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And when she cried out those words she should have known were forbidden, Zeus couldn’t bring himself to react the way he knew he should. Instead, he moved them both up in the bed, then pulled the coverlet over them so they could lie there, together.
Because he needed to gaze at her as if he expected, at any moment, that she would be taken from him again. And that, once again, it would be his fault.
“We never talk about that night,” he managed to say. His eyes were so greedy on hers, he felt so torn, that he was surprised she could stand to hold his gaze at all. But she did.
“What is there to talk about?” He thought that was a slap, a dismissal. Instead, Nina rolled closer to him and piled her hands beneath her face so she could smile at him. It felt like a miracle.Maybe she is the miracle, something in him whispered. “We both know what it was between us. How intense it was. What it meant. Yet it was always going to end the way it did. Because you’d already called them.”
The last time she’d mentioned this, he’d deflected.Were you truly under the impression that I was or am a good man?And maybe he would never be a good man. Not by any reasonable measure.
But for Nina, he would try.
“I did,” he said. Simply enough.
And of all the things he’d done in his life. All the sins, all the scandals. They seemed like nothing to him. It was this admission that cost him the most.
But her smile didn’t waver.I love you, she’d said. And unlike the many who had mouthed those words before, she knew him. She’d seen him do more than flatter and cajole a night away.
She’d chosen him, not his reputation.
“Zeus,” Nina said quietly, her brown eyes soft. “I understand.”
Then she leaned toward him, kissing him again. And it was as if she’d flung open the windows and let the noonday sun inside. He felt that light all over him. He felt bathed in sunshine.
He knew that if he bothered to look, it would still be dark outside. A cold winter’s night, with snow coming down as if it might never stop, up here in the mountains.
And Zeus had spent his entire life, it seemed, finding new ways to be worse. To be even more terrible than reported. To live down to every low expectation his father had ever set him.
He’d come to think that the reason it came so easily to him was because that was who he was. That all along, he hadn’t been acting at all.
But the way Nina looked at him, as if he was the miracle here, made him feel something he had long been certain he would never feel again.
Hope.
“You shouldn’t understand,” he told her fiercely, his hand going to her so he could grip her, to make sure she was real. “You should hate me. Why don’t you hate me?”
“I’ve tried,” she admitted, with that smile of hers. “Believe me, I did try. But it turns out, I don’t know how.”
What could Zeus do but kiss her again then, with all those things he thought he’d lost. His soul. His heart. Himself.
And he knew that morning would come. As morning always did. He knew that his endgame marched closer every day, regardless of what work he put into selling the world love stories. It would all come full circle soon. He was ready.
But here, now, far away in this castle room where no one could see who they truly were with each other, he let himself be the one thing he’d never been. In all his years of pretending to be this or that. Or everything.
Here with Nina, his Nina, he let himself be nothing more or less than a man.
Not just any man, but the one she loved.
Again and again.
There was a faint hint of light in the sky outside when Zeus woke again to find Nina curled up next to him. The sight caught at him, hard enough to leave marks. This woman who gave all of herself to him, when she, more than any other, should never have let him near her again. That big, round belly where his child grew, safe and warm. He kissed them both. Nina on her cheek, so she smiled a little while she slept. And his baby, too.
His baby.Zeus hadn’t let himself truly take in what that meant. That in only a couple of months, he would be able to hold a child of his own in his arms.
He would be able to do it differently. To do it better.
Take what had been done to him, but turn it inside out.
The heart he’d just rediscovered seemed to crack open inside of his chest. He tried to imagine Nina in the role of his mother. Or himself a king like Cronos. He tried to imagine letting all of that weight land on the tiny life inside Nina’s belly, and he couldn’t. It was too much. He wanted to rage. He wanted to punch the stone walls surrounding him.
