“So do I.” Her voice rises. “Sky, I have watched you disappear. I have watched you fold yourself smaller and smaller until you fit whatever shape that apartment demands of you. You used to take up space like you had every right to it. You used to say exactly what you thought the second you thought it, and God help anyone who didn’t like it.” Her voice cracks at the edges. “I miss the girl who would rather chew glass than let a man make her feel so small.
My eyes sting in a way I absolutely refuse to acknowledge. “I’m not small.”
“Then stop living like you are.”
The words bury themselves in my chest—brutal, true, and unwelcome in the particular way only the truest things ever are.
A sound comes from the bedroom. Damien coughs, the slow drag of a man half-awake.
My pulse jumps before I can stop it.
“I have to go,” I say, the words coming out too quickly.
“Sky, wait—”
I hang up, the screen going dark in my palm. The apartment folds back into silence.
“What was that about?” His voice cuts through the room, and I turn too fast.
Damien stands in the bedroom doorway, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs, hair messy, eyes narrowed against the light.
He is attractive, with a face that photographs well. Strong jaw, broad chest, the body of a man who spends enough time in the gym to make sure people notice. He knows it, too. Carries itthe way men do when they’ve spent their whole lives watching rooms rearrange themselves around them. The quiet certainty of someone who has never once wondered whether they were worth looking at.
That is why women chase him. And it’s why I should have known better.
He looks half asleep and already irritated about it, eyes scanning the room until they find me.
“Nothing,” I say.
Damien leans one shoulder against the doorframe. His gaze drops over me slowly. The robe. My bare legs. My hand still curled around the phone, as if I forgot I was holding it.
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“It was Cassie.”
Something shifts on his face. A tightening around the mouth, quick and controlled, gone almost before it lands. “Of course it was.”
I lift my chin, old instinct kicking in. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means whenever there’s drama, she’s involved in it.”
“She’s my friend.”
He lets out a small sound. “She’s a bad influence.”
I grip the phone tighter. The old me would have burned him to the ground for that. Would have taken that sentence apart word by word and handed it back to him in pieces before he’d even finished saying it.
But instead, I say nothing.
I watch him walk to the kitchen. He pulls a glass from the cupboard, fills it with water, drinks half of it standing at the bench, then sets it down on the counter.
“What did she want?” he asks.
I wrap my arms around myself. “Nothing.”
His eyes sharpen. “Skylar.”
That tone. My name pressed flat into a warning. One word, and somehow it makes me perceive that I’ve already done something wrong.
