All Chapters of Scent of Obsession : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Chapter 11: FissuresDamien noticed it at 7:03AM.He'd been awake for four minutes, which was already unusual. Normally waking up came at him sideways in the times he could sleep when his body could still handle excessive pills and sedatives prescribed by his doctors, the dragged up kind of sleep that felt less like rest and more like surviving another round. Groggy. Disoriented. Reaching automatically for the whiskey and pills on the bedside table.This morning he simply opened his eyes, this was his new normal atleast for the next 6 months.The room was pale and quiet. The city outside doing its early morning thing, that specific grey light that existed for about twenty minutes before the sun decided to commit.And the bed beside him was empty.He registered that before anything else.Not the time. Not his schedule. Not the unread messages already sitting on his phone.The empty space where she'd been. her scent seemed induced into the room now.He stared at the ceiling for a moment

Chapter 13: Uncharted Damien woke up at 5:47AM. Not from a nightmare. He just opened his eyes. Stared at the ceiling for a moment, waiting for the usual weight to settle on his chest, the dragging exhaustion, It didn't come. He became aware of two things simultaneously. She was still asleep beside him. And his hand was still holding hers. He looked down at it. Their hands. Hers small and relaxed, fingers loose around his, she had fallen asleep without noticing. He had noticed. He'd been awake when she reached for him. He'd felt the exact moment it happened. And he had turned his hand over and held on and now it was nearly six in the morning and he was lying in his own bed staring at his own hand like it belonged to someone else. He carefully freed his fingers. She didn't stir. He got up from bed, and decided he wasn't going to think about it.He spent the entire shower think about it.Not productively. More like a student working through the same equation again and agai

Chapter 15: 3AMLiora didn't know what woke her.She lay still for a moment.Damien's arm was around her waist, his breathing deep and even against the back of her neck, the slow steady rhythm of someone sleeping deeply, She'd learned the difference weeks ago without meaning to.He was fully gone.She carefully lifted his arm.He didn't reach for her this time.She stood and looked at him for a moment in the dark. The sharp jaw slack. The furrow between his brows that existed even in meetings, sometimes in sleep, smoothed out for once into something that looked almost like the absence of pain rather than the presence of peace.She grabbed the throw from the end of the bed and went to the living room.The city at 3AM was a different in a way entirely.She sat on the couch and pulled her knees up rest her chin on her knees. The lights were still there but quieter somehow, fewer cars, fewer moving parts, the whole thing scaled down to something almost manageable.She'd always liked the c

Chapter 17: Morning She became aware of three things in the wrong order. First, she was warm.It was the warmth she was getting used to, whose source came from the block of muscles behind her. Second, her head felt clearer than it had in two days. Third. She went very still. Damien was still asleep behind her, his arm around her waist the way it always was, his face in her hair the way it always was, everything exactly as it had been every morning for three weeks. Except. She was very, very aware of him this morning in a way that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with the fact that he was a man and it was morning and she was pressed against him and his body was making a completely involuntary and entirely mortifying point about both of those facts. She stopped breathing. He was still asleep. She was absolutely certain he was still asleep because his breathing was slow and even and his arm was heavy and relaxed and he had no idea and that was the only mer

Chapter 19: Daylight She'd kissed him. Not the corner of his mouth. Not a half conscious brush of something that could be explained away in the morning. His mouth. Fully. Warm and deliberate and real. And then she'd fallen asleep before he could do anything about it which was probably the universe's way of pointing out that there was nothing appropriate to do about it and he should sit with that. He was sitting with it. He'd been sitting with it for two hours and twenty three minutes. At five she stirred. He went still immediately, which was a new response, his body making decisions faster than his mind now, and she opened her eyes and looked at him with the clear unclouded look of someone whose fever had broken and who remembered nothing of two fourteen AM. Nothing. He could see it immediately. The absence of it. No awareness, no awkwardness, just Liora looking at him the way she always looked at him in the morning, slightly guarded, slightly soft, entirely unaware. "Hey,"