Damon

by Vanessa Hawkes

  Chester let out a hard breath and dropped a fist to the desk. “Enough of this. I’d rather you get to know David, or Damon, or whatever he wants to call himself, a little better before you go running off with him. He’s got some bad stuff in his past and we don’t know yet how he’s dealing with it. I’m not getting a call saying you’re in the same shape as his mom. That’s all I’ve got to say about it. You’re not leaving town with that boy. I want you back in here tomorrow morning safe and sound.”

  I gestured to the mess on his desk. “Is there anything I can do to help with all this?”

  “No, there’s no speeding this up. The surgery takes as long as it takes. You can help Bella close up. I’ll be staying late.”

  He put his glasses back on and focused on his taxes. His way of telling me to leave him alone.

  So, I did.

  Chester wasn’t my father, or my grandfather, but still, I wasn’t about to disobey him. He and his group, made up of my grandparents, Corky and Mrs. Jarvis, had always been like a family. I didn’t know the details about what had happened in Knoxville, but I did know they’d all decided to up and move to Polar at the same time, together. And of that group, it had always been accepted that Chester was the patriarch. The leader. The one with the final word. I’d been raised to believe that and I couldn’t turn my back on that belief now.

  I was disappointed, but just scared enough to feel relieved I’d talked to Chester and Bella, the only two people left on Earth I trusted with my life, and my safety.

  I helped Bella close up, then headed home, a little worried about leaving Damon alone with my mother, now that I knew what I knew about him, his father, his grandmother, and his life in general.

  He’d confessed to having done something to get himself thrown into a ‘place.’ He hadn’t admitted what he’d done, but it had to have been something bad, odd, or at least illegal. I intended to find out more about this man living in my house.

  And until then, I wasn’t going anywhere with him.

  ***

  As always, I entered the house holding my breath until I could take a good look around.

  Everything seemed all right, except that I couldn’t find anyone. Damon’s car was parked out front, but he wasn’t in the house… and neither was Mama!

  I ran out the back door and stopped abruptly when I saw her sitting in the gazebo, painting one of her pictures. Damon was high up on a ladder, scraping paint off the siding.

  The scene before me was so calm and logical for a moment I couldn’t grasp the meaning. Then I realized that Mama was sitting outside enjoying a pretty evening, content with her picture, and Damon was working on the house just as he’d promised he would.

  Everything was just fine.

  “Hey!” Damon called when he saw me. He headed down the ladder.

  “Magic,” Mama called, “come look at my tiger.”

  I stopped to give Damon the kiss he wanted, then went to look at Mama’s picture.

  That was when I realized what had actually been bothering me since lunch. And it had nothing, really, to do with the lies he’d told or his father being a murderer.

  I felt married.

  Damon had a way of making me feel trapped, and after knowing him for only two days. What would life with him be like in a year?

  I looked at him and noticed that his chin seemed a little too ridged, and his nose was too long. His eyes were angled way too far outward. Plus, he had a bad habit of licking his bottom lip excessively. Watching him do it was almost sickening.

  Jaynie had been right. I couldn’t see this one lasting as long as a month.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After supper, we left Mama cozy in her chair in the living room watching TV and went into Gram’s old bedroom - Damon’s room now, which bugged me a little. I could barely remember the last time I’d seen this room look like a bedroom, or seem so large. He must have spent a good two hours cleaning.

  He had the bed made with one of Grammy’s old quilts. I wasn’t particularly happy about that, either. I kept her quilts in a cedar chest so they wouldn’t suffer from wear and moths. She had made every one of them herself and very little of her things had survived Mama’s rampages. I often thought, at least I have her quilts.

  Damon lifted a bottle of wine from a sack under the bed as covertly as if he’d scored some drugs. “Shut the door,” he whispered.

  I did, then walked wide of the bed. The feeling that I was making a mistake with him hadn’t faded, and I felt uncomfortable being alone with him.

  “Come over here,” he said.

  He sat on the bed, holding a boot box in his lap. I sat on the bed, putting my crossed legs between us. “What’s that?”

  Damon took a deep breath as if struggling with his patience. “I’ll tell you what’s in the box if you’ll tell me what’s going on.” His tone was serious.

  “What do you mean?”

  He glanced at me with a wounded expression. “You don’t like me anymore. I can see it in your eyes.”

  I’d been thinking all evening how to bring up the new information I’d learned, but I was worried about his reaction. I didn’t know him very well. Certainly not well enough to predict how he would react if I told him I knew his father had murdered his mother. That his father was in a psychiatric prison of some sort, not just a hospital. That his grandmother had committed suicide. Or even that he’d been lying about his real name.

  I decided to play it safe. I didn’t want to end up like his mother.

  “I can’t go to Knoxville,” I told him. “Chester said I have to work.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, frowning at me. “But that’s not it. It’s something else. I can feel it.”

  I fell back on the mattress with a groan and stared at the molded ceiling. I’d never noticed that the ceiling in here was different from the rest of the house. The room must have been added on after the original house was built.

  Damon’s distorted face blocked my view. He was waiting for an answer.

  “It just seems like everything in my life has been turned upside down since you came here.”

  “All right,” he said. His face moved away.

  “All right?”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. “Except leave.”

  I sat up. “You’re leaving?” Now I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to leave or stay.

  “I’m not leaving.” He took his eyes off the box to frown at me. “I’m not a piece of furniture. When I come into your life, there will be complications. I can’t help that. I’m a human being. More or less.”

  “More or less?”

  He set the box aside, turned to me, and pulled me down on the mattress with him. We lay there on our sides, staring at each other. He brushed my hair out of my eyes, and then kept his hands to himself.

  “I’m in your face,” he said gently, “that’s what it is. I barged in.”

  “Well….”

  Suddenly, lying with him on the bed where I could feel his warmth and energy, I wanted to touch him again. His eyes truly were beautiful. And his lips… when he flicked his bottom lip with his tongue my own lip tingled.

  “It’s about this afternoon when I told you how I feel,” he said. “That scared you.”

  “Well….”

  “It feels like I’m stuck to you now, and you can’t scrape me off. You’re afraid I’m going to ask you to marry me. Or worse, just take over your house and run your life. You think I’m manipulative, and maybe I only said I love you to try to bend you to my will. Or maybe I’m just evil and I’m trying to get you fired, screw up your life and rob you blind before I take off to do it to somebody else.”

  Frankly, I hadn’t thought of any of those things. Until now. I sat up, a little alarmed. “Well—”

  “I’ll be straight with you,” he interrupted, sitting up. “I’ll show you why I’m here. Then you’ll either trust me or kick me out.”

  “Okay. Good.” Yeah, this was what I needed, some
thing solid to focus on. A decision based on physical evidence. Not pesky little emotions that ran crazy like tripped-out mice in a cage.

  I sat up and got comfy to listen. He sat cross-legged in front of me, then grabbed me beneath the knees and slid me closer.

  “Okay,” he said. “About a year before my granddad died he started acting really suspicious. I knew he was hiding something but I couldn’t find out anything until after he’d died.”

  “Really? What did you find out?”

  Damon stopped, apparently liking my interest, and smiled at me. He pulled my head closer and gave me a heated kiss, with parted lips, tongues and moisture. A kiss that would have led to much more if he hadn’t pulled back.

  He cleared his throat, gave me a wicked half-smile, and continued. “The month before he died he put a box in his trunk and brought it here to Polar. I lost him when some idiot pulling a horse trailer turned right out in front of me. By the time I got around it, Granddad had turned off and I couldn’t find him. When I got home he was already back and the box was gone.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You followed your granddad here? Without him knowing?”

  Damon nodded, waiting for my point.

  “Why didn’t you just ask him what he was doing?”

  “Because he was trying to outfox me.”

  I was a little amused. “You really do think you have the right to know everybody’s business, don’t you?”

  “This is important,” he told me sternly. “I found the box.”

  “You did?” Now I was guilty of being a busybody, but I didn’t care. I was curious. “Where was it?” I nodded to the box on his lap. “Is that it?”

  “This? No,” he said. “This is some of the stuff I found down in your cellar. Granddad’s box was in the drugstore.”

  “He gave it to Chester?” Now I was anxiously curious. “They said they’d lost touch with your granddad. How did you get it?”

  “I found it upstairs, in the back of a cabinet.”

  “In the storeroom? When?” I wanted to see this box. I’d been in the storeroom a thousand times and hadn’t noticed anything special.

  “Today,” he said. “After I saw the drugstore owner was in the picture.”

  “Wait. You came back after lunch? Why didn’t I see you?”

  “I came in the back when nobody was looking.”

  Before he could finish speaking, I gasped in surprise. “That’s what was in the locked cabinet. You picked the lock.”

  “How else could I get in?” he said.

  “You’re unbelievable. That’s why you broke into my house, and wanted to see Corky’s house. To find the box. Not to remember your childhood.”

  Not because you were interested in me.

  “I’m not a machine, Maggie,” he said, passion growing in his tone. “I wanted to find the box, but I also wanted to remember my past, and I wanted to get to know you. I also wanted to leave home and do something new.” He tapped his head. “I’ve got all sorts of things going on in here.”

  “I can see that,” I said dryly.

  He licked his lips and stared at me intently. “So what’s the verdict?”

  “About what?”

  “Are you going to relax or kick me out?”

  “Well… I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this means. So you came here to find a box. How does that make me trust you?”

  “Because I told you the truth. Now I’m not hiding any secrets.”

  “Really?” I could overlook the secrets about his murdered mother and murdering father. I wouldn’t have wanted to talk about that. Especially to someone I’d just met. But, he still hadn’t told me his real name. Then again, I hadn’t been exactly honest about my real name, either. “So what was in the box?”

  “Wait,” he said. He reached for the wine bottle and the two juice glasses he’d brought from the kitchen. “This first.”

  “Maaagggic,” my mother wailed from the living room.

  I jumped up automatically and pressed my lips together. “Be right back.”

  Mama had lost the remote control and while I searched for it, Damon was up to something. He walked through the living room, wiggling eyebrows at me over a serious face, and went out the backdoor. When he returned barely a minute later, he kept his hand behind his back and wouldn’t look at me.

  I found the remote under Mama’s chair, brought her another cup of raspberry tea and a shortbread cookie, then hurried back to Damon’s room.

  “What are you up to?” I immediately asked. But he wasn’t in the room. His front door to the porch was open, leaving only the warped screen door protecting my grandmother’s quilt from the moths dancing around the porch light.

  I followed him outside.

  “Kick off the light,” he said.

  I turned off the light and shut the wood door.

  Damon sat in one of my white wicker rocking chairs. I sat in the other. It was the perfect night to sit outside. Unseasonably warm with a light, fragrant breeze. The birds weren’t ready for bed yet and continued to sing to one another. I could almost hear the fountain I might afford now that I didn’t have to pay to have the house painted.

  The sound was Damon pouring red wine. He held the glass out toward the streetlight as if examining its color, then handed me the glass. He relaxed back to rock and enjoy the evening. Absently, he reached over and held my hand.

  I leaned my head back, closed my eyes and let out a long breath, releasing all the tension of the day. If ever a scene should have herded my thoughts toward the frights of marriage, it should have been this scene of the two of us rocking on the porch, listening to the birds and sipping wine like an old married couple. Yet, somehow, on a night such as this I couldn’t imagine anything unpleasant.

  “What happened to your dad?” he asked after a while.

  Even such an intruding question didn’t disturb the peace of the evening. I’d given up being sensitive on that issue long ago. And I’d planned to ask him about his own father, eventually. “He never existed.”

  “No?”

  “Mama doesn’t have a clue.”

  “No idea?”

  I thought back to my early teenage years when I’d grown curious, and had realized I’d have to give up on the idea of a father, forever. It only hurt a little bit anymore. “Not even a first name. Her memory is really warped. By the time they noticed she was pregnant, she’d forgotten the event. But she used to go out to bars.”

  “I don’t know which is worse,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  He imitated me, sliding down in the chair to lean his head back. “My dad’s mind is so fried he doesn’t know where he is. No sense of reality. He’s gone for good.”

  I realized then why Damon was so comfortable around my mother. He’d grown up the same way I had. Except, thankfully, my mother had never killed anyone. That I knew of. Not that she hadn’t tried a couple of times.

  “That’s pretty weird, don’t you think?” I said. “That our grandparents were such good friends and then your dad and my mom both ended up with the same rare condition?”

  That still bothered me and I hadn’t been able to get any answers out of Chester and Bella. I thought maybe Damon had a clue.

  “Try your wine,” he said instead. “It’s special.”

  I took a sip before I thought to wait and see what he meant by ‘special.’ I’d been warned time and again not to drink anything I didn’t open myself. Though, we weren’t in a bar, or at a party, and I didn’t think Damon would try to drug me since he was already getting what he wanted. Unless he wanted something I couldn’t yet imagine.

  The wine was sweet, fruity, with some underlying flavor I couldn’t identify, but liked. “It’s good. Why is it special?”

  “It’s elderberry wine. Granddad made it. I brought it from home.”

  I took another sip and decided the wine was okay. “Where is home?”

  “Nashville.”

  “You have a house th
ere or something?”

  “I did. Granddad’s place. I sold it.”

  So that explained his fancy car and ready cash. I should have wondered about that sooner, but I never seemed to focus on normal things.

  He lifted my hand and planted a firm kiss on the scar on my wrist, then traced it with his tongue, all the while keeping his eyes on me. I liked when he did things like that. Behaved in an abnormal way. I liked that he didn’t bother questioning me about my scar.

  “I asked Chester about the picture.”

  He stilled for a moment with his tongue on my wrist, then sat back, but kept hold of my hand. “And?”

  “They’d just been to a funeral. My grandparents had a son who died. A baby. That’s why they all look so weird. Grief.”

  He sighed and sat back. After a moment, he let go of my hand. “That’s not why.”

  “Why then?”

  He downed his wine and poured himself some more. Even though I’d only drunk a little of mine, he refilled my glass right to the rim. I had to take a healthy drink to keep from spilling it. A rush immediately went to my head.

  “They’re vampires,” he said.

  I almost dropped my glass, and barely managed to set it on the porch. I had to fight back a laugh. “Who? Chester and Bella? My grandmother?”

  He nodded, staring straight ahead. “And you and me. All of us. Half vampire, half werewolf.”

  “So, we’re vampwolves?”

  He grinned, nodding. “Funny.”

  I chuckled. “Or Werepires? I like that better.”

  His smile fell. “We are alien vampires.”

  I couldn’t think what to say. I had my moments of weird, no doubt about it, but I wasn’t weird enough to believe in vampires. Or vampwolves. Whatever. “What about sunlight? Why can we all walk in the sunlight?”

  He shifted his foot and almost knocked over my glass. I leaned over and picked it up again. “Real vampires aren’t sensitive to sunlight. That was made up by Hollywood.”

  I knew that. Or, I’d heard it somewhere. “So, what are real vampires?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I know they like blood. I know you like blood. Haven’t you ever wondered why?”