Chapter 3
The following Monday, she found Damian at his desk before eight—unusual even for him—and set a cup of coffee down in front of him without being asked. Exactly the temperature he liked it.
“Thank you for the kit,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
He didn’t look up from his monitor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Damian—”
“There are a lot of engineering kit vendors in this city, Ren. Statistically, one of them was bound to send you something eventually.”
She laughed.
And he almost smiled again.
And something in her chest that had been guarded for five months quietly, carefully began to come undone.
By April, the pattern of their days had become something Ren could set a clock by.
And something she found she didn’t want to lose.
Monday mornings meant coffee at exactly the right temperature, waiting on his desk before he arrived—because somewhere in the last two months, the roles had reversed without either of them announcing it.
Tuesday nights meant working late together, the office quiet around them, the city lights coming on outside the glass one building at a time.
Wednesdays, without fail, he asked about Deborah.
Thursdays, he asked about Eli.
Fridays, he said almost nothing at all.
And by then, Ren had learned that his silences carried as much weight as his words, if she knew how to listen for it.
One rainy Thursday in late April—the kind of rain that turned Chicago into a gray smear outside every window—Theo was out sick, and Damian drove her home himself.
The car was quiet except for the wipers, steady and rhythmic.
And neither of them spoke until they were three blocks from her building.
“Can I ask you something?” Ren said.
“You can ask.”
“Why me? Out of everyone at that company, why did you ever bother noticing me at all?”
Damian kept his eyes on the road for a long moment before he answered.
“Because you don’t perform for me,” he said finally. “Everyone in that building tells me what they think I want to hear. You told me I was boring and difficult to a room you thought was empty, and it was the first true thing anyone had said to me in years.”
Ren felt her breath catch.
“That’s a strange thing to fall for.”
“I didn’t say I’d fallen for anything.”
A pause.
“I also didn’t say I hadn’t.”
The car pulled up outside her building.
Neither of them moved to end the moment.
Rain traced slow lines down the windshield, and for one long suspended second, Ren thought he might lean across the space between them.
And some reckless, terrified part of her wanted him to.
He didn’t.
He gripped the steering wheel instead, knuckles pale, jaw tight with the particular effort of a man holding a line he’d drawn for himself a long time ago.
“Good night, Ren,” he said, voice rough.
She let herself out into the rain, heart hammering, and did not look back at the car until she was safely inside.
Where she stood at the window and watched his taillights stay parked outside her building for a full five minutes before they finally pulled away.
She stopped that night pretending she didn’t already know exactly what this was.
The one hard week in the middle of that spring came unexpectedly from a source that had nothing to do with Damian at all.
A new hire named Grant started in business development in early May.
Confident and easy in the way of men who had never once doubted a room would like them.
He asked Ren to lunch twice in his first week—casual, harmless on the surface.
And Ren, flattered, a little lonely in the specific way of someone caught between two feelings she wasn’t ready to name, said yes the second time.
She didn’t think anything of it until Friday afternoon, when she looked up from her desk to find Damian standing in his office doorway, watching the two of them laugh over something on Grant’s phone.
His expression gone carefully, deliberately blank in a way she’d learned to recognize as the opposite of nothing.
He didn’t say anything about it that day.
He didn’t say anything about it Monday either, though he was colder with her than he’d been in weeks—back to the clipped, exacting version of himself she hadn’t seen since February, correcting her work twice again instead of once, leaving no sandwiches, no small kindnesses, nothing at all.
By Wednesday, Ren had had enough.
She followed him into his office at the end of the day and shut the door harder than she meant to.
“If you have a problem with my work, say it,” she said. “Don’t just go cold and make me guess.”
“Your work is fine,” Damian said, not looking up from his screen.
“Then what is it?”
He was quiet for a long moment, jaw tight, and when he finally looked at her, something raw and unguarded slipped through before he could stop it.
“It’s not my business who you have lunch with.”
Ren stared at him.
An understanding landed slowly, then all at once.
“You’re jealous.”
“I don’t get jealous,” Damian said, in a tone that made the lie obvious to both of them.
“You’ve been cold to me for four days because I had lunch with Grant from Business Development.”
“I’ve been cold to you for four days because I don’t have any right to feel the way I feel about a lunch that isn’t mine to have opinions about,” Damian said, sharper than he meant to, and then seemed almost surprised at himself for saying it out loud.
He exhaled slowly, rubbing a hand across his jaw.
“I don’t know how to do this, Ren. I haven’t let myself want something like this in twenty-two years. I don’t have the first idea how to want it quietly.”
Something in Ren’s chest went soft and unguarded at that.
All her anger draining out of her at once.
“Grant asked me to lunch because he thought I was easy to talk to,” she said. “I said yes because it’s nice sometimes to have lunch with someone who isn’t correcting my spreadsheets. It didn’t mean anything, Damian. It was never going to mean anything. Because I’ve spent the last two months falling for someone who corrects my spreadsheets twice and still somehow makes it feel like the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Damian looked at her for a long moment, something shifting behind his eyes.
“That’s a strange thing to fall for,” he said quietly, echoing words from a rainy car ride weeks earlier.
“I didn’t say I’d fallen for anything,” Ren said.
And let herself smile.
“I also didn’t say I hadn’t.”
May you like
He crossed the room in three steps and kissed her then—quick and fierce and two months overdue—the first time either of them had let themselves stop pretending.
And neither of them mentioned Grant from Business Development again.
