All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

123 Chapters

Chapter 1: The Neighbor from Hell

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

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 h

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 grab

Chapter 4: Caught

She woke up before him.6am, grey light coming through the gaps in his curtains, the television having switched itself off sometime in the night. For a moment — just a brief, disoriented moment — she forgot where she was. Then it came back. The flood. The knock. The blanket that smelled faintly of his fabric softener.She lay still for a second, looking at the ceiling.Then she heard it. The shower.She sat up slowly. Pushed her hair back from her face. Told herself she was just adjusting to being awake, just getting her bearings in an unfamiliar space. She stood, folded the blanket with more precision than was probably necessary, and set it on the arm of the sofa.She should make coffee. Or sit back down. Or look out the window at something neutral and architectural.Instead she found herself standing in the hallway.His bathroom door was not fully closed. A tempting sliver of warm light and steam spilled into the dark hallway. The sound of running water was steady, rhythmic.She sho

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.

Chapter 6: The First Night

She lasted until midnight.That was the honest truth of it. She lay on his sofa with his blanket pulled up to her chin and stared at the ceiling and listened to the rain and told herself she was fine, she was comfortable, she was absolutely not thinking about the man sleeping fifteen feet away from her.She was thinking about him constantly.It wasn’t just the attraction — though that was there, loud and inconvenient and impossible to keep filing under irrelevant. It was the day they’d just had. The way he’d cooked without making a production of it. The way he’d listened when she talked, actually listened, not waiting for his turn to speak but genuinely taking in what she said. The way he’d laughed at something she said around seven o’clock and the laugh had been so unguarded and real that she’d felt it somewhere behind her sternum and hadn’t fully recovered.She turned over.Closed her eyes.The rain hit the windows steadily, relentlessly, with no intention of stopping.She sat up.H

CHAPTER 7: The Morning After

She woke up and knew exactly where she was. No foggy confusion, no blinking at strange walls. Just the solid weight of Damien’s arm across her waist, the unfamiliar slant of light through his curtains, and that smell—his smell—that she’d stopped pretending she didn’t like days ago.She stayed still for a while, letting herself just be there.Outside, London was already awake. Traffic grumbled past, a distant alarm kept beeping, the usual low hum of the city carrying on like nothing had changed. It was strangely comforting.Damien was still asleep, breathing slow and deep. She turned her head carefully and looked at him. Really looked. He was on his back, one arm around her, the other relaxed at his side. His face was softer in sleep, all that quiet intensity switched off. She let herself stare longer than she probably should have.Then she studied the ceiling.Okay, she thought. Not a big revelation. Just… acknowledgement. Something real had happened. And here she was, lying in his be

CHAPTER 8: No Excuse

She had a perfectly good reason to go back to her own bed that night.Her apartment was ready. Her keys were at reception. Her sheets were clean and her pillows were hers and her routine — the one she had spent three years perfecting — was waiting for her exactly as she had left it, patient and undisturbed, twelve steps across the hall.She stood in the bathroom brushing her teeth and looked at herself in the mirror and had a very reasonable internal conversation about all of this.Then she spat, rinsed, turned off the light, and walked past her own door without slowing down.She did not knock. She just opened his door — it was unlocked, it was always unlocked, she had stopped thinking about what that meant — and he was already in bed, one lamp on, reading something on his phone that he set face down the moment she came in.He did not say anything. Neither did she.She crossed the room and got into his bed and he reached over and turned off the lamp and that was that.Except it wasn’t

CHAPTER 9: Outside

It was his idea.She was on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled and the particular restlessness that came from having nowhere to be and too much to think about, and he came out of his room in a jacket and looked at her and said come on like it was already decided.“Where?” she said.“Out.”She looked up from her book. “That’s not an answer.”“It’s enough of one.” He picked up his keys. “You’ve been in this apartment for two weeks. You need air.”“I get air.”“Walking to the kitchen doesn’t count.” She looked at him for a moment. He looked back, patient and certain, jacket on, keys in hand, already decided. She had learned by now that this particular version of him — calm, immovable, quietly certain — was not something she was going to talk her way around.She put her book down.“Give me ten minutes,” she said.“You’ve got five,” he said, and she threw a cushion at him on the way to the bedroom.He took her to an arcade in Shoreditch.She stood outside it for a mome

Chapter 10: Too Loud

She noticed it on a Tuesday.Not that it started on a Tuesday. It had been coming for a while — she knew that, she was a therapist, she understood the mechanics of denial better than most people — but Tuesday was the day she ran out of road.She was sitting across from a client. A woman in her early thirties, good job, complicated interior life, the kind of patient who came in every week and said something that sounded like progress and then dismantled it in the last five minutes. Olivia liked her. She was good at her job and the session was going well and somewhere in the middle of it, while her client was describing the particular exhaustion of wanting something you have decided you cannot have, Olivia thought about the way Damien had looked at her over breakfast that morning.Not vaguely. Specifically. The angle of him at the counter. The thing he had said that made her laugh before she was properly awake.She thought about it in the middle of someone else’s session.She wrapped up

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