Chapter Text
You’ve had the upper hand for years.
Maybe it’s unfair.
You sit with your half-siblings at breakfast, cutting an apple with the knife Katie likes to think is kept safely in her left boot, and you keep your eyes on your plate. The mess hall is a morbidly gorgeous place for you—you get to know he’s there, you get to be close, just tables away, a small constellation of campers away, but there’s no danger—no danger, as long as you don’t look. If you keep your eyes on your plate he won’t notice.
That is—
Luke.
You cut into the apple again. Even his name makes you nervous.
“Is that my knife?”
Katie sits down next to you and snatches it from your hand.
You smile and press a friendly kiss to her cheek. “Good morning. Yes, yours.”
“Good morning. Where’d you find it?”
“Where do you think?”
“I’m sending you to Cabin Eleven,” Katie says, and laughs. She’s her mother’s daughter. You all are, really, but Katie looks the most like her—sloping eyes, a strong nose, cleft chin. “Can I have some of that?”
“Your knife is way better than the knives they give us here,” you complain, handing her a slice.
“Then get your own!”
Across from you, Jane passes you two packets of sugar; you thank her and dump them in your coffee.
The Demeter cabin is small and ambitionless, yes, but at least you all love each other. Coffee is a sacred rite, earth-black, glittering with honey. And in your case, sweetened with two packets of sugar.
Across the hall, he stands up with his tray, laughing at something somebody else said.
You take a sip of coffee and wince. “Jane, the honey?”
She passes that to you as well. “You okay?”
“Just too bitter this morning.”
“It’s always too bitter for you,” Jane says, smiling.
Late May smells yellow and green, like sweet grasses and red berries and clean sweat. The hours are heavy and long. The days crawl past. It’s not as though you don’t like it. You love camp. You love the cozy lines of cabins, the smoke of burnt offerings, the blue-green lake, the sweet smell of hay. You love the pegasi and their soft, warm, huffing breath, their liquid eyes. You love the summer season; you love the coolness of dark, sleeping earth.
This is not to say you love limping down the path to the beach, a new gash on your leg, thanks to a clumsy and particularly painful fall during this morning’s combat practice.
You ease down onto the sand, pulling off your boots, then rolling up your jeans to your knees.
It’s not terrible, you think. It runs straight through the mark on your calf. And it really hurts.
You lean back on your hands and close your eyes. Gods, it would be really nice to limp back up to the house and have some Apollo kid stitch you up, but no—absolutely not, you are not risking that. With your luck someone would have had him there earlier, maybe yesterday, or last week—would remember seeing the obtrusive black mark on his left calf—would see it there on you. Yes, it’s stupid. Yes, paranoid. And now you’re going to have to stitch this up yourself. And it’s going to really hurt.
You open up the first aid kit and get to work cleaning, stitching, and bandaging. You just grit your teeth and do it and it’s over before it’s begun. Just for good measure, you wrap the bandage over the entirety of the mark. It’s through, your leg is stinging, and you lie back on the sand with your jeans rolled up.
Some clouds are gathering over the lake. You throw a hand over your eyes.
You’re not really one for napping. But, embarrassingly, you do fall asleep, right there, listening to the water roll up onto the sand. You can feel the dryads and their wooden eyes, peering out at you from the trees from time to time. It’s not a deep sleep, and it’s not long, but it’s the best you’ve gotten in a while.
It’s one of your sisters, Miranda, who finds you.
“Hey, sweetie, wake up,” she murmurs, touching your shoulder.
“Did I—?”
She smiles. “Yeah. You okay?” She puts an arm under your shoulders and helps you sit up. “Jane said you seemed off at breakfast.”
“Just tired, I guess.”
“Obviously.”
You both stand up and she wipes the sand off the back of your shirt while you shake it out of your hair.
“Big House?” she asks, eyeing your bandaged leg.
You shake your head. “I cleaned myself up. What time is it? Already lunch?”
“Past lunch,” Miranda says. You roll down your jeans and you both start walking back towards the mess hall. “Katie and I thought you were in the cabin when you disappeared after combat. Seriously, are you okay? You’re limping.”
“I’m fine, I promise. I just overdid it with the bandaging. I am hungry, though. Want to skip archery and eat with me?”
“I’ve got a stash of chips in the cabin. Let’s just go there.”
She puts her arm around you and you lean on her all the way back to the cabin. You pass a group coming back from archery, chatting on the grass; you don’t notice, but Luke’s there, and he’s looking at you, at the hair sticking to your temples, at the stripe of white sand on your neck. He thinks he’s never seen you before. Hasn’t he? Doesn’t he know pretty much everyone at camp? Obviously not everyone. He’s about to ask someone, but then you’re around the corner, out of sight, and that’s that.
The summer goes on like this. Your leg is fine in a matter of days. You teach riding to the younger campers; you start them on regular, pissy, ridiculously cute ponies instead of pegasi. You spend every day with your siblings, your sweaty hair pinned back from your face, and you gossip with the dryads, you stir spoonfuls of golden honey into your coffee, you burn herb-roasted bread and cinnamon muffins for your mother, and at night you shower in chilly water and take your book to Cabin Nine, where your friend Dinah will let you in with oil stains on her cheek, and where you’re sure to find a warm, dark corner, where you can curl up and read, your wet, freshly washed hair staining your shirt. Summer nights are short and dreams are dense and extensive and… typical of demigod dreams. But the roof of Cabin Four is made of green glass; the bedsheets are cool and soft, and the air is clean and crisp with the smell of rosemary, densely green with lemon balm. And your dreams not always unpleasant.
Your dreams are sometimes full of him.
You don’t mind those dreams, even if they wake you up in the middle of the night and keep you awake—keep you up in the greenhouse, arms crossed, standing in between the shoots of basil and lavender, geranium and fennel. It’s a sweet kind of discomfort that seizes in your chest, as you pore over every second of every dream. Every pass of his dark eyes. He stands next to you. His arm touches your arm. Neither of you pull away. Every pass of his dark eyes. You don’t pull away.
You’ve had the upper hand ever since you saw him at the lake two summers ago, tugging off his jeans. He was laughing as his friends crashed into the water. You were dozing, half-asleep, under a willow tree down the beach with Katie, your legs bared, your hair loose and caught in brambles. You had a crush on him even then. He was cute. Really cute. And brave, and kind, and really good with a longsword, and patient with the little campers, and he had a warm, brambly voice that made you want to do silly things you’d never, ever do—like pretend you were lost and needed directions to the strawberry fields, or tell him you didn’t have a sparring partner that day in combat practice and would really appreciate it if he helped you out, or, gods forbid, confess your silly summer crush. But he never noticed you.
You weren’t ignorant of your mark but you never intended to have a soulmate. You always thought it was going to be a mortal for you, a sophomore in some high school in Arizona. If you ever met him, you’d feel your chest start to cave in, your heart would stop beating. Tunnel vision. He would be yours. And you would be his. Nothing to help it. But you’d never meet him, you consoled yourself—you’d never lose yourself so spectacularly. You would never be so responsible for a heart.
He was tugging off his jeans and you saw it on the inside of his left calf. It was your mark.
He ran into the lake, dove underwater.
Surfaced a few seconds later and pushed his hair back. He was saying something to his half-brother. The water was glittering on his shoulders and his back.
No, maybe you were wrong.
You were far enough away, maybe you saw it wrong.
In your chest, a low, keen pain. Your heart slowed to nothing. The sky that day was blue, brilliantly blue, the water sparkling like jewels.
Yes, it was true.
It was true.
You were giddy for a second. That’s what it’s like, finding your soulmate. Your true person. Oh, it’s Luke. Swordsman Luke. Luke with the nice hair and the dark eyes. And then you were almost immediately nauseous. Well, it’s Luke. What now?
And then you were just scared. That’s what it’s like, when you realize that you belong, body and soul, to a person. That’s what it’s like when you realize it’s real. The soulmate isn’t a soulmate but a boy, swimming in the lake, who never noticed you. I am helplessly in love, you think, you thought, lying on your stomach, watching him swim, trying not to retreat to the woods and throw up your lunch.
Well. It’s Luke.
I am helplessly in love.
“I’m going to head back and shower,” you told Katie, grabbing your jeans—thank the gods you’d brought jeans, you’d never wear cut-offs again—and tugging them on.
She rolled onto her side, already a little sun-burnt. “Now?”
“Yeah, I feel kinda gross.”
“Want me to come?”
“No, stay. I’ll see you at dinner,” you said, and you retreated, barefoot, in jeans, holding your orange camp t-shirt over your bikini top, your heart about to teeter off the edge of an irreparable cliff.
It was mean, and it was unfair.
It’s still unfair. You’re still avoiding him. You’d rather drown than let anyone see your mark. You’re wildly paranoid, yes. But you’ll always play it safe. You have no intention of letting Luke find you. He’s never found you before. He’s never looked hard.
He’s missing you, maybe. But you’re keeping him safe, too. That’s what you tell yourself in the greenhouse, arms crossed.
Every pass of his dark eyes.
You won’t ever get too close. You won’t twinge his heart. You won’t wake him up, disturb his dreams. You’re terrified he’ll know you, the moment your eyes meet.
(You’re terrified—yes, it’s unforgivable—it’s true—his eyes will pass over you—he will see you—he won’t—he won’t know you—his eyes will pass over you—
That you will hold out your hand and touch him—and he won’t—
Nothing—
Nothing at all.)
Let him imagine a mortal girl at some high school in Missouri. Let him pass over you, unseeing; let him have his life—
Please, please, let me have mine.
You take in another deep breath of dense green air, then close the door to the greenhouse, slip into bed, retreat into dreams.