Page 35 of Eastern Lights

She left my office, and just as she exited, Damian walked in with a grimace on his face.

“Good afternoon, Damian,” Rose stated.

He moved past her as if he hadn’t even noticed her existence. Not a hello, not a hey, nothing. A completely and utterly silent response.

Rose was a very attractive girl, and Damian was her same age, just a year younger. I would’ve thought he’d develop an attraction to her just as the rest of the guys in the office were, but he seemed far from interested.

Then again, that was Damian’s norm for the most part. He was extremely good at not caring about pretty much any other human being. He and I were the complete opposite. He was cold as ice, and I was known for my warmth.

Still, to me, he was family. I’d met Damian two years earlier when I was looking for a kid to help mentor through a program, and I was paired with Damian—the grumpiest sixteen-year-old I’d ever seen in my life. For a long time, I took his bad attitude personally, but then I realized it was a defense mechanism. He’d grown up in the foster system being tossed around from home to home, never really finding a stable life, so he closed himself off to everyone around him. He had trust issues that ran deep. He tried his hardest to push me away, because so many people had pushed him away in his lifetime.

Too bad for him that I was an annoying motherfucker who didn’t give up when something was challenging.

I’d stayed in his life for the past two years, and I had no plans of exiting anytime soon. When he told me he didn’t see himself going to college, I made sure to get him a position working for me. I didn’t believe everyone was meant for the college life track, but I knew Damian was smart as hell and could do amazing things if given the opportunity.

It turned out, he was one of my best employees—grumpy self and all.

“You didn’t say good afternoon to Rose,” I mentioned as he moved to sit in the chair across from my desk. Unlike Rose, there was nothing nervous about his entrance into my office. He moved with confidence.

“Why would I say hi to her?”

“Because she greeted you first.”

“She’s a fake, shitty employee. I don’t like her.”

“To be fair, you don’t like anyone.”

He parted his lips to respond but then shit it when he realized there was nothing but the truth in my words.

“What makes you think she’s fake?” I asked.

“The whole clumsy, stuttering, innocent girl act. She only puts it on around you. When you’re not around, she’s busy flirting it up and pushing her tits in the face of any person who will look.”

“No way. She’s a good worker.”

He sighed. “Must be hard believing everyone in the world is a good person.”

“I don’t think Jason Rollsfield is a good person.”

“Congratulations, Connor. You don’t like one person out of seven billion on this planet,” he sarcastically remarked. “Then again, you hate him and still gave him a job. Shocking. If you knew about Rose’s past—”

“No!” I hollered, tossing my hands up. “Don’t tell me. Every time you tell me about a person’s past, it changes how I view them.”

“As it should.”

I called Damian the grave digger. He had an ability I’d never seen before in a person—the ability to dig up dirt on anyone and everyone. He’d been able to unlock secrets people thought were buried deep. The only secrets he was unable to uncover were probably the ones he craved the most—the story behind his biological parents. No matter how hard he tried, he’d never been able to track them down. I knew it ate at him every single day.

When he and I met, I made him promise not to dig up dirt on people I knew before he came into my life. I didn’t need to know the skeletons of my business partners. Rich people did a lot of weird shit.

Damian was dressed in black from head to toe, as always. Black suit, black tie, black shoes. Every single day, he showed up wearing all black, had ever since I met him. He said it was his favorite color like his soul.

I couldn’t help but smirk at his emo tendencies.

At the same time, he was built like a linebacker. He stood at over six foot four with muscle on muscle. I wasn’t too closeminded to state he was a good-looking guy. Women would’ve been all over him if he wasn’t grimacing all the time. If it wasn’t for his cold personality, he’d have women throwing themselves at him on the regular.

“Anyway, got bad news,” he said, brushing his thumb against his nose.

“First, I didn’t get to tell you the joke of the day.”

---