Gaged In Gold

CHAPTER FOUR

What He Keeps

AMARA'S POV

The penthouse is not what I expected.

I built a version of it in my head on the elevator ride up. Cold. Minimalist. The kind of space designed to impress rather than inhabit, all clean lines and expensive emptiness, a monument to control.

Instead I find books.

Everywhere. Stacked on the coffee table, on a bench by the window, two left open on the kitchen counter like he was reading them simultaneously and chose neither when he left this morning. Spines cracked, pages dog-eared. These are not decorative books. These are books that have been read.

And a jacket thrown over a chair in the particular way of someone who has been throwing it there for years.

And a half-finished glass of water on the side table.

And Anna Karenina on the coffee table, a bookmark three-quarters of the way through.

It makes him more real.

I had not wanted him to be more real.

* * *

DAMIEN'S POV

She looks at the books.

Not the view, which is the thing people usually look at first, forty-two floors of Manhattan at night, the kind of skyline that costs money just to witness. She walks past all of that and goes straight to the books, her eyes moving across the spines with the expression of someone who has just discovered something she wasn't supposed to see.

Good.

I want her to see.

"Anna Karenina, she says. Third time?"

"Third, I confirm, moving to the kitchen. I find it instructive."

"As a cautionary tale?"

"As a study in what happens when people want things they've decided they can't have. Everyone in that book destroys something because they won't admit what they want."

She's quiet for a moment.

"That's a specific thing to take from a nineteenth-century Russian novel."

"I'm a specific person."

She almost smiles. She doesn't quite manage to stop it.

* * *

AMARA'S POV

He cooks.

That's the second thing I didn't expect. He moves around the kitchen with the ease of someone who does this regularly, not for guests but for himself, and the specific ordinary domesticity of it does something to the careful distance I've been maintaining.

We eat at the counter. We talk about the restructuring demand for exactly eleven minutes and then we don't anymore and the conversation goes somewhere else, somewhere I didn't plan to go, and somewhere in the second hour I stop tracking the time.

He tells me about the first company he built. Not Voss Industries,the one before, the one he built with a partner and lost, the story he tells with the specific flatness of someone who has decided the emotional content is not available for public consumption.

"Someone took something from you, I say."

He looks at me.

"What makes you say that?"

"Because people who need things to be entirely theirs usually had something taken from them first."

A pause. Longer than comfortable.

"Yes, he says. Someone did."

"Who?"

His expression closes. Just slightly — one window shutting while the others stay open.

"Not tonight."

Not tonight. Not a no. A deferral, with the implication that there is a tonight where the answer is different.

I file that.

* * *

DAMIEN'S POV

She asks about the architectural model on the side table.

The Dubai tower. I've had it for three years, since the groundbreaking, and I keep it here instead of the office because the office is for finished things and this is still becoming.

"Is it a finished project or a work in progress?"

"Still in progress. Eighteen months to completion."

"Why do you keep an unfinished thing?"

I look at her.

"Because finished things are different from things still becoming. They mean different things about the person who keeps them."

She looks at the model for a moment.

"What does keeping the unfinished one mean?"

"That I'm not done with something."

She looks at me then. Not at the model.

"With what?"

I hold her gaze.

"Several things."

The room is very quiet.

The city glitters below us, indifferent, doing its midnight thing.

She looks back at her plate.

* * *

AMARA'S POV

I leave at nine-seventeen.

He walks me to the elevator without being asked, the way he keeps doing things without being asked, and at the doors I turn.

"Thank you. For dinner. For—"

I stop. I'm not sure how to finish that sentence in a way that's accurate and safe at the same time.

"For asking if I was tired."

He looks at me.

"You don't have to thank me for that."

"I know. I wanted to."

The elevator arrives. The doors open. I step in and turn and he's standing two feet away with his hands in his pockets and his expression doing that thing it does, the careful, contained thing that means something much larger is being held very still.

"Goodnight, Damien."

Something moves in his eyes.

"Goodnight, Amara."

The doors close.

I press my back against the wall.

I look at the ceiling.

I think about a man who reads Anna Karenina three times. Who keeps an unfinished tower on his side table. Who asked if I was tired like the answer genuinely mattered and then sat with it in silence instead of trying to fix it.

I think about how much easier this would be if he were what I expected.

Cold. Empty. Simple.

Instead he's this.

And this is so much harder to resist.

* * *

End of Chapter Four