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Eurydice hangs out at the bar on weekends, daring men to challenge her to drinking contests. She tells them that if she can outlast them, they’ll have to pay for drinks and a meal. If they outlast her, she’ll buy the entire bar their next round. No one ever gets through the full night.
Instead, she collects on their bets with a grin, clearing their glasses for good measure. She catches people’s eyes as she walks through the bar, keeps their attention on her even as she turns her back on them. She’s the kind of person you have to watch when they walk by you, the kind of person you have to give a second glance. (Or maybe she’s not, and it’s just Orpheus who keeps glancing twice.)
Orpheus watches her as she takes shot after shot, still clear eyed and laughing. She laughs more when she’s drunk, and it’s a beautiful laugh (Orpheus could listen to the sound of it for hours on end). The men stumble home along the cracked sidewalks, but Eurydice hovers at the bar longer, sipping at a glass of water.
“Can I help you?” she asks, raising an eyebrow at him when he sits next to her. Everything about her is intentional, confident in movement. It’s as if she has a cardboard thick mask, a facade up to the world, one with pre-calculated motions and already examined smiles.
He shrugs. There’s a blush rising up the back of his neck, and no, he’s never been good at flirting, but Eurydice makes him want to try.
“Can I buy you some fries?”
She snorts. “Fries? Most men ask for a drink.”
Orpheus smiles internally. He wants to show her a new world, one without paper mache faces made up of calculated smiles and no real laughs. He wants to order fries at a bar and maybe hold her hand (he thinks it would probably fit perfectly).
“I just saw you take a year’s worth of shots,” Orpheus tells her. “I don’t think you need anything else to drink.”
“Try me,” Eurydice says with a smirk. The dim lights of the bar shift the shadows on her face, but her eyes are bright even as one of the lightbulbs dies.
Orpheus smiles for real this time. “I’d rather not.”
She smiles at him, something sparkling in her eyes. Orpheus could write sonnets and ballads about her eyes, about the way that her grin sometimes meets the shine of them, about the way that they glitter in the light. He could write concertos and sonatas about every piece of her.
He can write about anything, he knows that, but Eurydice is something different, special. Something that he can’t quite put a name to (though he thinks there will be a name for it, in the future). He can write about anything, but Eurydice makes it so easy-- there’s a melody in every smile she gives him, and he doesn’t have to work to write it down. No, it’s always there, fluttering at the base of his heart and the edges of his lungs.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Orpheus,” he tells her. He tries to pretend that he’s confident, wonders if maybe he’s pulling it off. From the way that she’s smiling, he doesn’t think so. “I’m gonna bring back the springtime early.”
Eurydice laughs, and it’s an honest laugh (so pure that he doesn’t mind that she’s laughing at him). “Oh yeah? How’re you planning on doing that?”
“I’m going to,” he says. He looks at her, trying to memorize her smile when she looks at him. He didn’t know how many more times she would ever smile at him. The bartender is wiping down the counters, the other patrons beginning to head out. “I’m writing a song.”
Eurydice rests her chin on the back of her hand, leaning towards him. She watches him like she’s trying to unpack all of his secrets, trying to figure out what his aim is. “Sing it then, poet.”
The back of his neck is flushed red, he’s sure of it now, but that isn’t stopping him from talking to Eurydice anyways. The song isn’t ready, isn’t anywhere close to good enough for anyone else to hear. It’s barely the scraps of a song. He didn’t want to give her anything less than the best he could, anything less than a masterpiece. That was what she deserved.
“It’s not finished yet,” he tells her.
She shrugs and says, “Show me what you’ve got, anyways.”
“I could play literally any other song,” Orpheus says. He stands up to grab his guitar from behind the bar. He plays at this bar some nights, when he’s got free time and the bartender will take him. It happens more often than not, when other gigs don’t work out or the rent is due.
“Literally any other song?”
Orpheus smiles, pulling the guitar strap over his neck. It fits perfectly, well worn from years of use. There are dark patterns of squares along it, something Hermes had gotten for him years ago for a birthday long past. He runs his fingers down it, shifting until it rests in the right place.
“Literally any other song,” he confirms.
“Well,” Eurydice says, a clear cut tilt to her smile. “But I still want to hear the song that’s gonna bring back sunshine. Winter’s getting long while we wait, Orpheus.”
He likes the way she says his name, the way that it falls from her lips so easily, smooth and strong and smart in a way that he has never felt. He likes the way she smiles as she says it, like the name itself might make her happy (gods, he hopes so).
“If you insist,” he says. He settles back onto his chair, resting the guitar against his knee. It’s a familiar weight. “But it’s not -- it’s not good.”
There’s a rush of insecurity there, overwhelming the safety he feels around her and bringing back all of the butterflies. The song isn’t ready, and it’s not good enough, and she’s not going to like it, and --
“Play,” Eurydice says. It’s soft, but commanding, and Orpheus decides he doesn’t care if it’s ready or not, he just wants to bring springtime to this moment. He wants to bring the sun into this dark barroom and he wants Eurydice to smile at him again.
So he plays.
His hands run easily over the strings, the sting of it easy on his fingertips. He keeps his grip steady as he sings, eyes trained on the guitar. He knows that Eurydice is watching him, but everything else seems to fade away as he sings the song. The lyrics have been aching in the back of his mind since he wrote the melody, a soft and lonely sound that fades into something joyful in the darkness.
Music has always come naturally to him, it’s always been something easy to learn and to write. Hermes used to let him play his well-worn vinyls of Nina Simone and Harry Chapin, and Orpheus would sing each line again and again until his voice hit all the right notes. He used to fall in love with the sound of an orchestra and he used to cry to the tune of a folk song, and now he’s going to sing until the world blooms again.
Winter always lasts so long without anything alive growing in the snow. It always comes in with a bitter howl and a gust of wind, and it slams doors closed that had been homes before. It’s winter now, and he’s just waiting for the sun to rise again. As he sings, he can hear Eurydice’s quick breaths, a drumbeat in the back of his head.
She’s smiling when he finishes, and he looks up to see her hastily rubbing at her eye.
“It’s good,” she says, and there’s a clarity in her eyes that Orpheus could fall in love with. “It’s really good.”
“You think so?”
She nods, saying, “It’ll bring back the sun for sure.”
That’s all the compliment that he needed, a grin breaking over his face. She returns the smile, and it reaches her eyes. He wants to memorize all of her, the brilliant honey brown irises and poppy red lips. He wants to take her far from this crumbling town with abandoned warehouses and cracked concrete. He wants to build her a world of flowers and sunlight and music and luxury.
He strums at the guitar again, a tuneless stroke, watching her as she tells him what she loved about the song. There’s something almost sad about her words, as if she hadn’t sat down and listened to a song in a long time. As if she’s never found a melody that burned its way into her lungs, branding her with something weighted in meaning and beauty. As if she’s never fallen in love with a harmony.
Orpheus thinks maybe he would give her a thousand songs and a million sonnets to make her fall in love (he’s already composing them, before she’s even walked away).
“So,” Eurydice says, shooting him a smile. “How about those fries?”
Orpheus beams, setting down his guitar (Eurydice’s voice alone is such a beautiful song). Springtime will come. He’s sure of it.