HIS BLIND OBSESSION

The first time Damien Cole touched me, I couldn’t breathe.

His hand found my jaw in the dark, certain, deliberate. His thumb pressed just below my lip and he tilted my face up toward his, and even though I knew he couldn’t see me, it felt like being seen more completely than I had ever been seen in my life.

“You’re still here,” he said. Low. Like an accusation. Like a relief.

I should have left. I’d told myself a hundred times I was going to leave.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m still here.”

He made a sound low in his throat and his mouth found mine and I forgot every single reason I had to go.

Three months before that, I was sitting on the bathroom floor at 2am holding two pieces of paper.

In my left hand, Eli’s hospital bill. $8,400. Balance due immediately. Eli who was seventeen and sleeping ten feet away and had been coughing since October. The kind of cough that made doctors go quiet in a way that meant they knew something they weren’t ready to say yet.

In my right hand my bank statement. $43.

I sat there for a long time just holding them. Like if I stared long enough the numbers would change.

They didn’t.

From the bedroom I heard it. Eli coughing. That deep, rattling sound. Three times. Then silence. Then once more, like an afterthought.

I closed my eyes.

I was twenty-three years old. I had a literature degree and a job at a coffee shop that paid $14 an hour and a brother who needed medication we couldn’t afford and another brother who was eight and had stopped asking for things because he’d learned that asking upset me.

That last part was the one that got me. Every time.

Caleb used to ask for everything. Cereal with the coloured marshmallows, new sneakers, an extra five minutes before bed. Normal kid things. Now he ate whatever I put in front of him without comment. Now he folded his own clothes without being asked. Now he watched my face before he spoke, working out whether today was a day he could afford to need something.

Eight years old and already making himself smaller to fit around someone else’s problems.

That was mine. I did that.

I put the papers down. Opened my phone. Typed into the search bar.

Personal assistant jobs Manhattan.

I found it on the third page.

Personal Assistant. Live-in. Immediate start. $6,000/month. Discretion required.

Six thousand dollars a month. Live-in, which meant no rent, which meant everything I earned went straight to Eli. Straight to the bills. Straight to coloured marshmallow cereal and Caleb being allowed to be eight years old again.

I applied before I finished reading it.

Three days later , a woman name Mrs Hale called . Monday. Nine a.m. Cole Tower, Fifth Avenue. Do not be late, Mr. Carter.

I googled Damien Cole the second she hung up.

Thirty-four. Billionaire. Cole Enterprises, real estate, tech, finance. Brilliant. Ruthless. Barely any photographs, and in every single one he looked like he was one small inconvenience away from ruining someone’s entire life.

Three years ago, a car accident. Brief speculation. Then silence. He’d simply withdrawn and kept running his company from behind closed doors.

One interview, four years old. One quote.

“I don’t tolerate inefficiency.”

I put my phone down.

Looked at the two pieces of paper still on the floor.

$43. $8,400.

“You need this job, Noah,” I said quietly. “You need this job more than you have ever needed anything in your entire life.”

I got up. Found my pale blue shirt. Coffee stain on the cuff. Told myself I’d deal with it.

Didn’t deal with it.

Walked into Cole Tower on Monday morning completely unprepared.

Not for the lobby. Not for Mrs. Hale’s three rules. Not for the fifty-second floor or the penthouse or the double doors at the end of the hall.

Not for the voice behind them.

Send him in.

Low. Quiet. The kind of voice that had never needed volume to be obeyed.

I walked through the doors.

He was behind the desk. Dark hair. A jaw that looked exactly as unforgiving as his photographs suggested. And his eyes, pale grey, almost silver, looking just past my shoulder. Not at me. Through me. Past me.

He couldn’t see me.

I knew that. I’d read it. But knowing it and standing inside it were completely different things, because somehow those eyes made me feel more seen than anything ever had.

“Sit down, Mr. Carter,” he said.

Like he already knew exactly what I was going to be to him.

I sat.

And in the back of my mind, quiet and certain and already too late.

Oh no !!!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​