She had been desperate in the situation. There was no doubt about that. The fact that she had agreed to the contract to begin with meant that she was willing to go through some lengths for her mom’s hospital bills. But would this have made things different? Changed her mind? There really was no way of knowing as it was already too late now. I had already made half the payments. Shaking my head, I sighed deeply as I saw Aria’s head wrapped around my door. How long had she been standing there?
“Do you have a minute?” she asked me nervously.
“Sure, come on in,” I said, despite still feeling some irrational anger towards her family and Aria too. “What can I do for you?” I asked bitingly as she sat across from me. “Besides what I have already done, I mean.”
Aria looked taken aback. She opened her mouth and closed it again, as though unsure how she was going to communicate with me.
“I don’t…I mean I just came in to check if,” she paused momentarily and added, “You have been acting rather strange since last night.”
“Oh, is that right?” I asked, getting more and more annoyed. “How so?”
“Well first of all, you ran out of my mom’s house without so much as a warning and a very poor excuse,” she snapped.
“Don’t take that tone with me. Not when your family—” I stopped mid-sentence. “Nevermind.”
“You overheard us last night, didn’t you?” she asked, looking resigned all of a sudden.
I shrugged. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. You and your mother simply weren’t as quiet as you obviously thought you were.”
Her face took on a deep shade of red as she looked away from me, breaking eye-contact. “Well, if you heard everything, you must have also heard that I had no idea that South National Bank had anything to do with my father’s bankruptcy. And that as soon as I found out, I had the full intention of telling you!”
“But you didn’t, did you?” I demanded angrily.
“Yeah, because it would have been so easy to tell you considering you stormed out of my mother’s house last night and haven’t spoken to me since!”
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 five hundred thousand 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 specif
ic. 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. 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 five hundred thousand 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 five hundred thousand 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 with a 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.