AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But not tonight.
Tonight, I’m going to lie here and let Orpheus paint me. We’ll release some of the pain still lingering between us. It’s strange to realize I had already started to forgive him before he ever made the journey to the lower city. The fact that he came, that he’s so invested in penance and doing whatever it takes to make things right…it means a lot. The man he used to be never would’ve considered apologizing, let alone engaging in the kind of things we’ve done since he arrived.
Watching him now, doing an activity I’m intimately familiar with, he should look like the old Orpheus. But he doesn’t. There is a heaviness to him, a weight he’s willingly caring around. Some people might call it maturity. I don’t know if that’s exactly the right word, but he seems content enough with the burden.
“Do you want to talk about what happened today?”
I concentrate on maintaining the position where he’s arranged me on the chaise, with one arm draped over my head and my body stretched out. He ensured I would be comfortable, propping me up with pillows so I can hold the position for an extended period of time. It still takes effort not to move. “You don’t normally like a lot of chatter when you paint.”
“There isn’t a lot left in my life that’s ‘normal.’ If you want to talk, I’m happy to listen.”
His words scratch at me, an itch I can’t quite reach. It takes me several long beats before I realize the problem. “What about what you want?”
“What I want doesn’t matter.”
I tense but remind myself to relax at the last minute. Even though we’re speaking, his brush moves at a steady pace, making the trip from paint to canvas and back again. “That’s bullshit, Orpheus. Iunderstand you feel guilty for fucking up, and that’s why you’re paying penance, but that doesn’t mean it has to become your entire personality. You’re a whole human with thoughts and feelings and needs.”
“Am I?” His brush hesitates, and then goes back to the canvas. “I thought I was your dog.”
I glare. “Don’t do that. Don’t dirty what we shared in the last couple days. You enjoy being on your knees as much as I enjoy putting you there, but that isn’t the entirety of our relationship, and you know it. You’ve wronged me, but I’ve forgiven you for it. To keep hauling around your guilt is selfish.”
He flinches as if I reached out and struck him. “Well, we’ve already established I’m a selfish asshole. I guess I continue to play to type.”
“Stop. Doing. That.” I have to concentrate to stop gritting my teeth. “I don’t want to be the albatross you string around your neck for the rest of your life. Can you see how that would be more of a burden than anything else? You’ve always had hopes and dreams and ambitions, Orpheus. Those didn’t just go away in the last year, even if you buried them deep.”
He sits back with a sigh. “If you want an honest answer to this question, it’s going to prove just how selfish and worthless I am.”
No matter what else is true, I don’t like seeing him in pain. But if we have any chance at a future, we need to get this kind of thing figured out now. If Orpheus is more in love with the idea of paying penance to me than he is in love with me as a person, it will never work. I don’t know if that fear is irrational or not, but his reluctance to name the things that he personally wants worries me. “Tell me.”
He stares at his painting for a very long time, so long that I thinkhe’s trying to get out of answering the question. I’m about to press him again when he says, “I just want to paint. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I only did all the other shit, the networking and the partying and playing the golden boy to the legacy families, because it made my mother happy. She loves me—and it’s not a conditional love, either—but I think there’s a part of her that can’t help wanting me to mirror her ambitions and take the family further than she did.”
I can see that. Calliope used her modeling as a way to open doors for her, and later her family, into the upper tiers of the legacy families. She was never shy about wearing her ambition on her sleeve. In Olympus, that’s practically a virtue. I’m nearly certain that her positioning helped her eldest son become Apollo. He deserves the title, and he’s one of the best of the Thirteen in my personal opinion, but it washerambition that secured him the spot, not his own.
As for Orpheus, no doubt she wanted him to follow in her footsteps. To use his art as an entrance to even higher levels of politics, to pave the way for an advantageous marriage that would ensure their family remained among the legacy families and create a possibility that his children could be future members of the Thirteen.
His relationship with me was never going to serve that purpose. My mother may be Demeter, and now my oldest sister may be Hera, but so much of Olympus still sees us as countryfolk, as outsiders. Calliope likes me well enough, but I’m not the partner she would choose for her son.
With all that said… “I thought you were happy. You seemed like it when we were dating before.”
“I was happy.” He shrugs. “It feels good to have the spotlight of Olympus’s attention shining on you. It made me feel like a god.It wasn’t until you were gone, and I stopped performing for them, that I realized how fickle that light is.”
It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I sympathize. Not that the golden light of Olympus ever shined on me. I have been tolerated even more than my sisters because I never made waves, but that’s a long way from actual approval. My family’s presence is a bone in the throat of all the legacy families, a reminder that they rely so heavily on those of us who come from the countryside around the city. My mother won her title by popular vote of all of Olympus’s citizens, both those in the city and those in the country. And that, the legacy families cannot stand.
“But the truth is,” he continues, “that as bad as things were for the last year, there was also relief mixed into the whole mess. I didn’t have to perform anymore. Losing my art hurt, but the rest of it was all unnecessary window dressing.”
I almost point out that he had an arrangement with the gallery set up before everything that happened with us, but I bite the words back at the last moment. I don’t need to tell him that. He knows. He stopped painting for the last year, so he had nothing to sell. But he’s painting now.
I take a breath and relax back into my pose. “Okay.”
“Okay?” He leans around the canvas to frown at me. “That’s all you have to say?”
“Yes.” A perverse part of me wants to leave him hanging, but that isn’t fair. “You answered my question. You want to paint. I understand.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” I watch him hesitate, and then finally go back to painting. His expression isn’t exactly peaceful, but his movementsare slow and methodical. It continues to soothe me as we sit in relatively comfortable silence. I don’t know exactly how long it goes on for, only that the light through the window has shifted, darkness creeping in as night falls.
Finally, Orpheus sits back and shakes out his hands. “It’s going to take me a while to get back up to speed. I’m out of shape.” He goes about cleaning his brushes, a line of concentration appearing as his brows draw together. “I hear what you’re saying, Eurydice. It’s going to take me some time to wrap my mind around it, but Iamlistening.”
