Chapter 56: The One He Wants
•⋅⊰∙∘☾✶☽∘∙⊱⋅•✾•⋅⊰∙∘☾✶☽∘∙⊱⋅•
"I don’t have an issue." he responded.
"You are definitely having an issue."
"I’m having a conversation."
"You’re doing that thing," I said, pointing at him emphatically.
His expression remained calm. "You’ll need to be more specific."
"That thing where you pretend you’re not judging me while you’re clearly judging me. That thing where everything you say feels like it’s hiding a second word. That thing!"
Something shifted in his eyes. Just like that, there and gone, like sunlight sparkling on water, visible for just long enough to register before it vanished.
"Maybe I’m just surprised," he offered.
"About what?"
He skimmed his gaze over me in a quick but deliberate manner. "That you were out this late, pretty irresponsible of you. You’ve never done that before."
And there it was again, that tone, that careful, unacknowledged implication lurking beneath a seemingly normal sentence. The pieces clicked into place so fast I could almost hear them.
"Oh my God!"
"What?"
"You think we slept together."
For the first time that night, Damien looked genuinely taken aback. It was fleeting, just a second, a brief flash of something unguarded crossing his typically composed features...but I saw it. I was watching him when it happened.
Which confirmed I was right.
"You do."
"I didn’t say that."
"You thought it."
"I didn’t—"
"Your face just gave you away."
Something flickered across his face, brief and well-controlled, gone in an instant. The muscle in his jaw twitched then settled back down.
"We watched a movie," I reiterated, trying to sound firm because apparently that was where I had landed. "Then we got ice cream. Then I walked her back, that’s all. I don’t sleep with girls in the first date, man."
His silence confirmed everything I needed to know, and I stared at him in disbelief, feeling like the situation had somehow become even more bizarre than I imagined.
"But we kissed though," I said with a pleased smirk, the words escaping before I thought about it. They hung in the air between us, fully formed, impossible to take back.
The apartment went deathly quiet.
Suddenly, Damien’s gaze snapped to mine with such intensity it sent an uncomfortable feeling through my chest. I felt the atmosphere shift, like the pressure changing before a storm, sudden, overwhelming, impossible to ignore.
I stood my ground, mostly because backing down now would be even worse. "We kissed. That’s all."
The silence stretched out, lingering long enough to become its own answer, long enough for me to notice just how little distance there was between us.
Then Damien laughed.
Not a warm laugh. Not the genuine kind I’d heard in the kitchen that caught me off guard when I wasn’t ready for it. This was quick and sharp, layered with something I couldn’t name but felt off for the moment, like a tool being used incorrectly.
Something twisted uncomfortably in my chest. I literally just told him I kissed his crush...and he laughed?
It made me feel like this entire evening, the entire date was a complete waste of time since he didn’t even give a shit. "Wow. Okay."
"What?"
"You don’t get to do that."
His eyes narrowed slightly. "I’m not doing anything."
"You’ve been sitting in the dark, waiting for me to come back—"
"I wasn’t—"
"—like some brooding Gothic hero who hasn’t quite figured out what he’s brooding about yet, and now you’re acting weird about a kiss on a date, which is a perfectly normal thing, and then you laugh about it?"
"Oliver—"
"No." I crossed my arms. "You don’t get to be weird about this. You don’t have the room to be weird."
His jaw tightened, the muscle jumping once, twice. "I’m not being weird."
And standing there in that warm lamplight, staring at Damien Lockwood with his tight jaw and darker eyes, and that carefully maintained expression that had been gradually slipping all evening, suddenly, it clicked.
He looked jealous.
The realization settled quietly, as if it had been there long enough to stop announcing itself. Not the dramatic, possessive kind but something quieter than that, a person alone in a dark room with cold coffee, waiting.
I gaped at him. Damn maybe I wasn’t a genius after all...he’d been jealous the entire time, he was just good at hiding it.
Anyone would be jealous if their roommate was busy boasting of kissing their crush after all. I snorted, guess I got a reaction out of him after all!
Whoooo!
"Sure." I drawled.
"Not at all."
"Completely normal behavior, sitting in the dark. Timing my return, making strange sounds at me. Very chill, just admit you’re jealous I took your girl."
"Would you stop—"
"I’m just stating the facts, you hate that Melanie likes me—"
"Who says I like Melanie?" he interjected, and there was a hint of control slipping through, just a touch...like a facade changing with a glance. "She’s not the one I want, so quit whatever it is yore trying to do. The person I like..."
Damien cut himself off, as if finally finding the strength to shut his mouth before revealing too much.
The silence that followed felt different from the previous ones, heavier, charged with something that carried weight and direction, moving toward something neither of us had named yet.
I gaped at him in shock. He didn’t like Melanie?
He met my gaze, and for one long, suspended, terrifying moment, I thought he was about to say more. I thought he’d finish that sentence, the one that would complete his thought, the one that would answer the question that had been stirring in my chest for three weeks without my consent.
But then I noticed a change in his expression. It was a moment of realization...like someone suddenly aware of how far they’d gone out onto thin ice.
A curse slipped from him, almost too soft to hear.
"Fuck...forget it."
My mouth opened, but no sound came. I realized I had never heard him cuss before. Damn, I really got to him this time, didn’t I?
"Damien—"
"Forget it, Oliver." His words were firmer this time, not angry but decisive, the tone of someone closing a door they didn’t mean to leave open.
He reached past me for his jacket, the motion rougher than his usual composure allowed, frustrated, raw in a way I’d never seen him. It was as if he’d exhausted all his control earlier in the evening and had nothing left for this.
"Hey, where are you going? It’s late."
He didn’t respond. He was already moving toward the door, jacket in hand, shoulders set in a way that made it clear this conversation was over for him, no matter what I had to say.
"Damien?"
The door opened.
"Damien."
It slammed shut behind him, hard enough to rattle the frame and leave an echo of everything unspoken in the apartment.
Then he was gone.
Just like that, into the night, leaving me in the middle of the living room with my jacket still on, my keys on the counter, and the lamp in the corner casting warm light over an enormous empty space.
I stood still for a long moment, unsure if I even could move.
Eventually, slowly, I sank onto the couch. The cushion was still warm from where he’d been sitting. I stared blankly at the opposite wall, my heart racing, my hands feeling strangely unsteady, which felt like an overreaction to a simple chat. Except that this hadn’t really been a conversation, had it?
She isn’t the one I want.
The sentence played in my mind. Again. And again. Each time leading me to the same place and exploding in the same way.
I felt so dumb, coming to the conclusion that he liked Melanie with little evidence to back it up.
If Damien didn’t want Melanie...
and I felt inexplicably confident in that, bypassing my usual skepticism, then what was he really mad about?
I sat with that question in the quiet apartment, under the warm lamplight, with the cold coffee still on the table and the faint scent of cedar lingering in the air.
Why did he glare at us back at the party like I was overstepping boundaries by talking to her?
Why did he stay up all night waiting for me?
If he didn’t care about Melanie, then why did he seem jealous when we kissed?
And that, sitting alone on the couch at who-knows-what-time on a Saturday night, my head formed questions I knew I’d never get an answer to from Damien himself.