Chapter 2: The View

Three weeks.

That’s how long Olivia lasted before she stopped filing noise complaints and accepted that Damien Cole was simply a fact of her life now — like traffic, or difficult clients, or the radiator that clicked every night at 2am. Unavoidable. Irritating. Something to be managed.

She managed him by ignoring him.

It worked, mostly. She timed her mornings carefully — out the door before his music started, home late enough that whatever chaos he was generating had usually settled. When they crossed paths in the hallway she gave him a nod, brief and professional, the same one she gave the postman. He always responded with that half-smile, like her deliberate coolness was something he found quietly funny.

She found that infuriating.

But it was working. She had a system. She was fine.

And then it rained for four days straight.

It was a Sunday. Grey and heavy outside, the kind of morning that made leaving the apartment feel genuinely unreasonable. Olivia had nowhere to be. She’d made her coffee, she’d eaten, she’d read forty pages of a novel she couldn’t fully concentrate on. By noon the apartment felt small in that particular way it only did when the weather trapped her inside.

She found herself standing at the window.

She wasn’t looking for anything. She was just standing there, mug warm between both hands, watching the rain drag itself down the glass. The building across the narrow gap between the two apartment blocks was close — close enough that on clear days she could see straight into the facing windows if she wanted to. She never wanted to. She was not that kind of person.

She was just standing there.

And then the light in the window directly opposite flickered on.

She didn’t move. Didn’t mean to look. But the movement caught her eye the way movement always does and before her brain had fully caught up her eyes had already found him.

Damien.

He’d clearly just come back from the gym. He was still in his workout clothes — or half of them. The t-shirt was gone. He had a towel slung over one shoulder and he was moving through what she now understood was his bathroom, completely unbothered, completely unaware, the light catching the lines of his back as he reached up to open the shower window a crack.

Olivia did not move.

She told herself she was about to. She was absolutely about to step back, draw the curtain, return to her book like a normal, reasonable adult woman who was not — categorically not — standing at her window staring at her neighbour undress.

She didn’t move.

He rolled his shoulders. Reached down to pull off his shirt — the last of it — and her brain finally, belatedly, sent the signal to her feet.

She stepped back.

Drew the curtain.

Stood in the middle of her living room with her coffee going cold in her hands and her heart doing something she refused to name.

“Okay,” she said quietly, to no one.

She sat back down on the sofa. Picked up her book. Read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word.

This was a problem.

Not a real problem — she corrected herself quickly. Not a feelings problem. It was a biology problem. A straightforward, clinical, completely explainable response to an objectively attractive person in a state of undress. It meant nothing. She was a therapist. She understood the mechanics of attraction better than most people and she was not about to be undone by a man who played loud music at midnight and had never once asked how her day was.

She was fine.

She reopened her book.

She looked again the next morning.

Just briefly. Just to — she didn’t finish the thought. She was at the window before she’d made the conscious decision to be there, curtain open just enough, coffee in hand like that made it casual.

He was already up. Already back from wherever he went at ungodly hours of the morning. She caught maybe thirty seconds of him moving through his bathroom, towel around his waist this time, before she made herself turn away.

Thirty seconds. That was nothing. That was practically accidental.

She went to work and sat across from a client who was describing her complicated feelings about a man she knew was bad for her and Olivia listened with her full, professional attention and said all the right things.

On the train home she stared out the dark window and thought about nothing in particular.

By the end of the week she’d stopped pretending it was accidental.

She knew his schedule now — not because she’d tried to learn it, she told herself, but because patterns were hard to ignore once you’d noticed them. He left early, always. Came back mid-morning, showered, left again by noon. Some evenings he was home by eight. Some nights he wasn’t home at all and she would find herself aware of the silence across the hall in a way that annoyed her deeply.

She kept the curtain open a little more than she used to.

It wasn’t something she was proud of. She was a grown woman with a postgraduate degree and a thriving practice and she was standing at her window every morning like a teenager with a crush she hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

But she stood there anyway.

And every time she saw him — shoulders, jaw, the easy way he moved through his own space like gravity worked slightly differently for him — something pulled in her chest that she filed carefully under irrelevant and refused to examine further.

She was managing it.

She was absolutely managing it.

End of Chapter 2

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