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Perhaps it was not so wrong to hope that she could be what he needed here, just for a while.
“Do you have any idea how many women have wanted to fix me, Athena? I laughed at them. While I made them mine in bed. I changed them, they never changed me.”
“Did you go somewhere else inside with them?”
“I didn’t have to. Eventually, I learned to take pleasure in my power. Do you know, it can be quite intoxicating to have a man filled with shame begging for your body, offering you money, saying no one can ever know. They debased themselves forme. And later, they kept on doing it. All these rich socialites. Beautiful women. And they would gladly give their bodies to me, and I could afford to give mine in return for free. And I took great pleasure in feeling nothing but their fingertips on my skin, in feeling nothing but pleasure in my body. Discard them, never think of them again. Not even remember their faces. What did it matter? All those rich people who used me, and I got to use them right back. It’s heady, the power in that.”
He said those things, so cold. And yet, she knew he wasn’t cold. This man who enjoyed good food, who was walking with her now.
This man who had offered to save her. Who had asked nothing of her in return. Not really.
“It begs the question,” she said slowly. “Why won’t you touch me? If it means nothing.”
“Because if I am to learn one thing from what happened to Irina, it will be not to inflict myself on another person again.”
“You were not a punishment.”
“There are those who would beg to differ.”
She looked again at all those couples, walking together. Melting against each other.
She had the strangest sense that whatever was happening between herself and Cameron was somehow deeper. For all that it wasn’t an easy stroll. For all that they didn’t touch. She had never known another person. Not really. She and Rose had known each other as well as they could. But they did not remember their lives before coming to the compound. Their friendship was often marred by the disparity between them, by the fact that Rose had to work, and Athena was prevented from helping her with any of her duties.
Athena couldn’t let Cameron know her as well as she wanted to. Because there was a limit to what she remembered. But she could know him. As much as he would share. And it didn’t matter that he was trying to shock her. Trying to get her with those thorns. Keep her from getting too close.
There was intimacy in this. The kind that she had never shared with another living soul, and he didn’t shock her. He did not appall her. Instead, she felt honored.
He had hidden away all these years, and she had seen his face first.
And now she had his story.
“There is one thing that you and I can both fully appreciate,” she said.
“And what is that?”
“Here we are. Walking. Free. Nobody’s telling us what to do, or where to go. We could leave if we wanted, or we could stay forever.”
“Little goddess, I fear that you are spinning fairy tales.”
“I’m not spinning fairy tales. The truth is, this is the most that I have ever seen. All in one day. I am... Overwhelmed by it. But it isn’t just the place. It’s everything that you’ve told me. This is the deepest I have ever been able to know another person.”
He stopped moving. “You should take it as a warning, not as a novelty.”
“I don’t care what I should and shouldn’t do. I am not your prisoner. I’m your partner. And I have spent far too many years kowtowing to what others want from me. I spent too many years in the back of the greenhouse, left to my own devices, in the most lavish of settings, but there was no attention paid to my deeper needs. Talking to you... That fulfills something in me.”
“You are a romantic, Athena, which speaks volumes to the differences in our upbringing.”
“Yes. I would not say that my life has been normal, but it certainly shielded me from a great many things. You were right. As I said. I did not have an appropriate level of respect for what it meant to have the resources that I did. I feel differently now.”
His voice suddenly went hard. “Tell me. Tell me when you first realized your life was not normal.”
“I was ten. We watched a cartoon. The little girl went to the zoo. She got a balloon. She got an ice cream cone. I asked to go to the zoo, and my mother said no. I threw a tantrum, I begged, I cried. Screamed about going to the zoo. The next day, a bunch of balloons, a tray filled with ice cream cones, and a lemur appeared in the courtyard. Just for me. Just to make me happy. And I knew that it wasn’t the same. It was somehow more, but not at all what I had asked for. If I can have a lemur brought to me, then why would it be beyond my parents’ reach for me to go to a zoo? It made no sense. And it was always like that. I would ask for something outside the walls, and they would bring it to me. That was why when... I’m ashamed of this.”
“Tell me,” he said. “I should have some of your shame since you had all of mine.”
“When my father first said that he was having me marry Mattias I was excited. I didn’t know the man. But I was... Ready. I was ready to leave. I was ready for something new. For... I wanted romance. Yes. But I wanted sex as well. Do you have any idea how difficult it was growing up in a compound surrounded by grim-looking guards. With your hormones raging like that. I had fantasies about them. But if any of them touched me my father would’ve killed them.”
“And why didn’t you run away?”
