Chapter 4 #2
His heartbeat is steady beneath my palm—the heartbeat of a man who has never once lost sleep over the right thing.
But nothing inside me answers.
Not the heat.
The ache.
Nor that reckless spark I used to feel from a single glance.
Zane never had to touch me to ruin me. A single glance across the room and I was already gone.
Damien has his whole body pressed against mine, completely present in a way I cannot match, no matter how hard I try. His hands know where to go. His mouth knows what it’s doing. Everything about him is skilled and completely disconnected from what’s happening inside me.
And all I can think about is the boy who used to gaze at me as if he wanted to set the world on fire and keep me warm with it.
Damien’s thumb brushes my nipple, then he pinches it.
My breath catches. It’s a sharp little inhale, involuntary, my body responding to sensation the way bodies do, regardless of what the rest of you is experiencing. Just nerve endings doing what nerve endings do.
He mistakes it for want.
His grip tightens at my waist, and he presses closer, his mouth dropping to my neck, his breath warm against my skin.
And I stand there, inside it, with my hands flat against his chest, my eyes open, my mind somewhere else entirely. On a night on a rooftop, under an open sky. On a boy who would say my name, carefully, like it was something worth saying.
Damien lifts his head to kiss me and I turn my face just slightly, causing his lips to drag against my cheek instead of my mouth.
He stills. It’s small. Barely anything. A half inch of movement, a fraction of a degree. Nothing that should register. Yet, he senses it.
He pulls back. His eyes move over my face. Studying me. Taking inventory. His gaze drops to my mouth, lingers, then lifts up to meet my eyes.
Whatever he finds there, he doesn’t name right away. He just looks. Hunger first. Annoyance close behind.
“You’re somewhere else again,” he says.
“I’m right here.”
“No. You’re not.”
I don’t argue because I’ve been somewhere Damien has never been and will never reach.
He lifts his hand and touches my face. His thumb traces slowly along my cheekbone, almost tenderly. It moves higher toward the small scar just above my eye. He traces it slowly and I stop breathing.
“You are beautiful, Skylar,” he says, voice soft and tender. “It’s such a pity that this scar ruins the symmetry of your face.”
The room empties all the air out of it.
Just for a second, all the sound drains out of it too, the hum of the refrigerator and the steady sound of my own breathing, all of it gone, leaving nothing but the hard, ugly thud of my heart against my ribs and the sensation of his thumb still resting against something he just made feel ugly.
I don’t move. I don’t react. But it lands.
It always lands hard whenever he brings it up, because there was only one other person who has ever touched that scar and never once did he make me feel bad for having it.
He traced his thumb gently over it, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You don’t get a scar like this from being weak.
That shit stays because you fucking survived it. ” He never thought it needed fixing.
“I could talk to Chris,” Damien says. “My brother knows a plastic surgeon. A good one. He could probably fix it.”
Fix it.
The words punch through something old and bruised that I keep in a place I don’t often visit. My eyes close before I can stop them. Suddenly, it isn’t Damien’s thumb on my skin. It’s Zane’s. His voice cuts through my thoughts. That scar says you kept breathing even when she wanted to break you.
I open my eyes and see Damien still in front of me.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“Talk about it.”
“I was only trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
His expression shifts—the warmth draining back behind something harder. “You don’t have to snap.”
“I’m not snapping.”
“Yes you fucking are.”
I try to step sideways, out from between him and the counter. But his body shifts with mine before I get anywhere, closing the gap, hip to hip, chest to chest, the counter edge pressing into the small of my back.
The conversation about my scar dissolves. His hand drops to my thigh.
The shift is so quick it almost steals my breath.
One second he is talking about my ugly scar; the next, his palm is warm against my skin, sliding beneath the hem of my dress, fingers tracing upward along the inside of my thigh with the unhurried certainty of a man who has never once been told his timing is wrong.
His fingers graze higher and reach the edge of my underwear, brushing across the fabric.
My stomach turns.
“Damien.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
“You need to relax.” His fingers glide higher still, with the lightest pressure. “You’ve been wound up for days.”
I catch his wrist in my grasp.
He looks down at my hand wrapped around his wrist, then back up at my face. Something shifts in his expression that I don’t like the shape of.
Then there’s a loud knock at the door. The relief that floods through me is so immediate it’s almost embarrassing.
“I’ll get it,” I say, already trying to step sideways again.
“Leave it.”
“But someone’s there.”
“No shit.”
“Damien.” I glance toward the door, my hand still wrapped around his wrist. Neither of us moves.
The knock comes again. Louder this time. More insistent.
“Whoever the fuck it is, they can come back later,” he says.
His eyes don’t leave my face. And in them, beneath the surface of all that practiced patience and manufactured warmth, lies the thing I have been pretending not to see for months.
The thing I have been constructing elaborate reasons not to name.
He is not stopping until he gets what he wants.
That is the thing about Damien I understood too late.
He mistakes persistence for passion and entitlement for desire.
He has never once in his life learnt to hear the difference between yes and the absence of no.
The knock comes for the third time. Sharper now. Faster. The kind of knocking that has a personality behind it. Impatient and completely unbothered, because whoever is on the other side of that door has no intention of going away.
Damien’s jaw tightens and something flickers across his face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
He turns and storms toward the door.
I pull my dress down. My hands are shaking so badly that I have to press them flat against my thighs and hold them there for a second. Just long enough to find the floor beneath my feet and remember what it feels like to stand on solid ground.
Damien yanks the door open.
Cassie stands on the other side, holding a paper bag from the liquor store down the street, hair loose around her shoulders, completely unbothered—as she has always been—by things that would make other people hesitate.
My breath catches in relief somewhere in my chest and stays there.
Her gaze goes to Damien first. A quick head-to-toe scan. Then past him, to me. Her eyes find my face across the apartment and in the space of a single second, without either of us saying a word, she sees everything.
“What do you want?” Damien says.
Cassie smiles. Not the friendly version. The one she used to aim at smartass kids in school, right before she told them what she thought of them. “World peace, financial stability, and for men with fake watches to stop blocking doorways. Since we’re all dreaming big.”
His eyes narrow. “You could have called. People usually do that before showing up uninvited.”
“And yet here I am.” She tilts her head. “Brave as fuck.”
“This isn’t a good time.”
She walks straight past him. “Sky, did your emotional support Ken doll just try to schedule an appointment for my friendship?”
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep the laugh in my throat from escaping.
Damien’s face hardens. “You need to leave.”
“No. I need wine. She needs better company. You need whatever comes after a personality transplant.” She drops onto the couch, sets the bag on the coffee table, and pulls out a bottle of cheap wine—bright screw cap, label slightly crooked.
“Relax. I won’t touch your collection. I brought my own.
The classy stuff, where it doesn’t take much money to get completely wasted. ”
Damien closes the door. He knows he hasn’t won this one, and the knowledge sits badly on him.
His eyes drop to the bottle, as they do to anything he considers beneath him. “That’s five-dollar wine.”
Cassie gasps and presses a hand flat against her chest. “Five? They fucking robbed me.” She twists the cap. “Still better than whatever you spend three hundred dollars on to convince yourself you have taste.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
“Glasses,” I say, my voice coming out thin, smaller than I intend.
Cassie’s eyes find mine immediately. She hears it. Everything sitting beneath that one word.
I move to the cupboard, pull out two glasses, and carry them back to the couch. My fingers are steadier now as I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch.
She pours without measuring, fills both glasses to the brim, and hands me mine.
Damien stands in the middle of the room, pissed off, watching us as if he has walked into his own home and found two squatters staging a coup.
“I have to get dressed,” he says.
No one answers.
His gaze cuts to me across the room, waiting for something I don’t give him.
“I’ll be out for a while.”
I nod.
He waits as if waiting for me to ask where. Instead, I take a sip of wine and stare at the coffee table. He goes.
The second the bedroom door clicks shut behind him, Cassie turns to me.
“What the fuck was that?” she whispers.
“Nothing.”
Her eyes narrow. “Sky.”
Just my name, the way she says it when she’s telling me she already knows and I should stop wasting both our time.
“Don’t.”
“No. I came here with wine, and somehow I still feel underprepared.” She looks toward the bedroom door, then back at me. “And I brought two bottles.”
“It’s fine.” I take another sip. The wine is awful, but somehow Cassie is beside me, and it tastes better for it.