Six

Damien

The rain had been falling for three days straight. The storm had come out of nowhere, bringing the kind of rain with it that soaked right through your clothes. The kind of dream-like rain that filled the air with a dreary, somber sort of melancholy. One that turned the sky into an endless bruise of gray.

     It was the kind of rain that drowned the earth below in a quiet, reminiscent haze, where thoughts of the past flicker across your mind, making you wonder about life—where you would be if things had turned out differently than they had.

     When I first arrived here back in Clearwater, I thought that I would get used to it. The constant drizzle that obscured even the shadow of nightfall; the silence that seemed to linger about the town during those eerily quiet midnight hours; the way the fog seemed to swallow the town whole, slithering about the cobblestone streets like a greasy, silver serpent.

     But there was something about this particular storm that felt… different, somehow.

     It felt as if it had been waiting for something.

     Clearwater wasn’t really the kind of place one would move to willingly. Unless, like me, they felt drawn here by something. All those times that my mother used to drive me up here for the summer, she used to tell me that we were running toward a quieter, simpler kind of life. That there was nothing left for us back in Chicago, that we just needed to start over. But I could tell by the way that she had said it that she had really been the one running away from something. A past made tainted by the sin of bad decisions, the kind that warranted the sorrow of shame and self-pity.

     That was before the divorce, though. Before she had left my life for good.

     And then I’d gone and done the same exact thing that autumn of my senior year.

     I’d left my dad behind, like she had, looking for something that I couldn’t explain in a town from my past that I no longer knew or belonged to.

     The lake that Clearwater sat beside was known as Hollow Lake. Its quiet waters were shallow, and its surface would sometimes twinkle like a thousand diamonds on those rare instances when the sun was out and bright, hanging high on lazy afternoons that seemed to drag on and on. Hollow Lake was especially beautiful whenever the moon was full, as pale threads of moonlight weaved themselves along the still surface, where fireflies would dance all night long along the shoreline.

     It paints a romantic picture—especially after what I’d seen there since I returned to Clearwater—but there really wasn’t all that much here aside from Hollow Lake. Clearwater was such a quiet place, the kind of town where everyone knows everyone, where no secrets are sacred amongst gossiping teenagers and lonely wives.

     Nothing more than a scatter of houses, really, all tucked and nestled amongst a scatter of trees that all stood against the tranquil background of a marble sky. Sometimes you could even hear their branches whispering back and forth to one another, as if they, too, are sharing old town secrets.

     It was a cozy town, all around, an interesting enough place to live, one that offered bleak solitude for any wanting to escape from the pain of somewhere else, I suppose.

     However, once that initial novelty wears off, Clearwater’s only available respite is the rain and the gray and cold.

     Always the cold.

     By the time my first week back in Clearwater had come to an end, I can say with firm confidence that I had already memorized most everyone’s names.

     Everyone, that is, except for his name.

     That familiar boy from the cafe.

     The boy from my dreams.

     I hadn’t seen him again since that morning in the cafe, his image a blurred and fleeting apparition that skated across my thoughts. Sometimes, I’d find myself thinking that I could feel his presence, though. Somewhere nearby, watching me from the corner of his eye, or from the shadows across the lake.

     His image had become something strangely impossible to hold onto, a blurred and fleeting apparition that skirted around the surface of my thoughts whenever I tried to grasp it directly. The harder I strained myself reaching for the memory of him, the more elusive it became, dissolving into fragments of silver light and drifting mist. Yet the instant I stopped trying, he returned of his own accord, as vivid as the afternoon we’d first looked at one another across the little table at Marlowe’s.

     Sometimes, I thought that I could feel him there too. As though somewhere just beyond the edge of ordinary perception, another heartbeat had quietly fallen into rhythm with my own. There were moments when I’d pause halfway through washing dishes because the unmistakable certainty of another presence would settle over the room. I’d glance toward the kitchen doorway, convinced that someone stood there watching with quiet patience. Only empty shadows greeted me.

     Sometimes I would catch myself turning while walking through town, certain I’d heard footsteps matching mine from the opposite side of the street. But, again, there was never anyone there.

     Still, that feeling persisted, following me through Clearwater with remarkable gentleness. On mist-heavy mornings, I’d find myself searching the shoreline before I’d even finished my first cup of tea. The fog gathered among the pines in pale curtains, and more than once I could have sworn that a tall figure stood quietly between the trunks, watching the water.

     I’d blink, and the trees would become only trees again.

     On rainy afternoons, reflections drifted across shop windows as people passed behind me, and for the briefest instant I would mistake one of them for him; a dark coat, a familiar silhouette, the suggestion of broad shoulders disappearing around a corner. Every time I’d hurry after it, my pulse already quickening with impossible hope, I found only strangers.

     The disappointment always surprised me. I knew that it shouldn’t have, though, I didn’t know him. I couldn’t even explain why his absence mattered at all, I just knew that it did. More and more with each new passing day.

     The lake became the worst of it.

     I started walking there almost every evening without admitting to myself why. I told myself that I enjoyed the quiet and the changing colors of the sky above and I enjoyed the scent of cedar carried across the surface of the water.

     The truth was always more difficult to face.

     There was some irrational part of me that believed I might find him standing there, waiting, exactly as he had waited in my dreams.

     I would linger long after twilight surrendered to darkness, watching the mist drift over the black water while every distant movement stole my attention. A heron lifting into flight. Branches swaying. The shifting outline of reeds. And each time my heart would leap before reason gently reminded it that birds were only birds, and that shadows belonged to nothing more mysterious than the approaching night.

     But I kept returning.

     His eyes haunted me the most.

     I could never remember their color with certainty, though. Sometimes I thought they had been gray, like cold steel, and other times they seemed almost silver, like pure moonlight resting upon the surface of Hollow Lake just after sunset, changing with every ripple until no single description felt true enough.

     What lingered wasn’t their color. It was the way they had looked at me, as though he’d reached the end of a very long journey and, for one impossible moment, believed that it had finally been worthwhile. 

     I had never been looked at in that way before him.

     The memory unsettled me.

     It also drew me back to it again and again.

     Then there was his smile, so restrained it scarcely seemed to exist, just a quiet lifting of pale, slender lips that never quite reached laughter.

     There had been something almost fragile about it, as though smiling had become unfamiliar after too many years spent without reason. Whenever I remembered it, an ache settled quietly inside my chest. Not because it had been beautiful—though it was—but because it had seemed so lonely; profoundly, unimaginably lonely. 

     Sometimes, lying there awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, I would close my eyes and attempt to reconstruct his face from memory.

     Dark hair falling untidily across his forehead. The gentle line of his jaw, the elegant stillness of his hands folded upon the cafe table, those pale lips of his parting just enough to ask a simple question.

     “Is this seat taken?”

     Such ordinary words.

     Why had they remained with me? Why did I hear them so clearly when so much else had already begun to fade?

     I found myself wondering ridiculous things—whether he preferred coffee or tea, and whether he walked the forest paths because he enjoyed them or because solitude had become a habit, and whether he smiled more often than he’d smiled at me; whether anyone else had ever looked into those silver, beautiful eyes of his and felt the peculiar, magnetic certainty that they’d stumbled into the middle of a story already unfolding.

     And the questions only multiplied.

     The answers never came.

     Mrs. Lane had once told me that stories had a way of finding the people that were willing to listen. I began to wonder whether people could do the same. Or, perhaps…

     Whether longing itself possessed a strange gravity, because the more I tried to dismiss him as nothing more than an unusual stranger I’d met once in a sleepy little town, in a sleepy little cafe, the more persistently he seemed to inhabit the spaces around me. 

     He appeared in reflections that vanished when I looked directly at them. And he showed up in dreams that dissolved before morning, and he was there in the hush between wind through the pines; in the silver stillness of the midnight lake.

     It became difficult to separate memory from expectation.

     And, eventually, I stopped pretending my evening walks were aimless.

     I found myself hoping.

     Hoping that somewhere, around some quiet corner of Clearwater, beneath the changing leaves or beside the dark water, I would see him again.

     Not because I understood him—I didn’t—and not because I understood what had happened between us, but because something deep within me, something much older and more alien than reason and quieter than thought, had already begun to miss someone who was, for all practical purposes, still a stranger. 

     And that realization was perhaps the most unsettling mystery of them all.

     Being the new girl in a place like Clearwater—or perhaps more accurately, the girl who had come back after disappearing for years—came with certain peculiarities. The fact that nearly everyone seemed to recognize me, or at least knew my family well enough to place me, was one of them.

     It turned out to be quite the blessing.

     Or maybe a quiet burden.

     I still hadn’t decided which.

     But I know it certainty made it a hell of a lot easier when my first day at Clearwater High finally rolled around.

     The building sat atop a gentle hill overlooking the lake, its old red brick walls softened by nearly a century of ivy and creeping moss. Unlike the towering concrete schools I’d attended back in Chicago, Clearwater High looked less like an institution and more like an old estate that had simply decided one day to become a school.

     Its tall windows reflected the gray autumn sky. Stone steps, worn down by generations of students, climbed toward heavy oak doors scarred with countless winters. Brass handles gleamed from years of use, polished by thousands of unfamiliar hands until they almost seemed to hold a kind of warmth of their own. 

     An ancient clock tower rose above the center of the building. Every hour, its bell would ring across the valley, proud and commanding, the sound reverberating far across the rooftops on the edge of the field, across the football field where the Clearwater Warlocks would play every Friday night, and it echoed through the surrounding woods, and eventually toward the lake, as all things in Clearwater tend to do.

     The entire school felt…

     Old.

     Comfortably old.

     The hallways smelled chalk dust as I made my way down them, aging books, fresh floor polish, and the lingering sweetness of cafeteria coffee. Wooden lockers lined the corridors instead of metal ones, each bearing tiny scratches, faded stickers, carved initials, and quiet evidence of lives that had long since graduated and moved elsewhere.

     Or perhaps…

     It never moved elsewhere at all.

     Sunlight, orange and dreary, poured through enormous windows that overlooked the surrounding forest. Golden maple leaves drifted endlessly beyond the glass. Sometimes I would catch myself watching them instead of listening to the teacher. 

     No one else seemed bothered.

     The teachers at Clearwater High all spoke quietly. And the students listened quietly. Even the announcements over the intercom arrived with surprising gentleness, as though nobody wished to interrupt the building’s peculiar peace.

     Back in Chicago, everything had been movement, all the time, everywhere; hallways overflowing with students, phones ringing nonstop, voices overlapping one another until individual conversation disappeared into constant noise. People were always rushing between classes with headphones pressed over their ears, backpacks bouncing against hurried shoulders, always looking ahead toward wherever they needed to be next.

     Everyone always had somewhere important to go. Everything in the city demanded urgency.

     Clearwater, in stark contrast, possessed none of that.

     Here, the students wandered rather than walked. Groups lingered together outside classroom doors even after the bell rang, finishing conversations they apparently trusted would wait for them. The teachers here all smiled patiently and pleasantly instead of hurrying them along. Nobody here ran, nobody shoved one another aside, and nobody seemed all that terribly concerned with arriving precisely on time.

     Time itself appeared willing to forgive small delays.

     The rhythm of it all unsettled me. It just felt impossible, compared to what I had been used to by then. It was like I had stepped into a place existing quietly beside the rest of the world instead of within it.

     The students here also fascinated me. Collectively, I mean. They all carried themselves with a kind of effortless familiarity, the quiet confidence of people who had grown alongside one another since childhood. They knew whose grandparents owned the apple orchard just outside of town, and they knew who always skipped fourth period to help at the marina, and which families had lived beside the lake for generations. They also knew of the many stories between them that stretched backward years before I had returned.

     Invisible threads connected everyone. I could almost see them, even.

     Lunch unfolded beneath towering oak trees surrounding the courtyard. Some students sat on old stone walls warmed faintly by afternoon sunlight, and others gathered beneath covered walkways draped in climbing ivy whose leaves had begun surrendering themselves to crimson and gold.

     Nobody seemed particularly loud. Laughter arrived in soft bursts before fading once more into comfortable conversation. Even arguments appeared strangely restrained, dissolving almost as quickly as they began. 

     The whole school reminded me of the lake: calm on the surface, and quiet enough to conceal whatever currents moved beneath.

     Sometimes I would catch people looking at me, curiously trying to figure out the New Girl’s story for themselves. A girl from chemistry smiled each morning without ever introducing herself. A boy carrying an armful of library books always nodded politely whenever we passed one another in the hallway. Teachers remembered my name almost immediately. Several of them asked after my mother with genuine warmth before remembering, almost visibly, that she was gone. Their expressions always softened afterward.

     Small towns remembered people long after they ceased walking their streets. 

     Sometimes that memory felt comforting. Other times…

     Other times it felt impossible to escape.

     The windows overlooked Hollow Lake from nearly every classroom. It was always there. A strip of silver resting quietly between dark forests. No matter where I sat, eventually my eyes found it. The teachers rarely bothered closing the curtains. Perhaps they had stopped noticing it years ago.

     I never could.

     There were moments during history or mathematics when afternoon sunlight struck the water just so, transforming its surface into polished glass.

     In those rare, beautiful moments, I found myself searching without meaning to, scanning the distant shoreline, the old docks and the trees bordering the water, and the mist gathering where the forest met the lake.

     Looking for…

     What? What was I looking for out there?

     Someone. A familiar silhouette. Dark hair. Gray eyes. A figure standing perfectly still among the pines. And each time I caught myself doing it, embarrassment warmed my face.

     He wasn’t there.

     Of course he wasn’t, though. I didn’t know what I’d even been expecting. 

     Every day, I found myself looking again.

     By the end of my first week at Clearwater High, I realized something quietly, deeply unsettling. I had stopped comparing Clearwater to Chicago. The noise, the traffic, the endless movement already felt strangely distant, like memories borrowed from someone else’s life. Instead, it was Clearwater itself that began feeling unreal. It wasn’t because anything extraordinary happened here, it was just because nothing seemed all that eager to happen at all. 

     Morning flowed gently into afternoon, and afternoon surrendered to evening without resistance. The church bells across town marked each passing hour, as did the clock in the courtyard, amber leaves drifting endlessly across the school grounds where the lake shimmered beyond the classroom windows. 

     Students laughed, gossiped and laughed some more, and teachers lectured. The seasons changed one golden leaf at a time. Everything continued on with dreamlike certainty. Some afternoons, as I wandered the quiet hallways between classes, sunlight spilling through stained-glass windows left trembling patches of color across the polished floors. Dust floated through those colored beams with such slow, deliberate grace that it almost seemed suspended outside of time.

     I’d stop walking just to watch it. No one passing me stopped to question why. Sometimes I would wonder if anyone else felt it like I did, that peculiar sensation of existing slightly outside ordinary life. As though the town had closed gently around me like the pages of an old storybook, and each passing day drew me a little farther from the world I’d left behind.

     It wasn’t frightening, not like I thought it would be, it was much softer than fear.

     A beautiful sort of melancholy. 

     But then I saw him again.

     It was a dull and dreary Tuesday morning, one that started out very much like any other that had come before it. Just as the fog thinned enough for the early sunlight to almost matter.

     He was undeniably handsome, even more so than he had been before when I’d first encountered him back at the cafe, with his masculine stature and his unwavering confidence as he walked into the classroom. Shrouded in a veil of mystery, with his thin, dark hair, and his dark, brooding eyes that seemed to absorb the pale light bleeding through the window blinds. He stood there in quiet patience, his skin as pale and gray as the morning light threading itself along his firm jaw.

     He carried something different with him this time. Something that could not be described simply as appearance. It was the way he entered a room as though he belonged there without needing anyone’s permission. And it was the way that conversations lowered around him—not because he demanded attention, but because something about him seemed to naturally draw it. He possessed a stillness that felt almost unnatural in a place filled with restless teenagers and hurried movement.

     Clearwater High was usually full of delicate, gentle noise—lockers slamming throughout the day, shoes squeaking against the old floors, laughter and conversation echoing through the hallways between classes, several voices all overlapping in endless harmony. Yet when he had stepped into the classroom, everything seemed strangely distant. 

     The teacher introduced him casually, explaining that he was new, and that he would be joining our class for the remainder of the school year. It was a simple explanation, another ordinary moment, but nothing about seeing him again felt ordinary in the slightest.

     My fingers tightened around my pen. I stared down at my notebook, pretending to read whatever words I had written there, though I hadn’t absorbed a single one of them.

     I already knew his name. That was the strange part.

     I had never learned it before Mrs. Cranston introduced him to the rest of the class, but the memory of the cafe returned with perfect clarity and I recalled the hesitation in his approach to my table, the sadness I’d seen in his gaze, and the way he had looked at me as though I was someone he had been searching for without knowing whether he would ever find me or not, and now here he was again.

     Standing at the front of my classroom, soaking in the pale morning light that filtered through the blinds behind him.

     Damien.

     The name slithered silently through my thoughts; like a dark secret of desire, like a ghostly question whispered from the lips of death, like something I had known long before I understood why. 

     He took the empty seat near the window. But of course he did, I thought, the irony of it making me smile a bit.

     The lake was glimmering in the distance beyond the glass beside him, silver beneath the cloudy sky. For a moment, his gaze drifted toward it, and I saw something change in his expression; a shadow of recognition, a quiet, profound sadness—like when I’d seen him at the cafe—but it all disappeared so quickly I wondered if I had imagined it. Then his eyes moved across the rest of the classroom.

     And found mine in an instant. 

     My thoughts stopped, my heart skipped a beat, and my breath caught pathetically upon the tip of my tongue, and I had to look away again, feeling my cheeks flush hot at being noticed like that. I was overcome with that same unsettling sensation that we had somehow both arrived in the middle of a conversation that neither of us remembered beginning.

     I looked back up. He was still looking at me, his expression softening slightly in small acknowledgement of my rising embarrassment; a quiet greeting without words.

     I looked away again, immediately regretting doing so as soon as I did it. I wasn’t afraid of him, which is why I was so confused. If anything, I felt everything but afraid of him. I felt drawn toward him in a way that I couldn’t explain.

     There was just something about him that felt like a mystery waiting patiently to be solved.

     Mrs. Cranston continued on with her daily lecture. All throughout the lesson, I found myself noticing subtle, little things. The way Damien listened more than he spoke, and the way he seemed to observe the world around him instead of simply moving through it, and I noticed the way the sunlight touched his face but never seemed to warm the distant expression in his eyes.

     He seemed like someone who had learned how to exist quietly, someone who carried entire stories inside of himself and had grown accustomed to keeping them hidden, and despite every reasonable thought telling me that I barely knew him, I wanted to know those stories. I wanted to understand the sadness I saw in his eyes, and I wanted to know why he had looked at me in the cafe like someone seeing a ghost. 

     Why the hell had he whispered words to me that were very obviously meant for someone else in my place? Why did the sound of his name feel like something remembered rather than recently discovered?

     The bell rang some time later. Students immediately began gathering up their belongings as Mrs. Cranston sighed, unable to finish her lesson, spouting off news about what to expect tomorrow when we all return and assigning some homework or other. 

     The spell of that enchanting moment had broken. Or at least, it should have.

     Damien stood and collected his books. For a second, I thought that he might leave without looking back at me. A small part of me even expected that disappointment—I had known it all my life up to then—but instead he paused, turning slowly, looking back at me after all. And there was that same quiet recognition again; that impossible familiarity between us. Then, almost too subtly to notice for sure, he smiled, his lips curling into something that felt like an answer to a question I had not yet learned how to ask. Then he walked away, and I remained seated there for several moments after everyone else had left the classroom, staring at the empty doorway where he had disappeared out of.

     I told myself it was just curiosity. That was all. Some, obsessive fascination with someone mysterious, a lingering, gnawing interest in a person I barely knew—nothing more than that at all. But deep down, beneath all the ordinary explanation I constantly offered myself, there was another feeling. One that I did not understand. It was a feeling that unsettled me precisely because it felt so damn familiar, like some forgotten part of me had been waiting patiently all along for him to return to me.

     Absurd, I know, but how else could I describe it?

     Eventually, I did move from my seat, scooping up my things as the others all had moments ago, and as I walked through the door, a quick look back at where Damien had been sitting assured me that he had been real.

     As I went about my morning, caught in that timeless daze of attending my classes and listening half-heartedly to lectures about dead presidents and molecules and learning the overly complicated process of solving equations that I would never use outside of school, taking tests I didn’t actually study for, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him.

     About Damien.

     It was like his presence had infected my mind, the very mystery of who he was and why I had felt so strangely around him poisoning my thoughts like a beautiful high of ecstasy. I saw his pale skin, and his dark, brooding eyes, and by the time lunch came around, all of Clearwater High had already decided who he was.

     Or who they all wanted him to be.

     Rumors moved fast here, but it was mostly because there really wasn’t all that much else to talk about. But, also, it was because gossip amongst friends somehow gave everyone a bit of warmth in a place that never stopped raining.

     Some said that Damien was new to Clearwater itself, like I had been. That he had come from the city somewhere, New York or Los Angeles, somewhere far, somewhere vast, and others claimed that he was just another drifter, someone passing through Clearwater on their way anywhere else, as most others before him had. A few even whispered that they had seen Damien late at night over the last couple of weeks before he showed up at school, out near the old town bridge, where he’d be standing where the mist met with the surface of the lake. They said that he had just stood there like that for hours, especially when the moon was full and bright.

     But I didn’t believe them, of course.

     When I had first met Damien at the cafe, he’d talked as if he’d recognized me. But I didn’t recognize him outside of my dreams, or the mention of his name—a name I didn’t even know.

     And I could not stop thinking about him…

     That afternoon, after school had finally let out, I found Damien lurking behind the gym, on the far side of the building, beneath the overhang away from the drizzle. He wasn’t doing anything when I found him there. He was just standing there in the shadows, and he was watching the edge of the looming trees like he’d been waiting for someone to step out from within them.

     That pull tightened inside of me when I saw him there, and I started to approach him, allured by the aura of mystery that seemed to radiate off him like hazardous waste.

     I was going to turn and go back the other way, mind my own business, nearly convincing myself that he wouldn’t want to waste his time talking to someone like me, but then his soft voice drew me even closer as I started to turn around.

     “You shouldn’t be out walking alone like this,” he said without turning to look back at me, as if he’d heard me approaching him over the steady drone of the rain.

     I froze at once, my eyes drinking in his ethereal form. “It’s only rain, though,” I said nervously, not really too sure what to say. He turned then, finally looking at me, and for a single heartbeat I forgot how to breathe.

     I noticed something in his eyes, too, making them darker than I remembered from earlier—so dark, that they seemed to reflect only shapes and no color. “It’s not the rain that you need to be worried about,” he said, voice drenched in melancholy.

     There was a pause then, one that felt as thick as fog rolling in from the lake.

     “I’m Damien Cross,” he said then, his eyes suddenly reflecting the tone of his voice. “And you’re Claire Halloway.” When he looked away again, I noticed his hand resting there against the wall beside him. Slender, still, pale as porcelain. The veins beneath his skin looked almost silver in the dreary half-light.

     “How do you even know me? And what do you mean it’s not the rain that I need to be worried about?” I asked him, trying for something casual, but the words came out as a whisper beneath the lighting droning drizzle. 

     He didn’t answer me right away though, his rigid posture tightening where he stood. His gaze stayed on the woods lining the edge of the field, their branches dripping fresh rain, as if something had been calling out to him from somewhere deep within them. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Claire,” he murmured.

     “Try me,” I countered, taking a step back, planting myself firmly before him.

     This made him look at me again, really look at me, and something in his expression lightened. Softened, maybe, or perhaps it had darkened again—it was hard to tell which it had been. 

     “You remind me of someone else,” he said at last. Then his form faded, vanishing into a blur, and he was standing dangerously close to me, as if he’d been right there before me the whole time we’d been talking.

     “How did you just—!” I started, but he cut me off.

     “I apologize for my behavior in the cafe last week,” he said, his words delicate, as if carefully chosen, and I knew he wasn’t accustomed to making apologies. “But there are things about Clearwater that you, or anyone else, don’t understand, Claire, and I feel that I maybe need to warn you.”

     “Warn me about what, Damien?” I said, my heart fluttering in our sudden closeness.

     Before anything else could be said between us, Damien was gone. Suddenly, like before, making me think that I had only just imagined him there. A single blink, and the space before me was empty, my breath stolen by his absence. Only the rain remained, and the faint metallic scent that lingered like a phantom.