Damien

Damien didn’t want me, but what hurt the most was that I knew deep down, I’d always want him no matter what happened between us. I’d never let him or anyone else know it, though. Damien might have hurt me, but I would never give him the opportunity to do it again.

He said he didn’t want me, and for as long as I lived, I’d never forget it.

Present day ...

I awoke with a start.

I shot upright and placed a hand on my chest, feeling my heart slam into my ribcage as it pounded erratically. My breathing was laboured, and instead of waking from a dream, it sounded like I had just completed a marathon. I closed my eyes and tried desperately to calm myself to no avail.

I hated when tears suddenly welled in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them from spilling over the brims and splashing onto my cheeks in big fat droplets. I sniffled as I carelessly wiped them away with the back of my hand. I raised my knees to my chest and hooked my arms around them, hugging them tightly.

Even in sleep, I was miserable.

Both my personal life and family life were falling apart around me, and it seemed everything I did to stop disaster from striking was only adding fuel to the fire and destroying everything I cared about faster. At the moment, my personal life was in tatters and took centre stage.

Almost every single night for the last few months, I’d relived the night I lost my virginity in detail. I hadn’t dreamt about that night in a long time, but the recent appearance of him back in my life seemed to bring it all tumbling back down on top of me like an avalanche of emotions I couldn’t escape.

I closed my eyes, and as usual, every thought switched to him.

Damien Slater.

I didn’t want to think about him, but it seemed I had no choice in the matter because my mind always drifted to him. To be so hung up on the boy who broke my heart in secondary school was pathetic, and I knew it was, but I couldn’t seem to get over it, no matter how hard I tried. I had accepted it, of course, but I could never get over the pain I felt when I thought about him and what happened between us.

I opened my eyes and scowled at myself, like always, when I realised how much of a gobshite I was. I had lost count of the times I wished to go back in time and slap myself silly for making the stupid decision that messed up everything. I closed my eyes once more, leaned back against my headboard, and clenched my teeth when Damien’s handsome face flashed across my mind.

The bastard was haunting me.

Half of the time, I didn’t know where to start when I thought of him. He was in my life for such a short amount of time, yet he had such a significant impact on it. My involvement with him shaped the woman I had become. As much as I hated to give him any credit, he was the reason I’d never let another person get intimately close to me. It was because of him that I built the walls high around my bruised heart.

I hadn’t always been so guarded, though. For a long time after he left me, left the poxy country, thoughts of him would consume me until I was sure all that remained was puddles of tears. That boy ... no, that man ... broke my heart, and I let him do it. Not only did I let him ruin me, but I also practically begged him to do so. My teenage infatuation with him went far beyond one’s first heartbreak because before we became intimate, I cared for him deeper than a new friend should have.

I saw the best in Damien even when he didn’t see it in himself.

Six years ago, I gave my heart and body to the new womaniser at school, and when he rebuffed my heart and only accepted my body, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I was devastated. I felt like I was cheated out of a magical first sexual experience because Damien became a completely different person after we had sex and didn’t remain the sweet boy who promised to keep me when I asked him to. The words he spoke were lies laced around fiery passion.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

“Stupid girl,” I cursed myself.

I pushed my bed covers away from my body and got to my feet. Rubbing my tired eyes as I walked forward. I ended up walking head first into my wardrobe when I misjudged the location of my bedroom door. I hissed in pain as I moved my fingers from my eyes to the now throbbing spot on my forehead. I looked over my shoulder, and through the dark, I glared at my ajar bedroom door.

The layout of my new apartment was still taking some getting used to.

I had recently moved into a spacious two-bedroom apartment in Upton thanks to one of my best friends, Aideen Collins. I had mentioned to her that I needed to move out of my old apartment due to a ridiculous rent increase, and she told me a newly furnished apartment was available in her building for the same price I had always paid in rent. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found it had two large bedrooms instead of one single room, and a separate sitting room and kitchen that were both more than generous in size. The furnishings were stunning, too. I practically leapt onto the estate agent who showed me around and told her I’d take it.

That was a month ago, and I was still walking into things during the night. I put it down to my recurring dreams—no, not dreams, nightmares—and simply hoped that they would stop; otherwise, my friends would start to think I was secretly getting beat up if fresh bruises kept appearing on my face. I could say “I walked into my wardrobe” only so many times before they got suspicious.

I left my bedroom, flipping the light switch as I went, and headed into my bathroom where I relieved myself. After I washed and dried my hands, I heard a ping come from my bedroom. The sound had me furrowing my eyebrows as I walked over to my nightstand. I picked up my phone, removed the charging wire from its base, and pressed the home button. I sighed when I saw I had received a text, a text from a person who I didn’t want to speak to.

Dante Collins.

I touched the screen to open his message and rolled my eyes as I read the text.

Booty call?

For the first time in days, I hit reply to a message.

No, thanks. Our ‘booty calls’ have become a problem.

The problem being that all my friends and Damien now knew about a relationship I wanted to be kept private. I sighed, sitting on the side of my bed, and kept my gaze downcast. One week ago, I was only dealing with family drama, but now, I had to add fuck buddy and ex-lover drama to the mix. I never thought I’d willingly want to be plagued with just the guilt of knowing my father was having an affair and doing nothing about it, but dealing with that and now the drama with Damien and my friends made me want to get into bed and stay there forever.

I lay back on my mattress, staring up at the ceiling, and thought back to a week ago.

Starting out like any other day, I woke up, had breakfast, and then spent most of the day flicking back and forth between sketching, painting, and designing a website for a client. My work had been the only escape from my life as of late, so I tended to immerse myself in it as often as I could, especially with the knowledge of my father’s secret affair.

I was doing a good job of blocking it all out when Bronagh sent me a text message and asked me to hang out with her and Georgie. We spent the morning together, and as usual, we had fun. It all went wrong when we stopped by Ryder and Branna’s house at lunchtime. Damien was there, and he was his usual friendly self. However, my past with him made me suspicious of that friendly behaviour.

He was trying with me.

I knew he was trying, but I didn’t know what he was trying. He could have genuinely just wanted to be my friend, but in the back of my mind, I was reminded that the last time he wanted to simply be ‘just my friend’, I was left heartbroken and humiliated to boot. For that reason alone, I kept him at arm’s length. If he walked into a room, I walked out of it. If he struck up a conversation with me, I politely shut him down. If he looked at me, I made it a point to look away and ignore him. I had been doing it since he returned home over a year ago, but that day, something in my attitude towards him changed.