“I wouldn’t call him that.”
Penelope tilted her head. “Why not?”
“I don’t think I want a…companion.”
She considered my words, and I noticed she was shredding the raw skin around her nail beds. A part of me wanted to reach out and still her anxious fidgeting, but I pushed the urge away.
“I think it would be good for you…to have someone,” she saidcarefully. “You should at least consider it.”
I shrugged, finding a sudden fascination in the ground. If only it would swallow me down into the halls of Hades, I would welcome the God of Death with open arms if it let me escape this excruciating moment.
“Melantho?”
I glanced up. “Penelope?”
Our names, once so innocent on our lips, now had a torturous effect. I was certain Penelope felt it too; I could see the memories flaring behind her eyes.
She looked away. “I’m happy for you, truly. You deserve to have somebody who will treat you well. Eumaeus is the right person for you.”
“Thank you,” I said, forcing myself to smile as her words hardened inside me like ice.
35
I began visiting Eumaeus regularly.
At first, I told myself it would be a brief distraction, something to keep my mind occupied, to stave off the madness Penelope had unwittingly infected me with. But then one night bled into another then another, spiraling away in a haze of soft midnight kisses and early morning whispers.
I felt guilty for using his love as a distraction, but I buried that guilt deep inside me, in the graveyard of all the other ugly pieces of myself I had learned to live with. And truthfully, I did care for Eumaeus. He was kind and sweet and allowed me to feel a sense of safety I had never known with a man.
He told me of his past, how he had once been a prince of a distant land but had run away from home as a young boy, lured by one of his father’s slaves, a beautiful girl he had thought he loved. That girl had betrayed him, selling Eumaeus to pirates to pay for her own safe passage back to her homeland.
“What of your family? Do you not wish to return to them?” I asked when he recounted this story to me. “You are a prince—”
“Iwasa prince,” he corrected somberly. “And I lost any right to that title the day I disowned my family for a stranger.”
“But you were just a child. Surely, they would understand—”
“What I did was wrong, Melantho. Slavery is my penance, and I amgrateful for this opportunity to redeem myself in the eyes of the gods.”
I wanted to tell Eumaeus the gods were sadistic monsters if they believed slavery was a just punishment for a manipulated child, but I had a feeling that would not go down well.
“Through my servitude, I have learned the importance of loyalty,” he continued, reaching out to cup my cheek. “And for that, the gods have rewarded me. Withyou.”
He would say things like that often, with such pride in his eyes. His love was so gentle, so genuine, the kind many men and women would dream of holding in their hands.
Yet still, I could not return it. Not in the way he deserved.
I believed there was something wrong with me; perhaps it had been since birth, or perhaps my heart had grown crooked after being broken so irreparably as a child.
Perhaps I simply could not love someone in that way.
But then I would hear Penelope’s laugh or see her smile, and I knew that was not the case. It was not that I could not love but that I loved the wrong person far too much.
And it was destroying me.
***
The seasons turned, and the war did not end.
