LIVING WITH MR.VALE

CHAPTER 4: TOO CLOSE

I did not sleep well.

The phone call went around the room with me all night, or rather one specific line of it did, *I'd prefer if Evan Carter worked on another section of the project*, in the voice he used for professional decisions, which was the same as the voice he used for everything else and was therefore giving me nothing to work with except the decision itself, which was doing quite enough on its own.

I constructed and demolished three separate explanations before one in the morning.

The first: a genuine professional concern about workflow or scheduling that had nothing to do with me, which was entirely possible and also, given the timing and the specific phrasing and the *no, there's no problem*, difficult to fully sustain.

The second: a protective instinct activated by the presence of an unknown man on his property interacting with a person he was responsible for, which was more plausible and also explained approximately sixty percent of the evidence and left the other forty percent unaccounted for in ways that kept me awake until almost two.

The third: the one I refused to complete because completing it felt like the particular species of wishful thinking that had caused me problems before and would cause me problems again.

I went to campus in the morning with the conscientious determination of someone who had decided not to think about a thing by thinking about something else more loudly. It worked for several hours. I had a tutorial I was genuinely engaged in, a library session that produced two pages of notes I was actually going to use, and a coffee with Priya that involved no complications because Priya was mercifully uncomplicated, and I needed that today.

I came back to the mansion at four.

The weather had been deciding something all afternoon, and by the time Marcus dropped me at the gate, it had arrived at its conclusion. The sky was the dark grey of something that had run out of patience, and the first drops came down heavy and certain while I was still on the drive.

By the time I was inside, it was a storm.

I am fine with rain. I have lived in this country long enough to have made a practical accommodation with rain. What I am less fine with, and have always been less fine with, and will not admit unless cornered, is thunder. The specific unpredictability of it, the way it arrived without fixed timing and at volumes that bore no consistent relationship to what came before, the absence of any system I could prepare myself against.

I went to my room and worked, and the storm established itself against the windows, and I was fine.

I was mostly fine.

At seven, the power went out.

The whole estate at once, the specific quality of silence that followed a loss of electricity, every small hum and background sound of a functioning house disappearing simultaneously and leaving something more absolute in its place. Emergency lighting came on after a moment, the warm, low glow of it in the hallways, but my room was its own specific dark, and the thunder was now doing something that had no consideration for the walls between us.

I went downstairs because staying in my room had stopped being a neutral option.

The kitchen was lit by the emergency lighting and the candles on the counter that someone had already set out, and the warm gold of both together made the room look like something from a different era, smaller and more enclosed than it was in ordinary light.

Damien was at the counter.

Not in his suit. I had not seen him outside of his suit or outside of the dark shirts that functioned as his version of casual, and what he was wearing now was a simple white shirt with the sleeves pushed back to his forearms and the collar open, and he looked like a person rather than a function, which was the only way I knew how to describe the difference.

He looked up when I came in, and the faint smile appeared, the one that was the real version rather than the professional one.

"Couldn't sleep either?" he said.

"The thunder isn't helping."

He turned back to the counter, and I realised he was already making tea, two mugs, the particular process of someone who had assumed company before company appeared.

"You knew I was awake?" I said.

"I heard you on the stairs." He didn't elaborate. He set one mug in front of me and wrapped both hands around his own. "Chamomile. It usually helps."

I looked at the mug. Chamomile, which was the tea I had been drinking since I was sixteen, after discovering that it was the one that reliably worked on the particular kind of restlessness that arrived at night and resisted the usual remedies.

"You remembered my favourite," I said.

He looked almost surprised. The brief expression of someone who had revealed something they had not consciously decided to reveal, caught in a small, specific honesty.

"Your mother mentioned it," he said, which may or may not have been true.

We stood at the counter, and the storm moved around the house, and the candles made their warm and unsteady light, and after a while I sat on the stool, and he leaned against the counter, and the kitchen held us in its small, lit circle while everything else was dark.

"Do you ever stop working?" I said.

It came out genuinely. Not as a pointed observation or a reprimand, just the honest question of someone who had now watched him for three days and formed a consistent impression.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. The actual version, brief and quiet. "I'm not very good at slowing down."

I looked at him properly in the candlelight, at the dark circles under his eyes that the daytime and the good lighting and the professional composure had been quietly managing. "When did you last sleep properly?"

A pause. He looked at his tea. "I don't remember."

"That's not good."

"Probably not."

I held my mug in both hands and thought about asking the next question, and decided that the storm and the candlelight and the kitchen at whatever this hour was constituted a different kind of space from the ordinary ones.

"Why?" I said.

He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to redirect it, find the usual professional distance, and step behind it. Instead, he set down his mug and looked at the window where the rain was doing something relentless against the glass.

"Running a company is not like running a project," he said. "A project ends. A company is the people in it, and the people in it have families and mortgages and health situations and children in schools, and all of that exists on the other side of every decision I make." He said it plainly, the way he said things that were simply true, and he had stopped finding it remarkable. "You don't stop carrying that. You carry it constantly, and you get better at not showing it, but the carrying doesn't stop."

I sat with that.

"And now," he said, and then stopped.

"And now?" I said.

He looked at the window a moment longer. "Now your parents are in Singapore, and I gave my word that you'd be alright, and I have approximately seventeen things on my desk that require my undivided attention, and you're here."

I did not know exactly what he meant by that. I knew it was not a complaint. I knew it was something else, something he was not going to say with more precision, something that existed in the space between the professional obligation he kept citing and the phone call I had heard last night about Evan Carter.

"You don't have to carry everything alone," I said.

He looked at me.

It was a long look, longer than most of his, and quieter, without the professional attention or the managing quality. Just Damien looking at me in the candlelight at whatever this was past midnight, with the storm and the dark house and no one else in it.

He said nothing.

But the nothing was specific, the kind that contained something that had decided not to become words yet, and I sat with it and the warmth of the chamomile and the particular awareness of being in a room with someone who was choosing what to reveal more carefully than they usually chose.

I reached for my mug at the same moment he reached for the sugar bowl between us.

His fingers were warm.

They touched mine for the length of one second, perhaps two, and neither of us moved, and I looked at my hand and then up at him because I could not do anything else, some mechanism of inevitability pulling my eyes where they went.

He was already looking at me.

And his face was the version I had seen in fragments, in the corner of a hallway and through the gap of a door and in the second before he reassembled whatever he was managing, except that now it was the whole face, in the candlelight, all at once, with nothing in front of it.

Not the billionaire. Not the guardian. Not the composed, strategic, impeccable Damien Vale who ran a company worth more than most countries and never let a room see what he was actually thinking.

Just a person.

Tired and honest and present, in a kitchen that smelled of chamomile and old wood and rain, with his fingers touching mine and his eyes on my face and the expression of someone who had briefly, entirely stopped managing.

The thunder arrived.

A crack of it, overhead and instantaneous, the kind that needed no building up, and we both startled with the clean, uncomplicated reflexiveness of people responding to a sound, and then we were not touching, and the mug was in my hands, and he was clearing his throat, and the kitchen had returned to its ordinary dimensions.

"It's getting late," he said. His voice was even. "You should try to get some sleep."

"Yes," I said.

"The storm should ease before morning."

"Right."

I slid off the stool and picked up my mug, and said goodnight, walked to the kitchen door, went through it, and went into the hallway. I was at the bottom of the stairs when I realised I had not said thank you for the tea and that I should say thank you for the tea, and I turned around.

He was still in the kitchen.

He had not moved to clean anything, put anything away, or begin the process of going to bed. He was standing where I had left him, and he was looking at the hallway in the way you looked at the space where someone had been, and when I appeared in the doorway again, his eyes found me immediately.

We looked at each other across the distance of the hallway.

The emergency lighting was low and warm between us, and the storm was still happening, and the house was very quiet, and his eyes on my face had the quality of something I could not name because I had not had access to it before.

Then I saw it.

His gaze moved. Just fractionally, just for a second, from my eyes to my mouth, and the movement was so brief and so quickly corrected that I would not have caught it if I had not been paying the specific, obsessive quality of attention that I had been paying to Damien Vale for two years.

He caught himself.

Something in his expression hardened, not with coldness but with the particular, controlled quality of someone who has observed their own response and made a decision about it. He looked away. He turned.

He disappeared into the dark of the house without another word.

I went upstairs.

I went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed and held the mug, and the mug was still warm, and his fingers had been warm, and the kitchen had been warm, and the storm was still going against the window, and I sat in all of it and pressed one hand flat against my own chest.

My heart was going at a rate entirely inconsistent with standing in a kitchen drinking tea.

I thought about his eyes. The unmanaged version of them. The fraction of a second before he looked away.

*For one impossible moment*, I thought, in the quiet dark of a room that was not my room in a house that was not my house, with the storm outside and the warmth of the tea and the absolute certainty of someone who had spent two years learning to read a face they should not have been reading.

*I could have sworn he wanted to kiss me.*