Chapter 6: Borrowed Time
1521 Words
The week settled into a rhythm Aria hadn't expected.
Work. Bus. Home. Sleep. Repeat.
It was ordinary in every way that mattered and she was good at ordinary. She had been practicing it her whole life. Show up, do the work, don't expect anything, don't ask for anything, go home. Simple. Manageable. Safe.
The problem was Damian Holt existed in the same building.
And ordinary had never felt so difficult.
He didn't seek her out. Didn't stop by her desk or manufacture reasons to be in her corridor. He was present the way gravity was present, not loud, not obvious, just there, exerting pressure without announcing itself. She would hear his voice down the hall and her hands would slow on the keyboard. She would step into a room and know within seconds whether he was in the building or not based on absolutely nothing she could logically explain.
It was inconvenient.
It was becoming a problem.
She told herself that every morning on the bus to Mirren and believed it a little less each time.
***
Thursday arrived cold and wet.
Rain had been hammering Velmora since before dawn, the kind that didn't come in politely but arrived all at once and settled in like it owned the place. By the time Aria reached the building her jacket was soaked through at the shoulders and her hair was doing something she had stopped trying to manage two streets back.
She was wringing water from her sleeve in the corridor outside her desk when she heard footsteps stop behind her.
She knew before she turned.
"You walked in that?" Damian said.
"The bus stop is four minutes away." She turned to face him. "It seemed manageable."
His eyes moved over her once. The wet jacket. The damp hair. The composure she was holding together through sheer stubbornness.
"Come with me," he said.
"I have work at..."
"Celeste knows." He was already walking. "Come."
She followed because arguing in a wet jacket in a corridor felt undignified and she had very little dignity left to spare this morning.
He led her to a room she hadn't been in before. Not his main office. Smaller, on the same floor, a private sitting room with a couch and a coffee table and a window that looked out over the rain soaked city. A rack near the door held a jacket she suspected had never been used. He took it off the rack and held it out without ceremony.
She looked at it. Then at him.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Aria."
Just her name. Nothing attached to it. But the way he said it made the word feel like a full sentence.
She took the jacket.
It was warm and smelled like him and she put it on quickly before either of those things could matter.
He moved to the window with his hands in his pockets and looked out at the rain. She sat on the edge of the couch and tried to look like someone who was not currently wearing a married man's jacket and feeling things about it.
The silence was different in here.
Smaller. More concentrated.
"Rowan spoke to you," he said. Not a question.
She looked up. "Last Monday. Outside."
"What did he say?"
"That he was your associate." A pause. "That we'd be seeing more of each other."
Something moved across Damian's jaw. Tight and brief. "If he approaches you again come and tell me directly."
She studied him. "Why?"
He turned from the window and looked at her and for a moment she thought he might actually answer that. His eyes moved across her face with that careful deliberate attention he had, the kind that made her feel like he was reading something she hadn't written yet.
"Because I said so," he said finally.
Not enough of an answer. Both of them knew it.
She held his gaze. "He wiped his hand after shaking mine."
Something shifted in Damian's expression. "What?"
"Rowan. After he shook my hand he wiped his against his coat." She paused. "I noticed because I did the same thing after shaking his."
The silence that followed was a different kind. Charged. Something moving behind his eyes that she couldn't fully read but felt the weight of.
Then he did something unexpected.
He laughed.
Low and quiet and entirely genuine, the kind that didn't perform itself, and it changed his face completely. Made him look younger. Made him look like someone who didn't carry the weight she had always seen on him.
She stared at him.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He shook his head but the smile stayed at the corner of his mouth. "Nothing at all."
She felt it happening before she could stop it. The answering warmth that moved up through her chest, the pull at her own mouth, the way the room had somehow gotten both smaller and easier to breathe in simultaneously.
She looked away first.
Outside the rain hit the window in steady sheets and the city blurred grey and silver behind the glass and in this small warm room with his jacket around her shoulders Aria felt something she hadn't felt in longer than she could remember.
Safe.
It terrified her.
***
She returned the jacket before lunch.
Folded it over her arm, knocked on the door of the smaller room, and hung it back on the rack while he was on a call at the desk in the corner. He looked up when she entered. She held up the jacket. He nodded once.
She turned to leave.
"Aria."
She stopped.
"Tomorrow," he said, still holding the phone slightly away from his ear, "take an umbrella."
She didn't turn around. Just kept walking.
But in the corridor with no one watching she let herself smile.
Properly this time.
***
That evening she was the last one to leave her floor.
She hadn't meant to stay late. A filing backlog had swallowed her afternoon and she had looked up at some point to find the office empty and the windows dark and her back aching from hours of hunching over a desk that was slightly too low for her height.
She shut everything down, gathered her bag, and made her way to the elevator.
The building was quiet in a way offices never were during the day. Her footsteps echoed slightly. The lights in the corridor had dimmed to their after hours setting, casting everything in a low amber that made the whole floor feel like somewhere else.
The elevator opened.
Empty this time.
She stepped in. Pressed the ground floor button. Leaned back against the wall and let herself be tired for approximately sixty seconds since there was no one to perform for.
The elevator stopped on the third floor.
Damian stepped in.
He registered her presence without visible surprise, which meant he had known she was still in the building, which meant Celeste had told him, which meant something she was not going to think about right now.
He pressed nothing. His floor was already selected.
The doors closed.
They stood side by side in the small amber lit space and the quiet pressed in around them and Aria stared at the numbered display above the door and was acutely, almost painfully aware of every inch between them.
Four inches maybe. Five.
Not enough.
Too much.
She could feel the warmth of him from where she stood. Could see from her peripheral vision the way his hands hung at his sides, relaxed, unhurried, everything about him always so unhurried while she felt perpetually like she was two steps behind something she couldn't name.
"You stayed late," he said.
"Filing backlog."
"Mm."
Silence.
Two.
One.
The doors opened to the lobby and neither of them moved immediately.
One second. Two.
Then she pushed off the wall and walked out and he fell into step beside her which she hadn't expected and didn't address. They crossed the lobby together, the night security nodding at Damian as they passed, and pushed through the glass doors into the cold night air.
The rain had stopped.
The street was wet and reflective, streetlights doubled in the puddles, and the air smelled like clean cold and something just washed.
They stopped on the pavement outside.
She turned to go left. He would go right, to wherever his car waited, to his estate and his iron gates and his life that had nothing to do with her.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Let me drive you."
She looked at him. The offer hanging between them as simple and complicated as everything else with him.
"Damian." His name felt strange in her mouth. New. Like she was handling something fragile. "That's not a good idea."
He looked at her steadily. "Probably not."
"So."
"So," he said. And then nothing else.
The street was quiet around them. A car moved past in the distance. The wet pavement reflected everything back doubled and wavering.
She should say goodnight and walk to the bus stop.
She knew that.
"Okay," she said.
She got in the car.
---
End of Chapter 6
- Writer
