Chapter 3: Flooded

started with a sound.

A low, persistent dripping that worked its way into Olivia’s sleep sometime around 3am and sat there until she couldn’t ignore it anymore. She opened her eyes to the dark ceiling, listened, and felt the specific dread of someone who already knows something is wrong before they’ve fully confirmed it.

She turned on the bedside lamp.

The ceiling above her bed had a dark spreading stain across it, wet and growing, and as she sat up properly she heard it — not just dripping anymore but a steady stream hitting her hardwood floor somewhere in the direction of the bathroom.

She got up.

The hallway outside her bathroom was wet. Not damp — wet. The kind of wet that soaks through socks immediately and keeps going. She pushed the bathroom door open and the sound hit her first, water running hard and fast from under the sink cabinet, pooling across the tiles and spreading outward with quiet, devastating confidence.

“No,” she said. Just that. Flatly, to the universe.

She grabbed every towel she owned. It didn’t help. She called the emergency maintenance line and was put on hold for eleven minutes before a tired-sounding man told her someone would be out first thing in the morning and that she should turn off the water at the mains in the meantime.

She found the mains. Turned it off. Stood in her wet socks in the middle of her flooded bathroom at 3am and looked at the water still sitting across her floor, soaking slowly under the skirting boards and spreading into the hallway.

She called the maintenance line back.

“First thing in the morning,” the man said again, gently but firmly, and she could tell he’d had this exact conversation many times tonight.

She hung up.

Stood there.

The water wasn’t stopping. Without the burst pipe actively running it wasn’t getting dramatically worse but it wasn’t getting better either and the smell of damp was already settling into the air in that permanent-feeling way that meant this wasn’t a one-night problem.

She could not stay here.

She sat on the edge of her sofa — the one dry island in the apartment — and thought through her options with the same methodical calm she applied to everything. Her best friend Jade was in Edinburgh for the month. Her sister lived forty minutes away and had a newborn and Olivia would rather sleep on the street than knock on that door at 3am. There was a hotel two streets over but she’d walked past the rates board last week and the number had made her wince even as a passing thought.

She sat with her options for a long moment.

Then she looked at the wall.

The wall that separated her apartment from his.

She could hear, faintly, the low sound of his television. He was awake then. Or he’d fallen asleep with it on again, which he did at least twice a week — she knew this not because she listened, she told herself, but because sound carried and she was a light sleeper.

She sat for another five minutes.

Then she got up, tightened the belt of her robe, and knocked on his door.

He answered faster than she expected.

He was in joggers and a plain white t-shirt, barefoot, looking at her with an expression that shifted quickly from surprise to something more careful when he took in the state of her — wet socks, hair loose, the particular look of someone who had run out of good options.

“My bathroom,” she started, and then stopped because she was not someone who asked for help easily and her mouth was having trouble forming the words in the right order.

Damien leaned out slightly and looked at her doorway. Even from the hall he could probably hear it — the faint drip, the wet silence of an apartment that had given up.

“How bad?” he said.

“Bad.”

He nodded slowly. Looked at her. She looked back at him and hated — genuinely hated — that this was the situation. That of all the people and all the circumstances, it was him, at 3am, in his doorway, being looked at like she needed something.

“You can stay here,” he said. Simple. No performance around it.

“I don’t want to impose—”

“Olivia.” He said her name in that easy way he had, like it was something he’d said a hundred times. “It’s three in the morning. Come in.”

She came in.

His apartment was not what she’d expected.

She didn’t know exactly what she had expected — chaos, maybe, given the parties and the noise and the general Damien-ness of him. But it was clean. Lived-in but not messy. A large sofa, a coffee table with a water bottle and his phone on it, the television playing something low. weights stacked neatly by the wall near the window. A gym bag by the door, always ready.

It smelled like him. She noticed that immediately and then firmly did not think about it.

“Sofa’s comfortable,” he said, already moving toward the hallway cupboard and pulling out a spare blanket. “I’ve slept on it enough times to know.”

“Why would you sleep on your own sofa?”

He glanced back at her. “Sometimes I fall asleep watching film.”

“Football film?”

“Match analysis.” A small pause. “Yeah, football film.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

He handed her the blanket. Their fingers didn’t quite touch but almost, the way almost kept happening with him, this narrow margin between one thing and another.

“Bathroom’s through there if you need it,” he said. “I’ll be up at six but I’ll keep it quiet.”

“You don’t need to—”

“I know,” he said. And then, because he was apparently incapable of just letting a moment be simple, he looked at her for just a second too long before he turned and went to his room.

Olivia stood in the middle of his living room holding his blanket.

She sat on the sofa. Pulled the blanket around her shoulders. The television was playing some late night documentary about deep sea creatures, the narrator’s voice low and even and oddly soothing.

She should not feel as settled as she did.

She closed her eyes.

She was asleep within minutes.

End of Chapter 3