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Post by Brandon Finn on Aug 16, 2015 19:57:24 GMT
Maybe that was a power that Amber had over people - something that she probably wasn't even aware that she was doing. He smiled at her with the understanding that invested and protective probably applied quite well to how someone might describe his feelings toward her. That was if one was to simplify them down to the very basic level. There were dozens of other ways that he would describe his feelings for her at the moment, but for now he was content to just let invested and protective cover the majority of it. "I'm glad that she had the idea for you to come."
It wasn't so much that he was eager to meet Cassidy, or that he felt like it was something that he had to do - he just felt a compulsion to become as much of a part of Amber's life as he could. And obviously, as he realized from what she had said, her assistant played a much larger role in her life than he would have originally thought. His own assistant barely registered in his life, she was more of the traditional secretary type than anything - but perhaps that's because his and Amber's lives, and their careers, were so much different than each others. Though, he admitted to himself, maybe that was a negative mark against him for thinking that way.
It was the statement that Cassidy had been a "cheerleader of all things related to" the two of them that caused a smirk to rise to his lips. "Talk about me much then, do you?"
In his own way, he supposed he had spoken about her a fair bit too. Or at least he had thought about her more in the time since the reunion that he thought he might have ever thought about any woman he had ever been with. Except for her - the last time that she had been in his life. He had even caught himself in a humiliating situation where he couldn't keep his own jealousy at bay when Parker Blye had poked at a few key buttons. And while he was sure that the lunch conversation he had with Parker and Cooper Benson had all been in the spirit of whatever weird amicable relationship they had, he hadn't liked the idea of anyone taking her out but him.
"What have you told her about me?" he asked, curiously.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Aug 16, 2015 20:17:32 GMT
Amber grinned at Brandon, glancing away with a chuckle. "You came up in conversation. Cassidy is a very sweet girl with very poor taste in men, and once, in the first month that she had been working for me as my assistant, I found her one morning sleeping on the couch in my office when I came in early to take a call with one of our partners in Paris. She'd broken up with her live-in boyfriend who she'd known for all of a month and a half. So, we cancelled our appointments for the day and we got a bottle of wine and lunch and watched trashy movies on life time and she asked me if anyone had ever broken my heart." Amber toyed for a moment with the napkin on her lap and shrugged a shoulder. "And I said no, but I said the only person I'd ever given it to hadn't quite known what to do with it at the time. And she asked me if I meant Jim, and I said no."
"And she let the conversation drop for a bit, but then when I started passing on models that were right for certain campaigns and photoshoots we were running, she connected the dots. Apparently, if you Google my name, yours comes up right beside it in a few choice articles in the New York Post. God bless the Internet." Shaking her head, Amber looked up at him. "So eventually, one night when we were watching movies, I told her the story of Amber and Brandon. One of my closest friends turned the first boy to ever tell me he loved me, and the weekends in the Penthouse and wordless fights based on who could be seen with more people on Page Six to make the other jealous. All the way up to the last time I saw you and the times I sent someone else to New York Fashion Week after getting my job because I didn't think I would be strong enough to pass you on the street with one of your fiancees and act like none of it had happened," she took a breath and then smiled. "And Cassidy decided that it was one of the greatest stories she'd ever heard and that she was very intent on finding out how it would end. And even though I argued that you were engaged and I was married and it was certainly over, she said it wasn't. And when I was looking into divorce attorneys, she was looking into job openings for me in New York."
Clearing her throat, Amber took another sip of wine. "She's a real spitfire."
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Post by Brandon Finn on Aug 16, 2015 20:37:45 GMT
He was surprised to hear her say that he hadn't broken her heart. At one point he had left a lot of broken hearts in his wake and he struggled to figure out what to do once it had happened. Generally he tried to rinse his hands of this situation and move on, but it hadn't always been that easy. After he had ended things with Alexa he had jumped into a relationship of sorts with Rhiannon. They had barely been dating for four months when they had gotten engaged. He couldn't even remember the details he had been so drunk, and so young, and it had only taken him another six months or so to realize that he didn't want to marry her. She was the wrong girl for him in so many ways that he couldn't even begin to count - but she was even younger, and very much in love. She hadn't taken the break-up well.
Amber was a different story. He had truly meant it the last time that he told her that he loved her, and he had spent several of the last ten years assuming that he would have to work that much harder to prove that he could mean it again. But maybe it wouldn't be too difficult - maybe he could even say it again, mean it, and move forward with her in a way that he just couldn't have done with the other women.
"We have an entire story?" The question was asked teasingly. It felt so strange to hear someone else put it in those terms, but he supposed they did. It made him feel an awful lot like he was in some sort of ridiculous teen novel.
"I like her," he confessed. Having someone like Cassidy around had not only proven to provide Amber with the sort of friendship and guidance she had needed on the other side of the country, but hearing that Cassidy had been the driving force to get her to come back had endeared her to him more. He smirked, coming to a realization, "So you came back for me."
He hadn't meant for it to come out as a statement, he had intended it to be a question, but he felt confident that he might already know the answer.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Aug 16, 2015 21:01:15 GMT
When he smirked at her, she almost rolled her eyes and laughed softly. "I came back for a lot of reasons, Brandon. The opportunity to run an entire division at Glamour in a position with more upward mobility. The fact that New York has always felt like home. I missed the seasons." She bit her lip for a moment and looked down. "But I will admit that I was also hoping that I'd have the chance to tell you something very important."
"When I left for California, I wanted you to ask me to stay. And I'll admit that I was hurt when you didn't. But since I've gotten back I've realized that I think even if you had asked I would have gone anyway. It's not that I didn't want to be with you or needed some unwavering declaration of your commitment to me. I wasn't nearly as unhappy with us as I was with me. I wanted to go away and figure out who I could be without all of the parties and my parents money and the reputation I'd built for myself," she frowned a bit. "And when I met James, I was trying very hard to be someone who was very much the opposite of who I was here. And I didn't say yes to marrying him because I loved him but because I thought it was what I should do, and because I didn't want to be alone. But it never fit. When I got the crossword puzzle answers wrong, he bought me a thesaurus. When I got promoted at work, he didn't understand how far I'd felt I'd come. I didn't..." she frowned. "It feels fairly horrible to say, given that he's gone now, but I didn't ever really want to be with him. I was just as lonely married to him as I would have been single."
"But other than that extreme error in judgment, I like the person I am. I'm glad that I didn't stay here to have cat fights with Liv Warren for ten years and stay the same person I was when I left. And I regret leaving you without explaining to you that it wasn't you that I was unhappy with. You knew the best parts of me and I wanted to go find the rest and I'm sorry." She looked up at him a bit sadly before dragging her fingertip along the rim of her wine glass and looking down. "I had a lot of reasons to come back, Brandon. But I will admit that I was hoping you might still have room for me, and forgive me for leaving, and maybe like the person I am now."
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Post by Brandon Finn on Aug 16, 2015 21:24:56 GMT
It wasn't certain which emotion played out more heavily for him. She had made him sad in a way that he hadn't been expecting tonight to do - but she had also made him angry. He was angry that she had gotten married, and not just because she had walked down the aisle with a man he knew was old enough to be her father, but also because he hadn't made her happy. Moving to California, separating herself from everything that New York had stood for when you were eighteen and trying to make it on your own - that he understood. He didn't understand marrying someone who didn't at least make you happy. There were thousands of people in the city alone who got married without love, and so he may have even understood that. But the problem was he, Brandon, had loved her. If she was so afraid of being alone, shouldn't she have known that he would have been with her? And he would have worked like hell to make her happy.
He was angry with himself for not telling her to stay, coming to get her when she left, or even following after her. He could have gone to school in California, could have tried to convince his father to let him open a branch of the company where ever Amber wanted to go - but he didn't.
But he agreed with her. He liked the person that she had become too. She had grown into a beautiful woman, both on the outside and in, and she still made him feel as though this was the relationship he had been waiting for. Everything in their lives had led to this moment, and for better or worse, they were supposed to find their way back to each other.
He reached across the table and took her free hand in his. "I don't forgive you," he said. "I can't." Looking at her with a soft smile, he continued. "You're right - you grew up in California and I wouldn't want to take that away."
But he was still angry. He retracted his hand to reach for his own wine glass and took a larger than normal drink. It may not have been fair, considering that he had made the idiotic move of getting engaged, but he had never gone through with it. Even though he hadn't been the one to end things with Alayna, no part of him had ever thought they would walk down the aisle and exchange rings. If anything, he assumed they would be one of those couples that stayed engaged for years, hating each other behind closed doors, but knowing that life would have been worse off without having the other one there.
"I don't know that I'm ever going to be okay with you getting married, though. Not to someone like that." He stopped there, not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but also not knowing how to explain to her all of the ways that he disliked the man on principle. When it came down to it, he had been there for Amber in ways that he wasn't - and neither himself nor her husband had made her happy in the last ten years.
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Aug 16, 2015 22:41:55 GMT
Amber smiled softly at Brandon as he took her hand, but the moment he retracted it, she had to fight to keep her expression from falling too much. She knew that her previous marriage was going to be an issue, she'd always known it. Maybe not at first when she'd thought the door had been closed on she and Brandon, but at some point she knew it might be one of the biggest issues the two of them would face. "I don't know that I expect you to ever be okay with it, Brandon," she admitted. "I think the question is whether or not we can move past it."
She took a breath and looked up at him, chewing on her lip. For the better part of her life, Amber had always been confident. Brandon always through a wrench in that. It wasn't that he made her doubt her self worth. On any given day, Brandon would look at Amber and she knew that he was one of the very few people that knew her at her best and her worst and still claimed to love her. "It would be the one thing I would go back in time and erase in a heartbeat if at the time I'd ever thought..." she shook her head and looked away. "But it happened, and if we can't move past it, I think we need to decide that soon. And I already know what I want to do."
And there it was, out on the table. The nagging thought in the back of her mind since she'd first interviewed for the position that would take her back to New York City. In her mind, though she hadn't exactly made the decisions to prove it, she had always belonged to Brandon and from the moment she woke up in his arms the morning after their reunion, she had been ready to fight for that. And Brandon had changed and grown in many ways, but she wondered if perhaps there was still more effort required that he would want to put in. Worrying that she was ruining their date, she frowned a bit and debated trying to change the topic. But it was a conversation she knew she had to have.
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Post by Brandon Finn on Aug 16, 2015 22:58:21 GMT
Mulling over the ways that he thought they should move past it, he started thinking that he had. It might have just been something that needed to be said, that he just needed to let her know that he hated that she had gotten married. But now that she know, and now that she accepted that this was always going to be one of their biggest problems, he wasn't sure if there was anything else he was expecting.
There was. It was something that they had been decidedly mute on, and yet he would rank it up there just below her marriage. Maybe it was even higher up on the list for her but he couldn't be certain. Mostly because they had never addressed the situation. "Have you already moved past the engagements?"
If she had, then they were in the perfect position to move past all of this uncomfortable conversation and focus back on their date. The date that had started off so innocent and yet had taken a very serious turn. But by having this conversation now, it might be easier to move past it faster and get on with their lives. Like she had said, this date was years in the making, and in that time he couldn't have expected that there wouldn't have been baggage.
"If you ever thought what? That I still loved you and would have made you happy whether we were here or in California? That I could have become a man a little more put-together than I had been before?" He sighed and frowned at her a little. "Do you know why I never got married?" Not waiting for an answer, he continued. "I kept comparing them to you. They weren't funny enough, or smart enough, or just weren't you enough. The funny thing is, I don't think that I have stopped loving you for a single day since we were teenagers."
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Post by Amber Jacobs on Aug 16, 2015 23:18:39 GMT
Amber bit her lip and looked up at him when he asked about his engagements. "At the time, I was angry even though I most certainly had no room to be. I was upset that you had taken that step and asked someone to be with you in that way when you couldn't with me. And then I remembered that we had only been kids, Brandon. And I remembered that, not to sound egotistical, I think I knew you really loved me even when you weren't sure." She fidgeted a tiny bit, her hand moving to toy with the rose he'd presented her with when he picked her up. "I was angry at the time and I was upset and I fired a few...dozen models and was reprimanded heavily by the higher ups in California because of it, but I don't hold it against you because I was the one who left."
She looked at him and when he confessed to still loving her, her breath hitched a bit. Reaching across the table, she took his hand and met his gaze. "I never doubted that you could make me happy, Brandon. You were the only thing here in New York that did and I needed to be happy with myself. I'm sorry that I never explained that to you. I'm sorry that I married someone else that I couldn't possibly love because you can't give your heart to two people and you already had mine. Maybe that makes me a horrible person for going through with it anyway. But I've always loved you, Brandon and if you doubted that for even a minute," she squeezed his fingertips and sighed. "I'm sorry."
She did, however, have to smile softly at him. Despite the fact that she felt guilty for everything the two of them had gone through and the ten years apart. He still loved her and it made her feel lighter to know that for certain. And maybe that was why she tilted her head at him. "Do you really think I'm funny?"
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Post by Brandon Finn on Aug 17, 2015 0:00:14 GMT
"That's fair," he agreed. They had been kids. They had been stupid and in love, and had no regard of consequences that would befall them because they had their parents' money and they thought that they were completely bulletproof. It had taken one too many close calls for Brandon to realize that wasn't the case and that if he ever wanted to be taken seriously at his father's company, he needed to be the person that everyone had expected him to be. And while he rebelled against it in his early 20's, by the time he was promoted into his current role, he truly felt as though he was ready to be an adult. At least, as much of an adult as a twenty-six could feel.
He squeezed her hand in response and couldn't stop the grin that rose to his lips. "You do have a tendency to make me laugh."
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