Beautifully Dangerous 🔞

Chapter Five — What Burns Slow Burns Completely

What followed was the most exquisite and most terrible month of Celeste's life.

By day: professional. Meetings, fittings, press schedules. The careful maintenance of appropriate distance in rooms with other people.

By night: Damien.

She went to him the way she went to everything that frightened her completely, and without looking away.

His apartment was on the forty-second floor of a building his family owned clean lines, expensive restraint, a view that made the city look like something you could hold. She had expected it to feel like a showroom. It felt, instead, like a place someone actually lived. Books everywhere not decorative, read. A desk with three coffee cups at varying stages of abandonment. A kitchen that had seen real cooking.

"You made this?" she asked, the first night she stayed.

"Don't look so surprised."

"You run a media empire."

"And I eat." He handed her a glass of wine. "Sit."

She sat at his kitchen counter and watched him cook and felt, with a terrifying clarity, that she could do this every night for the rest of her life.

— ✦ —

The first time it moved past the terrace was a Tuesday a Tuesday she would think about for years afterward, the specific quality of the light, the way the city was rain-blurred outside the windows, the way he had looked at her in the quiet of his apartment with the particular attention that was his version of saying everything.

She had arrived to return a jacket left in her fitting room. That was the stated reason. They had both known, she thought, that it wasn't the real one.

He had opened the door and looked at her at the rain on her coat, at her hair slightly undone by the weather and something in his expression had gone very still and very certain.

"Come in," he said.

She came in.

He took the jacket. Set it down without looking at it. Looked at her instead.

"You're soaked," he said.

"It's raining."

"I noticed." He reached out and pushed a strand of wet hair from her face slowly, deliberately, watching her the whole time. "You didn't have to come tonight."

"I know."

"Why did you?"

She looked at him. At the scar. At his mouth. At the question in his eyes that wasn't really a question.

"Because I wanted to," she said. "Just that. No other reason."

He stepped closer. She didn't step back.

"Tell me what you want," he said quietly. The same words as the terrace. The same offer no assumption, no presumption. Just the door, held open.

"You," she said. The simplest true thing she had said in four years.

He kissed her and this time it wasn't careful. This time it had the weight of months behind it, of every restrained moment and every room they'd performed composure in and every night she'd gone home and stared at the ceiling and argued with herself about what she was doing.

She stopped arguing.

His hands moved to her waist warm through the damp fabric of her coat and she pushed it from her shoulders and it fell somewhere and neither of them tracked it. She pressed into him and he made a sound low in his chest that she felt rather than heard and they moved, unhurried but inevitable, toward the bedroom.

Later much later she lay in the dark of his room with his arm across her waist and listened to his breathing even out and thought: this is the most honest I have been in years.

She was lying in his bed under false pretenses.

And the feeling in her chest was the most genuine thing she had owned since her father died.

She understood then that she was completely lost.

She also understood, for the first time, that lost was not the same as gone.