CHAPTER 147: FIRST LOVE

–Laura–

I had never expected Damon to go to such lengths. The restaurant where we’d had our first date — the one I’d assumed would have been swallowed by time or bulldozed into memory after more than a decade — sat before us as if frozen in a gilded frame: lacquered wood, a tinkling fountain, a shallow pond where koi circled like lazy moons. The scent of warmed soy and toasted sesame lifted from the entrance and made my chest contract in a way I pretended not to feel.

The food, when it arrived, was exactly as I remembered and more: the salmon sashimi glimmering with a careful brush of soy, the uni melting like dusk on the tongue. They had refined their menu, added small, brilliant inventions that tasted like someone had rewritten an old love letter and made every word truer.

"Can we take this out?" I asked.

"Babe, the chef said it’s not safe to eat the salmon raw right now," Damien said, half apologetic, half amused.

"Hmm. Then have Chef Wally take up the recipe," I replied lightly. I felt the urge to tease, to find purchase in the frivolous. He suggested we could visit anytime.

We could afford it every day, of course. Damon had friends in many places — and pockets deep enough to tuck whole neighborhoods away. Rumor had it the original founder’s restaurant had several branches now, all floated on Damon’s investments; he’d kept the founder’s name, perhaps as a kindness, perhaps as a ledger trick to keep his wealth off certain ledgers. I kept that detail close to my chest; it was the kind of thing that made the world around him hum with invisible gears.

"You can’t eat anything raw," I heard Damien tell his wife. I watched his gesture, the small wave of his hand toward the staff; I can see his movements, but only as a blind woman would — pieces of a picture rather than the entire painting, a map without a scale. I was still pretending to be blind, and the pretense had become an elegant habit.

"Don’t serve that lady anything rare," Damon told the chef. The Japanese man — Mr. Kimura, founder and fixture — bowed with the formality of a prayer. He looked unchanged, as though the years had only polished him.

If the gesture warmed me, I buried that warmth where the world could not easily spot it. I had always preferred to be an iceberg with a temperate smile.

We ate everything they placed before us. Waste sits poorly with me; it feels like throwing away decisions, and I am miserly with both food and decisions. After the courses dwindled into the soft silence that follows good things, Damon introduced me to Mr. Kimura in halting, earnest English. The older man offered his speech in Nihongo, precise and formal.

"Blackwell-sama, go shokuji o o-tanoshimi itadakimashite, makoto ni kōei de gozaimasu. Kon’ya, o-tsukae dekita koto wa watashitachi no yorokobi de gozaimashita."

His voice was a ribbon of reverence. I answered in the same measured language because manners are a currency I keep hoarded in my mouth.

"Hontō ni, dono ryōri mo subarashikute tanoshimemashita. Tokuni, sāmon no sushi to uni wa zettai ni utsukushiku, sugurete orimashita. Also, please send my regards to your staff."

The man bowed again, smaller this time, then passed the takeout containers to his assistant with a flourish. "Here are the takeouts that Laura-sama ordered," he announced, the honorific settling over his words like a cloth.

"Thank you so much," I said, cheerfully, and meant it. Small pleasantries are maps to people’s hearts if you learn to read them like I have.

They escorted us out with a synchronized bow — a chorus of ritual I felt in my bones more than my eyes. Damon guided me toward the car, the motion sure and private.

"How about a movie date night?" he asked me.

"Oh, we are going," Laura said.

Damien — always the one to comment when he could — muttered, "I think it’s time we stopped stalking them."

I remembered someone, years ago, watching us from the lacquered window while I had first approached Damon. Back then, nothing had happened: no kisses, no longing confessions, no gentle tethers of touch. He had restrained himself. Restraint suits certain men; it is a muscle they enjoy flexing.

That evening was casual as folding paper: no hands entwined, no kissing, no clumsy hugs — only Damon and me moving through the world as if we were two polite boats that had once brushed and fared well. His restraint was a kind of performance, and watching him perform always gives me pleasure.

We returned to our usual rhythms after the meal, the domestic choreography of people who own the same space. Morning came with the soft insistence of chores and obligations. He approached me with flowers. I refused them with the practiced softness of a woman who knows her face and keeps it for colder days. Laura — that eager, meddlesome thing Damon’s friends had bundled together for my benefit — took the flowers from him and tried, with a conspirator’s optimism, to match me with the man who had been a curiosity and then a nuisance and finally, perhaps, a steady heat.

I do not want that boy, I remember telling myself then. He was handsome, attractive in the casual way danger is attractive: sharp edges, bright teeth. He was reckless, maybe. But one small, obscene kindness he had performed altered my calculation: he’d cleaned the corpse I had left for the world to find. He’d scrubbed the evidence with the perfection of someone who liked things tidy.

"Let’s go home. I want to sleep," Logan complained, and Damien — pragmatic where Damon is dramatic — agreed.

"Movies? Like in the cinema?" I asked, testing, curious in ways I would not confess aloud.

"Yeah. I think you haven’t tried it yet?"

"Hmm."

He knew me well, knew the patterns my curiosity liked to walk. He led me to the car and made sure I was buckled — a small insistence that says more than talk usually does. He walked around to the driver’s seat with the kind of economy that always made me consider the angles of a man like one considers a set of knives.

I thought him irrepressibly sexy. My thoughts, private and predatory, imagined a night where we would make love with the desperate fertility of rabbits until the world obliged me with the one thing plans and experiments sometimes cannot deliver: a body that belongs to both of us.

He opened the door and settled. "Alright, love. Are you ready?"

"For what?"

"Oh, damn, I forgot," he laughed, and I saw the kind of beginning that’s only ever saved by charm.

"Maybe I can undergo surgery after I get pregnant," I said suddenly, letting the words fall like a test stone.

"Hmm. Okay. So you enjoy lovemaking when you can’t see anything?"

I smirked up at him, the expression a small blade I kept sharp.

"Isn’t it usually more thrilling during sex?" I teased.

He turned the car calmly and drove with the patience of someone willing to circle the same block an hour for a smile. "Yes, it is."

"So, do you always do that? Whenever you’ve been with someone before us?" I asked, tailoring my curiosity into a neat little needle aimed at him.

"No," he answered. "Those women were not up to par with you. Don’t be jealous, alright?"

"What are you talking about? I’m not jealous. I’m curious."

He chuckled — a sound like a lock being turned. "I want you to be jealous. I want you to be crazy."

His hand found my lap and squeezed, a soft, possessive punctuation. I swatted him away, more in performance than in anger.

"What are we watching?" I asked.

"Up for horror?"

I laughed and shook my head. "Those don’t scare me."

"But those scare me," he protested. He reached for my left hand and lifted it to his lips in a move so practiced it read like a liturgy. I felt the warmth of him there — precise, intimate.

We drove under streetlights like a procession of amber teeth. I kept my blind act as careful as a prayer; sometimes it slips, and small truths leak out of the corners like water. Tonight I let a little leak. I allowed his hand to return to mine and rest.

The rest of the world receded into a quiet I preferred: the hum of the car, the measured cadence of his breathing, the occasional muffled gasps of other passengers as trailers unspooled across the cinema screen. I pretend not to see, but I keep everything in my mind’s eye like a ledger: the tilt of his jaw, the quick, precise hands that clean away mistakes; the way he is kind when it costs him nothing, and ruthless when it costs everything.

When the film played, I let the darkness do what darkness does — make omissions seem like design, and designs feel like fate. Damon’s shoulder pressed against mine once or twice, and I let those touches collect like little daily deposits.

I do not know yet if I will have the second surgery with Dr. Anderssen. I do not know if I want to see him for what he is, with all the small imperfections that sight reveals. For now, pretending to be blind is a game I like to play: it gives me leverage, it gives me mystery, and it keeps him close enough to study without being obvious about what I study. I have always been fond of good experiments. This one, so far, tastes very sweet.