Chapter 14
XIV
LOGAN
It wasn’t how he’d have liked to find out.
A mutual friend had commented on the post, and it had shown up in his feed.
Daisy was engaged to a soldier she’d met in the Middle East. But he wasn’t just any soldier.
Callan Thomas had been one of the poster boys from his high school, tapped to join West Ham if he hadn’t ruptured his Achilles during a game.
They’d met a few times, exchanging a couple of polite words at house parties and the like.
He was an upgrade from Idris, but if his history was anything to go by, Callan had built a name for himself for not adhering to monogamy.
He stared at the photo of them both. Her hair had grown out and now settled at the breastbone. She was wearing a pale-yellow sun dress, and it didn’t hit him at first until he did a double-take. She wasn’t just engaged; she was pregnant.
Logan knew he had no right to be bitter, but it was impossible not to be.
His breath hitched, shallow and sharp like a blade piercing the skin under his ribs.
He shut off his phone, tossed it to the far end of the couch, and sighed.
She was just a girl, a fleeting page in the book of his life. So why did it matter?
After trying to remove the thought from his mind, he decided to go for a drink.
Not his usual, and not anywhere someone might recognise him and ask how he was doing, because he didn’t know how to answer that.
Instead, he went to a little dive bar he knew nobody would visit, one that he hadn’t visited since his university days.
He walked through the doors and looked around. It hadn’t changed much from the dimly lit, questionable establishment it once was. Even the bartender hadn’t changed, with Darren, the tattooed and foul-mouthed patriarch of his youth, still pouring whisky behind the bar.
“Look who it is,” he said, meeting Logan’s gaze as he approached. “Never thought I’d see you back here.”
Logan laughed. “And I didn’t think you’d still be doing this all these years later.”
Darren shrugged and reached for a glass. “It’s a simple life, and what can I say? I like simple. What are you drinking?”
Logan thought for a moment, scanning the line of spirits. “A whisky will do.”
“Straight, or do you want to mix it?”
“What kind of question is that?”
Darren shook his head and smirked. “I had to ask.”
He poured the whisky without another word, and Logan took a sip, savouring the burn as it hit the back of his throat. It was warm, numbing, and exactly what he needed.
“So, what is someone like you doing here?” Darren asked, wiping down the bar. “I’ve seen you in the papers. You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”
“Which is exactly why I came here. You’re the only one here who knows me.”
“Are you sure about that?” He gestured to the left of them, and Logan turned. There was a woman standing a few stools away, swirling the stem of her martini glass, her eyes flicking towards him every so often.
“Someone’s noticed you.”
Logan knew her type. From her figure-hugging dress, the practiced tilt of her head to the careful calculation in her gaze, she wasn’t looking for love; she was looking for a distraction.
He could walk over there, offer a drink and some idle conversation.
She’d smile, maybe laugh at something he said, and by the end of the night, they’d end up tangled in the sheets of some unfamiliar bed.
But he knew better than anyone that when you feed off others for sustenance, it isn’t without cost. Still, when she approached, he couldn’t deny the temptation.
“You look like a man in need of company,” she said, sliding into the seat next to him.
He turned his head slightly, enough to take her in. She was attractive, her dark red hair falling in loose waves across her shoulders, and her lips painted in a deep shade of red that matched her nails.
Logan offered a half, noncommittal smile. “That obvious?”
She shrugged and stirred her drink with a cocktail pick. “A little.”
She was direct, and under any other circumstances, he might have found that appealing. Instead, he felt nothing.
He nodded towards her drink. “What are you having?”
“Dirty martini.” She took a slow sip, watching him over the rim. “Not a fan?”
“I prefer my drinks uncomplicated.”
She drummed her nails against the edge of her glass, thinking. “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a drink.”
For the rest of the evening, they exchanged small talk. She was studying to be a neonatal nurse and had recently discovered that her boyfriend of six years had been living a double life. Where she’d been plotting their future, he’d been planning the getaway car.
Logan could hear the pain in her voice, not just in the words she chose but in the way she spoke them, as if each soft and bitter syllable was a reminder of her own perceived foolishness.
But more than that, he saw it in how she held herself—shoulders drawn in, hands wrapped tight around her glass, and how she seemed to shrink further into herself the more she drank.
Against the quiet protest of his conscience, he invited her back to his place.
Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was something far uglier.
Either way, he ignored the part of himself that told him to walk away.
She was quiet for most of the ride, her fingers tracing mindless patterns on the edge of her seat, and he was grateful for the avoidance because without it, he knew doubt would take hold.
At his apartment, he unlocked the door and stepped aside, letting her enter first. She hesitated half a second before crossing the threshold, and he followed.
It was all muscle memory, he told himself, a sequence of movements he could do blindfolded. But it felt hollow and more than that, it all seemed wrong.
Then she kissed him, slow and deliberate, like she was trying to anchor herself to the moment and steer them both away from hesitation.
Clothes fell away, slipping to the floor, but Logan wasn’t really there.
His mind was elsewhere, detached. Even when she gasped his name, her acrylic nails digging into the dips of his back, he felt nothing—just a hollow space where desire should’ve been.
But she needed this. And maybe, in a way he didn’t want to admit, so did he.
Later, when she was asleep beside him, her breath slow and even, Logan lay awake, staring at the ceiling.
The weight in his chest hadn’t lifted. If anything, it had settled deeper within him, burrowing itself deep into his soul.
He turned his head slightly, studying the woman curled up in his sheets.
She was beautiful, and six months from now, he wouldn’t even be an afterthought to her.
But him? He was a man lying next to someone he didn’t know, confronted with the stark realisation that he was becoming everything he once despised, all for Daisy, a girl he barely knew.