Chapter 55: That Day or Kind of Snuck into Your Room

Damon didn’t actually know that much about the whole Psycho Bellamy thing, which was, if Celeste had been asked, kind of the whole tragedy of him. Rich enough to buy an island but not curious enough to Google the girl currently holding his entire dignity hostage in a dead philosophy classroom.

She’d have found that endearing on a less life-ruining occasion.

Today it just made her want to bite him.

The Bellamy family was fucking massive compared to the Corvin Viremonts with so many cousins, siblings, branches, and rich unwashed relatives floating through every gala in the city that he’d never once been sure which Bellamy the nickname even belonged to.

He knew a few stories.

A few whispered warnings passed between elites and a few jokes but Damon had never once personally cared enough to build a family tree out of somebody else’s crazy.

Now, though?

Yeah.

’It is her.’

He could tell almost immediately from the shit coming out of her mouth. Celeste didn’t talk like some obsessed weirdo who’d spent too many nights building a shrine and was quietly mortified about it.

She said the sick parts out loud, easy and very comfortable, in the same casual way somebody used to admit they’d checked an ex’s Instagram twice this week.

Who the fuck told a guy — a stranger, technically, as far as he was concerned — that she’d considered planting cameras in his bedroom to collect videos and photos of them, his junk actually, and then blackmailing him into a relationship as if that counted as a slightly aggressive form of courtship in her opinion and crazy and said it like she was reading off a grocery list?

Somebody ashamed of being insane would’ve at least made an attempt at hiding it.

Celeste looked proud.

That was probably the part he hated most, if he was ranking things, which he currently was, extensively, in a private list titled things I now know about myself that I did not consent to knowing.

’Great. Love this. My villain origin story is a girl with who’s a psycho and with no shrink.’

Except something else had started clawing at the back of his skull while she stood there looking far too pleased with the situation.

How the fuck were they even connected?

She’d said that day like it was a shared memory; like they had history.

But Damon had never let anybody outside his family into his room, ever, not for any reason —

And there was zero chance Vespera or Mara would’ve knowingly let him get within ten feet of Psycho Bellamy if they’d known exactly which Bellamy she was.

Unless the two of them had wanted to fuck with him.

But he’d have known her too, wouldn’t he? If this girl had been circling closely enough to know things about him, there should’ve been something; a face for example, maybe a memory or some cringeworthy dinner, a party where she’d cornered him by the bar like they always did or a name he’d ignored while staring at somebody else’s wife’s chest.

But there was nothing.

And the answer slowly assembling itself in his head was one he really, deeply did not want.

Naturally, that meant his mouth needed to go find out anyway.

"So, Bel— I mean, Celeste." He caught himself. "What did you mean by that day?"

She blinked, and then recognition hit her all at once like an actual physical recognition and her whole body lit up like a slot machine paying out, one hand smacking the desk again.

’How dramatic.’

"Oh! That day!" A short bark of a laugh, loud, immediately cut off, she waved away with two fingers like swatting a fly. "Don’t worry about it. I just kind of snuck into your room."

Damon stared at her. ’Who is she trying to fool here?’

"I don’t have an outside doo on room you could sneak into, unless you entered from the house, dont try to fool me." he said slowly. "I have two floor-to-ceiling windows and a lock that costs more than your car."

Celeste’s smile didn’t flicker at all. "Okay, so, your lock — decorative, by the way, purely decorative, your security team has clearly never met a girl who’s good with her hands — one of your windows doesn’t latch flush at the corner. Did you know that? I know that. I found that out at like two in the morning with a credit card and way too much free time, and it took four minutes, and I counted, because I was bored, Damon, and then I wasn’t bored anymore." She said the whole thing fast, breathless, like she was reliving the thrill of it in real time rather than reporting a felony.

She’d also, privately, been a little disappointed at how easy it was. A four-figure security budget and the weak point was a window latch a raccoon could’ve solved. Rich people were all the same — armed to the teeth against the front door and stark naked at the one they never think to check.

She’d kept that as something useful, and mildly insulting on his family’s behalf, and hadn’t decided yet which feeling to keep.

"And your curtains weren’t all the way closed. And I was already out there. So."

"So?"

"So I was already out there," she repeated, like the sentence explained itself, like already being outside a stranger’s window at two in the morning was a neutral fact of weather rather than a decision.

"Why," Damon said, very carefully, like a man defusing something, "were you outside my window." He still didn’t believe her.

Celeste frowned at him like he’d interrupted a movie. "You’re skipping ahead."

"There shouldn’t be an ahead."

"There was definitely an ahead." She leaned one hip against the desk, drifting back into the memory with the soft, fond little smile like she were remembering a childhood vacation instead of what was, by any legal definition, several felonies stacked on top of each other.

"I got in, you were asleep, and you looked really fucking cute. Ridiculously cute; your one arm was under the pillow, hair everywhere, and you kept doing this little thing with your nose every couple minutes."

Damon’s expression went very still... wasn’t that the way he used to sleep until to few months ago?

Well, a lot of people do sleep like that, right? its basically common knowledge.’

"What the fuck are you talking about." He asked.

She kept going, entirely unbothered, already talking with her hands now, tracing some shape in the air that meant nothing. "I watched you for a while — don’t know exactly how long, wasn’t timing it, though I could probably math it out from when I got in versus when they caught me — oh! Actually, funny story—"

What Celeste did not say, because some things a girl kept for herself even mid-confession, was that eighteen-year-old Damon asleep had looked exactly like every embarrassing thing she’d secretly wanted a rich boy to look like and would’ve died before admitting out loud: soft, stupid, unguarded, one hand curled loose against the pillow like he trusted the whole house not to hurt him.

He’d looked like a person instead of a name on a building; she’d stood there way too long deciding that was the single most infuriating thing about him, infuriating enough to be worth a restraining order, honestly, on principle.

She was not going to say any of that. She was going to keep roasting him instead, that was so much safer than the alternative.

Damon caught exactly one word out of that sentence and held onto it like a life raft: "Caught you?"

"Yeah." She rolled her eyes, like the memory itself was the tedious part. "That whole ridiculous thing."

"What ridiculous thing."

"You genuinely don’t know?"

Her eyes went wide, and for a second Damon almost laughed at the theatrics before he realized, with a slow, cold drop in his stomach, that the shock was real.

"Know what, Celeste?"

A delighted smile crept across her face, slow, savoring it. "Oh my god. They never told you!"

Okay this was genuinely unpleasant.

"Celeste."