Page 20 of Damiano De Luca (The Five Syndicates)
Freud penned an essay arguing that Dostoevsky’s epilepsy began after his father died as a physical manifestation of his guilt over wishing for his father’s death, but I’d never been convinced. I hated my father. Yet, I couldn’t imagine wishing death upon him. At least, not without more provocation. Plus, I didn’t believe emotions could develop into physical illnesses.
/>
“Death should be a last resort.” Hypocritical, coming from a Vitali, but that didn’t make it any less true. “Not some trivial wish to be thrown about. And goosebumps, your example of emotions eliciting physical responses, aren’t as severe as a condition like epilepsy.”
He peered up from the novel and, for the first time since I had walked in, took in my teeny sleeping shorts and satin spaghetti strap shirt. His eyes darkened, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob. “Would you have stayed if I accused you of developing a heart condition over your attraction to me?”
I eyed where the throw blanket pressed against his hips because he’d been right. I did have goosebumps. From the cold, of course.
“It wasn’t an either-or situation. You weren’t limited to goosebumps and cardiovascular disease.”
But yes, I would have stayed, I admitted to myself, still unsure how I had gotten to the point where I sought being saved from my boredom by him. It also wasn’t lost on me that he had implied he wanted me to stay.
“Perhaps.” His hands untangled the blanket, flattened it as he held it open above the floor, and tossed it so it covered my body almost perfectly when it landed on me. “You overestimate my desire to converse with you.”
“Which one of us was the first to speak?”
“If I recall, it was me… after I caught you sneaking around my room.”
Okay, I walked right into that.
“You didn’t catch me snooping. You caught my laying on your bed.”
“Yet, you deny your attraction to me. Which is it, Knight? Are you attracted to me, or were you snooping?”
“What is it with you and absurd either-or scenarios?”
He set the book aside and swiveled, so his feet touched the floor and his forearms rested on his knees as he leaned forward and hit me with his unwavering stare. “Dodging my questions isn’t going to earn you any respect from me, and seven days from now, when we start our senior year of high school, you’ll be wanting that respect.”
I met his actions, unfolding my legs and leaning forward, so mere inches separated our faces as we sat across from one another on divans crafted for royalty. “I have your respect.”
“Is that so?”
“What do you call this?” I gestured between us. “Are you in the habit of discussing the psychology of literature with people you don’t respect?”
At eleven years old, Maman had taken me into the city during what was supposed to have been a quiet weekend visit to her Hamptons home. She passed me a food stand hotdog, and we made the trek to Barney’s. A bite in, I heard a whimper and caught the coiled tail of a stray dog. I glanced at my hot dog.
Maman cut her eyes to me. “Mon petit coeur saignant…”
I heard her warning loud and clear as she called me her little bleeding heart and yanked me into the safety of her waist. The hot dog slipped from my fingers, and the stray dog pounced at it, snapping at a pedestrian who walked past.
My head lowered as Maman placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Renata, ma petite fille, you have a beautiful heart, but one day, your need to save cornered animals will get you bitten.” She lifted my chin until my eyes met hers. “Some scars do not fade.”
It was one of the few lessons Maman had taught me that I had never taken to heart. Staring into Damian’s eyes with less than a hand’s width of separation between us, I reminded myself of the haunted look I had seen in his eyes—not once, but twice now.
It was too easy an inclination to want to fight him. But the desire to save Damian appealed in equal measure. Something in the way he held himself—too composed, too aloof, too unapproachable—had me convinced of his loneliness.
Lonely people started conversations with near strangers they seemed to hate, right?
Which had to be why I cut him off before he could say something that warranted a verbal lashing. “It’s okay not to hate me. It’s okay not to like me, too.” I dipped my eyes to the blanket that had pooled at my lap before returning them to him. A little act of kindness, which had me second-guessing everything.
His eyes followed mine to the blanket. “Hate would require emotions, and I—”
“—don’t possess any where I’m concerned. Yeah, I got it.” The urge to roll my eyes burned at my irises, but that would have been counterintuitive to my point. “There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude.”
One was pain; the other, preference.
Perhaps that had been too deep, too much for two destructive intellects, searching desperately for outlets in a town that possessed none.
