Chapter 82: The Victim Of A Barista
POV: Damien Lockwood
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The room went quiet after he and Oliver whispered goodnight to eachother.
Not completely silent, though. Outside, the storm still raged against the apartment, with rain hammering the windows in relentless waves as if it was on a mission to break the window planes, and distant thunder rumbling in slow intervals through the night.
But compared to the noise inside Damien’s head, all of it might as well have been complete and dead silence.
He glanced at the ceiling for a moment, then at the shape curled up next to him under the blanket.
Oliver had turned away the instant he said goodnight, a clean, decisive pivot, the body language of someone executing a tactical retreat and hoping it would go unnoticed. It was a move Damien had come to recognize over the weeks of watching Oliver turn away from him.
Whenever things got too close to honest, whenever the conversation drifted to the thing sitting between them like an elephant nobody wanted to talk about, Oliver would retreat and run for his life.
The tactics varied, sometimes sarcasm, as quick as if he’d rehearsed it his whole life; sometimes irritation, which at least was honestly expressed. Other times, he let loose enough profanity to raise an eyebrow from a reasonable bystander.
If Oliver was in a movie, there would be a lot of censoring beep noises coming from him.
Tonight, it seemed, sleep was his chosen escape.
Or at least the performance of it.
Damien watched Oliver’s shoulders rise and fall beneath the blanket. The breathing felt too carefully regulated, the rhythm that of someone managing a task rather than it being an unconscious action. The tension hadn’t entirely left his body yet. His shoulders were held a bit too tight, the line of his spine a little too intentional.
The stubborn brat was pretending to be asleep.
Something like amusement, warm yet unhelpful, stirred in Damien’s chest.
Of course he was. Oliver could pick a fight with gravity if he felt it was in his way. He could argue with a closed door. Once, he even spent four minutes debating whether toast counted as cooking on pure principle, and no one was even there to hear it... Damien was in the bathroom!
The idea of him just lying in the dark and calmly accepting a situation he hadn’t fully processed seemed as plausible as him willingly admitting he was wrong about something.
Admitting he was flustered would require a level of honesty that pretty much caused him physical and emotional pain.
Damien watched him and felt the quiet, uninvited warmth of finding all of this utterly endearing, which he recognized might be a problem.
Minutes passed, he rain continued its steady work outside, thunder moved away, doing what storms do when they’ve made their point. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Oliver’s breathing shifted... the careful pacing easing, the rhythm evening out, the control giving way to a natural, unguarded quality that only surfaced when someone had finally surrendered to sleep.
Tension slipped from his shoulders and the rigid line of his body softened against the mattress. The blanket, which he’d clutched as if defending a position, relaxed in his hands and turned around to face Damien.
Just what he was waiting for.
Only then did Damien let himself truly look at him.
The apartment was dark, but thin beams of pale moonlight sneaked through the rain-streaked windows, illuminating parts of Oliver’s face just enough without fully committing, like moonlight tends to do. It was enough.
Enough to see the cute tiny freckles scattered on the bridge of his nose that he probably didn’t realize showed in certain light. Enough to notice the loose strands of hair that had fallen across his forehead during their evening blanket battle.
Enough to see the small crease between his brows that seemed to linger even in sleep, a small but stubborn furrow of someone whose mind refused to shut down completely, still registering quiet objections to something even while unconscious.
As if some part of Oliver was still, at that moment, arguing with the universe on principle.
Damien let out a small chuckle, perhaps he was picking a fight in his sleep too.
Damien’s has always gaze lingered on Oliver longer than it should have, long enough that he stopped trying to ignore or hide it. Long enough to acknowledge, in the quiet darkness of the apartment while Oliver was mercifully unable to make any sarcastic remarks about it, the realization he’d been aware of for some time now and had stopped fighting against.
He was completely, hopelessly gone for Oliver Reyes.
This realization...revelation, was nothing new to Damien. He’d known for two years of his life and it was just until a few weeks ago at the frat party, that he felt he could actually do something about it.
It should have been alarming when he realized he had fallen for that mean barista boy. The few who knew him, the handful that understood him at any real depth, would have found it...kinda alarming.
Damien Lockwood usually didn’t allow himself to get "gone" for anyone. He was too careful for that. Too used to keeping an appropriate distance from anything that had the potential to cost him something even when having sex with it.
But right now, sitting in the dark with Oliver’s breathing finally steady beside him, it felt inevitably embarrassing.
For years, he’d built walls around himself that had turned out to be pretty sturdy. People rarely got close enough to even matter.
Most relationships felt like they were transactional, pleasant and manageable, based around what each party wanted from the other. Money, mostly, or influence, connections, a picture taken at just the right event. The Lockwood name attached to something that needed credibility.
That name alone had a way of drawing people in. It also revealed exactly what kind of person they were.
Gold digging opportunists.
The moment people figured out who Damien was or did their research on Lockwood, everything changed. They became careful, attentive, their smiles would appear a fraction of a second faster than natural, their opinions all of a sudden aligned with his, their laughter would come just a tad too soon, just before the joke landed instead of after it, as if it were rehearsed instead of genuine.
You could hear the difference once you knew what to listen for, and after hearing it enough times, you became very good at picking up on it.
It was exhausting in a way that things are when they cost you something you didn’t even realize you were giving up.
Then Oliver had come along.
Damien could still picture him clearly, standing in the doorway a few days after move-in day, three overstuffed bags around him, looking around the apartment with an expression that could only be described as deeply suspicious.
Oliver was not impressed.
Not playing it cool the way most people did when they wanted him to know they were unbothered by his penthouse. No, Oliver was genuinely suspicious, like he’d walked into a space that seemed too good to be true and was waiting to see what it hid before he ran off for his life.
Damien had spent the first ten minutes waiting for the expected questions. "So what does your family do? How much does this cost? How—"
Instead, Oliver had said, "This place is... really nice." then, a couple days later after catching Damien staring... "You’re pretty weird, you know that right?"
To this day, Damien wasn’t quite sure if he felt offended or fascinated, probably a mix of both. That feeling had never really resolved itself, which felt fitting somehow.
A quiet laugh almost escaped him. He held it in, knowing that waking Oliver would likely lead to either violence or an argument he wasn’t really in the mood for right now, and he could avoid both outcomes by being cautious.
He’d seen that look so many times since then. The one Oliver used when Damien said something that landed somewhere between ridiculous and a personal affront,.the slight narrowing of his eyes, the particular set of his features that silently said he was reconsidering something.
He gave that look to the expensive coffee machine. He gave it to the limousine, to VIP sections, crystal glasses, matching keychains, and all the other things Damien did without thinking to woo him, which Oliver found alternately bewildering and offensive.
He handed that look to Damien regularly, with passion.
So there was someone in this world, who could look at him like he wasn’t some sort of financial god...Oliver looked at him like a persistent roach.
God help him. He had somehow, without intending to, become completely charmed by that look.
He shifted his focus back to the ceiling. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he looked at Oliver again.
The blanket was nearly up to his chin now. His hands had relaxed against the fabric.
"You stole my blanket," Damien murmured quietly, not to anyone in particular. "You also stole my heart."