ALYSSA

I hated how I had watched Andrew walk away from me and had done nothing to stop him, I had just allowed him to walk away, and I hated that I had done that because he had put everything on the line for me but I was simply too scared to do anything about it. He had told me that I was fucking with his emotions, much like he had fucked with my own, and I allowed him to walk away with the implication that we were going to return to the silence which had consumed us for so long now.

And, now, as I lay in bed admiring the ceiling, his voice and words are the only two things which I can hear, and it's pissing me off. I didn't want him to continue apologising to me, I didn't even want him to make everything he had done to me up, I just wanted him to be there and I wanted him to understand how much of a change this was for me—I was never supposed to feel this way about the enemy and I hated myself for doing so, but I hated myself even more for admitting to him the way in which he had made me feel.

I should, naturally, despise Andrew and want to push him from the nearest cliff, and I should want him to suffer for everything which he had done to me, but there was the rational part of me which wanted to be there for him because I knew that he didn't have anyone other than Robert and his mother. I actually wanted to be happy and I wished so much for it not to be Andrew who had the power to make me happy but, just as he had the power to make me happy, he also had the power to break me.

He had the power to shatter my entire world. I had foolishly, very stupidly, given him the power to bring me crashing to my knees and to leave me with nothing other than a broken heart. He could break me beyond repair and there was nothing I could do to prevent that from happening, not when he was constantly running from me and making excuses as to why there could be nothing between the two of us, and not when he was the one who was already causing me pain because of his cowardly actions.

In the last four months, I had fallen for a man who had made me feel like shit, but had made me feel loved at the same time. I had fallen for a man who blamed me for his problems but was there to make my own problems seem meaningless. I had fallen for a man who was physically incapable of love because of my selfish, bitter sister but he still had the ability to make me think there was a chance for me to have something more than I had ever had with Dean.

I was in love with Andrew Collins and I fucking hated myself for it. I hated that I was weak and that I could no longer run from the way I was feeling, no matter how many times I pushed it to the back of my mind and pretended that he wasn't real, he was still in my thoughts and he was consuming every single part of me. I am an idiot, an absolute fool, for I was the woman who was still chasing a man who was inevitably going to break my heart.

Four months, in four fucking months, this single man had managed to turn my life upside down in both the best and the worst ways. Four fucking months was all it had taken for me to fall so far in love with man, that I didn't think there was a way for me to be able to escape, for I was emotionally attached to a man who only knew how to be cold-hearted and distant—I was with Dean for eleven months before he proposed to me, engaged to him for three months, and I was married to him for seven months, but he never affected me in this way and he sure as hell never consumed my thoughts in the same way Andrew had done recently.

Dean, the very same man I thought that I had loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had never had the same impact upon me as Andrew Collins was now having. Asshole of the year, cold-hearted bastard, stressed-out businessman and emotionless prick, that was the man I had found myself loving and I really did have no clue about how I was supposed to deal with this all.

"Ugh," I shouted into my pillows, grabbing my phone from the bedside table to check the time, and I groaned when I saw that it had just turned half four in the morning, and I knew that there was no hope of me getting any sleep tonight because one fucking man had decided he was going to embed himself in my thoughts, "of all the people I had fall for, why the fuck did it have to be you?"

"You know, when I left you last night, that was the exact same question I asked myself," his voice filled the room and, for a moment, I thought that it was only in my head because of how much I was thinking about him, but I turned to look at the door where Andrew was stood with his arms crossed over his chest and, from the little light which was shining from outside my window, I could see the smirk on his face, "good morning, Aly."

"Pretty sure I lock—" I paused what I was saying, knowing that I had locked my door before getting into bed, even with the alcohol in my system, I remembered all the warnings which Andrew had given me about not locking my door and so I never forgot to do it anymore, "what did you just call me?"

"Aly. Don't you like it?" he shrugged as he walked into my bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed and, had I not been as comfortable as I was right now, I would have moved but I couldn't be bothered to move, and so I allowed Andrew to sit beside me on my bed. His eyes were boring into mine as he waited for my reply, but I was lost in thought for a moment, remembering that was the nickname with Ella had given to me when she had been unable to pronounce my name and she had been the only person to have called me that before today.

"No. I like it, but, it's just, well, I mean, it's nothing," I sighed while I scrolled through the drunken message which Jenni had sent me in the early hours of the morning, attempting and failing to decipher what she had sent to me, but it was always amusing trying to work out what she wanted to tell me. I knew that I was distracting myself from the inevitable, but it would have to suffice for now, because I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to say; I never knew what to say when I was around him because he managed to render me speechless.

All of my common sense flew out of the window. All of the walls which I had built around both myself and my heart immediately collapsed, giving him a reason to keep coming back to me, but never enough of a reason to actually stay with me. All the words I ever wanted to say were on the tip of my tongue but they never quite got out into the open because I feared what he may say back to me in return.

"Good morning to you too, Andrew," I finally spoke when the silence became too much to bear. I found it almost comedic that, the first time I had discovered him in my apartment, I was furious and I had wanted to kill him for coming in here without my permission, but now it was a welcome surprise to see him in my bedroom and I actually welcomed his presence.

"Go out for dinner with me," I was shocked by how blunt he was, but I could also hear the nerves in his tone and he was obviously worried that I was going to turn him down, or that I was going to laugh in his face because I didn't want to go anywhere with him, "please."

"Dinner is always a code for sex, I do believe you are the one who told me that," I chuckled.

"I just want to have dinner with you, Alyssa. I have still never been to Darren's restaurant and many people have assured me just how good a place it is to eat," he replied.

"Darren?" I questioned suspiciously. I knew that Andrew and Darren had both tried to actually get on with each other, apparently it was something to do with what I had said, and they finally realised that they needed to move on with their lives which was only made easier by their newly found mutual hate for their father—apparently discovering that David Collins was a serial adulterer, drug dealer and a murderer has the power to do that to two brothers.

"Yes. I wish to take you to his restaurant for dinner and, before you even ask, this isn't some continuation of a revenge plan which we are carrying out with you in the middle," Andrew said as though he had read my mind and taken the questions I had been thinking of, without the need for me to actually ask them.

"What happened to going back to not speaking or seeing each other again?" I asked with an amused look. If we had carried through with that, I already know that I would have been on the phone to Robert, demanding that he take me to Andrew's place because, going back to the silence and not even looking at each other, it would have driven me insane in the end and I would never have lasted five minutes without him in my life.

"I went back to my place, after I left you, and I couldn't get you out of my head. I tried drinking you out, but that failed and only made me think of you all the more, especially with all the warnings of how drinking would eventually kill me. I tired exercising, but that did nothing and only made me think about you all the more, and I even completely ruined my bedroom out of frustration," he ran his hands through his hair and he looked anywhere other than directly at me. "You are always there, Alyssa, and it's driving me fucking crazy now."

I wished that love had an expiry date and, that when you fell out of love with the person you assumed you would always be with, that was the end and you never had to feel that way about another person again. But that would be too lucky, if something like that were to happen to me, because then I would never have met Andrew and I never would have fallen for a man so far away from what I wanted that I question what I am doing with my life.

"That night, the one where you told me how much you hated me—"

"I didn't really hate you. I was just seriously pissed with you and I wanted to make you suffer," I told him honestly. I realise now that, no matter how many times I told myself that I hated him, I never really had hated him, I was just pissed off with him and I wanted him to understand how he had made me feel when he acted the way that he had that night, and I also wanted him to know that he didn't have the right to be a total dick to me all the time without a valid reason.

"—No one other than Robert had ever dare tell me what I was really like before you opened your mouth. You stood there and put everyone in that room in their place and, the moment you looked at me, I knew that I was in the shit because I had been such an ass, but everything you said about me that night was true," Andrew started and, when I looked up, he was simply staring at the wall outside of the bedroom door and his breathing was irregular as he tried to compose himself, "the only reason I treated you in such a cruel manner was because you reminded me of Rebecca. She fucked me over in the worst way possible and I didn't think that I could trust you, not after she walked over me like I was nothing, and I couldn't let anyone do that to me again. She only ever loved me for my money, never the man I was without the money, and I couldn't stand the thought of putting myself through that again."

"Wh—Why did you think that I was like her?" I closed my eyes to prevent the tears from falling. I had always been compared to Rebecca, usually in the worst ways with people thinking I was a heartless user who only wanted men for their money, but hearing it from someone who you liked as far more than a friend hurt like a bitch. I was nothing like Rebecca, I wanted a stable relationship with someone I could see myself spending the rest of my life with while she only wanted some fun to amuse herself with and something to pass the time, and I would never became anything like that.

"I don't have a real reason, other than that I seriously misjudged you. It didn't help that you looked and sounded like her as well, so I guess I was just waiting for the moment where you were going to bring me down and, I know this is going to sound cruel and pathetic, but I was waiting to actually find fault in you," Andrew laughed humourlessly and, though I know it was hard for him to actually admit all of this to me, given just how closed off he has been about everything until now, it was just as hard for me to sit here and actually listen to what he had to say, "I mean, how fucking stupid is that I was actually trying to find a fault with you, just so I didn't have to feel this way about you?"

"When I told you that you were the worst person in that room, I wasn't actually lying, I did think that you were the worst person and I had a particularly strong dislike for you in that moment. Especially after the way you simply stood there, and did nothing, while you allowed your friends to speak about me like I was a piece of meat rather than a person. You didn't even say anything after you realised what Dean had done to me, you just allowed them to continue as they were with their hurtful comments," I finally said after an awkward silence had fallen between the two of us.

That night, he may have comforted me and tried to stop the tears, but he didn't actually say anything to his friends and he allowed them to make their degrading comments. He just looked at them and, from where I was stood at least, it was as though he was egging them on and, even though I was silently pleading with him to make them stop, it still wasn't enough to force him to open his mouth and defend me.

I opened my eyes, releasing a breath I didn't even know I had been holding, until it came out. I looked to see that Andrew was already looked at me with a sad smile on his face, and there was something amusing about him trying to conceal his emotions from me, not when I had his expressions worked out by the end of my third week as his assistant. So, even when he didn't want me to know what he was thinking, I could still figure out what he was thinking.

"You want to know the truth? The reason I didn't say anything when I had the chance to do so?" I nodded as his hand came to rest on my cheek and his eyes were trained on me, and I moved my hands from under the covers to rest on top of his, not moving my eyes away from his as he indicated for him to continue with what he was saying, "I am fucked-up, Alyssa. I have serious trust issues and, after everything which has happened over the years, I didn't want anything close to a friend because I preferred to be alone. Then you walked into my life with your sarcasm and smartass remarks to everything I say or do, and you had to become the most normal thing in my life, but I didn't want to become attached to you because I knew you would only leave me in the end. Everyone I care about leaves me at some point and, I thought that, if I hurt you on purpose, then I would push you away enough that you would never have the chance to actually hurt me."

"The first month after the Charity Ball, I loved knowing that you were miserable and I enjoyed watch you suffer, because that's the same way you had made me feel since I started working for you. I just wanted you to know and understand how you had made me feel and, if that makes me some sort of heartless bitch, then so be it, but it was tired of being walked all over by everyone," I couldn't hide the tears which were rolling silently down my cheeks as I thought about what I was going to say to him next, he may have had his own problems with Rebecca, but he didn't know the extent of the problems which I had with my own sister and the lengths she had gone to in order to keep me out of her life. "Even Rebecca has banned me from seeing Ella, I can't actually remember the last time I saw my own niece and, when she told you that you were never going to meet your own daughter, I suddenly wanted to be there for you and I wanted to be that friend you so desperately needed because I knew the hell you were going through. But you just kept up with the business talk and never once laid eyes on me. I was worried about you, Andrew, and you couldn't even stand to look me in the eyes. How stupid is that I cared about someone who couldn't have given a shit about me?"

This is the effect which Andrew had on me. He could make me happy one minute and then sad the next, he could make me laugh one second and then cry the next, and he had the ability to calm me down but he also had the uncanny ability to be able to piss me off at the same time. The man fucked with my emotions more than any other man I had ever even been close to, and he confused the fuck out of me to the point that I didn't know what was up and what was down anymore.

"I am shit with my feelings, I thought that you would have understood this by now and, when I realised how I felt about you, my first instinct was to run because that is, after all, what I do best in life. So that's what I did, I ran and I hid, all while pushing you away at the same time and, while that worked for a bit, it stopped working and it drove me to the point that I ended up drinking until I passed out in my office."

"And what the hell does drinking solve?"

"For one night, I needed to forget about the feisty red head who knew how to push every single one of my buttons, and I needed to forget about the sweet woman who gave me everything, despite deserving nothing from her. I needed to forget about the woman I had fallen in love with. I just needed to forget you, Alyssa, because it hurt too much to remember everything," I turned my head away from him, not being able to look at him as I silently cried into my pillow and absorbed the words which he had just said, because I had never realised that Andrew could be as vulnerable as he was in this moment. I couldn't look at him, knowing that his eyes would confirm everything he was telling me, and instead settled for interlocking my fingers with Andrew's and refusing to let go.

"Yes," I finally gave him the one answer which he had been waiting patiently to hear.

"Yes?"

"I will go on a date with you, Andrew," I said in a voice which was barely above a whisper. I knew that I was crazy, and I knew that people would call me crazy when they heard of what I had done, but you can't help the person you fall in love with, especially not when you don't actually go looking for love and it has a habit of appearing when you least expect it to do so.

The feeling of love hits you like an absolute bitch and you are completely lost until you know the person you have fallen for, feels the exact some way about you as you do about them. You form an attachment to that person and it feels like you can't breathe when you are around them, with your every thought revolving around what that person is saying or doing at a particular moment, and your heart feels like it may explode at the slightest touch; they become the only person you can imagine your future with—after Dean, I never thought that I would find something like that again, and I never thought that I would ever find someone who could make me feel the same way Dean had done at the beginning of our relationship together, but then I had never counted on Andrew walking into my life as he had done.

Andrew with his disgusting habits which were, in the long run, only going to kill him. Andrew with his ability to stop himself from saying exactly what he is thinking, even if he knows it is going to hurt the person in the long run, he will still keep it to himself because he is such a selfish bastard. Andrew with his determination to always prove people wrong, and his stupid smirk, and his overly expensive suits which he only wears to prove a point to people that he is better than them when they are inside his office, and there is no forgetting his ridiculous comments nor his ability to be there for me—

"Alyssa?" I was brought from my thoughts of all the things which attracted me to Andrew by the fact that he was waving his hand in my face and he had clearly been calling my name for a while now, but I hadn't been listening to anything he had said to me, because I had been too wrapped up in my thoughts to be able to concentrate on what he was saying to me.

"Huh?"

"I said that I will be going now and that I shall pick you up at seven this evening," Andrew replied. He tried to pull his hand from my grip, but I refused to let go and only tightened my grip around his hand, until he got the message and stopped fighting to get his hand from my own.

"Stay with me. I'm not ready for you to leave me," I mumbled as I finally felt the overwhelming urge to actually sleep. I didn't even know what the time was, or how long I had been speaking with Andrew for, but since there was light in the sky and birds tweeting, I would assume that it has to be some time after six now. "Please?"

I didn't need to ask a second time, much like he didn't need to say anything, because his actions said that he needed to say. I felt the bed dip behind me and Andrew wrapped his arm protectively around my waist, pulling me towards him until I felt my exposed back hit his firm chest, and I quickly found myself rolling over so that I could cuddle into the warmth and protection Andrew surprisingly provided me with as I allowed sleep to finally consume me, bringing about the end of what had been one hell of a night.

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