Unbearable

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  “Not losing your nerve, are you ol’ sawbones?”

  I wasn’t just losing my nerve, I was dumping it out the car’s exhaust by the bucketful. “Let’s get this over with,” I said.

  We opened the doors to air crisp with the resiny scent of pine and green hollows where wildness lived. My nighttime ensemble of a worn T-shirt and yoga pants did little to keep out the chill distilling on my skin.

  I held a finger to my lips and tested the wooden porch steps for any creaks that might announce our presence prematurely. Billy nodded, we advanced on the balls of our feet like cartoon burglars.

  The heavy brass door handle turned a quarter inch in my grip and stopped.

  Locked.

  Not that I should have expected otherwise.

  “Should we try hoofing it through a window or something?” Billy asked in hushed tones.

  I shook my head no and reached up to snag a hairpin from the haphazard bun I’d tossed my hair into before we had departed my apartment.

  Wisps of hair fell into my face as I sank to my knees and snapped the bobby pin in half. I bent one side at a ninety-degree angle and wedged it into the bottom of the lock while using the other half to jiggle the components at the top.

  “I say, where did you learn how to do that?” Billy asked.

  “A…friend of mine.” I blew hair away from my eyes. “Excels at extracurricular skills.”

  Skepticism narrowed Billy’s round eyes. “Would he be any relation to the dodgy fellow who relieved you of the blackmailer?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You’ll want to be careful of a bloke like that,” Billy warned. “I wouldn’t have figured a lady like yourself to associate with such an unsavory sort.”

  My knee-jerk need to jump to Liam’s defense disappeared when I saw my own hands bathed ivory in the moonlight.

  What was I doing?

  Sneaking around in the middle of the night, illegally entering someone else’s home, all for the sake of a jealous whim? I, who preached trust, patience, open communication, and boundaries on a daily basis?

  A click as quiet as the ticking of the clock announced the lock’s opening.

  I’m a fully actualized adult, I reminded myself. I can engage Crixus in an open and honest dialogue, voice my objections in a constructive manner, and allow him to make his own decisions. As a licensed professional, I can—

  “Fuck!” A ragged moan slid through the keyhole. “Again? Already?”

  Later, I would find my dusty shoeprint at hip height on the door, but remember nothing of kicking it open. For the moment, I heard nothing but the distant sound of breaking glass as something toppled from a nearby shelf.

  My gaze zeroed in on a blond head haloed in blue from the glow of a large flat-screen TV. The naked bodies writhing within its frame froze as she whipped around to face us, fully clothed, remote in hand—perhaps not the last sight I had expected to see, but close.

  Worse, she was lovely to the point of pain, even in the artificial LED lighting. With features as majestic and unapproachable as glacial ice and hair like spun gold, Goldy Locks didn’t look like a porn star. She looked like a fairy tale princess.

  Jealousy robbed me of the disgust I had been prepared, and even looking forward to feeling.

  Crixus was already halfway across the space between us, his face contorted in a red-eyed rage, when Billy piped up.

  “It’s us, old chap!”

  The demigod pulled up short and squinted into the darkness. “Matilda? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Like a match stealing a spark, my own anger flared bright and hot in the presence of his.

  “What am I doing here? Oh, I don’t know, trying not to die, mostly. What with the three bears chasing after me, providing therapy to the clients you’ve dumped on my doorstep, the blackmailer ruining what’s left of my life in bit-sized increments—”

  “It’s not safe for you here, Matilda.” Light from the TV shifted on Crixus’s tensing jaw. “I told you to stay where you were.”

  “And I just can’t imagine why,” I said, jerking my chin toward the couch where Goldy Locks sat, clad in a tank top that dipped low enough to reveal a smooth, lovely swell of cleavage that appeared—much to my dismay—to be completely natural.

  “You don’t what you’re talking about,” Crixus said.

  “Don’t I?” I walked up close enough to feel the heat of his body radiate through my T-shirt. “See, you may be half god, but you’re also half human, and humans follow patterns. Yours, as it happens, is dumping your assignments on me so you can go fuck around with the easiest piece of ass you can find.”

  “Now then.” Billy held up his small, white-gloved hands between us. “We needn’t snipe at each other like barnyard cockerels.”

  “Speaking of cock,” Crixus said, treating me to his raw, gem-hard stare. “Maybe if you got some, you wouldn’t begrudge everyone else a fuck now and then.”

  “Well I certainly wouldn’t stoop to get it from a walking mattress who has a turnstile in place of his zipper.”

  “Was I offering?” He closed the remaining distance between us to tower over me with the full advantage of his height. “I could get a warmer reception fucking an iceberg.”

  “At least you would have found a partner who can converse on your level,” I replied.

  “Children, I insist that you stop this at once.” Billy shimmied between our knees and pushed a hand against our thighs. “I think we could all use twenty winks. We can discuss this in the morning when our tempers have cooled.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss.” Crixus turned and angled for the stairs, giving us his back.

  Billy reached up and patted my leg. “I think I’ll go and have a word with the lad.”

  I stood rooted to the spot, staring after him in wordless, impotent ire.

  “Do you think my ass looks wide?” Goldy Locks’s voice was a serenade in smoke, marble cooled by shadow, a kiss in the dark.

  “Excuse me?” I looked in the direction of the couch to find her standing in front of the TV, her arms folded across her chest and weight on one foot in the posture of an art-gallery spectator.

  On the screen, she straddled the hips of a man who wore nothing but a laurel wreath and a smile.

  “Come here,” she said. “I need another woman’s opinion.”

  I floated over to her on wooden legs, taken aback by her friendly manner in the face of my insulting tirade.

  She punched a button on the remote, and the man on the screen grunted and started thrusting upward. “Now, watch.” The remote traced her outline on the screen when the diaphanous Grecian robe she wore billowed out as she bucked against her costar.

  The man reached up and pulled at the top of the gown, letting it slip down her shoulders. Full, round breasts bounced in time with their rhythmic dance.

  “Oh yes, baby,” Goldy Locks moaned from the TV’s speaker. “Yes. Slower. I want to feel you.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

  She arched backward, forming her body into a living bow, grabbing her partner’s ankles for leverage. “God, you’re huge!”

  “There!” she said, pausing the action.

  I collapsed onto the couch behind me. “Oh, shit.”

  “So you agree? You think it’s a bad angle?” She cocked her head to one side and chewed her lower lip.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. It’s just…” I shook my head and pushed my cool fingertips against my eyelids.

  “Bad lighting?” She sat down next to me and crossed her legs. “I’ve watched the rough cut about ten times now, and I still can’t see what Vick is talking about.”

  “Vick?”

  “My director.”

  “I see.” I glanced up at the screen but had to look away just as quickly. “Was Crixus in here with you while you were watching, by any chance?”

  “Earlier,” she said. “He crashed out on the couch and I finally sent him up to bed. Guy hasn’t had a wink o
f sleep. Watching me like a hawk during the day, tracking down information about some blackmailer guy every night.”

  I felt myself shrinking beneath the weight of my own chagrin. “So, you two aren’t…”

  “Are you kidding me?” Her wide green eyes sparkled with genuine amusement. “Zeus would kill him. And that’s saying something because I hear demigods don’t die easy.”

  I changed the subject in lieu of finding a bus to throw myself under. “So, you and Zeus, huh?”

  She shot me a conspiratorial grin. “And how.”

  “Can I ask you a semi-personal question?”

  “You’ve seen my vagina,” she laughed, gesturing toward the TV.

  “Good point.” I took a moment to shuffle the words in my head around until they felt as innocuous as possible. “Doesn’t it bother you that he’s so…open?”

  “You mean, that he gets more ass than a toilet seat at the Roman Coliseum?”

  No doubt about it, Goldy Locks was making it very difficult for me to dislike her.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “It doesn’t thrill me. But it’s not like I’m in a position to judge. If he were the monogamous type, he probably wouldn’t be all that excited about my line of work. Someone who cared would just complicate things.”

  “So you two don’t have much of an emotional connection?” My fingers itched for a pen. The phantom weight of a pad haunted my lap.

  “Zeus is about as deep as a puddle,” she snorted. “What’s to connect with?”

  “And it doesn’t bother you? That it’s purely sexual with him?”

  Goldy Locks picked at the buttons on the remote. “Of course it does. But I’ve had enough men to last ten lifetimes. Every relationship has its trade-offs. And when the trade-off is eternal youth and beauty, there’s a lot I’m willing to accept.”

  “What about the bears coming after you? Or Hera’s jealousy? That doesn’t frighten you at all?”

  She folded her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around them. A gesture that struck me as almost childlike in its vulnerability. “Women typically aren’t all that fond of me anyway. What’s a few more?”

  “A lot, when the few aren’t human.”

  “Speaking from experience?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

  “Yes,” I said. “I kind of accidentally slept with Adonis, which didn’t make me very popular with Aphrodite and Persephone, as it happens.”

  “That was you?” Goldy gasped. “I heard about that!”

  “Not my proudest moment,” I admitted. “But you’re not just talking about some jealous housewives here. I don’t know if you’ve ever been chased by a rabbit tsunami or a three-headed hell hound, but it’s not as glamorous as it sounds.”

  Her eyes widened. “A rabbit tsunami?”

  “And that was the pleasant part of the afternoon.” My mind strayed back to the last client Crixus had brought me, Marvin J. Cuddlestein—better known as the Easter Bunny—broken, bleeding on the grass after a run-in with Cerberus. I felt the fading warmth of his body in my cupped hands. Saw the clouds pass over eyes losing their shine.

  I turned and looked Goldy in the eye. Up close, her face was smooth yet, and unmarred by some of the fissures of worry that cleaved my own at thirty years.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do here. You are free to make your own decision, and if being immortal is worth it to you, I’m not going to convince you otherwise. But for what it’s worth, I wish there had been someone to tell me what I was getting into when I took this on.”

  She tucked a lock of pale gold behind her ear and nodded. “Thanks.”

  The ceiling creaked above us, a reminder of Crixus lingering there with my words still ringing in his ears. “I guess I had better go apologize,” I said, rising from the couch.

  “He’ll forgive you.” A secret hid in Goldy’s pillow-lipped smile.

  “Did you hear the awful things I said to him?” Even now, they echoed through my head, bringing remorse in clanging waves.

  “I also heard the things he said back. Dude is sprung. Big time.”

  The empty staircase where Crixus had fled me yawned open like a grave for any possibility. “You’re wrong about that.”

  “Look, you don’t get very far in my business without knowing a thing or two about men. And women.” She winked. “You two have enough sexual tension to sell sequels.”

  A furious blush stained my cheeks as lame denials crowded my throat, escaping in disjointed one-word burps.

  “It’s okay,” she said, resuming her grip on the remote. “Just go talk to him.”

  “Wish me luck.”

  “Luck,” she replied.

  I paused halfway up the stairs and leaned over the railing. “Vick is wrong, by the way. Your ass looks fantastic.”

  Her sultry green-eyed gaze sliding up the back of my legs sent an illicit skitter through me. “Likewise.”

  *****

  “Come in already.” Crixus’s voice floated through the door I had stood on the other side of for the better part of five minutes, my hand hovering above a knock and my heart beating like bongo drums in my ears.

  Crixus lay on his side in the center of a log framed full-sized bed, his long body dwarfing the furniture. Identical versions flanked it on either side, separated only by the mismatched tables between. Three dressers crowded the wall opposite the windows. Cold blue light streamed across the floor and pooled on the demigod’s chest.

  “Where’s Billy?” I closed the door behind me and walked over to the bedside. Crixus didn’t look up.

  “Went to rest in the other room.”

  “I owe you an apology,” I said.

  “You don’t owe me anything.” His words were flat, devoid of any emotion to help me gauge his feelings and respond accordingly.

  “Yes. I do. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.” I eased myself down on the edge of the mattress and laid a hand on the curve of his shoulder. Hyperawareness set my senses ablaze. The smooth heat of Crixus’s skin, the feel of his T-shirt beneath my palm.

  I was touching him.

  Him. Crixus. The demigod. As real and solid in the waking world as the earth beneath me but somehow more mysterious than a dream. I had faced down the prospect of the world’s destruction at his side, and yet knew nothing about him at all.

  “How old are you?” The question rose to my lips from the silent well of wonder flowing up through me at the sight of moonlight playing in the dips and hollows of his face.

  “Two thousand one hundred and nineteen years old.”

  I let my hand trace up the abrupt slope of his trapezius muscle where it met his neck, and followed it until the delicate throb of his pulse hummed beneath my fingertips.

  “Where were you born?”

  His hand came down upon mine, holding it there against his throat. I felt the vibration of his voice in the webbing of my fingers when he spoke. “Gaul. It would be Belgium on your maps.”

  “You were a gladiator?” I lifted my legs onto the bed and leaned back until my head rested on the pillow alongside his.

  “Yes.” He looked not into my eyes, but beyond them, searching a past I couldn’t see. “We were taken by the Romans, my mother and I. It wasn’t long before they discovered my aptitudes and brought me to Capua to train. Until the Servile Wars, when we fought, and lost. My mother had long been burned on the pyre by then. I had already been robbed of my liberty by savages who valued blood sport more than the written word. The life I had left I was willing to lose.”

  “But you couldn’t.” I imagined Crixus alongside the men he had come to think of as brothers, all slain. He alone would survive to see spring flowers watered by blood a broken dream.

  His eyes closed as if to blot out the scene unfolding in his memory. “I had lived a hundred years before I learned what I was.”

  “You were born a demigod?”

  His hand floated to my jaw, the blade of his index finger brushing over my ear. “Yes. My mother wa
s beautiful. Zeus thought so too. Didn’t think too much of her after he took what he wanted.”

  The bitterness of his words conjured images of the child Crixus must have been. Born into a world where he didn’t belong, left to fend for himself in times as brutal as they were barbarous.

  I pressed myself into the curve of his body, not knowing whether I did it to comfort him, or myself. The beating of his heart against my ear was the sound of war drums, the clash of sword against sword, the rushing undercurrent of the rise and fall of civilizations.

  “It must have been horrible for you.”

  His fingers slid through my hair. “You learn to take pleasure where you can. To live in every moment but never stay. Time is the enemy. So is everyone bound to it.”

  “You can’t really believe that,” I said. “Going through life, never loving another living soul? That would be so—”

  “Lonely?”

  He pronounced it like a challenge, daring me to square with it. Compelling me to comprehend what it meant to him, to understand what it had made him.

  I lifted my head from his chest to look at his face. “Why didn’t you just tell me Zeus asked you to protect Goldilocks?”

  “Because I wanted to keep her away from you.” Regret etched his face the moment the words left his mouth.

  “Me? Why?”

  “Zeus takes what he wants, Matilda. By any means necessary. If he came after you, I’d—”

  His words died on my lips.

  I kissed him. Tasted his surprise. Drank his primal groan.

  My tongue slid across his lips, and in the space of a second, I was beneath him, crushed by the delicious weight of his body. One hand tangled into my hair. The other grabbed my hip and ground it against his.

  A whimper escaped me when the hot, hard length of him pressed again the place where my blood pulsed beneath the thin layer of my yoga pants.

  He nipped at my lips, dragged his teeth against my jaw, found the hollow of my throat with his tongue.

  I hauled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it to the side. My hands pressed against the flat of his stomach, exploring each ridge before climbing his ribs and running up the predatory lengths of muscle on his broad back.