Chapter 10 Seth
TEN
Seth
As easily as that, Damon was now part of everything in my life.
I’d caved in once, letting him take me out on a date from some chivalrous sense of duty he must have felt for me, and now I couldn’t drag myself out of these ridiculous ideas of a happy life together.
Nights turned to weeks. Leaves grew orange, red, and brown on the trees outside my window as I filled out pages upon pages of my notebooks with lab results, mindless scribbles that looked a little too much like heartsick sonnets, and various notes from my lectures.
Then, one morning, I woke up alone in the room, glanced out, and realized that there was frost around the edges of my window and even more frost on the grass lawn.
Leaves were falling quickly in the days before and after, the radiator worked most hours in the room, and the fall jackets went deeper into the closet, replaced by winter coats hanging by the door.
Damon visited me every week. Most weeks, he found a way to come around more than once.
How he bribed Silas to tolerate this need for privacy wasn’t clear to me, but Silas assured me that he was compensated well.
I knew that Damon had offered once, weeks ago, to introduce Silas to his eligible teammates, but Silas had only shrugged and said he’d done it himself already.
Damon and I spent hours speculating which Arctic Titan was secretly hot for Silas.
“You’re with those guys all the time,” I’d said once. “You must have noticed something.”
Damon had shrugged. “Those guys date all the time. It’s hard to keep up.”
“You don’t think it’s one of the guys who are out, do you?” The idea alone made me a little sad. I liked to believe in eternal love and devotion, even if it only applied to others.
Damon sucked his teeth and shook his head.
“No way. Griff and Andrei are inseparable. Phoenix and Jaxon have been together for years, and Phoenix still blushes a little when he talks about Jax. He’s too in love to be hooking up with your roommate.
” Damon played with my hair, losing track of his thoughts.
Then he circled back to it, minutes later. “My money’s on Mason. Or Keiran.”
“Keiran’s got a girlfriend,” I said.
Damon laughed. “Doesn’t mean anything. He’s too loud about his girlfriend while slapping our asses with a wet towel.”
“Is that what happens in locker rooms?” I asked.
“That is all that happens,” Damon said. “Didn’t you know?”
I kissed him, stopping the teasing.
From time to time, Damon proposed a little date. We’d gone back to the vegan place the second time, and then we’d gone to a cellar bar that boasted about their natural wines.
“The hell’s a natural wine?” I’d asked.
Damon had explained it in terms that didn’t do much to sell the idea.
Like wine, but without any additives or modern technology.
We’d gone anyway, curious more than hopeful.
We were served the cellar’s finest sour slop and laughed about it all the way back to my room.
“I once met a guy who makes these,” Damon had said.
“Apparently, the highest compliment you can give to a natural wine is that it tastes just like the regular wine.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?” I asked.
“It very much defeats the purpose. It’s like making the same thing but with extra steps,” Damon said. “Oh, how can we complicate a well-established process?”
“Yes, yes, winemaking simply isn’t difficult enough. Let’s mess with it.”
“Why, I know,” Damon said, switching through fake accents faster than he had gone through his hookups last year. “Let’s take away all the useful parts and do it with old grapes.”
I laughed, pulling him closer and rising to my toes to kiss him. It was easy when we were inside. Outside, not quite. At least for me, there was this lingering question of why risk it. Why risk kissing him in public when this would never be worth the fight I’d have with Nick if he found out?
Well, that was not entirely correct. Almost all of my body and soul screamed that this was worth it. Some sliver of my rational mind prevailed, though, and I was grateful for it. I was still reasonable enough to know that I wasn’t going to be Damon’s forever.
If I fluttered through Damon’s life like a butterfly, and he showed me the devotion and interest as he did, then I would know I’d gotten the most I ever could.
Occasionally, as the frost on my window became more common than now, Damon and I carefully leaned into conversation topics that we both knew led us nowhere. Even so, for the giggles, we wondered aloud why we’d let a year go by without checking in with each other.
“Timing. Geography. Divine intervention. Take your pick,” he’d said once.
It was a clear, crisp reply to a stupid question. Yet when some days had passed, Damon asked me the same. I shrugged. “We always knew,” I said. “You don’t do mornings after, and I don’t do delusions.”
“Division of labor for the win,” Damon said, kissing me quickly to stop the conversation.
That, too, became a common theme through our nights together and our secret dates.
I didn’t mean to see him again so soon.
That was the plan, one perfect, disastrous date, and then a clean break before I remembered what Damon looked like when he was trying not to smile.
But two days later, he appeared outside my building, holding two iced coffees like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I wasn’t meeting you,” I said, taking the coffee anyway.
He grinned, slow and triumphant. “Exactly.”
After that, things blurred. There wasn’t a decision. There were just small, stupid moments that turned into habits. Damon waiting for me after class, me pretending it annoyed me, both of us pretending not to check the time when the other one didn’t show.
We weren’t dating. Dating was what normal people did. People who didn’t have brothers who could ruin everything with one glance. We were just filling time before the semester swallowed us whole. That was all.
Except, sometimes, it didn’t feel like time at all. It felt like standing still in a pocket of light, the rest of the world politely turning away.
One evening, we ended up on a sofa in his team house, half watching a preseason game, half doing whatever it was we did when pretending we weren’t together. Damon sprawled across most of the space, socked feet in my lap. He kept making commentary like a coach with a death wish.
“See that pass? That’s what happens when you let biology majors near strategy.”
“I’m a biology major,” I said.
“Exactly my point.”
I jabbed his calf, hard enough to make him flinch. He laughed without moving his eyes from the screen.
“Keep touching me like that,” he said, “and people will start thinking we like each other.”
I said, “I’d rather die,” but I didn’t push his feet away.
The next morning, sunlight sliced through his blinds and found us tangled together like we hadn’t moved all night. I woke first. The room smelled like coffee grounds and Damon’s shampoo. His roommate had been nice enough to surrender the room to Damon.
I told myself I should leave before he woke up. That’s how it should have worked. I’d go, he’d text later, we’d start the loop again. But there was a mug on the nightstand already, mine, not his, with steam curling from the rim.
A sticky note clung to the handle.
Drink this before you overthink. D.
I hated how well he knew me.
I drank the coffee anyway.
Later that week, we found ourselves in the campus gardens after dark. He’d stolen one of the forbidden pathway lanterns from the fence and carried it around like we were in some sort of fairy-tale trespass.
“Walk this way,” he said and hunched, dragging one leg after him like Igor from Young Frankenstein, and laughter burst from me so quickly that I scared the owls.
“This is definitely illegal,” I said.
“So’s everything that feels good,” he answered.
He crouched to set the lantern down between us. The light painted him gold again, the same shade as that night outside the restaurant. He looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to memorize something.
I told myself to look away. I didn’t.
Sometimes we fought about nothing. I accused him of being reckless. He accused me of being afraid. We both won, which meant we both lost.
After every argument, he’d appear with something strange: a tiny framed photo of a dead moth, a pressed leaf sealed in glass, a fortune cookie note that read better luck next time. He claimed he found them all by accident. I knew he was lying, but I liked the lie. It was almost tender.
The night it rained, we stayed in at my place after Silas announced he’d stay out.
Damon cooked, if you could call it that, something with noodles and too much garlic.
Kissing was impossible afterward. The window fogged, thunder rolling somewhere far off, and he wore an apron that made me feel things no apron ever should evoke.
He leaned against the counter, watching me eat straight from the pan.
“You’re impossible,” he said.
“You’re the one who keeps coming.”
“Correction,” he said. “I come for trouble.” He smiled, that low, knowing curve of his mouth that always made it hard to breathe. “You’re cute when you pretend you don’t want me here.”
I set the pan down, walked over, and kissed him until the storm drowned the rest of the world out.
If anyone asked, we were still nothing.
Not friends. Not lovers. Not anything that needed to survive daylight.
But his jacket was hanging on my chair now, and my toothbrush was in his bathroom, and every time he touched me, it felt less like a mistake and more like a confession neither of us wanted to say aloud.
I told myself it was doomed, that love stories like ours burned out fast.
Then I looked at him, laughing, alive, and warm, and thought maybe the burning was the point.
And whenever I saw Nick for lunch or coffee or the movies, the heat of Damon’s kisses lingered on my lips, and my heart cracked a little more.