Chapter Eight - The Rain
879 Words
It's raining on Friday.
I don't have an umbrella.
This is, somehow, how everything between us changes.
* * *
I leave the building at six-fifteen.
The rain hits me the second I step through the revolving doors.
Not drizzle. Not light rain.
The kind of rain that has opinions.
"Oh, come on," I say, out loud, to no one.
"Forgot an umbrella?"
I spin around.
Damien Voss is standing three feet behind me, under a black umbrella that is exactly as perfectly understated as everything else about him.
"I didn't think it would rain," I say.
"The forecast said a seventy percent chance since Tuesday."
"I don't check forecasts."
He looks at me. Then, in the rain. Then back at me.
"I'll walk you to the train," he says.
"You don't have to—"
"It's three blocks."
"Mr. Voss—"
"Damien," he says.
I stop.
He has never told me to use his first name before.
"Damien," he repeats. Quieter. Like he is trying it. Like he wants to hear how it sounds coming from my direction.
"Damien," I say.
Something in his expression shifts. Subtle. Significant.
"Three blocks," he says again.
I fall into step beside him.
* * *
We walk under his umbrella.
Three blocks have never felt longer.
Or shorter.
I am hyperaware of him beside me. The warmth of him. The fact that the umbrella is sized for one person, and he is tilting it toward me so that he is catching the edge of the rain on his left shoulder and pretending not to notice.
"You're getting wet," I say.
"Marginally."
"Damien."
Something about saying his name makes the warmth in my chest catch.
"I'm fine," he says. "I've survived worse than rain."
"So have I," I say, before I think about it.
He glances at me.
"I know," he says.
We walk another half-block in silence.
Then I say, because the rain makes me honest somehow, because there is something about standing this close to him under an umbrella that makes the walls feel less necessary than usual:
"I used to think about what I would say to him. If I ever got to say anything. I had whole speeches. In the car going south that night, in the first weeks in the city, when everything was hard. I had perfect speeches."
Damien does not say anything. He just listens.
That is — that is something. That he just listens.
"When I actually called him," I say, "I didn't use any of them. I just said what was true."
"What was true?" he asks quietly.
"That it was never about me," I say. "That I know that now. That I'm not angry anymore — I'm just done." I pause. "And that I'm glad it happened the way it did."
He stops walking.
I stop too.
We are standing on a pavement in the rain, twelve inches apart, and he is looking at me like I said something significant.
"Why glad?" he asks.
I think about it.
"Because," I say slowly, "if he hadn't rejected me, I wouldn't have left. And if I hadn't left, I wouldn't have built what I built. And if I hadn't built what I built—" I will stop.
"You wouldn't be here," Damien says.
"I wouldn't be here," I confirmed.
A beat.
"I'm glad you're here," he says.
He has said it before — by message, from forty floors away.
It is different in person.
It is different standing this close, in the rain, with his umbrella tilted toward me and his shoulder getting wet and his eyes on mine like I am the only thing in this city that is currently worth looking at.
My wolf is very, very quiet.
Not gone. Not suppressed.
Just — still. Waiting. Like she already knows how this ends and is simply giving me time to catch up.
"Damien—"
"You don't have to say anything," he says. "I'm not asking you for anything. I just — I wanted you to know."
I look at him for a long moment.
This man, who pulled my file and gave me the most important assignment of my career, came down twenty floors to leave coffee on my desk. Who told me about Lucas immediately, without keeping it from me? Who walked me to the train in the rain and got his shoulder wet and didn't pretend he wasn't doing it deliberately.
Who has never once, in ten days, made me feel like anything less than exactly what I am.
"I know," I say.
And then, because I am Maya Adkins and I drove south at three in the morning and built something extraordinary, and I refuse to be the woman who is afraid of her own life:
"I'm glad I'm here, too."
His breath catches.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
The rain keeps falling.
We stand there in it for one more moment — close, not touching, something building in the space between us like a question neither of us has answered yet.
Then I step back.
"I'll see you Monday," I say.
"Monday," he agrees.
I walk the last block to the train alone.
I don't look back.
But I smile.
The whole way home, I smiled.
- Writer
