He looks at my neck again, making sure I know he’s watching. “Tell me who the fuck he is.”
“No, it is none of your business.”
“You are still my girlfriend, Skylar.”
“I left your key on the counter a week ago and took my things. I didn’t leave a note because there was nothing left to say that had not already been said by seeing you sit across from another woman at a candlelit table.” I shift the bags in my arms because they are getting heavy and this conversation does not deservethe energy it takes. “I am not your girlfriend, Damien. I haven’t been your girlfriend for considerably longer than a week and you know it. We just didn’t have the conversation to make it official.”
His expression shifts. That polished composure slipping just enough to let something meaner show through. “So you found someone else that fast.”
“Move.”
“You wouldn’t let me touch you for months and apparently that was not about needing space.” His voice is harder now. “That was about saving it for someone else.”
His words land, and the anger that follows is immediate.
The audacity of that. I have slept with two men in my entire life. Him and Zane Rivera. That is it. That is the whole list. And he has the nerve to stand here implying I cannot keep my legs closed, even though he has been fucking whoever he pleases the entire time we were supposedly a couple.
“You were fucking other women while we were together,” I say, my voice coming out louder than it ever has with him. Loud enough that a woman walking past glances over. Surprise flickers across Damien’s face because in all the time we were together, I have never once raised my voice at him. I swallowed every sharp thing I wanted to say.
“That is not what this is about,” he says.
“It’s exactly what this is about.” I shift the weight of the bags. “Move, Damien. The only thing I want from you right now is for you to step aside so I can go inside.”
“You will not even give me a chance to explain.”
“You had the chance to explain. You stood in the lobby of my office building and told me I was overreacting.” I look at him. “I am going inside now.”
A man slows on the pavement a few feet away, walking a small dog, with the careful, uncertain expression of someone who hasregistered that something is not right and is deciding what his role in it is.
“Are you okay, miss?” he asks, glancing my way.
“Yes, thank you. I am fine.”
He looks at Damien.
Damien looks back with the polished, impenetrable calm of a man who has never once in his life appeared to be a threat and is entirely aware of it. The stranger holds for a moment, and I use that opportunity to step around Damien.
I take four steps.
Close enough to the entrance to see the buzzer panel and the slightly crooked number plate above the door. Close enough to start to exhale and then his hand closes around my arm.
He pulls me back and I spin with the momentum of it, one of the bags tipping sideways. Suddenly, things are rolling across the pavement, a tin, an apple, and the bunch of flowers splaying out across the concrete like some kind of humiliating metaphor.
I’m facing him again—my heart going considerably faster than it was a second ago. I glance around, looking for the man with the dog, but he is gone. People move past us on the pavement, their eyes deliberately elsewhere, doing that city thing of deciding that whatever this is, it’s not their problem and they would very much like to keep it that way.
“Let go of my arm,” I say.
“You are not walking away from me mid-conversation.”
“I said let go of my fucking arm, Damien.”
His grip doesn’t loosen. It only tightens.
The pressure sends something cold through me that I recognize from long ago, from a different street and a different set of hands and three boys who thought that surrounding a girl and cutting off her exit was a reasonable way to spend an afternoon. The details are different now. The feeling is exactly the same. That specific panic of a body that understands beforethe brain catches up that the situation has changed and the exit is no longer where it was.
My heart is hammering now.
“You are being dramatic,” he says.
