Nora - thank you for your lovely comment! To answer your question only Anya's friends and teachers are really aware that Yor is not Anya's real mother, not because it's a secret but mainly because it doesn't really come up outside of her social circles. So, I wrote that as a nearby student making a passing observation but dont worry, its not really important to the story :)

Thank you to everyone else who left comments, they really encourage me and it's really fun to see your thoughts!

Okay, now I cannot *wait* to show you this chapter. Would you believe me if I said you weren't ready 😂

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While Loid put away the dishes, and Yor cleaned away the last of the the things on the table, Anya was a little busy trying not to do anything embarrassing, like accidentally look into Damian's eyes.

God, what was wrong with her?

Both too awkward to stand, Anya had indicated to Damian that he should sit on the sofa with her, and she was going to suggest watching something together, maybe to ease the tension, or be some sort of distraction, or maybe to make sure that she was giving herself something else to look at instead of him because he was sitting right there and her body was surely about to spontaneously combust.

So, it was a bit of a surprise when she heard her parent's plan in her mind.

No, don't go! She silently pleaded, but her mouth wouldn't open, and all attempts at preventing her parent's plan fell ridiculously flat. It was like her body and mind had disconnected, like it wasn't listening to what her brain was telling her, because logically, she knew that being alone with Damian was going to be awkward and weird and it was the last thing that either of them wanted…

… But she couldn't deny the tiny, secret part of her that wondered what would happen if they were both truly alone.

So, she said nothing, and watched her parents prepare to leave.

Loid stopped midway through the door, and rummaged for something in his pocket. "Oh, I almost forgot, the authorities -" he gave Anya a meaningful look, "have finished sweeping out the facility and they retrieved your phone from the office."

"Really? Awesome!" Anya grinned, the awkward situation alleviated, but not forgotten. "Thank you so much!"

"Not a problem," said Loid curtly. "Just make sure it still works." He swivelled the small black object in his hands and threw it the short distance towards her.

"Will do! Thanks, Papa," said Anya, and caught it without much thought, while the door clicked shut behind him.

Damian turned pink and looked away, as he sat rigidly upright on the sofa, and Anya wondered what he was worried about. (Knowing him, it could be anything.) Was it because they were alone? Because the sofa wasn't that big, and she could easily reach over to him if she wanted to?

"You're not going to turn it on now, are you?" he said in a high voice, and Anya frowned.

"Yeah, so? Like my Papa said, I need to make sure it still works." Anya didn't think much of his reaction until she clicked the 'on' button.

It pinged immediately.

She moved to put it face down on the table, intending to read it later, but it pinged again.

"Just turn it off -" Damian muttered.

Ping! Ping! Ping!

A torrent of alerts erupted from her phone.

"- or throw it away, or something!" Damian started to panic visibly, and he lunged over to grab the phone out of Anya's hands.

Anya lurched backwards from Damian's surprise attack and stretched her arm, holding it out of his reach. "Hey, it's not a big deal! It's just -"

She stopped dead in the middle of her sentence when her eyes caught the notifications on the screen.

"- messages leftover…"

Her voice trailed away.

Damian messaged you
Damian messaged you
Damian messaged you
Damian messaged you
Damian messaged you
Damian messaged you

All down the screen, and then some. It was all the same.

"Damian," she read from the screen, and then glanced up at his flaming face. "What is all this?"

Damian attempted to cover his now fluorescent red cheeks with one hand. "Please don't read them."

It was too late. Anya had swiped into her phone and saw all the messages rolling in.

Hey. We're all pretty worried about you. You ok?

Hey. We haven't heard anything from you yet. Please call if you see this

Seriously. It's been hours

Where are you?

Are you okay?

Obviously you're not okay. I hope you are

Okay I mean

Please come back. I really need you to come back

And then she made it to the start of the longer messages, all spanning the days that she had been missing:

You've never missed school before. Everyone's worried about you. Emile and Ewen won't stop badgering me with questions about what to do and how to find you and I don't know what to tell them. I just wish you were here.

Hey. You probably can't see this. Sorry. But I can't stop thinking that you're still out there and maybe you can see this. People really care if you're okay. Please be okay. I don't know what I would do if you weren't

His words had rooted her to the spot, and she wanted to read more, but Damian grabbed her wrists and tried to wrench the phone out of her grasp.

"Hey!" she cried out, "give me back my phone!"

"Stop! Reading! Them!" he huffed and pulled hard, but she was stronger. It was a tug-of-war between the two, and Damian was losing.

Then she jerked her grasp to the side, trying to pull away from him, when she lost balance on the edge of her seat and they both tumbled to the floor. Somehow, they both managed to brace the fall, but Anya ended up flat on her back, phone still in her hand.

Anya groaned and would have tried to rub the back of her head, but she couldn't move her hand. Or her legs, apparently. Damian had her pinned to the floor. His face hovered inches from hers, flaming with embarrassment, or exertion, or both.

He smelled like warm sunshine, like being in the library on a sunny day, skimming the pages of a well-worn book. Golden eyes stared and stared at her, threaded with hypnotising shades of amber and bronze and gold woven together, and she wondered how she had never noticed it before. There were moments like this in the past, when their faces were close enough to feel each other's breath, but this was different. Where in those moments they would have leapt away, found some excuse to retreat, Damian and Anya were trapped in this compromising position of staring into each other's eyes, and in some mixture of horror and fascination, she didn't want to look away.

The light of her phone blazed in the corner of her vision, and she traitorously tore her eyes away from his, and read the last message lighting up the screen:

I'm really scared. Please be alive. Wherever you are right now, you have to be alive. I can't do any of this without you. I love you

Damian's arm shot out and he whacked the phone from her hand, and it skidded away across the floor to the other side of the room. He gripped her wrist to stop her from reaching out for it.

"Please," his voice cracked. "Please don't read them…"

Both panted heavily as they lay on the floor, faces far too close, bodies far too entwined. He had somehow landed on her so that their legs had tangled together, and he was far too aware of how close they were, far too aware of how good she smelled, of her hair spread out behind her, and her dishevelled shirt revealing the skin of her neck and collarbone.

Damian released the grip of her wrists, and slowly manoeuvred himself so that he leaned on his elbows, balancing his own weight. He tried to move back, to give her some space, but the awkward position of her legs over his had locked him in place.

She glared up at him with a determination that made him gasp, her forest-green eyes alive with adamant outrage. She had pursed her lips in hard resolve, and for a terrifying moment, Damian had a frighteningly strong urge to lean down and kiss her. He couldn't look at her. It was too much, with her in that position under him.

Her breath hitched, like she also had realised the dangerous position they were in, but she made no move to push him away. "It's my phone! They're my messages! I can read them if I want to!"

Damian couldn't move, and he cursed himself for it. Why why why did she have to look so beautiful? Why did she have the power to immobilise him like this?

Damian closed his eyes against her and leaned his head down, almost to the space of her neck, in an effort to hide his own face from her. He tried, and failed, to block out the sweet scent of strawberry.

"Anya, you don't understand," His voice tightened, and he swallowed. "It's too much, you don't know what you're doing to me."

The rush of his heartbeat thrummed in his ears, like waves crashing into the sea. Every part of him ached at the thought of being so close to her, while knowing that she wasn't truly his, and the sting of her rejection from the day before had twisted into an open wound.

So why couldn't he move away?

Eyes closed, he could feel her relaxing under him, releasing the tension in her body, and his pulse quickened dangerously.

"Damian," she sighed with a fullness that sent a shiver pulsing down his spine. "Look at me."

He kept his eyes closed and gritted his teeth, afraid to even move. "I can't."

Gentle fingers skimmed past his jaw, and sparks flew across his skin where she touched him, where she guided his face over hers, like putty in her hands.

Fingers in his hair pulled him closer.

He was powerless to stop her.

Kissing Anya Forger was like floating in space.

It was dazzling. Terrifying. Utterly freeing, and at once, totally exposing. He was half-sure that he was in the middle of a thrilling hallucination, or a fantastical dream. Galaxies spun behind his eyes and his senses bathed in nebulous fumes of strawberry and mint, pink and green.

The way their lips moved together was intoxicating. She was so much softer than he had ever imagined, so much warmer, and it awakened a fierce desire inside of him that obliterated everything else in its path, until kissing her was all that mattered, and he floated in a void, filled only by her light. He wondered why he was never brave enough to kiss her before. If he knew that it would make him forget everything else, that it would make him feel untouchable, that it would gift them with a bubble of time so precious and lovely, then he would have kissed her the day he realised how much he loved her.

She whispered a name - his name - against his lips, and he wanted to melt into her. Devour her. Collapse into her like a supernova.

Her hands glided from his face and traced down his neck, onto his shoulders, and instantly he lost all sense of himself. The concentrated heat of a thousand stars pulsed through him and he gasped into her kiss, his lungs burning for her, but Anya pushed back, capturing him again and again, stealing his breath each time she pressed her lips against his.

His lungs were on fire. He was going to -

Damian broke from her lips, fighting for breath.

He had run out of oxygen.

For a long moment they stayed like that, trying to get their breathing back, before Damian regained himself, and he dragged his eyes from her exquisite collarbone to her flushed face.

"Why did you do that?" he blurted.

He needed Anya to say it out loud. With every fibre in his being, he needed to hear it from her. He needed her to tell him what he had been longing to hear for nearly his whole life: if she shared his feelings, if she felt the same way, then maybe he could allow himself to have hope. If she gave him an answer then, maybe it could mean something, maybe it could -

To his dismay, Anya looked just as surprised as he felt. She stared up at him with eyes beautifully wide, and her hair spread in a shimmering halo of pink around her.

"I just…" She gulped. "I wanted to."

Damian's heart seized in his chest, and he bit back his terrible disappointment. So she just wanted to kiss him… just because? There was no other reason she reached for him like that? Did it truly mean nothing to her?

So, Damian realised bitterly. She really doesn't feel the same way.

Although he wanted nothing more than to stay there with her forever, and to dive back into their kiss, Damian fought his desire as he disentangled himself from her and rolled back on his heels.

Meanwhile, Anya slowly pulled herself up from the floor, eyeing him with sincere and cautious curiosity.

Minutes ago, he couldn't look at her, but now he couldn't bear to look away. The tightness returned in Damian's throat as he took in the sight of her.

The woman of his dreams. The love of his life. The centre of gravity in his world.

"You can't-"

The girl who rejected him.

"You can't just go around kissing people like that!"

Anya blinked, clearly startled. "Huh?"

All the emotions that he had been holding back rose in him then, in an agonising tsunami that decimated him. He dared let himself be vulnerable around her, and in less than five minutes his love for her had destroyed him once again because she knew how he felt about her, and she kissed him, even though she didn't love him back, and it overwhelmed him completely.

He didn't know what to do with himself, but he was immobilised by anger. Anger that he was being taken advantage of, that he was made to look like a fool, that he was being played with, and he didn't want to believe that she would ever hurt him like that on purpose, but with each passing minute that she didn't reciprocate his feelings, didn't even give him a straight answer, it was getting harder and harder to tolerate the pain building up inside him, and he was afraid that he might explode.

He couldn't believe what he was about to say. "I've never kissed anyone before. I wanted it to be special. I wanted it to-"

I wanted it to be with you!

"- to mean something, because that's what you do! You kiss people you love!"

His ragged breath was the only sound that filled the air, and Damian tried to blink back the threatening tears.

In the silence, Damian couldn't stop the last shred of hope from showing its colours within him. If there was still a chance that Anya could love him back, he needed to hear it from her, and he needed to hear it from her now. At least he would know, and then he could try to move on, however impossible that felt.

With his eyes on her, Damian searched for a last sign, for anything that he could use to stop his heart from breaking, but all he could see before him was Anya's shocked expression as she blinked incredulously at him.

Blink. Blink.

Why won't she say anything? Damian squeezed his eyes shut, and the ache in his heart only throbbed more painfully.

So. That was it then.

Damian's hands trembled as he pulled himself up, and in the time that he took to stand, he soured with bitter disappointment.

"Nevermind," he mumbled. "I'll see you at school."

Damian walked away before she could see the delicate cracks in his heart.

As she watched him walk away, Anya was sure that her legs had turned to stone. She wanted to run after him, and -

…and…

Her mind blanked.

And what? What would she tell him?

It wasn't supposed to go like this. He had asked her why she kissed him, and she couldn't bring herself to conjure up an answer because she honestly had no idea what to say. She had made a terrible mistake, she knew that much, and yet her ignorance paralysed her.

Why, indeed? It wasn't the first time she wanted to kiss him, just the first time that she acted on that inexplicable urge, but from Damian's reaction it was clear that just wanting to kiss someone wasn't enough of a reason to actually do it.

His voice echoed in her mind: You kiss people you love!

Kissing him wasn't something she had planned on doing, it just felt like it was the right thing to do in the moment, but he had kissed her back because he loved her -

So what was her excuse?

Anya clutched her shirt at her chest. Below her tightened hands, she tried to ignore the thunderous beat of her heart.

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I've had this scene written since January. January!

It's going to be uncomfortable for a couple more chapters, and then I promise the discomfort will be worth it!