New York. The Big Apple. The city that never sleeps, Damon Salvatore thought as he settled in his seat. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
"How long are we here again?" he glanced out the cab window and up at the flock of billboards flying overhead in the Times Square airspace, a confetti skyline swirled with Technicolor and kinetic lights.
"Three months, give or take," his assistant, Rose, says, not looking up from her phone.
Damon had already missed his house in Atlanta. Despite the many miles he logged flying all over the world, he was Southern boy at heart. A city like Atlanta made an excellent home base for him. A world-class city with the charm and sensibility of a much smaller town. Whenever Damon was in New York, he felt on edge, like the Big Apple was taking a bite out of him. It was not an easy place to negotiate. It was a city bursting with possibility and creativity, but it required a certain amount of armour. Feeling that way for three months….he didn't really like it but he knew he had to deal with it.
"We are lucky to have your brother's place while we are here." Enzo, his business partner and best friend of fifteen years, looked at their schedule on his iPad. "We have so many meetings at the UN this month. All the companies interested in buying us out are here in New York. We have several galas in the city over the next few weeks. Makes sense not to keep going back and forth, and just make this our base for a little bit."
"Yeah, at least we will be staying in Brooklyn." Damon leaned an elbow on the base of the cab window, considering the changing digital billboards while they were stopped at a traffic light. "Downtown gives me a seizu—"
The word froze on Damon's tongue when one advertisement in particular caught his attention. Or, he should say, the model did. Her name was nowhere on the ad, but it didn't need to be. Elena Gilbert had been one of the most recognizable faces in the world for the past ten years.
She was naked. Even though she was stretched out flat on her stomach with her chin propped on her hands, breasts pressed to the floor, she was obviously naked. Her hair, famously long and dark brown, was ruthlessly scraped back, exposing the flawless bone structure of her face. It was rare to see someone like her wearing no makeup at all, but her face was completely bare. Matter of fact, the product she was promoting was called REVEAL.
REVEAL: Skin care so good you will have nothing to hide.
She was naked, no cosmetics at all, and yet her eyes made a lie of that tagline. She was utterly exposed, and though her brown doe eyes were the clearest Damon had ever seen, they yielded nothing.
"You were saying?" Enzo wore a knowing grin, glancing from his face to the billboard before it swiped to the next product being advertised. "I hope you will be less obvious when we meet her in person tonight, Damon."
"Tonight?" Damon frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"That is Grayson's Gilbert daughter," Rose piped in, eyes still fastened to her phone. Sometimes Damon thought she had eyes in the back of her head. "She will be at the charity dinner tonight. They are at your table, if I'm not mistaken."
Damon looked back at the billboard even though a different image had taken its place. He still saw her as vividly as when she stared back at him with those guarded brown doe eyes.
Even when they were several blocks away and had started discussing their upcoming trip to Cambodia, Damon still wondering how a girl naked on the side of a building managed to hide in broad daylight and show nothing at all.
