I could let her continue the contract and be miserable. Some part of me felt
like that was exactly what she deserved. But, no. I would not be able to handle
an encounter with her where I knew that she would rather be any place in the
world other than with me. If she wasn’t enjoying herself, I wouldn’t be able to
enjoy her company. She wouldn’t be the Aria I had grown to care for.
So perhaps it was time to try something
new. I picked up my phone and called Aria. She didn’t answer so I kept calling
until she did.
“I get it, I am confined to your contract
until eternity and beyond – or whenever you decide you are done with me. You
made it very, very clear already. What more do you want?” She sounded like she
had been crying.
“I want to apologize,” I said as softly as
possible. “For my behavior. I am sorry.”