It was a story from the Middle Kingdom, but I’d never read it. I shook my head.
“The narrator meets Sakhmet in the marshes before she’s changed back into Hathor,” he explained. “She’s a wild animal, and he’s scared shitless because he thinks she’s going to eat him. But the next day at her festival, she’s all woman and ready for the new year.”
He buried his face in the curve of my shoulder. I could smell him on my skin.
“I’m thinking that I came to the desert with a lioness,” Wyatt said softly, “and ended up with a goddess in my arms.”
Together we watched the sun rise—my namesake, gilded in pinks and oranges; the universe being born again.
—
WE CREPT BACKto the Dig House then, to snatch a few minutes of sleep before the day officially began. But I woke up alone with the sun streaming into my room, panicking because I had slept through the morning’s work. I jumped out of bed, already wondering how much trouble I was going to be in.
The Dig House was empty because everyone was at the site. Or so I thought until I heard something crash in the magazine. I padded down the hall to find Wyatt picking up pieces of pots and setting them into a box.
A thousand thoughts cycled through my head: if he was here, and we were alone, he should have come to my room. Unless he didn’t want to. Unless there was a piece of him, like me, that believed last night didn’t happen. Or shouldn’t have.
“Tell me that was already broken,” I said evenly, and he jumped.
“Jesus, Olive!” He turned around. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“That may be the kindest way to die after Dumphries figures out we slept in.”
“Relax,” Wyatt said. “I told him we were both hungover. Apparently, finding a new dipinto and a potential tomb allows us one grace period of fucking up.”
“Speaking of that.” I swallowed. “This thing. Us.”
“What about it?”
It felt like knives in my throat, but I said what had to be said. “We had a lot to drink.”
He stared at me. “Are you saying you took advantage of me?”
“I’m saying maybe we took advantage of each other.”It was the most earth-shifting moment of my life.“We were celebrating. It was…bound to happen.”
Wyatt slid his hands into his pockets. He was quiet as he walked deeper into the magazine, trailing his hand along the box where George, the mummy, rested. “You think last night was a mistake.”
I tried to say yes. Really, I did. I had a hundred reasons why this was not a good idea, starting with the fact that we didn’t really like each other and ending with the reality that two graduate students would not be taken seriously for this discovery if we weren’t acting the part. But, still, I couldn’t say it.
Wyatt moved so fast that I didn’t even see him coming. He backed me up against a row of shelves, whose contents rattled with the force of my weight. His mouth was a bruise. He ripped the seam of my pajama bottoms, lifted my hips, and drove into me. I wrapped myself around him, the source of the flame, and set myself on fire.
“My God,” he said, shaking in the circle of my arms when I finally slid along the length of his body and let my toes touch the floor. “Did that feel like a mistake?”
But just because we were combustible didn’t mean we belonged together. Just because we’d made history together didn’t mean we were a team. “Dammit, Wyatt,” I said. “I’m trying to let you walk away.”
“Who says I want to?” he blistered. “Olive, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who gets the joke without me having to explain it. I was so busy trying to figure out what made me better than you that I didn’t pay attention to what we had in common. Every time I looked five years out, there you were. I thought it was a threat. But what if, all this time, it’s because you’re supposed to be wherever I am?” He stepped away from me, breathing hard. “Stop bloody trying to save me from yourself.”
Then he pressed a broken piece of limestone into my hand. “This is why I came down here, you idiot.” He turned and walked out of the magazine.
The stone was a lopsided triangle, and he had written on it in hieratic with a Sharpie. I recognized the writing from Ostracon Gardiner 304, about which I had once written a paper, comparing this poem to the Song of Songs in the Bible.
Both texts were exchanged as tokens of favor during harvest festivals. Both had nothing to do with politics or religion—just intimacy.
Both were about lovers who aren’t married.
The original poem had been scrawled on a limestone flake. Since papyrus was pricey, limestone or potsherds had been used as cheap writing surfaces. Wyatt had given me the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of a Post-it note.
I shall kiss [her] in the presence of everyone,
