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“Is this the collection I’m part of?”
“Yes,” he said, hard and offering no explanation.
“Why do you really collect things?”
He looked...embarrassed, almost. He looked away. “A habit. One I didn’t indulge in all the years after Apollo and I made success but something about this... I used to pick up whatever I found. I had no money, and one never knew what one might need. If you could find something for free, you kept it. And you held on to it.”
Her heart squeezed tight. “You started your whole career that way.”
He nodded. “When you are poor, simple objects can change your life. I suppose out here, bankrupt of all the trappings of the life I once I had, I slid back into that mindset.”
He had thought he might need her, and so he’d kept her.
He hadn’t even been wrong. It made her want to laugh. And cry.
“It’s a rather Spartan room,” she said.
“I live a fairly Spartan life. It is simple. And I don’t mind that.”
“Are you not lonely here?”
He looked at her, his face hard. “Loneliness happens when you let yourself want something. I want nothing. I wake up every day, and I follow the direction my mind needs to go. I need to create things. To invent them. If there are problems, my brain wishes to solve them, and I do that using technology. It is my only real drive. The business stuff... That was never me. That has always been Apollo. I simply want... I need to fix things. And that is all. Personally, as a human being, I require very little. I’m not driven by the need for material wealth. The pleasures of the flesh no longer appeal to me the way they once did. Even then... What I wanted was control. What I wanted was to spend the years taking back what I felt had been taken from me. Empty, useless pursuits.”
So, he didn’t feelnothingabout prostituting himself. He had felt very deeply about it for a time.
She chose not to say anything more about that either. More good sense on her part.
“We...”
“We shall leave tomorrow.”
“Oh.” She felt disappointed by that, and she couldn’t even say why. Perhaps because he was refusing to acknowledge that they were married.
Perhaps because you want him?
That little voice inside her felt nearlydangerous.
She needed to leave him, and all of this, behind, once he helped her. She needed to find out who she was and find her family. She couldn’t afford to be so...beset by him.
And yet she was.
“What?” he asked, and she knew embarrassment over the fact he’d witnessed her inner turmoil.
“It is our wedding day. And it will be our wedding night and...”
“You will have dinner as you always do. I will take dinner as I do. Do not spin stories about me. How could you, anyway? Do you not see?”
The problem was she did see. Perhaps deeper than he wanted her to. And she did not find him repulsive. Rather she found him compelling. Rather she wanted to draw nearer to him.
“I’m not spinning stories. I’m just getting to know you. Thank you. For the necklace. Have courage and take heart.”
“I didn’t even know what it said. I simply found a necklace with the goddess Athena on it, it seemed appropriate.”
He was lying. She did not know why he was lying.
“It’s a good thing you never get lonely. Because I think most people here would. How nice it must be to want nothing.”
He looked at her, his expression remote. “It is the only thing I know.”
