Five Years Ago
It started as a bet.
Damien had a chess set in his apartment the way he had most things: deliberately chosen, never decorative. Dark wood, heavy pieces, the kind of board that had been used rather than displayed. I had noticed it on the shelf for weeks and said nothing about it because I was twenty-one and still in the phase of pretending I was less curious about him than I was.
That Friday night he caught me looking at it.
Do you play?
A little.
A little meant I had not played since my father taught me at age nine and I remembered almost none of it. I did not say this.
I'll go easy on you," he said.
Please don't," I said.
Something shifted in his face. That quiet thing, not quite a smile, that I had learned to read as the closest he usually got to one. He set the board on the coffee table, opened a bottle of red wine, and looked at me.
Every piece you lose," he said, "you drink.
And when you lose pieces?
I won't.
I should have walked away from that table immediately.
I did not walk away from that table.
He was not lying about being good. Damien played chess the way he did everything: with complete patience and zero mercy. He did not rush. He did not make dramatic moves. He simply waited, and thought, and then placed a piece with the quiet certainty of someone who had already seen six moves ahead and was only now letting you catch up.
I lost my first pawn inside four minutes.
I drank.
I lost a bishop seven minutes after that.
I drank again.
By the time he took my second rook I had abandoned any pretense of strategy and was simply moving pieces and hoping, which is not a chess technique that works against Damien Cole, and which he found visibly, quietly, deeply amusing in that way he had of being amused without letting it reach his face.
You said a little," he observed.
I am playing a little. A little badly.
Drink.
I drank.
We were an hour in and I had lost count of the wine and he had lost nothing and the board between us looked like a very one-sided war, which it was, and I was sitting cross-legged on his sofa with my shoes off and my hair falling out of its pin and genuinely not caring about any of it.
That was the thing about being drunk in Damien Cole's apartment. It made everything feel very simple. Like the city outside was far away and the board between us was the whole world and nothing bad had ever happened or was going to.
He took my queen at the two hour mark.
I stared at the board for a long moment.
That was my favorite piece.
She fought well.
She deserved better than this.
Drink, Elena.
I drank. I set the glass down. I looked at him across the board, at the careful blankness of his face that I had spent two years learning to read underneath, and the wine made everything louder and closer and I said it before I had decided to say it.
I love you.
The room went very still.
Damien looked at me. He did not move. Did not speak. The chess board sat between us with its ruined landscape of my losses and he just looked at me with those steel-grey eyes and something I had never fully seen in them before came to the surface slowly, the way things rise in deep water.
You're drunk," he said. Quietly.
I am," I agreed. "I'm also not lying. Those two things can both be true.
Another silence. Longer. He reached across the board and set his king down on its side, the chess signal for surrender, which he had not needed to do because he had already won, which meant he was doing it for a different reason.
Then he stood up and came around the table and sat beside me on the sofa, close enough that his arm was against mine, and he looked straight ahead at the board for a moment before he turned and looked at me.
Say it again," he said. Low. Like it cost him.
I looked at him. At that face that gave away nothing to anyone else and was, in this moment, giving away everything to me.
I love you," I said. "And I am not going to stop. So you should probably decide what you want to do about that.
He did not answer with words.
He lifted his hand and pushed the hair back from my face in that careful, deliberate way he had, like he was allowing himself something he had been holding back for a long time, and then he said my name once, quietly, Elena, just my name, and kissed me.
It was the first time either of us had said what we were. The first time it had a name.
I fell asleep on his sofa with the chess board still on the table and the city lights coming through the window and his jacket over my shoulders because the apartment was cold and he had noticed before I did.
I did not know, falling asleep, that tomorrow night would be the last night I ever felt safe in this city. I did not know that Raymond Cole, Damien's estranged father, the man who had built the dark foundation this empire stood on before handing it to his son, had been watching me for weeks. That he had already decided I was a liability. That he had already arranged the parking garage, the meeting, the specific and terrible choice he was going to put in front of me.
I only knew that I had said I love you and meant it and that Damien had laid his king down and pulled me close and that the city outside the window was lit up and enormous and full of possibility. I only knew that I was happy.
I would not know, until much later, what it costs to be happy in the wrong city at the wrong time with the wrong man's father watching from the dark.