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The first time it happened, they had not yet been together long enough for either of them to have mapped the full territory of what they were to each other.
It was in a market town somewhere along a coast whose name he had already forgotten, a crooked little place of salt bleached wood and fishing nets drying in the sun, and they had been walking through it side by side in the first weeks of what they had become, still learning the shape of each other in daylight. A mortal woman selling fruit had looked at Percy the way people looked at things they intended to remember later, her gaze traveling the line of his shoulders and settling somewhere at his mouth with an appreciation that had nothing at all to do with commerce, it had lasted perhaps three seconds.
Artemis had felt something move through her chest that she did not immediately recognize, something with heat in it and teeth beneath the heat, something that arrived without being summoned and did not ask her permission before it took root. She had, without deciding to, taken his hand. Percy had looked down at their intertwined fingers with an expression she could not read, and then at her, and then he had said nothing at all, only tightened his grip and kept walking.
She had thought about it for days afterward.
She had lived for longer than the coastline they walked had held its present shape, and in all that immensity of time she had never once wanted to put her hand on something and say mine in front of witnesses. Possession had always struck her as the particular disease of gods who had never learned to be alone, an appetite that mistook itself for love. She had watched her family devour each other with it for millennia and had felt only a cold and distant pity, she had been certain, absolutely and without any doubt whatsoever, that she was immune.
She had been wrong about a great many things since he arrived, and this had been among the first.
The truth of it was that Percy was beautiful in a way that made people forget their manners. Not in the way gods were beautiful, which was a kind of aggression, a perfection engineered to overwhelm and leave the observer diminished. His was something else entirely, wild and devastating for it, the beauty of the sea in the hour before a storm, restless and alive in a way that made the eye return to it against its own will. There was nothing arranged about him. The gods wore their perfection like armor, every angle considered, every feature a small argument for their own supremacy, and he simply was, unstudied and unrepentant, and the effect was ruinous. It lived in the sea green of his eyes, which held that same shifting quality as deep water, one moment calm and then carrying something that made people forget what they had been about to say. It lived in the way he always smiled brightly at the people, as though he was a blessing sent from the Olympus itself to bring delight to the world.
He did not know, that was the intolerable part.
In all the time she had known him, even before they became a couple, she had never once seen him register a single glance thrown in his direction, never seen him adjust his posture, never seen him lower his voice, never seen him do any of the thousand small things people did when they knew they were being admired. He simply moved through the world with his attention entirely elsewhere, usually on her, and left a wake of quiet devastation behind him that he would have found genuinely baffling had anyone thought to describe it.
So she noticed for him.
She noticed the nymphs at the river crossing who had leaned out from between the reeds to watch him wade through the shallows with his boots slung over his shoulder, and who had made a sound of frank appreciation that carried further than they had intended. She noticed the goddesses at the divine events whose gaze had wandered over him as though he was a treasure beyond price. She noticed the mortal woman at a tavern who had filled his cup four times without being asked even once and had let her fingers brush his wrist on the last one, and several other women that watched him without a trace of shame. She noticed the spirits of the woods who whistled from the branches when he passed beneath them, low and admiring, thinking themselves hidden in the leaves.
She noticed all of it, every glance, every lingering look, every sound of appreciation, she catalogued them with the precision of a huntress marking tracks in fresh snow, and each one lodged somewhere beneath her ribs and stayed there.
"You could simply ignore them," he said once in their tent, unwinding the cord from his wrist while she stood with her back to him and her jaw set in a line he had learned to recognize.
"I could."
"But you will not."
"Never."
He was quiet for a moment, she heard the cord land on the table, heard the particular creak of the bed he always found wherever in the world they were sleeping.
"Does it bother you that much?"
She turned.
The lamp caught in her auburn curls and set the edges of them burning, and her eyes, silver as the chariot she drove across the sky each night, found him and stayed on him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed without a shirt and his dark locks a disaster and an expression of such genuine, uncomplicated curiosity that something in her chest tightened painfully.
"You do not understand what you look like."
"I look like someone who has not slept properly in a week."
"You look," she spoke, and then for a moment stopped, because the words available to her sounded insufficient when they did not sound humiliating, "Like a miracle the world was not supposed to be given."
He blinked at her, the color rose in his face slowly, starting somewhere beneath his jaw and climbing with the unhurried inevitability of a tide, "Oh," it was the only thing he could say as his lungs was left breathless, and he looked down at his hands and then back at her, and the smile that arrived was small and stunned and entirely without defense, "Thank you, Moon."
What she did not know, what she had never once suspected in all this time of watching him fail to notice a single admiring glance thrown his way, was that Percy noticed all of them.
He noticed the nymphs in the reeds, he noticed the goddess at the events, the women at the tavern, the spirits in the branches. And all of the countless others. He noticed every single one, and he did not care about any of them, and he had discovered something about himself in the noticing that he had decided, almost at once and altogether deliberately, never to tell her.
He loved it.
Not the attention, which meant nothing to him and which he found faintly embarrassing in the way one finds it embarrassing to be complimented on something one has not earned. What he loved was what came after. He loved the way her hand found his without announcement, the grip firmer than necessary, her thumb pressing hard against his knuckle. He loved the way she stepped closer when the gaze of a stranger lingered too long, close enough that their arms touched from shoulder to elbow, close enough that the message stood plain in every language spoken by anything living. He loved the particular stillness that came over her, the way a goddess who had commanded the moon for longer than there had been anyone to see it went absolutely motionless and let the entire weight of her attention settle on someone until they remembered, urgently, that they had business elsewhere.
Most of all he loved the moments when she stopped being subtle about it.
There had been a night at a festival in some mortal town, torchlight and music and too many bodies pressed too close, and a woman had said something to him he had not entirely heard over the drums, something with a laugh in it and an invitation underneath. He had opened his mouth to answer politely and had not gotten the chance, because Artemis had appeared at his side out of the crowd like moonlight arriving through a break in cloud, her auburn curls disordered by the heat of the torches, her silver eyes holding nothing in them but him, and she had taken his face in both hands and kissed him.
It had not been gentle, it had not been careful, it had been thorough and unhurried and absolutely public, one hand sliding into his hair, the other pressed flat against his chest over his heart, and she had held him there long past the point where the message had been received by everyone within twenty feet. When she finally drew back, her thumb had moved once across his cheekbone in a slow, deliberate arc, and she had directly looked at the woman without any particular expression at all.
The woman had left immediately.
Percy had stood there in the torchlight with his ears burning and his heart beating inside its cage as though it was trying to escape, and he had thought, plainly and with complete conviction that he would happily be looked at by every person alive if this was what would happen afterward.
He had never told her, and he never would.
It was the only thing he had ever kept from her, the single small treasure he had hidden in his chest and had not offered, because he understood with absolute certainty that the moment she knew, it would change. She would become self conscious about it, worse, she would begin to do it on purpose, and the thing he loved was precisely that she could not help it. That it came from somewhere older than her composure and moved faster than her considerable dignity. That for all her millennia of perfect serenity, this one urge simply arrived and took her over and left her holding his hand too tightly in a market street on a coast whose name he had forgotten.
"I want to keep you," she said once, in the deep hours, her voice muffled against his shoulder and thick with the honesty that came only when she was very nearly asleep, "Somewhere only I get to look at you."
"That does not sound legal."
"I would keep you very well, you would be really comfortable, well taken care of,” she made a low sound of disagreement and pressed closer, “I would spoil you beyond what any mortal has ever imagined.”
"I do not doubt it."
"You would hate it."
"Oh, I would absolutely hate it," he agreed with a chuckle, and turned his head to press his mouth against her auburn curls, "Give it a month and I would be scaling the walls."
"A week."
"Probably."
She was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, "I do not want to be this," some of the sleep gone out of it, replaced by a tone that was deliberate, "I have watched my family destroy everything they touched with exactly this feeling, I have despised them for it since before your world had cities."
"You are not doing that."
"I want to."
"Wanting to and doing it are not the same," he said, and his hand moved slowly along the length of her spine and settled at the nape of her neck, "You have never once made me feel owned, not once, you have made me feel chosen."
She lifted her head at that, in the dark he could see almost nothing of her, only the faint silver suggestion of her eyes and the darker mass of her curls against his shoulder, and the long silence that followed had weight to it, she asked softly, "Chosen?"
"You looked at the world, out of everyone, out of all of it, every mortal and every god and everything in between, and you looked at all of it, for thousands of years, and then you looked at me, and you chose me," he shrugged, a small movement in the dark, a small smile formed on his lips, "So yes, grip my hand until it bruises, embrace me until the last trace of breath leaves my lungs, kiss me until my heart forgets its own rhythm."
Her breath left her unevenly, she lowered her head back to his chest, and her arm tightened across him, and neither of them said anything for a long while, until she finally spoke, very quietly, "I do not deserve you."
"That is a nonsense statement and you know it."
"Perhaps."
"Allow me to decide on that."
The silence that followed was not empty, he listened to her breath for moments that could have been hours, at last she murmured against skin, words barely audible, “I love you.”
He kissed her forehead, and caressed her back until her breathing slowed down and she fell asleep within his arms, only then he whispered, “And I love you.”
As time passed, her jealousy had not lessened, if anything, it had only deepened, sunk its roots further into her, because everything precious in her life had become entwined with him, and she had spent long enough discovering exactly how much.
She still noticed every glance, she still catalogued each one with the same relentless precision, she still felt the old heat rise in her chest when the gaze of a stranger travels him too slowly, and she still, always, without exception, reached for his hand, pressed kisses to his lips, growled that he belongs only to her.
And he still let her take it, every single time, and he still did not say nothing, and the small bright secret sat in his chest exactly where he first put it, undisturbed and entirely his.
Somewhere above them the moon held its ancient course, and beneath it the tides rise to meet it, as they have always done, as they will do until the last water dries and the last star fades.
Neither has ever asked the other to stop pulling.