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He sleeps with his back to the door, curled around me, standing guard.
12
HERCULES
What I want isto be alone with Daisy. In this house. Inany house.That’s impossible, because her family won’t stop hovering.
I get it. I really do. This situation is worrying. Except I only have one tool, and it’s to dick her down whenever possible. That’s hard to do when a bunch of people are standing around with sad, worried faces or else gathering in rooms to have secret strategy meetings.
This doctor or that doctor?
Kidnap their sister or bribe her?
Takeeveryoneto the mountain?
It’s an endless round of questions and endless people coming in and out of Zeus’s house. Hundreds of questions. Thousands of questions. No, she won’t go to the hospital. Yes, she’s had this condition since childhood. No, there is no other drug regimen that’s helped. Even this process is a pain in the ass, because everyone who sits with her has to talk around the painkillers, and what they’re made from, and how they came to be.
After the incident at the pool—which, what the fuck—I start sleeping in her bedroom. Nobody says a word to me about it. Hades watches me when we come downstairs in the morning, like he’s trying to decide if he has to do some stealth-murder, but he never makes any veiled comments.
Every day is a weird combination of family time and extended naps. Daisy keeps trying to paint, but her attention slips away from the canvas. The blue wave on the app stays fuzzy. I feel like it could forget its shape at any time.
Everybody else thinks so, too. I catch Zeus frowning down at his phone at least six times a day. Hades doesn’t need an app. He takes one look at Daisy, and the corners of his mouth turn down.
I can’t sleep.
Ishouldsleep, but I don’t know when the nightmare is going to come again and fuck everything up. It would make sense for it to come when she’s already asleep, but I’ve seen what it does. I’ve seen how it can drag her in if she’s tired.
Or…is that changing, too? She didn’t seem tired out by the pool. She said she was wide awake.
I catch her staring into space.
It’s totally understandable, given that she’s the one who’s most sensitive to light. There’s not a ton of stuff to look at when you’re sitting in the dark. But during conversations, she’ll trail off, looking at…
Nothing.
It’s been three or four days when she rolls over in the middle of the night. I fucked her slow and quiet for an hour when we got into bed. I thought she’d be out for the night, but I feel her turn, and then:
“Tell me about your friend.”
My heart tries to jump straight over the memory. It trips and falls instead, ending up right in the center of the damn thing. It’s instinct to buy time.
“What friend?”
“Ollie.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Where did you meet him?”
“At boot camp.” I still remember him from that very first day at processing, when we spent eight hours waiting around to fill out forms and talk to different people in the Army’s finest display of wasting time on bureaucracy. “He had a big smile. And he didn’t care if everything took forever, which it always did.”
“A big smile?”
“Yeah. Like a happier version of Ares. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Always laughing, unless he was taking somebody out.”
“And he was your friend?”
“He was my best friend.”
