Chapter 9: Everything Burns

Victoria sat on the edge of Damien’s couch like a woman who had rehearsed this moment and was now discovering that rehearsal and reality were entirely different things.

She crossed her legs. Folded her hands in her lap. Looked at a point somewhere between me and Damien with those cold blue eyes that were not as cold as she wanted them to be, and I watched her gather herself the way I had watched people gather themselves before delivering news they had been carrying too long. That particular straightening of the spine. That breath that went in slightly deeper than the ones before it.

“He has a son,” she said.

The room went very quiet.

I turned to look at Damien.

He was standing beside his chair with his hands loose at his sides and his face completely still in the way that faces went completely still when something inevitable had finally arrived and the only thing left was to stand in it.

“Victoria,” he said. Her name in his mouth this time was a warning and a resignation at the same time.

“She needs to know,” Victoria said, and for the first time since she had walked through the door something genuinely human moved across her face. Something tired and sad and stripped of the performance she had been maintaining. “If she is going to be beside you at these events, if people are going to see her and talk about her and connect her to you, she needs to know what she is walking into.”

I looked between them. “You have a son,” I said to Damien.

He looked at me. “Yes.”

“How old.”

“Four.”

I absorbed that. Let it settle. “And his mother.”

“Is not Victoria,” he said. “And is not someone who is currently in the picture.”

“She left,” Victoria said, not unkindly. “When the boy was eight months old. She was not prepared for the reality of what she had agreed to and she made a choice.” She paused. “Damien has been raising him alone.”

I sat back down. Not because I had decided to but because my legs made the decision independently of the rest of me.

A four year old boy. Raised alone by a man who stood in the rain on dark streets and sent cars for women he did not know and kept sketchpads on his coffee table and had walls around himself so high that his own board of directors had started to notice.

Suddenly every careful thing about Damien Cole rearranged itself into a different shape. A shape that made considerably more sense and was considerably more dangerous to my heart than the original version.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“With my housekeeper,” Damien said. “He stays with her on mornings when I have early meetings.”

“What is his name?”

Something moved across Damien’s face. Unguarded and immediate, there and gone in a single breath, but I saw it. I saw it completely.

“Noah,” he said.

Victoria stood up. She smoothed the front of her coat and looked at Damien with an expression that held a whole complicated history in it, love and grief and the particular ache of two people who had wanted to work and had not worked, and then she looked at me.

“I sent that message because I was frightened,” she said simply. “Not to protect him from you. To protect Noah from another woman who might not stay.” She picked up her bag from the chair by the door. “That was not fair to you. I understand that.”

She walked to the elevator. Pressed the button. The doors opened immediately.

“She is better than the last one,” she said to Damien without turning around. “Try not to ruin it.”

The doors closed.

The apartment settled into silence.

I sat on Damien’s couch in the quiet of his living room with Central Park pale and cold beyond the windows and the sketchpad on the table between us, and I thought about a four year old boy named Noah who had his father’s eyes in my imagination and who had been left by the woman who was supposed to stay.

I thought about my own mother. About the particular texture of growing up with someone who was physically present and emotionally somewhere else entirely. About what it did to a child to be left by a person who was supposed to be permanent.

“Say something,” Damien said.

His voice was quiet. The composure was still there but underneath it something was exposed and waiting and very carefully trying not to show how much my response mattered.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” I asked.

“Because I needed to know if you were someone worth telling,” he said.

I looked up at him. “And now?”

He held my gaze. “Now I know.”

The heat that moved through me when he said that was slow and deep and settled in places I was trying very hard not to draw attention to. I pressed my palms flat on my thighs and breathed carefully and reminded myself that this man had a child and a complicated history and had just had his carefully managed morning dismantled by his ex fiancée and that this was absolutely not the moment for my body to be doing what it was currently doing.

My body was not remotely interested in the appropriate timing of things.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I signed up for eight events and I will be there for all eight. Noah changes nothing about that.”

Something in his shoulders released. Fractional and controlled but I saw it.

“He will be at the charity auction,” Damien said. “I want you to understand that before you agree to that particular evening.”

“I understand.”

“And I want you to understand that he is not a prop and not a detail and not something I discuss with people I don’t trust.”

“I understand that too.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and sat on the couch beside me. Not across from me this time. Beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him through his shirt and could smell that clean dark scent I had catalogued and filed away the night before and was now dealing with again at considerably closer range.

My breath did something embarrassing.

He reached forward and picked up the sketchpad from the table and held it out to me without a word.

I took it. Opened it.

The drawings inside were not bad the way he had claimed they were. They were rough and unschooled in technique but there was something in them that technique could not manufacture. Feeling. Raw unpolished feeling pressed into paper by someone who drew not because they were good at it but because they needed somewhere to put things.

Most of them were of the same small subject. A boy with dark hair and serious eyes. Sleeping. Laughing. Looking up at something outside the frame of the page with an expression of complete and uncomplicated wonder.

Noah.

I turned each page slowly and felt something happening in my chest that I had not given permission for and could not stop regardless.

“He looks like you,” I said softly.

“God help him,” Damien said.

It surprised a laugh out of me. Real and unguarded, the kind of laugh that arrived before you could shape it into something more appropriate. I felt him go still beside me when it happened, that particular stillness of someone hearing something they had not expected and finding they wanted more of it.

I looked up from the sketchpad.

He was already looking at me.

Close. Closer than I had registered, the distance between us on the couch smaller than it had seemed when he sat down, or perhaps it had been this small all along and I had only just allowed myself to notice. His eyes moved across my face with that focused unhurried attention he gave to everything and I watched them drop for one brief moment to my mouth before they came back up.

My heart rate made a decision I was not consulted about.

“Mia,” he said. My name in his mouth again, allowed rather than decided.

“Don’t,” I said. My voice came out lower than intended. Barely above a whisper.

“Don’t what,” he said, equally quiet.

“Don’t look at me like that when we have an agreement that is supposed to be professional.”

He was quiet for a moment. His eyes did not move from my face.

“And if I find the agreement increasingly difficult to maintain,” he said slowly, each word placed with extraordinary care, “what would you suggest I do about that.”

The air between us was very warm.

My hands were still holding his sketchpad and I was gripping it slightly harder than necessary and I was very aware of the exact amount of space between his thigh and mine on the couch which was not very much space at all.

“I would suggest,” I said carefully, “that you remember you are a man who does not permit himself unguarded moments.”

“I permitted one last night,” he said. “In the restaurant.”

“I noticed.”

“I know you noticed.” His voice dropped further and the low quiet register of it moved through me like something warm poured slowly into cold water. “You noticed and you looked away and then you reached for your water glass.”

He had seen that.

Of course he had seen that. This was a man who saw everything and stored it and brought it out at the exact moment it would be most devastating.

“Damien,” I said.

“Yes.”

“We should talk about the schedule. The events. The practical details of this arrangement.”

He held my gaze for three more seconds that felt considerably longer than three seconds. Then he leaned back slightly. Creating space. Deliberately. Like a man stepping back from an edge he had decided not to cross. Yet.

That yet was entirely in my imagination and I needed to evict it immediately.

“The first event is in nine days,” he said. His voice was back to its usual register. Composed and level. “A private dinner. Twelve guests. I’ll have my assistant send you details.”

“Fine,” I said.

“You’ll need something to wear.”

“I have clothes.”

He looked at me.

“I have perfectly appropriate clothes,” I said.

He continued looking at me with that expression that said everything without saying anything and I felt color moving up my neck and hated myself for it.

“I’ll have someone contact you tomorrow,” he said simply.

I stood up. Picked up my bag. Straightened Rosa’s jacket that I had worn over my jeans and told myself I was going to walk to that elevator with complete dignity and not think about the three seconds before he had leaned back or the way his voice had sounded at its lowest register or the fact that his sketchpad was full of drawings of his son done by a man who was considerably more than the headlines had prepared me for.

I pressed the elevator button.

“Mia.”

I turned.

He was still on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching me with those dark steady eyes.

“The agreement,” he said quietly. “The professional one.”

“Yes,” I said.

“It has a problem.”

“What problem.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved in his eyes. Honest and direct and stripped of all the careful management he applied to everything else.

“I have not stopped thinking about you,” he said, “since the moment you got into that car.”

The elevator doors opened behind me.

I stood there for one breath. Two.

Then I stepped inside.

As the doors closed between us I caught one last glimpse of him sitting exactly where I had left him, watching me go with an expression that was patient and certain and quietly, devastatingly sure of itself.

Like a man who had just made his opening move.

And knew exactly how the game ended.