Alle Kapitel von Staying with him: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 10

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

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

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.

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

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