Page 69 of Icarus

“But it’s . . . gross.” Icarus wanted to sink through the bed and down into the floor.

“It’s not. But even if it was, some gross things can be good too,” Helios said. He began letting go of Icarus’s wrist, but Icarus stopped him.

Please.

Helios understood. He reached across the bed and carefully, carefully, pulled Icarus closer. And didn’t let go.

Hue

“You are my strangest friend.”

Luca had said this to Icarus once, closer to when they first met. He’d laughed it off then, but he was beginning to understand what Luca meant now. Helios was . . . weird. But in a fun way.

Helios woke up in the middle of Icarus sketching him and instead of complaining or calling Icarus names, he sat up, took off his shirt, and draped himself across the bed more attractively, letting his arm hang off the side. Fingers lax but delicately posed.

“How long have you been awake? Is this your first drawing of me or have I been asleep long enough for you to make more?” Helios asked.

“Third,” Icarus said, leaning back in the child-size rocking chair he’d pulled from the corner of Helios’s bedroom. “And it hasn’t been long.”

Helios grinned. “I’ve been drawn before, but I’m curious to know what you think I look like.”

Icarus raised an eyebrow. “Given enough time, I could draw you exactly. Paint you in your colors.”

Helios chuckled and dragged his knuckles across the dusty wood floor.

“Hmm. What are my colors, then?”

Icarus stared at Helios hard. “In Pantone, your hair is PMS 717, mostly. You blush from PMS 705 to PMS 708. Your eyes are harder—they’re PMS 4695 in this light, PMS 478 in the sun and PMS 440 at night in the dark.”

Helios closed them for a moment, then sighed.

“That’s hot and creepy at the same time.”

Icarus laughed. “The inside of your mouth is PMS 178. . . .” He smirked, then went back to his drawing.

Helios made a series of offended and scandalized noises for Icarus to chuckle at, then settled back into his original pose.

“Since you like looking at me so much, are you finally feeling like watching me dance?” Helios asked.

Icarus had felt shy about asking. “Sure.”

Rust

After they had cereal, Helios scampered back upstairs to “do something in the dance room” and told Icarus to “find his own fun.”

So Icarus decided to start on dinner.

The inside of Helios’s fridge was massive and filled with takeout containers. He gazed at them warily and resisted the desire to throw them away. If it was out of character for Helios to do so, it certainly wouldn’t be good to disrupt that ecosystem for Mr. Black to discover upon his return.

He did manage to find some frozen pork in the freezer, a few shrimp, peas, a red pepper that had seen better days, half an onion, rice, oil, and some tomato paste. So he was intending to make something that should turn out a bit like paella.

He scrounged the kitchen for a bowl, a saucepan, and a cast-iron skillet and got started prepping ingredients. He defrosted the pork and shrimp in vinegar, salt, and water. Then, after an unusually difficult search, he found knives.

The pork needed to marinate in orange juice with salt, sugar, vinegar, and half of a taco seasoning packet he found in the back of their horribly lacking spice cabinet. The shrimp, he boiled until they were just turning pink, then popped back in the fridge.

He was planning to smoke the marinated pork in the cast-iron skillet on broil until the outside had a fair amount of char to it. But that should probably wait until they were ready to eat.

The rice he could do now. It was . . . definitely not how this was supposed to be done, but he dumped the rice, water, tomato paste, and a few Maggi cubes all into the same pot. Tasted the broth to make sure it was appropriately salty, then put it on to boil.