It happened on our ninth night in Rome, not long after midnight, somewhere in the middle of the trip when I’d stopped counting days and started simply living inside them, a phone I hadn’t even known he’d brought with him lighting up on the nightstand with no name attached to the number.
He was out of bed before it finished its first ring, already dressed by the time he answered it in a language I didn’t recognize, low and fast, all consonants, standing at the window with his back to me like he’d forgotten I was there at all.
“Chi te l’ha detto.” Then something else, faster. Then a long silence, listening, his shoulders going rigid in a way I’d only seen once before, in a pool block, the last time I’d watched him turn into something other than a man.
“Damian?”
He held up a hand without turning around, finished the call in three clipped words, and stood there a moment longer with the phone still pressed to his ear after whoever it was had already hung up.
“I have to go out for a while.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know.” He was already pulling on his shoes, moving with the particular controlled speed of a man trying very hard not to look like he was hurrying. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. Old business. Someone I used to know, asking for a favor I’d rather not owe.”
“Damian, you can’t just, someone I used to know, and walk out the door at midnight and call that an explanation.”
He stopped at the bedroom door, and for a second I saw something in his face I hadn’t seen, ever, a fear older than his existence. Something I didn’t dare to question.
“There are people from before,” he said carefully, “who don’t let go of things easily. I thought I’d put enough distance between myself and Rome that it wouldn’t matter, coming back here with you. I was wrong. I’ll explain everything I can when I get back. Please don’t wait up.”
He was back before Noah woke, showered, dressed, sitting at the kitchen table with coffee he wasn’t drinking like he’d never left at all, except for the faint shadow under his eyes and a tension in his jaw that didn’t fully leave for two more days, no matter how many times I asked, and no matter how many times he told me, gently but absolutely finally, that it wasn’t something we needed to discuss on this trip.
I let it go. I told myself it was one thread among many I hadn’t pulled yet, and that Rome had already given me more honesty in a week and a half than all our months in Glenfrost had managed. I didn’t yet understand that some threads, left alone long enough, have a way of finding you again whether you go looking for them or not.
He saved the last three days for an island I couldn’t find on any map Noah and I looked at together, a private stretch of rock and pine trees off the Amalfi coast that belonged, unsurprisingly, to a company whose name traced back, through several careful layers, to him.
Noah went first, ahead of us both, delighted to discover the island came with a caretaker’s teenage son who was willing to spend an entire afternoon teaching him to identify fish from the end of the jetty. It left Damian and me alone on a terrace overlooking water so clear it looked painted on, for the first real stretch of time since the night in the pool block, since the fangs and the blood and the five hundred years, that we’d had nothing and no one to think about except each other, and since the two a.m. phone call neither of us had mentioned again.
I noticed, once we were finally alone, how careful I’d been being without meaning to. Small things. Not quite meeting his eyes when they went dark. Flinching, just slightly, at the particular stillness that came over him sometimes when he forgot to breathe for effect. I hadn’t let myself see it until that terrace, golden light coming in low over the water, but some part of me had been holding him at a careful arm’s length for months, the way you’d hold anything you’d watched change shape in front of you once, waiting, without meaning to, for it to happen again.
“You’re doing it again,” he said, echoing my own words back at me, gently. “Being careful with me.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“I know.” He took my hand, turned it over, pressed his mouth to the center of my palm the way he had on the plane out. “I’d rather you were afraid of me and told me so than pretend you’re not. But I don’t think that’s actually what this is. I think you’re afraid of wanting all of me, the parts you’ve seen and the parts you haven’t, and I think some part of you is still waiting for me to turn out to be something you can’t survive loving.”
“And if I am?”
“Then let me prove you wrong. Slowly. As many times as it takes.”
He stood, and pulled me up with him, and walked me backward into the bedroom with a deliberateness that had nothing hurried in it at all, closing the door on the sound of the water and Noah’s distant, delighted shouting from the jetty like he was closing it on the whole rest of the world.
“Tell me if you want to stop,” he said, the same words from the couch in October, except his voice had none of the careful lightness it had carried then. This was lower. Slower. A voice that had already decided how the whole night was going to go and was simply, patiently, waiting for me to catch up to it.
“I don’t want to stop.”
“Good.” His hand found the back of my neck, tilting my head exactly where he wanted it, and when he kissed me it wasn’t careful at all, not in the way I’d been bracing for, not gentle enough to let me keep hiding behind my own caution. It was thorough. Claiming. His mouth moved down my throat with a slowness that felt less like restraint now and more like a promise, teeth grazing skin just hard enough to make my whole body go still and wanting, and I felt, rather than heard, the low sound he made against my collarbone when I stopped flinching and arched into it instead.
“There she is,” he murmured, and I understood, dimly, through the haze of it, that some part of him had been waiting months for exactly this, for me to stop watching him like a threat and start touching him like he was simply, entirely mine.
He undressed me the way he had the very first time, unhurried, deliberate, but there was nothing tentative left in it now, no careful testing to see how far I’d let him go. His hands knew every inch of me by now and used that knowledge without apology, and when he finally laid me back against the sheets and settled his weight over me, forehead to forehead, both of us breathing hard, he held there a long moment just looking at me, like he needed me to see, before anything else happened, that I was choosing this with my eyes open.
“All of me,” he said quietly. “Tell me you understand what you’re choosing.”
“All of you,” I said, and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything, and felt something in him finally, fully let go.
What followed had none of the careful holding-back of the nights when I thought he was human. He took his time and took it thoroughly, reading every catch of my breath like instruction, and when I finally broke apart under him it was with his name and nothing else, no fear left anywhere in my body for him to be careful of, only the two of us and the light turning gold outside the window.
We lay tangled together afterward, with the particular satisfaction of finally having stopped being careful with each other, until a guilty jolt reminded me exactly who else was on the island.
“Noah,” I said, sitting bolt upright, and Damian was already up and reaching for my discarded clothes, grinning in a way that made him look, for one unguarded second, exactly as young as everyone in Glenfrost still assumed he was.
We found him and the caretaker’s son down at the little crescent of beach below the terrace, both of them soaked to the skin and mid-argument over the rules of a game that seemed to be one part volleyball and two parts making it up as they went. Damian waded straight in without bothering to roll up his trousers, and spent the next hour being pelted mercilessly by a beach ball wielded by a delighted Noah, who had clearly been waiting all week for a third player, while I sat in the shallows and watched the two of them, salt-bright and shrieking with laughter, and thought that whatever else was true about the man in the water, this, at least, was entirely and simply good.
It was only that evening, once Noah had been fed, sunburnt, and put to bed still smelling of the sea, that Damian finally said the rest of it, both of us out on the terrace with the moonlight glistening over the water.
“Blood,” he said, quietly, watching the horizon rather than me. “That’s what I need. What I feed on. But you already know that I drink blood. I’ve just never said it to you plainly before, without leaving myself an exit.”
I turned to look at him. “Whose?”
“Animals, mostly, these days, when I can manage it. It’s not enough, not really, not the way it should be, but it’s enough to get by decently, and decently is a great deal better than what I used to settle for.” His hand moved closed around my waist as he hugged me from behind, breathing the scent of my hair. “Human blood, when I take it, I take it carefully. Consensually, where I can manage that too, from people who want to give it, who find the whole thing intoxicating rather than frightening. I don’t kill for it. I haven’t killed for it in centuries.”
“And that call, the other night,” I said. “Was that about blood too? About feeding?”
He was quiet a moment too long. “It was about someone from before,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you the rest when I understand it better myself. I promise you that’s not me hiding it from you the way I hid the rest. I genuinely don’t know yet what it means.”
I let it rest there, the sea dark below us, with nothing else between us but the truth he had given me freely, and told myself the rest would come when it was ready, the way this had.