Chapter Fifteen- Almost
1431 Words
It started with a storm.
Not a metaphorical one .an actual storm, the kind the city got in late spring when the weather forgot itself and decided to be dramatic about it. Rain against the windows in sheets, thunder rolling through the sky in long slow waves, the kind of night that made forty two floors feel simultaneously safe and exposed.
Luna liked storms.
She'd always liked them — the way they made staying inside feel intentional rather than circumstantial, the way they gave you permission to be still. She was curled on the living area couch with a book she wasn't entirely reading when the power flickered.
Once. Twice.
Then went out entirely.
The penthouse dropped into darkness broken only by the city light coming through the glass — diffused and blue grey, the storm turning everything outside into something moving and alive. Luna sat up slowly and listened to the rain and waited.
Emergency lighting came on after thirty seconds low and warm, strips of amber along the floor edges, enough to move by but not enough to read by. She set her book down.
"The building's backup generator will engage in a few minutes." Damien's voice came from the corridor. She hadn't heard him approach she never heard him approach, another thing she'd filed away and never found a satisfying explanation for. He appeared in the living area doorway looking at his phone, shirt untucked for once, the most undone she'd seen him outside of the early morning balcony.
"Does this happen often?" she asked.
"No." He looked up from his phone. "Something in the grid. It'll be sorted."
He moved to the kitchen and she heard him opening cupboards and then he reappeared with two candles and a lighter practical, prepared, the actions of someone who had handled unexpected situations so many times that even candlelight in a blackout was simply a thing to be managed efficiently.
He set one candle on the coffee table in front of her and lit it.
The flame caught and steadied and the warm gold of it filled the space between them and did something to the atmosphere that the emergency lighting hadn't — made it smaller, somehow. More immediate. The storm outside and the candlelight inside and the two of them in the space between.
He sat in the armchair across from her and lit the second candle and set it on the side table and looked at it for a moment.
"You were at Selene's last night," he said.
"I was."
"Caleb said you handled it."
"I did."
He looked at her. "That's all I get?"
"That's all you need." She pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at the candle flame. "She's running out of moves Damien. Everything she tries I turn around. Eventually she'll either escalate or give up."
"She won't give up."
"Then she'll escalate." Luna shrugged slightly. "I'd rather know what she's capable of than spend energy worrying about it."
He was quiet for a moment. Looking at her with that expression — the one she'd been collecting since the beginning, warm and unguarded and quickly contained. Except tonight, in the candlelight, the containing was slower than usual.
"The art program," he said quietly.
She looked up.
"Caleb told me what you said. At the gathering." His voice was careful. "About the scholarship."
Luna held his gaze. "You didn't know that about me."
"No." He paused. "I didn't."
"There are a lot of things you don't know about me."
"I'm aware." Something moved in his expression. "I'd like to. If you're willing."
The rain hit the windows in a long wave and the candle flame bent slightly in some imperceptible current of air and Luna looked at this man across the coffee table — this enormous complicated controlled man sitting in candlelight with his shirt untucked looking at her like she was something he was only just beginning to understand he wanted to understand — and felt something move in her chest that she was running out of ways to file away as unimportant.
"I wanted to paint," she said quietly. "That's what the program was. Fine arts. Painting specifically." She looked at the candle. "I was good at it. Not good like a hobby — good like it was the thing I was supposed to do." A pause. "I haven't picked up a brush in three years."
"Why?"
"Because wanting things you can't have is expensive." She said it simply, without self-pity. "Energy, emotion, attention — it all costs something. I couldn't afford it."
Damien was quiet for a long moment.
"What would you paint?" he asked. "If you could."
She looked at him. It wasn't the question she expected.
"Honestly?"
"Always."
She looked around the penthouse — the candlelight and the storm light and the city beyond the glass doing something extraordinary to the space, turning the familiar into something she was seeing properly for the first time. "This," she said quietly. "This light. Right now. The way the city looks through the glass in a storm." She paused. "The way things look when they're caught between two kinds of light and you can't tell which one is winning."
The silence that followed was different from their usual silences.
Damien was looking at her with an expression she hadn't seen before — not the recalibrating one, not the contained warmth, not the fractional almost-smile. Something more stripped than any of those. Something that lived in the territory she'd glimpsed on the balcony but was closer now, more present, less managed.
"Luna," he said.
Just her name. The way he always said it — low and even — but with something underneath it tonight that she felt in her sternum.
"Mm," she said. Because words felt suddenly expensive.
He leaned forward slightly — just slightly, just enough — and the candle flame was between them and the storm was outside and the city was below and everything was very still except her heart which was doing something entirely unauthorized and entirely impossible to ignore.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The distance between them was smaller than it had ever been and neither of them had moved significantly and she didn't know how that had happened and she suspected he didn't either and the candlelight was doing something to his eyes — bringing out that quality, that depth, that ancient awareness that she'd been collecting and cataloguing and never been able to explain—
The generator engaged.
The lights came back on — full and bright and immediate, the penthouse flooding back to itself, the careful modern space reasserting its proper character and its proper distances.
They both moved back at the same time.
Not dramatically. Just — a settling. A return. Two people finding their proper coordinates again after some temporary atmospheric interference.
Luna looked at the book she'd been not-reading.
Damien looked at the candle he'd just lit which was now unnecessary.
The storm continued outside, entirely indifferent.
"I'll get you a sketchbook," Damien said. His voice was completely even. Almost.
Luna looked up. "What?"
"Tomorrow." He stood, picking up the now-redundant candle with the careful deliberateness of someone performing a normal action as an anchor to a normal moment. "A sketchbook. And whatever else you need." He didn't look at her. "You should paint if you want to paint."
She stared at him.
He carried the candle to the kitchen and she heard him setting it down and then there was a pause — a long one, longer than putting down a candle required — and she understood that on the other side of the kitchen wall he was doing the same thing she was doing.
Breathing. Recalibrating. Reassembling.
She looked at the space across the coffee table where he'd been sitting.
Almost, she thought.
That was the only word for it.
Almost.
She picked up her book and looked at the words without reading them and listened to the storm and felt the almost sitting in her chest like a warm coal — not burning, just present, radiating something she didn't have a name for yet but was running out of ways to pretend wasn't there.
In the kitchen Damien stood at the counter with both hands flat on the marble and looked at nothing.
His wolf was not saying anything.
It didn't need to.
It had been right from the beginning and it knew it and it was content — infuriatingly, insufferably content to simply wait.
Almost, it thought.
Almost was enough for now.
- Writer
