Before We Knew

Stories

### Chapter 1: Chapter 1

They thought it was one night.

They didn't know it was the beginning.

Complete Chapters 27

Rating 4.3 ( 3 reviews ) Age Rating mature

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INTRODUCTION

Main Leads

— Controlled, guarded, and newly appointed to run Olivia's division. Raised to see love as a calculated alliance, he doesn't expect the stranger from one reckless night to become impossible to walk away from.

— Sharp and freshly heartbroken, she checks into a hotel to disappear for a weekend and instead spends one night with a stranger who turns out to be her new boss.

— Olivia's best friend and coworker. Loyal, blunt, and the only one who knows the truth from the start.

— Elion's right hand. Dry, sharp, unshakeably loyal, and the one who calls Elion out when no one else will.

— An ambitious colleague who wants Olivia's position and turns suspicion into sabotage.

— Olivia's ex-fiancé, whose betrayal starts the story and whose jealousy nearly ends it.

— Elion's formidable mother, a board power player determined to keep him from choosing love over legacy.

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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2

She stood in the marble lobby of the Verlaine Hotel with one suitcase and the particular, hollowed-out calm of someone who had already cried everything they had. The chandelier above her threw fractured light across the floor. Somewhere behind her, a bellhop was saying something about the elevators. She didn't hear it. She was still hearing Marcus's voice from two nights ago, still seeing her own engagement ring sitting on the kitchen counter where she'd left it, next to the wedding invitations that would never be mailed now, next to the photograph of a life she'd spent three years building for someone who had apparently been building an entirely different one on the side.

She hadn't told her parents yet. She hadn't told her boss, either, though she'd used up two personal days to come here — to a hotel four hours from home, under her maiden name, with a single instruction to herself: * disappear for a weekend. Feel nothing that anyone can see.

The suite was beautiful in the anesthetized way of very expensive things. Cream walls. A bed too large for one person, which felt like an insult. She showered until the water ran cold, put on the black dress she'd packed for reasons she didn't examine too closely, and went down to the bar because the alternative was lying in that enormous bed listening to her own thoughts, and she would rather have done almost anything else.

The bar was low-lit, mostly empty, the kind of place built for people who wanted to be alone in public. She ordered a martini she didn't particularly want and was three sips into pretending to enjoy it when a voice beside her said, "That's the wrong drink for the face you're making."

He was already looking at her — had probably been looking at her for longer than was polite, though somehow it didn't feel like an intrusion. Dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had never once relaxed, a suit that fit like it had been built around him rather than bought off a rack. He had the stillness of a man who was used to rooms rearranging themselves around his presence, and yet here he was, at the far end of an empty bar, talking to her like she was the only interesting thing in it.

"And what face is that," she said.

"The one that says the drink isn't helping." He nodded to the bartender. "Whiskey, neat, for the lady. She'll thank me."

"I didn't ask for your opinion."

"No," he agreed. "You didn't. I'm giving it anyway. Occupational hazard."

Something flickered behind his eyes — amusement, maybe, or the specific pleasure of a man who liked being asked questions he didn't have to answer honestly. "Tonight," he said, "I don't have one. Tonight I'm just a man at a bar, talking to a woman who looks like she's trying very hard not to think about something."

It should have irritated her. Instead it landed somewhere close to relief — the fact that he'd seen it, named it, and didn't ask what it was.

"I'm Olivia," she said, because it seemed easier than silence, and because she liked, suddenly and perversely, the idea of being someone new for one night. Not Olivia-the-jilted, Olivia-whose-fiancé-had-humiliated-her-in-front-of-both-their-families. Just Olivia. A woman at a bar.

"Elion," he said, and something about the way he said it — flat, unadorned, no last name offered — told her he understood exactly what she was doing, because he was doing it too.

The whiskey arrived. She drank it. He was right; it helped.

They talked for two hours, and she would later be unable to reconstruct the actual content of the conversation — only its shape, its rhythm, the way he asked questions like he was solving something and listened to the answers like they mattered. He told her he was in the city for work, temporarily, that he traveled too much to keep a plant alive, that he found small talk to be one of the great wastes of human civilization and had decided, upon meeting her, to skip directly to the part where they said true things to each other instead.

"That's presumptuous," she said.

"So is drinking alone in a hotel bar in a dress like that," he said. "I think we're both being presumptuous tonight."

She should have been offended. She was, instead, leaning slightly toward him, close enough to catch the low, clean scent of him beneath the bar's smell of citrus and old wood.

"What happened to you," he asked, quieter now, "before you came here?"

She almost lied. The lie was right there, practiced, the one she'd give her coworkers on Monday — *rough week, needed a break.* But his eyes were steady on her, dark and unreadable and entirely unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world to be but this exact question, and something in her simply gave.

"I found out three days ago that the man I was supposed to marry had been engaged to someone else for the last six months," she said. "Overlapping engagements. I found the second ring in his jacket. He didn't even have the decency to hide it well."

Elion didn't offer sympathy, which she was grateful for — she'd had enough sympathy in the last three days to last a lifetime, all of it useless. Instead he said, "Then he's an idiot, and this isn't really about you at all. It's about the limits of his imagination. He couldn't picture anything better than what he had, so he tried to keep both."

"That's a very generous way of calling him stupid."

"I'm capable of generosity," he said. "Rarely. You've caught me in a mood."

She laughed — actually laughed, the first unguarded sound she'd made in days — and something shifted in his face when she did, some crack in the careful stillness, like her laugh had cost him something to hear and he hadn't decided yet whether he minded paying it.

"What about you," she said. "What's your version of the ring in the jacket?"

His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. "I don't do rings," he said. "Or jackets left where people can find things in them. I'm careful. It's the one thing I'm good at."

"It sounds efficient." But his eyes didn't agree with his mouth, and she noticed that too — filed it away without knowing yet that she would return to it later, turn it over, try to understand a man who talked about efficiency like it was armor.

The bar thinned out around them. Somewhere past midnight, he reached over and moved a strand of hair off her face, unhurried, like he'd been given permission he hadn't technically asked for, and she let him, and the air between them changed the way air does before a storm — pressure building, nowhere to go but through it.

"I should go up," she said, not moving.

"You should," he agreed, not moving either.

"I know what this isn't," he said. "I don't need you to explain it to me. I know what tonight is. I know what tomorrow is. I'm not asking for tomorrow."

It was, she would think later, the most honest thing anyone had said to her in months. No promises. No performance. Just a man telling her plainly that he wanted one night and nothing else, at the exact moment she wanted the same thing so badly it frightened her.

They rode the elevator up together, not touching, both watching the numbers climb, the silence between them so charged it felt almost audible. His room, she would learn, was next to hers — one wall between them the whole weekend, as if the hotel itself had been arranging this collision before either of them checked in.

At her door, she turned the key card over in her hand and looked at him, and he looked back with an expression that wasn't asking anything, because he'd already told her he wasn't going to ask.

He didn't smile, exactly. Something better than a smile — a kind of quiet, focused attention, like she'd just become the only thing in the hotel worth his time.

She pushed the door open behind her. He followed her in, close enough that she could feel the heat of him without him touching her at all, and for one suspended second neither of them moved — like both of them understood that once this door closed, there would be no pretending, tomorrow, that it hadn't.

The door clicked shut behind him.

Inkitt’s mission is to discover talented writers and turn them into globally successful authors.

Authors can write and upload their manuscripts on Inkit for free and writers retain 100% of their copyrights while writing on Inkitt

Readers can read all books for free, without any ads and give the authors feedback.

Books that perform well based on their reader engagement are published on our Galatea app.

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