Chapter 24: Won’t Give Up Until You Pay Attention To Me
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"That tastes like dog shit," I choked out between coughs, my voice cracking from the effort of regaining some semblance of dignity. "Damien, you’ve been drinking dog shit for abs? Voluntarily? With your own mouth? Every day?"
It was awful. Genuinely awful. Not awful like cheap coffee or overcooked veggies, but in a way that felt almost architectural. Like someone had designed this flavor with a purpose. It tasted like chalk powder mixed with expired vanilla yogurt, two things that had definitely not gotten along, blended into a product that bore the generous addition of concentrated disappointment.
I coughed again, pressing a hand to my chest in dramatic flair. My eyes were still watering, and I chose to let them.
Meanwhile, Damien just stared at me, expressionless. Arms still crossed. Eyes carrying that particular quality of someone observing a situation they had predicted and felt no particular way about now that it was unfolding as expected.
"How are you alive?" I managed to ask, genuinely curious. "How are you a functioning human being who does this willingly? Is this what discipline feels like? Because if so, I want no part of it."
Nothing, no reaction. Not even a blink. The man had the emotional range of load-bearing architecture.
I coughed once more for effect...because my throat had legitimate complaints and waited.
After a long silence, which stretched out like someone taking their sweet time because they could, Damien sighed.
Not in annoyance, not sharp, but a long, deep exhale from somewhere inside. Like I’d reached in and depleted a reserve he’d carefully maintained. The sigh of a man who’d looked at the situation and made peace with it in real-time.
Deeply, spiritually tired. The kind of tired that had nothing to do with sleep.
Without another word, with the unhurried manner of someone who had already processed this event and put it away, he turned and walked back to his desk. He picked up his pen and resumed studying.
Like none of this had happened. Like I hadn’t just broken at least three of his precious roommate commandments in five minutes, assaulted his protein shake, and turned his kitchen into a full-on drama scene on a Tuesday afternoon.
I stared after him in genuine disbelief, still holding the bottle.
"That’s it?" I called after him, needing clarification. "No threatening speech? No dramatic lecture about respecting boundaries and personal property? Nothing? You’re not even going to look disappointed? I feel like I’ve earned at least a disappointed look."
He ignored me completely, the scratch of his pen against paper resuming at the same steady pace as before, like a metronome that had just been paused and was now back on schedule.
I blinked, then looked down at the protein shake in my hand.
Then back at Damien, who was already somewhere else entirely, mentally.
Then back at the bottle.
Come on man! Give me something!
I had broken rule one, openly, directly in his presence while making eye contact, and the result was a sigh and a return to studying. Not even a full sentence. I had braced for consequences and got a spiritual exhale instead.
I frowned at the bottle, like it had disappointed me.
"Wow," I muttered, making my way back to the fridge with less enthusiasm than when I arrived. "You really don’t care about anything, huh?"
No reply.
I carefully replaced the bottle exactly where I found it, with a precision that was partly respectful and partly a test to see if he was watching. I closed the fridge door quietly.
Still nothing. Not even a glare this time, which, weirdly enough, felt more insulting than a glare would have. A glare meant I was acknowledged. This was just absence.
I leaned against the counter for a moment, watching him from across the apartment like someone reconsidering their strategy.
Damien sat there with perfect posture, one hand resting near his open textbook while the other moved steadily across the page, his handwriting neat and even. The man had been at that desk for what felt like eons, and showed no signs of stopping, raising genuine concerns about his relationship with rest and if he’d ever met it.
"How are you not tired?" I directed the question at the back of his head with the low energy of someone who’d basically surrendered the expectation of a response.
No reply, which was right and expected.
I narrowed my eyes at his perfectly still silhouette.
"Do rich people recharge through photosynthesis or something?" I wondered. "Like, is there a panel somewhere? Solar-powered? Because I need to understand the science."
Nothing.
"Do you even blink?" I added, squinting a bit. "I’m genuinely asking. I’ve been watching and I’m not getting a consistent data set."
Silence.
I pointed at him from across the room, channeling the energy of someone lodging a formal complaint.
"That’s concerning, Damien. Medically concerning. I need you to blink right now just to confirm you’re okay."
Not even a twitch. The man was a monument. I let my arm drop back onto the mattress.
"This relationship feels very one-sided," I said to the room.
Still nothing, which was, at this point, its own kind of answer.
Honestly, I should’ve been more annoyed than I was. By any reasonable measure, being consistently and thoroughly ignored by your roommate should feel demoralizing or downright infuriating. And sometimes it did, especially right after a correction or when the silence pressed in a little harder than usual.
Because now, every tiny reaction Damien had felt significant in a way that was a little embarrassing to admit, even to myself. A glare had meaning, a sigh was an event and one sentence in an evening felt like progress worth marking.
Even him telling me to stop touching his things carried a different weight than silence, because at least that meant he was keeping track of me, aware of me, responding to me as a specific person rather than just background noise he had filtered out.
Which, objectively, was a pretty low bar to find meaningful. And yet.
I stared at the ceiling for a while, watching the light shift as afternoon turned into evening, thinking about nothing in particular and everything adjacent to it.
Then I started laughing quietly to myself, again. I was really losing my mind in this apartment. The mattress was too good, the silence too heavy, and I’d apparently started assigning emotional significance to the way a person sighed. This was a new development in my life that I hadn’t figured out how to process yet.
But honestly?
Whatever.
I still had plenty of chances to get under his skin in ways he hadn’t anticipated yet. I was creative, I was persistent and I had very little else to do in the evenings and seemingly infinite tolerance for making things interesting for myself.
And one day...one day, with enough patience and a little creative bending of the rules—
I was totally going to win.
Whatever that meant, I’d figure that part out later.
