The following week came faster than Olivia expected. All week, she carried the weight of that first tutoring session like a secret in her chest. She replayed his words...“You’ll hate me before you improve.” At the time, she had laughed nervously, but as the days went by, she began to wonder if he had meant it.By the time Thursday afternoon arrived, she felt both eager and sick with nerves. She dragged herself into the same quiet study room in the library, clutching her notebook tighter than usual. Her palms were clammy again, just like last time, and no amount of deep breathing seemed to help.Julian was already there. He sat at the oak table with his sleeves rolled up, a pen in hand, scanning through a thick stack of notes. He looked like he belonged there, like he could sit in silence for hours without ever losing focus. When Olivia entered, he didn’t glance up immediately.“You’re late,” he said calmly, still looking at the paper in front of him.Olivia’s stomach twisted. She chec
Olivia Bennett had learned the hard way that life didn’t hand people like her easy victories. At twenty-one, she was already carrying more weight on her shoulders than most people twice her age. Her parents had died when she was a teenager, leaving her with no financial safety net, no soft place to land. She lived in a cramped rented apartment with peeling wallpaper, a leaky faucet, and neighbors who blasted music at two in the morning.Her scholarship was her lifeline, the single thread holding her future together but that thread was starting to fray. Her grades had been slipping, especially in mathematics, the one subject that refused to make sense no matter how hard she tried. Numbers blurred on the page, equations tangled into meaningless strings and every failed test, every red-marked answer on her assignments was a reminder that she was only one misstep away from losing it all.When the university assigned her a private tutor, she tried to see it as a chance at redemption. A las
Lena sat at her desk late into the evening, the city humming faintly outside her apartment window. The night was quiet except for the ticking of the clock on her wall, each second stretching longer than it should. She had been restless all day, her thoughts circling around things she hadn’t dared to revisit for months.Finally, she reached for her laptop and typed his name, Damien Cross. She didn’t know what she expected to find. Maybe nothing. Maybe he had gone off the grid the way he always threatened he would. Maybe he had vanished into the corners of the art world where only whispers and collectors remembered him.But when the page loaded, her breath caught. There it was, his latest painting.The screen lit up with a canvas that pulled her right back into a storm she thought she had already weathered. Her throat tightened. It was her.Not the version of herself she thought he might remember, not the angry girl who had stormed out of his studio, not the silent woman who once stood
Damien had come. He had seen. He had looked proud. And then he had walked away.The rest of the night stretched on, endless and heavy. People praised her work, journalists scribbled notes, collectors whispered about purchasing, but Lena moved through it like a ghost. She was polite, gracious even, but her mind kept circling back to that single moment across the room, that look Damien had given her, so proud, so restrained, so final.When the night finally wound down and the last of the guests trickled out, Lena stood alone in the gallery, surrounded by her own creations. The silence felt too large, too empty. Her hand brushed against one of her canvases, Unbound, a riot of crimson and ash and she thought of Damien again.He had seen her. That much she knew. But he hadn’t stayed.Without a word.A year had passed.No word. No text. No call. Nothing.Damien had slipped away that night at her opening like smoke escaping a broken glass, silent and irreversible, and Lena had tried, God kno
The day of the opening came, and the air in the gallery felt alive, almost electric. The white walls glowed under the soft lights, every piece of Lena’s collection hanging like whispers of her soul made visible. People poured in: critics, collectors, artists, strangers with sharp eyes and softer words. The sound of shoes clicking on the polished floor mixed with low chatter, laughter, and the clinking of champagne glasses.Lena stood in the center of it all, her heart racing. She had spent months pouring herself into this collection, naming it Muse No More, and tonight it was no longer just hers, it belonged to everyone who dared to look and feel.She wore a simple black dress, elegant yet understated, and her hair was swept back in a bun that made her look more composed than she felt. Inside, she was trembling. Not from the crowd, not from the fear of judgment, but from one question gnawing at her mind since the invitation went out: Would Damien come?Her eyes scanned the room again
She tried to steady her breath. Six months of working alone, of trying to find her voice in paint and color, had led her here. And yet, as her eyes roamed the hall, her pulse stumbled.Across the room, through the scatter of critics and collectors, she saw him.Damien.He stood near a large canvas hung on one of the central walls, a glass of wine held loosely in his hand. His hair was longer, a little unruly, as though he hadn’t cared much about appearances. His eyes, shadowed with exhaustion, still carried that depth she remembered, the kind of gaze that could strip a soul bare.Their eyes met.Just for a moment.And then, as though burned by the weight of it, Lena looked away. Her chest tightened, her fingers brushing the side of her dress. She hadn’t expected to see him tonight, not in this city, not really, though she had wondered if the anonymous invitation had been his doing. Now, standing there under the crushing lights and watchful eyes, she wished she knew what to do.Should