Chapter 12: The Fire We Started

“Don’t go,” I said.

Damien turned from the window.

I had not planned to say it. It came from somewhere beneath all the sensible carefully constructed reasoning I had been using to manage myself around this man for the past ten days and it arrived in the room honest and unadorned and impossible to take back.

He looked at me from across the small living room. The fury about Marcus was still there behind his eyes but underneath it something else was looking at me now. Something that had been patient long enough.

“Mia,” he said. A warning. Or a question. I could not entirely tell.

“You asked me to stay,” I said. “In this. Whatever it becomes.” I held his gaze. “I’m staying. So don’t go.”

The silence that followed lasted four seconds.

Then he crossed the room.

He did not rush. That was the thing about Damien Cole that I was learning undid me more completely than anything else. He never rushed. He moved toward me with that same deliberate unhurried certainty he applied to everything and by the time he reached the couch where I was sitting my heart was already loud in my ears and my hands were already not entirely steady.

He stood in front of me and looked down at me and then he did something I had not expected. He reached out and pushed my hair back from my face with both hands, slowly, holding my face between his palms and looking at me with an expression so unguarded it made my chest ache.

“You are certain,” he said quietly.

“I have been certain,” I said, “since the rain.”

Something broke open behind his eyes.

He sat beside me and his mouth found mine again but this time the patience was thinner. This time the kiss was deeper and warmer and his hands moved from my face to my waist and pulled me toward him until I was pressed against the length of him and the warmth of his body through his shirt was immediate and overwhelming.

I pushed his jacket off his shoulders. He let it fall.

His mouth moved from mine to my jaw and then to the curve of my neck and when his lips found the sensitive skin just below my ear I made a sound I had not planned to make and felt him smile against my skin in response.

“You have no idea,” he said against my neck, his voice low and rough in a way it had never been across restaurant tables, “how many times I have thought about this.”

“Tell me,” I said, because I was apparently someone who said things like that now.

He lifted his head and looked at me and the expression on his face made heat pool low in my stomach in a wave so sudden and complete that I pressed my thighs together against it.

“I would rather show you,” he said.

He laid me back against the cushions of my secondhand couch with a care that was also, underneath it, something considerably more urgent, and looked down at me with dark eyes that moved across my body like something physical. I was in jeans and a sweater and he was still half dressed in his dinner shirt and none of that mattered because the way he was looking at me made me feel more exposed than I had ever felt in my life and I did not want to look away.

His hand found the hem of my sweater.

“Tell me to stop,” he said quietly, “and I stop.”

“Don’t stop,” I said.

He pushed the sweater up slowly and pressed his lips to the skin of my stomach and I exhaled in a rush that embarrassed me and then stopped being embarrassed because his mouth was warm and deliberate and moving upward with that focused unhurried attention he gave to everything and my hands found his hair and I stopped thinking about being embarrassed entirely.

He learned me slowly.

That was the only way I could describe it. The way a person learned something they intended to remember. Carefully and completely, with full attention, like there was nothing else in the world that required his focus and he had decided to give all of it to this. To me.

By the time his eyes came back up to mine I was warm everywhere and my breathing had lost all of its earlier composure and his hair was thoroughly ruined by my hands and he looked at me from above with an expression that was satisfied and hungry all at once.

“You are remarkable,” he said. Quiet and certain like a fact.

“You are overdressed,” I said.

That surprised a real laugh out of him. Low and warm and genuine and so unexpected on that composed beautiful face that I felt it move through me like something lit.

He sat up and unbuttoned his shirt with the same deliberateness he applied to everything else and I watched and did not pretend I was not watching and when he dropped it I pressed my palm flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat loud and fast beneath my hand and understood with a satisfaction that was almost fierce that I was doing this to him. That underneath all the control and the composure and the careful management of everything, Damien Cole’s heart was slamming against his ribs because of me.

“Come here,” he said.

I went.

What happened next between us was not frantic or desperate the way I might have expected after ten days of carefully maintained distance. It was deep and warm and achingly deliberate, two people who had been paying close attention to each other finally allowed to do something about it. He was generous in a way that made me understand this was not performance. This was simply how he was, a man who paid attention and used what he learned and cared genuinely about the response he drew from the person beneath his hands.

He drew considerable responses.

I was not quiet about any of them.

Afterward we lay tangled together on my narrow couch in the low light of my apartment with the city murmuring outside my window and his hand moving slowly up and down my back in long unhurried strokes and my head on his chest listening to his heartbeat gradually find its way back to something approaching normal.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

“Your couch,” he said finally, “is extraordinarily small.”

I laughed against his chest. “Some of us do not have penthouses.”

His arm tightened around me. “Some of us could arrange that.”

I lifted my head and looked at him. He was looking at the ceiling with an expression that was the most relaxed I had ever seen on his face, something open and unhurried that made him look younger and made something in my chest do things I was going to have to address at some point.

“Damien Cole,” I said.

“Mia Santos,” he said back.

“What are we doing.”

He turned his head to look at me. Those dark eyes steady and honest and entirely unguarded in a way they almost never were.

“Something I have not done in a very long time,” he said simply.

I looked at him. “Which is.”

“Wanting something,” he said quietly, “without thinking about the cost.”

The city moved outside my window. Somewhere below a cab horn sounded and faded. The low light of my good lamp sat warm and steady over both of us and I thought about a man standing in the rain with his hands in his pockets watching a car drive away and I thought about the number on a cream colored card and I thought about a sketchpad full of drawings of a sleeping boy.

I put my head back on his chest.

His hand resumed its slow movement up and down my back.

And then my phone on the coffee table lit up again. Another notification. Then another. Then three more in quick succession, each one casting its small rectangle of cold blue light across the ceiling of my apartment.

The headline was spreading.

The world outside was assembling its opinions about who I was and what I wanted and why a woman like me was beside a man like him, and it had not asked for my version of events and it did not intend to.

I felt Damien’s arm tighten around me again. Not in response to the notifications. In response to the way my body had changed when I saw them.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

I looked up.

“Let it run,” he said. “Tomorrow I will deal with Marcus. Tonight.” His eyes held mine with a steadiness that was also, underneath it, a promise. “Tonight is ours.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

And then I reached over and turned my phone face down on the table.

The notifications continued silently. The city continued outside. And Damien Cole pulled me back against him in my small warm apartment and pressed his lips to my hair and I closed my eyes and let tonight be exactly what he said it was.

Ours.

But somewhere across the city a phone screen lit up with the same spreading headline and the person holding it read it slowly and set it down and picked up another phone entirely. An older one. Prepaid. Untraceable.

And began to type.

Because Marcus Cole had not yet played his most damaging card.

And what was on it had the power to end not just the arrangement.

But Damien himself.