Chapter 4: Bourbon and Bad Decisions
The walk to Damon’s apartment was a blur of chilled air and jarring streetlights. She didn’t remember giving him the address, but he’d known it anyway. Of course he had. He’d been waiting. The building was a converted mill on the older, quieter edge of the Falls, all exposed brick and industrial chic. His was the top floor. The elevator opened directly into his living space.
It was a cavern of obsidian and shadow. The air hummed, thick with the scent of aged whiskey and something darker beneath—a metallic hint of old blood, maybe, cut through with the faint, ghostly trace of jasmine. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed a moonlit view of the river, but the curtains were mostly drawn. The real light came from a low fire crackling in a minimalist hearth, making the polished surface of a long mahogany bar gleam. Glasses, some half-full, some clean, stood like sentinels on its etched surface.
Damon was already at the bar, his back to her, pouring two fingers of amber liquid into a crystal tumbler. He didn’t turn around.
“Door’s open,” he’d said on the phone. It was.
She stepped inside, the warmth of the room hitting her like a wall after the woods’ chill. She felt ridiculous—damp, leaves in her hair, shivering in her thin sweater, the ink on her hand a glaring confession. She hugged herself, standing awkwardly in the middle of the vast, dark floor.
He finally turned, holding out the glass. His eyes scanned her from head to toe, taking in the disarray with a clinical appreciation that held no pity. “You look like something the woods coughed up.”
“Feel like it,” she managed, her voice raspy. She took the glass. The bourbon was smooth and expensive, a fire that burned all the way down to her hollow stomach. She drank half of it in one go, wincing as it settled.
“Easy,” he murmured, but there was a smirk in it. He leaned back against the bar, swirling his own drink. “So. The woods. A dramatic setting for a crisis. Did you commune with nature? Find any answers in the moss?”
“Shut up, Damon.”
“Just making conversation.” He watched her over the rim of his glass. The silence stretched, but his wasn’t the kind that demanded filling. It was patient, predatory. He was waiting for her to break first.
She finished the bourbon, the warmth doing nothing to thaw the icy knot in her chest. She set the glass down on the bar with a sharp click. The sound echoed. She looked at her hand, the ink now a grotesque, smudged tattoo.
“I broke his pen,” she said, the words flat.
“I heard.”
“He knows I broke it. He saw… this.” She held up her hand. “And he followed me. He said… he said he looks at me and sees a reflection.” A brittle laugh escaped her. “What the hell does that even mean? He’s a century-and-a-half-old vampire with a guilt complex. I’m a messed-up waitress who can’t pay her electric bill. What reflection? The one in a funhouse mirror?”
Damon listened, his expression unreadable. He didn’t offer platitudes. He just let the words hang in the scented air between them.
“I hate it,” she continued, the bourbon loosening the valve on her anger. “I hate that he sees it. I hate that he looks at Elena and sees… light, and salvation, and pie, for Christ’s sake, and he looks at me and just sees the same damn darkness he fights in himself every day. I don’t want to be someone’s mirror. I want to be…” She trailed off, the end of that sentence too pathetic to voice. I want to be chosen.
“You want to be the pie,” Damon said, not unkindly, just stating a fact.
“I want to not feel like I’m splitting apart watching him with her.” She sank onto a low, black leather sofa, putting her head in her hands. “And I hate myself for wanting it. Bonnie’s right. Elena’s good. She deserves the uncomplicated hero. I would just… ruin him. I ruin everything.”
Damon pushed off the bar and came to sit on the wide arm of the sofa, not touching her. He looked down at her crumpled form. “Stefan’s no hero. He’s a man holding a beast on a very short, very frayed leash. The ‘goodness’ is the performance. The guilt is the reality. You’re attracted to the reality. It’s more honest.” He paused. “And significantly more painful.”
“Why does it hurt so much?” The question was a whisper, a child’s question.
“Because you’re awake,” he said simply. “Most people walk through life asleep. They want simple things. They get them, or they don’t, and they move on. You’re awake. You feel the granular texture of every loss. You taste the metal in the water. It’s a curse. But it’s also what makes you interesting.”
He stood up and retrieved the bottle, refilling her glass. He held it out to her. “So. You have two choices. You can sit here and dissect the particular shade of your agony with me all night. I’m a surprisingly good listener, for a monster. Or.”
He let the word hang.
“Or what?” She took the glass, not drinking.
“Or you can let me distract you from it. No talking. No therapy. No reflections.” His gaze was intent, a deep, compelling blue in the firelight. “Just sensation. A temporary ceasefire with your own head. My offer stands. No strings. No future. Just tonight.”
Athena stared into her drink. The ice had melted, diluting the bourbon to a pale gold. She thought of the obsidian arrowhead in its box, a different kind of silence. This was another. A physical oblivion. Damon was a known quantity. He wanted, he took, he moved on. There was a terrifying purity in that. No one would get hurt here because no one was investing anything. It was a transaction between two wounded animals.
The ache in her chest was a living thing. She couldn’t sit with it anymore.
She downed the fresh pour, the burn a welcome familiar pain, and set the glass on the floor. She looked up at him, her dark eyes stripped bare of their usual defenses. “Okay.”
No smile of triumph touched his lips. He just gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod, as if accepting a terms of surrender. He held out his hand.
She took it. His skin was cool, his grip firm. He pulled her to her feet and led her wordlessly through the living room, down a short, dark hallway. His bedroom was more of the same: a vast space dominated by a large bed with black sheets, another wall of windows shrouded in gray silk. The only light came from a single lamp on a nightstand, casting long, dramatic shadows.
He turned to face her, closing the distance. There was no gentle preamble, no soft kiss. His mouth found hers with a blunt, hungry pressure. It wasn’t about affection; it was about consumption. His hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs pressing against her jaw, holding her still as he kissed her deeper, his tongue demanding entry. She kissed him back with a matching ferocity, pouring all her frustration, her jealousy, her self-loathing into the act. Her fingers twisted in the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer.
He broke the kiss, his breathing slightly altered—a faint, unnatural stillness, then a slow draw. His eyes searched hers, looking for hesitation. He found only a defiant fire. Good.
His hands moved from her face, pushing the thin sweater off her shoulders. It fell to the floor. He made quick, efficient work of the rest, his movements clinical in their focus. There was no reverence, no worship. It was an assessment, an unwrapping. When she stood bare before him in the lamplight, she didn’t feel exposed. She felt seen in a different way—as a functional object of temporary relief. It was perversely freeing.
He shed his own clothes with the same detached speed. Then his hands were on her again, rough and knowing, mapping her skin with a practiced inevitability. He walked her backward until her knees hit the edge of the mattress, and she fell onto the cool sheets. He followed her down, his weight a solid, anchoring pressure.
What followed was a clash, not a union. It was physics: force, friction, a desperate transfer of energy. He was demanding, controlling the rhythm, his mouth hot on her neck, her shoulder, leaving marks that would bloom purple by morning. She matched him, her nails digging into the hard muscles of his back, her hips rising to meet his with a bruising intensity. There were no tender words, no whispered promises. Just the sound of skin against skin, ragged breath, and the distant, indifferent hum of the city through the windows.
It was exactly what she’d wanted. A violent distraction. For moments at a time, her mind went blissfully, utterly blank. There was no Stefan, no Elena, no empty apartment, no dim future. There was only the immediate, punishing present. The feeling of being used, of using in return, carved out a clean, simple space in the chaos.
But the human mind is a treacherous thing. In a fleeting, suspended second, as she turned her head into the pillow, her eyes squeezed shut, a fragment slipped through. Not an image, but a sensation—the cool, careful brush of fingers on her ink-stained hand. A touch of unbearable recognition. A reflection.
She gasped, a sharp, broken sound, and Damon mistook it for something else. He drove into her harder, chasing his own finish, and the fragment was gone, obliterated under a fresh wave of sensation that was closer to pain.
It was over quickly. He stilled above her, a low, soundless shudder running through him. Then he rolled away, lying beside her on the black sheets, staring up at the shadowed ceiling. The silence rushed back in, heavier now, saturated with the smell of sex and sweat and expensive cologne.
Athena lay still, her body humming, her skin feeling both alive and oddly numb. The ache in her chest was still there. It had just been waiting. It yawned open again, wider, hungrier. The distraction had been perfect, and utterly pointless.
After a minute, Damon sat up on the edge of the bed, his back to her. He ran a hand through his hair. “Bathroom’s through there,” he said, his voice a neutral baritone. “Towels are in the cabinet.”
He didn’t look at her. The transaction was complete.
She slid off the bed, her legs unsteady. She found her clothes in a pile on the floor and dressed silently, her movements stiff. She didn’t use his bathroom. She just wanted out.
At the doorway of the bedroom, she paused. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, a silhouette of perfect, composed detachment.
“Thanks,” she said, the word absurd.
“Don’t,” he replied, not turning. “It was a mutual favor. Get some sleep, Athena. Or don’t. Doesn’t matter to me.”
She walked back through the dark living room. The fire had died to embers. The empty glasses on the bar caught the dying light, monuments to the night’s failed exorcism. She let herself out, the elevator door sighing shut behind her.
The cold air outside was a slap. She wrapped her arms around herself, the ghost of his hands already fading from her skin. She walked home, the town silent around her. The hunger inside her hadn’t been sated. It had been sharpened. It wasn’t for Stefan, not exactly. It wasn’t for Damon. It was a hunger for a self that didn’t feel this shattered, for a reality where she wasn’t always the broken reflection in the glass.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment. Inside, the quiet was deafening. She went straight to the bathroom, ignoring her own pale, haunted face in the mirror. She opened the medicine cabinet, moved aside a bottle of aspirin, and took out the small velvet box.
She opened it. The obsidian arrowhead lay inside, black and flawless, drinking in the weak light. It promised a different silence. A permanent one. A magic that didn’t just distract, but dismantled.
She picked it up. It was cold, heavier than it looked. It didn’t pulse. It waited.
Athena closed her fist around it, the stone’s edges biting into her palm, right over the fading ink stain. This time, she didn’t break. She just held on, alone in the yellow light, as the first gray hint of dawn began to bleed at the edges of her window.
She just held on, alone in the yellow light, as the first gray hint of dawn began to bleed at the edges of her window. The stone’s cold seeped into her bones, a clearer promise than Damon’s warmth had ever been. She placed it carefully on the lip of the sink and turned the shower on scalding.
The water punished her skin, turning it pink. She scrubbed at the ink on her hand until it was a faint, gray ghost. She scrubbed at the feeling of his hands, the specific places his mouth had been. The marks were there, purpling on her neck and shoulder. She’d wanted a distraction, and he’d been a textbook of distraction. But a hollow disappointment settled in her stomach, a flat, familiar taste. She’d assumed, stupidly, that he might have been a bit more caring with her. Not tender, just… present. He hadn’t even looked back.
She got out, shivering in the stale bathroom air. Dressed in a clean sweatshirt and jeans, she avoided her reflection. The ache was still there, a patient tenant. The arrowhead called from the sink.
She took it, and the crumpled napkin from her apron pocket—the one with his name etched in her own handwriting—into her small, dark living room. She didn’t light candles or chant. Grandma’s magic was for petitions. This was a breaking and entering.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, the napkin laid flat before her. She placed the obsidian arrowhead directly over Stefan’s name. Her palm, still red from scrubbing, covered it completely.
“Videre cor. Veritatem sanguinis.” The words were gravel in her dry throat. Not a request. A command. See the heart. Truth of blood.
She focused everything—the image of his thumb on Elena’s palm, the shattered pen, his voice in the dark saying reflection—and shoved it through the stone. She pictured his green eyes, the exact shade of regret.
A jolt, like grabbing a live wire, snapped up her arm.
Her vision whited out. Then it flooded with a sensation that was not sight, but a violent, overwhelming empathy.
Cool pages of a journal under his fingers, the script frantic. A name, her name, ‘Athena,’ circled once, then scratched out so hard the paper tore. The smell of her—cigarettes and amber and burnt magic—lingering on his clothes after she’d left the boarding house porch, and him standing for an hour just breathing it in. A sharp, protective fury when Damon smirked her name at the bar last week, a physical urge to slam his brother through a wall. The sound of her laugh, rough and unexpected, replaying in his mind while Elena talked about homework. It was a magnet’s pull, a gravity that felt like coming home to a place that was terrifyingly, beautifully ruined.
The love was there. It was deep, desperate, and tangled with guilt so thick it was almost another entity. It tasted like longing and old bourbon and despair.
But it wasn’t alone.
Sunlight. Elena’s hand in his, a anchor point in a stormy sea. Her belief in his goodness not as a performance, but as a truth he could maybe grow into. A simpler ache, lighter. A choice he’d made and desperately needed to believe was right. She was the daylight. Athena was the compelling, beautiful dark where he was forever lost. He loved them both, in different, warring ways, and the conflict was a fresh wound every single day.
The vision shredded. Athena gasped, wrenching her hand back as if burned.
The obsidian arrowhead lay cracked clean down the middle. A thin, acrid smoke rose from the napkin, which was now just brittle ash.
She slumped sideways onto the cold floorboards, her body trembling, her mind ringing with the echo. He loved her. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was a tumultuous, real thing inside him, vast and conflicted. And it didn’t matter. Because he loved Elena too, and he had chosen the sun.
The knowledge was a trophy made of thorns. She clutched it, and it bled her.
A numb, practical sadness washed over her, mixing with the residue from Damon’s bed. Used by one brother, eternally unwelcome in the other’s chosen life. She was a circuit between them, conducting their chaos, and never the destination.
Her phone buzzed on the couch. She crawled over to it. A text from Bonnie: You okay? Felt a weird spike. Like a scream.
Athena typed, her fingers clumsy. Fine. Just a headache. Going to sleep.
She looked at the broken arrowhead. The spell was cast. The truth was in her, now, a live thing gnawing at her ribs. She left the pieces on the floor, got up, and poured the last of her vodka into a coffee mug. She drank it standing at the window, watching Mystic Falls wake up into a morning she already knew would be too long.