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It really was easier when she was avoiding him, Helen considered.
Of course it had seemed rude not to accept the offer of a ride. And yes, she felt like she was owed something after she had told them all that. But it had been easier when she was avoiding him, and needing to decompress wasn’t the real reason she chose not to walk.
Diomedes calmed her down, in an awful sort of way. He pried at her the same way he pried at everyone else, no less, no more.
“Was it Odysseus’ idea?” she asked him, as he closed her car door for her. “To talk to me in the coffee shop and not go to my sister?”
Diomedes paused as he circled the car before getting into the driver’s seat. She glanced outside the window and saw Aegialia watching them with shining eyes. Helen felt a sharp spike of dread and turned to him.
“Does Aegialia want to come?”
Diomedes looked up, startled, like he had been contemplating and was promptly interrupted. “What? No.”
That didn’t do much to soothe Helen, but Aegialia turned away to get into her own car. Odysseus and Penelope were already gone.
“And to your first question. Which answer would make you feel better?”
Helen honestly doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if she wants him to be in on it so she can be right, or if she’s jealous of a secret they have that she doesn’t know. The second is, of course, absurd. Diomedes and Odysseus have known each other since before she even moved here, and if she wanted to be their friend, she could have tried.
Instead, she was a source of information. Her own anxieties about Aegialia and disappointing her sister and history repeating itself held her back. That wasn’t their fault.
“I don’t trust Odysseus.”
“You don’t trust any of us.” Diomedes put the car in drive and pulled out. Helen gripped the fabric of her skirt. He drove like her brothers.
He also wasn’t wrong.
“Nothing would make me feel better,” Helen said finally. “I have failed my sister and I don’t know how to fix it.”
He went silent at that, as if set off guard by unbridled honesty. Maybe he was. Maybe, in all of his schemes and twists and turns and secrets he forgot what it was like to be genuine.
The worst part? He was the most honest of any of the others at that table.
“You don’t think telling us fixed it?”
“I don’t trust any of you.”
Diomedes laughed. Helen glared at him half-heartedly. “What?”
“If you want revenge, just take it.” He said it like it was simple. He turned on his blinker. “Odysseus got involved because she could.”
“Is that what she does?”
“Oh, always.”
“And you two are still friends.”
He hummed, like he was ready to debate her. Maybe he was. Helen had heard their names fit together like a compound more times than she could count, but no one went so far as to call them ‘friends.’ “If that's what you want to say.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she muttered. He just laughed.
“Honey, if I was patronizing you, you’d know. See what I did there?”
“I can’t tell if that is a patronizing joke or a bee pun.”
“Why not both?”
Helen was irritated, which was silly, because she had no reason to be. She had been irritated since she got in this car because he was irritating in all the ways he poked at her and made her laugh. She had been irritated because she liked him and because things were easier when she was avoiding him. She was made more irritated by the fact that he wasn’t giving her enough reasons to dislike him.
“What would you do?”
“What?”
“If someone hurt your sister.”
“My sister’s in graduate school,” he said neatly, turning towards the school. “I assume you don’t need to go home first.”
“No.” Helen said. “And, okay, what if your sister was home?”
“I would do nothing. Comatheo would hit them with her car.”
Helen raised her eyebrows and he just shrugged. “My family isn’t built for that. I mean, of course she checks up on me, but we don’t get involved in each other’s problems.” Almost instinctively he tugged on the sleeve of his jacket, as though trying to cover his arm. Helen didn’t ask. She felt as though she should.
“Built for what?”
Diomedes shrugged. “I don’t know what you call it. Defensiveness? Not over each other. ”
Helen tried to imagine that, a family that wasn’t protective, a world in which her siblings weren’t the first and only people she could count on. She could not wrap her head around it. “If my siblings weren’t defensive, I’d probably not be here,” she considered half-aloud.
He had that disarmed look again. She bit back a smile. That didn’t irritate her at all. “How so?” he asked instead, nearly failing at nonchalance.
“I don’t know. Just–” There was too much there. There was an ocean of history. There was the time when she was seven that her brothers saved her, and there was last year with Clytemnestra pulling that girl off of her. There were a hundred things. Mostly, though, the fact that Clytemnestra reminded her that she was not alone in the world. “All the moving, I suppose.”
“Yeah,” Diomedes said. “Your brothers said you moved a lot, but they didn’t.”
Helen nodded. “Half-brothers,” she corrected almost absentmindedly, before freezing. Diomedes didn’t freeze. He raised his eyebrow slightly, but his lips were pressed together like he was trying not to smile. “You knew?”
“I guessed,” Diomedes said, stopping at a stoplight just a bit later than really made her comfortable. “I guessed well.”
She sighed. “Clytemnestra protected me, okay? I owe it to her.” When her mother moved them away because of all the fights with Tyndareus, Clytemnestra convinced Helen it was going to be fine. Clytemnestra was the one who lied to her about the arguments so Helen didn’t even know they were the cause until she was eleven. When she had to go to middle school with no one she knew, Clytemnestra helped Helen make friends. Clytemnestra ignored boyfriends to be sure Helen adjusted well. Helen owed a lot to her. It didn’t matter that she would never know who her father actually was or how distant Leda could be. Clytemnestra was absolutely family.
“I understand that better than you know.” She thought about what he said, how his family wasn’t close or protective, and she didn’t really have a clue who he was referring to. He did sound almost bitter, though, like he was referring to something he knew he would never fully have. They were close to the school and she didn’t want to get out of the car. “Family is worth fighting for, even when you’re not built for it.”
She stopped and turned to him as he parked. “Diomedes,” she said, and his name tasted like it was rife with violence. “You are built for it.”
“How would you know that?”
Helen smiled, and she wasn’t jealous anymore, nor irritated, just resigned that she would be thinking about this for the next week. “Odysseus.” she said simply. If the two of them weren’t family, what else were they?
He dragged his left hand across his right knuckles like he was remembering or planning a fight. His eyes were distant. “If someone hurt Odysseus, I would want to handle it so she didn’t have to.” The air was thick with implications that Helen had no way of seeing into, implications she wanted to pry open. “I would handle it the way I know how, but that doesn’t do you any good. People like listening to you, Helen. They go quiet when you walk in a room. Why not use that?”
Helen could feel her mouth go dry. There it was again, the reminder that she wasn’t like everyone else and she couldn’t seem to be, no matter what. She adjusted her cobalt headband and shifted slightly. “I hate it when people watch me.”
“Do you hate that or do you hate what you think they see?” He asked.
Helen paused, not answering, and set her hand on the door of the car. She would have to get out. She had class, though for the life of her, she couldn’t remember which one. His eyes were so brilliant in hue they were almost glowing.
Diomedes raised his shoulder. “They’re watching either way. Let me get your door.”
She let him.