Staying with him

Olivia had a system.

Not in an obsessive way — or at least that’s what she told herself. It was just that life ran smoother when things were predictable. Coffee at seven, two cups, no sugar. Breakfast with something quiet playing in the background — Sade, maybe, or just the sound of the city waking up outside her window. Then a shower, then work,Simple,Reliable.

She’d lived alone for three years and she liked it that way. The apartment across the hall had been empty for two months and those had been, genuinely, two of the most peaceful months of her adult life.

Then Saturday happened.

It started with a truck. She heard it from her bedroom before her alarm even went off — that low diesel grumble that meant something large was being parked somewhere inconvenient. She turned over and pulled her pillow over her head. It didn’t help. Then came the voices. Then the music.

Not soft, getting-settled music. Not background noise. A full playlist, bass turned all the way up, leaking through the walls like water through a crack.

Olivia lay there for sixty seconds. She counted. Then she got up, tied her robe, and opened her front door.

The hallway looked like a storage unit had exploded. Boxes stacked against the walls, a massive television being wrestled through a doorway by two men who clearly didn’t communicate well with each other, and in the middle of all of it — him.

His back was to her. Grey sweatpants, white t-shirt, the kind of build that made you momentarily forget what you were about to say. She caught herself and cleared her throat.

Nothing

“Excuse me,” she said.

The music ate her words whole.

She stepped further into the hallway. “Hey.”

He turned around.

Olivia had spent six years as a therapist. She’d sat across from people in the worst moments of their lives without flinching. She did not rattle easily.

But there was half a second — just half — where her brain went completely blank.

He was unfairly attractive. That was the only honest way to put it. Tall, dark-eyed, jaw like something architectural. And he had this way of looking at her, unhurried, almost lazy, like he had all the time in the world and found her mildly entertaining.

“You alright?” he said.

“No,” she said, because she wasn’t going to pretend. “It’s not even seven. Can you turn that down?”

He glanced back toward his open door, then at her again. “Yeah. My bad.” A pause. “I’m Damien.”

“I didn’t ask,” she said, and went back inside.

She stood in her kitchen for a moment after the door clicked shut. Picked up her coffee. Took a sip.

The music dropped.

She told herself the small knot in her chest was irritation and nothing else. It probably was.

By evening he was having a party.

Of course he was.

Olivia sat on her sofa with a client file balanced on her knee and the bass from across the hall tapping a steady rhythm through the wall behind her head. She tried to focus. She’d been trying for forty minutes. The words kept blurring.

She breathed in through her nose, slow and deliberate — the same thing she told her clients to do when they felt themselves unraveling. It helped less than she advertised.

At half eleven she knocked on his door.

A woman answered. Red cup, bold lipstick, the kind of effortless prettiness that came with not caring too much. She looked Olivia over once, twice, then shouted over her shoulder — “DAME!” — without breaking eye contact.

He came to the door looking completely at ease with himself. Dark jeans, fitted shirt, a drink loosely held in one hand. When he saw her a small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, like she was exactly who he expected and the thought pleased him.

She didn’t find that charming at all.

“It’s almost midnight,” she said.

“It’s Saturday.”

“Which becomes Sunday. Which becomes Monday.”

He tilted his head slightly, like he was genuinely considering that logic. “You want to come in?”

“I want you to turn it down.”

A beat. He looked at her the same way he had that morning — that slow, reading look that she didn’t appreciate from someone she’d known for twelve hours.

“Alright,” he said.

She turned to leave.

“You never told me your name.”

She stopped. Didn’t turn around. There was something almost deliberate about the way he’d said it — like he’d been waiting to ask

“Olivia,” she said.

She went back inside, locked the door, and did not think about him for the rest of the night.

Much.

End of Chapter 1