Chapter 58
Damien
Play - Cherry by Lana Del Rey
That fire burns
She avoided me.
She didn’t exactly, but she stopped looking at me for three days.
And it felt wrong. Mireya’s now sitting across from me, refusing to meet my gaze, but her scent is the same, her presence is unchanged, and I realize that in these few days, I’ve missed our little secret meetings more than I thought I would.
“I strangely missed your presence,” is the first thing I say once we’re both sat next to each other. Because I did. I missed her enough to risk it all just to have her close a little longer.
Her eyes flicker to me before softening. “I strangely missed you too, Mister Caldwell.”
“You can call me by my name, Mireya.”
“I know,” she says, her smile coming back.
“I should have reacted differently last time,” I murmur.
“You think so?”
“Yes,” I admit. “You’re brilliant, dangerous, and I was worried for your future.”
A silence stretches between us after this.
Every thought is conscious, and forbidden.
She leans slightly closer, not touching me, not saying anything, just existing in my space, and I feel the weight of it crushing me.
She smiles as if she’s won, and I don’t care, it makes me smile to see her like that.
“It’s true I’m brilliant,” she says.
“Yes,” I reply. “You are.”
“I’m smarter than you,” she says suddenly.
“I’m older than you,” I counter, letting my voice drop slightly.
“I feel more than you,” she shoots back.
“I can assure you… I’m feeling something stronger than you are, right now,” I reply.
Blue eyes meet mine and for a second I try to look past them. I forget myself there. I wonder if I look long enough to find the girl hiding behind all the things that hurt her.
“Oh really? And what would that be?” she asks, leaning slightly closer.
“A need,” I murmur. “And it makes me… sick.”
“You planning to do something about it, then?”
“I… wish I knew what to do,” I admit.
I want to kiss her. I know better. I know exactly why I shouldn’t. So why does every part of me want to do it anyway?
She looks up, then drops her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m looking at you normally.”
She laughs softly. “No, and you know it.” She leans in, keeping the smile that quickly fades, and then, instinctively, almost before I think, my hand brushes her face.
“The wound,” I ask quietly, glancing at the faint scar at her waist that I touched and saw, but now is covered under layers of clothes. “It’s… okay? Are you okay?”
Her voice is airy, her gaze is lost, confused, caught between what she’s thinking and what she should feel. “Better.”
“I’m glad,” I murmur, letting my hand hover briefly over a stray strand of hair, brushing it aside. She notices it but doesn’t move. I step back, aware I almost did something foolish. So I do what I do best, I change the subject before kissing her.
“I’ve been searching for new things, while you were busy avoiding me.”
“Me too,” she says quietly.
“Tell me.”
She begins listing anomalies she found. The gaps in the footage, some inconsistencies in witness statements, and a lot of administrative oversights.
I nod, letting her words sink in. “Good job, Mireya.”
She leans back, letting space return between us. But she’s proud of herself, and I like the way it looks on her. I shift focus, forcing myself back to the case.
“The donors,” I say. “The director is hiding something. Whoever we’re tracking… has been funneling money into this place for years. Nothing official I think. But it was enough to keep things buried and clean on paper.”
She traces the lines between dates and amounts. “It’s just… weird.”
“Then we wait for the right moment, and we’ll find the list and see if any name on there makes sense to us.”
She taps the paper once, then looks up at me. “So,” she says lightly, “we wait.”
“We wait,” I reply, “yes.”
“You’re very bad at waiting,” she adds.
A corner of my mouth lifts. “So are you.”
Her eyes flick to my mouth then back to my eyes. “I thought we were done flirting, Damien,” she says.
I want to tell her she restarted it, that I never stood a chance. But instead I smile and reply, “I thought so too. Then you looked at me again.”
She smiles again and I pull her chair closer. “I don’t remember doing that.”
“You do,” I say quietly. “You always do.” Before I can stop myself, my fingers brush against her wrist. “You, Mireya Vitelli, have the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen, it’s almost impossible not to notice them.”
Her fingers move to my tie and I stop breathing for a second.
She loosens it to pull it free from around my neck.
Her eyes stay on me as she wraps the fabric around me, covering my mouth.
And then she leans closer. My entire body goes still when I meet her eyes.
They stay on mine the entire time, and that ruins me.
My hand moves, closing around her wrist, and she doesn’t pull away. Instead she leans closer, then her lips press against the fabric covering mine.
The kiss never reaches my skin. It stays there, between us, separated by the smallest possible barrier. And somehow, that makes it worse.
When she pulls away, she whispers, “No breaking rules.”
She rises slowly, and the distance comes back. I look up at her and for a second, I forget every reason I should move.
She looks… beautiful.
“You should go,” I say.
“I should,” she breathes softly.
“Yes.”
“You told me earlier,” she says carefully. “that you were feeling something. Something that made you sick.”
“I did.”
Her gaze stays on mine. “Do you still?”
I inhale once and tilt my head to have a better look at her from this angle. “It’s worse,” I admit. “It’s burning now.”
“What is it?”
I stand up, facing her now. My hands land on the table, either side of her, leaving myself enough space to stop and remind myself that she’s still my student. I breathe in and don’t answer immediately. Because the truth is already too close to my mouth.
“I’m imagining doing things to you, Miss Vitelli,” I whisper in a confession.
It sounds like a shame. “And none of the things I’m thinking about are appropriate, or things I can undo once I start.
” Her breath catches, and I keep fighting the urge to do something else.
“So,” I add, lower now. “Please leave, before I make a mess of my own self-control, this library… and you.”
For a second, I think she won’t listen. Then she turns her head toward mine, her eyes stay on mine as she steps away.
“I will,” she murmurs. “I should.”
She lingers for a brief instant and then she turns away. Her fingers trail briefly over my sleeve as she passes as if to remind me she was here and she says, “It’s burning too, for me.”
When the door closes behind her, I finally breathe again.
It’s burning too.