There was a version of Damian I only saw at night, once the gentleness had done its work and something older underneath it was finally allowed off its leash.
It happened for the first time on a night in late November, in the guesthouse two towns over, when I made the mistake, the wonderful, terrifying mistake, of teasing him about how carefully, how endlessly patiently, he always undressed me, as though I might shatter.
“Careful,” he said, low, from where he stood at the end of the bed, watching me with an intensity that made me feel suddenly, deliciously exposed. “You don’t actually want to find out what happens when I stop being careful.”
“Maybe I do,” I said, before I could think better of it.
Something shifted in his face, the last of the gentleness folding away like a coat he’d decided he no longer needed, and in the space of one unsteady heartbeat he was over me, one hand closing firm around both my wrists and pinning them above my head against the pillow, not hard enough to hurt, but with an absolute, immovable certainty that told me exactly how little effort it was costing him.
“Say it again,” he murmured against my throat, his voice gone rough at the edges. “Tell me you want to find out.”
My pulse was hammering somewhere I could feel in my whole body. I had never, not once in my life, felt so completely and thoroughly caught, the way a doe must feel in the half-second before it understands the lion has already decided the chase is over.
“I want to find out,” I said, and heard my own voice shake.
He made a low sound against my skin that wasn’t quite human, and after that there was very little gentleness left in him at all, only a slow, deliberate command that took my breath away as thoroughly as it took my choice, his mouth and his hands moving with a certainty that left no question of who was setting the pace, who was allowed to beg and who got to decide when begging was answered. He held my wrists the entire time, effortless, unhurried, murmuring instructions against my ear in a voice gone dark and rough, don’t move, not yet, good girl, that undid something in me faster than any touch alone could have managed.
When he finally let me go, it was only to flip me beneath him with an ease that stole what was left of my breath, his hands framing my hips like he intended to memorise the shape of them, and the rhythm he set after that had nothing careful left in it, deep, deliberate, relentless, a claiming rather than a question, until the whole room narrowed down to his voice at my ear and the overwhelming, consuming pressure of being wanted by someone who seemed to have spent a lifetime learning exactly how to want.
I came apart twice before he allowed himself to, and when he finally did, it was with my name torn out of him like something he’d been holding back for far longer than the few hours we’d had together.
Afterward, he gathered me against his chest with a tenderness so complete it was almost disorienting, given what had come before, the lion folding back down into something that simply held me, stroking slow circles against my spine while my heart rate found its way home.
“I frightened you,” he said quietly, into my hair. It wasn’t quite a question.
“No.” I pressed closer, breathing him in. “You just reminded me there’s a whole side of you I haven’t met yet.”
He went very still at that, and I felt him press a kiss to the top of my head, careful again, gentle again, but I understood, by then, that the gentleness was a choice he made every single time, and that underneath it there would always be something far older and far more dangerous than the boy I thought I knew, patiently, deliberately, choosing me instead.
I fell asleep telling myself that should have frightened me more than it did.