Page 81 of Icarus

Helios took a moment to digest that.

“I want—” Helios swallowed hard. “I want you to stop acting like you’re not an option. For me. That way. Just because I have experience doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be faithful. To you.”

He spoke in fits and starts, like each phrase cost him dearly. Icarus scooted toward the edge of the bench as Helios sat up to face him properly.

“Unless. That’s not. What you—”

“Helios.” Icarus placed his hands around Helios’s face, pushed his thumbs into the soft warm space beneath his ears. “Helios, would you like to be with me, and come to live by my side?”

“Yes, I’ll come,” Helios breathed, eyebrows knitting with emotion.

Icarus grinned. “Will you brighten my house with your light, Helios? Will you bring your heat to my hearth? Do you need me to say things poetically for you to take me seriously? Because I will.”

“Okay, you can stop now,” Helios laughed. “You love ruining intense moments.”

“I do,” Icarus confessed sweetly, pulling his hands back to tuck them under his arms and stop their shaking.

“Come on. I want to show you something else.”

Rough

At the back of the red wing there was another storage room, not dissimilar to the one in Mr. Black’s personal wing.

Unlike Mr. Black’s, which was a cyclonic mess, this one was more organized. It was just very densely packed. Large metal shelves of paint and supplies lined the wall; canvases were stacked into unwieldy piles. The larger canvases were practically slipping, held up only by a crate of notebooks.

“It was her studio,” Helios said, dragging a hand across the top of a jar of paintbrushes. “My mom was an art major like your dad. I think they met before our dads did actually, but not by a lot.”

“Cool. So is this mostly old work?” Icarus asked. “Does she still do this?”

There were a few unfinished landscapes around. They weren’t anything to write home about. Helios’s mom was an average painter.

“Not really. The stuff on the walls is older work, but I’m sure the rest of it is from right before we moved out,” Helios replied. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”

He paused. “Please don’t be mad,” he said, softer.

Icarus followed him to the very back of the room. There was a desk stacked with notebooks, a door that was cracked open to reveal a small bathroom, and in the corner across from the desk, a large canvas covered with muslin next to a small stool.

The canvas was one of the biggest Icarus had ever seen outside a museum. The hairs on his neck stood on end.

“What is this, Helios?” he asked, but Icarus already knew.

How could he not?

Helios reached for the muslin, but Icarus put up a hand. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he strode across the space and pressed his forehead to Helios’s shoulder.

“I’m not angry at you. Not for this.”

Then he stepped away, grasped the muslin, and tore it down.

The canvas was . . .

Anyone could still see that it had once been breathtaking.

The splashes of acid had stripped away most of the middle of the canvas, even forming a few holes big enough for Icarus to crawl through. But it wasn’t a perfect job.

Angus hadn’t brushed it evenly over the whole thing, he had thrown it recklessly. So you could still see the sky, the trees, and the water at the edges. It looked like someone had burned a hole in the world.

Icarus backed away from it, disturbed. He accidentally bumped into the desk behind him, unable to tear his eyes away. Notebooks and loose paper spilled to the floor. Helios crouched to pick them up.