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Thalia
She skipped down the stairs, watching Pirithous circle the car. He ducked his head to peer underneath it and then straightened again, his expression unreadable.
“Is something leaking?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Good.” She unlocked the car with the key fob and pulled open the driver’s side door. “Get in then. We have shopping to do. Serious business. And I want to get back here before Nikki does, or she’ll throw a fit about me buying you clothes.”
Pirithous seemed to hesitate, staring at the door before opening it slowly. She buckled her seatbelt and stuck the key in the ignition.
“Well?” she asked, when he was still studying the interior of the door. “What’s the matter?”
He cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he said again, sitting down in the passenger’s seat and pulling the door shut.
She started the car, but Pirithous just sat there.
“Seatbelt?” she prompted him.
“Seatbelt?”
She snapped the strap across her chest. “Seatbelt.”
“Ah.” He looked for his own, then pulled it across his body, glancing from his to hers. He fumbled with the buckle.
“Let me guess. No seatbelts in Thessaly.”
He winced. “What fools you must think us.”
“No.” She reached over, guiding his hands to buckle it. “But all you have to do is say so. I’m sure there are plenty of things I’d be utterly confused about if I were visiting your people. Like that whole gift thing. I’d probably end up marrying myself off to someone on the first day without even realizing it.”
He chuckled, the sound warm and deep and her stomach fluttered with the memory of his kiss. “I would not let you marry yourself off without knowing it. Unless, perhaps, it was to me.”
She flushed and put the car into reverse, backing out so she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Part of her wanted to play it off as a joke, but they hadn’t talked about that kiss. She bit her lip. Maybe there wasn’t a lot to talk about. His hands and his lips had made it perfectly clear what he wanted, and if Nikki hadn’t interrupted them...
But she had. And there was no use kicking herself over something that hadn’t even happened. Just because she’d been a heartbeat away from wrapping her legs around his waist didn’t mean anything except that he was a very, very good kisser. With a body like a Greek god.
She turned onto the road and risked a glance at him. He had eyes like storm clouds, hovering between blue and gray, and he stared out the windshield as if he didn’t want to miss a single tree.
“So you don’t have seatbelts,” she said. “Do you have cars?”
He didn’t answer. She glanced at him again, but his mouth was a grim line.
“I guess that’s a no.” The silence stretched awkwardly, and she sighed. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me about Thessaly, you could at least tell me about yourself. I know you like wine, but you make faces at everything else. So what do you like to eat? We can get it while we’re out.”
“I used to believe I was easy to please with food. That drink you gave me last night, before the wine. Is that something you enjoy?”
“Coke? Yeah. Between the sugar and the caffeine it’s better than coffee to keep me awake.”
“How is it made?”
She laughed, but a quick glance at his face told her he was serious. “I don’t know. They make a syrup, I guess, then add carbonation and water. Lots of sugar. Vanilla. Food coloring. It’s pretty much as fake as you can get.”
“Ah.”
They crested the hill, the town laid out in front of them, nestled in the valley. Pirithous leaned forward, his hand braced against the dashboard.
“This is your city.”
“Big enough to have a mall, though there isn’t much in it. And too small for more than a four screen movie theater.”
“We have neither, in Thessaly.”
“You’ve never been to a movie?”
“No,” the word was soft, little more than a whisper. “But I think there are a great many things in this country that I have never done. Tell me of this one.”
She frowned slightly. What kind of back of beyond did he live in that he didn’t know what a movie was? Or maybe it was just a translation issue. She could never tell with him.
“A movie is like a play, only recorded. You must have plays, at least.”
“I suppose we must.”
“Don’t you know?”
“I am not certain. What is a movie for?”
She blinked, glancing at him. He was intent on the valley, his eyes devouring the city like a little boy seeing an airplane or a firetruck for the first time.
“Well,” she said slowly. “They’re for fun. For entertainment. What do you do for fun in Thessaly?”
“We had games, where men competed in sword work or spear throwing or wrestling. Riding and chariot races, too. And of course we had bards and poets to tell stories in the evenings. I used to go hunting every day in the summers, and raiding when the seas were open, returning with so much gold and plunder and—” he hesitated. When he spoke again, his tone was more cautious. “Though we were small, we were very rich, because of it.”
Chariot races and spear throwing. Raiding. “That’s why you have the rules about giving gifts, to keep people from raiding you?”
“In part.” He leaned back, his hands falling to his lap. Strong hands, she noted, before forcing her attention back to the road. “You have no walls here, and the city sprawls. The people must think themselves quite safe.”
“Yes.” She considered his words again, about gold and plunder, and something else he’d stopped himself from mentioning. “We don’t have wars here. No one raids anyone else. Sometimes neighbors have disputes over barking dogs, or trees hanging over a fence line, but that’s pretty much the worst of it.”
“The world is very changed from what I knew.”
Gold and plunder and what? “America is unique I guess. We have so much space that there’s no real reason to fight over land anymore. I mean, the whole of Greece isn’t all that much larger than New York State.”
“How large is America in comparison to Egypt?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t really know how big Egypt is, but it seems pretty small on a map. We’ll stop at the library, and you can look at the atlas.”
“Atlas!” When she glanced at him, his face was white, his shoulders bunched and his body braced as if he would leap from the car the moment it slowed enough to allow it. “You do not mean to tell me he is here. And you bring me to him, unarmed?”
“What?” She almost swerved off the road, he’d distracted her so completely. “An atlas is a book, not a—a person?”
“A...” He sat back, the tension going out of him as quickly as it had come. “A book?”
“Yes, of course a book! What did you think I meant?”
“Just as you are named Thalia.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shook his head. “I knew a man named Atlas, once. A very long time ago. I would prefer not to know him again, now.”
“God, Pirithous.” She turned into the lot for the mall and parked the car, jerking up on the parking break with all her frustration. “Sometimes you respond to the strangest things in the most violent ways, and I really wonder for a moment if Nikki is right, and I’m just some sucker you’re stringing along. Like all that business with Helen of Troy and Theseus and Menelaus. And now this. I don’t even know what to say to you.”
“You need not say anything at all.”
She stared at him for a moment, but he met her eyes, unflinching, waiting.
“And what?” she asked.
He raised both eyebrows. “Hm?”
“Gold and plunder and what?”
“Ah.” He looked away then, his jaw tightening. “Things are very different where I come from, Thalia. I have not seen much of your world, and already I know it. I was as much a pirate as I was a king, and good at both.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No. Because I fear the answer will upset you, and we are a long way from the woods now. I need you with me in this city, where I do not know the customs.”
“I’m not going to abandon you on the street, Pirithous.”
He smiled, but it was humorless, and it disappeared as quickly as it had come. He met her eyes again, and she couldn’t look away. All she could see was his earnestness, his worry for what she would think of him.
“And women,” he admitted. “We took gold and plunder and women to warm our beds. But there were worse things for a woman than to share my bed, I promise you.”
Her mouth went dry, and she felt more trapped by his gaze than she ever could have been by his hands. She had let him kiss her. She had thrown herself into his arms, willing to give him more than just that. She’d accepted his ridiculous gift, welcomed him into her home, fed him, promised to clothe him, and now he’d practically confessed that he was some kind of rapist. A kidnapper at best.
“You’re right,” she managed to say. “It does upset me.”
She kicked open the car door and got out.