I had been naked around the handmaids countless times, whenever we swam in the sea or changed in our quarters. Nudity never felt strange in their company, but under Penelope’s gaze, it felt…different.
Her eyes dipped over me again, slower this time. The air between us was thick enough to choke on.
Penelope then shook her head as if remembering herself and rose.
“Here.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, taking her offered shawl and wrapping it tightly around my shoulders.
She turned away and stiffly sat back down. I settled beside her, shivering slightly as sand clung to my damp body.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
For a while, neither of us spoke, and I noticed Penelope was avoiding looking at me, her eyes set on the darkness ahead.
“Doyouthink Achilles and Patroclus were lovers?”
Her question was abrupt enough to make me laugh. “I don’t know. It certainly sounds like they were, doesn’t it?”
Penelope tilted her head upward, staring at the sky with such intensity, as if she were committing each star to memory.
“Do you thinktheyknew if they were?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I just wonder if they were able to be honest with themselves…before it was all over. Did they ever admit their feelings, or did Patroclus die never knowing how Achilles truly felt?”
I stared at her for a long moment, trying to decipher her expression. But Penelope’s face was like a labyrinth, filled with so many twists and turns to lose myself within, never truly knowing what lay at the heart.
“I hope they did,” I finally admitted, every word placed so carefully between us. “For it would seem an awful waste otherwise, to think they had spent nine summers side by side, loving each other but never admitting it.”
“So you think they should have acted on their feelings?”
She turned to look at me then, and something in her gaze made me feel wildly unsteady yet somehow deeply rooted, as if her eyes were the sole anchor tying me to this world.
“Why are you asking me this, Penelope?”
“I suppose the news of the war has made me…reflective,” she admitted. “Made me consider things that have been playing on my mind for a while.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, and within that fragile stillness, I allowed myself to imagine it: the possibility that this same madness had been screaming inside Penelope all this time, fighting to be heard. My hope flared, so sweetly bitter in its terrible desperation.
“What things?” I pressed, daring to stoke those embers between us, willing them to catch light, to engulf her as they had me.
Her eyes flickered to my mouth, and I found myself leaning forward in anticipation of her answer. But instead, she silently reachedout a hand and brushed a damp curl from my face. Her touch lingered at my jaw, torturously gentle.
“Penelope,” I breathed.
Her fingers skated along my cheek, then brushed over my mouth.
“Say that again,” she said.
“Penelope,” I whispered, and she traced the movement of my lips, feeling the shape of her name upon them. “Penelope, Penelope, Penelope.”
My heart hammered against my ribs, and I had the vague sensation I was back in the water, floating on those inky waves. Weightless among the stars.
Carefully, Penelope took my trembling hand, unfurling my fingers so she could place them on her own lips.
