—
THAT NIGHTIdream of Egypt for the first time in years.
I remember a moment from my first season in Egypt, when I hated Wyatt Armstrong. I was sitting under a tent attempting to pick the grit out of my cheese sandwich as Wyatt and two undergrads discussed mythology and sex. “Greek myths are the weirdest,” said one student. “Zeus gets it on as a swan.”
“Pan stalked a nymph who turned into a reed to get away from him, and he made a flute out of her so he could blow her,” said another student.
“Typical,” I muttered, as Wyatt said, “Genius.”
“I’ve got this all beat,” he said. “Our story starts with Seth and Osiris, who are basically Sonny and Michael Corleone. You’ve got Seth, the hothead, always at odds with Osiris, who’s all about staying calm and cool while he destroys his enemies as the King of Egypt. Plus, Osiris is married to his sister Isis, because divine royals are down with incest, especially when a relative is smoking hot.”
He was telling the story of the tribunal of Horus, albeit the soap opera version. I rolled my eyes and looked up at the roof of the tent, which was snapping in the wind.
“Seth is crazy jealous of his brother, so he murders Osiris and hacks his body into forty-two pieces. Isis and her sister Nephthys hunt for the bits and they find everything but his dick. Anubis, the jackal god, mummifies Osiris. After that, Isis turns into a bird and sits on her dead husband’s corpse and fucks him, getting pregnant with Horus.”
“Wait,” one undergrad said. “Without a dick?”
“Oh, they find that eventually,” Wyatt said. “So Horus grows up and has an epic battle with Uncle Seth. Mind you, Seth is chaotic and probably shouldn’t have chopped up his brother, but he also kills Apep, the serpent of evil, so he’s more Loki than Thanos. Horus wins and becomes the divine template of the king on earth, while Daddy gets to be king of the Netherworld. All because his mother fucked a dead guy.”
“That’s messed up, man,” one student said. “It’s like Hamlet.”
Wyatt grinned. “Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.”
I stood, giving up on eating lunch. “Apologies,” he said, not looking at all apologetic. “I think we’ve put Olive off her feed.”
I took a bite, just to be contrary, and nearly broke my tooth on some grit.
“You do know it’s called asandwich,” he said.
I left the tent and walked into thewadito pee. I was just buttoning my pants again when I heard Wyatt’s voice behind me. “Don’t stop on my account, Olive,” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as you, I imagine.”
I stalked past him, wondering if someone’s penis could get a sunburn, wondering why it was so easy for Wyatt to annoy me. At lunch he’d been showing off, but nothing worse than I’d heard before, and the other students found him entertaining. “Why does everything have to be a joke to you?”
He stilled, his hands at his belt. “Maybe it’s not, Olive. Maybe that’s just what I want people to see.”
“I really don’t think you have to work harder to get attention.”
“You’ve probably heard that my grandfather has a wing at the Met named after him, and that I come from four generations of Yalies?”
What an egotistical asshole. “So what?”
“What youhaven’theard is that my father effectively wiped out the family fortune in a single generation and he hates my guts because one of his sons died and it wasn’t me. And that I graduated with a double-starred first from Cambridge because I worked my bloody arse off, not because I was given a free pass. But it’s easier for people to assume I’m just another entitled idiot.” He blinked. “Why am I even telling you this,” he muttered.
“You should tell everyone. They’d like you more.”
Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “You know, the Ancient Egyptians believed that words were so powerful that if you spoke them, things might happen you didn’t want to happen. It’s why when you read the texts about Osiris being murdered, they only allude to it. And it’s probably why we keep secret what we wish for on our birthday candles, and why we never tell our wildest dreams out loud. It’s too bloody terrifying to think how our lives might change, if you just put it all out there.” I heard the buckle of his belt jingle. “I’d recommend you take your leave, unless you’re kinkier than I thought.”
As I walked out of thewadiI realized that although I had been working in close proximity with him for the past three years, I had only just met Wyatt Armstrong.
—
IDON’T SLEEPwell, and finally give up the battle an hour before sunrise. I sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and picking at a stain on a place mat. I know why I dreamed what I did. All this discussion of the unfinished past with Win—no matter how hard I keep trying to focus on Brian, the memory of Wyatt keeps surfacing.
Brian pads into the kitchen in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, bleary, looking just as exhausted as I feel. He stands in front of me, rocking on his heels. “Hi.” He sees the look on my face. “Did I do something wrong?”
