Chapter 5: Staying

Maintenance said three days.

Three days to fix the pipe, treat the damp, assess the flooring, do whatever it was they needed to do before the apartment was liveable again. Olivia stood in her doorway on Monday morning and looked at the state of it — the warped floorboards, the smell of wet plaster, the towels she’d laid down now stiff and useless — and called her insurance company and then her sister and then Jade in Edinburgh and then stood in the hallway and accepted, quietly, that she had no real alternative.

She knocked on his door.

He opened it already knowing, she could tell. He had that look — not smug exactly, just settled, like the situation had resolved itself in a direction he’d already anticipated.

“Three days,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, and stepped aside to let her in.

That was it. No negotiation, no conditions, no conversation about boundaries or arrangements or what this was. Just — okay, come in. Like it was simple. She found that both reassuring and faintly alarming.

Living with someone tells you things about them that no amount of hallway interaction ever could.

She learned that he woke up at 5:45 without an alarm, every morning, without fail. That he made his bed with a precision that surprised her — corners tucked, pillows straight, the kind of habit that came from discipline rather than preference. That he ate the same breakfast every day, weighed out on a small kitchen scale, and that he did it without complaint or apparent boredom, just quietly, like a thing that needed doing.

She learned that he watched football the way other people read — leaned forward, focused, occasionally muttering something low under his breath that she couldn’t quite catch. That he had three calls a day minimum with someone he called Coach and that his voice changed slightly during them, became more clipped and certain, the easy looseness of him sharpening into something more concentrated.

She learned that he laughed at things he found funny on his phone without sharing them, a quiet private laugh that she heard from across the room and found herself wanting to know the source of.

He learned things about her too, she supposed. She tried not to think too much about what.

They existed around each other carefully at first. She took the sofa, he took his room, they shared the kitchen in shifts that gradually, almost without her noticing, stopped being shifts. By the second morning she was making coffee for both of them without thinking about it. By the second evening he was cooking — actually cooking, something with chicken and rice that smelled extraordinary — and setting two plates on the counter without asking whether she wanted any.

She sat down and ate.

“You can cook,” she said.

“You sound surprised.”

“I am surprised.”

He glanced at her sideways. “What did you think I ate?”

“Protein shakes. Pre-packaged things. I don’t know.”

“I do eat protein shakes.”

“In addition to actual food apparently.”

He almost smiled. “My mum taught me. She said no woman was going to cook for me my whole life so I’d better learn.”

Olivia looked at him. “I like your mum.”

“She’d like you,” he said, and then looked back at his food like he hadn’t said anything, like that sentence hadn’t just landed quietly in the middle of the kitchen and sat there.

Olivia looked at her plate.

Ate her food.

Said nothing.

The third night she couldn’t sleep.

This wasn’t unusual for her — she’d always been a light sleeper, prone to waking at 2 or 3am and lying in the dark with her thoughts for company. At home she had systems for it. Herbal tea, a specific playlist, a book she kept on the nightstand for exactly this purpose.

Here she had none of those things.

She lay on the sofa and watched the dark ceiling and listened to the city outside and tried, with limited success, not to think. Her brain kept circling back to things she didn’t want to examine — the way he’d looked at her in the hallway that morning, the coffee already made the way she took it, she’d like you.

She sat up.

The apartment was quiet. The light under his bedroom door was off. She should stay on the sofa, stay horizontal, close her eyes and wait it out the way she usually did.

Instead she got up and went to the kitchen for water and stood at the counter in the dark drinking it slowly, looking out at the city lights.

“Can’t sleep?”

She didn’t jump — barely. She turned. He was in the doorway in his joggers, no shirt, hair slightly pushed from sleep, looking at her with quiet eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.” He came into the kitchen, reached past her for a glass, filled it at the tap. Stood beside her at the counter. Close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him in the cool dark kitchen.

They stood like that for a moment. Just the city outside and the quiet between them and the fact of how close they were standing without either of them moving away.

“Do you always wake up at night?” he asked.

“Sometimes. My brain doesn’t switch off easily.”

“What’s it doing right now?”

She considered lying. It would have been easy — nothing, just restless, just one of those nights. The kind of deflection she could produce smoothly, professionally, without even thinking about it.

“Thinking about things I’m not ready to think about,” she said instead.

He turned his head slightly to look at her. She kept her eyes on the window.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

Neither of them moved.

The city hummed outside, indifferent and continuous, and something sat between them in the dark kitchen that had been building for weeks — through the complaints and the curtain and the hallway and the coffee and the almost-touches — and neither of them reached for it yet.

But it was there.

It had been there for a while now.

Olivia set her glass down.

Damien reached for her first. His hand slid around her waist, pulling her closer until their bodies pressed together. In the dim light filtering through the window, his eyes were dark, intense. He leaned in slowly, giving her a chance to pull away.

She didn’t.

Their lips met in the dark kitchen, soft at first, then deepening with hunger. Damien’s mouth was warm and sure, tasting like sleep and restrained want. One hand cupped the back of her neck as he angled her head, his tongue slipping past her lips to stroke hers. Olivia moaned softly into the kiss, her fingers gripping his bare shoulders, feeling the hard muscle beneath her palms.

He backed her gently against the counter, his body flush against hers. The kiss grew hotter, more urgent — teeth grazing, tongues tangling, his thigh pressing between her legs. She could feel him hardening against her hip, thick and insistent, just like she’d seen in the shower. Her hands roamed down his chest as heat pooled low in her belly.

When they finally broke apart, both breathing heavily, Damien rested his forehead against hers.

“Been wanting to do that again since the other morning,” he murmured, voice rough.

Olivia’s heart hammered. She didn’t trust herself to say more than a shaky, “Me too.”

He kissed her once more, slower this time, before they both stepped back. The tension still crackled between them, unresolved.

“Goodnight Damien,” she said softly.

She felt him watching her as she walked back to the sofa. She pulled the blanket up, closed her eyes, and lay in the dark with her heart beating slightly faster than usual.

Managing it, she thought, with no conviction whatsoever.

End of Chapter 5