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Thalia
Bandages and bricks made a strange shopping list, but at least going into town would take her mind off the centaurs and the punishments of gods she didn’t want to believe existed. Thalia fingered the cross, running it back and forth on the gold chain and glanced sidelong at Pirithous in the passenger seat, dressed in the purple t-shirt and khaki shorts she’d gotten him. In clothes that fit and without the sword belt, she could almost pretend he was just a nice Greek boy. She could pretend that there was nothing abnormal about any of it. Just a trip to the home improvement store for building materials and some first-aid supplies because he was accident prone.
She almost smiled. Pirithous might have been a lot of things, but clumsy would never be one of them. If she hadn’t pulled the arrow out herself, she wouldn’t have known he’d been hurt at all. Without more bandages, she hadn’t wanted to check his shoulder, but he moved more easily than he had the night before and when he laughed it wasn’t cut off by a wince. She hoped he was right about how quickly he would heal, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d be back to normal in less than a week. Not from what she’d seen of the damage. And if he healed that quickly, what then? Going back out to hunt the centaurs again didn’t really seem like the best plan, all things considered.
Pirithous didn’t let her out of the car until he had scanned the trees that grew along the edge of the parking lot. Thalia wasn’t sure how he thought centaurs were going to hide in that strip of land unnoticed, but he was so tense she didn’t think he’d even hear her argument, and he was still too quiet, after last night. They’d finished another bottle of wine together on the couch, but she hadn’t been able to get his words out of her head, about how the gods treated Theseus and the idea that they would do the same to Pirithous too.
The thought made her sick, and between that and the wine, she’d crawled into his lap and stayed there. Having sex took his mind off the pain in his shoulder, and when he kissed her she stopped thinking about all the things that could go wrong.
She’d woken up alone in her bed before dawn, how she’d gotten there, she could only guess, and Pirithous was asleep in the living room in one of the recliners. She tried not to read anything into it. Maybe he’d just been hurting and needed to sleep alone. But he hadn’t spoken to her that morning beyond agreeing to go with her into town, not even asking her help to build the fire for his offering, and he had come back inside looking grimmer than he’d left.
A grim Pirithous. Anger would have been better than this, she thought, walking with him across the parking lot. She missed his smile, and the sound of his chuckle, and the way his eyes warmed when he looked at her. Right then he felt too much like a man struggling to find the words to say goodbye. For her own good.
Thalia chewed the inside of her cheek. This situation was exactly what she’d been hoping to avoid. She never should have agreed to let him protect her even from the centaurs. She didn’t need him to protect her from his gods, either. She had her own God, and a host of angels and saints. She had faith that He would protect her. Or else what good was any of it?
“You hold the cross so tightly, I wonder that the metal does not twist beneath your fingers,” he said.
She blew out a breath and forced herself to let go. “You burn food, I cling to the cross.”
“It is a sign of your god, then?”
“Yeah.” Thalia caught herself fingering it again and stuffed her hands in her pockets instead.
He followed her through the automatic doors, and she saw him look back out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t really trust herself to explain how motion sensors worked. Especially when he still considered electricity to be some kind of magic.
The entrance was near the hardware section, and it took her a moment to realize Pirithous had stopped dead inside the doors. She went back for him, taking his hand. With her luck, he’d lose himself if she didn’t keep hold of him.
His fingers closed tightly around hers and she squeezed back. Pirithous getting lost in a forest? Impossible. But in a hardware and home improvement store? Even she got turned around sometimes inside places this size.
“So what do you need for this temple of yours?” She checked the signs and guided him toward the lumber, walking backwards so she could see his face.
His mouth was pressed into a thin line and his eyes were pinched at the corners, the same way he had looked when she showed him the map. Did they even have screwdrivers before the Trojan war? No electrical saws, she decided. He may not have been clumsy, but power tools were a disaster waiting to happen with most people, and there was no way she was letting him fool with one when he hadn’t even taken a basic shop class.
“We could get a pre-fabricated kind of shed thing, if you wanted,” she suggested. “That would be the easiest and the fastest. But if you feel like you have to start from the ground up, we could just get the lumber, though I’m telling you right now that I have no idea what I’m doing in that department. Or maybe some stone for an open air altar. Obviously I can’t afford marble columns or anything, but they have stone benches to set in gardens.” His pinched gaze shifted from the shelves around them to her, and she stopped. “I’m talking too quickly again. Um. This way. It will probably be easier if I just show you.”
And it would have been a lot easier if she actually knew where she was going and what department to find it in. Thalia flagged down a man in an orange apron and prayed to God that he wouldn’t recognize her when she realized they’d graduated together. And possibly she might have made out with him in the janitor’s closet once. Tom someone. She honestly could not remember his last name to save her life.
“Thalia Stavropoulos!” Tom grinned and leaned in for a hug she couldn’t quite avoid. He lifted her right off her feet before letting her go. “I haven’t seen you in years.”
Her face flushed, and she could feel Pirithous’s glare without even looking. “Um. Hi, Tom.”
Baker. That’s what it was. Tom Baker. And they might have made out more than once, now that she thought about it, but they’d never dated. Good old spin the bottle. In high school, she’d never gone beyond kissing—not that she hadn’t wanted to, just that Alexandros was always popping his head in and getting in her way. She was lucky she’d even gotten to the kissing at all, really.
“I didn’t realize you were still in town.”
“Oh yeah, I’m management now. It isn’t the dream, but it pays the bills.” He nodded over her shoulder. “Finally found a man who wasn’t afraid of your brother, huh?”
He held out his hand to Pirithous but Thalia intercepted it with a forced smile. “You know, Alex actually hasn’t met him yet. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to anyone. Word gets around. Especially with Nikki’s family everywhere and you know how Alex gets.”
Tom laughed. “Do I know how Alex gets! When he heard we’d hooked up that one time, I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Right.” She bit her tongue and hoped that particular expression wasn’t one she’d used in Pirithous’s hearing. He’d shifted closer, and she felt the heat of his body at her back. Please don’t let his eyes start burning. Please, please, please.
“So what do you guys need? Indoor, outdoor, paint samples?”
Thalia breathed a sigh of relief. “Um. If you could just point us to the sheds, maybe?”
“Sure, sure.” He waved for them to follow. “Are you going to be bringing the mystery man to the wedding? Wait until Alex is distracted to make the introduction, right?”
“I am not afraid of Thalia’s brother,” Pirithous said, before she could answer, his tone sending a chill down her spine.
“He speaks!” Tom grinned over his shoulder at them. “Good for you, man. It’s about time. I don’t know how many of her boyfriends he scared off in high school, but she broke a lot of hearts.”
“Not that many,” she murmured when Pirithous’s eyes narrowed. “And most of them never even got beyond the first date.”
“The way I heard it, Alex always showed up for the second date and sent them packing. Only the chosen few made it into the promised land of date three.”
She said a silent prayer for patience. “The sheds, Tom?”
“Right,” he said, leading them down an aisle where floor models were assembled for display and lined up against the wall. “Plastic, wood, metal?”
“Whatever you have in stock.”
“Everything, right now. What do you need it for?”
“Well.” She glanced at Pirithous. “Kind of a mancave-slash-office, I guess. And preferably flame resistant.”
Tom raised both eyebrows. “For the mystery man? Does Alex know you’re living together?”
“We’re not living together.” She could have kicked herself for responding so quickly. Tom grinned and Thalia rolled her eyes. “I have an internship at the National Gallery. In D.C. I’m only here for another week and a half, all right? He’s just visiting, and I swear to God if I find out you told anyone, you will wish you were only dealing with my brother.”
“All right, all right!” He laughed, holding up his hands in surrender. “Your secret is safe with me, cross my heart. Now. Are you putting this thing together, and can I assume the mystery man knows what he’s doing with a screwdriver?”
She gave the smallest shake of her head she could manage, and hoped Pirithous didn’t notice. “The simpler the better.”
“Say no more,” Tom said. “We’ve got a nice model here in solid plastic. Double doors that open wide, skylights and windows. I wouldn’t necessarily barbecue inside it, but dropping a match isn’t going to light the place on fire. You have a level place to install it?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re going to need to make a level bed for it, but that’s probably the hardest part. If you want, I can come out and help you set it up. No charge, even.”
Pirithous flexed his bad arm, and Thalia saw his jaw tighten. She frowned. But he met her eyes and shook his head. “It must be done by my hands.”
“Your shoulder—”
“My sweat and my blood, given freely, if it will serve. I will build it, whatever it requires. Already this feels too easy.” He ran his hand over the door. “The material is very strange.”
“It’s plastic,” she said. “Lasts forever compared to wood and you don’t have to worry about painting and repainting it, or rust, either. But you’ll still have to figure out how to fit the pieces together.”
“Stone would be better. Open to the sky and the trees, to begin.”
“Or maybe this would be somewhere to begin, and when your shoulder heals you can build whatever you want.”
Pirithous looked doubtful, but he opened the door and ducked inside.
“You won’t even tell me his name, will you?” Tom asked.
She sighed. “Not if I can help it.”
“You think Alex is going to deck him or something when he finds out?”
“No.” Thalia pressed her lips together, the bent light pole hovering in her mind. “I think Alex is going to hurt himself trying.”
Pirithous stepped back out of the shed. His gaze traveled to the shelves opposite, filled with playground equipment and hot tubs and she could tell by the furrow of his brow he was thinking about how strange it all was. This wasn’t his world. It wasn’t his time. But the way he had talked about it terrified her.
Ever since he’d learned she was leaving, he’d grown more distant, more resigned, more withdrawn. As if none of it mattered, beyond her. Not even his own life. And with everything he’d told her about his gods, she couldn’t even blame him. Who would want to live like that? Crushed by faith. There had to be a way he could escape it. There had to be a way for him to be free, and happy. He just had to find his place.
She slid the cross along the chain again, her stomach twisting. He turned his head, meeting her eyes, and for a moment she saw all the warmth and concern that she’d missed that morning. It was gone again too quickly. He had been happy, before. Or at least content. He had been warm and affectionate and teasing until she’d told him she had to leave.
“So?” Tom asked him.
Pirithous shook his head, and Tom turned to her instead.
She sighed. It looked like they’d be doing this the hard way. “You don’t have stone benches, do you?” It was the closest thing to an altar she could imagine.
“We have plastic benches, made to look like stone.”
She wrinkled her nose. Pirithous would probably respond to that the same way he had the shed.
Tom laughed. “All right. Well, for a solid stone bench, you’ll need to contact a masonry company. There’s one up the hill from your house, actually. They do tombstones and rock gardens, all that kind of stuff. A stone bench is going to be heavy though. You won’t be able to move it once you get it delivered.”
She snorted. “I can’t even begin to tell you how much that isn’t going to be a problem.”
Pirithous touched the small of her back, the warmth of his hand spreading into her stomach. All she wanted was to get back and curl up against his body, breathe him in and pretend she could stay there forever. But she still needed to find him some proper bandages. Or better yet, a comprehensive first aid kit. She had a feeling this wasn’t going to be the only wound she’d need to patch up.
God, please protect him. Please protect us both.