The Rose

by Tiffany Reisz

  She lay back under him, ran her fingers through the thick soft waves of his hair and then slid her hands down his back, pushing his shirt off his shoulders and to his waist. His skin was smooth and sun-warmed. She couldn’t stop touching him. Her body rose under his, almost of its own accord. August released her breast at last, but it seemed he hadn’t gotten control of his emotions enough to meet her eyes again. Instead he nudged her thighs wide and nestled between them.

  August’s cock throbbed against her as if trying to find its way to her opening. Lia shifted under his chest and pushed against the tip until it slid through her wet folds and entered her. He shivered in her arms, and his breathing was ragged, his eyes still closed tight. Then he raised his head and looked at Lia, and she didn’t know who he was.

  For the span of one single breath, Lia was afraid of him. His eyes had gone cloud wild. She’d never seen such a blue as that. And she knew in an instant, and no one had to tell her, that she had been wrong when she’d thought that August’s eyes were the color of storm clouds. No, no, no.

  August’s eyes weren’t the color of storm clouds...

  Storm clouds were the color of his eyes.

  He smiled, and in a second breath he was August again.

  “You should always be here,” he said.

  “I’ll stay if you stay,” she said, touching his cheek.

  He kissed her again, gently, and as he kissed her, he found her clitoris with his fingertips and stroked her with such precision she clenched hard around him, hard enough his breath caught in his throat. She lay back again and let herself enjoy the terrible sweetness of being the cause of a man’s undoing. He was older, a mystery to her and vastly more experienced, and she could conquer him utterly while lying flat on her back. This was power even a god would envy.

  August rested his forehead against the center of her chest as he moved in her. No thrusting—that might tip the boat. They made love an inch at a time, barely moving and yet pushing so hard against each other Lia could hardly bear the tension.

  When she came, her climax wasn’t like last night’s. It was gentler, quieter, and far more tender and dear. August’s back bowed once before he came inside her. He stayed in her afterward, holding her in his arms.

  “August?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. His eyes softened. He laid his hand on her forehead and tenderly stroked her hair. Gently he began to move inside her again.

  “‘“There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing,”’” he said into her ear between sweet kisses, “‘“as messing around in boats.”’”

  PART SIX

  Aethra & Poseidon

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lia spent the next day in a hazy-headed daze. She sat at her loom from midmorning to evening, embroidering a white-winged horse onto her tapestry’s dark evening sky. The work was absorbing, a perfect distraction from her thoughts, thoughts that troubled her nearly as much as her feelings and more than her memories.

  Every stitch required her complete concentration. She was painting a Pegasus with needle and thread, no easy task. Between each stitch, however, she had time to think, to feel, to remember.

  August. She couldn’t even hear his name echoing in her mind without needing to stop and catch her breath. Something had happened last night that she hadn’t expected, hadn’t asked for, hadn’t realized she wanted so much until August had given it to her.

  When she’d come to in August’s bed, she hadn’t felt the usual high she’d come to expect as a standard side effect from drinking from the Rose Kylix. She’d glanced around and seen his bedroom and begun to cry.

  August had pulled her into his arms and held her against his chest.

  “Why are you crying?” he’d asked. She had liked the way he’d asked her, as if he simply wanted to know why she cried, not because he wanted her to stop.

  “I want to go back,” she’d said. And then said, “With you.”

  She fell asleep only after he’d promised her he’d take her back as often as she wanted.

  Perhaps that was why Lia had spent her waking hours at her loom, weaving herself again into a myth by day, the way August wove her into myths by night.

  A good thing she’d left the Rose Kylix at August’s flat by his bed. If she’d had it with her, the temptation to drink from it would be nearly overwhelming. She would drink and dream her way back to Pan’s Island. She would sit at the feet of Pan and listen to his piping, perhaps dance in the woods among the trees and the flowers. But it wouldn’t be the same, of course, without August there.

  Since coming home last night—this morning, really—she’d felt like a veil had gone up between her and the real world. She and August on one side of the veil, everyone else on the other. Including her parents. Her brothers. Her friends. David, too. It scared her how much she wanted to stay behind that veil with August. Or...if she was honest with herself...it scared her how much she wanted to stay with August behind that veil.

  Lia had just put the final stitch into the left wing of the Pegasus when she heard a soft knock on her sitting room door.

  “Come in.” She lifted her head from her embroidery and realized it was evening already. Where had the day gone?

  Lia wasn’t surprised to see her mother standing in the doorway. But the outfit...that did catch her off guard. Her mother, usually dressed to the eights if not the nines, was wearing black yoga bottoms and a white T-shirt.

  “What are you doing, Mum? Why are you dressed like that? Did you lose a bet?”

  She had concerns this was a bizarre sex thing involving her father, but she was too curious not to ask.

  “I thought if I put on exercise clothes I might accidentally do some exercise.”

  “Exercise? What happened? You aren’t dying, are you?”

  “I stepped on the scale.” Mum patted Lia on her cheek. “Word of advice—stay young as long as possible, then immediately get old. Skip right over being middle-aged. It’s hell on the metabolism.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Mum. You’re beautiful and you know it. Men throw themselves at you all the time.”

  She snorted a laugh. “They throw themselves at your father’s bank account and hit me on the way there.” Lia didn’t believe that for one second but she didn’t say anything. “So...are we seeing our Greek god tonight?”

  “We are,” Lia said. “But if you’re here to interrogate me about him, you know where the door is.”

  “Oh, fine. I’ll keep my questions to myself. Although... I do like him for you.”

  “I like him for me, too,” she confessed. She smiled as she stretched her back. Her mother came and stood behind her sewing stool and rested her chin on Lia’s shoulder. She peered at Lia’s tapestry.

  “My daughter is very talented,” Mum said. “Sometimes I wonder how you’re mine. I can’t sew on a button.”

  Lia rolled her eyes but not unkindly.

  “You could if you practiced,” she said, and then realized she sounded exactly like someone she knew—her own mother. Her mum ignored that comment and started nosing through the books on her side table.

  “What’s all this?” she asked. “Planning a new tapestry?”

  “Maybe,” Lia said, though that wasn’t true. But she was hardly going to tell her mother she’d been thinking about other erotic adventures she wanted to go on with August.

  “Poseidon and Aethra,” her mother said, looking at the page Lia had left open on her sewing table. “I know Poseidon, but who was Aethra?”

  “The mother of Theseus,” Lia said.

  “Ah, you know better than that,” her mother said. “Who was she? Not who did she give birth to or who did she marry. Believe it or not, I’d had my own life and adventures before I met your father and you were born. Some that would t
urn your hair white.”

  “I actually do believe that, Mum. You have adventures now that turn my hair white. This is a wig.”

  “It’s flattering.” Her mother tugged a curl of Lia’s hair. “Who was Aethra?”

  Of course Mum wasn’t going to let it go.

  “She was...a mystery,” Lia said. “She’s known for having had sex with her husband and a god in the same night and being impregnated, somehow, by both of them. That’s the story I was reading.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. I assume Poseidon was the god? Who was the husband?”

  “A king named Aegeus. He came to visit her father, King Pittheus. Aethra’s fiancé had just been exiled from the country for murder. Pittheus must have wanted to foist her off on someone else, fast. He got King Aegeus pissed on undiluted wine and sent him to his daughter’s bedroom to shag and sleep.”

  “Parenting was very different in those days,” her mother said.

  “Mum, you gave me a vibrator for my eighteenth birthday.”

  “There wasn’t a drunk king attached to it.”

  “Anyway...” Lia continued. “King Aegeus and Aethra slept together. Maybe they hit it off so well because they both had names starting with Ae. Whatever it was, they shagged and fell asleep after. They were sound asleep in bed when the goddess Athena appeared and woke Aethra. She said Aethra needed to hie herself over to the Temple of Sphaeria. Why? Athena didn’t specify. But Aethra went, presumably after cleaning the royal sperm off her legs.”

  “A wet flannel works best,” her mother said. Lia ignored that comment.

  “She went to the temple and offered a sacrifice to, well...somebody. Athena, most likely. And while she was there, Poseidon appeared, all wet and naked and in the mood. They shagged in the temple. Or he raped her. Several versions of the myth say it was rape, but in those same versions, she’s the one who’s telling everyone that her son was fathered by Poseidon. I don’t know how to reconcile a woman bragging about her son being the child of her rapist.”

  “Do you think it was rape?”

  “Possible,” Lia said. “On one hand, he was a god and she was mortal. That’s a big power imbalance. Hard to imagine she could properly consent to an immortal. On the other hand...if you had the chance to shag a god, wouldn’t you take it? Don’t answer that, Mum. Rhetorical question.”

  “Oh, I definitely would,” her mother said. “I’d start with Thor.”

  The good countess clearly needed a refresher course on rhetoric.

  “Look at that. Could you resist that?” her mother asked. She’d turned to a page in the book, a full-color photograph of Bernini’s most famous sculpture, The Rape of Proserpina. Bernini had lavished all his talent and attention onto the body of Pluto—Hades to the Greeks. He was massive, naked and impossibly strong. Proserpina—Persephone to the Greeks—squirmed in his grasp but in vain. No woman—goddess or mortal—could escape such a being. Utterly male but more than male. Human but more than human. Merciless in his beauty. Savage in his lusts.

  “No.” Lia stared at the god and the poor girl helpless in his grasp. “I wouldn’t even try.”

  “Poseidon and Hades were brothers,” her mother said. “If Poseidon looked anything like that, Aethra probably volunteered for the job of having his child.”

  “You know the maddest thing?” Lia asked. “There’s no artwork depicting the encounter—Aethra and Poseidon in the temple. Theseus is one of the most famous Greek mythological heroes and, according to his mother, he had two fathers—one a king and one a god. But no artwork at all? Not a single famous painting or kylix or amphora or anything that depicts Aethra and Poseidon in the temple? So strange.”

  She tossed the book and it landed neatly on the love seat.

  Mum smiled and sat down next to the book.

  “Suppression,” her mother said as she drew her legs under her into a position that could have been called almost-yoga. “It’s the most dangerous form of flattery. When a story like that gets ignored by male artists, that always means they’re afraid of it for one reason or another.”

  Lia turned on her stool and gave her mother her full attention.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Ever heard of a book called Mathilda by Mary Shelley?”

  “No,” Lia said. “I only know of Frankenstein.”

  “The reason you’ve never heard of it is because it’s the story of a teenage girl whose life is destroyed when her father falls in love with her. Mary Shelley’s father was a book publisher. He read her new manuscript, was horrified by the implications of it—guilty conscience, probably—and confiscated it. He wouldn’t allow it to be published, and it wasn’t—for over a hundred years. If a story is suppressed or obscured, it’s because somewhere along the way it scared the shit out of a man. And that story of Aethra sounds like a prime candidate for suppression by men. On one hand,” her mother said, holding up her right hand, “you have a woman who’s trying to tell anyone who would listen that the father of her son was the god Poseidon. On the other hand, you have a mortal man humiliated that his young bride left their marriage bed on their wedding night to have sex with someone else. Who benefits by calling it rape?”

  “The husband,” Lia said. “If she had sex with Poseidon willingly, then he’s a cuckold. If she was raped, well...you can’t sue a god for adultery.”

  “More important,” her mother said, folding her hands into her lap, “King Aegeus would have been humiliated to have his wife telling the world she’d left him sleeping in bed to go have sex with someone else. If he called it rape, he saved face. And the best evidence that nobody buys the rape story is the lack of artwork about it. The old masters loved painting rapes. Walk through any art gallery of Renaissance paintings and it’s a history of rape on the walls. They adored subjects where women were being hunted, chased, kidnapped, raped. The artists wanted to enshrine male power over women. They chose what myths they thought were worthy—the rape of the Sabine women, Apollo and Daphne, Medusa—”

  “Hades and Persephone,” Lia said. “Leda being raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. Europa. Helen of Troy.” Lia had seen dozens of paintings of those subjects.

  “The old male masters would never choose to preserve the story of a wife who got to have more fun than her husband. Not only that, she isn’t punished for it. She’s not turned into a tree or some reeds or a cow. In fact, she’s rewarded for her adultery by giving birth to the most famous hero in Greek mythology.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Lia said. “You’re probably right.”

  “You should weave it,” her mother said. “As talented as you are, you don’t need an original source to work from. You can do it all by yourself. And Aethra and all the badly behaved wives in history will thank you.”

  Lia felt a surge of love for her mother. Sometimes she forgot how nice it was to talk to her about art, life, love, nonsense. She had a much different perspective than her father, who cared more about the value of an artwork than the substance of it.

  “I’m going to tell Daddy you said all that.”

  “Do it,” Mum said, laughing. “He loves me because I’m so badly behaved, not in spite of it. As a good husband should. Or a wicked whore of a husband like mine.”

  “Mother.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You are not.”

  “Not really. Your father might be a handsome whore but he’s also the love of my life, the father of my children, my best friend and, well, all the clichés. But I can pretend he’s a normal saintly husband for your sake if you like.”

  “It’s all right,” Lia said. “I don’t want you to pretend.”

  “You don’t mind having two wicked parents?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “Good, because we aren’t changing anytime soon,” her mother said. She got up and kissed Lia on her c
heek. “Better two parents who can’t keep their hands off each other after twenty-two years instead of two parents who can’t stand each other, right?”

  “Much better,” Lia said. “As long as you keep your hands off each other in my general vicinity.” She waved her hand in a circle to indicate the general vicinity of the entire house.

  “No promises.” Her mother kissed her cheek again and then started to leave. Lia wanted to stop her and ask her something. She wanted to ask if it really was possible to fall in love in a week. She wanted to ask who was supposed to say stupid stuff like “I think I’m in love with you” first in a relationship. She even wanted to ask if it was all right to fall in love with someone you never went on a real date with but had fantastic sex with...or was that just infatuation?

  Her mother would know the answers to all those questions, but Lia couldn’t bring herself to ask them. What if Mum wanted to know why Lia was so unsure of herself with August? The answer was David, of course. Lia kept her mouth shut and hated David Bell a little more. He hadn’t just broken her heart, he’d bruised her relationship with her own mother.

  “I should go change,” Mum said. “Don’t forget drinks with David before his show tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Mum. I haven’t forgotten.”

  Her mother left and Lia dropped her chin to her chest.

  She would be a very happy person the minute David was out of her life forever.

  But would he be? Ever?

  As long as she stayed silent about what had happened between them, her parents had no reason to not pick up their friendship with David where they’d left off. Her father might even talk David into finishing the mural. He’d be under their roof again. Lia would move out—her parents had a town house in London—but that would mean leaving David alone with her parents here at Wingthorn. She was sick at the thought of her parents being friends with the man who’d crushed her heart under his heel, who’d nearly beaten down her door in fury, who’d hurled horrible insults at her, who’d blackmailed her the second he’d gotten dirt on her.