Chapter 8
Skylar
For the past four days I’ve stayed at Cassie’s apartment and my body is slowly starting to remember what life feels like again.
Not the curated version.
Not the one people perform for the world with their highlight reels, and carefully angled photographs meant to signal that they have their shit together. This is not that.
This is Cassie’s bra hanging over the back of the kitchen chair because she maintains—with genuine philosophical conviction—that laundry baskets are capitalist cages.
Two mugs in the sink, tea stains around the rims, because neither of us has ever possessed the spiritual fortitude to wash dishes before caffeine.
The yellow throw blanket half-dragged off the couch, where I fell asleep last night with one foot hanging off the edge and my neck at an angle I am still feeling this morning.
Cassie’s record player is still spinning quietly in the corner.
The needle long past the last track, just turning in that soft, patient loop the way it always does when we forget to lift it.
The apartment smells like cheap coffee, Cassie’s vanilla body spray, and whatever takeout container she left in the fridge and is now refusing to acknowledge, apparently because she has decided that making eye contact with leftovers gives them power.
Four days, and some part of me has already slipped back into its rhythm like a language I never actually forgot.
Cassie yelling at the kettle because it boils too slowly.
Me stealing the last clean towel and maintaining total ignorance of its whereabouts when she comes looking for it.
Her leaving sticky notes on the bathroom mirror in her handwriting, little fluorescent yellow squares that say things like “hydrate bitch,” and “you are that girl so act like it”, and, this morning’s one that reads, “if you change your mind about the man with the cheekbones and the criminal history, I will put on my good jeans and come with you, no questions, no judgment, limited commentary.”
I stood in front of that mirror for a full minute, reading it.
It feels almost like old times.
Almost.
Except I am not eighteen anymore, freshly cracked open by Zane Rivera, running on cereal and the specific, desperate bravado of a girl who has not yet learned the difference between surviving something and actually getting through it.
Cassie is not that age either, not the girl who appeared with a garbage bag of everything she owned, both eyes full of tears, threatening legal action if they fell.
We are older now. Sharper in some places. Softer in others, that neither of us would ever admit out loud without at least two glasses of wine and a power outage.
I know what the last two years were like.
I can see it clearly now, from the other side of it.
My heart was broken when I met Damien, and I knew it was broken.
I still chose him anyway, not because he was my prince charming, but because he was safe, uncomplicated, and nothing about him was going to reach into the places that were already damaged.
I didn’t understand that a heart that is still broken is not ready to let anyone in, safe or otherwise.
But none of that has stopped Damien from trying.
The buzzer sounds.
Cassie appears from the hallway, hair sticking up on one side, yesterday’s mascara smudged under her left eye, wearing a shirt that says emotionally unavailable but well accessorized in block letters across her chest.
She walks to the intercom and presses the button.
A familiar voice comes through, saying, “Skylar, open the door.”
Damien.
I freeze in the kitchen, a spoon in my hand, cereal halfway to my mouth.
“Who is it?” Cassie asks in the tone of someone who already knows and is simply being an asshole.
“Cassie,” Damien says her name as if it tastes cheap.
“Wow.” She tilts her head. “Wrong answer. We were looking for “‘fuck off”. So come back tomorrow and try again.”
“Let me speak to Skylar.”
“She’s busy.”
“With what?”
Cassie looks at me across the kitchen.
I’m holding a spoon, wearing the expression of someone who has just been asked to defuse a bomb and has no fucking idea where to start.
She turns back to the intercom. “She’s in the middle of an intimate moment with Captain Crunch. Very physical. Lots of tongue.”
“Cassie.”
“Damien.”
“This is childish.”
“Is it?” She says. “Coming from a man who got caught in a restaurant. Tell me, was it just a hand job under the table, or did you go the full effort and fuck her in the restroom?”
His voice hardens. “Open the fucking door.”
“No.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“That’s fine. The sidewalk is very accepting of men who can’t take a hint. Just don’t stand too close to the trash cans when you’re out there. The collection truck comes by today, and honestly, the driver’s not going to look twice before he picks up.”
She lets go of the buzzer button.
The intercom goes silent as she turns around and walks back down the hall toward the bathroom. Moments later, I hear the bathroom door close, then the sound of the shower.
I put another spoonful of cereal in my mouth and chew.
The second time he comes, Cassie tells him through the buzzer that I have joined a witness protection program for women with taste.
The third time, Cassie doesn’t bother answering. She just goes back to painting her nails, muttering, “Men really do hear silence and think, “Better add more personality to my disorder.””
I ignore his calls.
All of them.
His messages, too.
The first few are apologies. Then come explanations. Then frustration dressed up as confusion, which is its own particular kind of manipulation, the repackaging of anger as hurt so that you feel responsible for both.
Damien: Skylar, just talk to me.
Damien: You’re overreacting.
Damien: It was business.
Damien: You know how these dinners are.
Damien: Do not let Cassie get in your head.
That last one almost makes me reply.
Not because he’s right, but because I want to tell him that Cassie has been in my head since we were ten years old and has never once treated me the way he did.
When I don’t reply, he comes to my workplace.
Patricia’s assistant calls me from reception to say that Damien is waiting for me.
I walk out with a file tucked against my chest because having something in my hands is the only armor I have right now.
He stands near the front desk, coat on, eyes moving over the walls—the framed donor photographs, and the flyers about transitional housing and aging-out support programs—scanning the space the way he always scans spaces that are not his, assessing rather than seeing.
When he sees my face, his expression softens.
“Sky.”
“You cannot come here,” I say.
He blinks. He expected tears, or at the very least a crack, but he has gotten a locked door, and the adjustment takes him half a second he can’t quite hide. “I needed to see you.”
“I’m working.”
His jaw tightens fractionally. “Can we please just talk?”
“I’m too busy to talk about this now.”
“This?” His laugh is quiet and wounded, as if he rehearsed it somewhere between the lobby and the elevator. “You left without a word, Skylar. You left a key on the counter like I was a landlord. The least you could have done was talk to me.”
I look at him steadily. “You were on a date with another woman.”
“It was a business dinner.”
“Then go talk to the woman in the red dress about how you were out with her while your girlfriend was at home wondering where the hell you were.”
Frustrated that I am not giving him an inch, he takes a deep breath.
“Skylar.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No.”
“Because I know what a man looks like when he is leaning across a table, trying to get laid, Damien.”
His mouth flattens into a thin line. “You’re making this ugly.”
“No,” I say. “You did that yourself. I am simply refusing to make it pretty for you.”
For a moment, he says nothing.
The office moves around us.
A caseworker walks by with two coffees. Someone’s phone rings at the far end of the floor.
The front-desk printer jams and starts beeping.
I hate that we are doing this here, in this space, in front of people who know me as someone who has her shit together, but I’m at the end of whatever patience I have left to manage his comfort at the expense of my own.
Damien lowers his voice. “This isn’t you.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. It’s loud enough that the receptionist glances up from her keyboard.
“That’s the funniest thing you have ever said to me,” I tell him.
“Because you never actually met me. You met the version of me still bleeding from someone else, having sewn herself up just enough to look functional. You got the stitches, Damien. You never got the wound. And the sad thing is, you never once noticed the difference or thought to ask.”
His eyes narrow. “Cassie is poisoning you against me.”
“Cassie,” I say quietly, “reminded me that I had a pulse. That the life I was living in that apartment was not a life at all. It was just a very expensive cage. There is a difference. You just never cared enough to notice.”
I walk away before he can answer. Before he can see my hands shaking. Standing up for yourself is not always clean or triumphant. Sometimes it just feels like stepping off a roof and praying the ground remembers your name on the way down.
Every time I leave the apartment now, I expect to see him. On the sidewalk outside the building. In the parking lot at work. In the margins of an ordinary moment, standing there, waiting.
Four days. That’s all it takes for my life to feel more like mine than it has in years. That is the part I keep turning over quietly.
On the sixth day, I leave work a little later than usual. A court report needed one more pass. A phone call I had been putting off turned into forty minutes of careful, exhausting listening. By the time I close the file, my eyes are burning.
My phone sits on the desk beside me, face-down.
Three missed calls from Damien and two messages, which I have totally ignored.
I grab my phone and pick up my bag.