Chapter 40
I waited until nightfall before returning to the palace.
Perhaps it was cowardly, but after my embarrassing display the previous night, I wanted to avoid the others as best I could. Especially Penelope.
Mercifully, our quarters were empty. I padded over to the hearth and began prodding the embers with an iron rod.
Veins of gold and crimson pulsed to life, a few flames finally catching.
As I fetched more logs for the fire, Telemachus’s words lingered in my mind.
Whatever has come between you, I cannot believe it is more important than what you share.
How could I have explained to him that it was exactly what we shared that had come between us? Or rather, what we did not and could never share.
“Melantho.”
I knew her voice too well for it to catch me off guard. It was as familiar to me as my own breath, my own heartbeat. Still, I stiffened at the sound of it, a thick, creeping tension closing around my muscles as I turned to her.
She was standing in the doorway to her bedchamber, gray eyes glinting in the shadows, just as they had that first time we met.
We kept our distance, she draped in the silver of the moon and I in the gold of the fire. Between us, the darkness stretched, a deep and dangerous unknown. Neither of us dared step into it.
“I wanted to apologize for my behavior last night,” I said carefully.
“You do not have to apologize.” She was calm as ever, yet there was something in her eyes that unsettled me, something sharp and bright.
“I want to. I was foul to you.”
She said nothing.
“Penelope?” I prompted, desperate to know what thoughts plagued her.
“You are not marrying him,” she murmured.
I swallowed once. Twice. “No.”
“Why?” The word was laced with a surprisingly stark thread of desperation, squeezing it tight.
“You know why, Penelope.”
She turned her face away so it became wholly consumed by the shadows.
The weight of her silence pressed in around me, but I forced myself to continue.
“I have given it a lot of thought, and I think I should leave the palace and serve Laertes. Eurycleia said he needs a slave to assist him at his cottage, and I feel this would be a…suitable opportunity for me. With your permission, of course.”
Penelope tilted her head, just enough for the moonlight to brush a silver finger along the length of her jaw, the rest of her face still obscured.
“You wish to leave?”
No, I ached to tell her. But I must.
I could not trust myself around Penelope, not anymore. Every day, I felt my control slipping, inch by inch. I knew one day it would snap, and I would do something truly foolish, and these poisonous feelings would infect everything beautiful we had built between us.
I needed time away, to clear my mind and purge my heart of this madness.
I needed time away from her, as much as the mere thought of it wounded me.
“I think it is best,” I whispered.
More silence. Its stillness felt sharper this time, cutting the night like glass. It was maddening not being able to see Penelope’s face, not having a glimpse of what she might be thinking. I considered moving closer, but being near Penelope always made me act in ways I regretted.
“What if I say no?”
Her question caught me off guard, my shock quickly followed by a familiar sting of anger.
“Then I would say that is unfair.”
“Unfair?” She huffed an empty laugh. “You speak of abandonment, and you say I am being unfair?”
“Abandonment?”
“Yes.” She finally turned to me, her face limned in cold, silver rays. “Is that not what you are proposing here? Laertes has deserted the throne, the war may be lost, Odysseus could be dead, and you wish to leave now?”
She strode toward me as she spoke, every step like flint against stone, threatening to spark a fire between us.
She stopped a few feet away, yet still it felt too close.
“I am trying to find a solution,” I said.
“And I am asking you to find another one.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then help me to.”
How could I? How could I put this madness into words? I was like Icarus and she the sun, her radiance drawing me closer even when I knew how far I had to fall. That was what it felt like to want Penelope—a sweet, assured self-destruction.
“Why now?” she pressed. “I do not understand why we cannot continue as we always have. For ten summers, we have made this work between us—”
“And it has drained me.” I half choked on the words, caught between my desperation to speak my truth and my fear of having it finally heard. “Every single day, it’s drained me.”
She winced as if I had struck her.
“Has it truly been so terrible,” she murmured, “living beside me?”
“Penelope.” Her name was a pained sigh. “You know I have loved every moment of the life we’ve made here, of being with you.
But this…thing inside me, these feelings I cannot control…
I know they are strange and wrong. I thought they would go away with time, but they just get worse. I cannot…I cannot keep doing this.”
She looked away, shaking her head. “And what if I cannot lose you?”
“Don’t. You do not get to push me away and then not let me leave. You are being selfish.”
“Selfish?” She whirled back to me. “You think me selfish?”
“I do.”
She pushed closer again, swallowing up that narrow sliver of space between us. I tried to back away, tried to escape, but something in her eyes rooted me to the spot—there was a fire in them, one I had never seen before.
She was angry.
No, not just angry. She was furious, and I felt that fury calling to my own, feeding it, until the flames of our rage crackled, rich and wild and devastatingly dangerous.
“All I do is for others,” she said, that rainfall voice swelling with thunderstorms. “For my husband. For my son. For Ithaca. You act on the heat of your emotions without a single thought of the consequence, but I have an entire kingdom to think of with every breath I take. And you dare to call me selfish?”
Her eyes sparked with that delicious fire, and some reckless, dizzying part of me wanted to stoke it further, to see how high those flames could rise.
“You are like the tide,” I snapped, “continually drawing me in, then pushing me away. But when I wish for distance, you refuse to let me go. How is that not selfish?”
“If I were truly selfish, do you think I would have let you walk away from me the other day? Do you think I would have granted Eumaeus permission to marry you? Do you think I would have spent ten years denying myself the only thing I have ever truly wanted?”
Her words stilled the anger in my veins, emptying all thoughts from my head. Penelope’s own rage seemed to recede as well, chased by a sudden diffidence.
“What…what do you want?”
She shook her head. “I cannot—”
“What do you want?” I repeated, firmer this time.
“Melantho—”
“What do you want, Penelope?”
She stared at me, eyes desperate and searching.
“Penelope. Tell me. What do you wa—”
Her lips captured the words against mine.
The kiss obliterated my senses. I could not think, could not even breathe. All I could focus on was the devastating softness of her lips and how I could feel them unravel everything I had been holding inside me, letting it all come crashing down into sweet, burning chaos.
Penelope pulled away abruptly, as if her mind had fallen two steps behind her actions.
“I–I am sorry,” she gasped.
We stared at each other, stunned. Then I reached out, brushing the rosy flush that had risen in her cheeks, like daybreak dusting over the clouds.
“Melantho,” she whispered.
I sensed the words crowding behind my name, the doubts and fears that would shatter this moment.
“We—”
I shook my head. “Don’t.”
Then my fingers sank into her hair as I pulled her mouth to mine once again.
I was tentative at first, but my lips quickly grew desperate, giving shape to the madness that had been pulsing inside me for so long.
And I could feel that madness inside Penelope, too, calling to my own, a wild, heated battle cry that devoured my mind until all I could think about was tasting her and touching her.
My hands were knotted in her hair now, and hers were cupping my face, our bodies pressed in close, molding so perfectly against each other.
And the world ceased to exist.
It was just her. She was the air, the sky, the ground, the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins. She was my beginning and my end.
She was everything.
“You will undo me,” Penelope whispered as she pulled away to catch her breath.
She was right. I could feel it, that thick thread of her desire curled around my fingers. A single tug and I could unravel her completely, all that control she so carefully clung to.
I reached up, brushing my fingers along her mouth, memorizing the feel of it.
“Tell me to stop and I will,” I murmured.
She let out a shaky breath, and I felt it warm against my fingertips. Then she smiled, and my fingers traced that perfect curl of her lips.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
I stared at her. “Are you sure?”
Instead of replying, Penelope wrapped her hand around mine and led me to her bedchamber.
She shut the door behind us, her movements so poised and controlled, even now.
When she turned back to me, I moved instantly, knocking her against the door in my eagerness.
She laughed, and I caught that beautiful sound in my mouth, wanting to swallow down every drop of it.
Lemons. Her laugh always reminded me of lemons.
“Do you know how often this has driven me mad?” I murmured, brushing that hollow dip at the base of her throat.
She smiled. “Really?”
I lowered my head, kissing that spot and feeling her pulse jump beneath my lips. “Really.”
“What other parts have driven you mad?” she whispered.
“Here.” I ran my fingers over her lips, then traced the length of her neck. “Here.” They then ventured over her collarbones. “And here.”
“A lot then.” Her laugh was tight in her throat.
“You have no idea.”
“I do. Trust me, I do.”