Chapter 12 Harper
Harper
Sunlight stretched across Damien’s vinyl floors, warm and slow, as the smell of bacon curled through the air. I moved quietly, flipping the strips of meat, feeling the strange weight of a good mood settle over me.
Today will be a good day, Harper.
Then I heard him coming, his footsteps soft, stopping in the doorway to the washroom.
“You’re up early,” Damien’s voice was rough, stretched thin by a yawn that made him sound half asleep and fully annoyed. “What’s got you so chipper?”
I glanced back over my shoulder, cocking my chin toward the bar stools. “Do I need to be in a good mood to make my roommate breakfast?”
His eyes narrowed, suspicious and a little too curious as he eased onto a stool and rested his arms on the counter.
“Just saying, you’re acting… different. Not depressed.”
I slid a plate of eggs and bacon across the island and followed it with a bottle of maple syrup. “Not depressed is suddenly a bad thing?”
“No… ” He watched me drizzle syrup over the bacon like I was some kind of magician. “I know you’ve been seeing someone from the app. Is that what’s going on?”
Meeting his gaze I shrugged, biting into a crispy strip of bacon with a slow, satisfied crunch. “Do the two have to be connected?”
“Harp,” he drawled out.
His use of my name hit different this morning. Somehow, it didn’t sting.
“Things are… good. For the first time since I left Chad, I feel—” I shrugged again, shoulders bouncing like they were trying to dance—“happy. Like, really happy.”
Damien chuckled, finally digging into his own breakfast. “Alright, I like it. You deserve that. And hey, if your happiness means free food for me, I’m all in.”
“Oh! And heads up—I should have enough cash to get out of your hair soon.”
He raised a brow, chewing another bite. “Yeah? How much is this mystery guy paying you?”
I licked the sticky syrup off my fingers, pulled out my phone, and flipped the screen toward him, my bank balance glaring at him in all its glory.
Damien choked on his bacon, eyes wide as saucers staring at the zeros.
“What the fuck?”
I laughed, sliding my phone back into my pocket.
“Who on earth is paying you that much for therapy—” Damien cut himself off, mouth falling open as he looked at me like I was on a ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ poster.
“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? Is he pressuring you?
Harp, if this is about you crashing on my couch, you don’t need to go to those lengths. And what kind of sleaze ball is—”
“Damien!” I half-shouted, the thought of Ambrose as some mystery man buying women like a noir villain making me laugh out loud. “It’s not like that. He’s a good guy.”
Damien scoffed. “A good guy? He’s on an illegal app—”
“One you pointed me to.”
“—Looking for women. Sure, it’s some pheromone thing, but if he’s got that much money to throw around, he can’t be any good. What if he’s a gangster or something?”
“Damien, my dearest and oldest friend,” I said, hands firm on his shoulders, “he’s not a gangster, or a mafioso, or a made man or any of the nonsense you’re imagining. He’s a good guy. I promise. I know him, okay?”
“Know him? The only guy with that kind of money you know is…”
I watched the expression on his face change as the penny dropped. Damien sighed, crossing his arms as he leaned back like a man who just lost a bet.
“Ambrose? Your boss, Ambrose?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, voice low but steady. “Ambrose.”
He blinked a few times in rapid succession like I’d just told him I was dating an actual mafia don.
“Aren’t you… worried? I mean, your boss? That’s a whole different kind of complication, Harp.”
I shrugged, pushing the bacon around the pool of syrup on my plate.
“Complicated, sure. But sometimes good things are complicated, right? And honestly, why does complicated need to mean ‘bad.’ Chad wasn’t complicated and look how that turned out.
Chad was supposed to be the straight and narrow package—complications not included. ”
Damien snorted. “Since when did you become so corporate, looking for all these loopholes?”
“Since I met someone complicated and fun.” I shot him a look that was equal parts challenge and confession.
He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing but softer now. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’s he like?”
I smiled, the kind that starts in my toes and spills out through my eyes. “He’s… not what I expected. Not flashy or arrogant. And when we are together his attention is so singularly focussed on me, it’s like I am the only thing that matters.”
Damien grinned, his canines bared, shaking his head. “Sounds like you’re in deep, Harp.”
I laughed, pouring myself a cup of coffee. “Maybe.”
“So how does it work with you guys working together and everything? Have you done it on his desk?”
“Damien!” I gasped, throwing a piece of bacon at him as he laughed. “No! And for your information, he doesn’t exactly know it’s me that he is with.”
His brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“When I figured out he was the person I was meeting, I asked him to wear a blindfold.”
“Harp,” he sighed like I’d just told him I was secretly a vigilante. “You blindfolded your boss and are secretly hooking up with him without telling him who you are? That’s the plan?”
“Technically, he was already blindfolded when I walked into the living room,” I said with a shrug, sipping my coffee like this wasn’t my most unhinged Tuesday ever. “I just… didn’t correct the situation.”
He stared at me. “Didn’t correct the—Harper!”
“I panicked! I was already in his house when I realized who he was, and I had all of three seconds to respond to this new, and incredibly awkward revelation!” I tossed my hands in the air, coffee dangerously close to sloshing out of the mug.
“What was I supposed to do? Be like, ‘Hey Ambrose, surprise! It’s me, your executive assistant-slash-lowkey emotional disaster hiding out in your music room. Now kindly forget you were about to release your demon sex pheromones on me to get me naked so we could fuck like rabbits, and I’ll go file those reports. Okay? Okay!’”
He blinked. Once. Twice. “You’ve seen him naked?”
“That’s your takeaway right now?”
“I’m sorry but you dropped a lot on me, so I apologize if my brain is just showing the highlight reels.
” Damien leaned in, less playful this time.
“So… what’s your endgame here? You keep showing up, he keeps being blindfolded, and you just hope he never figures it out? Or one day it comes off while you’re—”
“I don’t know!” I cut in, rubbing the back of my neck, as the warmth of my earlier happiness cooled into something a little more vulnerable.
“I don’t know. It’s just—when I’m with him, there’s no pressure to be anything but me.
I used to work so hard to achieve the perfect life, chasing the puzzle pieces rather than just…
living. When I met Chad I thought he was one of the final pieces, but if I’m being honest, I was never truly able to be myself in that relationship.
But now, when I’m with Ambrose, I don’t have to overthink it, or perform, or make myself smaller—I get to just feel.
Is it so bad to want to hang onto that for a bit longer? ”
“Harp, you can’t have a future that is built on a lie, even well-intentioned ones. That isn’t how relationships work.”
I nodded, staring down at my messy plate. “I know.”
Silence fell between us for a beat—comfortable but weighted. Then, in true Damien fashion, he blew it all to hell with one sentence.
“So, you’re saying he’s good at it?”
“Damien!” I groaned, throwing my last precious piece of bacon as he dodged it, grinning like a damn child.
“I mean, if you’re risking your job and your mental stability for some rich CEO fantasy definitely not mafia-man—he better be making you see stars, Harp.”
I laughed despite myself, shaking my head. “You are the worst.”
He winked, picking up the stray pieces of bacon from the counter. “And yet, you keep feeding me.”