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Year One
Piper was crying and Shel didn’t know what to do about it.
She was clearly trying not to, constantly wiping her eyes whenever Shel wasn’t facing her, or when she’d just underestimated her peripheral vision, sniffing like she had springtime allergies.
“What’s wrong?” she said for the fourth time, pressing her hand to her girlfriend’s. “Piper, you’re clearly upset.”
At least she didn’t try to tell her she was fine this time. Shel didn’t really like being lied to, but she was letting it go right now for obvious reasons. Piper was lying more to herself than to her anyway.
She looked away from her, face squashing up like she’d bitten into a lemon, right before she took great heaving sobs, her body lurching forward like she was on the verge of vomiting, her hair falling in front of her face, getting in her mouth, getting caught in her earrings. Shel pushed it back, trying to be gentle, just with her index and middle fingers, smoothing down her parting.
She pushed her water bottle into Piper’s hands too. Normally she’d have some qualms over sharing, but given that she’d had her tongue down her throat only two days ago, it was safe to say that this was not how she was going to catch mono from her girlfriend.
“Thanks,” she said, when she had gotten her breathing under control. “I think— I’m going to go home, if that’s alright. I’m not really feeling up to this.”
“Let me walk with you,” she asked, being careful not to touch her as she took the bottle back. Even so, Piper flinched when she got even that close. She decided not to take that personally.
“Alright,” she said, standing and brushing off her shorts. Summer was here about three months early, and she had never coped well with the heat anyhow. School dress codes could fuck themselves when it was eighty two degrees in March. Well, they could fuck themselves forever, but that wasn’t the point right now. Her hands scrambled for her keys, thrown into the fruit bowl in her mom’s kitchen.
Piper wandered after her, looking slightly less lost. Her brain seemed to be turning back on now. Shel nodded at her, and opened the door. They could do this date anytime. She had to make sure Piper got home safe right now.
Year Five
“I’ll pick you up in,” she checked her watch. “Three hours?”
“Thanks,” Piper said, climbing out the car door at the top of the beach. “Shel?”
“Yeah?” she looked up again. Her girlfriend’s eyes were a little puffy but her mouth was only set in an unhappy line, not in the expression of agony she had seen in the past around this time of year, around the time of Jason’s death.
“Drive safe, alright?” she smiled at her softly. It didn’t reach her eyes but Shel didn’t mind.
“Always,” she said, letting her wave her off, back onto the road. It wasn’t so busy here as it got in Los Angeles proper, but Shel hated the traffic here. In their part of Oklahoma, it wasn’t quiet, per se, but it wasn’t bumper to bumper for hours, and not even in rush hour. She had no idea how anyone lived here, really.
She ended up parking at a roadside diner/gas station, content to just drink coffee and scroll on her phone until it was time to go pick Piper up.
They hadn’t done this every single year, but this was the second in a row that Shel had driven her girlfriend all the way to California and back in March, the second that she’d dropped her off at the top of the beach, and driven away for a few hours so she could be alone.
It had the air of some kind of tradition by now, Shel thought.
She knew next to nothing about Jason Grace. She’d seen pictures of him, a tall boy with blond hair and a scar on his lip, next to Piper and Leo, whom Shel had met a few times by now. She knew that he had used to be Piper’s boyfriend, that he had been part of her insane year when she was sixteen and had gone to Italy and Greece and all over in a flying boat, and that, like Piper, he was a demigod.
And she knew that he was dead. And that Piper had been there when it had happened.
Nothing else.
Maybe Piper talked about him to Leo, or to any of her other demigod friends, but every time the conversation strayed near him, every single time in the last five years pretty much, she changed the subject away from him.
Shel could take the hint.
But there was something about him . An absence so clear it becomes a presence. Negative space is still space. She bit her lip and downed the coffee — cold now and too milky — it wasn’t that useful to think about a person in off-lines from her art and lit classes.
But who was Jason Grace?
She drove back two and a half hours after she had dropped Piper off, making it at the two hour, fifty nine minute mark.
Piper was already in the car park, legs swinging as she perched on a wall, the bricks of which might have been hit with a bulldozer in the past couple of years and never fixed. Her hair was windswept, the bottoms of her jeans darkened with water. Her feet were bare, sneakers beside her. She waved as she spotted her, and Shel pulled up beside her, heart a little heavier in her chest than it had been that morning.
Year Seven
“Do you want to come?” Piper asked, getting out the car at the same beach.
“Do you want me to?” she asked, already looking for a place to park, checking for a metre.
Her lips twisted, and she wrapped her hand around the one Shel had on the gearstick. “I do. Please.”
The beach was mostly empty, but given that they had had to half hike down a cliffside to make it there, she supposed that made sense. Plus, who wanted to go to the beach in March? Even with a jacket on, the wind blew bitterly through her.
Piper pulled off her socks and shoes, nodding at her to do the same. Shel had never particularly enjoyed the feeling of sand between her toes, but she did it anyway, leaving them beside their path and interlinking their fingers.
They walked in silence in the surf for a long time, letting the water wash over their feet over and over. Shel ignored how horrible wet sand was, in the way of textures, and pressed her head to her partner’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t hurt so much today,” Piper said out of nowhere while Shel was staring at a collection of seaweed dumped by the ocean, interlinked with plastic bottles and trash. Her voice was soft, but guilty. Like it was a confession of a kind.
She didn’t say anything, she had no idea what to say, but she squeezed her hand.
“It’s dull, I think,” she said. “Like getting punched, rather than getting stabbed.”
Truly, Shel thought. Only a comparison a demigod could conceive of.
She didn’t say anything else for another mile, but when they turned at a random spot that Shel suspected was not so random after all, she began to talk. And she didn’t stop.
Her image of Jason Grace filled in on the ninety minute walk back to the car park. He had been funny, but not a joker. Forthright. He had always thought he could never measure up to what other people wanted him to be, and he’d only just been learning how to let go of that when—, and he’d had a lot of plans to restore some of the minor gods, and had been a pretty good diplomat when they needed him to be.
“But—” Piper said, when she was ahead of her on the goat-path up to the car park, her shoes clutched in one hand. “I’ve changed so much since then. You know that.” Shel did. She had too. They all had. “Every time I do something, like when I got my driver’s licence, or when we were old enough to start drinking legally, or— whatever, I feel cheated. Because he should be there too. He should have a shitty car he thinks he can watch Leo fix up while acting like both of them did it, and he should have drunk too much on his twenty-first birthday and have to be carried home because he had no tolerance before then. And he should have gotten to change like we have, and be a different person. I’m just so angry that he didn’t. Do you think that— if it had gone differently, he’d be here with someone too, and telling them the same thing but about me? I keep picturing what he’d say and my mind just goes blank. I can’t imagine him at our age. I can’t even conceive of it now.”
“I’m sorry,” Shel said.
When they reached the top of the cliff she could see the tears in her eyes.
Year Fifteen
“This used to be the worst day of my life,” Piper said, lying on the beach, letting the water wash over her.
Shel lifted her head, rolling over so she wasn’t crushing her arm. “And now?”
“Still is, maybe.” She stared up, eyes almost blank. “I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”
Shel kissed her on the cheek and brushed back her hair. “It’s getting dark. Maybe we should go.”
Her eyes fluttered shut again, “Five more minutes.”