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“Is that what you spend your sacred prostitution money on? Blue fires?”
“If I push a button I can turn it purple or orange, if you prefer,” August said.
“Blue will do.”
“Blue it is, then,” he said. “My business is your pleasure.”
“You’re making this less easy,” she said.
“Harder?”
“I wasn’t going to say that word around you.”
“Wise woman,” he said. “I suppose you’d like to talk about what happened between us Saturday night?”
“I would like to do that, yes,” she said. “Could you explain to me exactly what happened in terms I will understand and will not cause me to go mad?”
August didn’t answer at first. “I’ll try,” he finally said. “But I can’t promise either of those things.”
“Do your best.”
“First,” he said, “I have to ask if you can accept the possibility that you are living in a world where the Olympic gods—Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis, the whole crew—were real gods who existed in a very real way and wielded very real power. If you can, that’s the answer. If you can’t, this conversation won’t go very well.”
Lia took a deep breath. “I rode the Pegasus bareback. I’ve never ridden a horse bareback, always with a saddle. But now I know how it feels, and I think if I had to do it again I’d know how to hold my knees...” she said. “Let’s just say I’m willing to suspend disbelief for the time being.”
“All I ask,” he said.
“What about the sex?”
“What about it?”
“Did we have it?” she asked, wincing slightly.
“Not in the traditional sense of the word.”
“You didn’t put any bits of yours into any bits of mine?”
“Apart from when I kissed you and put my tongue in your mouth.”
“I didn’t think we did,” she said. “I didn’t feel like it after. It just felt like I’d...” She waved her hand.
“Had an orgasm?” August asked.
“That. You?” He held up two fingers. “Twice?” He nodded. “Nice.”
“I’ll send you my dry-cleaning bill,” he said.
“We didn’t have sex, but we both came,” she said.
“Mind over matter.” August shrugged. “Ask any teenage boy about that phenomenon.”
Lia had teenage brothers. She didn’t have to ask.
“The power of the Rose Kylix,” he said simply and with another shrug. “The Greeks have always believed in other realms of existence. Plato’s world of the ‘forms’ where the ideal form of all things exist. The physical Mount Olympus and the Olympus where the gods lived and reigned. And a realm of fantasy—Arcadia, as the Renaissance painters have called that world.”
“We were in Arcadia?” she asked. Next, he’d tell her they’d taken a detour through Narnia.
“In a way, yes. In mind,” he said. “Not in body. It’s like a dreamworld except a million billion times more real, more vivid. Literally we experienced a metanoia—going beyond one’s mind.”
