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“Athena...”
“Tell me. Tell me really, how it started. Tell me.”
“No. There is no need to speak of it. We are walking down the streets of Paris, and you wish to speak of my time as a rent boy?”
“I don’t know that I wish to, but it keeps coming up, and I feel the way that you use it to try and distance me.”
“I shouldn’t have to try to distance you. If you recall, I took you prisoner.”
“Please. You took me prisoner, and then offered me the world. You took me prisoner, and then offered to take care of me. What I want to understand is why you were so married to the idea that you were the worst person on earth.”
“Ask Irina.”
“She’s dead, so I can’t,” said Athena. “And before you say that’s the point, I will remind you that you are alive. So perhaps you should find a better tribute than sitting around talking about how you’re beyond redemption.”
“How do you even give attribute to a woman you felt nothing for? When I tell you about my time as a rent boy... When I tell you that I am... Do you really want to know how it started?”
“Yes. You told me you made more money, but you had to discover that at some point.”
“All right. There was a woman. Older. I was seventeen. Every bit as tall as I am now. Not as broad, mind you, because we did not have enough food on the streets. I was quite lanky. But I looked older than I was. Apollo was still working his charm, distracting people while I went in and stole their purse. We stole this woman’s purse. We ran. Later, she came to the door of our storage unit that we stayed in. She had followed us. Seen us go in.
“She said that she was sorry to see boys taking to the streets to fend for themselves. She said she wouldn’t call the police. She asked me to come to her house. She fed me a meal. It was...”
He had a terrifying, detached sort of look on his face. In his voice. “I thought perhaps she was caring for me. For the first time, I thought perhaps someone was caring for me. Just because. And then she asked for sex.”
“What?”
“Yes. She was an older woman, attractive enough. She was lonely, she said. And I... I was too. I had seen her as a mother figure, feeding me dinner, taking pity on me even though I had stolen from her. But she did not see me as a son. She offered me the entire contents of her wallet plus two hundred more dollars for sex. I said yes. Because I’m not a fool. I said yes because not only was she not calling the police on me, she was offering to pay.”
“That’s... That’s very...”
“It’s unsavory is what it is.”
“Yes,” she said, honestly.
“That’s the kind of man I am.”
“You were a boy. Was it your first time being with anyone?”
He nodded. “I wasn’t concerned with sex. I was concerned with survival. So... You don’t judge me, because you feel that I did it out of desperation. For food. For money. That is true. But the worst was the small, needy part of myself that wish to be touched. That wish to be close to another person.” His lip curled. “I learned. As I went on. I learned not to think of it that way. You can’t. You might feel something good for a moment, but the shame of it afterward, and the pieces of yourself you leave behind... It isn’t worth it. So you go somewhere else. And watch her body do all those things. It’s much easier that way.”
“Oh.”
That told her more about him than anything else ever could have. He went somewhere else. It was how he had survived so many things. She wondered if he had ever found a way to come back to himself.
She wondered if he even wanted to.
She had thought that maybe he separated his body and soul on occasion. But she wondered now if it had been something more final than that.
“I’m so terribly sorry for what the world has done to you. And I am sorry... The way that I spoke of my willingness to leave my family, the way that I spoke of being poor, as if it was a Charles Dickens novel, and not something that is harrowing. Attending to your own survival that way. I am sorry.”
He had not grown thorns for the sake of it. He needed them. She wondered if there was a part of Cameron that remained untouched, unspoiled by the world. And she felt desperate to reach down and find it.
She felt like it might be essential to her. To testing her own strength and to...being needed for herself.
For perhaps she had been specifically sharpened and honed to attack the demons that lived in him.
Perhaps she was the goddess of a very particular war. One that lived in him.
