Chapter 2: Embers of Adoration

Love, when it first arrives, wears no warning. It looks like a gift wrapped in patience, tied in ribbons of attention. Damon appeared everywhere as if summoned by the gaps in my life, though I never prayed for him. The messages began the next morning. Not paragraphs that begged for answers, but single lines that hovered like smoke.

Did you sleep? Do you always write at night? The sentence you stopped in the café — it followed me home.

I told myself I would not reply. I replied anyway. A few words at first, then a line, then whole exchanges that filled the hours I used to give to silence.

By the second week, he arrived outside my apartment with a paper bag of roasted plantain and groundnuts. He claimed it was a coincidence that he was 'already nearby.' Coincidence has a way of carrying a man’s scent when he wants it to.

He knew the things I liked without needing to ask. Bitter coffee, loud rain, the particular shade of blue that makes walls look like they are holding their breath. He noticed them as if cataloguing evidence. And in those early days, I mistook it for care instead of surveillance.

When I told him about Ciara, how she teased me for vanishing into notebooks, how she once barged into my room with music loud enough to chase grief into the hallway, Damon only nodded. “A friend like that is rare,” he said. “She’ll keep you accountable.” His tone suggested he was measuring how much of me belonged to her.

The third time we met, he handed me a folded sheet of paper. Inside was a poem, written in his uneven hand.

'You are a desert, and I am rain. But too much rain will drown even thirst.'

I didn’t know whether to laugh or shiver. “That last line doesn’t work,” I said, trying to protect myself with a critique.

“It will,” he said, “when you’re tired enough of waiting for storms.”

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I should have walked away then, but something is flattering in being studied like scripture. His gaze made me feel visible, like a stained-glass window lit from within. That night, after he left, I prayed again. Not the kneeling kind, not the folded hands my mother taught me—just a whisper into the ceiling. "God, is this an answer or a trap? Please, make it clear." 

The ceiling gave no reply, only the faint echo of his voice, promising I would never be alone again.

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The first argument came sooner than I expected. I had forgotten to answer a message. Three hours of silence while I worked on a draft. When I checked my phone, six missed calls blinked back at me, followed by a final text. I thought I lost you.

When I finally called, his voice cracked like a man holding grief in both hands. “Don’t do that again, Selene. Don’t disappear.”

I wanted to tell him that disappearance is my language, that even God sometimes loses me in it. Instead, I said, “I’m sorry,” because sorry is easier than explaining wounds you’ve stopped naming.

He came over that evening with flowers that didn’t belong to the season, his eyes swollen, his hands trembling. He pressed the bouquet against me as if it were proof of survival. Then he wept, quietly but without shame, and I felt my chest break open in pity. It is dangerous to make someone’s pain your compass. It will always point you back to their need, never to your own. I held him anyway. In his arms, the café sentence returned, half-finished. A house remembers the heat… But in his sobs, I could not tell whether I was inside the fire or trying to escape it.