She was right. I hadn’t even given her a chance to come clean about the whole situation since I had been so angry. Why should I give her a chance? Why should I give her anything more when I had already given so much to her family? A fresh surge of anger began to bubble up inside me, so I reached for the stress ball, hoping Aria wouldn’t notice.
“Why are you so angry with me?” she asked after a few minutes of complete silence where neither of us so much as looked at one another. “I’m sorry, Zayden! Had I known about this at any point before the contract, I would have made full disclosure before letting you…I’m just…I’m sorry that you had to suffer financial loss because of my father. As a direct victim of his shenanigans, I can safely say I understand how you must be feeling right now.”
“Oh, have you lost 500,000 dollars to a man only to later find out you were paying his ex-wife’s hospital bills in order to help out his daughter who you had just happened to fall for?”
“That’s oddly specific. I’m going to go with no.” She attempted a weak smile, trying to change the mood of the conversation. It worked slightly, as the look on her face made me want to kiss her. But I was still angry, and looking at Aria’s face, I wished I wasn’t.
“Look, I know you didn’t know about any of this,” I said, exasperated with her, the entire
situation, and myself. “But it doesn’t change the facts, does it? And I can’t help feeling…and I’m sorry for what I am about to say, Aria, because it’s really not your fault directly… but I can’t help feeling like I’ve been scammed by your family.”
She looked like I had just slapped her across the face as tears began to visibly surface in her eyes.
“You don’t know how much your dad cost me. And on top of that, I am paying for your mother’s hospital bills…like, what the actual—”
“But I am paying you back for it,” she snapped, fighting back tears. Aria was never one to show weakness, that much had been firmly established. “I am not sure you have actually read this contract you keep referring to, because if you had, then you would remember a very important clause at the end of it, which I might remind you of. I insisted we add to the contract and even refused to sign the whole thing without the clause that states as soon as I graduate from college, I will begin paying you back for the hospital bills in installments. Or have you forgotten that entire encounter where this deal would not even have existed if you hadn’t agreed to let me pay you back!”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said, getting more annoyed. “But that still puts me at a loss of, let’s see, about 500,000 dollars!”
“There is nothing I can do about that!” she exclaimed, clearly starting to get very frustrated. Her answer pissed me off, too. What did she mean she couldn’t do anything about it? It was her father, after all, who owed me the money. And after all that I had done for her and after finding out what her father caused my bank, she could just sit there and act all helpless like there is no way for her to rectify the situation?
“Yes, there is,” I said, more out of anger than anything else. “You can pay me back the 500,000 dollars after you graduate, too. Installments are okay.”
For the second time that afternoon, Aria looked like I had slapped her across the face, which was unfair from where I stood, considering I was just asking for my own money back. And not even right away.
She looked like she had been searching for an appropriate response for a while when she finally just said, “Wow.” She was clearly dumbfounded.
“Just because I don’t actually need the money, Aria,” I prodded after her lack of response. “Does not mean it is okay for people to run off with what is mine, no matter the circumstances. I don’t care how rich I am or how much money I have, I am not okay with any business I run facing any sort of a loss. It’s part of being a businessman. If I didn’t learn to care about every single penny that flowed towards me where my businesses are concerned, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today. So you have two options from here on. You can take this personally, get really offended, and start another fight, which you know how that is going to end. We have already been through that motion. You’ll get angry, show me a lot of attitude and haughtily walk out of here only to return in a couple of weeks when your mom’s hospital bills are due because you realize in the last minute that you need me more than you care to admit. Or, we could go for the simpler option, which is you take this in stride – just like one business-oriented person to another – and agree to pay me back and we move on, picking up where we left off. So, which option will it be then?”
Instead of speaking, she allowed the tears to fall freely. This made me even angrier. It was easier to be a stern asshole when she was snapping back with all her might. Her tears just made me feel guilty, which was not something I deserved or needed to feel in the current situation.
“Aria, say something,” I said in what I thought was a much gentler tone.
She, however, continued to stare at me with tears covering her entire face, making me wish I could punch a hole through the wall.
Chapter Six
Aria
I couldn’t believe what Zayden had been saying and wished I could stop the damn tears from pouring all over my face. The last thing I needed was to show weakness in this situation, yet I felt completely lost in terms of words to produce from my mouth. Scammed. He had said he felt scammed. That I had, somehow, unintentionally scammed him!
My gut felt like it was falling low on a downward spiral of a dangerous roller coaster when I had heard him use that word. How could he? In the time we had gotten to know each other, he had most certainly gotten some idea of the kind of person that I was. If not, then this whole relationship itself was a scam. After how much I had insisted that he add the clause about me paying him back to the contract, how dare he question my character.
He had overheard the whole conversation between me and Mom, which meant that he knew very damn well that I was completely clueless about this and intended on telling him everything. He found out as soon as I found out.
It was not good enough, though! None of it was apparently good enough for him. He had decided what I was doing was my fault even when it wasn’t, and demanded payment – literal and figurative – even though he knew the insinuations would hurt me. It wasn’t that I minded the idea of paying his bank the money my dad owed it. After all, if things all went as planned, I was going to be successful in a couple of years, and it would only make me feel good to know that I cleared up the mess my dad left behind. This was regardless of whether I had ever found out South National Bank’s involvement. No, the money was not what hurt me so much. It was the fact that he sat there, looking me straight in the eyes, and asked me to pay him that money, as though I had personally stolen it from him.
The fact that he could make me feel so low made me furious!
To think I was coming to believe our relationship had been making progress. Maybe it had. To Zayden’s credit, he had gone out of his way to make me feel like our relationship was, at last, real, even going so far as to asking to meet my mom. Obviously, when he had asked for that he wasn’t expecting all these revelations and neither was I. It wasn’t some trick or an effort to make me feel as shitty as I was feeling right now. He was genuinely interested in my life and getting to know my mom.
I tried imagining myself in his place when he overheard the conversation, from the point of view of a guy who had just gone against all his reservations and jumped into a serious relationship with me. After all that he had been doing for me these past few months, a part of me understood why hearing about my dad must have completely ticked him off. His running off last night was completely justified. I would have run out of there myself if I could have, given what I had heard.
I couldn’t run every time things didn’t go the way I wanted to. Perhaps it would take more time to earn Zayden’s complete respect, and if I wanted to keep this relationship, I was going to have to be okay with that. As angry as I was, I was not willing to give up what we had built over the past few months. It would be much easier and more respectful to just agree to pay him the money that my dad owed.
“Option two,” I spoke after what felt like an eternity, wiping off my tears. “One business-oriented person to another, I will pay you every single penny back. Happy?”
“Far from,” he snapped, somehow looking even angrier for getting what he had wanted. He had expected me to put up a fight, or argue in some way, or most likely of all, walk away. I had thrown him off with my response, undoubtedly, and it felt oddly like the ball was in my court all of a sudden.