Page 44 of Damiano De Luca (The Five Syndicates)
And so long as she wanted me to, I would fight for us.
Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Unknown
I knew I had asked him to leave, but when I woke up to an empty bed, the pang in my chest reminded me of what a horrible idea being near Damian was. I had spent the past ten years convincing myself that I didn’t care about him.
Now he was gone, and I didn’t want him to be.
All war is deception.
Sun Tzu
Three Days Later
Damian: I said I’d be gone, but I lied. I’m not giving up on us. I made a mistake when you left ten years ago. I should have chased you better. I should have never stopped chasing. I’m not making that mistake again. I’ll see you at the next summit in a month. We’re not spending another ten years apart when we both want this. This is happening, Knight.
Error: Message failed to send. This number is invalid. Please resend using a valid 10-digit mobile number or a valid short code.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Arthur Conan Doyle
“Save some for the rest of us,” Sally joked as I hoarded half of one of the pepperoni pizza boxes in the empty staff room. She was my best friend in Connecticut, which was sad considering we weren’t really friends. Just colleagues who spent lunch period eating together on occasion.
My eyes lifted to hers, one hand on a plate full of pizza slices and the other shoveling a slice into my mouth. “Sorry,” I spoke around a mouthful of food.
Her nails tapped the table she sat at, and in a conservative cardigan, silky blouse, and loose slacks, she looked more like a librarian than our actual librarian did. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were eating your way through a heartbreak. You look like me after Eric and I divorced.” Her locker-blue eyes scanned my figure through oversized glasses as she tucked a blonde lock of hair back into her neat bun. “Just about nine years younger and forty pounds slimmer.”
“No heartbreak here.” I took a seat next to her and set down my plate on the cheap plastic tabletop. “I just haven’t eaten pizza in forever.”
Truthfully, I was stress eating. You know that feeling you get when you know something is wrong, but you do it anyway? After changing my number, I had that in droves, and it pushed me into the cushy arms of pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and extra marinara. I paused. Fuck, I forgot the parmesan.
Like the mindreader she was, Sally handed me a few packets and smiled when I thanked her. “Are you going to tell me what is eating away at you?”
I tore a cheese packet open and sprinkled the processed parmesan onto a slice with the skill of a Kitchen Nightmares chef. “Nothing is eating away at anything except me with this pizza.” To make my point, I chomped down on a bigger bite than I could handle.
My mind wandered to my phone, and I wondered if Damian had tried to text or call me since I left New York. Changing my number had been a spur of the moment ordeal, fueled by the fear and uncertainty I felt after waking up alone—even though, being the hypocrite I was, I’d asked him to leave before I woke up.
Sally handed me a napkin, which I dabbed against my face. Her mama bear instincts were strong despite our mere ten-year age gap, and she doted on me like she did one of her students. “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt? Really, Sal?” I pointed a pizza slice at her as I retorted, “You know, if this conversation were an essay and you were one of your students, you’d fail yourself for either plagiarism or unoriginality.”
“My students are seven and eight. They don’t write essays.” She took in my face, then paused, raised a manicured hand to her chest, and gasped. “Renata, you do not make your students write essays. They’re in second grade!”
I set the pizza slice down and dabbed at the oil with a napkin because I knew the pet peeve would distract her. “It’s a formulaic five paragraph structure on why family matters, not a research essay on the lack of bipartisanship in Washington. They’ll manage.”
“Do you have to do that?” Her eyes dipped to my fiery-orange, oil-soaked napkin, and she scrunched her nose before meeting my eyes again. “‘They’ll manage’? I swear, you were raised by tigers.”
Close.
Vitalis.
“They’ll write thank you notes to me from whatever Ivy League school they’re accepted to in ten years.” I shrugged and tossed the napkin at the trashcan by the door, nearly missing. “And yes, I have to do this. There’s more oil than pizza on each slice.”
She ignored me as I pressed a second napkin to the slice. Her unimpressed expression bounced off my shoulders. “I thought you were more fun than that. You’re supposed to be the cool teacher. You had your students build miniature catapults last year, and they got to launch little ping pong balls at the PE teachers. I remember all that screaming and cheering—and all the shade my students threw my way for not adding catapults to my lesson plan.”
“I’m not fun. It was an engineering, math, and physics lesson,” I pointed out.
