by S. L. Stacy
I gaze into his face. He’s grown silent and studies me now with round, wary eyes—the eyes of the young man in the village who offered to be my guide. What did he tell me? “I’m closest with my twin sister. I’m worried about her. I think she needs my help, but I—I can’t help her. I can’t protect her.”
I knew that the prince and my guide were one and the same, but I’d always assumed the villager was the disguise, designed to trick me into trusting him. But this wicked being I’ve been at odds with since I got here is the alter ego. Underneath this mask of blonde and gold is a boy with a narrow face, pale skin and the same obsidian colored hair and green eyes as his sister.
“Dolos,” I whisper, eyes watering. Even though I try to hold them back, a single tear escapes, spilling down my cheek.
“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” Dolos pulls away from my hand and stands up, walking away from me. I follow a few steps behind.
“Eric is holding you prisoner so that Apate will do his bidding.” Dolos nods. “So ‘forever’ was kind of an exaggeration,” I point out, not ready to completely accept his innocence. “Eric will let you out when he’s done with her. Then we’ll be free.”
Dolos pauses in the middle of the room, turning slowly to face me. His upper lips twitches. “He’s not going to let us go. When he’s no longer in need of her skills, he’ll toss my sister in here with us.”
My jaw falls. “Oh.” I suddenly realize I can see the stone face of the opposing wall through Dolos’s golden skin and black leather vest and pants. He’s fading. “What’s happening? Where are you going?”
“I said that if you won the game, you would be free of me. I wish I could get you out of here, but I can’t. This is the best I can do. I’ll leave you alone. I won’t bother you anymore. You are free, Carly.” He’s just a head and neck now, and even these are disappearing fast.
“Don’t go!” I reach for the ghostly head. “I don’t want you to go! Don’t leave me all alone! Please!”
Just as quickly as he began to vanish, Dolos is solid again. “You want me to stay?” he asks uncertainly.
I nod, smiling. “If we’re going to be down here for a while, I could use the company. Even if said company can’t sing and talks too much.”
“I can be quiet!” As a demonstration, he closes his mouth and returns to his spot on the floor. I start to go over to where I was sitting before, across the room from him. About halfway there, I look back at him. Head bowed, he twiddles his thumbs in his lap. Sighing, I walk over and sit down next to him, tentatively resting my head on his shoulder. His hands grow still, his entire body stiffening.
“Is this okay?” I ask him, lifting my head up an inch.
“Yes,” Dolos says, relaxing once again. Wrapping an arm around me, he pulls me closer. I shut my eyes, finally feeling content. Well, as content as one can be when being held somewhere against her will.
“I’m bored,” Dolos says a few beats later. “Wanna play—”
“No,” I groan against his neck.
“Just kidding,” he says quickly, sounding disappointed.
Chapter 23
Curled under Jasper’s satin sheets, I try to relish the feel of his arms wrapped around me—to hang on to the delicious memory of our lovemaking—rather than relinquish to the inevitable vortex of self-loathing threatening to pull me under.
The room is dark, the blinds closed. I don’t know what time I left the hospital, nor what time it is now. It’s probably way past curfew. I don’t care. It sounded like Victoria was going to stick around the hospital to make sure everything was okay anyway, and as for Farrah—well, right now I don’t really care what Farrah thinks. She wants to kick me out of Gamma Lambda Phi? Fine. I almost hope this small transgression pushes her even further over the edge.
Jasper shifts, then leans over to kiss my cheek. “Relax.” He readjusts his hold on me. “You’re so tense.”
“I know.” I consciously soften my body, digging my head further into the pillow. “I was just thinking.”
“About what? What?” he repeats, retracting his arms as I sit up.
I reach over to the nightstand and turn on the lamp. “I’m not tired.”
He sits up, too. “We’re just relaxing. You don’t have to sleep. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“We are not doing this.”
“Not doing what?”
“Pillow talk. We might have a good thing going here. Sex. Just sex.” I give him what I hope is a sexy smile, running my finger along his jaw. “No talking.”
My sexy smile doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. “Something happened,” he presses.
I sigh. “Someone found out about how you were…well, you know, last seen at our house before you went ‘missing,’ and posted about it on this gossip site. I got in trouble with Victoria because I had told Anna about the sorority.”
“Did Victoria put you in a time out?”
I roll my eyes. Not wanting to get into the stuff about possibly getting kicked out, I go on to tell him about Anna. “I never realized ambrosia was so addictive,” I admit. “I just thought it was something you took a little bit of until you transitioned, then you stopped.”
“Most Olympians take a little every day,” Jasper says.
“Why?”
“I’ve told you all this before. It keeps us beautiful. Keeps us strong. But you have to keep taking it. I’ve never known anyone—at least on Olympus—who has accidentally overdosed like Anna did. Maybe some of the halflings can’t handle it.”
I’m still stuck on his earlier comment. “You don’t have to keep taking it. I’m sure you’d still be hotter and stronger than almost—well, everybody—if you stopped. You could stop if you really wanted to, right?”
Jasper just shrugs. He gets up and turns his back to me, staring at the closed blinds. I try to focus on his dark hair, but my gaze slips down to his back, buttocks and legs, the contours of muscle so sharp he might as well be chiseled out of marble.
“I bet you can’t stop,” I realize. “God. You’re like an entire planet of drug addicts.” When Jasper doesn’t say anything, I continue, “Taking a little bit every day supposedly works wonders, taking too much at once kills you. But if you keep taking a little every day, over a long period of time—what happens then?”
Jasper looks at me over his shoulder. “Nothing.” I raise my eyebrows. “Nothing bad,” he corrects himself. “The oldest among us have been taking it for millennia, and they’re fine.”
Somehow I highly doubt this, but I decide to drop it. He doesn’t know. It’s not like he’s a toxicologist.
“I’m sorry about Anna,” he says. “I’m glad she’s okay. But…I wish you wouldn’t only come over here when you’re feeling bad about something.”
“I don’t have any other reason to come over,” I say slowly, keeping my voice low. “It’s certainly not so we can spend quality time together. I don’t even know what this is.”
“I don’t either.” Jasper rakes a hand through his dark hair. “I just know I don’t like this feeling.”
“Oh, what, are you feeling used? You poor thing. I don’t like being accused of something I didn’t do.”
Mouth set in a stubborn line, Jasper crosses his arms, turning his back to me again.
“Come on.” I pat the space beside me even though he can’t see me. “Stop being such baby. Come back to bed. Jasper.” He steals a glance at me. I throw off the sheet and stretch out on the bed, elongating myself as much as possible. Lips parted slightly, he peruses my naked body. “Make love to me,” I tell him.
Despite his hooded gaze and hard cock, he hesitates, and for a moment I think he’s going to turn me down. Then, he falls back into bed, stretching out beside me. Crawling on top of him, I position my hips over his. I run my fingers up and down his chest, enjoying the sight of him gasping as I guide him inside me, inch by delicious inch. I ride him furiously, catapulting us both back over the edge.
***
“
It’s just you were always…different,” Jasper says to the ceiling, picking up our conversation from before round two.
“Here we go again, with the talking and the feelings.” I say it with a playful smile, while inside I’m groaning.
“Than the others, I mean. They only wanted me because of what I was. What I could give them.”
I sit up to give him the full force of my glare. “You mean the human girls you screwed before they killed themselves?”
Jasper’s head flies up from the pillow. “Who told you that?”
“Victoria.” I’m glad that this is the case, and not that I remembered on my own. Then I might have to tell him about the other memories. “But what about Alexa? I thought she was your first love.”
“I did love her,” Jasper says quietly. “Very much.”
“And the others were…what. Just for fun?”
“What is it called here? I was on the…rebound, you could say. I had already spent the night with another woman when I found out that the second—the girl right after Alexa—that the same thing had happened to her. Then I was celibate for a while. Until—”
“Until you met me and apparently didn’t care if my having sex with you made me suicidal.”
“No! Of course not!” Jasper looks horrified. “You knew the same thing wouldn’t happen.”
“Right, because I’m just so perceptive.”
“No, because you knew. You knew you were different—special—even if you didn’t know why. And even if you didn’t—the same thing would never have happened.”
“You can’t be sure!”
“The same thing wouldn’t have happened, because I would have never left you.”
I laugh bitterly. “You never would’ve left Psyche. You had no problem leaving me.”
“From what I recall, you left me.”
“You were going to choose power over me. You said so yourself!” I remind him.
“Excuse. Me.” Shaking his head in frustration, Jasper gets up and shrugs on a black terrycloth rob. He crosses the room in a few elegant strides, vanishing behind the divider. A few seconds later, I hear the faucet in the kitchen sink running.
I get up and start putting on my clothes. I glance at the clock—it’s only midnight. Well, not only midnight, but it had felt later. The buses are still running. I can catch one home.
Lifting up the sheet, I look and feel around for my underwear. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. When I still can’t find them, I look under my pillow, then Jasper’s. As I’m setting it back down, something glints against the red sheets. Tossing the pillow aside, I scoop up two circular, white bands. I clamp a hand over my mouth, my earlier anger and annoyance crumbling. The rings blur together as tears spring to my eyes. Our rings.
Our wedding rings.
The guests, the beach, the flowers, my dress, Nike and Aphrodite walking with me up the aisle, Eros waiting for me—the memory blasts me like a tidal wave, a blatant reminder of everything we had then, everything we were then. And how somehow, in another life—given another chance—we’ve both managed to screw it up so epically.
“With this ring, I am bound to you, always and forever,” I murmur.
“What did you say?”
I turn around, quickly making a fist over the rings. Jasper takes a few steps closer to me, regarding me warily.
“Nothing. I d-didn’t say anything.”
“You said our vows,” he insists, coming even closer. “You remember.”
“What are these? What are they doing under your pillow?” I grill him, opening my hand and thrusting the rings toward him.
“Nice try. You know what they are. And I keep them there because it makes me feel close to you. Don’t change the subject. You remember our wedding.”
“Maybe a little.” I drop my hand. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Jasper’s eyes search my face. “What else do you remember?”
“Almost…almost everything.” It comes out as a squeak. I’m afraid I’m going to have to repeat myself, admit to it all over again, but then Jasper’s carefully controlled demeanor caves.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Oh crap, he’s crying. I hate it when he cries. It makes me want to pull him into my arms and just hold him, forever. It makes me forget to hate him. “When did this happen?”
“After you were already…gone. I took some ambrosia to finish my transition, and then I just…remembered. Some things are still coming back to me. But I remember most of it. And it was so…”
“Wonderful,” he finishes for me, looking at me like that should be obvious. “I wish you would have told me right away. The night of the masquerade. You could have told me then.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference. You still think I betrayed you.” I obliterate the wall I’ve erected around Psyche’s memories. I call up the night of the Guardian Ceremony. “Look into my thoughts,” I tell him. “My mind is completely open to yours. Please. It will only take a moment. You have to know I’m not lying. I never betrayed you.”
I have no idea if he’s taking me up on my offer—it’s not like you can feel the Olympians reading your mind—until his face scrunches up horrifically, and he sobs, “I know. I know you didn’t. I didn’t want to believe it, but—”
“Why not?”
“Because it was easier. Easier to hate you for something since I knew we weren’t going to be together—at least not like we once were. Easier than just being lost and…broken.”
“You think I broke you?”
“I broke us. It’s all my fault. I know that. I can’t be what you want me to be—”
“I just want you to be like you were!” I run up to him and place a hand on his cheek, slick with tears. “You already were that person! We just have to go back—”
“We can’t!” He ducks away from me. “Don’t you see that? I’ve gone too far this time. There’s no going back for me.” He holds out his hand, and I know what he wants without him even saying it. I drop the rings into his palm. “You should go.”
I shake my head stubbornly. “We can go back. Starting now. Come back to campus with me. You can show everyone you’re back, still around, and then they’ll see—”
“I can’t do that!”
“Don’t you get it? They think we killed you! They think we killed Carly! Everything’s falling apart! I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
“Carly?” Jasper’s brow furrows. “What happened to Carly?”
“She’s missing. We thought it was the Alpha Rhos, but now everyone thinks it’s us. If you make your presence known, it will all go away. Please. Come back with me, Jasper.”
“I can’t.” He somehow looks sorry and not sorry at the same time.
“If you don’t want to do it for me, or even for my sisters, fine. Then do it for Victoria. For your sister.”
“It doesn’t make a difference! Don’t you see that? I can’t, and I won’t, because Eric told me not to. And because I’m selfish, and more worried about what will happen to me if I do than what will happen to your sorority if I don’t.” Grasping my shoulders, he gives me a small shake—not to hurt or threaten me, but to snap me back to reality. “Stay. Go. Just understand that this is who I am now.”
I close my eyes as the weight of his words slams into me. The spectrum of emotions I’ve gone through tonight has exhausted me. “One minute you’re telling me I should have told you about the memories. Like you want to be together. The next you’re telling me to go away. So which one is it?” I wonder, opening my eyes again.
“I want what I can’t have,” he says through a sad chuckle.
“Which is?”
“You. And everything else. I don’t want to give anything up. And I know that hurts you—I don’t blame you. If you stay we can continue whatever this”—he motions between us—“is, and I can love you with what’s left of me, and you can pretend to love me, pretend that what I am doesn’t bother you. Or you can leave and probably save yourself a lot o
f disappointment.”
“So those are my options. Staying or leaving.” It seems so simple. And yet I know if I leave, I’ll be leaving—if not my heart—some other part of me here. Some part of me that will always stay with him, always be with him, even if the rest of me goes. Even if he doesn’t realize he’s taken it. And I will walk around without that part of me, never being quite whole again.
What did Victoria tell me? You left him. No one else would ever be able to do that. Like it’s some sort of superpower, to be able to leave this otherworldly man who’s too much for every other woman to handle. And I guess it is, in a way. But I can’t help that wanting to leave also makes me feel like a coward.
It was only a few weeks ago that I had my revelation—that Farrah and everybody else were right, that Jasper was a hopeless case—and I walked out so certain I would never look back. But now I’m starting to think he’s not as far gone as he thinks he is, or even as I thought he was. I think he’s stubborn and selfish. But malicious and ruthless? Utterly irredeemable?
This time around, I’m not so sure. Things are different, because I’m…different. How can I possibly accuse him of being all of those things, when I’m not turning out to be much better myself? It’s so easy to fall into a routine of lying and manipulating—much easier than I ever thought it could be. Until it becomes like breathing, and you barely even notice you’re doing it at all. Until you’re daydreaming about throttling your ex’s new sex buddy. Until there’s an enchanted necklace feeding off your negative energy, amplifying it and pouring it back into you. I know I’d like a do-over, a second chance—and someone to believe in me. Maybe everyone deserves more than someone just giving up and walking out. Even Jasper.
If I were a little more innocent, a better person—someone like Carly—or even myself from a few weeks ago—leaving would feel like a triumph. Like breaking all ties with evil so I could return to good.
Instead, I walk away, feeling more like a hypocrite and a coward.
***
Back in my own bed, I toss and turn, unable to fall asleep.
Whenever I do drift off, I see Carly again—floating limply in the black abyss—and I jerk awake. Unlike my other dreams, even the ones that are actually memories, this one has a disturbingly present feel to it. But it can’t be anything other than just a dream—just a nightmare my subconscious has concocted to torture me even while I’m asleep.