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Persephone meets Hades at her mother’s flower shop. She is perched up on the register counter, absently kicking her legs out in time to the quiet music drifting from the speakers. She’s sketching out an idea for a wedding bouquet—one of Hedone’s customers is getting married in a month, and has ordered nearly a hundred flowers from the shop—and she’s just about decided on the color scheme, when the bell over the front door chimes.
She puts her sketch aside before glancing up, and nearly trips when her dress snags on the counter as she tries to hop down. The man is somehow torn between seeming awkwardly out of place, and smoothly confidant in himself. He doesn’t seem aware of this, or of Persephone’s own growing embarrassment, as he crosses over to her. She’s still struggling with her dress, and he reaches a hand around her own, deftly untangling the material from the edge of the counter. His hands slide to her hips, and he lightly helps her down to the floor. She glances up, neck craning because of his height, and mumbles a thank you. He blushes, and Persephone knows she’s a goner.
Since she was a child, her mother has called Persephone a romantic, with a shake of her head and the ghost of a smile. Persephone would follow her mother through the garden—while Demeter scattered seeds and lovingly cared for her flowers, Persephone would make up stories about the wisteria and hydrangeas falling in love, or the morning glories dancing with golden rod when the others weren’t looking. Demeter thought it was childish, but charming, and she would laugh. Eventually, Persephone grew out of assigning love stories to her mother’s plants, but she never outgrew the stories, themselves.
Having a best friend like Psyche, it was hard not to get a little caught up in romantic notions.
Persephone isn’t naïve; she understands that sometimes, there is no happy ending. Sometimes, things don’t work out, or the happy couple falls out of love, or the happy couple wasn’t ever really happy at all. She was raised in a small house, by a mother and an aunt that never saw a wedding altar. She’s never asked after her father, and Demeter has never mentioned him, but Persephone can guess she wasn’t the product of some whirlwind romance. More than likely, she was the result of too much wine and not enough foresight.
By the time she meets Hades, Persephone is fifteen years old, and though she still loves those books Psyche sometimes slips into her bag, and the films they spend their summers watching, and all the glowing couples that show up at the shop, she has come to terms with the idea that she will never fall in love. She’s mostly fine with it—she has her mother, her aunt, Psyche, and sometimes Dionysus. She isn’t alone, will never be completely on her own, and she can be happy that way.
And then Hades steps through the door, and his hands are wide and gentle against her hip bones, and he is so much taller than her, and when she smiles at him he blushes.
He is much older than her, which she notices, of course, but she doesn’t really notice, until Dionysus mentions it. He owns a funeral home—a popular one, if his expensive suits and luxury cars are anything to go by—and he buys his flowers from their shop. Apparently, he’s always been a frequent customer, but usually he has Eros come pick up the order. Eros, Persephone knows—a good-looking college kid, quick to flirt and smile boyishly. She likes him, but likes Hades much better. She tells him as much, in a rare moment of blunt honesty, and the blush spreads down the back of his neck, and she thinks I could get used to this.
She helps him carry the flowers—a dozen baskets of white calla-lilies—to his Rolls Royce Phantom, though he doesn’t need the help. He lets her, smiling at the floor almost as if he doesn’t want her to see it. She’s positively charmed, and absolutely nervous.
He’s older, and he owns his own business, and she’s pretty sure he’s rich-rich. And she’s fifteen, sort of awkward, with dirt on her knees from watering the tomatoes that morning, and she’s got a Physics test in the morning she’s pretty sure she’ll fail.
She tucks a loose bit of hair behind her ear as he softly slides the trunk closed. Everything he does seems to be soft, and nearly silent. She’s overwhelmed with the desire to make him laugh, undignified.
“Will I see you again?” she blurts, and regrets it immediately. But he smiles down at his shoes again, cheeks pink, and then glances back at her.
“I certainly hope so,” he says, so soft she barely hears it.
And then he drives away, and the rest of the day is ruined for her. She spends the afternoon lost in thought, lazily sketching his eyes, and cufflinks, and smile. She spends the evening replaying each moment with him in her mind, so completely oblivious that she doesn’t even care when Dionysus steals bites of avocado pasta salad off her plate. Her mother worries that she’s stressed over school, but Persephone waves her off and goes to bed and dreams of him.
The second time she sees Hades, it’s two days later and she walks out of the local high school where she takes her PE and Ceramics classes, to find him leaning against his car in the parking lot. He looks even more out of place here, and entirely uncomfortable, and he’s holding two travel coffee mugs.
She’s grinning so wide her face hurts by the time she reaches him, and he’s blushing again, and he hands the floral coffee mug to her. She suspects he bought it recently, not quite believing he’d already own something so delicate, and the idea warms her even more than the coffee—which is, strangely, her coffee. Hazelnut, and he got the cream ratio a little off, but it’s definitely close enough to surprise her.
She’s only told him her name, and that the shop belonged to her mother, and that she worked there part time. He’d asked after her sketch, so she’d mentioned the wedding, but that was as detailed as their conversation became.
She looks up at him in question, and he seems to know just what she’s thinking, because he sets his coffee down on the trunk of his car and rubs the back of his neck. It’s an incredibly bashful gesture, and very endearing. She’s so gone.
“I went back to the shop, but you weren’t there,” he admits. She nods; she would have been in school—depending on the time of day, either at home with her online courses, or at the high school gym. “So I asked Eros where to find you…” he trails off, embarrassed. Persephone smiles into her coffee, and reaches a hand out to lightly tug the sleeve of his blazer. He must have just come from the funeral home; he’s still wearing the black suit.
He reaches back for his own coffee and she reclaims her hand. He gestures to his car. “May I drive you home?” he asks, and she nods—probably too quickly, but oh well. She likes him, and it’d be impossible for her to pretend otherwise. Besides, she wants him to know.
He gently slides the satchel off her shoulder, and places it in the backseat. He holds her door open for her, and then carefully tucks in the flare of her skirt before closing it. Neither of them switch on the radio, or make small talk. Instead, he turns off the air conditioner when she rolls down her window, and she plays absently with the hem of her skirt. Every now and again she’ll point out the street he should turn on, but otherwise keeps silent. It’s a nice quiet, almost buzzing, laced with some sort of anticipation she can’t really define. She feels like they’re heading towards something besides her childhood home.
He parks just in front of the first staircase, and they both hesitate. She unbuckles her seatbelt slowly, and he watches, hands gripping the steering wheel. She gives him a soft smile that she hopes isn’t as shaky as the nerves in her stomach. “Thanks for the ride,” she offers.
Hades’ arm twitches, almost like he’s about to reach out for her, but he doesn’t. Instead he asks, “May I see you again?”
This time, her smile is steady and big and she nods before grabbing her bag from the backseat and skipping up the stairs.
Dionysus is at the kitchen window when she walks in, and he gives her a knowing grin around a bite of sandwich. She sticks her tongue out before floating back to her room. Focusing on that night’s homework is hopeless, but she manages to paint out three new flower arrangements. Psyche calls just before midnight—which Demeter isn’t happy about, but Persephone just shrugs her off.
“So who’s Mr. Limousine?” she asks, smoothly. “Everyone saw you leave with him, today.”
Persephone smiles up at the ceiling and shrugs to no one. “His name’s Hades,” she says. “He’s…a friend.”
“Right,” Psyche snorts. “Whatever you say. Can I borrow your Chemistry notes?”
Persephone sighs. “I’m not studying Chemistry, Psyche.” Despite the fact that Persephone only takes two classes at her high school, Psyche is constantly trying to wheedle notecards and essays from her.
“Really?” Psyche purrs. “Because I heard you had some to spare in the parking lot earlier.” She cackles even as Persephone hangs up the phone.
Things continue like that for a while—three days a week, she’ll walk out of school to find him waiting, coffee in hand, to drive her home. Sometimes he’ll pick her up in the morning too, and she waves off her mother’s questions, saying I’m catching a ride with a friend. It’s true, technically, and anyway her mother doesn’t need to know everything. Sometimes when she’s working the after-school or weekend shift, he’ll stop by the shop and help her label the flower bins, or water the plants.
She jokingly asks him to arrange a bouquet, mostly out of curiosity, and he spends an entire forty-five minutes deliberating seriously between orchids and roses, baby’s breath and queen Anne’s lace, green or blue ribbon. It’s hilarious, and in the end he hands her just four pink ranunculus and some holly. He decides on the blue ribbon, and he looks so anxious handing it over, she nearly laughs.
“They remind me of you,” he explains quietly. And, well, she can’t laugh at that. So she kisses him instead. It’s quick, and a little sloppy, and definitely forward.
It’s on his cheek, just at the corner of his mouth, because she’s not that forward. Neither of them really seem to know what to do after that, and he leaves, and she puts the flowers in a mason jar on her window sill.
The kiss changes things. Hades becomes more tactile—he’ll brush his fingers against her elbow in greeting, or lead her to the car with a firm hand at the small of her back. Once, when dropping her off, he reaches out and swipes a few strands of hair back behind her ear. He clenches his fist afterwards, as if forcing himself to withdraw. She understands—she has to bite her lip until it bleeds, to keep from kissing him.
He doesn’t always pick her up in the Rolls Royce; sometimes she’ll find him leaning against a faded blue pickup, more rust than paint, with a bench seat and sticky gear shift. On those days, he wears dark jeans and cotton shirts, with messy hair and dirty hands. She likes this version of him best, though she doesn’t say so. He’ll let her turn on the radio, crank down the window, and wind her hand through the wind as he drives.
Usually they simmer together in the quiet, but sometimes she’ll spend the time collecting bits of information about him—like how he takes his coffee (black, with cinnamon), what his favorite music is (instrumental; he’s partial to the Dances With Wolves soundtrack), how he got into the funeral home business (family heirloom, though he doesn’t elaborate), what he wanted to do when he was a child (dog-trainer, which is almost too adorable to take).
On one of the suit-and-Rolls-Royce days, she asks why he doesn’t have a driver. “You’re definitely rich enough,” she muses. “You’re like, unnecessarily wealthy.” Then she winces, because that sounded on the wrong side of rude.
But he laughs, and she takes a moment to appreciate the sound. “You’re not wrong,” he admits, and it’s the early morning so his voice is deep and rumbling and gives her goose bumps down her legs. “I like to drive,” he explains. “It relaxes me.”
She hums in response, because she has nothing to say, and they bask in the quiet. The buzzing has been getting louder, recently, almost warm. They’re getting closer.
The next day she works at the shop, bringing one of her paintings to life. It’s a small arrangement, of sunflowers and golden rod wound in ivy. The ribbon is a red so dark it looks black. She has it delivered to his business. She doesn’t put a card—he won’t need one.
She steps outside in the morning to find him waiting for her, wearing the suit but looking disheveled, like he hasn’t slept. His face isn’t usually clean-shaven, but he keeps his beard trimmed, and it’s looking more unkempt than she’s ever seen. She skips down the steps and he meets her at the bottom, jittery.
“What’s wrong?” she demands, searching his face worriedly. She wonders if he’s sick, or stressed, or maybe—
“You sent me flowers,” he blurts, confused and excited, and she pauses. Oh.
“Yeah,” she admits. “They, uh. They reminded me of you. Well, of us.”
He raises a brow because, yes, her explanation wasn’t the best. She tries to clarify. “The sunflowers and golden rod, they’re my favorite, because they don’t really need much, you know? Just sunlight, a little water, and they’ll grow. And golden rod, it means the coming of Autumn, and change, you know. Growing up, getting older. Sunflowers are supposed to mean hope, and happiness and—adoration.” She stopped herself, feeling her cheeks getting hotter with each second. But when she met his eyes, Hades was smiling.
“And ivy?” he asks.
“The ivy is you,” she whispers. “It’s the ruler of winter. Eternity, loyalty, love.” She ticks off each meaning on a finger. Hades’ smile grows.
He raises a hand to her cheek, grazing his knuckles against her collar bone on the way. She shivers. He presses the pad of his thumb just below her lip. It’s probably the most erotic thing that’s ever happened to her, which would seem pathetic if she wasn’t so turned on.
“I liked the flowers,” he mumbles. She swallows and nods, because she can’t trust her voice. “You know them well.”
“Not really,” she waves off the compliment, mouth still dry. “Not like my mom; she’s the expert. I’m just the expert’s daughter.”
“I don’t think you’re just anything,” he smiles, with an overwhelming amount of affection. Persephone blinks.
Kiss me, she thinks. Demands. Begs.
“You’ll be late,” he warns, hand dropping back to his side. “We should go.”
She tries to make a bowl in her Ceramics class, but it turns into the crude lovechild of a lampshade and spoon. Which reminds her of the time he admitted he has never been able to cook anything without burning it.
She thinks about making him French toast for breakfast, and drinking coffee at her kitchen table, and introducing him to Psyche and Dionysus and maybe even her mother, and she thinks about driving around in his truck and just not stopping, and she thinks she’s in love with him.
She tells Psyche in between classes. She’d called a few days earlier.
“I hardly even see you anymore.” Persephone could hear her pout through the phone. “You spend all your time with your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Persephone had said. And her voice had sounded mild, but the words hurt to say because she wished they weren’t the truth.
Persephone finds Psyche in the girls’ locker room, painting her toenails pink. Psyche does these things—painting toe nails, waxing armpits, brushing teeth—in awkward and inappropriate places, like locker rooms, cars, and the bathrooms of shopping malls.
“I think I’m in love with Hades,” Persephone blurts. A few of the other girls turn, only distantly curious—most of them don’t really know Persephone, and so they turn back again.
Psyche spills her nail polish and swears. Then she leaps up and hugs Persephone tightly, which is a strange reaction, but. It’s Psyche; anything goes.
“Operation Get the Guy—GTG for short—starts now!” she declares vehemently. “First things first,” she grins, “I have to meet him.”
He isn’t in the parking lot that afternoon, which is less than ideal but Persephone forces herself not to worry. She shrugs at Psyche’s deep-set frown. “He’s probably working; he owns his own business. It’s not like he can just drive me around whenever I want.” She doesn’t admit that she’d begun to think he could—it was easy to forget he had a life that extended beyond their car rides and conversations.
“Convenient timing,” Psyche grumbles, upset that Operation GtG has been interrupted already.
Persephone just shrugs. She walks to the shop. She forces herself not to worry. She makes a new arrangement—lilacs and yellow tulips, folded into black lace. She helps women pick bridal bouquets, boys choose first-date bouquets, spouses find forgive-me bouquets. She closes the shop at sunset, and forces herself not to worry when he still hasn’t shown. She calls Dionysus to come pick her up.
She doesn’t see Hades for five months. Eros resumes his job as the flower-boy. The first two times, he just smiles at her warmly, collecting her special arrangements along with the rest of the orders. The third week, she can’t hold back anymore.
“What happened to Hades?” she blurts, and maybe she could have been a little more subtle, because Eros is looking at her with so much pity she might vomit on the floor. Her mother would not be pleased.
“He had to go home for a while,” he says gently. “Family emergency. He’ll be gone for a couple months.”
The words hit her like a physical blow, and she’s not sure why. He’d mentioned his family before (vaguely, and in the most roundabout way ever, but. He had.) She knew they existed, knew this was a possibility. She knew his world extended beyond her; he was a grown man, with a past and a life she knew nothing about. He had his own business, his own fortune, his own family—and what did she have? An overbearing mother, an estranged half-brother, a few boring classes, and a stupid teenage crush.
“For what it’s worth,” Eros says as he finishes loading the hearse, “He wasn’t actually supposed to stay here as long as he did.”
“What?” Persephone asks stupidly. Eros shrugs and grins conspiratorially.
“He was just supposed to stay through the summer.” It’s the middle of October; Halloween is in a week. “He stayed for you.” And then he shrugs and drives off, as if he hasn’t just dropped a verbal nuclear bomb on her.
“I just don’t get it,” Psyche says, for the fourteenth time. She’s sitting cross legged on the floor of the shop, gluing feathers and sequins to the white plastic mask she’d bought at Party City. It’s Halloween, just after school, and Persephone is carving a cat-face into a pumpkin at the counter. It’s been a slow day—Halloween isn’t really a big flower holiday.
“Leave it alone, Psyche,” Persephone sighs. Psyche is the type of person to answer any perceived slight on her friend, with aggression and genuine confusion—like she just doesn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t like them. She’s pretty sure that if Hades ever were to return, Psyche would probably try to fight him. She’s very hands-on.
The bell above the front door chimes, and Persephone hates how excited she gets for a moment, glancing up. She hates the excitement, and she hates the disappointment, and she hates this shop, and she hates Hades, and she hates herself.
Psyche seems to follow her train of thought because she scowls, and is still scowling when she turns to the door.
It’s Eros, looking tired and a little confused by the sight of pumpkin guts and sequins all over the place, but mostly amused. He offers a friendly head-nod to Persephone, before raking his eyes over Psyche. Psyche, for her part, is trying to look extremely disinterested in the sudden appearance of a boy. Persephone goes back to carving out the ear of her cat-o’-lantern.
“What is that supposed to be?” Eros asks, gesturing to Psyche’s half-finished costume, sitting in a shimmery heap.
Psyche, now gluing in a sloppy, irritated way, snaps, “A costume.”
“Of what?” presses Eros, prodding the dress with his sneaker. Psyche swats at his leg and he glances down at her, amused.
“Odette,” she huffs. “The Swan Queen.”
Eros glances up at Persephone with a raised eyebrow, but she shrugs and ignores them, working on a whisker. “Shouldn’t you be gluing feathers, then?”
Psyche sighs and gropes around in her school bag, snatching out a handful of white bird feathers in response. She tosses them to the side and goes back to her sequins, stealing glances at Eros from the corner of her eye.
Eros juts a chin out at Persephone. “What about you?”
She shrugs. “Probably a fairy.” It’d been her fallback costume since she was eleven; she has a pair of life-size wire wings, with purple and green fabric stretched over the frame, and they flounce when she walks. She’ll have Psyche braid her hair, throw on a dress, and that will be that.
Psyche kicks Eros’s thigh with her pointy, bare toes. “What about you, Nosy Parker?” Her tone is harsh, but her neck is blotchy. Persephone swallows her grin. Eros doesn’t.
“Guess you’ll just have to see,” he waggles his eyebrows suggestively and Psyche scoffs.
Eros helps them close the shop before driving off in the hearse. Psyche follows Persephone home, and braids her hair for her before putting on her own costume. She asks about Eros in the roundabout way that means she doesn’t want to be asking about Eros, and Persephone answers what she can.
They hand out candy at the bottom of the stairs. Psyche’s older sisters call from some house party, and offer to get them in. They take Psyche’s car, which is actually her father’s, and drive to the other side of town. The party is mostly college students, and a couple of people they recognize from high school.
Eros is some sort of ninja, with a bow and arrow. He pretends to shoot Psyche, and she splashes him in the face with her beer, but they both laugh so Persephone figures it’s just how they flirt. Psyche’s sisters dance with them for a bit, and then one hits on Eros while the other throws up in a vase.
Persephone dances with a few boys, and then a few girls. Mostly she dances with Psyche and Eros because she at least knows they won’t pinch her thighs or spike her drink. She dances more than she probably should in those shoes, because they start to pinch her heels until they bleed. Eventually she tosses the flats away and keeps dancing. She definitely drinks more than she should, but she doesn’t throw up in a vase, so she counts it a victory.
Eventually she gets drunk enough that she can’t dance without the room dancing too, so she goes outside to sit down and breathe. It’s cold enough for goose bumps, but it’s not uncomfortable. She’s forgotten where she tossed her shoes, and the grass is cold and wet against her feet. She puts a palm to the earth and feels it hum against her skin—it’s still new to her, she’s not her mother, and she’s not very good at it, but she knows that it’s there. It’s alive, beneath her. She lets the thought of that steady her mind.
She throws up in the bushes around sunrise. It’s still not a vase, though.
Christmas is, decidedly, a flower holiday. She and Psyche and Eros, strangely—no one questions it—spend an afternoon cutting out paper snowflakes and taping them around the shop. She helps her mother grow and pot two hundred poinsettias, until she can’t stand the sight of them. They play Bing Crosby and Hilary Duff carols over the speakers. She helps Psyche pass winter midterms by the skin of her teeth. Persephone finished her online courses in November, but she still needs to finish her PE and Ceramics credits before she can graduate.
Hestia comes back to the house on Christmas. She brings presents—little wooden houses, churches, clock towers that make up a village. She gives Persephone a single tower, like a giant Rook chess piece. She’s not really sure what it means, but she places it gently on the shelf by her bed.
Hestia and Demeter make a Christmas dinner that could feed a dozen, and six pies. Dionysus eats almost all of everything, and they drink hot chocolate spiced with nutmeg, and eggnog spiked with bourbon, and they wear their pajamas all day. Psyche shows up just after sunset, wearing red lipstick and felt elf ears. She puts a pair of reindeer antlers on Dionysus, and a Santa hat on Persephone. There’s a pair of little bells on the end, and it dangles down by her hipbone, jingling with every step.
The two of them stay up watching It’s A Wonderful Life and eating chocolates out of the Ziploc Psyche brought. Persephone sneaks up a bottle of her mother’s Bailey’s, and they take turns drinking until it’s empty. Around midnight, Psyche’s phone goes off. She checks the message and then smiles, pressing her nose to Persephone’s cheek in a moment of warm, drunk comradery. She whispers, “Cover for me,” and sneaks out the window.
She slinks back in just before sunrise, mumbling for Persephone to roll over so she can slide into bed beside her. She presses her cold feet to Persephone’s calves, and they fall asleep as the birds start to wake.
Persephone turns sixteen on the first day of spring. Psyche has been planning for the day all year—she’s more excited for Persephone’s birthday than Persephone is. Demeter decorates the house with fresh orchids and sunflowers and rosebuds. Persephone dresses in yellow, and braids delphinium and forget-me-nots in her hair. She pulls on her comfortable boots, having learned from Halloween, and has Dionysus drive her to the Spring Fling.
Psyche is there, and Eros, though Persephone isn’t sure how since he’s not in high school. They dance to awful electro-pop, and even worse indie ballads, and they drink strawberry punch that somebody spiked with cheap vodka. The dance lasts until midnight, and they stumble out into the slight chill of a new spring.
He’s there, and at first she thinks she’s drunk-hallucinating him, but then she feels Psyche go rigid at her side, and Eros nudges her towards him, so she knows he’s real. He’s real, and he looks awful. His eyes are ringed with bruises from exhaustion, his hair is rucked up, his clothes are wrinkled and stained. There’s a hole in the knee of his jeans, and his knuckles are bruised. He’s not holding any coffee, and he’s leaning against a car she doesn’t recognize—a plain, black sedan with dirty tail lights.
He’s staring at her, heavier than she’s ever seen, and it shocks her into standing still. Eros gives a final push, and suddenly she’s stumbling over, and then she’s finally in front of him, so close she has to bend her neck back to meet his eye.
He’s not going to speak first, which she’s irrationally bitter about—he’s the one that left for five months without a goodbye, without writing or calling or anything—she thinks he should be the one to break the silence. But he won’t, and so she clears her throat awkwardly.
“You’re back,” she settles on. She’s swaying a little, possibly because she’s a little cold, probably because she’s a little drunk. She shouldn’t be drunk in his presence. She shouldn’t be in his presence at all, but she’d imagined this moment, and she was always composed and well adjusted and moved on, while he was somber and sorry-looking. He is sort of somber and sorry-looking, but she is decidedly not composed, or well-adjusted, and she’s not sure if she’s moved on. She hasn’t thought about him in a few weeks, she thinks that’s a sign of something.
“I’m back,” he agrees, voice hoarse and rumbling. She shivers involuntarily and pointedly blames it on the weather. He notices and before she can protest, he’s shrugged off his jacket and wrapped it around her pale shoulders.
She means to say no, to hand it back, or toss it on the ground and stomp on it petulantly. Instead she grips the lapel and snuggles, which is a little mortifying, but she’s too drunk to care. She sniffs the material indiscreetly. It smells like coal dust, and campfire smoke, and him.
“Why did you leave?” she asks, and she doesn’t think she’s ever sounded quite so small. She scuffs at the pavement with her boot and nearly falls from the lack of coordination. He steadies her, a reflex, but then he doesn’t take his hands away from her arms, and it’s just not fair that he can look so utterly heartbroken when he was the one that left.
“I had to,” he sighs raggedly, eyes never leaving hers—they’re aggressive; not towards her, but in general. “I didn’t want to go.”
She’d be less inclined to believe him, if he didn’t look so wrecked. So instead she nods stiffly, glancing back over her shoulder to where Psyche and Eros and a few others are standing around, trying not to look like they’re spying. Well, Psyche is outright staring at them, but the others are at least trying their hands at discretion.
Persephone turns back to Hades. His hands have begun slowly stroking her upper arms, and she doesn’t think he’s noticed. She bites back a shudder, and says, “There’s going to be a bonfire,” she blinks away. “You can come, if you want…”
He nods slowly. “I want to,” he promises. She nods and waves a hand at the group.
“We’ll meet you there,” she calls out. Psyche looks ready to fight—either Persephone’s decision to split up, or just Hades outright—but Eros drags her away with a smile and wave.
“Nice to see ya, boss!” he calls out, and Psyche glares like he’s a traitor.
Hades holds her door open for her, tucking in the hem of her dress before closing it. She doesn’t turn on the radio, but he rolls down her window for her, and she tucks her face half outside into the wind. It’s probably ruining her hair, and the flowers, but her skin feels too hot for her body. They don’t talk, and the silence between them doesn’t buzz so much as spark—likely to ignite any moment.
The bonfire is at a ravine; Psyche, her sisters and Eros had piled up a mountain of driftwood earlier that day, so by the time Persephone arrives, the flames are high and bright orange. Someone pulled their truck up to the lot and left all the doors open, blasting 70’s funk. People are milling around, dancing abstractly and chatting. Hades parks a few yards from the party, still in the shadows. Persephone pops her door open and sticks her legs out but makes no move to leave.
In the end, he breaks the stalemate this time. “You said I was the ivy,” he started, voice low and weary. “Eternity. Loyalty. Love.” The last word is a whisper, and Persephone’s mouth goes dry at the sound. He finds her eye in the darkness and holds it. “That you were the golden rod and,” he pauses, finger reaching up to wrap in some hair, escaped from her braid. “Sunflower. Hope. Happiness.” He licks his lips, his fingers dipping down to brush against the slope between her neck and shoulder. “Adoration.”
In the end, they move at the same time, and they meet in the middle. He tastes like earth, and a little like coffee, and his hand is firm at the base of her skull, but his mouth is soft, letting hers take the lead. She’s still wearing her seatbelt, so there’s a moment of frustrating fumbling as she gets it undone, and then her hands are on his shoulders and then his chest and then his neck, as flighty and undecided as the rest of her; she doesn’t know what she wants to do first, where she wants to touch, how she wants to kiss. She whimpers, a little needy and a little nervous, and that seems to be the permission he needed because then he’s dragging her across the console until she’s sprawled across his lap, and his tongue is in her mouth and then his teeth are dragging down her neck and she’s panting in his ear. He whispers a curse into the skin above her collar bone, and she combs her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. He’s twisting her around to a better angle, when someone knocks on the window.
They pull apart, mouths red and wet, breathing heavy, and turn to look. Psyche still looks a little irritated, but mostly she looks amused. Eros, for his part, is smugger than Persephone has ever seen him. He opens the door and motions for them to get out. She thinks about saying no, feeling warm and comfortable and a little irritated at the interruption.
But Psyche spent hours putting this night together for her and, hopefully, she’ll have plenty of time to make out with Hades in more convenient settings, in the future. So with a grudging sigh, and a final, hard kiss to his mouth, Persephone detangles herself from his lap. He grips her by the hipbones and helps her to her feet, like the day they first met, and that makes her surge back to attack him again. Behind her, Psyche blows a loud raspberry, and probably rolls her eyes exaggeratedly, though she can’t really see.
Eventually, she pulls away, feeling incredibly satisfied to see how completely wrecked he looks—and thoroughly kissed. She winds her fingers through his, and leads him out to the fire.
They dance to Earth, Wind and Fire, and The Temptations, and Kool and the Gang—well, Persephone, Psyche and Eros dance while Hades watches pleasantly from his seat on the ground—until their legs give out, and then they collapse where they stood, laughing and flicking sand at each other. Persephone crawls over to Hades, and then into his lap, and he rests his head on her shoulder as he points out all the constellations and tells her their stories. Some of them she already knows, but she prefers the way he tells them—or maybe just his voice—so she keeps quiet. At some point, someone had brought out a case of cherry mojito pouches, so she’s probably drunk enough to sink back against him without it seeming strange. So she does, and he lets her—she’s pretty sure he doesn’t even mind. Across the fire, Psyche gives her an outrageous wink, alcohol marring her coordination, and Persephone laughs out at the sky, loud and joyful.
She’d given Hades his jacket back, having gotten sweaty between all the dancing and the heat from the fire, so he’s wearing it now. She twists around in his arms. It’s still late out, but the edges of the sky are fading into gray—the first hint at morning. She studies his face for a moment, before finally landing on his eyes, warm and watching her. She leans in with a smile, bumping her nose against his. He laughs, the noise vibrating in all the places where his chest touches hers.
“Next time you leave,” she says, pulling back to look at him fully. She has to blink a few times, because her vision’s getting blurry, but he’s mostly all there. “You have to say goodbye first,” she demands. He looks back at her solemnly.
“Alright,” he agrees.
“And you have to come back,” she amends. He smiles a little at that.
“Definitely.”
She nods and reaches up to pluck a forget-me-not from her hair. It’s a little wilted, and pathetic-looking, but she tucks it in his breast pocket, anyway. She pats it softly and glances up at him. “Just in case,” she explains. Her head feels heavy, so she lets it droop against his shoulder. “So you won’t forget me,” she mumbles into his neck.
“Oh, Persephone,” he sighs, clutching her shoulder blades. “There’s no forgetting you.”
She hums, pleased at his words but unable to form her own. Her eyelids are feeling heavy like her head, so she lets them fall. She’ll just rest them for a while. When she wakes up, she’ll tell him it’s the same for her.
And then she’ll take him home, and make breakfast.