“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 apartmentand 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.
