Chapter 16: The Weight of the Past
1125 Words
There were things about Damon Blackwood that Aurora learned slowly, the way you learned the particular geography of a new city, not from a map but from walking the same streets in different weathers until the knowledge became physical.
He woke early. Earlier than her, earlier than Leo, earlier than the household in general. She discovered this on a Wednesday when insomnia drove her downstairs at five in the morning and she found him already at the kitchen table with a coffee and papers spread across the surface, reading with his glasses on, which she had not known he wore and which he removed with brief self-consciousness when she walked in.
"Don't," she said. "They suit you."
He put them back on. This small capitulation felt significant.
She made her own coffee and sat across from him and they did not speak for twenty minutes, each of them reading their respective things, and it was one of the most comfortable twenty minutes she had spent in recent memory.
She learned that he laughed rarely but when he did it was genuine and surprised him each time, as though laughter were an ambush rather than something he cultivated. She learned that he had strong opinions about architecture that surfaced unexpectedly in the middle of conversations about entirely other things. She learned that he was patient with almost everyone and impatient specifically with people who made the same mistake twice when they had been clearly shown the correct approach.
She learned that he had been alone for a very long time.
This emerged not from anything he said directly but from the texture of how he moved through the house, the particular self-sufficiency of someone accustomed to their own company, the almost imperceptible adjustment he made whenever she or Leo occupied the same space. Not unwelcoming. More like recalibration. Like a room that had been arranged for one person slowly rearranging itself for three.
She asked him about it one evening when Leo was asleep and they were in the sitting room with the fire.
"You've been alone a long time," she said.
He looked up from his book. Considered whether to deflect. Decided against it. "Since my father died. Eleven years ago."
"Before that?"
"Before that there were people. My mother, who died when I was sixteen. My father, who was present in the way that powerful men who define their lives by obligation are present: consistently and at a significant remove." He paused. "Friends, within the pack. People I trust. Nadia, Briar. But not. This."
"This," she said.
"The specific kind of present that comes from someone who knows you and stays anyway."
She sat with that for a moment. "You thought the mate bond was the mechanism. Not the result."
"I thought, for a long time, that the pull I felt toward you was the bond doing what bonds do. Compelling. Directing." He turned his book over on his knee. "I've come to understand that's not what it is. The bond recognized you. It didn't invent the recognition. You are specifically who I would choose, if there were no bond at all."
"How do you know the difference?"
"Because I've had six years to feel the bond without you. And what I felt was not the bond. It was missing you. A person. Not a function."
Aurora looked at the fire for a while.
"My mother thinks I'm staying with a friend," she said. "While things were complicated. I haven't told her any of this."
"When will you?"
"I'm working on how to say it." She glanced at him. "She's going to have questions."
"Most questions have answers."
"Not the question she's going to ask, which is why didn't you tell me for five years that Leo's father was findable and alive."
"What's the answer to that one?"
"Because I was afraid and I made myself convinced it was the right call." She exhaled. "She'll forgive me. She always does. But the conversation first is going to be significant."
"Would it help to have me there?"
She looked at him. "That might make it harder initially. My mother is very protective."
"I can be protective too."
"Of different things and using different methods." She almost smiled. "Maybe after the initial conversation."
He nodded. "Whenever you're ready."
This was something she had noticed about him: he did not push. He positioned himself clearly and then waited, and the waiting was not passive or resigned, it was a choice, deliberate and respectful. She had been with people before who said they would wait and grew resentful of the waiting. Damon did not grow resentful. He simply continued to be present, and the presence was consistent enough that eventually she found herself moving toward it without entirely deciding to.
She told her mother on a Sunday. Leo was upstairs with Mrs. Caldwell. She sat at the kitchen table with her phone and her coffee and called her mother, who answered on the second ring the way she always did, and spent thirty-five minutes explaining what had happened and what was happening now.
Her mother was quiet through most of it.
When she finished, the silence on the other end lasted long enough that Aurora checked the connection.
"Mom."
"I'm thinking," her mother said. "Give me a moment."
Aurora gave her a moment.
"He's good to Leo," her mother said finally. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And to you."
"Yes."
"Then I'll reserve my speech about the five years for when I see you in person, because it deserves to be delivered face to face."
Aurora laughed despite herself. "Fair."
"Bring them both for dinner next Sunday. Leo and this man."
"He's not just a man, Mom. He's an Alpha King of a werewolf pack."
"He can be both. Sunday. I'm making the jollof."
"He doesn't deserve the jollof yet."
"If he's good to you and my grandson, he deserves the jollof. That's my standard and it has not changed." A pause. "I love you, Aurora."
"I love you too."
She hung up and sat with the phone in her hand and felt something unclench in her chest that had been held tight for five years.
She found Damon in the library.
"Sunday dinner," she said. "My mother. She's making jollof."
He looked up. "Is that significant?"
"She's Nigerian and she only makes jollof for people she's decided to accept. You haven't done anything to earn it yet, but apparently the bar is whether you're good to me and Leo."
"Have I cleared that bar?"
"According to her." She leaned against the doorframe. "Don't make her regret the jollof."
"I won't," he said, with the same seriousness he applied to pack territory decisions. Which, she thought, was probably correct.
- Writer
