Chapter 16
Skylar
The trick to groceries is confidence. You commit to the load, distribute the weight evenly across both arms, and you walk like a woman who has everything under control and is not one rogue tin of tomatoes away from losing the entire structural integrity of the situation.
I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen—three blocks from the store, arms burning, dignity intact—because it was simply how it was, and complaining would not have made the bags any lighter.
Two full bags today, plus flowers for Cassie, because she has been absorbing my chaos for the better part of a week, and flowers are the least I can do, even if she will spend twenty minutes pretending she doesn’t love them before finding the best vase in the apartment and putting them somewhere everyone can see.
The afternoon light is doing that late-day thing, sitting low and golden over everything and making the street appear kinder than it is. I cut around the corner at my usual pace when I carry groceries—quick enough to get home before my arms give out, slow enough not to lose anything.
I don’t see him until I walk straight into him.
The impact is immediate and solid.
The bag in my right arm lurches sideways, a tin breaking free and hitting the pavement with a hollow, ringing clang. I grab for it on instinct, already saying sorry, already looking up, and then I see his face. The word dies somewhere between my chest and my mouth before it ever reaches the air.
Damien.
Which means he has already tried the apartment. Probably stood at the buzzer long enough to conclude that nobody was answering and now here he is, directly in front of me.
His eyes move over me in that quick, assessing way of his, and then they settle on my neck.
The mark has faded over the past six days and is nowhere near what it once was, but it is still faintly visible. The kind of thing anyone paying close attention would notice immediately. And judging by the way Damien’s face is changing right now, I can tell he is paying very close attention indeed.
I don’t reach up to cover it. I am done reaching up to cover things from him.
“Well,” he says. “That didn’t take long.”
“Damien.”
“Who the fuck is he?”
I crouch to pick up the tin from the pavement, but a young man appears from nowhere, scoops it up before I can reach it, and places it carefully on top of the bag with the quiet efficiency of someone raised with manners.
“Thank you,” I say, straightening up and directing every bit of my attention to the young man, none of it to Damien, who is standing directly in front of me, radiating a mood I know too well and have absolutely no interest in engaging with on a public sidewalk with groceries in my arms.
“Skylar, I asked you who the fuck he is.”
“That is not something you get to ask me about.”
His jaw tightens as he shifts his weight slightly to the left. Not in a way that would look obvious to anyone passing by, but enough that he is now positioned between me and my building.
His hands are in his coat pockets and his eyes are still fixed on my neck. It is a small movement. Calculated.
“You have been gone for a week,” he says.
“I know how long I have been gone.”
“Seven days, and you are already letting someone fuck you and put his mouth on you.” He says it the way he says most things, with that particular controlled quiet he has always used instead of volume, as if keeping his voice down makes what he says more palatable. “That is really something, Sky.”
“Move, Damien.”
“No. We need to talk.”
“No we really don’t.”
He looks at my neck again, making sure I know he’s watching. “Tell me who the fuck he is.”
“No, it is none of your business.”
“You are still my girlfriend, Skylar.”
“I left your key on the counter a week ago and took my things. I didn’t leave a note because there was nothing left to say that had not already been said by seeing you sit across from another woman at a candlelit table.
” I shift the bags in my arms because they are getting heavy and this conversation does not deserve the energy it takes.
“I am not your girlfriend, Damien. I haven’t been your girlfriend for considerably longer than a week and you know it.
We just didn’t have the conversation to make it official. ”
His expression shifts. That polished composure slipping just enough to let something meaner show through. “So you found someone else that fast.”
“Move.”
“You wouldn’t let me touch you for months and apparently that was not about needing space.” His voice is harder now. “That was about saving it for someone else.”
His words land, and the anger that follows is immediate.
The audacity of that. I have slept with two men in my entire life. Him and Zane Rivera. That is it. That is the whole list. And he has the nerve to stand here implying I cannot keep my legs closed, even though he has been fucking whoever he pleases the entire time we were supposedly a couple.
“You were fucking other women while we were together,” I say, my voice coming out louder than it ever has with him.
Loud enough that a woman walking past glances over.
Surprise flickers across Damien’s face because in all the time we were together, I have never once raised my voice at him.
I swallowed every sharp thing I wanted to say.
“That is not what this is about,” he says.
“It’s exactly what this is about.” I shift the weight of the bags. “Move, Damien. The only thing I want from you right now is for you to step aside so I can go inside.”
“You will not even give me a chance to explain.”
“You had the chance to explain. You stood in the lobby of my office building and told me I was overreacting.” I look at him. “I am going inside now.”
A man slows on the pavement a few feet away, walking a small dog, with the careful, uncertain expression of someone who has registered that something is not right and is deciding what his role in it is.
“Are you okay, miss?” he asks, glancing my way.
“Yes, thank you. I am fine.”
He looks at Damien.
Damien looks back with the polished, impenetrable calm of a man who has never once in his life appeared to be a threat and is entirely aware of it. The stranger holds for a moment, and I use that opportunity to step around Damien.
I take four steps.
Close enough to the entrance to see the buzzer panel and the slightly crooked number plate above the door. Close enough to start to exhale and then his hand closes around my arm.
He pulls me back and I spin with the momentum of it, one of the bags tipping sideways. Suddenly, things are rolling across the pavement, a tin, an apple, and the bunch of flowers splaying out across the concrete like some kind of humiliating metaphor.
I’m facing him again—my heart going considerably faster than it was a second ago.
I glance around, looking for the man with the dog, but he is gone.
People move past us on the pavement, their eyes deliberately elsewhere, doing that city thing of deciding that whatever this is, it’s not their problem and they would very much like to keep it that way.
“Let go of my arm,” I say.
“You are not walking away from me mid-conversation.”
“I said let go of my fucking arm, Damien.”
His grip doesn’t loosen. It only tightens.
The pressure sends something cold through me that I recognize from long ago, from a different street and a different set of hands and three boys who thought that surrounding a girl and cutting off her exit was a reasonable way to spend an afternoon.
The details are different now. The feeling is exactly the same.
That specific panic of a body that understands before the brain catches up that the situation has changed and the exit is no longer where it was.
My heart is hammering now.
“You are being dramatic,” he says.
“Let go of my arm.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is the one advantage of having learned very young how to keep your face composed while everything underneath it is going sideways.
“Lower your voice.”
“I am not raising my voice.” I hold his gaze, keep my voice level, and fight the panic rising in my chest because showing him that he has rattled me is the last thing I am going to do. “I am asking you for the last time to let go of me.”
Damien’s grip holds. His eyes move over my face with the look of a man who has decided composure no longer serves him and is reaching for something uglier.
“You wouldn’t let me fuck you for three months,” he says, quietly, each word placed with precision. “Three months, Skylar. And then you walk out and come back with someone else’s mouth on your neck.”
He leans in slightly. “You are a little slut.”
The word lands the way he intends it to.
I feel it hit with the specific shame he aims for, that old reflexive flinch of a girl who spent years being told, in various ways by various people, that she was less than and simply not worth the trouble.
His face is now close to mine. Too close.
“You think I couldn’t tell you were never really there,” he says. “Two years of you going through the motions, looking straight through me. And now you are out here parading someone else’s mouth on your neck like it’s fucking nothing.”
I don’t say anything because the panic is loud enough that I don’t trust what comes out if I open my mouth.