“And it has drained me.” I half choked on the words, caughtbetween 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 getworse. I cannot…I cannot keep doing this.”
She looked away, shaking her head. “And what ifIcannot 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 meselfish?”
“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 wasfurious, 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 callmeselfish?”
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 mego. How is thatnotselfish?”
“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 spentten yearsdenying 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…whatdoyou 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.
