The week had passed in a strange and suspicious way. Damien had been… different. Not in a bad way, exactly. He was more attentive, more present. He’d taken me to my favorite bookstore twice, sat through my long rants about corporate law cases without checking his phone once, and f****d me with a kind of desperate tenderness that left me breathless and sore in the best ways. But there was something underneath it all. A quiet excitement he couldn’t quite hide.
I noticed the way he’d disappear into his office for “calls” that ended with him smiling. The way Sofia had been texting me less than usual, which was suspicious as hell because that girl could talk for hours about nothing. Something was brewing. I just didn’t know what.
By Friday evening, I was exhausted from a long day of classes a
