GABRIELLA
Donna chewed the end of her pen as I sat perched on the corner of her desk. Her expression was unreadable and left me uneasy. I fidgeted with her stapler, put it down, picked up a paperclip, and played with that instead.
“Say something,” I said.
She took the pen out of her mouth and set it across the top of her keyboard. “Are you sure you’re ready for this step? I mean, you two have been official for what, a week?”
“Nine days.”
She stared at me flatly. “Same thing. With how up and down things have been with you and Jake, are you sure you want to introduce him to your family?”
Things might have been up and down if one counted the time since I’d been hired months and months ago to now, but when only taking the last nine days into consideration, things had been steady. Healthy.
We’d been open and honest about our relationship when I came back to work last Monday. My colleagues had been shocked, to say the least, and I knew there was some whispering going on behind my back. I couldn’t blame them. After all, Jake had been their evil overlord for such a long time, they probably couldn’t wrap their head around why anyone, especially a girl like me who’d hated him as vehemently as everyone else, would want to actually date him.
But they didn’t know the version of Jake that I knew.
They knew the rigid, inflexible, sharp, grumpy Jake. That guy was on his way out. The new Jake was stepping into his shoes, and he’d been putting in great efforts to make all his staff more at ease.
So far, it was working.
People no longer looked down at their desks when he walked in the office. He exchanged friendly hellos with people, who, after a few days, didn’t shy away from his attempts at talking. Sure, it had only been a week, but the atmosphere in the office was already improving. I suspected people were still talking about us, but that didn’t bother me so much.
Let them think and say what they wanted.
I had no reservations about my relationship.
“I think now is the perfect time to introduce him to my family,” I said. “It gives everyone plenty of time to get to know him before my brother’s wedding. On top of that, I feel like it gives Jake some credit for all the hard work he’s done. He wants to meet them, and it means a lot to him that I’m ready to take that step.”
“Okay.”
I pouted. I just wanted my friend to reassure me that I was making the right call. This time however, it didn’t seem like I was going to get that.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt again,” Donna said when she noticed my dejection. “He’s hurt you more than once, and last time was bad, Gabi. Once your family is in the picture it will make things even harder. I just hope you’re looking at this from every angle, that’s all.”
She was just looking out for me, I reminded myself. This was what friends did.
“I hear you,” I said. “I’ll be careful and manage my expectations, but I’m going to go through with it. I’m ready.”
“Okay,” she said again, nodding. “I trust your judgment. What do you think your mom will say about you dating your boss?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? I think she’ll just be happy I’m dating anyone at all. The fact that he’s a literal billionaire will give her and my dad peace of mind. Maybe they’ll finally get off my back about all this money stuff.”
Donna pursed her lips. “One can hope.”
I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Well, I’ll let you get back to work. I have a conference room to set up. Talk later?”
“For sure.”
As I made my way up to the conference room, I knew in my gut that Donna had left things unsaid. She wasn’t happy that I was back together with Jake. I supposed it made sense. She cared about me, and he’d hurt me on more than one occasion. Any sensible person would be skeptical. Hell, I was skeptical. But I was also blissfully happy and willing to take the plunge one last time with everything out in the open.
Jake had trusted me enough to tell me more about his family. I knew where his trauma and his problems came from. I knew that his anger had never been about me in the first place. No, he couldn’t use me as his punching bag, but it helped to understand him better. There was still so much I wanted to know about him and how he grew up, and I trusted that, in due time, he would let me in more.
Jake was already in the conference room when I got there. He greeted me with a disarming smile and reached for me. His hand slid up my arm to my shoulder, where it stopped. We’d agreed on no PDA in the office. We didn’t want to make people uncomfortable, and we wanted to continue to treat this place as a professional office.
“Were you talking to Donna about this weekend?”
I nodded. “She’s not convinced we should take the step of introducing you to my parents.”