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“What are you thinking?”
Eurydice turns from the window. She realizes belatedly that Orpheus must have been talking for awhile already.
“Hm? Oh, nothing,” she says, with half of a smile. “There’s a storm coming.”
Orpheus looks strangely out of place in bad weather, like the sun without its clear blue sky. She narrows her eyes curiously. She doesn’t believe Eurydice isn’t thinking about anything, but she doesn’t usually pry.
“What were you saying before?” Eurydice asks, hoping to deflect.
“Oh,” Orpheus’s hand strays to the back of her neck, a familiar tic when she feels she’s lost control of herself for a moment too long. “I was just wondering if you’d listen to something I’ve been working on. It’s not important. Whenever.”
Orpheus is usually confident in her craft. It’s strange to see her feeling awkward about it. “I’d like to hear it,” says Eurydice, and she wishes her smile came easier.
A lot of people mistake Orpheus for a man when she plays in taverns. Eurydice guesses that's fine—it makes things easier sometimes—but she's never understood it. There's a boyishness about her, maybe, in a certain light, with her angular frame, her strong jaw and short-cropped hair, but that's where the similarities end. Eurydice has met more than her share of men, and none of them were anything like Orpheus.
Certainly, none of them had a voice like Orpheus. Her speaking voice is sweet enough, but when she sings—
“You’re sure?” Orpheus asks her, a hand already half-outstretched for her lyre. “If you’d rather watch the storm…”
Eurydice shakes her head, and the smile does come easier this time. “The storm will come whether I watch it or not. Play the song.”
It’s not the song. She’s been stuck on that for weeks now, at least. Something about old gods and a world out of tune, a melody that reaches deep inside you and plucks at something you didn’t even know was there. It’s beautiful, and terrible, and frightening. Eurydice doesn’t like to be here when Orpheus is working on that song.
Even though at first, it was what drew her to Orpheus. Or so she tells herself.
Her eyes are drawn to Orpheus’s fingers as she prepares to play, the apparent softness of her hands but for the callused fingertips. She remembers the first time Orpheus reached for her hand, the barest brush of fingers, and how Eurydice’s breath had caught in her throat. She thought she knew what holding hands was supposed to feel like.
She thought she knew what a lot of things were supposed to feel like.
Orpheus swallows audibly. Eurydice reaches out to squeeze her arm. “Why are you so nervous?” she asks kindly.
A strangled chuckle escapes Orpheus’s throat. Eurydice wonders how even the simplest sounds can ring like music in her voice. “It’s not the kind of thing I usually, uh…that is, I sort of wrote it for…”
Bright eyes meet hers, the clear blue sky hidden behind the stormclouds.
“For me?” Eurydice finishes, breathless.
“Well, anyway…” Orpheus glances away, her fingers settling upon the strings at last.
Eurydice thought she knew what music sounded like, too, before she met Orpheus. She’d heard songs to dance to, songs of love and loss, songs about drinking and missing the sea. She’d even had a favourite once, a song she’d heard when she was still a child, and one she sometimes asked to hear if she chanced upon a traveling musician and had a coin or two to spare.
But when Orpheus plays, when she sings, everything is different. Eurydice couldn’t even say how. People whisper that she is touched by the gods, and Eurydice is inclined to believe them, for how else could a mere mortal make a sound like that?
The song doesn’t have words, but Eurydice recognizes strains of the tune she’d once called her favourite, expanded and varied until it is at once familiar and entirely unrecognizable. Eurydice hasn’t quite let go of Orpheus’s sleeve, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Now that she’s begun to play, her awkwardness has melted away, and she is scarcely even in the room at all. She is a vessel for the song she plays, a vessel for the music of the gods.
Eurydice closes her eyes and she is a little girl again, light and free, blissfully unaware of how cold and lonely her life will be. Her fingers dig into the fabric of Orpheus’s sleeve, and she relives their first meeting for what must be the thousandth time, the way a world that had seemed to her a neverending maze of closed doors and discarded dreams had suddenly come to life with possibility again.
The music ends, but the feeling remains. Eurydice doesn’t open her eyes, and she doesn’t let go. She hears Orpheus set the lyre aside, feels her hand settle upon Eurydice’s waist as she draws near. “Did you like it?” she asks.
Eurydice leans in without opening her eyes. Let her kiss be her answer, for how can she ever put into words the way it made her feel?
Orpheus was so confident in her pursuit of Eurydice, so open and forthcoming in her desire. It was not aggressive or unwanted, and still it almost frightened her. It stirred some deep, unspoken fear inside her, that a woman could be so certain and so honest—that she, Eurydice, could perhaps have been that way, too.
“Isn’t it hard?” Eurydice asked her once, angry and frustrated at nothing in particular. “Doesn’t it ever scare you?”
Orpheus thought for a moment, brow furrowed and lips drawn. “Sure, sometimes,” she said slowly. “But it’s much harder to pretend to be something I’m not.”
Eurydice wishes she understood how Orpheus feels. It’s always been easier for her to pretend to be whatever someone else wants to see. She’s still not sure she knows how to stop.
“I love it,” she says against Orpheus’s lips, because anything else she could say feels stupid even in her mind. She drapes her arms over Orpheus’s shoulders and kisses her again, and again. Thunder rumbles low in the distance, and she does her best to ignore it completely.
She is hungry. Actually, Eurydice cannot remember a time when she felt truly sated. Hungry for food, hungry for comfort, hungry for love, or perhaps hungry for something she wouldn’t even know how to name. The wind howls outside, an echo of the gnawing emptiness inside her. Is Eurydice imagining it, or do the storms just keep getting worse?
She doesn’t know how Orpheus can stand it. Orpheus has never been much better off than Eurydice, but it’s clear she hasn’t known the same kind of hunger. Music fills her up, she says sometimes, and Eurydice is inclined to believe her. Orpheus is barely human when she is working on her music. She doesn’t notice the heat or the bitter cold, sometimes doesn’t even notice Eurydice. It stands to reason that she wouldn’t be perturbed by something so banal as an empty belly.
An old, bone-deep impulse twinges in the pit of her stomach. There’s a storm coming, she almost says, not a breath shy of Orpheus’s lips, and we need to find food.
She said it, or something like it, the first time they were together. When Orpheus’s callused fingers first brushed the bare skin of her waist, just beneath the hem of her shirt, the words came tumbling forth in a flood of nerves and ancient wounds. A habit formed of a hundred times when the brush of fingers was wholly or at least partly unwelcome, the consequence of needing a warm bed or a solid meal.
Perhaps she had expected the same response. A man would have chuckled at her show of nerves and mistaken it for shyness, teased her for her irrepressible practicality and continued upon his chosen course, giving her feeble protestations little consideration.
Not Orpheus. Orpheus had stopped at once, and stammered something to the effect of, “Oh. Of course. Yes, of course, if that’s what you want.”
Stunned, Eurydice grasped onto Orpheus’s wrists to keep her close, or perhaps to keep her own balance. That simple sentence reverberated in her mind as bells clamoring in a grand cathedral, cacophonous and overwhelming.
If that’s what you want. When had anyone ever cared what Eurydice wanted?
“It isn’t,” she had said, before she had fully decided to speak at all.
She still remembers the way Orpheus’s eyes looked by the light of candles, bright and warm and so alive. “It isn’t?” she echoed.
Eurydice shook her head, and she smiled.
And though Orpheus surely wanted to ask what she was thinking, or why she had said something when she didn’t mean it, she has never been the sort to pry. “Okay,” she said simply, and she followed where Eurydice led.
Privately, Orpheus can admit that it’s still a little jarring when Eurydice kisses her like this. It always seems to come on so suddenly. Eurydice keeps her thoughts to herself and holds her cards close to her chest, and Orpheus has never minded that. But then, all at once, it’s like whatever Eurydice was thinking about becomes utterly unimportant. Her chaste kisses turn passionate, and the idle grip she had upon Orpheus’s sleeves turns almost desperate.
Maybe jarring is the wrong word. It feels like a dream, and an embarrassingly self-indulgent one. Who is she, to command such attention?
She knows Eurydice is worried about the coming storm. The thought is never far from Eurydice’s mind, and so in turn it is never far from Orpheus’s. It’s hard for her to understand in a way, the fear Eurydice feels whenever a storm is approaching, and so she makes it a point to remember, lest she say something unimaginably stupid.
It’s not that she doesn’t understand on a fundamental level. Eurydice is afraid because the storms are destructive. They make food scarce, and they make people behave strangely. People who are afraid do strange and frightening things—Orpheus knows this, of course, and all too well.
And it’s not like the storms don’t frighten her, too, sometimes. It’s just that the only thing Orpheus has ever known with any certainty is that she is going to be the one to fix this—to find whatever is going wrong with the world that makes each storm worse than the one that came before. She is going to write the song that will bring the world back into tune. She knows this like she knows her own name, or maybe something even deeper than that, more fundamental.
Well. She is certain of this, and she is certain about Eurydice.
Orpheus has seen many, many beautiful women. Even took a few of them to bed, though it never lasted very long. They always seemed to tire of her, or to grow weary of her devotion to her music, and she was never especially sad to see them go.
She couldn’t even say what it was about Eurydice that made her different. It was like looking at a piece of herself that she didn’t know she’d lost.
She thought she was crazy for thinking that at first. Crazy for pursuing Eurydice at all, maybe. Eurydice didn’t show it, but Orpheus could tell she was nervous. She was smiling and laughing, but her body language was closed off, and her eyes—by the gods, her eyes!—often flitted about for something else to look upon.
But just when Orpheus had resolved to let her be, to turn and walk away even in spite of that inscrutable feeling that had screamed at her to approach Eurydice in the first place, Eurydice had caught onto her arm with a breathless, “Wait!”
It was less than nothing, and yet Orpheus felt sunlight welling up in her chest as she turned around. “What is it?”
“What about this song of yours?”
In the present, Eurydice’s eyes are heavy-lidded and half-closed, but Orpheus feels certain she would know them anywhere. There is a storm in Eurydice’s eyes, but it’s not like the raging tempest that threatens to burst forth outside. It is the kind of storm that feels like a release, like tension shattering after a long and heavy silence.
Eurydice is the kind of storm that comes after a drought, and Orpheus is ever scrambling to partake of her glorious downpour.
Being with Eurydice doesn’t feel like a distraction. It feels like a vital piece of her work. Orpheus is going to fix this, she vows with each kiss, each brush of her fingers. She is going to fix this, and then Eurydice won’t have to be afraid of the storms any longer. She is going to be the one to build a better world for her lover. And then Eurydice will know—
Orpheus slides a hand beneath Eurydice’s shirt to rest at the small of her back, and she remembers with a twinge the first time they were together. Eurydice was so nervous that Orpheus was sure she’d done something horribly wrong, and had almost retreated from her yet again.
Being with Orpheus would be a leap of faith for anyone, she cannot help but think, but especially for Eurydice. Eurydice is earthy and practical, and Orpheus barely remembers to eat or sleep half the time. Eurydice can change or obscure nearly anything about herself if it suits her fancy, and Orpheus isn’t sure she could pretend to be different even if she wanted to.
“Eurydice,” she leans down to press her lips to the artful angle of her lover’s shoulder.
“Hm?” Eurydice’s voice is a music all its own. Orpheus wonders whether she will ever grow accustomed to it.
“Are you still worried?” she asks, though her lips never leave Eurydice’s skin. “About the storm, I mean. We can go and—“
She feels Eurydice tense, but it isn’t the same as it has been before. Eurydice is holding her close. Eurydice doesn’t want her to pull away.
“It’ll be all right,” she says. “We’ve got enough.”
Orpheus pulls back just enough to meet her eyes. “You’re sure?”
Eurydice smiles and reaches up to trace Orpheus’s cheek. “I just want to stay here with you,” she says.
Orpheus gazes back at her, stunned and silent. Her mind catches on an old story she heard again recently, about the old gods and the way the world used to be. She thinks she understands the god of the Underworld a little bit in that moment, how he must have felt when he first laid eyes on Persephone, and how he must have felt when she looked back at him with the same love in her eyes.
How the world must have seemed so ordinary, so unremarkable to him up until that moment, and how nothing thereafter could ever be the same. How he must have known that to love him would be a leap of faith for anyone, but for Persephone more than most.
Outside, there is a terrible crash of thunder and lightning. The storm breaks, and to her credit, Eurydice barely even flinches.
Orpheus is going to fix this, she vows again as she pulls Eurydice tight against her.
Orpheus is going to fix the world, and then Eurydice will finally know that her faith was justified.