THE DEVIL I LOVE

Chapter Seven — Stolen Hours

They met again the following Tuesday.

No planning this time — he had texted in the morning asking if she had a free hour and she had rearranged two things she probably shouldn't have rearranged and met him at a small gallery in the arts district that neither of them had visited before.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and the gallery was nearly empty. Their footsteps echoed softly on polished concrete floors as they moved through rooms of large abstract canvases, speaking in the lowered voices people use instinctively around art, as though silence were a form of respect.

"This one," Aria said, stopping in front of a painting that was mostly deep blue with a thread of gold running through its center. "This is the whole story."

Damien stood beside her. Close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him. "What story?"

"Every story. Something dark, something that keeps going anyway." She tilted her head. "Don't you think?"

He was quiet for a moment. She glanced up and found him looking at the painting with genuine attention, the kind that couldn't be performed.

"I think," he said slowly, "that the gold could be a c***k. Or it could be a light source. Depends on where you're standing."

"And where are you standing?"

His eyes moved from the painting to her face. "Somewhere I didn't expect to be," he said. "But I'm finding I don't want to move."

Aria looked back at the painting.

They were doing this constantly — having two conversations at once. The surface one, careful and deniable. And the one underneath, which said everything neither of them had yet put into plain words.

They had coffee afterward at a place around the corner, sitting outside in the mild afternoon. She learned that he was methodical about mornings, that he had a complicated relationship with his father's legacy, that he kept a journal though he would have preferred she not find that amusing.

She found it a little amusing.

"It's not funny," he said, but the corner of his mouth was doing the thing she'd noticed that first night — not quite a smile, more dangerous than that.

"It's a little endearing," she offered.

"That's almost worse."

She laughed, and he watched her laugh with an expression that made her feel simultaneously seen and unsteady.

"Aria." He said her name simply, without preamble. "I need you to know that I'm aware of what this is. The situation. The history." He held her gaze. "I'm not being careless with it."

She understood what he was really saying. That he knew the weight of what was growing between them. That he wasn't pretending it was simple.

"Neither am I," she said quietly.

He nodded once. Then he picked up his coffee and looked out at the street and she looked out too, and they sat together in the particular peace of two people who understand each other without requiring everything to be said.

When they parted an hour later he touched her hand briefly — just his fingers over hers on the table for a moment before he stood.

It lasted three seconds. It stayed with her for three days.