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It wasn’t big. It wasn’t furious and horrible and drakon acid to the face. No boats exploded. No-one died. Honestly, it was kind of fine.
The day Clarisse realised she had to break up with Chris was just an ordinary Tuesday.
The sun had been setting for the past half hour. Her hair was freshly braided. She’d had a just-okay day at work. And she needed to break up with her boyfriend of six years.
“Right,” he said when she muttered it as he washed up after their dinner. “Right.”
“Chris,” she started, beginning to gnaw the inside of her cheek. She thought she should apologise. Or not that she had to, but like, that it was the done thing. You dump your boyfriend with whom you’d been with since you had been teenagers. You apologise for… wasting his time or something.
But she wasn’t sorry. And she barely apologised even when she was actually sorry anyway. So she just pulled two beers from their fridge, opened them with the little ring she kept on her carabiner, and handed him one. Late summer in Arizona was no joke and they could only just about afford decent AC half the time. A cold drink was a cold drink so he took it off her with a half-grimaced smile.
“Been a while coming?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But—” It wasn’t that it was her and not him — it was the fact that it was both of them. Run its course didn’t seem right either. This wasn’t a chariot race. If it had been, then she could have smashed it out the fucking park. But something had been niggling at her, the warm feeling she used to get when she looked at Chris replaced by something a little closer to dread. Not her boyfriend anymore. More like a roommate she still slept with sometimes. She shrugged, draining the neck of the beer. “It’s here now.”
“Cool,” he nodded his head a few times. Clarisse was good at reading people — all Ares kids were. Being able to read someone could make all the difference in a spar, battle, or war — and his face was blank. “I guess you win this time too?”
“Come again?”
He smiled a little and something happened in her chest. Not romantic affection. But fondness. Something she felt for a friend. She was glad of that. He was one of the only demigods she knew around here, one of the only people who got what it had been like for them as teenagers. Even if she didn’t want him like a boyfriend, she still cared about Chris as a person. “I was gonna— well you beat me to it. I don’t know if there’s a good way to tell someone you’re planning on breaking up with them.”
“No,” she agreed. “When Silena—”
He eyed her, “Sorry?”
“Did I never tell you?”
“You dated Silena?”
“No,” she sighed. It had been so long since she had thought about it — thought about it like this — she’d forgotten that it had been a secret. “But I wanted to.”
The rest of the beer slipped down pretty easily. It wasn’t a very nice kind — that was a dumb thing to spend money on when they were scraping for AC and bills — but in comparison to the thrice watered-down piss the Stolls had hawked out the back of Cabin 11, it was basically nectar.
Chris stared at her, his eyes big and dark and a little too knowing for her liking. “When?”
“When she was—” she cleared her throat. “Ahem. When she was tutoring me on how to ask you out. It got a little… too hands on, I guess. Too involved.”
“You have good taste at least,” he ran a hand through his hair. “Half the guys at camp were in love with Silena.”
“I know,” she rolled her eyes. “And that’s why I picked on all of you at training. About half of everyone, really, I think. Just a little less obviously.” She hoped, at least. Or, she had hoped. She didn’t mind if people knew now. In a way, she wanted them to know. Silena Beauregard had died a traitor and Clarisse La Rue loved her. Loved her now. Missed her. Longed for her.
Some of it was nostalgia, probably. More than probably. There was nothing like longing for your teenage crush when you were reorganising the budget with your long-term soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. She thought about Silena the same way she thought about feeling the sun on her face when it was winter and before they’d moved from Montreal to Phoenix.
Other times she thought about Silena were less nice. Those were the times when she woke up in the night with a dry mouth and her head aching and her nostrils still full of that smell, that horrible smell of melted, burned flesh and drakon acid.
She used to have those nights all the time. Or the ones where she woke up crying and her heart racing and feeling sicker than she had in her whole life. Or the ones where Chris ended up shaking her awake because she was screaming and there was no other way to get her out of there.
Now it was just a dull ache. A fading bruise she could poke at. Currently. The days of feeling like her own limb had gone away with her best friend, with the first person she’d really loved, with the bravest hero she’d ever known would probably make a comeback.
She wanted to turn to Chris, to say something half-funny, half-vulnerable. Ask him to tell her that she wasn’t losing him too now. Please.
But she thought if she said that, said anything else about the whole thing, then she’d probably throw up. Definitely cry. Likely say something so embarrassing that Chris wouldn’t look her in the eye ever again.
So she just sat there. And she kept sitting there as he slunk in next to her, his arm around her shoulder, so she could press her face into the side of his head and pretend that she wasn’t shaking. Just a little pain relief to see it through to the end. Just for now.