Burning Moon (9 page)

You know those 3-D optical illusions? Those pictures made up of seemingly random patterns or dots that, when stared at for long enough, with just the right intensity and at the right angle, a 3-D image emerges out of the chaos? It's usually a galloping horse, a biting shark, or a bird flying toward you, or some other dramatic animal in motion. But once you've seen it, you can always see it, and the random patterns never look the same again.

That's what happened with Damian.

He looked completely different today. Or was I seeing him differently?

He was still dressed in his signature black, but he looked much more casual and relaxed. The sleeves of his shirt were shorter this time, and I noted that the tattoos on one of his arms crept all the way up to his shoulder. I'd never liked tattoos. I'd always seen them as a sign of heroin dependency, excessive moodiness, and a tendency to throw TVs into hotel swimming pools. But on Damian they were—dare I say it—sexy. As he turned around, I saw his T-shirt said
READ BOOKS, NOT T-SHIRTS
. I smiled to myself; that was so Damian.

His hair was different, though; it looked like a small child had taken a pair of scissors to it and created a strange lopsided Mohawk. It was weird and irreverent and wouldn't have suited anyone else but him. By this stage his facial hair was more than just a five-o'clock shadow, which only added to his dark mystery. His thick black eyebrows accentuated his big, wide-set black eyes, and I stared at him trying to figure out who he looked like.

But there was no one; his look was completely unique. It was gawky yet confident, definitely weird and naughty, sexy and sweet all at the same time. And right at that very moment, he looked dark and broody and dangerous.

Oh my God.
He suddenly turned and looked straight at me, and I knew I had an embarrassing look plastered across my face. He waved tentatively, and I waved back. A moment later he was standing at my table.

“Hey…so…um…yeah, nice hair.” What a stupid thing to say. But it was all that had come to mind.

Damian smiled and ran his fingers through it playfully, twisting it and creating a kind of spike that stuck straight up for a moment or two and then flopped back down. Why did I find that so cute? “The guy in the kitchen insisted.”

“Huh?”

“I've been washing dishes here, and he said it was too long. So he attacked me with scissors and a razor.”

“Why are you washing dishes?”

“Need cash.”

“Oh, of course. I forgot about that.”

“I can't. Trust me. The image of that guy coming toward me with a plastic glove will be burned into my brain forever.”

We laughed, and when it tapered off, I knew I had to say it.

“Look…I'm really sorry about last night. I shouldn't have screamed at you like that. I'm really sorry.” Our eyes met.

“Me too. I shouldn't have said that stuff about not getting married. I had no right to.”

We smiled in mutual acceptance of the apologies.

“Well…” He started turning away from me. “Enjoy your meal and the rest of your vacation.” And then he walked away. Just like that, he was heading for the door.

Anxiety gripped me; I'd lost him once today and now that I had seen him, I was overcome by this feeling that I didn't want to lose him again.

“Wait!” The word flew out at a volume that was entirely inappropriate for a public place; fellow diners turned and stared at me.

“Where're you going?”

“I'm going back to town to get something to eat and then I have a thing tonight.”

A
thing
? That sounded very mysterious and my mind was conjuring up all sorts of images. Frankly, I was afraid to even ask.

“Why don't you have lunch with me?”

“I'm afraid I can't afford a meal like this on a mere dishwasher's salary. But thanks for the offer.” He started walking away again.

Stop walking away. Stop walking away.
I wished I was telekinetic now, and I could make him turn around with the mere power of my thoughts, instead of having to open my mouth again.

“I'll pay.” The volume and the pitch were all over the place once more, and he turned back to me. “You can pay me back sometime. I know you're good for the money.” I'm sure I must have looked at him with pleading desperation in my eyes, and I mentally kicked myself for this, too.

“Sure,” he said quickly, like he really hadn't needed that much convincing. He sat down with a smile.

Up until now our relationship (or whatever you call it) had been characterized by awkward moments. Awkward silences, strange smiles and looks (or a lack of looks). But from the moment he sat down at the table, the conversation just flowed. We ate, we drank, we laughed, and I found myself telling him the strangest things. Things I hadn't told anyone about.

I told him about the first and only time I'd smoked weed and thought that Buttons, my cat, was trying to tell me something in Russian. About the embarrassing time my mother did a live radio interview for one of her plays and was so drunk that she fell off her chair, hit her head, and had to be rushed to hospital midshow. I told him about the day I got braces, how I was so embarrassed that I stopped talking at school for two weeks so no one could see. How I got stuck in a glass revolving door at a shopping center and had to stay there for two hours while they tried to repair it and a crowd of people gathered to watch.

I gave him the low down on my friends, my absolute obsession with reality TV and any program that involved a crazed bride, teens giving birth, or housewives in various states of desperation and divorce. I even went into details about my favorite colors and clothes, my preference for baths, and that I favored sweets over savories.

I basically told him everything and anything that popped into my head in the moment. All the while, Damian held my gaze intently, and I could see he was listening to every single word I said. And he clearly found me funny, because he would laugh loudly at almost everything I said. It occurred to me that no guy had ever found me this funny. Michael certainly hadn't. Damian never took his eyes off me, not for a second. In that moment I felt like I was the center of his universe and he was hanging on my every word.

“And you?” I finally asked when I'd finished telling him my entire life story.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.” I hadn't meant for that word to come out of my mouth the way it did. With that strange whispery tone that made it drip with a certain subtext that now hung in the air between us.

I blushed. I couldn't help it. And when I looked up at Damian, he was looking down at the table and smiling.

“Well,” he finally said. “I've always been a bit obsessed with space, and I wanted to be an astronaut. I even tried to make a space suit out of my mom's tinfoil…didn't work. Um…my friend and I started a rock band when we were twelve and called ourselves The Worm Holes, but neither of us could play an instrument. And when I was sixteen, and had very bad taste, I got my first tattoo—the worst tattoo in existence.”

He stuck his leg out and I noticed a small tattoo on his ankle of a butterfly with skulls on its wings and daggers for feelers.

“Oh my God. It's hideous.”

“Yup.” He smiled at me with a knowing look. It felt familiar, as if we were lifelong friends sharing a joke. It was slightly strange but good at the same time.

“I thought I was very hardcore and cool.” He gave me a rather lame
Rock on
hand gesture and we both burst out laughing, and it went on and on like that for hours. We even figured out that his father—who happened to be the CEO of a billion companies—once used my dad's firm to do an audit.

At some stage I looked around and noticed that the restaurant had almost cleared out. The waiter had that desperate look on his face, like it was the end of his shift and he wanted to give us the check. The sun outside had started to dip below the horizon, filling the sky with a pale pink glow.

“How long have we been here?” I asked, gesturing at Damian's watch.

Damian looked at it and suddenly shot out of his chair. “I need to be somewhere and I'm running late. Thanks so much for lunch, Lilly.” He took a pen out of his bag, grabbed my arm, and started writing his number across it. “I'm leaving soon, but call me. Please.”

And then he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. Although he was in a hurry, the kiss was not. It was slow, and he let his lips linger for a moment too long. I slowly turned my head toward his and our lips brushed past each other. I looked at him and his eyes were closed. He opened them and looked straight into mine. We were so close I could feel and taste his warm breath; it was sweet with a hint of red wine on it.

“Good-bye, Lilly. Thanks for lunch,” he whispered, before turning and running out of the door. That same anxious feeling rose up again, and I jumped up and ran over to our waiter.

“How much is the check?” I practically shouted in the poor guy's face.

He told me and I quickly dug in my bag, grateful that I had almost the exact amount in cash. I shoved it in his hand and then ran outside as fast as I could under the weight of all my shopping. Damian was only a little way up the road and I called after him as loudly as I could.

“Wait up!” He turned, and although he was far away, I could tell he was smiling.

“I'm coming with you,” I said, finally catching up to him. “Unless this ‘thing' you're doing is illegal…
is it
?”

Damian burst out laughing. “Like what?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. You're pretty weird after all.” I smiled at him teasingly.

His smile grew, his eyes locked onto mine, and he extended his hand. “I would love you to come with me, Lilly.”

Twenty minutes later, we were back in busy Patong. Although it was night now, it was even busier than before. It was humming with people and lit up like Las Vegas. The market that I'd been to earlier was bursting at the seams with tourists and partygoers. I was so busy looking around in awe of the transformation that when I looked back, Damian was gone.

I tried looking for him, but there were so many people that I had to physically push them out of the way. I stepped off the sidewalk into the less crowded street hoping for a better vantage point, but I was suddenly very nearly knocked over by a man on a bicycle. I tried to jump out of the way, but it looked like the collision was inevitable, until I felt someone grab me by the arm and yank me back onto the sidewalk. It was Damian. He gripped my arm tightly and shook his head at me with a smile.

“Someone as clumsy as you shouldn't be left unattended in a place like this. Who knows what could happen?”

And then we were off again. He dragged me through the streets, past restaurants and karaoke bars with badly sung ABBA blaring out of them. I was struck by just how many there were; it seemed that every second restaurant had some kind of karaoke happening. Drunk students swayed together singing, while hot Thai girls dressed in heels and short skirts dropped it like it was hot. Old men with beers cheered them on.

But Damian was pulling me farther and farther into the bowels of the city.

The hordes of people started to dissipate and began to be replaced by small groups of the sexiest women I'd ever seen. They all had long, black shiny hair and the most incredible figures, with legs that went on for miles. Some of them were wearing garish outfits, complete with diamanté bikini tops and feather headdresses, and others were wearing almost nothing at all.

The atmosphere had suddenly changed from the happy-go-lucky energy of the night market to something that was much darker and sexually charged. The light around me became very red, and colorful neon signs lit up all the puddles in the road. I knew where we were. And I didn't like it. One little bit.

I stopped walking and let go of Damian's hand.

“Where are we going?” I looked up at the neon sign of a naked woman with ginormous breasts flashing at me. It was not subtle.

Damian flashed me a reassuring smile. “Come. I promise it's not illegal.”

I heard a buzzing and looked behind me—the word
sexy
was blinking at me angrily, and it was enough to give anyone an epileptic seizure.

“Why are we here?”

“Well…” Damian paused for a moment. “I kind of need to make some quick cash.”

I gasped. “You're a male prostitute!”

Damian looked at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Is that what you think of me?” He was laughing even harder now.

“It's not quite like that, I promise.” And he continued walking even though my feet were glued to the pavement. He turned to me and threw his arms in the air. “To come or not to come, Lilly, that is the question.”

His corny words seemed to taunt me, as if he knew that I was the kind of girl who'd
never
been to a place like this. Ever. I looked around nervously; drunken men were stumbling into clubs with women draped over them. Women on street corners were hiking up their skirts and whistling loudly. Well, I certainly wasn't going to wait here alone, that's for sure.

“Wait for me!”

After walking up yet another two or three bright-red alleys, we finally stopped outside a club. It looked exactly like the other five hundred we'd just seen, complete with bright, flashing neon lights and a constant buzzing sound coming from the wattage of a thousand light bulbs.

“Here we are,” Damian said.

I turned to survey the outside of the club, and then I saw the sign.

 

MALE STRIPPERS NEEDED. TOTAL NUDITY NOT REQUIRED.

WE PAY CASH. 2,500 BAHT.

 

It took me a few seconds to make the necessary mental links; they were offering money for men to take off their clothes, and Damian was a man and he needed money, and now we were here, which meant that…