Chapter 35: Damien Lockwood Has Officially Altered My Brain Chemistry
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I woke up feeling really irritated. Not the usual kind of irritation, like when my back’s sore and I have class in an hour, that’s just the background noise of my life at this point.
No, this was something deeper, almost personal. It felt spiritual, like a kind of annoyance that had solid roots.
It was lodged in my bones since around three in the morning where I finally fell asleep and had apparently decided to stick around, kind of like that one houseguest who just can’t pick up on the hints to leave.
For a few blissful seconds after I opened my eyes, I managed to forget why I was annoyed. Just lying there, staring at the ceiling, with my mattress being unreasonably nice to my back while my brain was still kind of fuzzy around the edges.
Then, just like that, the memory hit me hard, complete with no warning and absolutely no mercy as if to say "I’m backkk, bitch! Miss me?!"
The crowd chanting.
The closet.
Damien’s hand on my waist.
His mouth on mine.
The way he’d pressed me against the wall, all the certainty of someone who’d made a choice and was all in on it.
I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.
"Oh my God," I groaned, dragging both hands down my face like I was receiving bad news I already knew about but wasn’t quite ready for. "No, nope. Absolutely not."
I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow, really trying to press down hard as if I could somehow smother the memory before it fully emerged.
Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.
My brain, powered by a mix of betrayal and a complete lack of mercy, played the whole scene over in vivid detail.
The heat of him in the darkness. The pressure of his hand. The way the kiss went from urgent to slower and more passionate, somehow making things worse for my overall sanity.
The unevenness of his breathing at the end, which was totally unlike him, and it did something to me that I was desperately trying to file away somewhere I wouldn’t have to see it.
The ridiculously expensive cologne still lingered in my memory, embedded there like some low-key invasion.
I let out a muffled sound into the pillow that could definitely be called a scream.
Fuck! Get out of my head!!!!
"It never happened," I told the pillow firmly. "We are deciding right now that it never happened and we’re moving on."
Thankfully the pillow didn’t respond and then, from the depths of my brain, a treacherously quiet thought: But his lips were really soft though—
I shot up immediately. "No."
I pointed at the wall, at nothing, at the overall concept of my wayward thoughts.
"We’re not doing this today. I’m drawing a line. This side of the line is normal, we live here, we stay here."
The sound of a page turning made me freeze. I turned my head slowly, fully aware I was probably going to find exactly what I feared.
Damien was already awake.
Of course he was. The guy probably didn’t sleep like normal people. He probably just went into some low-power mode around four AM and resumed like some expensive, incredibly annoying piece of machinery.
He was sitting at his desk in a fitted black shirt, one arm resting on the table, working through a textbook that looked so dense it could cause damage if dropped. Perfect posture, calm expression. Every inch of him projected his usual air of collected composure.
Like nothing had happened.
He wasn’t even wondering why his roommate was angrily talking to himself so early in the morning like a crazy person.
Like last night had been just another night, processed and filed away without a hitch.
Like he hadn’t walked me into a dark closet and completely messed with my sense of self.
That little shit...
I glared at him from across the room.
He looked normal, too normal, suspiciously normal, in a way that felt like a challenge, even though he was just reading.
Meanwhile, I was one intrusive thought away from looking for an escape route.
I waited and watched. Surely something would give, a lingering glance, a shift in the silence, anything that would hint that last night had registered on his radar as more than just another boring Wednesday.
Damien flipped a page and grabbed his pen, wrote something down then put the pen back.
That was it. Just that.
Somehow, that was more irritating than if he’d given some acknowledgment. At least that would mean it had happened for him too.
I stared even harder. He remained completely unfazed. I stared even harder still as though if I stared hard enough, I’d burn a damn hike into the back of his stupid head.
Finally, after yet another page turn, Damien looked up. His icy blue eyes met mine for a split second before he said:
"Morning."
One word. Flat, calm, delivered with the same energy someone might use to talk about the weather.
I could only stare at him.
Morning.
Sir! Sir, you just kissed me against a wall twelve hours ago. You whispered things in the dark that I’m still trying to process. You gripped my waist like you’d been thinking about it, yet here you are, treating me like I’m just some piece of freaking furniture you’ve noticed, and the first word out of your mouth is morning?!
I watched him stand up from the desk and walk to the bathroom in that same unhurried, composed manner he used for everything, like he owned the floor and the room and as if the events of the previous night were just non-existent.
The nerve.
How absolutely audacious this man was.
I stared daggers into the back of his head until the bathroom door closed behind him.
"Oh, okay," I muttered, throwing the blanket off with a bit more force than necessary. "Cool, awesome. That’s the energy we’re bringing into today. Great decision. Love that for us."
I grabbed my towel with the determination of someone who’d committed to acting normal, even if it killed me.
If Damien wanted to pretend last night didn’t happen, fine. I could also put on an act. I had depth, I had range, I was friends with theater kids in highschool, I was quite capable of ignoring things that had happened when they clearly had. I’d been doing it my whole life with much bigger stakes.
I was an actor.
A performer.
A survivor of tough situations.
I pushed the bathroom door open a few minutes later, toothbrush in one hand, still feeling the after-effects of not enough sleep coupled with too much repressed information.
And then I stopped.
My brain shut off completely, like someone had pulled the plug.
Because there was Damien, standing shirtless at the sink.
He had his back partially turned, broad shoulders moving as he dried his hair with a towel, and my treacherous eyes completed a thorough visual assessment before I’d even had a chance to tell them not to.
There ought to be regulations about this. Something that says you need a warning and a waiting period before you can just stroll around in shared spaces looking like that this early in the morning.
Because this had to be illegal...Maya was right.
The sharp angles of his back, the clean line of his waist, the well-defined physique of someone who had clearly taken fitness seriously for a long time, those plump, soft pink lips of his...
And then he turned slightly, and my brain, which had been looping the closet memory since the moment I woke up, decided now was the perfect time to replay the part where his hand had been on my—
I inhaled toothpaste.
Hard. I mean, a real, dedicated gulp of actual toothpaste straight into my lungs.
"ACK!" Coughing erupted immediately, loud, violent, and completely lacking any grace. I doubled over the sink, making sounds I wasn’t going to forgive myself for any time soon.
Damien turned around. His brow furrowed slightly, the most concern his face ever showed. "...you okay?"
I straightened just enough to point at him, still coughing and tearing up. "This is your fault!"
His expression morphed into a kind of confusion that most people would have shown. "I literally didn’t do anything."
"That," I wheezed, waving a hand at all of him, "is the problem. Put a damn shirt on!"
He looked down at his own torso briefly, then back at me, clearly not getting it, because we were both guys, so I shouldn’t have a problem with seeing his torso and I had already seen it a bunch of times but for some reason...I was now having a problem with his...his indecency! Which was honestly fine, because explaining wasn’t an option I was about to entertain.
Not that I could explain it anyway...
