Page 32 of Curvy Sold Mate

“How’s that working?”

The question came out the way questions came out of Damian—buoyant, curious, skimming the surface of something deeper without seeming to notice the depth. He asked it the way he might have asked about a new job or an apartment, a development in her life that was interesting rather than seismic.

“It’s working,” she said. The response was designed to close the topic, and she delivered it with the flat precision she’d been perfecting since she was old enough to understand that short answers controlled conversations better than long ones.

Damian was not controlled by short answers.

“Come on. It’s me.” He nudged her foot with his. “The magic paired you, right? The new ritual—the one you and Caitlynn designed. That must have been something, hearing your own name come out of a ceremony you built.”

Her fingers tightened around the mug. The phrasing landed close to a bruise he didn’t know was there, because she’d never told him—had never told anyone except Caitlynn—how it had felt to hear her name spoken by the magic she’d helped construct, the consent clause she’d fought for three days to get right rendered irrelevant by the very system she’d trusted to make choosing fair.

“It was unexpected,” she said.

“Unexpected.” He turned the word over, amused by it. “That’s one way to put it. Viktor Hale, of all people. The man has the emotional range of a filing cabinet.”

“You’d be surprised.”

She hadn’t meant to say it. The words slipped through a gap in the perimeter she’d been maintaining, and she felt them land in the air between them with more weight than the sentence should have carried.

He leaned forward. His elbows settled on his knees, and his mug dangled between his hands. The posture was so achingly familiar—Damian at twenty-three, sitting exactly like this on the porch of the eastern barracks, asking her about her day, his body always angled toward her as though she were magnetic north—that something in her chest folded inward.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“You’re going to regardless.”

“Fair.” His smile was rueful, self-aware in a way she hadn’t expected. “Are you happy? With him. With all of this.”

The question was simple, and she wanted to dismiss it, wanted to deploy the blade-edged deflection she kept sheathed for conversations that got too close to the bone. But Damian was looking at her without an agenda, and the sincerity of it caught her off guard.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. The honesty surprised her more than it seemed to surprise him. “It’s complicated.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Everything with Viktor is complicated.”

“That’s because Viktor makes it complicated. He always has.” Damian shrugged, a loose roll of his shoulders. “I love my brother. But the man turns breathing into a strategic exercise. You deserve someone who can just—be with you. Without the calculations.”

The implication sat at the edge of the sentence. Olivia heard it, examined it, set it aside.

“Damian.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re saying several things, and they’re all aimed at a door you don’t get to walk through anymore.”

His expression shifted—the first time since he’d arrived that the easy warmth gave way to something beneath it, something that might have been surprise or might have been the recognition that the woman on this bench was not the woman he’d dated four years ago, and the difference was larger than he’d accounted for.

“I deserved that,” he said quietly.

“You didn’t deserve it. It’s just the truth.”

He looked at his mug. Turned it in his hands. For a long moment, the only sound was the wind through the garden and the distant clang of the training yard beginning its morning drills.

“Was I bad for you?” he asked, and the way he said it was different from anything else—stripped bare, no performance of ease.

She considered lying. Considered the kind, constructive version—they’d been young, it had been fine, nobody’s fault. The version that preserved the pleasant footnote Damian had been telling himself their relationship was.

“You weren’t bad for me,” she said, because accuracy mattered. “You were just somewhere else. I’d be talking, and I could feel your attention thinning out, sliding off whatever I was saying and toward the next thing you wanted to do with your hands.” She sipped her tea. It had cooled to the temperature where the bitterness surfaced. “You made me feel wanted. You didn’t make me feel known. And after a while, the gap between those two things was all I could see.”