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Post by Brandon Finn on Oct 8, 2015 17:40:14 GMT
Brandon couldn't remember the last time he had gone to any sort of function, social or work-related, alone. He was sure that he probably had never actually come to any of them alone. There had always been some woman that he knew he could call to be his date for the night, and even while Amber had been in California, he never had found it difficult to find someone who could keep him company. But he had been happy to toss out his figurative little black book when Amber had come back into his life, and he had enjoyed having her by his side at the variety of events they attended. It seemed to make the entire thing more bearable with her by his side if he was being entirely honest. But the thing he hadn't been counting on was that they would get to a point where his stress levels would have caused him to snap at her, and in turn cause her to leave him at a party.
He would have followed her if he could have, but she chose to leave him at his own corporate holiday party of all places, and he wasn't sure that as the head of the company that he would be able to make it out of the hotel ballroom completely unnoticed. And so he stuck it out to say hello to the various acquaintances around the room, trying to focus on anything other than the issues that were happening behind closed doors at work and in his personal life. But once in the car on the way back to the Penthouse, he found himself becoming more and more worked up by it all. He felt betrayed about the subtle sabotage that was happening with the corporate takeover that seemed to be happening, and he felt unusually angry with Amber for - well, he wasn't entirely sure. If he hadn't come back to the party to see her playing nice with Adam Tyler he was sure that it wouldn't have been so bad, but it had just been the last straw.
Unsure whether or not she had already resigned herself to bed, he tried to enter the apartment as quietly as possible, though he blamed the rising anger for the fact that he had let the door slam shut behind him.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Oct 8, 2015 17:49:31 GMT
Amber was on the couch in her pajamas by the time Brandon returned home. On her way from the event, she'd stopped along the way to buy herself a hot chocolate and a cupcake and was reading reports for work to keep herself distracted. It wasn't even that Brandon had needed to work - she knew it had been important. From the way that Riley had explained it, Amber understood. She'd started to wonder if she really was being selfish. Part of her was a little worried that this was how it was always going to be, even when the baby came along - and maybe that scared her the most. What had bothered her most, though, was that Brandon hadn't said anything like that to her in a long time and when he snapped at her, it had stung more than she really wanted to admit.
She was startled when the door slammed, but kept her eyes focused on her report, pushing her glasses up her nose and turning the page. She couldn't help but feel a bit of irritation that he was still clearly upset with her so she avoided saying anything for the time being to keep from snapping at him.
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Post by Brandon Finn on Oct 8, 2015 18:09:45 GMT
He spotted her quickly on the way to their bedroom. She was on the couch in her glasses, just like he had seen her every other night and while part of his heart warmed at seeing her there, he still wasn't ready to move past the anger that he was feeling. Instead, he wordlessly crossed into their bedroom and changed out of the suit that he had worn to the party. The familiar routine gave him time to think about what he was feeling about everything, and while it did nothing to justify being angry with Amber, it did allow him to focus on the myriad of things that were making his life feel suddenly much more difficult. Perhaps the most upsetting of it all, he realized, was that his two primary issues at the moment could be traced back to the same source - Eliot Quinn. He hated that he hadn't listened to Amber when she said that Eliot was trouble, he hated that he hadn't seen it for himself, and he hated that the other man kept interfering with his life. It had even been Eliot that had been behind his painful and much too recent break up with Amber, a fact that he hadn't figured out how to tell her.
Emerging from the bedroom, he chose to sit in a chair far enough away from her to give her the space that she seemed to have needed when she left the party. "There are a lot of things going on right now, in both of our lives, that are just causing a lot of stress right now." He knew that there were plenty of things stressing her out as well, but he thought that he had been sympathetic to them. He was starting to feel as though because of what she was going through that they were supposed to prioritize her stresses above his own, and that added weight was making things seem much more strained than he would have liked. "If Riley and I are unable to find a way to fix everything that's been done at Finn Industries, there's a good possibility that things are going to get a lot worse. I never prepared for something like this and so I'm at a loss. On top of the fact that it looks like Eliot's behind it, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm getting awfully sick of having that man interfere in my life." He sighed, trying to keep his temper under control before he started shouting at her. "And then, of course, there's the whole thing about the paternity test and everything else that he's been behind. But I just feel like I need you to stop prioritizing your own problems above my own. I can't try and handle all of this at work and then come home and put out fires here too." He realized that he sounded much more angry and cold than he had anticipated being with her.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Oct 8, 2015 18:36:54 GMT
Amber hadn't quite been expecting that. She took a deep breath and closed her report, leaning her elbows on her knees, she rubbed her hands over her face before sitting up straight at him. She opened her mouth to respond before snapping it shut. "If that's how you feel," she nodded, glancing away from him. "I agreed to take the test," she said after a moment, trying to stay calm. "I didn't make a scene and demand that you fire Gwen because I didn't want your personal life to interfere with your professional one either. I thought I was doing what I could to make things easier for you," she shook her head and frowned. "I'm sorry that you feel I was trying to put myself over you, when you're basically the only person I would put over myself other than our baby." She collected up her things. "I'm going to go to bed," she replied.
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Post by Brandon Finn on Oct 8, 2015 18:51:29 GMT
It wasn't that he had necessarily been expecting her to be understanding and sympathetic because quite frankly he knew on some level that he was being a little irrational, but for whatever reason, the fact that she had been trying to separate his personal and professional life on her own seemed to only succeed in making him more upset. "It's not up to you to make sure that my personal life stays separate from my professional one," his realized quickly that he was raising his voice with her, but he wasn't sure that he knew how to stop it. "You don't have any control over it, and sometimes, quite frankly, I don't either. I fired Gwen because I knew that it upset you, but that was a decision that I had to make on my own. And sometimes, I regret firing her because she was actually pretty good at her job. The biggest problem with Gwen was that Eliot got to her first. It was a setup Amber. It was a sad, sick man trying to get rid of you for whatever reason. I don't know what Gwen was getting out of it, but I really believe that she had no interest in pursuing anything with me."
Frustrated, he ran a hand through his hair. "I'm not asking you to make me your first priority, or even your second one, I'm just asking that when tensions are already high, that you not do anything to make it worse. I don't know why you couldn't just ignore the gossip and play nice instead of deciding that you now want to be friends with Adam again. There were hundreds of people in that room and you chose to end whatever problems you had with him just then. I was just surprised, to say the least."
Maybe deep down he knew that it wasn't about her conversation with Adam, and it was about Eliot trying to mess with his life. But so many facets of his life seemed to have been affected by Eliot recently that he had a hard time pinpointing what he should be the angriest about. He had worked so hard to get to where he was now, and he had made sacrifices in the time that he spent with Amber to make sure that he was doing the right thing as the head of the company so it felt like a crushing blow to hear that one person could overturn all of that hard work just for petty reasons.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Oct 8, 2015 19:23:42 GMT
"I don't actually know what you want from me," she said softly. "Is this really about me? Or about me talking to Adam?" She frowned, "Or is this just how you feel about me?" She shook her head. "I don't know what you want me to say here, Brandon but if this is the way you feel, if 'putting out fires with me' is causing you that much extra stress, maybe we need to reevaluate what we're doing."
She crossed her arms in front of her and didn't look at him. "You know who I am. You know what I'm like. I don't know when that became the wrong thing with you." She took her glasses off and placed them aside.
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Post by Brandon Finn on Oct 8, 2015 19:30:57 GMT
He sighed heavily. She was right, he knew that. It wasn't about her, and it was probably never about her, but she just had the unfortunate luck of being the closest to him. But because of that, he also knew that they both had the ability to hurt each other in ways outside of what other people were capable of. If worst came to worst and somehow Eliot had manipulated his way into somehow having Brandon removed from the company, or if his reputation became damaged in any way, the absolute worst part of the entire thing would be if he had to go through it without Amber. And now that they had both come around to the idea that they were having a baby, he hated thinking that he would miss out on being there for their child too. "Amber, stop it," he still couldn't seem to stop snapping at her, but this time he was immediately sorry for it. "I'm not mad at you," he admitted after a long pause. "It's just everything that's going on."
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Oct 8, 2015 20:38:15 GMT
Amber looked at Brandon again, eyes narrowing a bit as he snapped at her. He'd already told her it wasn't her fault and she needed to be less selfish and that there wasn't anything she could really do to make his work life easier on him. She nodded, "Okay." She was exhausted and she was sad and she didn't even know what to say to keep them from fighting.
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Post by Brandon Finn on Oct 8, 2015 20:43:21 GMT
Brandon had been expecting her to be angry with him in a visible way. He had expected that they would fight, scream loudly at each other and that things might even have been thrown at him. He had been expecting the sort of volatile fights they had always had. He would have known how to handle that, and eventually he would have known how to fix it too. He didn't know how to handle the sadness that she seemed to be exuding. It was hard to tell if she was even angry at all. "Okay," he repeated.
Having deciding that he was ready for this night to be over, he said, "Can we just go to bed now? Let's just put this all behind us and maybe tomorrow it'll be better."
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