Chapter 1: In which Malcolm encounters an aggravating sea princess
Notes:
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If there was one person Malcolm could blame for all this, it was Percy.
Percy had this insane idea. An extremely risky plan that Athena would never approve of. But by now, after a decade of being best friends with Annabeth, including seven years of dating her, Percy, Malcolm realized, had come to understand how children of Athena operated. He knew what got them to tick.…
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
It had been a sunny Saturday July morning at Camp Half-Blood. The calming waves of Long Island Sound would have driven anyone to a siesta were it not for the commotion brought about by the camp’s residents, who were currently embroiled in a game of capture the flag.
Leading one side of the game were the children of Hermes, who had quickly recruited Cabin Three. Opposing them were the children of Ares, who had fought tooth and nail to enlist Cabin Six.
Before the game had even started, the battle had begun. Cheating had been rampant, hexes had been thrown about, and an ancient rivalry had been exploited. Already inflamed campers only escalated their jeers and taunts. Whether one could blame the juicy rivalry or simply ingroup-outgroup bias (or both), an onlooker might’ve thought there were two battles to be waged.
Add the extra rivalry to the inclusion of the Romans, the two added flags in play, and a hefty dose of pride at stake, and you get two hundred and thirteen geared up demigods, satyrs, and nymphs anticipating a war that could get real ugly real fast.
At the sound of the horns, clouds arrived on the scene, turning the sky an ugly gray. With a thunderclap, rain started to pour. As Clarisse coordinated defense south of Zephyros Creek, Annabeth, Frank, and Malcolm headed north. Malcolm—invisible under Annabeth’s Yankees cap—ran towards the edge of the woods, taking down a daughter of Hecate and two children of Hermes in his wake.
Sure enough, Hermes had set down a flag near Long Island Sound. Smart perhaps, but predictable. Now if he could set up traps before anyone noticed his footprints—
A sudden force knocked him to an empty clearing. The Yankees cap flew five meters away.
“What’s up, Malcolm?” a familiar voice called behind him.
Malcolm rose into a crouch and stood to face Percy Jackson. Percy struck first. Malcolm parried his assault—but Percy blocked his counter. They got into the rhythm of a violent dance, whirling and side-stepping, slashing and whacking. Malcolm let instinct take over, catching Riptide’s arc with his xíphos and dishing some blows of his own.
The rain poured on the men and swirled around them, collecting into ropes that encircled the son of Athena. Malcolm dodged the force of water and rolled beneath it.
He rose yet again. His xíphos and wits were enough to handle Riptide, but he still couldn’t dodge all the incoming jets. And what did the water care if it was slashed by a blade?
Percy formed an opaque barrier of rain around them, blocking any chance of Malcolm’s escape.
“Don’t take this personally, okay?” Percy said. He sent ropes of water from all directions towards Malcolm. They circled Malcolm’s body and slid the xíphos out of his hand. “And don’t fight back,” Percy told him.
The water threw Malcolm towards the breaking waves in the beach.
Surprisingly, Malcolm landed softly. But before he could even think, he was pulled by the waves and dragged nearly a hundred meters away from the shore.
Shit.
Disarmed from his xíphos, ensnared by the water, and cold as hell with nowhere to turn and no one to save him, Malcolm was done for—and curious to know just how much Percy held back on all other occasions. He’d never seen Percy fight so dirty. Resigned by the thought that there sometimes was no way to outmatch sheer force, Malcolm tried regardless.
He got his wits about him and took Percy’s advice: don’t fight back. Survival 101 dictates: don’t swim against the current. The only way out was to first swim parallel to the beach.
It wasn’t easy with his cuirass weighing him down, but he couldn’t not try. The rip was about twenty meters wide, narrow enough to escape. Maybe afterwards, he could find his way to the shore. That is, if—a big IF—Percy forgot about him. That didn’t seem likely. Malcolm could see his tall figure approaching step by step on the beach.
Taking a deep breath, Malcolm evaluated his options. He still had his trusty grappling hook. Maybe he could use it to pull himself further away from the current.
As he reached for the device, the thought occurred to him: What if he negligently killed a fish? Or, gods forbid, an endangered turtle? And over what? A meaningless game?
And if it didn’t catch an animal, what was it going latch onto? A wave? What a joke.
And then what? Was he really going to try to outswim a son of Poseidon?
Percy’s distant figure disappeared into the water. In seconds, he rose just a meter away from Malcolm and sat himself cross-legged on the surface, floating like a bored punk Jesus, with Annabeth’s cap in hand.
Malcolm stopped swimming. There was no point anymore.
“You’re in deep water,” said Percy before his lips formed into a triumphant grin. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
As annoyed as Malcolm was at the situation and as disappointed as he was in himself to get kicked out this early, he was impressed. Effective strategy, topped off with a solid pun. Percy had every right to be cocky. But Malcolm held back the compliment. Maybe later.
“You just wanted to take down Annabeth’s right hand, huh?” he accused, meeting Percy’s good-humored, sea-green eyes.
The wind breezed through Percy’s jet black hair as he observed Malcolm. “That’s usually me,” Percy said.
True. But Malcolm could still call first.
“So…” Malcolm said. “Riptide and a riptide? Fancy.”
“It’s actually a rip current,” Percy said. “People mix them up. And undertows, too. Ugh. Trust me, they’re not the same. Natural rip currents are caused by the shape of the shoreline and can drag you into the water up to eight feet a second. Riptides happen in places where flow is constricted and they’re way more predictable, but they’re usually much stronger and they pull you much farther away from the shore.”
Malcolm was barely paying attention. He tried to think of something. Anything. “What a nerd.”
“Coming from a child of Athena?” said Percy. “Thanks.”
“So what are undertows then?”
“Like you can’t Google it later.”
“Why not go with a riptide?” Malcolm asked. “Would’ve made for better theatrics.”
“The theatrics weren’t worth it,” said Percy. “What did you want me to do? Hold back all the flow into the beach? I wasn’t gonna risk drowning you. I’m also not going to risk talking to you until you come up with a plan to escape. I’ve seen Annabeth fight and I’ve rewatched too many Kim Possible episodes with my sister to make that mistake.”
Ya got me.
“I’ve got a challenge for you,” Percy said. “And if you’re anything like Annabeth, you’ll appreciate an interesting challenge.”
Just like that, Percy’s words held him in a vise. Malcolm wouldn’t be able to swim away freely, even if Percy allowed him to.
Percy offered him a deal: “I won’t take you to the jail. You’ll remain in the game if you do me a favor. At no cost to you.”
“No cost,” Malcolm repeated.
“I figured I could trust you.” Percy held out his hand.
A challenge that came at no cost? Percy had practically ensnared him. (And how stupid would he be not to take advantage of the situation? Even KP never got an offer that generous.)
“You can,” Malcolm said, clasping Percy’s hand.
Malcolm was immediately rewarded with dry warmth. An air bubble encased him, shielding him from the water as Percy took them under the surface.
Percy took out a folded up paper from his back pocket. “Give this to Annabeth. Secretly.”
“That’s it?” Malcolm said, more than a little offended.
“That’s part one. Annabeth’ll figure it out.”
Malcolm eyed it warily. “It’s not inappropriate, is it?”
Percy looked affronted. “Bro.”
Malcolm shrugged.
“You can open it,” Percy said. “It’s harmless.”
Malcolm took the paper and unfolded it to reveal a picture of an ancient citadel he recognized. “The Acropolis. Cool. You know, passing notes to Annabeth doesn’t constitute a challenge.”
There wasn’t even any writing—not on the front, not on the back. No marks against the light either. It was just a postcard.
So, why the Acropolis? Why a postcard? Malcolm’s mind whirred with possible answers: Acropolis. Athens. City. Patron. Poseidon. Athena. Contest. Saltwater spring. Olive tree. Rivalry.
“Like I said, she’ll figure it out,” Percy said.
Annabeth. Percy. Argo II. Athens. Acropolis. A promise.
“No, let me guess,” said Malcolm. “You want Cabin Six to team up with you.”
But why a postcard? Why not something as simple as verbal words?
Percy’s lips quirked up. He didn’t even look the least bit guilty.
Oh. To show this was his plan A. Malcolm was intrigued. So, what’s the catch?
No. This was Percy. There was never a catch. So, what was his motive?
“Why?” asked Malcolm simply. “You just don’t wanna fight Annabeth and want us to get the glory of winning together with you, or…?”
“Yeah, me. Not Hermes,” Percy said. “Or Ares.”
A shot of adrenaline flowed into Malcolm’s veins. “You mean…”
Percy grinned. “Yeah.”
Malcolm couldn’t help but entertain himself with the thought. A short laugh escaped involuntarily before he sobered. “There are only eight of us,” he pointed out.
“And by now only—what, a hundred and fifty of them left max? Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about whether Athena could steamroll the whole camp.”
Yes. Which Athena camper hadn’t wondered about the extent of Cabin Six’s capabilities? It seemed Percy was perceptive enough to figure out that secret (unless, of course, Annabeth had told him about it).
It wasn’t like the hundred fifty or so would be expecting it anyway, right? And with their combined skill and power… Dear gods.
“How in the hell d’you come up with this?” said Malcolm.
“Honestly? People kept making Romeo and Juliet references ’cause of the whole parental rivalry thing, but it seemed stupid to me, since Romeo and Juliet killed themselves,” Percy said. “As Paul likes to remind his students,” he added in a mutter. “So, I thought it’d be better to do a reverse Romeo and Juliet.”
“A what?”
Percy shrugged in his typical easy-breezy nonchalance. “Instead of killing themselves, they kill everyone else.”
And that was something that Malcolm had taken a few years to realize about him. Everyone thought Percy was selfless. They saw him as the ever loyal lover and friend who’d always put his life on the line to save others. But they were wrong. Percy was loyal, yes, but he was also extremely selfish.
How many times had the guy demonstrated that even the wellbeing of the world wouldn’t be enough of a reward for him to counter the loss of his girlfriend? To what extreme lengths had he willingly gone not to cope with that much disutility?
Yeah, no one needed compensating variation or Hicksian demand functions to come to that conclusion.
“See, this is exactly why Athena doesn’t trust you,” Malcolm reminded him.
Percy smiled his trademark troublemaker smile before facing Malcolm with a more serious look. “But it’s also why she does,” he said.
Huh.
“And both her judgments are in your favor,” Percy pointed out. “So, which side do you want to play on?”
Insane as it was, Percy’s plan made sense. Athena would have never approved, no, but she would have probably been impressed. Percy was both crazier and wiser than he was given credit for.
But Percy hadn’t seemed to consider one thing.
“And in the end?” Malcolm asked. “There’s seven of us and only one of you. What makes you think we won’t conspire to take you down?”
“Yeah, my plan only went that far,” Percy said. “If you want to, go ahead. But I’d prefer it if we call truce and build more chariots or whatever than continue this stupid rivalry.” His gaze pierced through Malcolm. “I’m not gonna fight any of you,” he said, speaking with the certainty Malcolm would only trust from his family. It was a promise. The truth and nothing but. “I’ve had enough, even before that Hecate kid tried to brainwash me with that hate smoke potion, whatever that was. And even if you do knock me out, 99% of the time, we’d still be a team.”
Malcolm mouth quirked on a side as he nodded up at Percy. “How many times did you rehearse that?”
Percy cracked a grin, cocking his head in admission. “I guess not as much as I should have.”
But Percy had convinced him enough. Him and the rest of the cabin: Annabeth (no questions asked), Claire (the competitive athlete), Conrad (Claire’s devious twin), Sophie (wary but ultimately undeterred by the calculated risk), Zeke (thankful for finally having the opportunity to try this scheme), and Alicia (the six-year-old duckling who’d imprinted on her eldest siblings).
Through stealthy exchanges of intel and sly manipulations of their unknowing “teammates”, the group of eight executed their plan and did their own part to drive down the active soldier count.
While the Athenians carefully avoided Percy on the battlefield and dragged out Ares’s offense, Percy let Hermes sacrifice eleven to defeat Nico and Hazel alone (which, of course, only meant thirteen fewer campers to deal with) and convinced Hermes to set up a second HQ on a small ship in Long Island Sound.
The battle continued well into the night until the two official sides reached a stalemate and called truce until dawn. The truce wasn’t followed, of course (there was neither enough trust nor enough incentive not to cheat in the case of their prisoner’s dilemma), so each side took turns keeping watch, letting their littlest ones sleep.
By now, Eos had risen, opening the gates for Apollo to soon pass with his sun chariot.
Under Annabeth’s Yankees cap, Malcolm made his way from the Ares base to Cabin Three. He snuck in through the open window and heard snickering coming from inside.
Annabeth was peering at the contents on a table as she braided her blonde hair. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, was searching for a shirt, the tattoos he’d gotten in recent years in full display: Aνναβεθ in elegant calligraphy, a drawn-by-Estelle star (for none other than his sister Estelle), a hammerhead shark (he said it was cool), and an anchor (because he was into nautical references, but Malcolm had suspicions it meant some sort of sappy shit relating to Annabeth).
Malcolm took off the cap. “Really, guys?”
“We were actually looking at maps, though,” a now-fully-clothed Percy told him.
“Sure.”
Looking at maps. That had been Percy’s dumb coverup nine years ago. It had become their thing. Red-faced as Malcolm had been when he’d walked in on fourteen-year-old Percy and Annabeth hugging each other, he’d made sure to whip out the phrase and satisfyingly watch Percy turn pink every time he caught the couple sneaking off to do cutesy things. Eventually, Percy had become desensitized and no longer cared who caught them, but it had been fun while it lasted.
“Malcolm, I am literally looking at a map,” said Annabeth, holding up what was indeed a map with what he guessed were markings of the Hermes plan.
“And you can blame Frank,” Percy said. “Dude wouldn’t stop following Annabeth.”
So, Frank knew not to trust her. But as long as Malcolm fed Percy the intel and Annabeth only collected, no one could blame her for the leaks.
“So, your solution was to…?”
“Make out?” Annabeth finished. “It works every time.”
Malcolm supposed he couldn’t blame them. It was the perfect excuse. And that it had been Frank of all people? *Chef’s kiss.*
Malcolm updated them on the developments: “I got Clarisse to reorganize, so the twins are heading to the ship now. For all she knows, it’ll be under Ares’s possession soon. Zeke, Soph, and Allie are still with Ares, but they’re by one of the flags over here by Zeus’s Fist.” He pointed to the west side of the woods.
“So, what are we three doing now?” Percy said, looking to the Athena siblings. “Finally capture a flag or keep kicking ‘em out little by little so no one notices?”
They scanned the map for opportunities.
“Or we go for straight the heads,” Malcolm thought aloud, turning to Annabeth. “Plan 16b?”
“What’s plan 16b?” Percy said.
“Hidden decapitation strike,” Annabeth said. “We isolate the leaders and remove command and control so the teams get disorganized.”
“And they’ll probably fracture and fight for leadership,” Malcolm added, “which makes things easier for us.”
A part of him felt guilty to use nearly the same tactic that had inadvertently helped wreak havoc on his hometown—especially since the exact point of plan 16 was to wipe out as many people as they could with so little effort. But it was effective and efficient.
“But let’s not kill their bases,” Annabeth said. “We don’t need them scattered everywhere. They’d just be more difficult to hunt down.”
Good plan. Another thing his city hadn’t been prepared for. Well, they knew that now.
“So, we go for Ares first,” Annabeth said. “If I have to report to Clarisse at the base in fifteen, we could turn Percy in—”
“Turn Percy in?”
“I didn’t mean actually turn you in, Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth told him with her affectionate smile. “Actually, you do it, Malcolm.”
“So,” Malcolm said, “I bring you”—he looked at Percy—“to the base and tell Clarisse that you know who the traitor is but won’t talk. Frank could help, so he’s there, too.”
“Then I show up with Clarisse and whichever Ares/Mars honchos are there,” said Annabeth. “Three of us can take them all down, right?”
“Is there a water supply at the base?”
“Pretty sure.”
Percy smirked. “Then sure we can.”
One sneaky ploy, two busted water tanks, and three wearied demigods later, Annabeth, Percy, and Malcolm restrained an outraged Clarisse, a betrayed Frank, a dumbfounded Sherman, and a disappointed Ellis.
So long, Larry Hoover. Let the chaos begin.
Under her Yankees cap, Annabeth ran off to steal Leo’s comms gear (she was a better hacker than Malcolm) and to aid Zeke, Sophia, and Alicia. If all went according to plan, they’d bring the two Ares flags to the ship, leaving Percy and Malcolm to capture the fourth and final flag from Hermes.
But on their way to the Hermes base, a jet black, winged stallion blocked their path and frantically neighed.
Percy faced Malcolm with a wolf stare that could rival those Malcolm had seen in the Great Lakes. “They took Alicia,” Percy said.
Malcolm opened his mouth.
“Ares.”
“Gods damn psychos,” Malcolm blazed. “She’s six!”
Percy relayed Blackjack’s message: “After Sophie got the flag and headed with Guido to the ship, Ares forces split up Alicia and Zeke. Annabeth found him, but they’re stuck chasing the ones who know we’re in on something. They might lead them to Alicia.”
Blackjack, bless him, had already issued an Amber Alert to the other pegasi. Porkpie was apparently leading the search party and called on Guido to alert the other Athenians.
“So, now we get a Hermes flag,” Percy said. “They want one in exchange.”
As what? Ransom? Are they fucking serious? Malcolm held in his protest, took a moment to breathe, and prepared to get to work.
“Also, Blackjack knows where the flag is.”
For a moment, Malcolm actually relaxed. “I love your horse.”
“Tell him yourself.”
Malcolm got a nudge from a pegasus head in response.
Blackjack galloped them away. But with each passing minute, Malcolm’s chest grew heavier. They were getting farther and farther away from the creek.
“Percy?”
“Yeah, I can’t. I’m drained.”
It only got worse. Though they could still see the creek, it must’ve been forty meters behind the flag, which itself was about ninety meters away. Approximately thirty campers stood in between them and their prize.
Malcolm cursed silently. Percy looked equally distraught.
They were in over their heads at this point. Alicia was missing. Who knew if Claire and Conrad had overthrown the Hermes ship, if Sophie had managed to make her way to them with the flag, if Annabeth and Zeke had weeded out those on the Ares team who’d caught on?
Ah. And there it was: Athenian arrogance. Guilty of sipping the Kanye juice.
But it was only arrogance if they couldn’t find a solution. Maybe they still could. Then it was just confidence. Genius, even.
Realistically though…
What were the options? What were the options? Malcolm couldn’t find any winning outcomes.
“Maybe if Tyson were here, we could, but I can’t see how we can do this without backup,” he said.
Percy’s head moved up sharply. “I have a plan,” he said to him quietly.
“What do I need to do?”
“Nothing," said Percy. "We’re calling in the cavalry.”
Malcolm didn’t understand what he meant. It was literally just them. The eight of them were operating as the barest skeleton crews, the pegasi were searching for Alicia, and the hippocampi were protecting the ship. What other tricks did they have up their sleeves?
Percy gave Blackjack all their ambrosia bars and Riptide, and directed him to drop all that stuff into the creek before aiding the other pegasi or Annabeth.
Malcolm’s eyes bulged, but he reined in his gut Percy-what-the-hell? reaction. Malcolm trusted him. Percy was… creative… with his ideas. That some campers didn’t see his smarts was a dismal failure of their evaluation skills.
Soaring as low as he could, Blackjack swooped to dodge incoming arrows and sank their stuff into the water.
“They’re over here!” distant voices hollered. The closest five Hermes soldiers were heading their way.
“Ten seconds, Percy,” Malcolm warned. “Do you have Riptide yet?”
“Let’s stall.”
Guess that’s a no. “Stalling’s not really our decision to make.”
But what he could do was get Percy a sword or two. Malcolm aimed his grappling hook at a camper with a medium-length xíphos that was hopefully a close enough resemblance to Riptide. Quickly disarming the fallen guy, Malcolm threw Percy the sword.
He and Percy held them back, but they were about to be ambushed by over a dozen more opponents. Left and right, the Apollo campers were drawing their bows towards them.
Then, amidst the blur and the noise of Malcolm and Percy’s sparring matches, much too much water rose from the creek and formed into the figures of horses that rushed at the Hermes squad. The equine flood swallowed arrows and felled the soldiers without even a clang of a sword.
Wow, dude. Who knew protein bars could—?
From behind the rush of water appeared a slender raven-haired woman, clad with a loose floral dress. It was a strange sight in the middle of a battlefield, especially considering her generously dipped neckline—hardly an appropriate thought given the current circumstances, but really, only a blind person would’ve missed it. She looked curiously at the flag in her hand brought to her by one of the water-horses.
The troops had diminished to a mere seven.
“Hand over the flag,” a chiseled camper Malcolm knew as Scott demanded.
“No,” said the woman.
“Well, I don’t take no for an answer.” Scott raised his sword and charged.
“Learn to,” she seethed. Another water-horse struck a blow to his head, promptly knocking him out cold before her feet. She rolled her eyes, muttering none too softly, “Rapey asswipe.”
The corners of Malcolm’s lips ticked up. Just who are you?
Together, Malcolm, Percy, and the woman crushed their remaining opponents and cooped them up with a grappling hook and ropes of water.
Percy turned towards their savior. “Thanks, Princess.”
“Anything for my little brother,” she said.
“Younger brother,” said Percy before he attended to their new prisoners.
Malcolm knew a fair bit of Percy’s family tree. The woman was obviously a daughter of Poseidon, and if she really were a princess, her mother must’ve been Amphitrite. She couldn’t have been Kymopoleia, who he knew had been disowned by her royal parents. That left a single option.
“You’re Rhode?” he asked, finally fixing his eyes on the woman. “Or Lady Rhode?” he corrected.
Maybe it was the way she carried herself, maybe it was her dress, maybe both, but this lady did look regal. And dammit, she was gorgeous. (Hey, he might not have dated often, but he had a functioning pair of eyes.) Her hair looked almost blue in the sunlight, all shiny and thick, and as the wind swept locks of her tresses over her shoulder, Malcolm caught a hint of black ink on her tanned skin.
Having to shift his gaze up to meet hers, Malcolm averted his eyes at breakneck speed, feeling like the world’s biggest dirtbag. (It was her shoulder he was looking at, okay? Her shoulder.) When he looked back, her eyes were still on him, holding his gaze challengingly.
“That’s Your Highness to you,” she said haughtily.
Aaaand she just had to ruin it.
Malcolm wanted to roll his eyes. He opted instead to say, “Sorry, Your Highness.” And just maybe he couldn’t completely hide his annoyance. Still, he gave her a small bow. He knew better than to provoke the gods, especially those who were ridiculously touchy about their titles.
“People usually kneel before me,” she responded, carrying the smuggest of expressions.
Seriously? That’s how you’re gonna be?
Rhode’s eyes flashed, and Malcolm figured it’d be better to acquiesce than become the victim of a goddess’s ire. As he dropped a knee, he heard Percy confusingly say, “Dude, what are you doing?”
The princess’s stony expression cracked and morphed into one of mirth as she snickered. “I wasn’t really serious. That actually worked?”
Oh that little… Malcolm huffed as he stood. “Okay, if Ms. Hoity-Toity’s had enough fun, we have work to do.”
Rhode’s eyebrows popped up an inch, but she changed her entire demeanor when Percy introduced him as “Malcolm Pace, Annabeth’s older brother” and recapped her on the game plan.
The children of Poseidon floated their captured opponents to a makeshift jail by the creek, and Malcolm attempted to busy himself with keeping on the lookout for the pegasi who’d bring them to his sister. It was pointless, of course, so he simply third-wheeled, observing the siblings.
Although Percy had grown less boyish and more handsome over the past several years (hello, jawline), Rhode still seemed relatively more mature-looking. The only similar features they shared were black hair, green eyes, and a general sense of good looks that might suggest they were related.
But her hair was bluer, her face rounder, her tan deeper, her eyes more blue? Or more green? Were they brighter? Were they darker? Malcolm couldn’t tell. They somehow… changed. But though the siblings’ looks wouldn’t exactly prove their relation, their interactions certainly did.
“Geez,” Percy said. “You sounded like Triton back there.”
“You take that back, Percy,” Rhode said.
Percy seemed to be holding back a grin. “Hey,” he said with his hands up in surrender, “I didn’t say it.”
“Well, that was the intention,” she laughed. And in milliseconds, she glared. “I’m offended, by the way, that you think I would need an offering to help you.”
“It was just to get your attention.”
“Well, I don’t want it.” She tossed him the ambrosia bars that Blackjack had dropped in the creek.
“What if I replace it with muffins?” Percy offered.
“That I will accept.”
“Yeah, we both know you’re trash at baking.”
Rhode responded with a light shove and a chuckle.
Malcolm had known Percy and his godly family were friendly, but he wouldn’t have guessed that he and his immortal half-sister were close enough to tease each other like best friends. His other one, after all, had tried to kill him.
“You know, I’ve been waiting for a call from you,” Rhode said. “When you asked for my help, I first thought it had to do with you finally planning to pop the question. Then I noticed your sword.”
Whoa. “You’re going to propose to Annabeth?” Malcolm asked.
Percy didn’t bother to face him. “I’m not answering that.”
“Which probably means you are going to,” Malcolm reasoned. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a massive bet going on at camp.”
From what he’d heard, the odds were around 50-50 on who would propose and a majority of bettors gambled on it happening within the next year.
But if Malcolm were to do some simple calculations, perhaps employ the binomial and geometric distributions… say, a sample size of thirty recent interactions, with a probability of—what was it?—0.65 that Annabeth took the lead…
But binomial probability and geometric probability were only relevant when considering independent events. That assumption didn’t exactly hold in this case. Malcolm threw away the thought experiment.
As though Percy could see him attempting calculations, he shot Malcolm a look. “I’m not going to help you win any bets.”
“Relax,” said Malcolm. “I don’t make bets on your relationship.”
Besides, it would be unethical and unwise to bet with the insider information Malcolm had access to. According to Annabeth, the campers had it all wrong.
They continued walking in silence, but Percy’s curiosity seemed to outweigh his desire for privacy. “If you had to?” he asked.
If he had to? Malcolm had always thought Percy and Annabeth would end up together, married with kids and all, complete with pets (Mrs. O’Leary already counted, right?) and a white picket fence (or whatever Annabeth thought was more chic in landscape architecture these days). It seemed like something they were bound to do, given that they were them. But a conversation with Annabeth a few months back made Malcolm doubt whether they’d tick every single one of those boxes.
What binomial and geometric distributions also didn’t account for was the fact that this was a much, much bigger event. A proposal wouldn’t be equivalent to everyday interactions. In the first place, one of them would have to be willing to take the initiative.
‘It’s not something we’re going to do,’ Annabeth had told him. Malcolm hadn’t been sure Percy at least wasn’t going to ask—to which an irritated Annabeth had insisted, ‘Of course, I’m sure.’
Malcolm totally didn’t get it. Were they waiting on each other? Was this too big a step for Percy at this time? Was he just trying to be some modern feminist and give Annabeth the reins? Was Annabeth hoping instead that he would take the lead? Malcolm didn’t know. This was too much drama for him. If even their love life was that complicated, he couldn’t imagine what other people were like.
So, if he were being honest, he didn’t know if—
Malcolm paused to choose his words carefully. “Percy, have you talked to Annabeth about this?”
“Of course.”
Oh. “And?”
“And we’re on the same page?” Percy said, like there was only a single, obvious answer.
“Are you sure?”
Percy shot him an offended look. “Bro, what are you implying?”
“Look,” said Malcolm. “Annabeth and I talked about it just a while back. She said it wasn’t something you two were gonna do.”
At that, Percy laughed.
“I’m serious,” said Malcolm.
“I know.”
“Well, is that true, Percy?” Rhode asked. “You’re not going to propose?”
“Drop it,” Percy said.
Rhode didn’t drop it. “You’ve told me you wanted to marry her someday,” she said. “And you’re practically married already. I’ve been told you live together in the Poseidon cabin and you literally have her name inked near your heart. You can’t get any more committed than that, so why don’t you just ask?”
“It’s not that I wouldn’t want to,” he said.
“You think Annabeth doesn’t want you to?” Malcolm said.
So, maybe his first suspicions were wrong. But had that just been Annabeth’s tactic to stop the questioning?
Percy paused for a moment. “I was going to once,” he said. “But she didn’t let me.”
A wave of shock came over Malcolm. But was it actually that surprising? This was Annabeth.
Rhode touched Percy’s arm. “Oh, Percy. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be,” Percy said. “Really. We’re good.”
That seemed true. Still… Malcolm wondered. He wasn’t one to pry, but maybe if he could help his sister, who seemed visibly displeased by the current state of affairs… maybe it was worth getting involved.
“Did she tell you why? If you don’t mind me asking.”
What had been the problem? Timing? Hera? A general distaste for marriage on Annabeth’s part? Something else?
“It’s just… you know how stubborn she can be,” Percy said, but he seemed content. “It’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about, okay? We’re on the same page, we’re good, and that’s all you need to know. Now, can we please focus on our plan? We’re in the middle of a child hostage situation right now, and if my ears are working, the pegasi are about to arrive.”
Malcolm stashed the matter as a topic to be revisited at some point.
Soon enough, Blackjack, Guido, and Porkpie flew the trio to a clearing south of the creek and took off yet again to help Malcolm’s siblings.
Hermes flag in hand, the plan here wasn’t to infiltrate the new base. A trade was a trade, as ridiculous and unfair as it was. Alicia was obviously worth way more than a flag. That the Ares team gave them such a shit offer on their part was mind-boggling.
“We’re not here to fight,” Malcolm reminded Percy and Rhode. “We’re getting Alicia out. But this could be a trap, so let’s just be ca—”
Rhode strolled over to a pair of soldiers—Laurel, a daughter of Nike, and Mark, a son of Ares—and cheerfully greeted their astonished faces. “Hi! Excuse me, I’m new here,” she said. “Can you tell me where I can find an abducted child?”
Laurel took a moment to recover from her shock, ultimately giving not a single hoot as to who Rhode was. “The flag,” she demanded.
Percy rolled his eyes. “Have your dumb flag,” he said, throwing it to them. “Give us Alicia.”
“Put down your weapons first,” said Mark.
“When you lead us to Alicia,” Malcolm said. “We’ve already given you the flag.”
“We won’t hurt either of you,” Percy said.
Laurel nodded at Mark. And the two of them took off running.
A jet of water burst out of a petrified seashell in Rhode’s hand, and she willed the water to slip their opponents’ weapons from their grips—but Laurel and Mark escaped nonetheless. Malcolm and Percy came to Rhode’s aid as more soldiers attacked. Springs of saltwater shot out of the ground to restrain or shoo away the approaching soldiers.
“What was that?” Malcolm rounded on the goddess.
“They’re were being dishonest,” she said.
“You jeopardized the mission. I’m trying to get my sister out of here.”
“As am I,” she retorted. “But you’re doing it so slowly, so I’m helping.”
“In the short term, sure. Now, they'll just end up scattered everywhere and it's going to be infinitely more difficult to track them all down later,” he hissed to her.
Cabrini-Green all over again.
“Malcolm, over there!” Percy exclaimed.
For now, Malcolm set aside his irritation as he caught sight of a blonde girl with the messiest ponytail he had ever seen. Alicia put on a brave face but was clearly a bit shaken. Like she needed more to deal with than losing her dad to a drunk driver's fuck-up. Did they have no conscience, isolating a child from her siblings?
Malcolm rushed towards her. “Hey, Allie. Are you okay?” He crouched to her level, scanning for cuts and bruises.
Alicia nodded. She didn't seem physically hurt, but her gray eyes were watery. She barely looked at him. “I'm sorry I got caught.”
Malcolm tried for a gentle voice. “Hey. No. Don't worry about that. You did great, Alicia. They just didn't play fair. Stay close to Percy or me, okay?”
“Who is that?” she asked warily.
Malcolm followed Alicia’s struck gaze and saw the Atlantian princess at the end of it, decking yet another of their opponents. “That would be Rhode. Don’t worry. She’s on our team. Now, we’re getting out of here and we’ll win this thing. Ready?” He offered Alicia a smile and a fist bump, which his sister hesitantly returned. “Come on.” Malcolm gave her the extra knife strapped to his leg.
Together, he and Alicia and Percy and Rhode pummelled the remaining players until not a single remaining soul there stood.
They made their way to the beach and just about whooped upon seeing the small ship resting on Long Island Sound, proudly hoisting three flags. Rhode stayed by the beach to recruit sea friends as spies and allies, and in the tranquil underwater air bubble Percy made for the Athenians, Malcolm could finally redo his sister’s hair.
With their Amber Alert cancelled, three flags captured, and dozens of enemies defeated, it seemed the tides were turning in their favor.
Notes:
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you truly for giving this story a shot.
I’ve been working on this project nearly every day since July 28th, 2018, so it means a lot to me. There’s a lot more to come, and I hope you’ll follow along and have at least half as much fun reading Strategist as I’ve had writing it.
Please let me know what you think. Constructive critique is welcome. I prefer the big picture stuff (e.g., plotting and planning) and I’m just trying to tell my story honestly (i.e., not in some flowery, try-hard way), but I still want to get better at words and shit. (As Annabeth says, “I’m good with ideas, not mechanics.”)
You might be surprised by the amount of time I spent thinking about things like the perfect tattoos for fictional characters. (Too much. But no regrets.) Honestly, though, who doesn’t like the idea of Percy getting more ink? ;)
For those game for sleuthing, the end of each chapter includes hints/riddles in the form of emoji. Each set relates to some part(s) of the text of the corresponding chapter and also foreshadows following chapters. Here's the first! Can anyone decipher this?!
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥💨💨💨💨💨💨💨🏙🏙🏙
Chapter 2: In which Malcolm wins and loses
Notes:
To the lovely human beings that are Retainer, Mira, and StarReacher. Way to go, you three, on making me feel both so happy and so ashamed. I hope you enjoy this update and the rest to come.
And to the precious Onlychoice and Bucky05. Onlychoice, your liberal use of interrobangs is unbelievably sweet and your excitement is infectious. Bucky05, I hope you’ll be sqeeeeing at the end.
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics). Also, Greek text and translations will only appear if "Creator's Style" is not hidden.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Honey, I’m home,” Percy called out after they rose to the surface. He had his wide jokey grin on.
Climbing aboard the helm, the trio were met with Annabeth on watch.
“Hey, you.” Annabeth welcomed Percy with a quick kiss and crouched down to her little sister. “Are you okay?” she asked Alicia, who replied in the affirmative. “Are you hungry? Sophie’s got those protein bars you like.” Annabeth directed Alicia starboard to the blonde teenager keeping an eye on nine bound and unconscious campers.
All observed the adorable Alicia—adorned with baby fat and a custom-fit cuirass—plop herself criss-cross applesauce by a doting yet quiet fifteen-year-old Sophie. But Malcolm was more interested in the responses of the two by his side.
They weren’t even that subtle. Annabeth shared a glowing look with Percy, who returned a smile and the barest hint of a nod—what Malcolm reasoned was their when-we-have-kids exchange.
He had caught those interactions over the past several years, especially around Percy’s little sister Estelle, but they seemed to be coming up more so now. That perhaps had to do with the fact that Alicia looked like a mini-Annabeth. So, whether Percy and Annabeth ended up married or not, it seemed pretty clear they wanted kids.
Whatever. Their business.
“Noticed the flag. Good job,” Malcolm said.
“We even managed to drive out the potential leakers,” Annabeth said, returning Malcolm’s offered high five.
“Of course you did,” Percy said, casually throwing an arm around Annabeth’s shoulders. “You know I don’t doubt you.” He pressed his lips to her temple in the way he often did and with a wink proceeded to command the ship.
“That man needs to stop feeding my ego,” Annabeth said under her breath.
This was the gold standard, Malcolm thought. Ladies, gents, everyone… pick a partner who believes in you like Percy Jackson can.
Leaving Annabeth to ogle her man in peace, Malcolm familiarized himself with his surroundings as he caught up with the team. Percy had relieved Claire from sailing duties, and the duo promptly shipped off the last prisoners on a tugboat led by hippocampi. Sophie and Alicia (and eventually a focused Annabeth) were then free to begin brainstorming some offensive plays over ambrosia protein bars. And portside by the cannons, two blonds were taking turns hissing and cussing as they stung each other’s wounds with nectar. Zeke’s cheek cuts would heal quickly, but the ugly gash in Conrad’s right (and favored) arm gave Malcolm a case of the heebie-jeebies. For now at least, the Athenians could take a breather to recharge, given that the ship and its surroundings were Percy-fied.
But shortly after Claire joined Malcolm’s efforts to fix up their brothers, a flurry of blues and oranges hurled over to Annabeth. Malcolm’s hand shot to the xíphos at his side as he swiveled around.
“Annabeth! It’s so good to see you again!” Rhode said, greeting Annabeth with cheek kisses and a warm embrace. “How is everything?”
Oh.
Following some momentary fluster, Annabeth quickly regained her composure and struck a relatively hushful conversation with Rhode.
Percy made introductions to all, and as Rhode gushed to the Athenians about their sister’s architectural prowess and the beauty of the newly renovated Atlantian palace, Malcolm decided that he could definitely tolerate the goddess.
“I hate to bring this up, but is Rhode even allowed to play Capture the Flag?” Claire asked, bandaging her twin’s arm. “I mean, you’re a goddess. That doesn’t sound fair.”
“Don’t tell me you interrupted one of my few afternoons off to have me join a game I can’t actually play,” said Rhode to her brother.
“I’m pretty sure sea nymphs are allowed,” Percy said. “If a Cyclops and the Hunters can join, why not one of the Haliai?”
“Because Rhode is clearly far more powerful,” Annabeth said.
“Oh, let her have fun. We’d love your help, Rhode,” Conrad gritted out, mid-arm stretch.
“I also don’t think I’ve done anything Percy couldn’t do,” Rhode said.
“Although I could only do that stuff maybe just on a really good day…” Percy mused.
“Sure, on a good day and perhaps without as much style, but, beautiful horses or mangled donkeys, the outcome is all the same,” Rhode said, snickering to a grunting Percy. But she ultimately agreed she wouldn’t go beyond her brother’s power level.
Given Rhode’s confirmation that a warning system of marine and equine beings was in place, the team continued their break, making sure to fuel up and apply sunscreen. It was probably better to let Ares and Hermes fight it out and dive back in later, once the pegasi and sea friends gave word as to the whereabouts of the flag. And Conrad wasn’t in good shape anyway.
Better than bum around, Malcolm hesitantly but politely heeded Annabeth’s instructions to help set up their new friend with comms and take stock of weaponry, so he and Rhode explored the lower deck. In a little tool room of their stash of hijacked weapons, communications gear, and armor, he quickly found the extra earpieces.
“Ooh, I feel like I’m in a spy film,” Rhode said as Malcolm cautiously helped fit one of the devices over her ear, trying not to touch her.
He almost smiled at the comment. “It does make you feel like that, doesn’t it? Annabeth’s going to program the pieces to our names. It’s activated by brainwaves, so all you have to do is think the name of the person you want to reach and then talk. Okay, is that comfortable?”
Rhode nodded.
“There’s also probably some armor here that fits you,” he said, looking around.
“Oh, I’m all right, thank you,” Rhode said, straightening her dress.
Malcolm fixed his own earpiece to himself. “Are you gonna keep wearing that?” he asked.
“Funny you say that. You seemed to like what I’m wearing,” Rhode said, entirely too satisfied for his liking. She even threw him a wink as she half-posed with her arms akimbo. “I think it’s quite nice, too.”
Rhode took a moment to admire her outfit and Malcolm made the mistake of following her gaze as it traveled downwards, pleasing her and his lizard brain. He ignored both.
“Your attire isn’t the least bit appropriate,” he said.
Rhode’s eyes suddenly narrowed into slits. “Are you policing my clothing?” she said.
Malcolm held in a scoff. “I don’t care what you normally wear. I’m just saying your dress is impractical for fighting.”
“And I saved your ass in this dress,” Rhode said. “So maybe you need to step it up instead of bitching about what I’m wearing.” But her outward annoyance dissipated as quickly as it had come. “You’re welcome, by the way.” Rhode flashed another smile.
Malcolm remembered then that even the ancient Romans, pompous as they’d been, hadn’t encountered people so infuriatingly arrogant before they’d stepped foot on Rhódos. Maybe that trait applied, too, to the island’s patron goddess.
Had irrationality also been a Rhodian attribute?
She thought it was a good idea to fight in a dress. Without armor. And with her hair untied. Like, What? What are you thinking? This isn’t a gods-damn fashion show.
“What is it with you?” said Rhode. Her eyes so quickly formed a storm.
“With me?” he said. “Oh, I’m not the one who could’ve messed up our play because I was so okay with throwing our plan out the window without a second thought.”
“But I didn’t mess anything up!” Rhode said. “I disarmed two of our opponents and took down five faster than you could lift a finger, thank you very much. We made it out fine and we made it out quick.”
“But why even take that risk?”
Rhode stepped into his space with an icy stare—but he wouldn’t be provoked. “What’s the matter with a little risk?” she said. “You’re not a coward, are you?”
“People often mistake bravery with stupidity,” Malcolm responded.
“Don’t you call me stupid,” she hissed in his face. “I had that under control. And risk-takers win. It’s not stupid of us to face the whole of Camp Half-Blood. What would that make you? A hypocrite?”
“Ever heard of calculated risk?”
“I don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know you’ve been gambling,” she said.
This close, Malcolm could see that Rhode’s eyes changed colors from sea green to teal, reminding him of the way that waves shimmered as they reflected light. Greed glinted out from some sort of deep green or blue.
“But maybe,” Rhode said, “maybe the gamble’s worth it for that chance to reap such glorious rewards.”
If Rhode agreed, maybe this entire plan had been a terrible idea.
Or was she just goading him? To what end? To get him to admit she’d helped? To get him to—?
Movement caught his peripheral vision. She crossed her arms. And with a rise of her chest—maybe a little too noticeable to be unintentional—came a surge within his, as he wondered how fucking serious she was if she truly were attempting to toy with him.
But as Rhode grew yet nearer, her sea eyes held Malcolm’s captive. He hadn’t finished the puzzle. Really, what color were they? What… color…?
A cleared throat snapped Malcolm out of daze. Stupid ADHD. (Yeah, that was it.) Malcolm immediately distanced himself from the sea goddess and turned to face his savior.
By the doorway stood Percy, his eyes darting back and forth between his sister and Malcolm as though watching a ping-pong match. Percy's brows shot up.
“We were just, um…” Malcolm tried to explain. Yelling at each other? Crap.
“Looking at maps?” Percy asked. His innocent tone was betrayed by a conspicuous, teasing smile.
Malcolm just stared and offered no response. Beside him, Rhode rolled her eyes but ultimately strode off in triumph to the upper deck.
“Sorry, I guess,” Percy told him, looking genuinely regretful.
“No. That’s not—” Malcolm sputtered, feeling even more red in the face.
“Geez,” Percy mumbled. “You two met less than an hour ago and within three minutes of alone time—”
“We were not— I didn’t even do anything. It was her—”
“Uh-huh.” Percy took stock of the tools, weighing a sword, observing a spear, peeking under a shield….
“This really isn’t the same thing,” Malcolm said. I was just… trying to figure out what color her eyes were.
Like that sounded any better.
“Okay,” Percy said. “I just came in to check on our smoke grenades. Alicia wants to use them.”
Still a tomato hue for no good reason why, Malcolm gave him an earpiece and helped him find the weapons. When Percy failed to take the air of awkwardness with him up the stairs, Malcolm was left to mindlessly busy himself with organizing the scraps.
What was it about Rhode that annoyed him? Her carelessness? (Sure.) Her pride? (Did she say or do anything he didn’t believe to be true about her or himself, though? How would this compare to Athenian arrogance?) Did his cortisol levels rise as a result of some purely biological-level attraction? (Possibly.) Or was it annoying that she knew she was attractive? (No, of course not.)
Static buzzed by his left ear. “Testing, testing. Team meeting, Mal,” came Claire’s voice.
“Yeah, I’m coming up.”
Malcolm hoped to the gods his cheeks weren’t still as heated as they felt.
Under the glare of the sun, Percy and Rhode lounged carelessly on the side of the ship, and the Athenians scattered nearby around snacks on the floor, with Annabeth distributing sunscreen.
“Any updates? Do we wanna get back out there yet?” Malcolm asked.
“We have everyone on the lookout,” Percy said. “Pegasi, hippocampi, water spirits, fish…. And Rhode and I are here. We can probably still chill for now and let Hermes and Ares fight each other until we get some news.”
“They could join forces if we let them stew for too long, couldn’t they?” said Sophie.
“I think that would be overestimating them,” said Annabeth. “But we should figure out how we might want to address that. Alicia suggested we blitzkrieg them with smoke grenades before going in.”
“Just not where the flag is maybe. They might move it then,” Malcolm said.
“Plus, it’d be better if they think we’re heading someplace else,” Conrad added.
“Yeah,” Malcolm agreed. “So let’s just make sure we stick to the plan or operate within reasonable deviations from it.”
“We should also make sure we’re not being uptight,” Rhode said flatly as she picked at the chipping polish on her nails. “That’d simply kill all the fun, making this a worthless quest.”
“It’s also important,” Malcolm said, “to be wary of having such a haughty att—”
“Oh, you think I’m a hottie?” Rhode said, head cocked. She smirked right at Malcolm.
“I said haughty and you know it,” Malcolm said forcefully.
Claire nudged Conrad’s good arm. “Are you getting a sense of déjà vu?”
“Dear gods. This doesn’t need to happen again,” Conrad said. “We know how this plays out. This is stage one.”
“And if history’s any indication, next is to just go get a room and hash it out,” Claire said, receiving in chuckles and snorts from Malcolm’s other siblings.
“Yeah,” Sophie agreed. “Just not Cabin Three, though, because Percy and Annabeth have already booked it.”
Half the couple responded with an eye roll. The other half pretended no comments were ever made.
“Nah, that’s old news. Now they thankfully hide from camp and then coincidentally always get spotted at the lake. How mysterious,” said Zeke.
“Please. I wish it were just the lake they’d do it in,” Conrad added.
“Do what?” Alicia asked. Everyone seemed to forget that there was a precocious six-year-old in their company. “Is this about the strawberries?” she asked suspiciously.
Oh no. Poor Alicia was probably even more confused now.
“Strawberries?” Rhode asked.
“Ya,” said Alicia. “I heard Mal talking to Annabeth about catching her and Percy eating strawberries. But I don’t know. It seemed like they were lying about it.”
Percy’s brows furrowed. “I’m sorry, what did you say? What about strawberries?”
Stop. Just stop.
“They were talking one time,” said Alicia, “and I remember I heard Mal complain that he would have to hear you and Annabeth having strawberries again.”
That had been just over a month ago, when Annabeth and Percy moved back from New Rome. Malcolm told his sister something along the lines of: Get some. Get all you want. But, for the love of the gods, when I have to get to you when someone’s looking for you, I just don’t want to hear you doing it. Again.
“Huh? How can he hear us having s-strawberries?” Percy just about squeaked out the word. Embarrassment turned into amusement. He didn’t have to literally LOL for Malcolm to see he was laughing at him. “Strawberries?”
Hey. Alicia had just walked in. It was the first thing that came to mind. Outwardly, all Malcolm could do was sigh, try not to meet his little sister’s eyes, and figure out how to worm his way out of this topic.
“I don’t know!” Alicia exclaimed. “And I asked them what was so bad about strawberries, but Annabeth said they weren’t bad. She said she likes strawberries.”
Everyone stared at Annabeth.
“Wow,” said Zeke.
Even Percy questioned her with look and a restrained laugh.
Malcolm wished he could say that Annabeth’s past attempt at making him uncomfortable would come back to bite her now, but she looked quite poised.
“What?” she said. “Was I supposed to say no?”
“I thought they’re healthy,” said Alicia, “but Mal said to be careful because there could be ‘negative externalities,’ which I think means something like ‘unintended consequences’. So, I did some research about strawberries. I found out that they’re mostly healthy, but not as much as other fruits. They’re apparently high in sugar, so you should beware of, ähm, tooth decay and sugar crashes.” She counted the side effects on her small fingers.
Malcolm couldn’t help but smile. She was such a smart cookie. It was cute how she was lecturing everyone about this, even if she didn’t fully get the concept of externalities.
“Oh, and Ainsleigh from the Demeter cabin told me all of Camp Half-Blood’s strawberries are organic, but I found out that almost all strawberries produced in America are made using pesticides. There’s something called fum—ähm—fumi—something with an ‘F’.”
“Definitely an F involved,” Conrad said.
Not helping, bro.
“Fumigants,” Conrad then supplied.
Still not helping.
“Fumigants,” said Alicia. “And they’re really bad. They’re these gases that are put in the soil and they hurt or kill everything they come into contact with. Farmers started to use fumigants after some researchers used the tear gas left over from World War I in their science experiments. So, it’s mostly bad for the people growing the strawberries. But also,” she said, enrapturing everyone, “if you have too many strawberries, you can get upset intestines.... If you know what I mean,” she added in a loud, sneaky whisper.
Oh, sweet summer child…
“That’s all I know,” she said. “But some things still don’t make sense.” With furrowed brows, Alicia resumed her ambrosia nibbling.
Florian Dietrich must have told his daughter that all babies sprang from their mother’s heads. There was no way she wouldn’t have otherwise connected the dots. And while Malcolm didn’t want it to be him to tell Alicia about the birds and the bees, his siblings had already pushed the duty on him, arguing that it was the responsibility of Cabin Six’s head counselor and oldest resident. (It was a good excuse, but it just wasn’t fair.)
“Fascinating,” said Rhode, jolting Malcolm from his thoughts. “Well, in any case, strawberries at least seem more appetizing than cherries.”
A loud grunt escaped the throat of the preteen Zeke, while spit threatened to burst out of Sophie’s mouth.
“Excuse me, what are you implying?” Malcolm said.
Rhode crossed her arms. “Oh, I’m not implying. I’m saying you’d l—”
“Rhode. Malcolm. Please?” Percy said. “We better not implode just because you two can’t keep your hormones in check.” He wore an infuriating and seemingly knowing look.
Just no, Percy. There was nothing to know here. With his eyes, Malcolm sent a “cut it out” to his siblings, who had the wits to look at least partially remorseful.
“We’ll have this in the bag within the next several hours,” Annabeth told him pre-protest.
Right. She probably couldn’t tell off Rhode. That just pissed him off more.
“You can argue all you want later,” Percy said. “Preferably not, though. But right now, we’re a team. All right?”
The butting heads grudgingly took heed, and an awkward silence followed before Claire initiated a tepid discussion on predictions as to what their opponents were up to.
Malcolm, meanwhile, tried to ignore Percy and Annabeth’s whisperings, and chose instead to join his siblings in a muscle stretch as well as take turns using the aphedrṓn. (Ah. The wonders of a ship. How comforting it was to have access to a real, private toilet during Capture the Flag.)
A good five minutes after Malcolm welcomed a conversation with Sophie, who wanted to update him on her revised study plan for the upcoming academic year, Blackjack arrived on the scene, bearing news of the enemy.
Apparently, the eighty remaining opponents were dispersed throughout the grounds, and the fourth flag to be captured was held south of Zephyros Creek by the old entrance of the labyrinth.
The team of nine decided to let the pegasi storm the strongholds with smoke grenades and to split in three groups. Now, to allocate members to teams while distributing experience and injury...
Malcolm mentally slotted the restrictions and possibilities into the obvious buckets.
Percy would protect the ship and the three flags with sea friends. Alicia could join him if she wanted; she would be safest on board.
Meanwhile, at least two groups of the rest would round in on the forces protecting the remaining flag.
Conrad and Claire, for sure, would comprise a team, maybe with another sibling—someone other than Annabeth and Malcolm. Sophie or Alicia then, if the twins needed.
That left Zeke, Malcolm, Annabeth, and Rhode, which seemed like overkill. So perhaps—
“I could help eliminate the rest of the enemy and divert attention away from those capturing the fourth flag,” Rhode suggested. “I don’t even have to be near a creek. I have the petrified seashells.”
Smart.
In that case, then maybe do PA, CCZ, MS, so Ann—
“Malcolm, will you go with Rhode?” Percy asked.
Malcolm refused to look at her.
“You’re the only one who knows how Rhode fights,” Percy said. “And with your overall experience, you two can go alone. We won’t need any more of us.”
And that was how he got trapped.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm’s siblings were tactful enough to allow him and Rhode two pegasi.
He opted to remain mum on the ride as Rhode conversed with Porkpie and Guido, but this wasn’t productive, and it hadn’t taken long before the awkwardness became more unpalatable than any potential argument with Her Annoyingness.
“So, what are you thinking?” asked Malcolm. Sneaking a glance, he saw Rhode staring into the waters of Long Island Sound. Maybe she could end this all quickly. How ‘bout a tsunami?
“I’m thinking it’s really hot here and I’d like to lounge in the sound,” Rhode said.
Malcolm refrained from groaning aloud or rolling his eyes. “I meant ideas about our attack.”
“I’m thinking: We see them, we obliterate them,” she said. “Et voilà. Nous avons terminé.”
“Anything more concrete?” Malcolm said, trying not to curse Percy for putting him in this situation. “How’s this? You lead, I adapt,” he offered. Except maybe it wasn’t so much an extension of an olive branch as it was the fact that it’d be easier if he didn’t have to explain anything to her. And if he wasn’t expecting anything much, he wouldn’t be disappointed, right?
Rhode faced him. “You’ll let me lead? I didn’t think you trusted me.”
“I trust Percy,” said Malcolm. “And I’ve heard that if you have ten Rhodians, you have ten ships. One should more than suffice here…. Not that you are a Rhodian, because you are Rhode, obviously, but…”
As he trailed off, Rhode observed him with eyes that matched her father’s—with a gaze that could be as cryptic or expressive as they wanted. And right now, Malcolm had no idea what those aqua eyes were saying.
Out of thin air, Rhode conjured an off-colored dose of nectar. “Drink this,” she said.
Malcolm stared at her offering. “I’m good, thanks.”
“It’ll make sure you can stay dry and withstand floods,” she said.
Malcolm chugged the taste of pecan pie. Rhode also offered him a dozen petrified seashells to scatter around.
He landed soon after. With Rhode flying on Porkpie, just specks in the air now, and Guido taking off to aid the other pegasi, Malcolm was finally alone. On the ground, he kept his head on a swivel, on constant lookout for the enemy. Yet his eyes still couldn’t detect any threats.
“Hi. The blue team is coming out of the forest on our left,” Rhode told him over comms. “Can you hear me? Is this working?”
“Yeah, yeah. How many of them are there?”
“At least five,” Rhode said. “Oh. Uh oh. There’s another, bigger group near them about fifty meters away. Don’t ask me how much that is in feet.”
Malcolm nearly stopped in his tracks at the affront. “I’m familiar with the metric system, thanks.”
So, Hermes had managed to stay somewhat intact. Probably acting as a guard? Maybe scouting?
“Can you draw them out to the clearing?” Rhode asked.
But—but he’d be out in the open. Against at least five of their enemies. With a whole pack to come to their aid.
Ten Rhodians, ten ships.
“All right,” Malcolm said.
Rhode and Porkpie flew presumably behind their enemies. A hammer-and-anvil-type scheme could potentially work, Malcolm reasoned. Just as he flung three seashells on the ground for Rhode to potentially use, three members of the Hermes team headed towards him. Wicked sharp swords swung in his direction.
“Where’s the rest of the dork brigade?” asked Ekaterina, a daughter of Demeter.
Malcolm didn’t bother to respond. He easily caught her strike and used momentum to twist her blade out of her grip, all the while watching out for the grass and whatever plants surrounded him. Her four teammates were catching up. Swords clanged and swooshed, and soon enough, vines sprouted from the ground, threatening to bind Malcolm’s ankles. Malcolm sidestepped and jumped out of their reach. But a pull on his leg brought him to the ground. Cutting the vines, he rolled away and got back up to face his opponents.
“Do you really think you could take us all alone?” Trevor, a son of Tyche, said, delivering but a near miss to Malcolm’s arm.
“I mean, I can try,” Malcolm said. But who says I’m alone?
A daughter of Hermes narrowed her eyes. “This is obviously a trap,” she said to her teammates.
In Malcolm’s ear, he heard Rhode. “Can you draw the others out?” she said.
“Then too bad you don’t have backup,” Malcolm goaded to the opponents. He dodged their swings and retreated a bit. Rhode, he yelled in his mind. “I’m obviously the bait, aren’t I? Gotta give you credit, though.” Another dodge. Another sidestep. “These vines are impressive.”
“Hold on,” Rhode told him. “I’m trying to be discrete.”
“But if I could give you advice,” he said, dodging another blow, “you should hurry.”
Almost instantly, saltwater flooded an eight-meter radius around him and encased them all, Malcolm included. Yet, while the water pressure knocked his opponents aside, Malcolm remained standing. The wheezing and coughing dumbfounded demigods were no match for Rhode. Malcolm quickly disarmed them and, at his request, she remotely shipped them off.
“Thank you, Princess.”
“You’re welcome,” Rhode said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yes. The others are coming out now, I think?”
Arrows began flying and Porkpie swooped.
Yeah, I don’t think so. Maybe they’d seen her power, maybe they didn’t deem Rhode and him a threat.
He briefly wondered if Rhode would be okay but ultimately trusted that the daughter of Poseidon could handle herself on a pegasus. Let Hermes waste their arrows.
As Rhode feigned a retreat, executing a Parthian shot with her own strikes of water, Malcolm busied himself by dropping more petrified seashells on the ground.
Now… how to draw them out from the cover of the forest? Entice them? Force them? Could Rhode make it pour over them? But how much would that do when they were already shielded by trees? They could simply retreat further, too. Whatever the means, he’d have to figure it out quickly. Arrows were bound to aim his direction any second now. And out in the open, Malcolm was a liability.
If only he could offer them something they wanted. But there were no flags he could flaunt. And assuming he could draw the group out, the odds would stack against Hermes only if Malcolm could fight them little by little.
Ah! Aha!
“Rhode, can you fling a couple of them out here?” Malcolm said.
One after the other, two young demigods, chained in ropes of hardened water, were hurled out from the forest and into the clearing.
“Happy birthday,” said Rhode, gifting him the three-in-one package of honey, shield, and victim.
“Perfect.”
Malcolm held off on ending their swordfight until their teammates came out. Apollo’s kids aimed more arrows up at Rhode, but that was nothing a trusty grappling hook couldn’t fix. The demigods fell in Malcolm’s lasso.
“Are you familiar with Gaugamela?” Rhode asked.
“Yeah.”
But what of it?
Malcolm surveyed the scene.
The rivers? No, at this point, they’d be at the plains by the Tigris, not the Euphrates. She had said Gaugamela. And, presumably, they’d follow in the Macedonians’ footsteps, seeing as they’d won the battle? So, was it gaining the hill that the Macedonians won from Mazaeus? Well, Rhode and Porkpie already had the high ground. Were they to wait to attack as the Macedonians had? The Hermes team was better prepared, after all, and it wouldn’t bode well to storm the rich.
But why make Hermes think they were the Persians? Aside from the plentiful soldiers, Hermes’s side didn’t resemble the Persians’; unlike Darius’s troops, Hermes was still organized and well-trained. Unless Hermes were to think they themselves were in the Macedonians’ position? Why would Rhode then have chosen Gaugamela?
Malcolm realized it then. It didn’t matter to Rhode who was who. She gave herself and Malcolm every advantage both the Persians and Macedonians had enjoyed. Indian-trained war elephants? Strength in numbers? Her midair flood would surely do. And the two cavalry units she now controlled on either of Malcolm’s sides, as coordinated as the Macedonians’ and still stronger than Parmenion’s wing, could stretch farther than Hermes’s forces.
As soldiers approached, Malcolm’s heart pounded in heavy drum beats. He forced himself to breathe. Rhode was on his side. They could do this.
Malcolm envisioned the play: Left and right, the water would envelop their enemies, who’d fail to break Rhode’s encirclement. That would leave him to hold the center unit in place until Rhode could drive a wedge of water into the weakened enemy infantry—the infantry led by a son of Mercury, Bae Hyeong-min.
Of course it was Bae. Excellent choice.
As Rhode’s wall of water stretched in both directions, Hermes mirrored Rhode’s set-up simultaneously. The blue infantry plowed headlong at Malcolm. Malcolm fought one, two, three attackers. And another and another and yet another. He struck and retreated, charged and feinted, and— And, oh, whom was he kidding? What the hell was a one-man infantry? Surely he was the one tweaking.
Gaugamela had worked because Darius had fled in terror. But Bae wasn’t going to run like Darius. Bae had the skill and confidence. He would recognize all their tactics. Perhaps he had the brains to have outsmarted the greatest of the Argead kings. He’d anticipate their moves and figure out a way to—
It took all of Malcolm to stop catastrophizing. But as another Roman soldier joined the two currently occupying Malcolm, panic began to settle in. Someone from behind struck with a blow. Pain seared his left side. Two others approached. His grappling hook was gone. Bae was closing in. And Malcolm managed a plea for help.
In a matter of seconds, a force of water created a barrier between him and the soldiers, throwing back his attackers.
“Thanks,” he wheezed as he collected himself. “Bae. Dude in charge. Roman. He needs to go.”
“Who?” he heard in his left ear.
Malcolm groaned in his head. Did it even matter who? Surely, Rhode could attack them all?
“The guy on—”
“Throw a shell at him,” Rhode said.
Fishing for one of the remaining shells at his disposal, Malcolm pitched a shot at Bae’s chest as Rhode summoned the sea, shooting gallons of water in the son of Mercury’s direction. Dragged off his horse and made to trip over aqua ropes that encircled him, bye bye went Bae. Malcolm even took the time to watch and chuckle.
So… Darius didn’t flee, but the Achaemenid Empire would still fall.
Sorry, man.
With increasingly weary swings, Malcolm fought off the remaining soldiers who broke through Rhode’s cavalry, eventually resorting to use his grappling hook like a lasso to trip and tackle the enemy. One by one, Rhode kept them down and rounded them up to haul them out of the game.
Over and over, Malcolm inhaled into his searing lungs. He’d need at least a minute to recover. Porkpie’s hooves thudded on the grass beside him, and the pegasus kneeled to help Rhode off before galloping into the air.
“Porkpie left to help Percy,” she said, gesturing her head towards Long Island Sound, where, above the ship, the pegasi fought the drones that attempted to snatch the flags from the air.
Nothing to worry about. If Percy could obliterate the Williamsburg, he could totally deal with this.
“So, it looks like I’ll be on the ground now,” Rhode said.
Malcolm heaved and puffed again until he could manage proper breathing. “Just don’t ruin your dress, Princess,” he muttered.
“Okay, what now?” she said.
“Now, we pick more fights.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
As he and Rhode headed west into the forest, Malcolm ignored as best as he could the fact that one of four hands was busy lifting the train of a dress and that two of four eyes (and momentary glances from the other pair) were occupied to make sure that sharp twigs weren’t stepped on with sandals. But Rhode duly provided him with nectar—served in a glass of ice, no less—and Malcolm instantly felt better.
“Gaugamela,” he said quietly. “Good one.” He gave her a nod.
“Aléxandros would not shut up about it,” Rhode said nearly under her breath.
At the sight of a couple soldiers, Malcolm forced himself to rein in thoughts that she’d probably known the guy personally.
Sneaking into the shadows of denser thickets, he and Rhode spotted two nearby reds, squabbled at by three more reds. Malcolm and Rhode stayed put. Two screeches later, the Ares team parted ways.
Sans leader, sans base, how many different gangs had Ares split into now? Must’ve been roaming like pests all over the forest. Ugh, what a pain it would be to track them all down, no thanks to Rhode.
But a rustling of leaves followed, accompanied by swooshing and oofs, as a blue-helmed squad caught up to the smaller Ares bunch.
Luck must’ve been on Malcolm’s side.
Except was it really luck? True, Rhode might have made it more difficult to hunt down the dispersed factions, but didn’t that just make his job easier? The goal here, after all, was to drive them all out—Hermes and Ares—not to keep peace or save any lives.
Successful in their mission, the Hermes soldiers headed deeper into the forest, towards the larger of the Ares crews.
Neat. Hopefully, Hermes’s numbers would dwindle, too.
“I guess you deserve credit for how easy we have this,” Malcolm said to Rhode. “I’ll still say for the sake of Alicia’s safety that it wasn’t a risk that needed to be taken, but splitting up the enemy definitely helped.” That is, since the remaining Ares soldiers weren’t collectively intelligent enough to optimize decision-making.
Rhode seemed surprised at his admission.
Malcolm could’ve rolled his eyes. “My ego isn’t that big,” he said. Ego tended to lead to stupid decision-making, after all. “And I’ll appreciate any factor that’ll wrap up this game ASAP. This has to end soon. I have work to get to.”
“That’s a joke, right?” she said.
“Well, New Athens isn’t going to build itself, and I’m the city planner, the city manager, and the head of finance, so I have a constantly growing pile of things on my plate.”
Rhode turned towards him again. “So you’re the one running the ship. My father’s mentioned the developments.”
“He’s been helping the funding a lot as a patron god,” Malcolm said. “You can tell him thanks from me.”
Rhode’s gaze fixed on his. Bluer than grass, greener than the sky, dancing between teal and emerald… Malcolm still couldn’t pinpoint the color.
“I mean, I would,” Malcolm said, “but he’s obviously super busy, and I’m not just going to bother him....”
“I’ll tell him,” she said.
The two continued to stroll at Rhode’s pace in a covert pursuit of the enemy. But between the bright blues and oranges on Rhode’s dress and whatever flowery shampoo or soap he detected off her, there was no way they’d manage to remain hidden for long. Now, this is why she should’ve changed.
Let it go.
The clamoring soldiers were in view again, still heading north. “Shall we ambush them?” Rhode whispered.
Malcolm regripped his sword into a comfortable position. Rhode used a clip to get hair out of her face.
You can tie it.
“You ready?” he asked.
“You go left, I go right,” she said.
Before Malcolm and Rhode could even flank the blue team, the enemies had spotted her. Rhode conjured a wall of water, turning the flood into rows of spikes. The hoplites instantly switched their swords for spears.
Damn Hephaestus gear.
But, held in the middle, the opponents’ twelve-foot spears were effectively six feet long. Rhode’s, however, remained twelve, and they squiggled between the ranks, jabbing at the opponents in quick stabs and effectively splitting the phalanx. Yet, even with Malcolm’s efforts to cave them in from the other side, her strikes couldn’t hold back all the soldiers.
Catching Rhode’s wide eyes and retreating steps, Malcolm threw two petrified seashells to his left. A force of water that vaguely resembled something equestrian burst forth, trampling their opponents in a stampede. And with a deep breath, Rhode was poised once more.
“It’s more difficult when I have to hold myself back,” she said to Malcolm after they disarmed the remaining enemy and threw them into a new jail.
Malcolm wondered if the worst were over. In the next three minutes, he and Rhode ambled northward, seeing nothing but flora. Another minute passed and Rhode briefly paused to reposition her hair clip before resuming her stroll. Her eyes flitted down, left, right, and center—never behind for some reason, unless she counted on Malcolm to do that—all as she brushed her fingers through her long, black hair.
Two hands down, then.
Malcolm shut his eyes. Let it go.
“Does Capture the Flag typically get this anticlimactic?” asked Rhode.
Malcolm couldn’t help but snicker. “Sometimes.”
“I expected more of a frenzy. This is...”
“Boring.”
“I didn’t want to say that,” she admitted. “This has been going on for two days? It’s no wonder you want this to end.”
A full four minutes passed (Malcolm counted three more hair adjustments). Distracted by Rhode’s hair shenanigans and the heat, and wishing for more wind, his mind wandered. In his faraway state, his brain got to processing his current, nearly surreal reality: that he was in New York again, permanently at that, and was now sauntering through the woods with a goddess in order to help his siblings and Percy overthrow the camp. Who’d’a thought?
He found himself enraptured by how light could reflect off seemingly the blackest black instead of being absorbed by it. Oh, but then perhaps that wouldn’t be the blackest black. Or was it loads of conditioner that did the trick?
Thoughts then turned to eco-friendly ingredients. What also was the optimal way for New Athens to minimize plastic waste from the production and use of daily hygiene products? A recycling facility ought to be set up in the city, naturally. Maybe someone would also create a supermarket with product refills? But would that be more expensive for the company?
That wasn’t on him to deal with, however. And, of course, he’d have to focus on building the foundational base of the city before truly tackling specific environmental policies. What would be the results of the New Athenian effort to crowdsource the city constitution? Now that the round 1 surveys had been administered and the focus groups were wrapping up discussions—
Malcolm nudged Rhode’s arm and gestured to their left, from where a group of five gabby Hermes soldiers was approaching. His warning was pointless, however. Mariana Torres, a daughter of Aphrodite, spotted him and Rhode almost instantly.
“Hey, Malcolm,” another of them called out. Malcolm recognized him as one of Leo’s brothers, Suleiman Azikiwe.
“Yo.”
“Hello there,” Rhode said, shooting Mariana with her friendly smile. An almost subtle hair flip accompanied the greeting as she faced them.
A second of indecision provided Malcolm plenty of opportunity to steal a sword from Mariana and gave him time to prepare for a brawl from the rest.
Meanwhile, Aphro dude (Malcolm couldn’t for the life of him remember what his name was) practically glitched. “Uh, who in Hades are you?” he said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Rhode coquetted.
“Careful. That’s probably some trick,” Mariana reasoned—though her brother Mark Antony Flores didn’t seem to mind.
“Excuse me. I’m very much real,” Rhode said.
Aphro dude could barely believe his eyes. He stared at Rhode for an unhealthy amount of time, his gaze lingering at her chest in a way that pissed off Malcolm and embarrassed him for his own previous gaffe.
With no active defense anymore, Mariana was no match for Malcolm, who disarmed her easily. From his five o’clock, a sluggish Hypnos kid, whom Malcolm had almost missed, summoned the last of his energy to cast a sleeping spell. Malcolm shot out of the way and the curse hit Mariana instead.
Two down, three to go.
Suleiman paid no heed to the action. “Well, damn,” he said. “And I’ve seen Venus. No offense to your mom, Mark Antony.”
Get a grip, people.
“Mark Antony?” Rhode said. “I haven’t heard that name in a while. Nice name.”
“Ahaha, thanks,” beamed the teenager.
Malcolm concentrated on exploiting those moments of enemy hesitation that Rhode so effectively provided. Managing to round up the opps surrounding him to one side, he matched the three strike by strike, even knocking Suleiman to the ground.
“Oh, okay, we’re really fighting, huh?” Suleiman said.
No shit.
The brawniest of all parties by far, Aphro dude was the most difficult to manage. The other two, meanwhile, lacked experience; they had never faced war and probably hadn’t encountered many monsters. But Malcolm knew Suleiman could pack a mean strike and even baby-faced Mark Antony Flores could be a swift fighter. What were the odds he alone could beat all three?
Wait. Alone?
In his purview, Rhode was just standing there leisurely, her hand on her hip as though she had all the time in the world. What in Hades was wrong with her?
“You’re not gonna help anymore?”
“Sometimes I’d rather just watch,” Rhode replied, eyeing Aphro dude. “I like a man who can handle his own sword.”
The hell? Malcolm almost dropped his xíphos.
While the younger demigods laughed, Aphro dude spun his sword in his hand (as if that accomplished anything useful) and charged at Malcolm, trading off technique for greater force.
Seriously?
All Malcolm had to do was let him trip his unbalanced ass to the ground before disarming him.
Pathetic.
“Weight distribution,” Malcolm couldn’t help but point out. “You can do better than that.” But it didn’t matter anymore to the groaning face-planted demigod.
“Hey. So, um. However this ends,” Mark Antony said to Rhode, “would you— Whoa there, Malcolm!” The son of Venus just narrowly sidestepped a blow. “Would you be up for coffee or something sometime?”
Even Malcolm took a momentary pause to gawk at him. “Dude.”
“Shooting my shot,” Mark Antony said with a shrug and a glance at Rhode.
But Rhode frowned at him. “Are you even of age?”
Suleiman erupted in a snort. “He’s nineteen!”
Rhode apologized.
One caught in embarrassment, the other in laughter, it was so easy for Malcolm to steal their weapons and stick blades to each of their throats.
“Get out,” he growled.
“Well, that was easy,” Rhode said. She was still standing there, wearing a smirk. Malcolm chose yet again to ignore her.
“I like you,” Mark Antony said.
Rhode grinned. “I like your confidence. But I’m still too old for you.”
Meeting Malcolm’s disgruntled expression, Suleiman said, “Legit, we weren’t gonna beat you anyway.”
“Well, you barely tried. How would you know?” Malcolm said.
“Because I still have bruises from our Friday training!” Suleiman protested.
“And if you remember correctly,” Malcolm said, “it was Mark Antony who slammed his hilt onto you.”
“Yeah, but we were fighting you,” the culprit responded.
Amidst Malcolm’s reminders that the injury could’ve been avoided if they had simply been paying attention (to which they attempted to argue that the actual smart thing to do would have been to surrender before the fight had begun, right?), Rhode gave Suleiman an ice pack.
“Oh, shit! You’re a goddess!” Mark Antony exclaimed once introductions were finally made.
“And she’s Princess,” Malcolm added for some reason. Truth's sake or something.
The goggling only intensified.
Just as Malcolm and Rhode were about to throw them into a jail, Mark Antony swore on the Styx they’d walk themselves to a prison outside the forest (insisting he absolutely did not need to be escorted to make a pit stop along the way). The young demigod proceeded to haul his sister over his shoulder, leaving Suleiman to pick up the other two unconscious demigods. Gladly excusing themselves from the scene, Mark Antony and Suleiman jabbered to themselves about the latest video game craze.
Malcolm and Rhode departed in the opposite direction, heading deeper into the forest.
“They talk too much for battle,” she said.
“That’s their usual state. You’d think even if there aren’t as many monsters around, people would still take things seriously, but nope.”
That had been too easy. Well, of course it was, he realized. How different was this situation, really, to the girls who earned street cred by operating as their fellow gang members’ shields? At least Rhode could trust more fully that her rivals wouldn’t be as violent. See, maybe if she’d just told Malcolm her tactics in advance, he wouldn’t feel the need to question or push back on her most absurd decisions.... Although there was the matter of whether he’d even have approved such a plan. And even so, her ploy left him uncomfortable for more reasons than one.
“Did that feel like cheating to you?” Malcolm asked.
“It’s not our fault they’re too sexist to have wanted to fight me. Because I have a feeling they’d still go after unarmed, armorless men,” Rhode said. “And don’t complain. You have work, remember?”
If anything, the Malcolm had to appreciate the efficiency.
“I also would rather be sitting down right now,” she said, lifting her train even higher to step over a fallen branch and muttering about how much of a shame it was that she’d just gotten a pedicure.
But, unfortunately for Rhode, the Athena and Poseidon team received orders from Alicia to head towards the cliffs ASAP.
“So, ähm, I’m flying on Blackjack now,” the six-year-old said over comms. “I’m going to drop the smoke grenades. Mal and Ms. Rhode, please go right.”
“Aww, she’s so polite,” Rhode noted. “She even said ‘please’.”
But Malcolm was more concerned with the distance between them and their destination. “Can you run in those sandals?”
“Don’t be silly. I’m going on horse,” Rhode said, throwing a seashell in the air.
The saltwater sphere that burst out of the shell elongated and split in four at the bottom. Legs and hooves formed from the ball of water. Muscles outlined the haunches and torso of the horse. A tail and neck sprouted out.
“Can Percy do this, though?” Malcolm prodded.
Rhode groaned out a high-pitched sound that made Malcolm’s own throat hurt. Though he itched to take off in a run, he figured it’d be rude to leave her to fend for herself.
Rhode took a moment. Her water horse lost its head, its tail, and some height to its legs.
Malcolm raised a brow. “We’re wasting one shell on a chair?”
As Rhode took a seat and crossed her legs, the chair stretched to her left to a one-meter width. Malcolm gaped.
“Well, don’t just stand there like an idiot,” she said. “Hop on.” She patted the seat beside her.
“I literally cannot believe this,” he breathed. Seriously. How?
The moment he sat next to her, the sofa carried them eastward, out into the clearing, and whizzed north towards the beach. Yeah, this was so fucking weird.
“I look left, you look right?” Malcolm suggested.
Rhode shot him a momentary glance before taking heed. “I’ll pretend not to be offended that you claimed the useful task and gave me such a pointless one.”
“Well,” he tried, “you’re already dealing with the couch, so I gotta make myself useful somehow.”
“Fine.” She rested her chin on the upholstered back of the couch, eyes alert towards the empty clearing.
“For what it’s worth, there doesn’t appear to be anyone on this side either,” he said.
It took another 46 seconds of silence before he caught sight of fleeing opponents on their left. Rhode rotated her couch, and together she and Malcolm shot shells at their moving targets, reminding him of the time he and his mortal brother used those spring-action shooters on a Toy Story ride at Disney World.
A squad of arrowed enemies approached, their flinging weapons destroyed by Rhode’s makeshift shield. Two more shields took their opponents out.
Arriving near the cliffs, the duo rose from the trusty couch and regrouped with the other Athenians. Despite his internal warning system crying ‘DANGER’, Malcolm could freely run in with the comfort that a plan would be executed as optimally as could be allowed for. He easily fell into sync with his siblings, just as they’d practiced repeatedly during their group training. With forming, storming, and norming out of the way, all there would ever be left to do was perform.
Rhode tripped the enemy with her ropes of water, leaving Malcolm to disarm the soldiers and his younger siblings to shoo all those lacking. Annabeth and Claire, meanwhile, rounded in on the opponents wanting to brawl Conrad, who clenched the last flag, wrapped around his hand. But an arrow whizzed past the sisters, catching Conrad in the leg. He fell to the ground.
Annabeth swooped for Conrad’s thrown flag and ran.
Up on Blackjack, Alicia dropped Annabeth’s cap to Claire—but an Ares soldier tackled Claire nevertheless. As Malcolm came to her rescue, Rhode, Sophie, and Zeke molly-whopped the rest of the asses following Annabeth. Leap by leap, Annabeth neared the cliffs, still sending it up on the opps on her way. And in what seemed like slow motion, she ran off the edge.
Malcolm’s heart stopped. He knew it was her plan and he trusted Percy with her life, but—
“Annabeth?”
His sister’s voice filled the void in his left ear. “I’m fine.”
Malcolm let out his breath. The water had caught her. They had captured all four flags.
His other siblings quickly rounded up the remaining enemy. And in the time it took for Malcolm to raise his sword, Rhode tied up the five opponents around him. The only evidence she’d engaged in a fight was her windswept beach waves. Otherwise, she remained completely unscathed.
Ya couldn’t do that earlier?!
He gritted his teeth even more as Rhode straightened her dress (as though there were any wrinkles in it at all), looked him dead in the eye, and took a bow, concluding by flipping her hair over her head. Malcolm couldn’t make out the details, but it seemed he hadn’t imagined the ink on her shoulder.
Knowing for certain that her smirking face was about to spew something infuriating, he got his word in first: “Oh, Princess, you don’t have to bow to me.”
Rhode shot a disbelieving smile. “Do you feel so emasculated that you have to make some snide remark because I’m far more powerful?”
“I’m not emasculated,” he said. “Please. Continue to be my bodyguard. In fact, you can join the next game! I have better things to do than fight over cloths attached to sticks.”
“And you thought I couldn’t fight in a dress,” she said.
“Hey, you two,” Conrad said, limping a bit towards them, “we’re done. We won.”
Rhode rushed to give Conrad some nectar and Malcolm let his brother lean on him as Conrad caught them up with the rest of his siblings’ happenings.
Facing an empty clearing and a pile of felled opponents, none of them could hold back a smile at a mission accomplished. They really did it. They’d crushed the whole camp.
Gathering round the beach, the team exchanged cheers and high-fives. But were this not a simple game, Malcolm knew they’d have stopped long ago, given Conrad’s new injuries and the needless sacrifices of at least four pegasi. He hoped to Athena they’d never want to execute such an arrogant plan in real life. Surely, they were more Periclean than this game suggested.
“You know, I’m sure we could come up with a way to beat you if we wanted to,” Annabeth told Percy, even as she smiled at him.
“Normally, I would believe you, but I don’t know,” Percy said. “Rhode’s here, too. She could just protect me and wipe you all out with a snap of her fingers.”
“No one messes with my little brother on my watch,” Rhode said. “Not even you, Annabeth.”
“It’s younger brother,” Percy corrected.
“I met you when you were sixteen,” said Rhode, “so no matter how much you age, Percy, you’ll always be my little brother.” She kissed his cheek and proceeded to apologize as she wiped lipstick off his face.
The children of Athena and Poseidon agreed to leave it at that and revel in their shared glory. After all, this wasn’t simply a one-off game; a payoff matrix would conclude that a win wouldn’t be worth the loss of long-run trust.
The pegasi crowded around the Atlantian princess. “Well done, my sweets,” Rhode said, laughing as she hugged their necks and pecked their bashful faces.
At this point, all the now-released prisoners had caught on. Malcolm estimated seven-tenths were pissed off, four-tenths were impressed, a third was bored, a quarter was ravenous, and a tenth was unconscious (or perhaps napping).
“Oh my gods. This is so romantic,” squealed Valentina, a daughter of Aphrodite. If heart eyes could be communicated in real life, she proved it.
But others were of a different opinion—including her own Roman brother, Pravir Bhattacharya, who grumbled about broken rules.
“There’s no rule that says that non-demigod siblings can’t join,” Zeke pointed out.
More complaints of overpowered players were had, and the children of Athena thoroughly refuted their points. Some even threatened to invite their godly siblings to the upcoming games. But in their planning, neither Malcolm nor his siblings had seriously considered the long-term risk of setting a precedent for godly participation—because, of course, it would only be an issue if other godly siblings could give a shit.
Rhode surveyed the protesting opponents before them. “And now I’m making enemies,” she murmured to Percy.
“They don’t really hate you and you never have to work with them, so we’re all good,” Percy said.
Betrayals happened often in Capture the Flag anyway; almost all were forgotten within the week. The other campers were also probably more interested in a hearty meal and a nap right now.
“What work do you do, Ms. Rhode?” asked Alicia.
Thankfully, someone voiced the question. Malcolm didn’t want to be the one who asked. He’d just focus on making it over to Cabin Six with Conrad’s weight on his right.
“Princessly duties,” Rhode replied.
“What does that entail?” Sophie asked.
Yeah, what does that entail? Sitting on a throne, dressing up, and looking pretty?
“Gaining soft power by building and maintaining relationships with sea deities, facilitating trade deals, conducting peace talks, mediating issues between parties in conflict…” Rhode said.
Oh. Huh. Okay. Wow.
To be fair, though, mortal princesses didn’t exactly have those roles. Royalty was just a show and a tourist attraction. But that didn’t lessen Malcolm’s guilt or shame.
“Plus, I get to throw my own party in Atlantis every year, which I will make sure to invite you all to,” Rhode said.
“Lord Poseidon would allow children of Athena to visit Atlantis?” asked Alicia.
“Annabeth’s visited several times,” Rhode said. “And Babás won’t say no to me.”
“Anything for his favorite daughter,” Percy said.
“Favorite child,” she teased, sticking her nose up at him.
“As you deserve to be,” he said, throwing an arm around Rhode and squeezing her shoulders.
“No. I can always share the title with you, Percy,” she said.
Yet again, Malcolm was forced to do a 180 then another 180. Either Rhode was such an inconsistent character, or he was terrible at judging. Maybe both, but he vowed he’d be less prejudiced. He’d have to observe first before coming to concrete conclusions. That’d do him some good. (And he could deal with the cortisol.)
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
To celebrate their win, the Athenians decided to throw a party in Cabin Six—their version of a party at least, which involved playing board games over olives and afternoon tea.
When their new Atlantian friend opted to stay for their festivities, Malcolm wondered if she’d realized they didn’t have the same definition of “party”. It was jarring to see her in the cabin, where that fancy dress clashed even more noticeably with simple Tees. But while Rhode passed on the sencha and olives, taking instead a coffee and some ambrosia, if she felt like she didn’t fit, she didn’t let it show.
Malcolm eyed his computer and notes but ultimately put thoughts of work aside to partake in a game of Risk, during which Rhode perhaps made it a point not to mess with him. As relieved as he was, he was more annoyed by her suboptimal moves… before he caught onto her play of diplomacy and followed suit. Conrad probably would’ve won regardless.
Clusters of conversations then formed across the cabin. As Annabeth, Zeke, and Conrad discussed the physics of javelin throws, and Claire, Sophie, and Rhode deliberated over Atlantian energy policy, Malcolm inconspicuously observed Percy and Alicia’s chat in an attempt to understand how the son of Poseidon took on childcare. It must’ve been a superpower of Percy’s that not only did he never feel awkward around these little creatures, he could even magic away the reservations of even the shyest of them.
“Alicia, you were incredible out there!” Percy said. He looked up at her face from his crouched stance. “Blackjack says you flew amazingly.”
The littlest of the Athenians beamed. “It’s easier now. It was weird wearing Annabeth’s cap. But it was fun. I used the other smoke grenades and the Ares team was really confused and before they knew it, we caught them! Did you see?”
“I did!” Percy told her. Uncontainable wonder burst from his eyes. “And because you did that, we could get the last flag and win the game! They totally didn’t know what they were getting into, going against you. They just fell or ran out because of the smoke! That was you! Your mom and dad would be proud.”
Alicia’s head bowed. “You think so?” she mumbled.
“I know so,” Percy said with the kind of affection unknown to godly parents. “I know we’re all proud of you. Ask anyone here. You. Were. Awesome.” He winked and spread out his arms.
Alicia filled the empty space and let him embrace her before being summoned by Claire, who heaped yet more praise upon her.
Child of Athena’s rival be damned, Percy already seemed like part of the family. A permanent fixture in all their lives. Catching his classic doe-eyed expression fix on Annabeth, Malcolm figured that maybe Percy could be officially—not that he wasn’t, but... maybe under the law….
Making his way to him, he told Percy quietly, “I think she actually wants you to ask her at some point.”
Percy huffed air from his nose. “This again? Malcolm, me asking her isn’t going to change anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” Percy said. “It might even offend her.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m willing to bet a hundred bucks that you’re wrong.”
Percy went silent, his sea green eyes entirely unreadable. “Will you really?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Percy surveyed Annabeth. “You’re gonna be so mad at yourself,” he said quietly. “I’ll prove you wrong. Then I’ll get to say ‘I told you so’ and collect my winnings.” Before Malcolm could argue back, Percy carried his voice across the room: “Hey, Annabeth?”
Oh, dear gods.
He wasn’t seriously— Why did he—? Curse the spontaneity of Poseidon’s children.
Annabeth’s head turned in her boyfriend’s direction, and without missing a beat, Percy asked, “Can I marry you?”
His words caught the attention of the entire cabin. As shocked as she looked, Annabeth’s lips curved into a smile—much to Malcolm’s relief.
See?
“Malcolm thinks that if I try to ask you again, you’ll change your mind,” Percy explained. “So I just wanted to check. Can I marry you?”
Her eyes flitted confusedly to Malcolm before she faced Percy. “Yeah,” said Annabeth. “Yeah, you can.”
Bingo! Malcolm's smile morphed into a broad, cheek-aching grin.
There was a collection of shocked gasps and squeals as the witnesses clutched onto each other’s limbs. “Oh my gods! Did he just—? Did she just—? Did they just—?”
“See?” Percy told Malcolm. “Nothing’s changed, so you owe us a hundred bucks.”
Malcolm’s brows furrowed. “But Annabeth just said—”
The gears in his brain were turning. Come to think of it, what played out actually didn’t square with what Annabeth and Percy had told him. ‘It’s not something we’re going to do.’ ‘Nothing’s changed.’
Malcolm closed his eyes. O theoí. Athena forgive me. “You were already engaged.”
“Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!” Percy said.
Amidst the chorus of gobsmacked what?s that erupted, Malcolm cursed himself.
“So disappointing, man,” Percy said. “I mean, you literally had to have it spelled out for you.”
“Just get over here.” With elation that far overpowered his internal groaning, Malcolm pulled Percy into a congratulatory hug until it was Rhode’s turn to smother her brother.
“I can’t believe you kept this from me!” she exclaimed.
Percy just laughed.
Once Annabeth finally escaped their siblings’ hounding, she wrapped her arms around an ever so patient Percy’s neck and pecked his lips. (There really wasn’t much they could do in Cabin Six.)
“I just won you a hundred bucks from Malcolm,” Percy told her. “And I’d give you the ring officially, but I know you already stole it from the cabin. You thief.”
“Is it really considered thievery if it’s mine?” Annabeth said. As she laughed, she pulled a ring out from a long necklace she wore under her shirt and held it out to Percy.
Siblings crowded around as the honors were done, both by him and her. Because, of course, Annabeth had her own ring to exchange—one she’d stored in a locked utilitarian box in her drawer in the cabin library.
It’d been there all along, Malcolm thought. It could’ve probably even been there when he’d had that talk with her.
“When did you get engaged?” Malcolm asked.
“It was... a while ago,” Percy admitted.
Annabeth took his hand. “You do remember, right?” she teased.
Percy rolled his eyes and gave her a look as if to say, Are you serious? “Your birthday,” he said.
“Her birthday?” Rhode said. “Aww! That’s so sweet!”
But...
“Wait. You mean her birthday that’s two days from now?” said Conrad.
“Fun fact: July 12th isn’t exclusive to this year,” said Percy.
He had to be kidding.
“You’ve been engaged for a year?” said Sophie.
“And you didn’t tell anyone?” said Zeke.
“You know,” Annabeth said, “July 12th isn’t exclusive to this year or the last.”
Their jaws dropped in unison. Malcolm was the first to speak. “You’re shitting me.”
“Language,” said Annabeth. “There are kids present.”
Malcolm’s other siblings weren’t having it either. “What in Hades? You asked Annabeth to marry you two years ago?” said Conrad.
“And she said yes?” said Claire.
Hold on. Malcolm wasn’t following anymore. Hadn’t Annabeth not allowed Percy to propose?
“No,” Percy said. “Two years ago, Annabeth asked me to marry her, and I said yes. I was going to ask, but she just had to rudely”—he mock-glared at her as she smirked at him—“interrupt me and propose to me herself.”
“We did just get the rings though,” said Annabeth.
“But...two years ago?” said Claire, looking almost betrayed. “That’s insane! Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Okay, we were only twenty-one and twenty,” Annabeth said. “It was obviously going to happen anyway, so it didn’t actually matter how young we were. We were talking about our future one day, and we acknowledged we were definitely going to get married. So, technically that meant we already were engaged. So, why not make it official? But we didn’t want everyone to be all weird about it, so we just kept it between us.”
Makes sense.
“I’m sure Athena and Poseidon knew,” said Percy.
“Oh whoa, whoa! Did you ask for her permission? I would have paid to see that,” said Zeke.
“I didn’t ask for her permission,” Percy said. Then even more strainedly, he added, “I just asked her not to kill me when I’d eventually ask. But, of course, I didn’t even get to do that.”
Snorts and restrained giggles abounded from everyone but Rhode at the image of their stern mother impatiently staring down a stuttering Percy.
“You’re all laughing now, but it really wasn’t funny then,” Percy said.
Oh, Percy. Precious Percy.
Gods, Malcolm couldn’t rein in his grin. This was a moment he decided to commit to memory—with Alicia chattering cheerily, Zeke gaping and giggling intermittently, Sophie laughing louder than she’d typically let herself, Conrad lazing among them, and Claire emitting her rare squeals. Malcolm’s own state was reflected off Rhode, whose expression didn’t indicate surprise or glee as much as a happy solace. Maybe that was what came with the job as an older sibling to demigods.
And, of course, there was Annabeth and Percy, ever more loving and loved. Sharing grins as Percy kissed her temple, they looked like they were privy to secrets between only them. It was something Malcolm had envied at one point and another, but Annabeth deserved her secrets with him. They deserved their bubble, their tower, of just them. And after all the hell they’d been through—the figurative hells, the actual hell, the literally-worse-than-hell hell, and the post-hell hell—they deserved their happily ever after. On and off the battlefield, Malcolm knew Annabeth and Percy made a great team. There was honestly nothing that would come between them, and even as an unromantic cynic, Malcolm believed that.
And you know what? Malcolm was only happy to part with a hundred bucks. Heck, he’d throw in a nice engagement gift, too.
Parting momentarily from her fiancé, Annabeth faced Malcolm with shining eyes and he enveloped her in another tight hug.
“Congratulations. I—” He couldn’t find the words. Could he even talk with a smile so wide?
Annabeth's joy burst into laughter as she reciprocated his embrace.
“I’m so happy for you,” Malcolm said. A glance at Percy reminded him what this meant for her. “Another something permanent,” he whispered in her ear.
Annabeth’s head bobbed a smidge. Her breath had a shudder about it. “Kópros. Don’t make me cry, Malcolm.”
Her body rocked at its foundations as she gripped him tighter. And when she looked at him—bit lip constraining her smile, brows twitched ever so slightly, radiant gray eyes unusually soft—Malcolm could sense it off her: excitement… relief… and gratitude.
Yeah, Malcolm told her. Yeah, Annabeth. Anytime.
“Oh! You know what this means?” Zeke bellowed with the cabin’s trademark bright eyes that threatened to release a mental barrage.
“What?”
“We have a wedding to plan!”
Notes:
As mentioned above: Help finalize the Values of New Athens! Fill out this quick survey!
The patient will be rewarded at 38. 😘
Delphians are warning of drama on the 17th. ⚖️
Chapter 3: In which Malcolm uses his social skills
Notes:
I hope all of you are doing well.
To sracha1713 and plexus. My, my, you are angels. I’d been feeling quite awful recently. Writing helped. And sharing this is even more rewarding and posting is less anxiety-inducing when I see comments like yours. (Seriously, I was afraid I’d be boring people.) It’s just super lovely to know people are enjoying this story. Ugh! I really can’t contain my joy right now!
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics). Also, non-English text and translations will only appear if "Creator's Style" is not hidden.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Sitting on the big secret for the rest of Sunday was an absolute pain. But the Athenians’ knowing grins and bursts of laughter could at least be excused away as prideful triumph. They only needed to hold it in until Monday morning.
At the “Athena” table in the dining pavilion, Annabeth and Percy—both ringless for now—gathered round their usuals for breakfast. Grover, Piper, Hazel, Frank, and Rachel had filed in. They were just waiting for Nico, who had probably been busy smooching Will, and for Leo, who had probably spent another night breaking curfew in the Cabin Nine bunker.
In the meantime, Malcolm cut up some basil while Annabeth salted and Percy peppered a mound of smashed avocado, letting Alicia dash in some lemon juice before their siblings spread the avocado on a dozen toasts.
“Gooood morning, peeps!” Leo exclaimed, leaning on Malcolm’s shoulder to squeeze in between him and Grover.
“Leo, I’m holding a knife,” Malcolm said.
“My bad.” Then Leo groaned long and loud. “I am so sore.”
That’s what he said.
“Did you remember to stretch?” said Annabeth.
Leo shut up. Malcolm sent him a look and sighed, proceeding to place pan-seared cherry tomatoes on top of the avo-ed toast.
“When will he learn?” Annabeth asked her brother.
Beside her, Alicia giggled in her glass of orange juice.
“Careful not to choke,” Percy warned delicately.
Leo reached for a sandwich. Annabeth swatted away his hand.
“These are taken,” she said. “And those are for Athena and Poseidon.”
With that, she and Percy left momentarily to make the sacrifices on their and Cabin Six’s behalf.
Malcolm took two-fifths off his triple decker. “Here. Munch on this,” he said. “You can make me another.”
Leo turned to him. “Have I ever told you you make the best avo toast?”
“Better replicate it then. And don’t forget the basil,” Malcolm said.
Leo, of course, had to take it upon himself to construct a quadruple decker. For efficiency’s sake, Malcolm lent a hand.
“So, why are we gathered here today?” Leo asked.
Immediately, Malcolm took a big bite of toast. Around him, his siblings either pretended not to hear or invested more attention to their breakfast and intra-cabin conversations. Malcolm chewed slowly, denying his urge to satisfy his grumbling belly from his morning run.
“Yeah, why are we here?” said Rachel.
“Mm...” Malcolm bobbled his head. He chewed even slower.
Thankfully, Annabeth and Percy returned soon enough, accompanied by Will and Nico (who was still raising complaints about yesterday’s game).
Malcolm occupied himself with his breakfast, taking smaller and smaller bites. Trepidation and anxiety bloomed within him as Annabeth began to speak.
He watched the leftover betrayal and pride morph into surprise and elation and then into confusion and betrayal yet again, and soon enough—
“SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!” Leo bellowed, just decibels away from deafening Malcolm’s left ear.
Malcolm flinched violently to his right, bonking his skull onto Claire’s. Both siblings yelped and clutched their heads.
“Indoor voice, Leo!” Malcolm gritted. “Holy Hades.”
Leo laid a kiss on his own fingers and covered both Malcolm’s ears before facing Annabeth and Percy once more. “Why didn’t I know this was a thing?” came Leo’s muffled bellow.
“Well, w—” Annabeth began.
“You?” Rachel screeched at Leo from across the table. “Forget you! How did I not see this?” Her shoulders slumped at the pace she lips formed a pout. “I lost my bet, you guys.”
And so had everyone else, who, across the pavilion, responded in too much clamor and confusion, leaving Chiron to immediately issue an informal PSA on the dangers of gambling. Since the bettors had brought it upon themselves, all losses, the centaur suggested, could be surrendered to Ásylo, an Atlantian marine conservancy organization, whose local branch was run by none other than Percy himself.
Rachel was consoled by one thing, however: “Let it be known,” she declared, complete with pointer in the air, “that I am the only person who has ever dumped this no-longer-eligible bachelor.”
“You and Percy never dated, Rachel,” Conrad reminded her, earning him thanks from said no-longer-eligible bachelor.
Rachel waved a hand. “Pfft. What does that matter? I still dumped him,” she said.
“You kissed him, too,” Annabeth added.
“Oh, yeah. I forget about that,” Rachel said with a faraway look.
“That bad, huh?” Annabeth said.
Oof, Malcolm thought, even as he snickered.
Percy shot Annabeth a look. “Why are you in on this?”
The ladies ignored him. “He pretty much just stood there,” Rachel complained. “That was it.”
“I know what you mean,” Annabeth said. “It was the exact same in Mount St. Helens. Like, kiss me back, Seaweed Brain.” Ultimately, guilt overpowered humor, and Annabeth reached for his cheek. “I love you.” Their lips met again.
Of course. There had to be a gazillion more public mouth-sucking episodes. Malcolm glanced away momentarily, deciding instead to face the simmering son of Hephaestus beside him.
“Let it go,” Malcolm said. “I didn’t know either, ‘kay?”
“But they basically li—”
“Yeah.”
“But—”
“Zip it. They can do whatever they want.”
Leo's tense muscles eased as he sighed. “Then for all we know now, he could’ve already knocked her up,” he muttered.
Annabeth’s mouth flew open. “Are you going to test that theory again, Valdez?”
Percy was on the verge of laughter. “Are you gonna bet on that, too?”
Leo sulked. He threw an arm around Malcolm’s shoulders and pulled himself close enough for Malcolm to detect his cinnamon-flavored chapstick. “You wouldn’t lie to me,” Leo said.
“Why would I lie to you?” Malcolm responded.
Leo shook his head at Annabeth and Percy. Malcolm just knew his sister was holding back an eye roll. Give Leo half a day. There was a high chance he’d be the most obnoxiously gleeful of the bunch.
Frank and Hazel, of course, elatedly gave standard (read: socially acceptable) responses. Grover, meanwhile, was still caught up in his bout of tears. He could barely find the words.
“Finally! Finally!” was all the satyr could manage.
“We want you to be our officiant,” Annabeth told him.
“What?” Grover croaked. His near sobs nearly drowned out Annabeth's voice.
“Can you be the one to marry us?” Percy said.
The crying only intensified. “You guys! You guys!” Grover half-trotted towards the couple and buried in a bone-crushing hug.
Piper actually squealed. “Mom is going to be so happy.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
“Uncle Leo, did you find out what was wrong with the engine?” Alicia looked up at him on their way from the pavilion to the Cabin Nine bunker.
By now, Leo had actually stopped pouting and had already been brainstorming congratulatory presents for the couple. And Malcolm remembered once more that Leo’s monkey business was, in large part, performed purely for his friends’ entertainment.
“I was thinking you could help me figure that out, Allie Ballie. And next time, we can show your big brother how to assemb—” Leo faltered. “Uh. Hah. Uh.”
Malcolm turned to the source of Leo’s dreamy gaze and had his words knocked out of him. Cortisol levels spiked at the sight of a damn good looker clothed in black jeans and a T-shirt under a zippered blazer. Entranced with shiny waves of obsidian, Malcolm wondered how on earth she’d made it through Camp Half-Blood’s boundaries.
How’d she managed to get even prettier was another question. It didn’t seem to be the understated albeit perfect makeup. Yet there was also something totally off. Gone were her determined eyes—typically too busy for anyone and anything outside her focus. For some reason, she was... crying? And fanning her face? With... a roll of paper streamers?
“My babies are getting married!” Aphrodite’s voice carried across the outdoor deck of the dining hall. “Oh! I’ve never been so happy!”
Malcolm shook his brain out of its daze and tried not to be disappointed by what had so obviously been an illusion from the get-go. Texting was a thing anyway, and it was always a delight to see the literally—and truly, literally—stunning goddess of love and beauty.
Aphrodite’s features then shifted from one Rihanna look to another. Malcolm was embarrassed and guilty to have seen a former instructor—so much so that it was a relief to see a co-leader in battle and a friend of friends. At least it made sense to see some resemblance of Reyna (no matter the impossibility).
“Remind me again who she looks like to you,” said Leo, situating Malcolm in his present setting.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Malcolm said.
“Man, you know that’s not an answer.”
“Allie, what are we going to work on today aside from the engine?” Malcolm asked.
Alicia, too, glanced away from Aphrodite. “Can we fix the sound engineering of the, ähm, you know when the door closes and it sounds cushy?”
“Yeah, we can do that,” Malcolm said. “Do you have any ideas on how we can get a cushier sound?”
As Alicia discussed techniques, Leo tsked, tsked, tsked beside him. Malcolm tried his best to ignore him and congratulated himself on reining in any flushes. Leo could probably guess correctly anyway—not that that would change anything.
Malcolm himself wondered what if his friend still saw a certain someone. Did she, say, have light-brown hair? It annoyed him and he knew it. But, oh well. One couldn’t help who one was attracted to.
Malcolm took one last look at Aphrodite. True enough, in spite of Aphrodite’s audible wails, he spotted a hint of mischief. He knew he’d be gazing into dark-brown eyes had they not faced the other direction. He kept looking. Aphrodite’s elfish, slender figure gained muscle. Short, curly dark hair became a glossier black. The plain t-shirt turned into a purple toga. But no. Not yet.
Forcing himself through a self-inflicted slight pang, Malcolm willed himself to see someone else. Forest green v-neck on dark skin. Sleek and ponytailed. Thick-browed, jaw set certitude. She appeared in glances, but the image Aphrodite offered was never quite right.
Or had he already forgotten?
Nah, he couldn’t have.
Before Aphrodite morphed again, Malcolm turned away from half-empty promises of co-authorships and a someday.
As Aphrodite’s attendants rushed to hand her a handkerchief, Malcolm directed his full attention to Alicia and led them away.
Leo followed, and Malcolm thanked the Fates that the goddess of love was preoccupied with more pressing matters to have the capacity to mess with the love lives of other residents of Camp Half-Blood.
“How’s my makeup?” Malcolm heard Aphrodite ask those around her. “Is my mascara running? No? Oh, thank the gods for waterproof makeup. Oh wait. I invented it. Oh, I must’ve known this moment would come. This must be the best day of my life.” She continued chattering about “the greatest love story that ever was” and how “not even Helen and Paris compare.”
“I heard that Annabeth’s first words to him were ‘He’s the one. He must be,’” said the new campers, all gaspy and giggly as the older demigods regaled them with stories of Percy and Annabeth.
Nearby, Piper eagerly expressed that seeing their relationship helped her change the Aphrodite cabin’s rite of passage from breaking someone’s heart—
Ew.
—to *ahem*... “making someone’s heart whole.”
Oh, what bullshit.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
But Lovey Dovey Fest continued until Tuesday. A birthday and engagement party needed to be prepared, after all. Even working and teaching couldn’t drown out the syrup. While designing studies with Bae and Chiara Benvenuti and the rest of the stats gang, conversations launched into talk of romance and weddings. Nevertheless, reprieve came in the form of a family brunch party that the Blofises held for Annabeth’s birthday in their Manhattan home.
Seventeen people crowded in the dining and living rooms: the couple, the six other Athenians, two other children of Poseidon, the three Blofises, and the four other Chases who’d flown in from Cali.
Malcolm braced himself for the inevitable intros. It was harder to do while momentarily cut off from Annabeth and Percy and the Blofises. So Malcolm indulged himself in a healthy dose of Sally’s cookies as he watched the Chases make heart-eyes at Alicia.
“What’s your name, sweetie?” said Dr. Chase.
Alicia mumbled her name, a third of her behind Claire’s legs.
“Sorry?”
“Alicia.”
“Alicia,” Mrs. Chase tested the name, getting confirmations from the Athenians. “How old are you, Alicia?”
“Six,” said Alicia.
“Yeah. Six,” Claire told them.
The Chases aww-ed.
“She turns seven in four months,” Malcolm let himself blurt out, looking directly at Frederick Chase.
“Oh,” Dr. Chase said, his voice nearly an octave higher than his normal register.
Malcolm waited to receive a nudge from Claire—but he felt no taps on his back, and Frederick Chase had blinked first and already looked away. The man’s head bobbed, his fingers twitching with the bag of goodies in his grip.
The five steely stares that fixed on Dr. Chase only relented when the resident dark-haired girl skipped in between them, landing with a jump in front of the littlest of the Athenians.
“Allie!” Estelle Blofis beamed. “Do you wanna come play with me? Mommy and Daddy said I can show you a new jigsaw puzzle we finished.”
Dr. Chase’s face contorted yet more.
Malcolm held back a huff. Bless you, Estelle.
Alicia took Estelle’s outstretched hand and let her lead her away.
“How’s your doll collection now, Stell?” Conrad asked loudly.
Estelle swiveled around, unknowingly dragging a slightly disoriented Alicia with her. “Do you wanna see? Archie the Urchin has a new friend now!”
“Does he? Can we see them, too?” Malcolm feigned the excitement required for a child.
Estelle nodded at him in a frenzy.
Once three meters away, Conrad grunted a snort in Malcolm’s ear. In front of them, Sophie covered her mouth, and Zeke coughed as his shoulders shook.
“That’s it, ‘kay?” Claire said. “I don’t think Annabeth would want today to...”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” Malcolm promised.
“I mean, maybe another time,” Claire frowned.
Fat chance. Their next opportunity would probably be the wedding.
But lest his stubborn temper rise, lest practiced shower tirades spill out, lest any bitterness or boorishness ruin a celebration, Malcolm stuck to his siblings, Percy, Percy’s parents, Tyson, and, hell, even Rhode, who just... stunned him.
A train-less, patternless dress today, he noted. Far more functional an outfit than what she’d worn during Capture the Flag. The extra curliness of today’s hair wouldn’t exactly have helped (and it seemed awful to take issue with her Greek genes) but guess what.... She’d frickin’ bunned it. For brunch. And yet, not for a battle! Malcolm chided himself on still being hung up about that. It wasn’t like it mattered anymore. (But gods!)
“I extended your thanks to Poseidon,” Rhode told him across the kitchen island as they and Sophie took over setup duties.
“Uh, thanks,” Malcolm said, pausing his cutlery distribution to meet her eyes. “Thank you. How’s Atlantis?”
“Well, thank you,” Rhode smiled.
The eyes matched the beam. They were brighter now than Sunday, he noticed. It wasn’t just random, now was it?
“We’re putting together a festival right now,” she said. “People tend to be quite jubilant this time of year. And they’re extra happy for Percy this time around....”
Once he put more effort into ignoring any damned cortisol spikes and into not caring to figure out everything he couldn’t understand or pinpoint, he found he could quite easily participate in conversations with Rhode about the architecture of the Atlantian palace and, more generally, the kingdom she helped to govern.
“Oh! Rhode,” said Sophie, “I also looked into the hydropower issues you were telling me and Claire about. Has Atlantis found effective ways to deal with the methylmercury from dam reservoirs?”
“Somewhat,” said Rhode. “It’s also not just from damming, though. A lot of the methylmercury comes from general atmospheric emissions—say, from volcanoes, mines, and”—she grumbled—“especially coal-fired power plants. All that can be trickier to deal with. But, with dams in particular, our scientists—and mortal scientists, too—think that it helps to remove soil with high carbon concentration and to increase levels of oxygen or iron in water.”
The two Athenians listened intently.
“See, in the air,” said Rhode, “mercury is mostly harmless. It’s when the soil (with inorganic mercury) is underwater that it’s exposed to less oxygen. And when there’s less oxygen, the inorganic mercury will be more likely to ‘methylate’, therefore making it highly poisonous.”
“And that methylation process is caused by iron-reducing and sulfate-reducing bacteria,” said Sophie. “I read that at least.”
Rhode smiled at her. “Yes, that’s right. And also poisoned microorganisms like plankton.”
Sophie nodded. Malcolm could tell she was dying to write it on her phone. Alas, her hands were occupied with divvying up cookies onto various plates, so he made sure to log in his brain as much as he could on what Rhode had to say about demethylation and reductions in the bioavailability for methylation. He just knew Sophie would pull him into a debrief later. And, yet again, she’d probably be altering her study plan if she was already working on assignments two months early.
Malcolm then realized he’d zoned out a bit when Rhode had stopped talking. So much for helping his sister. Where were they now?
Rhode was staring straight ahead of her, yet way past him. A dark storm had formed in the goddess’s irises. How could they be described? Haunted? Haunting? Both?
“It’s deteriorated merpeople’s nervous systems,” she gritted. She took a deep, audible breath and let out a long sigh, refocusing then on wrapping cutlery into napkins. “Mortals are even less accustomed. They can suffer more from the neurotoxicity. It can particularly harm fetuses, causing paralysis, limb deformities, physical growth disorders, intelligence disorders, impaired vision, potentially also ADHD.... So many things.”
“I’m assuming Atlantis monitors methylmercury concentrations in different species?” Malcolm said. “How’s that going?”
“We’ve been trying to map them to food webs, also to see impacts on interconnected ecosystems,” she said as he forced himself to meet her eyes. “It’s not looking good, if I’m honest.”
The problem was that it was just difficult to process every word. You know, as it could be, generally speaking, with such direct eye contact.
Students’ eyes shouldn’t follow the professor around the room. That’s how you know they’re not really present, his father had once noted. (That was also how Malcolm knew who wasn’t paying attention in his classes at camp.) But, surely, one should be able to pay attention in one-on-one conversations, because eye-contact was impor—
Methylmercury. Monitoring. Mapping.
“—no easy solutions,” said Rhode, “and still no consensus on what’s the ideal response.” She looked down again to count the dressed up utensils. “Even mitigating already done damage seems impossible. Fish and other creatures that happen to be poisoned with high concentrations of mercury aren’t quarantining themselves or they don’t even know if they’ve been infected, so they’re, in turn, infecting anyone who happens to eat them. The effects also build up higher up the food chain.”
“Bioaccumulation,” said Malcolm.
Rhode faced him again, hesitating before she responded. “Yes. Per organism, I guess you could say. Or per trophic level. Biomagnification up the chain.”
“Intra versus inter.”
“Yes. Both.”
“I see.”
“So, apex predators are more at risk than prey,” Sophie remarked.
“Funny that, isn’t it?” said Rhode. “So, rule of thumb,” she said. “Avoid eating fish that are larger and have longer life expectancies. Big eye tuna, ahi tuna, king mackerel, sea bass, yellowtail, marlin, swordfish, tilefish, sharks...”
Malcolm wasn’t going to remember all that. That was okay. He didn’t eat fish.
“And the accumulation happens because—” Rhode turned to Sophie again. “You’ve probably come across this in your research. Unlike inorganic mercury, methylmercury is so easy to absorb. It’s almost entirely absorbed by the organism consuming another infected organism. Methylmercury is also difficult to get rid of. It stays in living beings. It doesn’t quite get excreted. It builds up.”
“Yeah, I read that the half-life of methylmercury is something like seventy days,” Sophie said. “And ecosystems can experience elevated methylmercury levels for... decades?”
“And yet,” said Rhode, “not everyone wants to or can evacuate from highly infected communities. As for those who do, we ultimately have to consider the politics of the neighboring communities and how livable those habitats are.”
“How big are the evacuation zones?” said Sophie.
“Oh, huge,” Rhode said. “But then that has a negative impact on the ecosystems, which, of course, can’t be sustained if abandoned.”
“And fish travel. Those food webs must be complicated then,” mused Sophie.
“I could show you those models and maps,” said Rhode. “It’s certainly complicated. It makes testing and contact tracing all the more difficult. And, slowly but surely, we’ve built up testing capacity and tracing capabilities. But, unfortunately, there’s been a little bit of pushback due to privacy concerns in some areas. Marine communities are quite independent. Atlantis tries not to interfere when uncalled for. So, as one might expect, the situation demands some compromise and creative political maneuvering.”
“Does it involve moves like throwing that game of Risk?” Malcolm said. “You didn’t need to do that, by the way.”
“I think I can do whatever I please, thank you,” said Rhode.
There was no bite to her words or her expression or her glance—not even a hint—yet Malcolm’s instincts detected something. Was it amusement? Was it annoyance? Something else?
“I was only curious to see if you’d beat Conrad. He’s the best at Risk,” he said before looking away.
“Did you feel guilty for attacking my troops?” she said.
While Sophie ducked her head, Malcolm’s turned sharply up. “Is that why you did it?” he said quietly.
As Rhode opened her mouth, Sally came by to fetch the plates of snacks. Sophie eagerly followed at her heels.
“It was just a question,” Rhode said.
A hint of animosity lingered in the air nevertheless. Perhaps his bias must’ve been coming through from remnants of their arguments previous. Malcolm wondered if his other siblings felt some sort of side effect of their parents’ rivalry when around her. Or was it all just in his head?
Out of spite of some sort and for Annabeth and Percy’s sakes, Malcolm decided he’d ignore whatever jabs she’d throw and win in politeness.
“I thought it’d be nice to see someone win against him, and I do think you probably could,” he said.
Their resulting staredown probably benefited him less than it did her—because while she seemingly got what she was looking for, he came out with zilch. So, he retreated to tend to the pitchers of juice.
Malcolm didn’t know if he was imagining it, but he felt the weight of her gaze on his back—confirmed as he turned around.
What surprised him was that Rhode looked pleased. And, for some reason, that made him feel pink.
Rhode smiled then for sure.
Annoyed somehow, he directed his attention to the beverages again. Why did it feel like he’d lost? Had he played right into her hands?
“Seriously, what is it with you?” she muttered, seeming even more amused.
“What? Nothing,” he chose to say.
It truly wasn’t difficult to act dumb when he had no idea what the fuck she was alluding to.
But, really. Nothing.
Totally. He could stand there in front of her at the island again. Because there really was nothing up.
Rhode’s grin broadened.
Before Malcolm could even think up a retort, the kitchen door swung open, and in marched Paul, followed by his stepson.
“Oh, awesome! You’re done!” said Paul, lightly clapping Malcolm on the shoulder in thanks.
Percy looked like he was about to say something before he bit his tongue. He grabbed the pitchers Malcolm had prepped without uttering a word other than his thanks for helping out.
“I can help clear this up,” Malcolm offered to Paul.
“No, you two, go enjoy the party!” said Paul. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”
Both were silent until Malcolm held open the door leading to the living room.
Rhode paused for a moment in the doorway. “Thank you.”
Malcolm felt like ignoring the comment and consciously tamed his grouchiness before diving into the festivities.
It seemed, judging by a lack of snappy remarks the rest of the afternoon, Rhode wasn’t even going to play whatever stupid game of civility he’d figured they would. Instead, she spent much of her attention fussing over her brothers and conversing with new faces, including the Californian visitors.
Malcolm wondered if Annabeth’s mortal family even knew she was less than two months younger than he. And he wondered if she’d ever told them where she had spent parts of the summers she turned eleven and twelve (and, nearly, thirteen). Theories floated in his head throughout brunch, and he ultimately decided, no, he still wouldn’t even ask Annabeth.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
There was little left to be executed in Aphrodite and Piper’s grand party plan for that night. The Aphrodite kids were already handling lighting and photo booths, the Apollo kids set up music and speakers, the Demeter kids were on flowers, and the Hephaestus kids were dealing with furnishings.
While their siblings managed food and some tra-la-la, Malcolm and Alicia set the tables in the dining pavilion. Eight tables in, and she spoke less and less, now fiddling with the ends of a tablecloth.
Her glum ruminations made him wonder if she’d even dozed on the ride back to camp or if she’d just been closing her eyes. Was she in a cranky mood but showing self-restraint? Had Dr. Chase reminded her of her dad? Was she missing him in general? Was she just tired? Was she not managing to get sleep at night but didn’t want to tell him or their siblings? Was the night light not bright enough? Was it actually too bright? Was she missing Texas? Was—
“Are you looking forward to tonight, Allie?” Malcolm tried to insert a little more excitement in his tone.
Alicia merely nodded.
“Wanna help me set this table?” he asked.
Alicia dutifully assisted.
“Did you have fun with Estelle earlier?” Malcolm asked.
Alicia nodded again. “Estelle is cool,” she said. She still seemingly refused to look at him.
“Yeah.”
“She’s also six,” said Alicia. “And she reads very well. Actually, she already reads books for second graders.”
Ah.
Malcolm’s brain whizzed with possible responses.
“Well, that’s really nice. Good for her,” he said. “I couldn’t do that when I was six. I wished I could.”
Her gray eyes met his.
“And, you know,” Malcolm said, crouching down beside her, “when I was six, I also didn’t know the parts of an engine, let alone know how to assemble a car. And not that any of this is a competition, but I’m pretty sure Estelle doesn’t know either.”
Alicia blinked. Her lips twitched.
“So,” he continued, “you know she’s cool because she reads very well, despite her not knowing how to build engines or do algebra or other stuff you can do. And, meanwhile, you’re amazing in engineering and math and so many things, but—like me and pretty much everyone at camp—deal with dyslexia and have had trouble reading. So, what does that tell you?”
“We have different strengths,” Alicia mumbled.
“Right. And?”
An almost resigned look washed over her. “And there's no need to compare ourselves to others. It’s healthier and more effective to put on blinders and just keep improving ourselves,” she practically parroted, a bit too robotically for his liking.
“That’s true,” he said. “And?”
Moments passed as Alicia’s eyes sped at ever increasing paces.
“Ähm—” she said.
But the brakes weren’t activating. Her widening eyes darted across his face and beyond as she failed to cling to something—anything. As if by some Athenian voodoo, Malcolm could almost feel himself running out of oxygen.
“And it means you’re cool, too,” he said, chiding himself for giving her a pop quiz to panic over. Had he just made things worse?
Thankfully at least, the freefall was over.
“You know Estelle’s cool,” he said. “By the same logic, you must know you’re cool, too, right?”
Alicia didn’t say anything, but he read an oh.
“If it helps, I know you’re cool. And Estelle is cool and smart, so she must know you’re cool, too,” he said. “And you know what?” he tried for a conspiratorial whisper. “Dyslexic or not, I’m sure you’re still the most curious, most brilliant, most hard-working kid there is in all of New York and Texas. Okay?”
Any awkwardness he felt dissipated the second her lips curled into a failed restrain of a smile. For a moment, he even forgot there were campers around.
“Come on, you know it.” He grinned as Alicia returned a fist bump. “And remember what Mom says,” he added. “It’s okay to say you don’t know. It’s how we learn, and there’s no shame in learning.”
Alicia’s cheeks turned pink.
“It’s okay, Allie,” he said gently. “And if I’m asking you questions, yes, it’s because I want you to think for yourself and push you a little. Because I know you’re smart. But, no, it’s not a test. You don’t have to know.”
She nodded.
Commotion erupted as Annabeth entered the pavilion. A bunch of thank-yous and laughs passed before she made it over to her siblings.
“Connor and Travis want to do pyro later,” she said.
“That’s exciting. You liked their fireworks last week, didn’t you, Alicia?” Malcolm said.
Immediately, Alicia lit up, infecting them her delight. Malcolm didn’t fail to notice Annabeth’s eyes had shifted to him instead.
“It’ll be cool, he said.”
“So, if you wanna see them, you might want to take a nap,” Annabeth said to their little sister.
Ultimately, Alicia agreed. Hand in hand, they ambled away to Cabin Six, with Alicia jabbering to Annabeth that she liked the swirly-whirlies although they were pretty loud, and that although she had hurt her neck last time, she had recently found out the ideal way to watch the fireworks, and that she hoped it would work because she didn’t want to miss the story, since that was her favorite part....
“Gah! She’s adorable.” Such cute aggression was displayed by Ainsleigh, resident of the Demeter cabin and head of agriculture of New Athens, who paused her flower arranging to squeal at Alicia.
“Yeah.” Malcolm returned a grin.
It wasn’t saying much for her. Ainsleigh was always smiling. Like Claire. And like Valentina from the Aphrodite cabin. Interestingly, he noted, none of them were in the same circles. And Malcolm randomly remembered that, even in situations that didn’t call for a smile, women would smile—overwhelmingly more so than men would. Which kinda irked him.
“I think your sister’s giving people baby fever,” said fellow Demeter resident Billie Ng.
“I mean, I love her, but I don’t think I have baby fever,” he chuckled.
“You’re good with her, though,” Ainsleigh said.
Seriously? Annabeth? Yeah. Percy? Totally. Me? “I’m trying” was all Malcolm ended up saying. “Thanks, though.” Truly, it was comforting to hear.
They worked in silence. As he prepped the last table, Billie decorated another pillar, and Ainsleigh rearranged flowers on nearby tables for the nth time. She offered more help still, but the pavilion looked perfect. Once the ladies excused themselves to get dressed, his mind snagged onto something.
“Hey, Ainsleigh?” he called out.
She beamed her beam again. “Yeah?”
“Thanks— Well, first, thanks for this. And Billie. It means a lot that everyone wants to pitch in for Annabeth’s birthday. And engagement party. The flowers really add a lot. And also, thanks for befriending Alicia. She says you’ve been showing her around the fields and teaching her about fruits. On behalf of Cabin Six, we appreciate it. Thank you.”
“It’s a pleasure,” said Ainsleigh with her warm, radiant smile.
And what a relief it was to hear. It really took a village to raise a kid—and an emotional toll Malcolm hadn’t been prepared for.
He needed to thank Leo, too, he realized. And Rachel. And, of course, Percy. Naturally, Percy would never accept thanks for what he’d consider to be such basic efforts, but he deserved it most. And not that he hadn’t been family before, but still.
The reminder led Malcolm to crack a grin. He’d officially gained another bro.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Once Malcolm had dressed appropriately and returned to the dining pavilion, he immediately noticed how strange (and welcome) it was to see campers, normally with atrocious orange tees, with better getup. What might have been normal for Valentina and others in the Aphrodite cabin wasn’t so much for others. It looked almost odd to see Travis and Connor from the Hermes cabin with dress shirts and trousers, but both were looking extra handsome. Billie had also changed out of her overalls into a dress. Ainsleigh, too, made an effort to ensure the pink flowers in her braid stayed in place.
But with each additional dozen people arriving, Malcolm’s apprehension grew.
This was going to be a looong night. It was only 6 PM. Sunset would be at 8:27, meaning the fireworks would only occur at 9:30 or something. And seeing as he was Annabeth’s brother, he probably couldn’t leave before 11.
As far as Malcolm knew, there were five tactics one could deploy to get by during a large social gathering.
Tactic #1, which required the most preparation, was to decide on some “problem” to solve (and to bring along a little notebook and a writing utensil). Be it drafting essays for homework in his former days or making to-do lists or thinking up ideas for the classes he now taught, there could always be something to ponder over. If one could activate the brain, one could remain productive and be too preoccupied to feel awkward.
Tactic #2 was to stick around people you know and like. One issue for this particular event was that the people he was closest to were the center of the party (and, thus, they had everyone else to converse with). A general issue was that his work buddies weren’t at work; friendly acquaintances would also have their own people to hang with. But at least he was close to Leo, who tended to be mindful of introverts and always managed to engage them somehow.
To really kill time, Malcolm could also resort to tactics #3-5.
Tactic #3 was to look around and walk around. People-watching was one activity in this category, though it could get truly boring to observe people he frankly didn’t care to know. But he could observe the decor and appreciate the string lights draping over and around wooden panels that were bound to look magical once sunset came. He could also study the buffet, count how many blue desserts and blue cocktails there were, evaluate every dish, and locate the specific dishes he wanted. He could also make rounds and plan out his meal. Twice. That would eat away a combined forty minutes, probably.
Proceed to tactic #4: Eat slowly and drink frequently. Spacing out food intake was key. More specifically, it helped to take a bit of food at a time, so as to be able to kill more time returning to the buffet to take more food. The drawback, however, was to have to return more dishes to be washed. That, of course, meant having to evaluate the unnecessary use of water and soap. (And how could anyone ever be desperate enough to be so wasteful?)
And if one could drink plenty of beverages, one could exploit the last of the low hanging fruits, tactic #5: Take bathroom breaks. There was, of course, a cap—perhaps four bathroom breaks at the very maximum (and this was for longer parties). The optimal number of visits, Malcolm thought, could probably be modeled by a linear relationship. On a graph of hours versus visits, the y-intercept could probably be 2 visits. For each additional hour, there could be—
A girl’s squeal snapped him out of his daze.
“Oh my gods. Bae’s here!” said a young teen camper.
“Where?!” said another.
Gasping and squealing, a gaggle of girls fawned over Bae’s blinding smile, gorgeous eyes, exquisite bone structure, perfect eyebrows, well-defined abs....
Guy’s got brains, too, Malcolm wanted to say. Worthy of MIT at that. (But sure. There was no denying such a man had the type of body and face that Polykleitos would’ve liked to sculpt.)
“From certain angles, you can actually see the shadow from his cheekbones. Ugh.”
“Come. On,” said a third girl.
“No seriously,” said the first.
“Damn, Mika, why you so thirsty?”
The girl named Mika merely giggled.
“She’s not wrong, though,” said admirer #2 as she played with her hair.
“He’s your teacher. He’d never date you.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t look at him!” Mika said. “Gods, every time the word ‘curves’ comes out of his mouth.... Mmm.”
“I know, right?” said the hair-twirling friend. “Like, seriously, in terms of hotness, he’s, like, three standard deviations above the mean.”
They continued gushing over the son of Mercury.
Little creeps.
‘It is weird, but they’re harmless,’ Malcolm remembered Bae telling Chiara last week before one of their Stats Department meetings. ‘And look. The class is over capacity. Everyone’s been achieving the learning objectives, and now they know how to update priors and stuff. In the grand scheme of things...’
Malcolm shuffled along, sending a quick hey to Bae, who nodded up in response in the midst of a hearty exchange with his Roman pals.
Naturally, Malcolm found himself on the sides of the pavilion, enjoying the light breeze with a plate of olives (thinking he really should’ve gotten a bowl).
“Oh, hi, Malcolm. Again,” said Ainsleigh, looking at his clothes. “You look nice,” she added as she fixed her brown hair behind her ear.
“Thanks, you too.” He nodded towards her. “Nice flowers.”
“Oh,” she laughed. “Thank you. It’s my attempt at looking fancy. Parties aren’t really my thing. You don’t seem like you like parties either.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“It takes one to know one, I guess,” she said. “And, well, you didn’t go to the Fourth of July party.”
“I prefer P and Q,” he decided to reply. “Did you go?”
He wondered if they could exchange party-coping tactics.
Nah, that’d be too weird and personal.
Ainsleigh told him she had attended the event with her sisters, Billie and Cabin Four head Miranda Gardiner. Both Ainslegh and Malcolm uh-huh-ed and asked questions when appropriate. Malcolm had to be thankful at least that she made it easy to do small talk. She even kindly offered Alicia another opportunity to go berry picking. (Already being productive. How lovely.)
A good four minutes in, Malcolm heard his name being called out, syllables pronounced slowly and intentionally, followed by a wolf-whistle and the presence of a swaggering, impish figure whose face had always been more adorable than hot.
Malcolm returned the favor (not the whistle—because he couldn’t whistle). “Damn, Leo,” he said, looking him up and down. “Look at you. You’re even cuter out of those cargos.” He winked.
“And I see you’re out of your sweatpants.” Leo nodded. “Button undone, sleeves rolled up, that bit of scruff. I’d want to climb you like a tree.” Leo waggled his eyebrows. “I’d just take these damn shoes off first. Seriously, these shoes are killing me.”
“At least take your socks off, too,” Malcolm said.
“Of course,” said Leo. “I’d take everything off for you.”
Malcolm laughed and gave him a hug.
“Oh! I never knew— Are you... a thing?” asked Ainsleigh.
The men shared a look. “Didn’t you know?” Leo said.
“Oh?” she said.
In thirty years. Twenty. Fifteen. There could be patents and papers. Leo had suggested...
“Nah,” Malcolm said with an arm on Leo’s shoulder. “It’s just, if you think your boy looks nice, say so.” He faced Leo. “You look very nice.” And he did.
Leo sent a pucker and a wink his way. “Thanks, baby.”
Malcolm winced on the inside but let that slide. Only Nana had the right to call him that, but he would let that ruin his and Leo’s thing.
“So, this is a strong bromance,” Ainsleigh surmised, observing them with a calculating look.
“Except neither of us are really romantic,” Malcolm said.
“Well. So, about six, seven years ago,” Leo said, “we started off building our ship—”
“I thought it was your ship,” Malcolm muttered, flattered.
“—and two weeks ago, we started laying a lot of pipe,” Leo deadpanned, nodding.
Okay, now that finally got Malcolm to blush. “He’s talking about New Athens infrastructure projects,” he told Ainsleigh. “The water and sewage systems.”
“Oh, yeah. No, I got that,” said Ainsleigh grinning broadly until she laughed.
Of course. How else would she really have taken Leo’s words to mean?
“Or was I?” said Leo next to his ear.
Malcolm pushed him away. “Excuse him. He thinks he’s funny.”
Ainsleigh apparently thought so, too, which Malcolm knew would make Leo proud. It was impossible not to smile.
“Have I added you on socials?” Leo asked her. “I don’t think so.”
It took nearly two minutes for Leo to correctly spell “Ainsleigh Callanach” on his phone. (All the better. That was another two minutes gone by.)
“Pray for us demigods with names like that,” she said.
Malcolm wondered which of her parents had been so thoughtless to have named their dyslexic child with that many unnecessary letters.
When the trio sat themselves at one of the tables Malcolm had set up, he remembered his earlier vow, and faced Leo. “Hey, man. Thanks again for spending time with Alicia. I know you don’t have to. She really enjoys it.”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Leo, gripping Malcolm’s shoulder. “Uncle Leo’s always here. By the way,” he scoffed a laugh, “so, she’s still using German words for tools. Dude, I still don’t understand what she’s saying. Schraubenzieher! Schraubenschlüssel!” He shook his head.
Leo proceeded to tell Ainsleigh about Alicia’s new project. Pride bloomed in Malcolm as it did every time other people were impressed by his sister. (But not too impressed to think her accomplishments were so unbelievable. There was a delicate balance.)
Just as Leo began to describe Alicia’s sound engineering explorations, he got quiet. “I should... say hi, shouldn’t I?” he said, staring into the distance.
Malcolm followed his gaze and saw Leo’s ex. So she was here, too. The nerve. But they’d all made their peace, so it was best to let go of the matter. (In theory.)
“Calypso!” Leo called out. “Hey.”
The former titanness approached them slowly. “Hi, Leo. Malcolm.” She looked twice from Leo to Ainsleigh, who introduced herself.
Malcolm gave Calypso the look he’d given her for six years—the one that said: I know what you did. He knew she knew he knew, and that—that he knew she knew he knew—he had known for ages, but he did it anyway.
Of course he knew. It hadn’t been difficult to figure out in those endless nights (and days) of hearing Annabeth’s cries of ‘Why did you leave me?’
After her father’s neglect... after Thalia’s sacrifice... after Luke’s betrayal... the person she completely trusted—whom even Athena could trust—to never abandon her joined the list she had doubted would stay.
Then add that to the living nightmare that was Tartarus: ‘I keep seeing him dead,’ Annabeth had cried to him. ‘And I did nothing. I couldn’t do anything.’
Of course, this had nothing to do with Malcolm. He had no right. After all these years, he still didn’t even know Calypso personally. She’s nice, they all said.
Oh, she’s nice, sure. How about we switch the genders. How would that have looked?
‘Sorry, dude, I’m leaving you because I gotta save the world. Plus, I’m not exactly emotionally available anyway because I sort of have these feelings for my best friend. You know, whom I’ve known for years, in contrast to how I only just met you. However—fast forward two years, during which I was busy fighting battles in a huge war I was a major part of—I’m such a lovely lady that I still thought about you and made the gods swear on the Styx to get you out of your prison, though none of it was my fault.’
‘But the gods didn’t keep that promise and I’m blaming you’ was the response. ‘You were so awful you didn’t give me a second thought. I’m cursing you, bitch. No, actually, let me curse the guy you really liked. He should know what it feels like to be abandoned the way you and so many others left me. Forget that I don’t have a fucking clue what that guy’s already been through. He might already be dealing with abandonment issues already for all I care. Forget that he did absolutely nothing to me. Forget that his only crime was to exist and be so outstanding a person that you wanted to be his best friend and potentially something more. Forget that you did actually think about me and tried to help me. Forget that my freedom was one of the demands you made in exchange for your immortality. Forget that you didn’t do me any wrong. Forget that it was well within your right to leave me, even if you didn’t have a crush on someone else. Forget that no matter how much I loved you, you are an independent woman and I am not entitled to you. Forget all that. I’m cursing your boyfriend anyway.’
What did that look like? Like toxic masculinity, that’s what. Some incel lunacy.
But, yeah, she’s nice. What a strong woman ....
Malcolm unclenched his jaw. “How are you, Calypso?” he said in just a bit of a tone—not for Leo nor Ainsleigh to know, and not a threat in the least, but a reminder. I know what you did.
Calypso ignored him and took Leo’s offered seat.
Malcolm tuned them out and instead talked to Ainsleigh, who wondered what else he and Leo and Alicia had been building. In turn, he asked about the official food guide she was working on with other Demeter and Apollo kids and other health experts. Ainsleigh ranted that the federal government had succumbed to Big Dairy’s lobbying efforts to add a glass of milk (or whatever serving of dairy) to the US’s dietary guidelines. She assured him that she’d already removed it for New Athens’s guide. Based on her team’s research, which she said had zero input from lobbying groups and which also made considerations for environmental impact, New Athens’s recommended food guide would also use the plate analogy, but would split the plate in just three portions (half fruits and veg, a quarter protein, and a quarter grains).
Malcolm also got to hear about her farmer siblings’ joys and frustrations about having entered the avocado industry. He now wondered if regulatory capture was an issue here, but she made no mentions of whether they’d asked for subsidies, and he figured he’d probably consider doing her siblings a favor anyway when the topic moved to Mexican drug cartels that had turned to avocado to make their pesos. The Demeter farmers hoped their much pricier avos could be deemed valuable enough if marketed as American and free from extortions, kidnappings, and murder.
But he and Ainsleigh were clearly running out of topics once they started discussing possible Scottish ancestry. (Apparently, both their names were Scottish.) The need to carry on conversation got Malcolm to add that his mortal brother’s name was Irish. (The kid was most definitely not Irish.)
Once Malcolm’s eyes caught a tall, chiseled, sandy-haired woman, he thanked the gods for giving him a way out and graciously excused himself—pointedly not looking at Calypso, who, for her part, did the same.
“La Rue!” he exclaimed. “You’re not still mad about the game, are you?”
Clarisse swiveled around. Her towering figure cast shadows on him. “Oh, I am, you liar,” she snapped.
“I didn’t lie.”
“No, you withheld information,” she said before narrowing her eyes. “You fed Jackson the intel, didn’t you?”
“I’m not just gonna reveal our secrets,” Malcolm said.
“But you revealed ours? Some shit-ass partner you are,” she said. “Remember this the next game Ares faces Athena.”
“Well, gee, thanks for the warning. Super kind of you. Now I know I should be on the lookout.”
Clarisse rolled her eyes at that.
“You fought well,” he told her.
“Yeah,” she said, “before my co-leader ditched my ass and betrayed me.”
“And I’m a little sorry about that.”
“We’re supposed to be fighting Jackson together,” Clarisse said.
There was a sober silence.
“Since they got back this summer,” Clarisse said so quietly he almost didn’t hear her, “has he asked for a match?”
“No,” Malcolm replied in an equally low voice. “You?”
“No.”
Their eyes found their way to the couple, who’d grown beyond the shadow of their former selves. The new kids—Alicia and others claimed over the past several years—had no idea what hell Percy and Annabeth had gone through. Even some older campers were unaware.
But now, there they were, wrapped up in each other, rambunctious with friends, exchanging whispers, bursting with laughter.... No need for an outlet to unleash any bitter wrath. No need to find safety in the arms of an older brother in the darkest of nights.
“They look well,” Malcolm’s voice caught on something in his throat, both pained for the past and grateful for the future.
“They look happy. Carefree.” Clarisse sucked in a breath. It came out raggedly.
Malcolm wanted to face her. But Clarisse wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Too late. He’d already moved too noticeable an amount for it to seem incidental.
The daughter of Ares fidgeted. “I won’t tell anyone you did if you don’t tell them I did,” she said under her breath.
“I have emotions, Clarisse.”
“That’s not the reputation you have.”
“Then people read poorly.”
Or they just weren’t paying enough attention. Really, who hadn’t bawled upon finding out Annabeth and Percy were in Tartarus?
“Can you pass on an anonymous request to Ms. Architect?” Clarisse asked.
“Shoot.”
“Chris and I have been in Long Island for a month, and I can’t stand it,” she said. “We need apartments ASAP.”
Malcolm snorted, glad she moved on to a lighter topic.
“She knows,” he said.
“Well, it’s no secret she stays in Cabin Three, so, you know, I don’t think she gets it,” Clarisse said. “The sooner she’s done, the sooner Nine can start building, the sooner we can get our apartments, make our celebratory avocado toasts, and have some privacy.”
“She’s already gotten those requests.” (Demands more like. The Aphrodite kids were being very persistent.) “You know there’s a schedule. The apartments won’t be up until October.”
“Dingy motels near camp can’t seriously be the only affordable option,” Clarisse said. “You wanna know how many times I’ve run into people doing the dirty here? Three. This week. And this abstinence rule is...” She groaned. “Dead bedrooms are not good for relationships,” she declared. “And it was never healthy to begin with to have no personal space for this long. All these horny teenagers who can’t get off anywhere but the shower.... Bleh. It’s gross. The bathrooms aren’t even private. So, for all those people who don’t... deal with their raging hormones... well, that’s spilling over. I’m starting to think this is unsafe for some people. O Zeu kai álloi theoi! Valentina’s told me she and some other kids have gotten some disgusting messages. Turned out, it was a couple of the Romans.”
“Which ones?”
“One o’clock,” Clarisse said.
She faced her three, allowing him to catch a glance. Malcolm saw a couple guys getting drinks. He recognized one as one of the guys Rhode knocked out with her water horses.
“Add Scott MacDougal to the list,” said Clarisse. “You know, ever since the Romans got here...”
“Maybe they’re more likely to get caught?” Malcolm suggested. “They’re not all like that.”
“Bae’s not like that,” Clarisse said.
“Got that right,” he said.
Clarisse smiled amusedly. “I just meant the cabins are filling up even more. So, there’s even less privacy now. Or—” She suddenly scoffed and shook her head. “Gods. See ten o’clock. Look at how they’re looking at Rhode. Are they stupid?” She was nearly laughing. “She could easily turn them into a puddle of seawater.”
Once again, he saw her graciously turn down a drink.
“That’s the fourth time I’ve seen that,” said Clarisse. “Anyway, seriously. Does Chiron even get it? I thought the Aphrodite kids already gave their presentation about how people with ADHD have a higher tendency to be hypersexual and blah, blah, blah.”
“And his stance,” said Malcolm, “is that the solution will be here in October. It’s less than four months away. Understandably, no one wants to build a camp brothel. Especially when everyone’s scrambling to build apartments and cabins. It’s just four months.”
“And in that time, what?” said Clarisse. “There’ll be creeps here. And then who’ll have to deal with the creeps? The head of security. And who’s head of security?”
“You’re head of security.”
“I don’t want to deal with any more creeps. Don’t make me deal with the creeps. I’ll bash their heads in and then I’ll get in trouble. ‘She was asking for it? Well, then so were you, dumbass,’” Clarisse spat.
“You’re not going Jon Burge.” It was a request. A reminder. A question.
“I am not going to violate UNCAT. Or anything Geneva-related. Holy Zeus,” said Clarisse. Still, she shoved him—one of the select few she dared do that to. “We also don’t have the budget for reparations.”
Malcolm chuckled.
Between them, a comfortable silence passed as they people-watched. Hers was a different kind, he realized. Useful, too. It shamed him a little that he hadn’t thought to do this before.
“I heard Rachel said something’s going to come up about Afghanistan,” Clarisse said.
“Does it matter? So long as we don’t think the ICC has any jurisdiction—”
“Fuck you, Bush.”
“—how are we gonna do anything but keep excusing war crimes?” Malcolm said. “Which… sounds like quite the oxymoron.”
“Heavy emphasis on moron,” Clarisse muttered. “Gods. How many more stupid corrections do we have to make here? What a fucking waste of time. We already have enough shit— Oh, Hades, did you hear about that case I was handed?”
“Which one?”
He knew there were several cases she was looking into of some asshat using unnecessary force in training sessions with inexperienced campers. It was fine if there was a genuine accident. It was also training. A few just didn’t stop.
“You know the one. A man and a woman walk into a bar...” Clarisse started. “Or the Big House.”
Ah. “Both get drunk, hook up, and accuse the other of rape.”
Words were trapped in Clarrise’s throat. “How do I even—?” she groaned before letting out a resigned sigh. “We’ll figure out in time, I guess.”
Clarisse returned to her sweep of her surroundings, lingering on her boyfriend Chris Rodriguez for a moment before she focused her attention to her two o’clock. Her eyes landed on Annabeth, Percy, Leo, Piper, Hazel, and Frank snapping some pics of themselves.
“Whoa!” Clarisse yelled. “Who are we?! The supporting cast?! Who do you think led the battles here while you were vacationing in Europe?”
Malcolm laughed.
“Then come here, drakon slayer!” Annabeth yelled back. “You, too, Malcolm!” They gathered Nico and Reyna.
Reyna... still gorgeous, still intimidating, maybe forever a bit of a crush, however much it had faded since she made herself totally off limits.
“We should get the Stolls and drop the lovebirds in the canoe lake again,” Clarisse suggested to Malcolm as they made their way over.
“Wow, Clarisse. I didn’t think you were that sentimental.”
“Shut the fuck up, Pace. I’m not sentimental.”
“Of course not. Which is why we’re taking these group photos for you.” Malcolm grinned, dodging the little jab he knew was coming.
“You’re just asking for it,” Clarisse said.
“For a missed swing?” He slid to Annabeth’s other side.
Clarisse’s next attempt caught Leo instead, who yelped.
“Sorry. That wasn’t meant for you,” Clarisse said as contritely as she could get in such a situation.
“Then I’ll excuse that,” Leo squeaked out.
“Okay, places, people!” Piper directed.
“Say cheese!”
“Where’s that fucker?” Clarisse growled.
“Smile, Clarisse!” Leo said.
Then came a chorus of ohs. “He did not just...”
“You know, I guess you did deserve that after all.”
“I didn’t mean it like that!”
“Oh my gods. Can we take the damn picture already?”
Percy started to laugh.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Following a brief, mutually flattering conversation with Reyna over each other’s good calls out on the battle they’d led six years ago, Malcolm meandered with his thoughts once more.
Both Clarisse and Chris had changed, he reminded himself. So, too, had Leo, who apparently had been a bit of a douche to sweet Frank—the Canadian, of all people! Even Annabeth, who’d been unbearable at times with Rachel in the picture—unbearable enough for Malcolm to have once snapped at her face in Percy’s defense—had changed. Hell, Malcolm knew he himself, too, was already a less judgy, contrarian asshole (WIP). So, yes, he concluded—for the nth time—that Calypso could change, too. But that didn’t by any means make them friends.
For the rest of the night, Malcolm paced his mini meals and avoided the dance floor, where campers moved to the latest earworm promoting codependency.
Bae, he noticed, was almost always surrounded in a three meter radius by ladies—with gents lingering nearby.
Malcolm wondered what those girls giggling over Bae had thought. Because, in his mind, Camp Half-Blood, boasting some of the hottest of the hottest men and women, couldn’t be represented by a normal distribution. It only made sense that the distribution would be skewed to the left.
And still, amongst the crowd of demigods and nymphs and satyrs, it was impossible not to notice the two outliers in attendance.
First, there was Rhode: an arresting vision from her curled hair to her heels that left one to wonder how long she could last in them. The real showstopper, however, was her chiton-like jumpsuit—which truly would have looked normal were it not for the slits that stretched from ankle to waist and left her skin bare.
Without an ounce of Malcolm’s consent, the most outlandish, uncalled for questions wormed into his brain. Questions like: How the hell is she even wearing underwear under that? Or isn’t she? But, of course, he wasn’t a swine, so he wasn’t going to think about that.
Naturally, the other outlier was Aphrodite, who... well... who now twinned with Rhode.
Ehh. Okay. Malcolm wouldn’t have disagreed anyway. He was self-aware enough to know what qualities he admired in a person. Capture the Flag had already been one thing, but brunch hadn’t helped either.
Despite their heels, Rhode and Aphrodite opted to sip champagne and eat cake at a standing table, where one of Aphrodite’s attendants was fanning her.
With the two just out of his peripheral vision, Malcolm heard Aphrodite gush to Rhode: “They’ve always been so adorable and so in love. I’ve been looking forward to this day for years, I’m telling you!”
“You were so kind, helping to put this together,” said Rhode. “It’s shaping up to be such a lovely day to remember.”
“I still remember your engagement party,” said Aphrodite, “and your wedding.”
“Do you?” said Rhode. “Wow. That was a long time ago. That’s really flattering.”
“You two made such a gorgeous couple,” Aphrodite said.
Though Malcolm assumed Aphrodite must’ve resembled some other people by now (Bae or whomever), he pictured Rhode being complimented by her mirror reflection.
“I’m still honored that you attended,” Rhode said.
“Your lipstick caused quite a stir, didn’t it?” said Aphrodite.
Rhode laughed. “I’m sure yours did as well,” she said. “So, I appreciate everyone could see you with it, too.”
“How fortunate Helios and Ares never made a fuss about such nonsense,” said Aphrodite.
“I do think people generally cared less than mortals, though,” said Rhode. “At least when comparing Atlantis.”
“That is true,” said Aphrodite. “Ugh, these mortals. And now they still can’t get over forgoing bras? Really, I don’t understand. But we always have been ahead of the times, haven’t we?”
“Someone has to set those trends,” said Rhode.
“Alíthos,” said Aphrodite.
“Propíno soi.”
Champagne flutes clinked, and Aphrodite and Rhode exchanged their favorite lipstick shades and memories with “Cleo”. When Aphrodite began to complain to Rhode about Olympian drama that Malcolm simply could not give a hoot about, he directed his attention elsewhere as he tried to get by moment by moment.
To Malcolm’s left, a daughter of Aphrodite, Rosalyn, was laughing with her friends, Alice, Shannon, and some others he didn’t recognize. He listened to them comparing Manhattanhenge photos they’d taken the day before.
Then there were Connor and Travis, who bragged to some Romans about their upcoming fireworks display.
Malcolm spotted Rhode again—this time in the thick of a lengthy chat with Chiron and Dionysus, who for once didn’t look like he didn’t want to be at camp. It wasn’t that he was hitting on her by any means. He just looked... normal. Which was weird.
While Malcolm was in the midst of another round of olives, head of city stats Chiara Benvenuti introduced him to her friends, and he gladly tooted her horn for ten minutes about all the incredible things she was doing for everyone.
Shortly after, Malcolm saw Bae shaking Rhode’s hand. Malcolm read “I’m sorry” from her lips and “No! Don’t be” from his. Something something Alexander from her. A speechless, beaming Bae eventually managed to say thank you. Something something flowers. Something something... loud forex? Cloud forex? Cloud forest?
“That’s one of my favorites!” Rhode exclaimed to Bae.
They talked about waterfalls and mist.
Malcolm swept his eyes across the dining pavilion again, debating whether to (or how much to) judge the drunks and that one person who’d thrown up. Thankfully, that camper received aid from her siblings, because he did not want to deal with that.
More rounds of food, more rounds of walks.
After a couple tiring conversations, Malcolm rewarded himself by heading to the bar area and ordering a virgin strawberry daiquiri. Just as he wondered if whoever had set up the bar knew that the couple being celebrated didn’t even drink alcohol, the daiquiri came. The ice, he found, helped with the summer heat, and he was even pleased enough with the taste not to be irked at the wastefulness of the cocktail umbrella. At least it provided some entertainment, as he could now study the construction of the paper parasol.
“Nice jeans,” he heard behind him. “I said nice jeans. Hello.”
Malcolm turned around and came face to face with Rhode, accompanied by what looked like an iced coffee. Up this close, he could now see she gained some inches on him.
Malcolm swiveled his head round again and saw no one. He faced her again.
“Are you talking to me?” he said.
Rhode laughed and glanced at his jeans. “They look good,” she said. “They work better than those khakis you wore earlier. You were looking like you were going to a country club with a posse of fellow WASPs.”
Of course she had to.
“They were whole at least,” Malcolm said. “Rhode, I think your pants ripped. Or they forgot to stitch the sides.”
“You noticed,” she shot back with an infuriating waggle of her brows.
As Rhode sipped her iced coffee, Malcolm struggled to respond. “You know, this also would have been a more functional outfit than that dress you wore for Capture the Flag. Less the heels, of course.”
“What I did on Sunday, I could still do in heels,” she said. “I doubt you could say the same.”
In came Percy, who threw his arms around their shoulders. “How are we?” he said, his head ping-ponging between the two of them. “Hmm?”
“Good,” Malcolm said, trying not to feel like he was being told off like a child. “Hey, man. Congrats again.” He learned in to give Percy a half-hug and was hit with the ocean breeze scent of two children of Poseidon. “Have you seen Annabeth?” he said.
Percy duly provided him with directions away from Rhode.
Annabeth, as it turned out, was surrounded by friends, and he didn’t feel like wading into that. So, Malcolm found Sophie to watch the sunset with and managed another hour searching for and talking to Leo and Clarisse.
Finally, the blaring dance music faded when Connor and Travis announced they’d soon start their fireworks show. Yet, the chatter grew and the crowd headed in Malcolm’s direction—and he tried not to feel like Simba facing a herd of wildebeests.
Malcolm eased his restlessness by reminding himself why he felt so unnecessarily irritable. He knew his ADHD also compounded the sensory overload. There was no rational need to feel so agitated. Still, he preferred to take the worst seat in the house, so long as it got him more breathing room.
On and on, his ears braced for the pops and bangs as he watched the shattering sparks form shapes in the sky. He was glad at least to see Alicia gasping and pointing at the pretty lights with Sophie and Zeke. Whatever story the Stolls were playing out, he couldn’t tell. He’d rather see Alicia. After another barrage of bursts loud enough to cause him to shudder, he wondered if Connor and Travis had ever experimented with drones. Alicia probably wouldn’t have liked it as much, though. Malcolm smiled as he watched her gawk again upon a loud crack, and he could’ve sworn his skin prickled once more. He realized when he felt something against his arm that Conrad must have joined him.
“You could’ve told me you’d be here,” said Conrad. “The olives are killer, aren’t they?” Conrad held out his bowl of almond-stuffed olives, which Malcolm knew was Conrad's favorite.
“I’m good,” Malcolm said.
The brothers continued a lame but valuable conversation as both watched the fireworks, chatting all the while about new methods of manufactured spending, the elephant unemployment crisis, the banana disease, the latest unfounded outrage, the wonders of Japanese chalk....
Once the fireworks were over, Conrad was called by Grace—one of the few campers who weren’t intimidated by either him or Claire. Malcolm still hadn’t heard the full story of that day in the Arts and Crafts Center last month or for that matter what happened between the two at the Fourth of July celebrations.
“Don’t tell me you hung with my ass instead,” said Malcolm.
“I wanted to,” Conrad said earnestly.
Malcolm looked at him. He knew Conrad really meant it. As for the other possibility... “Did some— You good?”
“Yeah,” said Conrad—like, of course.
Malcolm nudged him. “Go,” he whispered. “Unless you actually wanna walk around with me, ‘cause I’m gonna get fruits or something to cap off dinner. But it’s kinda rude if— Hi, Grace.”
“Hi, Malcolm,” she said cheerily as she walked up to them. “Conrad, I was looking for you.”
For Conrad’s sake, Malcolm pretended not to notice Grace touch his brother’s elbow. (Aha!)
“Sorry,” Conrad said. “I was getting olives. Do you want some?”
Grace took one.
Malcolm already figured he wouldn’t be hearing about the events of this night either. He also figured there wouldn’t be anything for him not to know about if he kept hanging around. So, he excused himself and chose a quiet spot for chamomile and a bit of cake.
But Rhode had found her way there, too, helping herself to another serving of dessert. Three paces away stood Pravir, this aggressively attractive Roman with eyelashes envied by both men and women at camp.
“You must be the infamous Princess Rhode,” said Pravir.
Ah geez. Malcolm watched them from the corner of his eye. He needed a strategy.
“That would be correct,” Rhode replied. “How did you know?”
“I only had to look for the most beautiful woman here.” Pravir flashed his perfect, blinding smile.
Under his lids, Malcolm rolled his eyes. Dude, that’s so cheesy. Was this seriously how people flirted?
Rhode hummed. “Why, thank you,” she said, pleased. “And you would be?”
“Pravir Bhattacharya, son of Venus,” he said.
“I can see why. It’s lovely to meet you, Pravir,” she said. “You have a nice smile.” She took a bite of cake.
“Thank you. You, too,” Pravir grinned as he swirled his highball. You know, you’re pretty impressive,” he said, moving even closer to Rhode. “I’m not even mad at Percy for wrecking the game if it meant camp could be graced with your presence.”
“Oh, is that so?” she said.
Clarisse had only partially been right, Malcolm deduced. Valentina might not have wanted the attention, but it seemed Rhode was only happy to receive it.
“Oh, it is definitely so,” Pravir said. “Someone should call the cops, because it has to be illegal to look that good.”
Malcolm faced them and butt in loudly, “Do pickup lines that bad actually work?”
“Excuse me?” said Pravir.
Malcolm waited for Rhode’s response. Was Her Highness going to admit that he was right? Or was she going to show him that she fell for those awful lines?
“Did you want to share a better one?” said Rhode. Any nonchalance was cancelled out by the hint of malice in her gaze.
“What would a child of Athena have to offer anyway?” said Pravir, even knitting his (of course, flawless) brows at Malcolm’s cup of tea.
What do you want me to do? List things? You know, children of Athena do like making lists. Let’s see. There’s intelligence, including detailed knowledge of the female anatomy....
“You mean besides the ability to refrain from idiotic pissing contests?” Malcolm said.
And, seriously, why did so many just assume Athena’s children were sexually inexperienced nerds? (It was either that or dumb jocks, which felt more insulting. Regardless, the whiplash was astounding.)
Pravir tilted his head. “I know a cop out when I see it,” he said. “Go... enjoy your tea, Malcolm.”
Malcolm gestured to the Roman. “Idiotic pissing contest, exhibit A,” he said to Rhode.
A stumped Pravir couldn’t look at Rhode anymore. He raised his highball at Malcolm. “Gaandu,” he said, and downed his drink.
It took all of Malcolm to fight his own impulsivity and stupidity. Once Pravir left, he stopped biting the insides of his mouth.
“Shukriya," he said under his breath.
There’d be enough to pay for. Not at work, no, but he’d probably have to be extra careful during a future Capture the Flag game.
Rhode eyed him. “How do you know Hindi?” she said.
“Friend,” he said with a reflex smile. “And I only know several words.”
“Oh, and was that one familiar because that’s what they called you?” she taunted.
Malcolm huffed. “Nah, she’s great,” he said.
As if tuned to his thoughts, Aphrodite, not far behind Rhode, offered him yet another glimpse of Meena, reminding him of his yet unfulfilled promise to visit Oxford some summer. Maybe graduation—dinner on him. But it was highly likely she’d visit New York sooner than he’d leave. And she had also said she’d send him a draft of her dissertation, so at least there was that.
Noticing that Aphrodite now appeared as part Indian PhD student, part Grecian royalty (Holy crap.), Malcolm averted his eyes.
“Why couldn’t you mind your own business, hmm? You just had to cut in,” Rhode said.
Malcolm stepped closer and lowered his voice. “He’s a known player who’s asked other guys for a look at their girlfriends’ nudes. Maybe it was just a bad joke he made to fit in with some gross people. I don’t know. But he did receive a talking to from HR. And I didn’t think you wanted to be reduced to a sex object or potentially have your privacy rights violated.”
He fully prepared a rebuttal for an I can take care of myself type comment.
Rhode’s eyes softened, however. “That’s considerate of you,” she said.
Yeah, well, information asymmetry could be a serious concern in the market for hookups.
And c’mon, Princess. You can do a lot better than that guy. There were better people at camp. His twin brother, for one. See, now, Vivek was plenty hot, too, and he never hung around manchildren. Of course, he already had a girlfriend, though. Maybe Rhode had chatted him up, too.
“Do you flirt with everyone with a pulse?” said Malcolm.
“I see nothing wrong with keeping my options open,” Rhode shrugged, “provided they are legal and available and decent.”
Numbers game or not, she needed standards, was what she needed.
No, that wasn’t it.
“You just lead them on because you like people fighting to win your attention?” Malcolm guessed.
“Winning my attention like how you fought those Hermes soldiers?” Rhode said.
Malcolm was slipping. All the while, his annoyance was peaking, despite knowing full well she knew he hadn’t been goaded by her like Aphro dude had been. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said.
Seemingly both unimpressed and amused, Rhode replied, “Don’t you think I’d give myself enough attention to have to look for a man’s?”
Irritation dissipated as Malcolm felt a laugh bubble up. He held it in, though he probably couldn’t rein in a part smile.
“And I don’t have to kid myself. I’ve seen you looking at me,” Rhode added. Her face neared as she spoke more quietly. “You’re not as covert as you think, Malcolm.”
“Oh. Covert like you were staring me down in the kitchen earlier today?” he blurted.
Shit. What in Hades had he just said?
“I’m a busy person. I have no time to be covert,” said Rhode. Her eyes eagerly roamed his face, his chest, his shoulders, his neck…. “Now, I’ll make this easy for you,” she said, meeting his eyes again. “What else would you have to offer?”
Malcolm stared. “What else? I never offered you anything.”
Footing retained.
“You already gave me the gift of saved time,” said Rhode. “As well as multiple flattering remarks, which have been quite lovely to hear. Although it’s fascinating it seems like they affect you more than me. Your face will flush… your cheeks will turn pink….”
Malcolm felt his ears heating up.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just like that.”
Malcolm grew redder.
See, all this while, he’d expected her not to accept those nice comments, to shrug them off and roll her eyes. So they could spar. But, noo. She’d just taken those compliments and turned them into ammo. Clever Rhodian.
For far too long, Malcolm offered no response. Look, as impressed as he was, he didn’t want to be annoyed by her. She just made it impossible. And now he didn’t know how to get out of this situation. Percy wasn’t here this time. How was he to walk away without being rude?
But in a flash, Rhode’s jokey expression was replaced with a kind sincerity. “I think it’s admirable you dish out compliments and credit when it really doesn’t benefit you to do so,” she said. “And don’t stop just because I’m teasing you a little.”
“It really wasn’t going to affect my plans,” Malcolm snapped.
“Good,” she smiled, shrugging off all his snark.
“I just do it when I think people deserve it,” he said. “Why should giving credit be a function of whether or not I benefit from giving it? Or what anyone else thinks of me doing it?”
“Exactly.” Her eyes were actually gentle now.
Someone tell his illogical ass why he was trying to argue back when clearly she agreed.
“Thanks, I guess,” he said.
Rhode studied his face. “You’re less red now,” she noted.
Malcolm ignored that. “So, what, is it your turn now to dish some out?”
He wondered once more what was in his brain.
“Well....” said Rhode, looking once more like she was happy to cause trouble. “You could first show me sometime what’s worth complimenting. But if you don’t think you’d be capable, I’ll be on my merry way.”
That was terrible logic. To present a false dichotomy. A non-exhaustive list of events. Illogical... unless assumptions were made. Undeniable assumptions. ‘I’ve seen you looking at me....’
Prove it to me, she was saying. There he was, confronted with the temptation of a challenge—a challenge to prove her wrong in the best possible way. Had she gotten him already? What was he to do? Turn it down?
Duh. What else? Holy Zeus.
So, Malcolm held in his pride and refused the bait, and Rhode received a scoff and an eye-roll. Lame, perhaps, but it did the job.
As Rhode searched his face, her own lost its humor once more. “You know, I’ll stop if you actually want me to,” she muttered.
Malcolm stared back into her green eyes and blinked. He was certainly touched... by the lowest of standards. No, she didn’t deserve points for that.
An awful pit lodged in his belly. His mouth was dry, and he was running out— Out of what, he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Malcolm didn’t want to say something he’d regret. But he also didn’t want to say something else he’d regret. So, he said nothing and ended up going with the only appropriate answer he could think of.
“That’s considerate of you,” he said, repeating her words back to her.
They’d reached a stalemate, but in a dimension beyond. Somehow, that made things weirder. But... at least he’d had an answer?
“I... uh-I actually have to look for Alicia,” he muttered. “It’s way past her bedtime.”
Immediately he cringed. Had he consciously stressed the word “actually”? Did that actually mean anything? He couldn’t tell. No matter. He actually wasn’t interested in knowing.
“I just saw her with Rachel and Sophie,” said Rhode. “They should be in the fireworks viewing area.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Rhode simply smiled. “Kalinýchta,” she said.
He awkwardly bowed his head. “Kalinýchta.”
Rhode smiled wider. “Óneira glyká,” she said.
Yeah, she was totally needling him.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Outside the pavilion, the string lights shined in the summer night. By one of the dimly lit potted trees, Malcolm found Alicia sat a table with Sophie and Rachel.
As Sophie waved at him in the midst of chewing, Rachel stacked an empty plate above another and rearranged another three little plates filled with confections.
“You want some cookies and milk?” Rachel offered him.
“Or churros?” Sophie said.
“I’m good, thanks,” he said, and approached Alicia’s chair.
Alicia’s eyelids were already drooping.
“Hi, Mal,” she said, rubbing an eye in a way that reminded him of his mortal sister Sadie.
They shared not a hint of resemblance, but at times their childlike actions would match and he’d realize once more that he’d forgotten how young Alicia really was.
“Ready to go, Allie?” said Malcolm.
“No, I’m okay,” she mumbled. “I can just sit here for a little and—” She yawned for an impressive eight seconds. “And close my eyes.”
“Not happening,” Malcolm said, as Rachel said, “Ohh-kay. Time for you to go, little missy.”
“If you nap now, you’re not going to be able to wake up until morning,” Malcolm tried to reason. “Let’s get you to the cabin. Then you can sleep.”
But Alicia didn’t budge. She let out a little squealy groan in protest.
“I’ll go with you,” he said more softly.
Alicia leaned on him, pressing her face onto his side.
Malcolm crouched to her level. “Let’s go. It’s just ten minutes away,” he said, reaching for her hand.
Come on, kid. Please don’t make this difficult.
He really should’ve fetched her earlier. His own fault.
Alicia looked at him, protesting with baby seal eyes between her heavy blinks. She was spending too much time with Percy if she could replicate that. Or maybe kids just had that innate ability. (Actually, no. He’d seen some demonic kids.)
Alicia’s eyes were closing again. “Aber’chbin so müüüde,” she whined.
Malcolm figured he got the point. Ten minutes for him, he remembered, could be fifteen with little legs. With sleepy little legs, probably nearly twenty.
“Okay,” he said, both out of pity and desperation. “Okay, come on.”
Malcolm maneuvered hoisted Alicia up from her armpits and her arms went around his neck.
Bidding Sophie and Rachel a fun rest of the night (and mouthing a thank you to Rachel behind Alicia’s back), Malcolm made his way out and ignored everyone and all the awws around them.
As he strode away from the crowd, commotion muted into indistinct chatter, and in the simple serenity, white noise blared. Alicia’s breathing heated his left ear, leaving him a tad uncomfortable from the imbalance.
“How are you doing, Allie?” he said.
“Not good. No, no. Not well,” Alicia said. “But I liked the fireworks. And I saw Mommy today.”
“Yeah? How was that?”
“It was nice,” said Alicia.
“That’s nice.”
It had been Athena’s second visit since Alicia’s arrival to Camp Half-Blood. Once again, Malcolm had promised his mother he’d help look after his sister. Alicia brought about new challenges for him to deal with, but he swore to himself, too, that he’d take on all the unglamorous and awkward and boring hurdles—snot on his hoodies, eventual explanations about strawberries, discoveries of some of the most basic knowledge, whatever.
“If you need anything or want anything, you let me know, okay?” Malcolm reminded her.
He felt Alicia nod.
“Anything,” he said.
“Okay.”
Once they reached the cabin, Malcolm set her down, and Alicia hugged him before she started getting ready for bed. For the 56th day in a row, he laid a peck on her forehead, the way Malcolm’s father had done to him.
It hadn’t even been two months since her arrival at Camp Half-Blood, but Malcolm felt as though they’d known each other for years already. (Which was quite the paradox, though, because the days and weeks had seemed to get shorter since her arrival.)
He knew by now that her favorite color was purple. Her favorite animal was the beaver (because beavers were engineers). She had a beaver plushie named Baz—a present from her father. And she had lost three teeth already and currently had one wiggly canine.
“You did great today,” Malcolm said while supervising her tooth brushing. His dad used to tell him that, too.
Later, after he finished combing her hair and helped tuck her into Annabeth’s old bed, she asked, “Mommy won’t leave, right?”
“No,” Malcolm assured her. “She won’t be around nearly as much as your dad was, but she won’t leave.”
Alicia nodded. Malcolm could see there was a question on her mind. He waited beside her.
“Mal?” she said in her squeaky voice.
“Yeah?”
“What is death really like? What actually happens to people who die?”
Oh dear. Trust a child of Athena to ask the hard questions. At 1:20 AM. At least this was easier than the question she’d first asked: 'Why?'
Malcolm did what his mortal parents did: tell the truth.
“There are a few answers to that,” he said. “Biologically speaking and spiritually speaking. All living things—plants, animals—at least in the mortal world, eventually get...” Decomposed—no, broken down—by fungi and bacteria. Nah, he didn’t want to explain that. “Well, they, um... They change form.” He hoped Alicia wouldn’t ask for specifics. “In that process, they get converted into carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and a whole bunch of other nutrients. And all those things create new life. Without that process, there wouldn’t be life. So, whatever came before us and whatever will come after us was created or will be created in that way. That’s what they call the circle of life....”
He explained that, on the spiritual side, some people were at peace in Elysium or even the Isles of Blest, that some were not at peace and faced eternal punishment—but that that was only for really, really bad people. He admitted that not all gods get to live forever; some didn’t exist anymore and they faded like Pan and old titans. That wasn’t an exhaustive list, but he hoped it would be okay for now.
There were some things that Malcolm didn’t think she was ready to hear yet—at least not when she was going to sleep and not so soon after her father’s death. He wasn’t going to mention Tartarus outright—or that their sister had the misfortune to go there and see Tartarus in the flesh.
Malcolm didn’t like thinking about it either. Even now, his heart would clench, his eyes would well up, and his air passages would get blocked, bringing him back to the time he’d been most horrified—to the time he’d been scared shitless and fucking furious at the gods that they allowed that to happen to her. To them.
He’d already known there was enough hell on earth without having to go to Hades or Tartarus, but never had he loathed the world so much.
All their siblings had turned to him then. Annabeth was going to be okay, right? Right? Right? Malcolm recalled the time he’d yelled a barrage of expletives at thirteen-year-old Conrad for asking such stupid questions. And that other time, after Annabeth had come back and their siblings still asked the same questions about the sister they sometimes barely recognized. At least then he’d been calm.
She’s okay now, Malcolm reminded himself. They both are. And she’s here. She just turned 23. She’s safe. She’s healthy. She’s engaged. She’s happy.
A call of “Mal?” pulled him from his thoughts. Alicia’s young brow creases had disappeared, but her eyes then flitted around his face. “Ähm... is there time for story time tonight?”
Immediately, he was eased, grateful to be grounded by simpler problems.
Alicia still could barely meet his eyes.
“Of course,” Malcolm said. “Have I ever said no?”
As Alicia fiddled with her blanket, Malcolm walked over to his bedside shelf that stored the books he’d checked out from the Cabin Six library. Setting aside a pile of his fathers’ working papers and manuscript drafts, Malcolm’s eyes darted through the names: Angrist and Pischke, Bassano, Chomsky, Coates, Collins, Friedman, Foucault, Haley, Homer, Hurston, Kahneman, Krugman, Levitt and Dubner, Mankiw, Marx, Papanek, Peterson, Rand, and finally—
Book in hand, Malcolm dropped into the beside chair reserved for story time, pulling it closer to Alicia, and turned to the page they’d bookmarked. Chapter 32: Flesh, Blood, and Bone.
Yeah, no, this wasn’t a good idea right now. Alicia liked Cedric (“He has gray eyes?!”). This wasn’t how she should end their special day. Malcolm shut the book.
“Actually, how about something different today?” he asked. “Since it’s Annabeth’s birthday, I think I could recite you a poem that I think screams Annabeth.”
Alicia nodded and snuggled deeper into her covers. Malcolm knew just the poem. It was one he’d recited many times to Sadie—a favorite of hers that he knew by heart. Figuring Alicia could benefit from a dose of Angelou, he began:
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size,
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
The words earned a smile upon her small lips. Malcolm continued reciting words of honey bees and inner mysteries. By the fourth and final verse, Alicia’s eyelids had fluttered shut and he began to hear soft snoring—or heavy breathing. (Alicia insisted she didn’t snore. That was one other thing he opted not to tell her.)
“Good night, Allie,” he whispered, and asked their mother to ensure her a peaceful slumber.
Malcolm left the nightlight on. He’d gotten used to it years ago when Annabeth had needed some light.
Returning Goblet of Fire to the shelf, Malcolm’s eyes landed on the wall of artworks created by the cabin residents. Of the dozen displayed was a relief sculpture that his older sibling Ray had done of Annabeth studying with a few of their other older siblings.
To the right were twin diagrams of plant and animal cells, drawn, colored, and labeled by Claire. She’d used to hate the piece because of some typos, but Malcolm, Annabeth, and Conrad insisted on displaying it front and center.
Above Claire’s drawing was a piece Malcolm and Annabeth had done as children of a man-made mountain range across a lake, under a backdrop of pink and purple skies. Just as Malcolm tried to remember who had done which part, the sudden staccato bursts outside jolted him from his reverie.
Right. The party wasn’t over.
Malcolm watched the fireworks from outside the cabin, and inhaled deep breaths of the pure summer air until he could no longer feel the tingling on his stomach.
Perhaps it was ADHD that led him to check the news on his phone, that led him to the library sectioned off in the back of the cabin to call his mortal brother.
Within two seconds, his screen displayed the face of his teenage, beanstalky brother Tyrone.
“Hey,” Malcolm said faintly. “How are you?”
“Hey-ey,” Tyrone answered in two syllables. “I’m good.”
“Yeah?”
“Course,” said Tyrone.
As Tyrone set down his phone, presumably, Malcolm noticed his brother was at his desk in his own bedroom.
“What’chu been up to?” said Malcolm.
“Um, I’m right now writing this thing on historical credit rationing here. With models and effects and stuff. Piece o’ cake so far. I just need to reset my brain.”
Leaning back in his swivel chair, Tyrone stretched and rested his hands behind his head.
On his brother’s left wrist, Malcolm spotted the bracelet Athena had given Malcolm as soon as he could walk. The bracelet was made of a soft rope with two adjustable knots to resize the rope’s circumference. Beside one of the knots, light reflected off the otherwise unassuming metal bead inscribed with the Greek letters alpha, theta, and epsilon: AΘΕ.
“It’s summer, Ty. I think you can take a break,” said Malcolm.
“What are those?” Tyrone snickered. “No one’s making me do this. I just want to”—His hands moved in circles beside his head—”process and apply, ya know.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, dude!” Tyrone sat up, leaning towards his screen. “I made a pretty sick pie today. So, no cake, but you can tell Annabeth we had pie. Banana cream pie.”
“Ohhh.” Malcolm salivated.
“You could still taste the coconut cream, but at least it didn’t taste weird with the banana.”
Malcolm smiled. “Bet.”
Malcolm wanted to hear about the most mundane things: his brother’s baking, his reading, their little sister’s ballet…. Sadie had finally perfected pirouettes, apparently. But in her attempts to recreate perfection, she’d gotten so dizzy, she face-planted—and then weepingly declared she didn’t want to be a ballerina after all.
“You know, it’d be cool if you could come here next year,” Malcolm said. “After you graduate.”
“Like I wouldn’t see your city!” Tyrone said.
“I meant to stay longer.”
Tyrone was silent for a while. “I’ll think about it. How are things on your end?”
Malcolm caught him up to speed about goings-on in New York until Tyrone decided he was going to work on his paper again before hitting the sheets.
“Send me your essay, ‘kay? I wanna read it,” said Malcolm.
Tyrone nodded. “Call soon!”
“‘Kay. Good night, Ty. I love you. Tell everyone I say hi.”
After sneaking in a quick “Okay. I love you more!” Tyrone immediately hung up.
Dammit. Malcolm would make sure to win next time.
Setting aside his phone, Malcolm opened his laptop. He did a routine check on a bookmarked page, studying the figures that were guaranteed to be updated at least weekly and that were accompanied by some sleek yet irksome data viz and a readily accessible but equally annoying CSV file.
He stared at the glaring numbers.
358.
2,149.
358. 2,149. Now 111 and 725 more than 2015’s equivalent.
Impressive.
Three fifty-eight. Three hundred and fifty-eight.
Seven hundred twenty-five… more. Before the end of July. Before mid-July.
Seven fucking hundred twenty-five—
Defeat sunk in and turned into searing pangs. Malcolm wanted to break something.
He’d known the rough figures already. He’d already done the math. He’d expected hockey sticks in the summer, naturally. But why the total shift upwards?
Letting out a sigh, Malcolm slumped and stared into nothingness.
His mind took him back to West Monroe, to West Carroll, to East 29th…. Where, on those hot summer nights, he would hide in his father's embrace from the deafening pelts of rain. Where, through brittle windows and walls, lights would flash and sirens would wail. And tires would screech, followed by shouts in the heavy storms.
But logged in his brain was also the memory of Annabeth talking his ear off about the City Beautiful on her trip to his home twelve summers ago. He remembered the two weeks he had spent going on every architecture tour and visiting every art museum with her. He remembered Annabeth teary-eyed over having to cut short their explorations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s structures—all because they’d had to kill some stupid chimaera. So, his fathers had extended her stay, and the siblings had roamed Wright’s playground to their hearts’ content.
He remembered the boat ride on Annabeth’s eleventh birthday—and her marveling at the drawbridges and skyscrapers that straddled the river. And later that night, after cake and candles, heads peeking out under covers, they’d chatted for hours and hours in hushed tones, gazing at the glowing stars on his bedroom ceiling. And Annabeth, with her characteristically certain gaze, had told him her heart’s desire in exchange for his.
‘Something permanent,’ she’d told him. Like the architectural masterpiece Wright et al. had brought to life for the most beautiful great city left in the world.
Malcolm scoffed. Were you blind or dumb, Wright?
Some things were just too permanent. Would Wright have cared or noticed now, 57 years after his death?
The stats hadn’t been compiled until 1968, noted a little voice in Malcolm’s head.
And could he be blamed for the segregation that might have caused his potential ignorance or apathy (or simple tone deafness, more like)?
And those riots also only happened after he’d died. Those neighborhoods had only been decimated in the ’60s.
Not that any of that was captured in Annabeth and Malcolm’s picture, which remained aloof and unyielding under Malcolm’s searing gaze.
It wasn’t Wright’s business either, his internal voice continued. What could he have done? He just made buildings.
Maybe Wright would’ve known—had known—that hidden in all the beauty was a stomach-lurching ugliness.
As if Wright—or Root or Burnham or especially Sullivan—would have been proud of such superficial grandeur. As if anyone could be proud of the unfathomable cruelty and the fucking embarrassm—
‘Focus on things you can control,’ Athena had long reminded him.
Malcolm closed his eyes and breathed. He counted to four. And repeated. Once he’d reached a state of calm, he opened his eyes.
There was nothing he could do from here. Might as well be productive.
The web bookmark disappeared with a whoosh.
The mirror provided a good enough reminder anyway—as did showers.
The sunken vertical line on his abdomen and the matching craters on his back and his right leg would’ve been no worse than the Stymphalian feather he’d taken to the shoulder in New York. Except those newer wounds had quickly healed, and their resulting scars had faded. And no wonder. He’d actually had access to nectar that time.
Malcolm had always supposed that was Athena’s point in giving him a bracelet that had only warned of dangers—instead of, say, a cap that could turn him invisible. Or maybe a supply of nectar. He’d understood the reasoning. After all, if there was no escaping or changing of any outcome, why should a precedent have been made to ignore the consequences of reckless behavior?
Naturally, Malcolm’s father had never agreed. And while his father couldn’t hold a grudge against Athena like his grandmother could, Malcolm knew that that was David Pace’s final straw.
Malcolm shed the thought as he toweled himself.
Pausing for a sec, he surveyed himself. The tingling was gone.
With one last checkup on Alicia, he repositioned her beaver plushie, which she instinctively cuddled, and drew up her covers to her chin.
Settling into his own bed, Malcolm read himself some bedtime poetry on his phone and checked his messages. Tyrone had sent a link to his essay and photos and videos of his banana cream pie. A clip showed Tyrone and Sadie making the pie, and, with their fathers, wishing Annabeth a happy birthday. Malcolm sent it to Annabeth.
He revisited his photo album, observing Tyrone’s latest baking accomplishments, then scrolled up for the old ones. Past Sadie’s piano playing, family restaurant outings with himself, and travel pics to Europe, he smiled at those shots of slightly overcooked pie under bad lighting, found another poorly angled shot, and then suddenly encountered… her.
She who kept him from numbness. Who haunted and guided him. Whom he promised the world to—or at least a city. She with her mocking laughs and her mocking name.
Ayesha. His… his what? She’d never been his anything. And yet….
‘She would’ve loved you, too,’ his father had told him. It had been an attempt to assuage his son of his irrational guilt, but those words only ever made it worse.
Fuck this. Malcolm just wanted to sleep.
Notes:
149 🌞🥀
🏙 4400 WM WGP M7
It was fun to edit chapter 3 while also editing parts of later chapters. There are already many hints of what’s to come! Some, you might remember as you read. Some, you’ll only catch if you re-read once all’s said and done.
I’m also betting that someone’s already figured out the culmination of the crouton-sized breadcrumbs that are in each chapter. Any guesses?!?!
NB: The girl I named Sadie (Malcolm’s mortal sister) is not Kane Chronicles Sadie. I thought of many alternatives and I don't know if it might be confusing, but I couldn’t name Strategist Sadie after anyone other than the mighty queen, knocker-down of doors, and paver of ways that was Sadie TM Alexander (1898-1989). Because Sadie TM Alexander should be a household name.
If you still wanted to, you can help finalize the Values of New Athens! Fill out this quick survey! (This will be part of chapter 4!)
Chapter 4: In which Malcolm helps kill some industries
Notes:
June 28, 2021:
To H. E. on FF.net, this should’ve been in the previous update: Thank you for your feedback and your thoughtfulness! I seriously appreciate it. ❤️ It does help.
To those who filled out the survey, especially those who added comments, thank you! I appreciate you! I incorporated these comments throughout chapter 4 in different ways. (There are more parts coming.) So you helped put this chapter together!
And to the dear person who wrote, “This is a riot i love it”, ENJOY!!!
October 11 & 14, 2021:
Welcome back, friends! Hell, yeah, I finally finished chapter 4! It was a struggle. I’m so happy.
Many thanks to those who took the time to fill out the survey for New Athenian values and to those who shared their thoughts on healthcare and constitutions and such. I incorporated all your comments throughout this chapter. 🙂 And thanks to those who filled out that meta feedback survey for part 1 of chapter 4! I did not expect the tucking-Alicia-into-bed scene to be a common answer for fave moments (at least within the small sample size of that survey), but awwww.
There were opposing opinions on the (perhaps way too technical) healthcare discussion. (I think I’ll rewrite that and some other bits someday. Moving on now.) And I SERIOUSLY appreciate you letting me know your thoughts. That’s why I asked. I rewrote scenes in part 2 based on the feedback. I wanted to make it better while still writing what I enjoy. What I have now is definitely an improvement from my 2018(!) draft. So, thank you.
There will be more work stuff, which is a huge reason I wrote this novel, so I was happy to see the council meeting also included in fave moments. However, there won’t be AS much later as there is in this chapter, which was meant to be more “day in the life”. There’s also nothing else that’s as technical as Bae’s spiel (save for a smaller thing in chapter 17-ish, but that’s Malcolm being Malcolm).
I’ve updated the bibliography, of course. I’ve also managed to edit the previous chapters so they read better.
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FYI: This chapter, meant to be more "day in the life of building New Athens", is an anomaly. Skip to the last scene or the next chapter if you can't wait for the more direct Malcolm/Rhode plot.
After five hours of rest and three full minutes observing the rough fibers of his camp bedsheets and staring at his phone that lay out of arm’s reach, Malcolm decided he wouldn’t waste a potential half an hour pretending he could still nap. Dragging himself up, he ignored his betraying yawn and heavy eyelids that warned him he’d regret refusing extra rest.
The remaining five residents of Cabin Six were sound asleep. Alicia and her beaver plushie, he noticed, were in Claire’s bed. Gods, Malcolm hoped his answers to her questions last night hadn’t given her another existential crisis.
‘Mal? I’m scared,’ he remembered her whispering last week.
‘Of?’ he’d asked.
Alicia hadn’t said. She’d merely snuggled up to his chest and took expansive breaths while nestled in the crook of his neck. But who knew? Maybe he’d actually helped quell her fears?
Yeah, what were those odds?
Trying not to blame himself, Malcolm crept to the bathroom to splash water on his face and brush his teeth. Having finally changed into sweatpants and an old Columbia t-shirt, he tried not to wake up his siblings as he exited Cabin Six. Then in went the earbuds, silencing the chatty birds and hellos from the sound.
Once he finished his stretches, he sped off to a deep kick drum. The beats rolled with a guitar riff and heavy bass, overlaid with bars that confronted one with an impossible question—
I’m wonderin’ if a thug's prayers reach
Is pious pious ‘cause God loves pious?
Socrates asks, “Whose bias do y’all seek?”
—the line of questioning that always led to a Nietzschean conundrum. Malcolm wouldn’t have gone so far as to renounce religion; however, the guy’d had a point. Given that the gods owed their continued power to mortals’ and demigods’ and others’ worship, how could the gods so often do little more than sit back and watch the world implode?
But there were assumptions that laid in that line of thinking. Because, in the first place, how much control did the gods truly have? If demigods, after all, had to keep solving the gods’ problems, what did that say about the immortals?
No, that wasn’t a fair assessment, Malcolm thought. Mortals, demigods, and gods all created problems and all solved each other’s problems.
That thought only brought him back to that self-perpetuating cycle Plato detailed in Euthyphro. What made something pious? Who had the power to make something holy? Did that party hold the cards? Or was Plato right all along, that gods and mortals existed in a symbiotic relationship? Did that imply that no one, not even the gods, had control over the world’s shit?
Was that a comforting discomfort? Or perhaps a discomforting comfort?
On one hand, lack of omnipotence meant that choices mattered. So, given the limits to godly power, perhaps life on earth could go on fine without the gods. Or at least without relying on the gods.
Yet, given that gods were more powerful than mortals and demigods—no matter who or what made deities powerful—and given that the gods couldn’t fix mortals’ issues—what then could lesser lives accomplish?
Could the city that Malcolm imagined, just and free, possibly be created? Was this dream of his simply a delusion?
He opted to believe the opposite. What he witnessed during each of his runs was this vision getting further and further from just that. The evidence was present in the steel frames that rose daily in the New Athens city center. In the carbon-capturing concrete materials that Leo had so excitedly talked his ear off about a few months ago and that Malcolm now saw dress the lower floors of the apartment skeleton that Annabeth had designed.
The evidence was there in Malcolm’s own work. In all the data that he, Chiara, and Bae had collected and utilized. In the internal and external policies that Rayel drafted. It was there, even in the sorts of issues that Malcolm and other councilors were grilled on by constituents—some of whom didn’t seem to know what the hell they were even talking about.
But at this moment, there was no one with him to delay progress—no one coming to him with more problems. So, before he’d have to rein in his mind at City Hall, Malcolm let his sprawling thoughts direct him wherever they wished.
The freshly paved streets before him had him wonder how best to fuel public transit and the odd cars and motorbikes in this upcoming 15-minute city. Why not biomethane sourced from landfills? He’d have to ask Marcella for her advice on the costs and benefits of an anaerobic digester. Would it be worth it to use the city’s waste and even buy New York’s waste and make something of the methane building up in landfills? Or would such a business discourage industry from eliminating waste in the first place?
Marcella probably also had other thoughts on whether it’d be preferable to advance the adoption of blue hydrogen. Or, better yet, green hydrogen. Or perhaps she’d advise him to first focus on potentially lower-hanging fruits in the city’s marginal abatement cost curves—options that could still yield more cost-effective emissions reductions (or prevention, in this case) for decades to come.
And still, residents wanted more say in how their city was run. Wind turbines! Small modular reactors! Direct air capture! Which... weren’t uninformed exactly. But as if their advice would outmatch that of a wood nymph with decades of experience in creating alternative fuels and researching nature-based solutions to climate change.
There had already been some valuable crowdsourced ideas, however. Top of the list: Public bathrooms everywhere, equipped with bidets! What a game changer.
Perhaps in a few years, once the city budget had room, New Athens could poach mortal connections in the federal government or the private sector. And then they could run way more open innovation challenges so the public could have more opportunities to give experts a run for their money. And for that, the city would have to cultivate an innovation hub to pull and push together the best and brightest minds. Hell, they didn’t even have to be “experts”. Randos would do, so long as they possessed varied knowledge and experience.
Ah, and Malcolm remembered as well he’d have to look into how to apply concepts from the social settlement movement. Was it good enough that the most well-off individuals would live in the same buildings as the least well-off? He’d have to reconsult Jane Addams’s theories and any rigorous findings available. Though perhaps it’d be easier to pick Annabeth’s brain on ideas on infrastructure’s role in achieving social interconnectedness and a lower Gini coefficient....
Ideas continued to flow as blood circulated in his body, until Malcolm zoned out and let himself embody the braggadocio of his run’s soundtrack.
Beat the odds, beat the Feds
It wouldn’t be wise to bet against the kid
It was always productive to start the day with a heavy-bassed banger and a dose of arrogance. But the abrupt change in melody reminded Malcolm that it was precisely that attitude that fueled the chaos—that helped cause the melancholy that soon mirrored the somber beats pulsing in his ears.
He’d known it was coming. He knew he’d hurt. And he welcomed it.
Yet, his legs still carried him faster and farther. Farther east. Farther away from window-boarding plans, from biweekly pew-sittings. Farther away from what felt like everything—in search of calm nothingness. New York could offer only so much escape. But by now, tucked away past the pearly gates of Camp Half-Blood and New Athens, it was simply impractical to head back.
But there, Athena had thrust upon her son a choice he’d made nearly every day: run in or run away. To aid him or haunt him, she’d merely given him a single tool: that cord he’d once worn on his wrist, reminding him that the one time he’d fight back could have been his last. And that all the times he hadn’t could have counted as a trade for someone else.
What was his current tally? Billy, DeShawn, Tom, Andre, Michael, Dylan.... That made six. There was his old neighbor Miles, who taught him disarming tactics. His pal Keenan he ran errands for, who’d kept him updated on territorial disputes. There’d been a student from the school around the block. A shopkeeper at the corner store. In total, at least a dozen of his former neighbors. By now, probably a handful more of his old classmates, like those kids from school who’d never returned. Maybe they’d moved, maybe they’d dropped out, maybe they’d gone to juvie. Or maybe they were dead.
Is it genocide?
And what, pray tell, had the gods bothered to do?
’Cause I can still hear his mama cry
Know the family traumatized
Shots left holes in his face about piranha-sized
Malcolm pushed his legs to their limit. But he’d never run fast enough. In his mind rang the echoes of that familiar sound of a bang and then a crack that no mortal—and even no demigod—could outrace.
The old pastor closed the cold casket
And said the church ain’t got enough room for all the tombs
Fury and anguish coursed through him and ruled his head. Malcolm ran faster along the shoreline. His muscles were protesting. His heartbeat was approaching hazardous levels. He was running out of oxygen.
Malcolm sucked in sharp breaths, filling the deepest depths of his lungs with Long Island air.
It’s a war going on outside we ain’t safe from
I feel the pain in my city wherever I go
Three hundred fourteen soldiers died in Iraq
Five hundred nine died in Chicago
Leap by leap, Malcolm continued sprinting, nearly stumbling as he persisted. His abdomen was prickling again. His chest was on fire. His body screamed at him to slow down. His brain flashed with reminders of the quarts that had pooled out on the way to Stroger.
But that—this—was more tolerable, wasn’t it, than the aftermath had been? Than being given mortal blood transfusions that weakened his muscles, that weighed down his bones, that fogged his brain, left him in a haze, and impaired his reaction time?
Waking up, Malcolm remembered, had felt like an unbearable hell—had freaked him out in a way that no one, not even his father, could understand. The doctors had insisted it was the opioids. At seven, he’d known they were wrong.
But he had his brain back now—sixteen years and counting. And he wasn’t going to sleep this time. Not like she had.
If he’d had the odds then, surely he could manage here and now. Surely he could do his little run. This was easy. This was just him and his body and an empty pathway. He was in control. He could take a step. He could run. He could set this city on the right course.
Here, no one would need to worry about strays or accidents. No child here would walk onto the blood on the streets before firefighters had time to hose it down. Kids here would never, ever grow up listening to the screams of victims and cries of the other souls that died with the murdered. Because here, violence and trauma wouldn’t be normal.
And brick by brick, policy by policy, by the grace of any willing gods, Malcolm would do every little thing in his control to construct a haven where luck was simply and radically unnecessary.
In the land of the bereaved and home of the depraved, they’d build an enclave with better problems.
New Athens would be everything the Second City should have become after that great blaze. Paralleling the wonders of the City Beautiful was simple enough. With a park system to make Bennett proud and a Burnham-inspired guarantee that not a foot of the shores would be appropriated to the exclusion of the people, New Athens could easily be established as “City in a Garden” and “City by the Sound”. New Athens could, too, boast the togetherness and unshakeable optimism of Malcolm’s kind of town.
But this city wouldn’t squander its chance to start from scratch. New Athens would be the place hailed as the City that Works—that did work, and for all. Where Sadie could play ball and do ballet in any park. Where Tyrone could take that damn cord off his wrist and wander wherever. Where young demigods would have simpler decisions to make.
The sledgehammer beats pounding in his ears, complemented by disses hissed to those standing in the way of success, made Malcolm believe 20% more that his plan would come to fruition.
And they want me dead
But I’m so sorry, but I just can’t die for you
As Malcolm rounded around a bend by the sound’s shores and turned back towards camp, he felt a surge of power once his eyes fixed on the hilltop where the Athena Parthenos stood. It was as if Athena had in this moment blessed him with a turbo boost. Or perhaps it was Apollo making him feel like he was literally keeping pace with a pair of 1985 white Lamborghini Countachs.
Accompanied by the tinkling keys of a “Chariots of Fire”-esque piano melody that curved his lips into a grin, Malcolm let himself suspend judgment at such bizarre bars to sink into the universal feeling of weightlessness from an orchestra of instruments and a chorus of operatic voices.
He finished his run at the end of the masterpiece. 17.6 kilometers in a little over 51 minutes, his watch told him. A rate just 18 seconds over his record time.
He’d take it.
Cracking a smile, Malcolm inhaled deep breaths and slowed to a jog. He tested the joints of his fingers. No resistance, no delay. Everything was in sync.
Malcolm jogged his way back to Camp Half-Blood, nodding in hello to some Demeter kids already planting trees by the New Athenian streets.
He paused for a moment at the city gates before joining the day’s bustle. And with another intake of air, Malcolm simply stood, struck by the reminder that he was still alive.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Within the shipping container walls of makeshift City Hall, Malcolm sat at a round table with his fellow councilors, trying not to succumb to the heat, his lack of sleep, or, for that matter, the whiff of cologne sent his way by the swinging tower fans among them.
Two seats away to Malcolm’s right, Will Solace tapped his pen in a staccato jitter, drawing too much attention from six people with ADHD. He was going to ruin it, Malcolm thought. The ink would get stuck. He’d need another one sooner than necessary. How inefficient.
Concentrate.
“—prepare for when they move here,” Will said. “We should keep inviting those demigods here. The satyrs have been reaching out. Some have already expressed interest, so we need to set up those sites ASAP. You can’t just switch over to nectar and ambrosia. It takes a while, and the amount you’d need would kill you.”
“Um... how do we—I mean, not we, but the city—get access to... coke and stuff?” asked Rayel Perez, daughter of Harmonia. “I get that we’ve legalized everything...”
Screw federal law, Malcolm thought. They didn’t have to know.
“But, like you said, Will. We need supply,” Rayel said.
“We can make it,” Will said.
Rayel gaped. “Who’s we?”
Sitting on Malcolm’s left, Chiara paused her hair tugging as she furrowed her brows. “Are we, like, building a meth lab or something?” she muttered as Will was saying, “We have... chemists.”
Will updated them on the logistics he’d worked out with Malcolm a few days ago. The rehab center, they’d agreed, should be located east of City Hall to be on the opposite side of Camp Half-Blood and the New Athenian gates: away from the city center to maintain privacy, but still near a bus stop to ensure accessibility.
“But then my team and I thought that the center should also run a new initiative we're proposing to address teenaged campers’ use of e-cigarettes,” Will said. “Because, apparently, vaping seems to be on the rise. So, maybe we could locate the center closer to camp.”
“How often do they vape, do we know?” asked Malcolm. “Are they just trying it, or do they do it regularly?”
“We—thanks to Chiara and the stats team—found that a quarter of older teenagers at camp vaped nicotine within the previous thirty days of our asking,” Will said. “And nearly half of those teens vape daily.”
“Holy— That’s a lot,” Malcolm said. “Even if it’s around 10% of the population, that seems like a lot. Wow.”
“We’ve seen an increase in the share of youth who are physically addicted to nicotine,” Will said. “And, judging by their— And this is self-reported, mind you, so who knows how high this actually is. Judging by their responses, they’re four to five times more likely to experiment with cigarettes year over year.”
“Who are these people?” said Pravir.
“And you know what some are turning to to kick their vaping habits?” Will said.
“Patches?”
“Cigarettes,” Will spat, setting his pen down forcefully. “So, they’re not just for experimenting. They’re for using. And ‘coping.’”
With a pulled face matching her colleagues’ expressions, Rayel said, “Don’t these kids know we didn’t have the privilege of ruining our lungs and getting frickin’ cancer, since we were preparing for war after war when we were their age? I, for one, do not want to pay for vapers’ or smokers’ healthcare.”
Bit rich. “For fairness’s sake, we’d have to do the same thing with alcoholism,” Malcolm said. Had that been too much? He wasn’t exactly—or he wasn’t just—talking about seeing her pretty trashed last night. “And other things,” he added, just to be safe.
“You know,” said Pravir, “Frank once told me that the Canadian government views alcoholism as a disability. At least in the context of workplace discrimination and employers’ duty to accomodate. Not sure if it’s the same here, but... would that fly with our values and code of rights?”
“And how about people who don’t exercise?” said Chiara.
“Or people with bad diets?” Pravir said.
“Couldn’t we exclude all from our free healthcare program?” Rayel said.
“If someone has some pre-existing condition,” Malcolm said, “like clogged arteries or heart disease or some cancer—”
“Then we can cover those people—” Rayel said.
“But how would we know,” said Malcolm, “that those conditions didn’t come from eating too much red meat or processed meat? Which, the WHO, by the way, classifies as carcinogens. And we don’t know if people simply lacked the education. Or lived in food deserts outside camp.”
“At the very least, we could do that anti-vaxx thing, can’t we?” Chiara said. “If you don’t vaccinate yourself—assuming you can be—you can’t get free healthcare?”
“I mean, I think you should have to register as an anti-vaxxer,” Pravir proposed. “Whoever is on the list should then be put in the back of the line for medical services. If you don’t believe in medical science, you shouldn’t need it.”
“That is not how we treat our patients,” Will sighed, even as he smiled. “Positive reinforcement is almost always the way to go. Punishing and shaming patients, even if they’re wrong, tends to lead to worse outcomes. That’s not a way to build trust.”
“Well,” Malcolm said, “we could just put people with better vaccination records in the front of the line. That’s positive reinforcement. Right, Prav?”
“There you go,” Pravir said to Will.
As Bae laughed beside Malcolm about framing effects, Will, meanwhile, took a long, hard look at Malcolm’s face. “Are you seriously suggesting that?” he said.
Will gave the look Malcolm occasionally got from non-Athenians—one that prided or irked him, depending on the situation. The one that conveyed: You. You’re a child of Athena. You should know better.
Blame his contrarian habits for offering that comment. Or his need to make peace with Pravir. Or maybe the fact that it wasn’t actually a bad idea.
Malcolm thought some more. “On the off chance that there are shortages and all emergency cases are considered equal... then, sure,” he said. “But you’re the Chief Medical Officer, so if you have reason to believe that won’t help, then obviously no. I’ll side with your expertise.”
“Have we thought about interaction effects, though?” Chiara said. “Like, the two policies together? We could just have that sort of positive reinforcement along with bans on those religious and philosophical exemptions. Combined, we could see larger improved health effects.”
“We have made those bans already, right?” said Rayel. “I know they work in Mississippi. I’m from there, and let me tell you, it’s like the only thing we have going for us. A near-perfect school immunization rate that blows every other state out of the water. Whereas, last I checked, 48 states have these stupid religious and philosophical and conscientious exemptions. Seriously, how does Mississippi of all states beat everyone on something like school immunization? Mississippi!”
“We’re putting those bans in place for schools, sure. But affecting access to healthcare is a bit much,” Will said. “We’ll monitor the situation and consider the front-of-the-line thing if we have a problem. But I don’t think it would matter in practice the way Malcolm suggested. We can maybe find other ways to instill personal responsibility for the collective good.”
“If I could add something,” Ainsleigh said. “I saw a comment in our survey about how we should think about safety. If I could read it out?”
Ainsleigh turned on her tablet and read aloud, “‘I hope that safety means physical and mental. Many demigods have trauma, addictions, and/or mental illnesses, and a good mental wellbeing is essential to a just society. Therapists and psychiatrists should be available to residents of New Athens (and preferably all of Camp Half-Blood).’
“I really liked that,” she said, receiving nods and hums. “One, the point that we can frame health as a safety issue and think of it at the same level of importance as other kinds of safety. And two, it would probably be a violation of our values and ethics code not to have universal healthcare. Not having it would deny people safety and the freedom to live. And also, three, I don’t think we would think of charging a higher price for public safety services to people more likely to need those services.”
“Thank you, Ainsleigh,” said an exasperated Will.
“I second that,” said Bae. “I think I saw that comment. Someone else just put down, ‘Socialism’,” he snorted.
Rayel grinned. "Succinct. I like it."
“A bunch of us also ran with universal healthcare as a campaign promise,” Bae said.
“And,” Will argued, “in this country, there are an estimated 26,000 to 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage. Working-age Americans who are uninsured have a 40% higher death risk than those who have private insurance. Public health researchers found this seven/eight years ago. This is a safety issue, like the constituent said. So, no matter who the city residents are and what they might choose to do to themselves, we can’t let them die on our watch.”
The matter was settled—finally, and hopefully for the last time—and the councilors moved on to implementation and funding issues.
Here, Bae took the lead. “So, according to this prof at MIT, a healthcare economist who worked on setting up Romneycare and Obamacare—”
“Wait. Sorry. Romneycare?” Chiara said.
“In Massachusetts,” Bae nodded.
“It was the basis for Obamacare,” Malcolm added. “Passed four years before the ACA was a thing.”
“Yeah,” Bae said. He faced his solid musculature towards him, and smiled with dazzling eyes. “You know this, right? So—” Bae turned back to the rest of the group, and Malcolm tore his gaze away to do the same. “—healthcare systems need three things so that they don’t collapse. A three-legged stool, if you will.”
“Another three-legged stool?” Pravir muttered. “We already have the three Ps of sustainability.”
“There are a gazillion three-legged stools. We should get used to them,” Bae said. “Okay, one: insurance regulation, which should make insurance providers offer insurance to everyone at the same price. Two: the individual mandate, meaning everyone is required to buy insurance; no one can opt out. And three... three.... Gods, what’s three?”
Bae snapped his fingers repeatedly. Brown eyes locked on gray ones for a moment—or two. Or three.
“Insurance subsidies,” said Malcolm.
“Insurance subsidies,” Bae nodded. “So that money isn’t a barrier for anyone,” he explained to their fellow councilors. “All three are needed. If we’re missing a piece of the three, the whole system will collapse. For example, if there’s no individual mandate—if not everyone is required to get insurance—that means we’d only have people who need insurance most.”
Adverse selection.
“And the average cost would go way up,” Bae continued. “Whether the insurance system is single-payer or a public-private combo, the costs would be super expensive per person. There are states that have offered health insurance to everyone at the same price without an individual mandate. People could just get the insurance when they got sick, knowing they’d get more healthcare than they’d pay for. Payouts exceeded premiums, which was obviously unsustainable, so those markets collapsed.
“Second, if there’s no insurance regulation—which, again, refers to offering the same price for everyone, no matter how little or how much healthcare they get—then some people would be charged an unholy amount of money for their insurance. That’s why we need, as Malcolm mentioned, subsidies for people who can’t afford it.
“So, we should follow that model. But budget-wise... transparency-wise,” said Bae, turning to Malcolm with mischief in his gaze, “how ‘bout let’s not go the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ route.”
Malcolm did his best to rein in a shit-eating grin. “Well, let’s not make those comments in the first place.” Turning to Chiara, he said, “I’m curious. Have we found anything on whether there’ll be enough support here for our proposed coverage—emergencies, routine checks, pharmacare, dental care, and all? If we are transparent enough to say it’d cost residents more?”
Chiara shrugged. “We haven’t collected that data yet.”
“But regardless,” Bae said, “I don’t think we have to hide the fact that it’ll actually cost residents at the end of the day, instead of companies. Honesty creates trust, right?”
“Wait, why?” said Pravir. “Why can’t we just charge companies? Obamacare does that. And if Americans already pay more for healthcare than, say, Europeans and Canadians do...”
“Because that’s not how taxes work at the end of the day,” Bae said. “So, we have public-private insurance, right? Which… who knows? Maybe we’ll change someday. Well, anyway, with Obamacare, fancy accounting by the Congressional Budget Office hides the fact that it’s people ultimately paying extra for what superficially looks like added costs meant to be borne by companies. On paper, companies pay. In reality, it’s people. Because the demand curve for healthcare has a high slope—it’s pretty inelastic—and the supply curve is elastic, consumers will be the ones paying the added costs. Yes, even if charged to the companies. You know, let me draw it out.” Bae headed over to their smartboard.
Gods, Malcolm loved this part of his job.
(1) He didn’t have to tell people shit.
(2) There were people who’d have his back—not that they were exactly there to have his back, but it was a comfort nonetheless.
(3) What a delight just to wa—
No. Nope. This was work, he thought as he observed Bae draw two sets of axes, side by side.
“First, compare these two graphs,” Bae said. “Here are the axes. Price on the vertical, quantity on the horizontal. And here are the supply curves—what companies can sell.”
Bae drew a diagonal line, making each of the identical graphs look somewhat like very wonky arrows facing southwest, with the (0, 0) origin as the pointhead.
“Now, here are hypothetical demand curves.”
On the left graph, Bae drew a downward-sloping line, creating an X with the supply curve.
“This is elastic demand. If it’s flatter, it’s more elastic,” he said, while drawing perpendicular dashed lines from the intersection of the X to reach each axis. After labeling on the axes the price and quantity associated with the equilibrium (P₀ and Q₀), Bae continued.
“And this on the right,” he said, stretching the horizontal dashed line to the identical supply curve on the graph on the right, “is inelastic demand. If it’s steeper, then it’s more inelastic. So far, the prices and quantities are the same. Let’s see what happens when we raise the price, say, by a tax.”
To indicate the new price, Bae drew a new horizontal dashed line, parallel to and several inches above the dashed line representing the old price.
“Here’s the new price for both graphs. So with elastic demand, when prices change a bit, quantity demanded changes by a greater proportion. Here’s the new quantity, Q₁. See that?”
Bae used a green marker to shade in a right triangle underneath the demand curve, whose height equaled the distance between the parallel price lines and whose base spanned the difference in quantity. He did the same for the graph with inelastic demand.
“If we compare these triangles, the heights of the triangles are the same, but the bases are different. On the left, the base is larger than the height. On the right, the base is smaller than the height. Geometrically, that’s what determines elasticity.”
“Alternatively,” Bae said, “we could see what happens to the price on either graph if we change the quantity by the same amount.”
Bae erased some markings to revert the graphs to their initial equilibria stages. After reconfiguring the settings of the smartboard, he rotated the board to portrait mode so that the graphs were stacked one on top of another: left now on the top, right now on the bottom.
“Here, we’re looking at the same change in quantity. In the graph above, with elastic demand, the equilibrium price barely budges. The price is almost the same. In the bottom graph, we see a big increase in price. When it comes to healthcare, we’re on the bottom graph: with inelastic demand.
“So, that was demand elasticity,” Bae said, as he spun the board again to landscape mode. “We can also look at supply elasticity, but I think you get it. With an elastic supply curve, given a 1% increase in price, quantity supplied decreases by more than 1%. With an inelastic supply curve, quantity supplied decreases by less than 1%.
“So, elasticity is important because it determines who bears increases in taxes. We can look at two situations: one, the tax is levied on people instead of firms, and, two, firms pay instead.”
“The prices will be different,” said Rayel.
“Yes!” said Bae. “The prices will be different. But let’s break down the tax burden.”
Bae cleared the board and redrew two sets of axes and a pair of identical inelastic demand curves and elastic supply curves.
“If we levy a tax on consumers, the demand curve shifts left. Basically, people can get less quantity for the same amount of money at any price. So, we get this new demand curve, D₁. The vertical distance between the two demand curves is equal to the per-unit tax. Following so far? ‘Kay. Good.
“Given the shift in demand, the quantity supplied then adjusts: we move along the supply curve, toward the left, causing a little decrease in price and a slightly larger decrease in quantity. As we’d expect. This is, after all, an elastic supply curve. So, now let’s analyze the tax.”
Bae drew three red, solid lines: a horizontal line from the new equilibrium to the y-axis, a vertical line from the new equilibrium up to the old demand curve, and a horizontal line from that spot on the old demand curve to the y-axis.
“This rectangle,” he said, “represents the total cost of the tax. The height is, of course, tax per unit. And then we multiply that with the quantity, which is the base. That’s the total tax. Right? But who pays what share? For that, we look at the old equilibrium.
“Everything above the old price line—this dashed line, P₀—and below the old demand curve, D₀, is what consumers basically paid. And everything below P₀ and above the supply curve is what suppliers basically paid to cover the tax. So, here, even though the tax is levied on consumers—i.e., consumers have statutory incidence—producers actually pay a portion of the tax. That’s economic incidence. Moving on—”
“Wait. Question!” said Chiara.
“Yup?” Bae paused.
“If the price dropped...” Chiara said. “Like... I just don’t get how that rectangle shows that consumers are paying. Just in relation to the curves.”
Bae nodded. “Good question. It’s easiest to just look at the size. So, if we think about it in accounting terms, consumers pay the whole tax, right?”
“Right.”
“So that should be the whole rectangle. They pay the per-unit cost—this height—this many times,” he said, now gesturing to the base of the rectangle.
“Okay.”
“It should be the whole rectangle. But what happens is that producers don’t get to charge as much money—precisely, this much money, this little gap between the old price and the new price. And for each unit they sell, they now charge less this many times, Q₁ times, equal to the base of the rectangle. The tax decreased price and quantity, right? Well, the drop in price is a benefit to consumers.”
“Oh.”
“What we’ll see later,” Bae said, “is when the price increases because producers’ costs rise—”
“That part would be consumers bearing the tax,” Chiara said.
“Exactly.”
“So, in that case,” said Rayel, “the consumers bear some of the tax? But less than the previous case?”
Bae’s eyes lit up. “Well, let’s see,” he said, stepping over to the graph on the right. “What happens when the tax is levied on producers?
“So, the same tax is levied with the same height in the shifts, remember?” he said, illustrating his points as he spoke. “The supply curve then shifts left. We get a new equilibrium: higher price, lower quantity. Let’s break down this rectangle. Again, there are two parts: above the old price and below the demand curve, and below the old price and above the supply curve.
“Boom! On each graph, we end up with the same tax burden.”
“Yoooo,” said Chiara.
“So, it doesn’t matter… whom we tax,” Bae said. “It’s the same outcome either way. And in any situation in which supply is elastic and demand is inelastic, consumers will bear more of the tax, no matter whom the government taxes.”
“Even though the prices are different,” Rayel said, transfixed.
Watching the other councilors was like witnessing Alicia watch Leo’s magic tricks. Malcolm remembered his father drawing out the same gobsmacked expression out of him all those years ago.
“That,” Bae concluded, “is the tax burden. Also known as tax incidence.”
“And that,” Malcolm added, “is how governments can hide taxes ultimately paid for by taxpayers.”
Pravir narrowed his eyes. “You mean the Democrats have been lying?”
“It’s a white lie,” Malcolm said, shrugging.
“To get public support for the ACA, yeah,” Bae said. “So it could get passed. I mean, doesn’t it sound great to say, ‘Oh, our new and improved health insurance policy won’t cost you more! We’re having insurance companies pay for it! As if they won’t charge more for their services. And let’s pretend that your employer, who’s helping to provide you the insurance plan, won’t deduct more wages for the insurance or won’t raise prices on goods and services to cover their increased costs.’
“But,” Bae said, “I say we try it out honestly here. With transparency. Without saying, ‘Oh, free for you, because companies are paying.’ I mean, if you all agree. But I really think we should try that here and get people used to the mentality of paying taxes to get services without us having to cover it up.”
And having to rely on—and make up for—the ‘stupidity of the American voter’.
“Not saying I disagree, because I’d honestly prefer what you’re suggesting,” Malcolm said. “But I think we’d first have to be sure residents here would be okay with all the extra costs and with that much redistribution from rich to poor. In general, Americans aren’t okay with that. And we’re adding a lot more services, requiring even more redistribution. Worst case scenario, we implement the policy with insurance subsidies for low-income residents like Romneycare, instead of messing with our tax code the way Obamacare did, and then we get voted out and have our policy axed. Even if we implement a single-payer system, which we still need more funding for, especially considering that we can’t rely on any state or federal funding, there’s still that risk that it’ll be politically infeasible to expand coverage as much as we want to, even if it’s a great policy.”
“I don’t think residents here are as opposed to a single-payer system as the rest of the country is,” Pravir said.
“Yeah, but they’ve never had to have their incomes deducted or had to pay inflated prices for goods to pay for Will and others’ care,” Chiara said.
“It really could be a problem," Ainsleigh said. "The Demeter Cabin’s already getting complaints that produce now comes with a non-zero price. Like farmers don’t deserve fair wages.”
Malcolm faced Bae once more. “Yeah, so we don’t have enough information to be certain we won’t encounter those political issues. Until Chiron manages to get more funding from the gods, we’ll need the public-private system. And even then, we need to set relatively high sales taxes or property taxes. Income taxes are still a bit tricky. Our tax department’s still working with New Rome to figure out how to covertly coordinate all that stuff with the IRS. We should anyway try to be as self-reliant as possible. So, before we publicly make statements about how we’re doing this so transparently, we can have a backup plan.”
The awkward silences were thankfully getting less awkward. No one cringed this time at the content or the volume of such confidential conversations that were muffled from all outside by sound-proofing devices courtesy of Cabin Nine.
Pravir was the first to speak. “Yeah, and how ‘bout we keep the tax incidence card and play it later on if necessary? For other sorts of policies. If we need to.”
Set on the plan, the seven at the table brainstormed some general messaging.
Bae offered an idea: “If we show the similarities in services and expected results to those of Romneycare and Obamacare, and also the benefits compared to those programs, pretty much everyone could agree with our program.”
“Pretty much no voter here is right-leaning, though,” said Chiara. “I think if we mention something like that, it’d just open a can of worms that’ll get some people to devalue the policy. ‘Romney agreed with this? Yeah, I don’t think so. We need to do more.’ Ya know?”
“How ‘bout we leave party and ideology out of this and stick with evidence and expected results?” Malcolm suggested. “‘X fewer dead residents per Y years’?”
Rayel appeared unconvinced. “Party, sure, but we can leave in ideology. It’s not like we can ever actually avoid it when using an evidence-based approach. So, we could still use some Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance type argument, which complements the ‘fewer dead residents’ messaging.”
The seven then decided it made sense to argue from both utilitarian and deontological standpoints. The health team could figure out the details.
What the councilors still needed to confirm, however, was what to do with the vaping issue. Leave it be? No, they agreed. What policies could they then implement?
Twirling his pen, Will said, “In addition to offering services in the rehab center, or even in a pop-up location at camp, the city could do some information campaign. My team can coordinate that with Prav, since that fits within the education mandate.”
“Maybe we could connect the hazardous waste problem and whatever emissions caused by e-cigarettes to environmental destruction and climate change. We know at least teenagers care about those things, too,” Chiara said.
Rayel plastered on a grimace. “We could just ban ‘em."
“And create a War on E-Cigarettes, like how the War on Drugs worked so well?” Pravir said.
“And among adults who do use them, they could just turn to cigarettes. That’s just worse,” Malcolm said.
“Well, we don’t need cigarettes here either,” Rayel said.
“As good as that sounds, I don’t think we need total prohibition. We’re just against teens using it. They’re minors,” Malcolm said.
“Yeah, it’s like alcohol, right?" Bae said. "We’re not banning alcohol. Like, I know it’s nice to black out occasionally with some wine.”
Well then. That made things easier for Malcolm. How disappointing.
Whatever. It changed nothing anyway.
In the lull of their discussion, Ainsleigh spoke up. “I’m not really sure, but there’s this interesting study proposed by some researchers at the University of Chicago,” she said, immediately causing Malcolm’s ears to perk up. “They’re going to run an experiment to find out if teenagers can avoid eating junk food if they’re just told about the predatory tactics that marketers use to hook young people on their crap. Because maybe the teenagers would rebel and refuse to consume junk food.”
Malcolm’s mind raced with ideas as he let out a “huh.”
“And this approach could work,” Ainsleigh said, “because, while so many other methods haven’t been effective in getting kids to care about long-term health, this would, in Chiara’s speak, circumvent the high discount rate… or something like that?”
“Because they wouldn’t need to think that far ahead in the future!” Chiara said. “It’s about claiming victory in the present… to people who think they’re stupid.”
Ainsleigh smiled. “Yeah. So, the randomized controlled trial hasn’t been run yet. So, it’s not certain what the effects are right now. But we might see the results of the study in… 2019 or something. But, anyway, we could maybe try the same for vaping?” she said with a shrug. “I don’t know. There might be a better idea. What do you think?” she said to Malcolm.
“I think that’s a great idea,” said Malcolm. “It’d be cool if it works. Thank you.”
Maybe someday she’d stop turning valuable points into questions.
Just as he was thinking how to get more out of her, Chiara exclaimed, “Another experiment! Ainsleigh, I can work with you and Will on that.”
Ainsleigh beamed as she agreed, and she and Chiara immediately began jotting away some notes.
Much better.
The rest of the team began to draft a communiqué of their policy proposals, and signed off their names on it after conducting a final values check based on the Bill of Rights and the most recent draft of the New Athens Values and Ethics Code.
The councilors then resumed their killing spree, eager to commit death by Millennial.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Back in his office, merely a floor above that particular conference room within their shipping container complex, Malcolm revisited the findings from the recent round of public consultations. Scanning through the document, he considered how to amend the drafted city values.
Freedom and Safety
Equality and Justice
Truth and Accountability
Collaboration and Innovation
Self- and Shared Empowerment
Beneficence and Non-Maleficence
Critical Patriotism
Six twin pillars and a special seventh to build the foundation of New Athens.
His heart raced at mere words. Would removing a pillar or two cause the foundations to crumble? Was there a weak link or a missing column that’d cause the others to crack?
No pressure. If he or the councilors or their respective teams had missed something, they’d had the backup of the public, who’d already provided input. The constituents’ very involvement, too, provided democratic legitimacy.
No pressure. Perhaps what Malcolm was doing meant little in the first place, if values were too inflexible to change, even with this exercise. Because if cultural pillars were more permanent than the physical pillars currently being erected, how could he possibly think that settling on a list of words would influence how New Athens would be founded?
No pressure. This document wouldn’t necessarily be permanent. Making errors in codifying a set of values and principles for a generally uncodified constitution could only do so much harm.
Despite the reminders, the burden loomed over him. Institutions were rigid; values were sticky. But Malcolm comforted himself again in the fact that, even in its “finalized” form, this was merely the first draft of an evergreen document.
It certainly seemed like people were getting that. There had been a comment pointing out that constitutions were better uncodified. He’d also gotten a random request during training from a poli sci student who asked for a sort of “living tree doctrine” in the spirit of democracy and continuous improvement. Not very American perhaps, but there was reason to take inspiration from the country that hosted his parents’ first wedding.
Malcolm remembered then how Frank had pitched to a crowd of Americans that focusing on “peace, order, and good government” would better ensure the opportunity of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—and how Frank had then politely rubbed it in all their faces that the American Dream was more a reality up north. Canadians at least hadn’t needed to be tricked into being given healthcare.
Will the 69% of respondents who rated Truth and Accountability as high priority bite us in the ass for doing things like tax-incidence-related accounting schemes? Malcolm wondered. For the time being, he let himself think not. Maybe he could argue that Accountability trumped Truth in this case.
He combed again through the debrief of the survey from the last consultation round. Some 50% of respondents had rated Collaboration and Innovation to be “very important”. It seemed a tad low…. Ehh, what the hell, he’d just propose to leave it in. It was a useful reminder to avoid competition for the sake of competition and to be wary of depressed innovation caused by excessive collaboration. Half saying “very important” was enough.
Merely 43% said the same for Beneficence and Non-Maleficence—do good and do no harm—which had replaced the earlier draft’s set of Respect and Compassion. Meant to be a catch all, Malcolm now supposed Beneficence and Non-Maleficence were too vague, too unrealistic, too redundant, and too jargonistic to be meaningful. He’d kick ‘em out.
When he reviewed Bae’s comments on Critical Patriotism—namely, the popularity discrepancy among public servants versus the general public—Malcolm realized a potential misunderstanding and miscommunication. (Unless he was the one misreading the situation.) Was the public—or at least 74% of respondents—not concerned whether or not decisions would be made by civil servants with unblinded allegiance to the city they governed? Or was it that the public didn’t subscribe to such values themselves? Or was it that Critical Patriotism was repetitious? Perhaps he’d never know.
Regardless, what values-based mechanisms wouldn’t cover, rules-based ones would. In a move to please both Friedrich and Finer, the city government was both recruiting candidates who had the moral push to embrace these principles and imposing laws and other moral-pull measures that would force rascals to find extra creative ways to break rules.
So. What would Malcolm propose here? Perhaps it’d be better to rephrase Critical Patriotism to something more obviously about the public interest. And, to make an even number of pillars, maybe they’d also classify this value as a pillar instead of a bedrock. That’d simplify things. Uncodified constitutional systems were difficult enough to understand anyway.
Making note of his suggestions, Malcolm sent off the new draft to the team and tasked Pravir to ensure that public communications on constitutional matters would be kept at an eighth-grade level and be ready by Monday.
Not five seconds later, Malcolm’s computer dinged again.
Pravir: Wrapping it up Friday morning.
Of course he would.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
After catching a glimpse of a city-sponsored fabula praetexta, held to honor Apollo on his special day, Malcolm headed for the woods of Camp Half-Blood. As he strolled past the clearing where Gaugamela 2.0 had happened, a rush of pride bloomed within him at the memory of their victories. A reverse Romeo and Juliet indeed. Oh, Percy.
Wafts of pine and mud tickled his nose as he sauntered deeper into the woods, and once he arrived at a spot with a bench-shaped rock cushioned with leaves, he took a seat.
His watch ticked and ticked: one past, two past, three past, four past…. It was 10:07 now, and the drumming of his fingers resembled the drum in his chest. He kept waiting.
A few minutes later, light thuds fell behind him on the forest floor. Malcolm swiveled around.
From the thick of the groves, a dryad emerged, her skin coursing with more chlorophyll than usual—topped only in the state of desperation he’d witnessed whenever Camp Half-Blood was under siege. The leaves in her wreath rustled as she shook her head.
Malcolm’s heart dropped. “Didn’t go well?”
Marcella sat herself beside him, her crossed legs as rigid as a tree. Self-consciously, Malcolm straightened his back before she could scold him for slouching. But Marcella was too preoccupied for even that.
“You know,” she said through her teeth, “some aren’t going to want to do anything with any fossil fuel company.”
“It’s different!”
“Well, what did we expect?” Marcella said in a sigh. “Some people simply don’t care about reducing emissions outside this city. And if it doesn’t sound perfectly pristine like wind or solar—”
“But solar’s—!” Malcolm began to erupt. No, he totally didn’t need to go through this.
“Oh, I said. Jake Mason, too,” Marcella told him. “But they did seem more receptive after I mentioned that Europe has many biomethane projects. Although, I should note, with this crowd, it might help more to call it renewable natural gas instead of biomethane. The dryads seemed to like it more. A few also appeared more convinced after Jake said he and his team had explored onshore wind only to determine that we would have to cut so much of the woods to get enough space. But, overall, they all barely budged.”
Malcolm remembered Jake inquiring about wind zoning regulations earlier this summer and Marcella advising the rest of the Council that an onshore farm would get in the way of New Athens’s future expansion.
He ran his tongue over his teeth at a twinge of guilt. “Are there people still pissed we cleared the eastern woods for the city?”
“Less so. But naturally, they’re insisting on expanding Mare Novum,” she said, referring to the offshore wind project being proposed by a New Roman company. “So, I asked them to please, please help put up the money for it or submit a solution to our Offshore Open Challenge, because it is currently not cost-effective for the city government to allocate funding for more turbines right now—not when offshore is already much more expensive to begin with, even with Percy Jackson’s help.”
Malcolm huffed amusedly as Marcella took a breather from her rant. Her bright green skin finally turned to her darker brown.
“I made it clear we need a mix of renewables, even if we didn’t want to help New York transition,” she said. “I don’t know what it will take for enough to get on board to avoid protests. The other issue that concerns them is the public funding. Jake sent us new operating cost estimates today. The costs might be low enough for us to decrease the subsidy to a more publicly acceptable amount.”
So, technically, the RNG project could work. Economically, it’d provide riches, especially if Jake’s company, Vio Life, licensed out their tech to mortals. What remained, therefore, was how to help Vio Life get the social license to operate their project—and appease opposers to the city funding.
Perhaps there were other angles to take for the next external advisory committee.
Malcolm glanced at Marcella. “Could we estimate the emissions coming in from outside the city? To compare? Project versus no project? Is that…?”
Marcella shook her head. “It’s too tricky to be accurate. We could try. But it likely won’t convince the rest anyway, if they’re afraid methane leaks will happen here, despite Jake’s assurances.”
After a long pause of the two silently grumbling, she had her own proposal:
“I was thinking we can lead a future discussion—not necessarily as part of the formal committee—with wind and solar. The opposing dryads will like that. We’re using wind and solar anyway. No matter. And then we can discuss our plans for solar waste and then segue into existing industrial waste, municipal waste, and forest residues. The satyrs especially will like that. And we can bring up what useful things Hephaestus is already doing with slag and co-products from these sorts of projects. The demigods will like that. And with that order of presentation, maybe that will be their ‘aha’ to okay the project.”
“That could help,” Malcolm said, much more hopefully. “On top of that, I have another idea…. What if we could somehow show people Long Island’s trash shipments?”
Marcella thought. “We can arrange a one-way IM with Iris. We could maybe even track the trucks and trains to other states or show some sort of simulation,” she said. “Why? Do you think the visual would convince them?”
“So, one problem is that they see renewable natural gas competing with solar and wind.”
Marcella’s eyes shined a brighter green. “We could reframe it,” she mused. “It would be about waste.”
“Yeah. And another problem is that they don’t see the waste issues as a New Athens problem,” Malcolm said. “They don’t see it as their problem. So, if we say, ‘We all live on Long Island. Many of us eat at mortal restaurants, stay in mortal motels, and get here using mortal vehicles. The city also sources a lot of things locally. Our actions help produce all this waste and, on top of that, emit greenhouse gases from gasoline and fossil natural gas. This is our problem, too. And the city is accounting for scope 2 and scope 3 emissions, not just direct scope 1 emissions.’”
“And also: ‘What would happen if other states stop taking Long Island’s trash?’” Marcella added.
“That, too,” he agreed. “Then we can go, ‘Long Island’s spending X much money to truck waste off the Island because there’s no space for landfills anymore, and they’re only incinerating some of the waste for energy. Mortals haven’t worked out an immediate solution for the rest of the waste, but we have one.’
“‘So’,” he continued, “‘why should New Athens ignore this problem? Why wouldn’t we take advantage of being given money for the ingredients not only to create a source of renewable fuel for vehicles and materials for buildings, but to also replace some of Long Island’s fossil natural gas with renewable natural gas?’”
“‘If’,” Marcella said, “‘you let us build some sort of tubal device to inject renewable natural gas into Long Island’s fuel network system.’”
Malcolm smiled. “Now then they’d think we’re being shady.”
“So let me do the talking then,” she offered. Marcella snickered, looking him up and down. “I think they would hate you for even saying ‘pipeline’.”
Malcolm laughed. “Ouch?”
“Well, do we want this to work or do we not?” she said.
Malcolm met her eyes. “Thank you, Marcella.”
She waved him off and produced from the deep pockets of her dress a container of apple slices, berries, nuts, and a tissue, leaving Malcolm to wonder once more if this was just a Marcella thing or if it hadn’t fully hit her that the ten-year-old she’d met had grown into a fully-fledged demigod. But he took her offer all the same.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
At the Camp Half-Blood amphitheater, Malcolm and Marcella joined their fellow city councilors in scattering in the front row among a dozen industry representatives, advocacy group leaders, and youth delegates, as well as thirty curious members of the general public.
As he’d promised, Leo had come from Bunker Nine, piggybacking Alicia, who was now crunching on an apple slice from Malcolm’s lunchable. While they waited for the meeting to begin, Malcolm munched on some almonds and studied the scene. In the seconds he took to note new attendees and acknowledge Connor and Travis Stoll plopping down nearby, Leo had gotten Alicia to throw blackberries into his waiting mouth.
As Alicia giggled, Malcolm shot Leo a look. “Let’s try to avoid risking injury, shall we?” Malcolm said to the both of them. “Allie, do I want to know what trouble he puts you up to in Bunker Nine?”
“There’s no trouble!” Alicia insisted, just as Leo protested, “Hey, I’m careful with the kiddo! She’s a Michelin Man in the Bunker, just wrapped in safety features.”
“And you?”
“Set a good example for young engineers,” Leo said.
“Better be.”
Instantly, Leo sent one of his signature troublemaker smiles Malcolm’s way. “If I hurt my handsome face, then you wouldn’t be able to admire it.” He winked.
Malcolm took a look at said face as Alicia laughed. “That would suck,” he said.
At Chiron’s beckoning, Malcolm stood to get the show on the road. Once they’d passed the hellos and thank yous, Percy claimed dibs on the first five minutes.
Striding up to the center of the amphitheater in his easy yet confident stature, Percy commanded everyone’s attention. His weighty gaze—blazing a more startlingly green than normal with that teal t-shirt Aphrodite campers had complimented him on at breakfast—landed on councilor after councilor.
“First: for the love of Poseidon and Amphitrite and Pontus and Thalassa,” Percy said, “can we please ban plastic straws? And those plastic six-pack rings? And all single-use plastics?”
Leo leaned towards Malcolm. “Instead of those boring ‘refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle’ posters and hashtags,” he said, “you could do something like, ‘Suck dicks, not straws.’”
Hilarious, considering some men apparently didn’t recycle because they figured it made them look gay.
“You offering? Or asking?” Malcolm muttered. He knew full well he could never utter those words to Leo’s face.
Leo clamped his lips together, but couldn’t keep his shoulders from shaking—which felt like a better accomplishment than actually hearing Leo’s literal LOL.
“I’ve been putting up mesh netting around Long Island Sound to catch the garbage,” Percy was saying, “but I’m pretty sick of it, and we need real solutions from all retail industries.
“And second: We also really need to deal with microplastics that end up in the waters, so the city should regulate sectors like the fashion industry until it uses better materials and makes fewer clothes. So, maybe we put a high tax on synthetic clothes or something.”
“Excuse me?” From across the amphitheater, Drew Tanaka, daughter of Aphrodite, shot Percy her infamous stink eye.
Beside Malcolm, Connor snickered to Travis. “He’s really underestimating how important clothes are to them.”
Percy removed his hands from the pockets of his Bermudas. “Look, many Atlantians also love fashion, my sister included. That doesn’t mean they mindlessly buy a gazillion items made from horrible materials only to wear each piece seven times on average before throwing them out. Which does happen. Which is insane.”
“Oh my gods, he’s really doing it,” Travis said. “He’s really doing it.”
As Percy went on about higher consumption and cutbacks in quality, Drew scoffed. “Our clothes are good quality, so they’re more in vogue and they last longer, which means people want them. We’re doing our part.”
“Yeah,” her brother Jax said. “Our clothes are also donated. We know some—a lot, okay—we know a lot of other people’s clothes are thrown out, not donated. But the Aphrodite Cabin makes sure that our clothes are repurposed.”
Next to them, Marcella said, “We appreciate all those efforts. But, speaking honestly, I—and my department—would be with Percy on this. It is our responsibility to reduce waste and we have to consider the second-order effects. If the A— if anyone keeps producing clothes at such a high rate—”
“But we donate them!” Drew exclaimed.
“Yes, the clothes are donated,” Marcella said. “But those donations would displace other donations, would they not? Then the clothes that would have been donated would go to a landfill. So, in the grand scheme of things, there’s more waste. We need absolute reductions in waste, not just less waste per quantity of clothing. The same goes for microplastics.”
Malcolm wondered if her words would come back to haunt them when dealing with the biomethane issue.
In the millisecond silence, Percy got in another word. “I just want to stress: No one here sees the consequences of fun weekly shopping sprees and five-minute bubble tea drinking. But we do. And I can tell you that there’s even way more plastic hidden deep in the ocean than on the surface. The rivers and oceans shouldn’t be a— It shouldn’t be a trash pit. I shouldn’t have to spend every day saving turtles and fish and dolphins and other species. My work shouldn’t have to exist, and especially not because of New Athens.
“Hades, a research team found plastic fibers in the guts of animals in the Mariana Trench. The Mariana Trench! That’s 36,000 feet deep. This isn’t even considering landfills, like Marcella said. And there’s tons of microplastics in oceans because our clothes are now made with plastic. We all eat microplastics. There’s also microplastics in merwomen’s placentas. Don’t be surprised if researchers find out that that’s happening to mortals, too. Or demigods or dryads.”
Still seated, Jax crossed his arms. “Do you have evidence for any of these claims?”
“I’ll share some Atlantian research if you really need it,” said Percy agitatedly. “It’s not that hard to understand. Polyester and other synthetic fabrics are partially plastic. Guess what happens when we make clothes and do laundry? Microplastics come off and end up in the ocean. And we can barely even recycle polyester.”
Drew sneered. “You know, there always seems to be an air of sexism here in how fashion is targeted disproportionately in comparison to other sectors. I just really wonder how much we’re targeted because women are perceived to do less useful things. So let me point out: fashion is an industry. This is art! Why are you only attacking fashion? How about the other kinds of art? The paintings and other crafts? How about all the useless robots Hephaestus makes that no one does anything with? You know how much paper and plastic they use?”
As Pravir futilely tried to calm down his siblings while seemingly avoiding their and every other person’s gazes, Malcolm saw Alicia looking up at him and Leo with wide eyes. He made a mental note to talk to her later.
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t look at all those sectors, too,” Percy said.
“There’s a lot of livelihoods that depend on this industry and are hanging in limbo,” Drew said. “With a tax like Percy’s suggesting— I just— This is ridiculous. Prav, come on, you know this.”
Rayel looked at her incredulously. “You know, you can’t just ask him for leniency because he’s your brother.”
“Look, the city isn’t even open yet,” Pravir said flatly. “It’s not like jobs are ‘lost’. So, there’s no money for ‘retraining’. And maybe in the process of adapting, businesses could figure out how to operate without cutting jobs. There’s also a bunch of environment- and climate-related grants, which Marcella and Malcolm can speak to. Or, we also have all that info on our website.”
Drew’s glare told Malcolm that Pravir might’ve had to figure out backup accommodation plans that night. Maybe Hermes could offer him refuge.
After a look from Chiron, Malcolm jumped in. “All right,” he said. “Thanks for that. Percy, we’ll review the research on plastic bans. We just have to make sure we won’t cause worse problems elsewhere, or else we’d just play whack-a-mole. For example, fewer grocery plastic bags, which people do reuse, like for trash, might mean more single-use garbage bags. And needing to use reusable totes might cause an unholy increase in emissions. We’re not sure. We’ll look into it. And the tax squarely fits in our Zero Waste Strategy and goals for cleaning Long Island Sound, so we can look at incorporating it into the plans.”
“Well, of course you’d side with him,” said Jax.
Malcolm turned to him. “With the proposal? To use sin taxes to cut waste and water pollution? Because it’s the environmentally responsible thing to do?”
“Malcolm,” Drew beseeched. “What if there are other policy instruments and technical measures? We can’t just make these assumptions. Why not work with industry and think outside the box? There could be programs with innovative solutions! Like maybe the waste-to-energy thing Marcella’s been talking about.”
“We’re doing that while trying to cut overall waste,” Marcella said.
Drew spread her arms. “Well, we could explore more technologies to make waste disappear—”
“We can’t just make waste disappear,” Percy said.
“—or incinerate it with no emissions.”
“How would that be possible?” Percy retorted.
Drew glowered at him. “I don’t know! There could be research to look into it! Things do disappear! Monsters disappear. Has anyone ever looked at the possibility of vaulting trash and CO₂ and other stuff off with those scummy things?”
As Percy fell silent, every other camper followed suit.
“No one,” Malcolm said in a raised voice, “is going to Tartarus—or opening a portal to it—over clothes. Or for any reason.” He took a breath. “Thanks, everyone, for your perspectives. To clarify something before we move on, I think there might also be some misunderstanding about our funding programs. The Hephaestus Cabin gets funding for applied R&D, not so much pure R&D, which isn’t as productive. And, Drew and Jax, I’m sure there are some things you can apply your skills to to fit the eligibility criteria for our current funding. So please take a look at that option. There is help.”
Another twenty minutes passed, with few complaints on taxes on any packaged water and much hurrahs on updates of the city’s nasoni plans.
Malcolm ended the town hall with another call for blood donations.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
All the way to Cabin Six, Malcolm did his best to assure Alicia she could definitely continue her Bunker Nine experimentations. Percy was already waiting by the doorway for Annabeth, who’d just changed from rayons to polyesters and was now zipping up her leather cuirass.
“How’d it go?” she said, laying a peck on Percy’s lips.
Malcolm left them to it and let Alicia pull him by the hand towards the cabin library, where they found Claire, Zeke, and Sophie crowding around some purple cardstock in Conrad’s hand. In his other hand, Conrad held a matching purple rose.
Malcolm zeroed in on the flower. That couldn’t possibly have been something from or to Grace. Could it?
“Ooh, what’s that?” Alicia rushed to them, tiptoeing to try to peek at the purple paper.
Conrad handed the items to her.
Yeah, clearly not.
“Why don’t you read it out, Sha?” said Claire.
At once, Alicia stopped in her tracks, her eyes held high above the heathered card balancing in the tips of her fingers. Her siblings gave her nods of encouragement. But Alicia didn’t move.
“It’s in Greek,” Conrad said. “You can translate it.”
Finally, Alicia focused on the card. After a moment of concentration, she slowly read aloud as Malcolm silently followed along the words:
Dear Alicia, Annabeth, Claire, Conrad, Malcolm, Sophie, and Zeke,
COME TO CELEBRATE!
You are cordially invited to the Festival of Atlantis.
Celebrate Atlantis and its people with food and fun.
When: Friday, July 22nd at noon (Atlantian Time)
Where: The Palace of Atlantis Courtyard
Bring your appetite.
Gifts will be accepted in the fundraiser for
the Atlantian School of Art and Design.
The RSVP details were crossed out and replaced with a cursive, handwritten ‘Tell Percy.’
Aside from a few hiccups—on “courtyard” and “fundraiser”—Alicia had provided an accurate translation. Best part? She knew she did.
“Make sure you’re free. It’s actually her birthday,” Percy told them from the doorway. “It’s celebrated on the fourth Friday every July. She kind of uses it as an excuse to throw a party for everyone.”
A party. Was that not wasteful spending? Malcolm thought rather scathingly.
But, he then figured, perhaps a “party” could also be considered civic engagement. Maybe the party wasn’t taxpayer-funded. And maybe it wouldn’t make a difference if it were.
Ugh. So much for overcoming his wretched, stupidity-inducing jerk reactions about her.
By now, his siblings were filing out of the cabin, giving Malcolm the space to change into his training clothes—and to think. So, with several minutes to spare for training prep, he could afford to do a little dissecting.
At the mere thought of Rhode, he automatically felt a ball expand and rise in his chest.
Annoyance, he easily deduced.
At what?
Her presumptuousness, for one. Her amusement by him, for another.
Why had she pestered him of all people?
It didn’t seem so much like she had despised him more than others. Not at all. Perhaps it was more so ingroup-outgroup bias. Rhode hadn’t teamed up with other campers, had she? She hadn’t been in a position to know them well enough to treat them as entertainment.
A tiny, tiny bit of him was… what was that? Flattered? How dumb. But, oh, how… how special it was to have received her attention. This… this person … this… multihyphenate had directed her gaze, spent her thoughts, taken her efforts… at him, of him, for him….
‘I think it’s admirable…’ ‘Don’t just stop because I’m teasing you a little.’
She had given him a genuine compliment.
And she’d also given dozens of other people genuine compliments.
(That bubble-balloon-ball in him lost some air. Was that a flicker of disappointment?)
But—and the deflation then ceased—it wasn’t quite the same, was it?
At this point, he also noticed some sort of swarm in his abdomen.
Nerves, he gathered. He recounted the moments he’d unknowingly walked into the unrelenting jaws of her wit and the times he’d been released from her traps at only her will—over and over, invoking both his ire and intrigue.
‘I’ll make this easy for you.’ ‘You could show me what’s worth complimenting.’
It was startling to think. She’d asked him. Perhaps not only him, but him specifically.
How much of it was because she’d found him amusing? Was that even a good thing? Could it be anything but a good thing?
‘You’re not as covert as you think.’
Malcolm felt his neck heat, and his mind resisted her accusation and his own acknowledgement of it. But he told himself that someone like Rhode, as with Aphrodite, or even Reyna or Bae or—well, some others he knew at camp—were objectively prone to arresting people’s attention. It wasn’t just Rhode. So, so what if he had been looking?
And what reason was there to be embarrassed anyway, when Rhode herself had been looking back?
There’d also been that moment, he thought, at the end of their weird conversation, when he’d suddenly felt more ruffled than before he’d spoken.
But why?
Why? Amid the clamorous protests cluttering his head, Malcolm saw right through their deceit. He hadn’t exactly wanted to turn her down, that was why. Sure, it still hadn’t made sense to take up her offer, but the idea... With her Gaugamela-invoking smarts, unfathomable power, efficient guile… and the shrewdness in her eyes, and those alluring colors, and her soft s—
Malcolm left the matter in a limbo, backed up, and followed another train of thought. The swarm jittering within him indicated he was nervous, yes. But there was something else—something not unpleasant, in fact.
He focused on the feeling. It felt like he was grateful or something and— What was indicated by this sense of elation? Luck? Grateful and lucky for something… shared between them. Like an acknowledgement of each other’s—
Ah, and there it was. At the heart of his own ingroup-outgroup bias: trust.
Malcolm had to bite the inside of his mouth as joy and relief and pride ballooned in him, threatening to crack his stony facade. Despite their differences, they’d managed to find that. Even cultivate it.
‘That’s considerate of you.’
The words—his and hers—ran loops in his head.
Trust, huh?
Those other campers didn’t share that with Rhode, did they? They didn’t have that huge shortcut of being close to Percy. And they hadn’t teamed up with her, hadn’t fought alongside her—alone, no less. They hadn’t saved or been saved by her….
“What are you laughing at all by yourself?”
Malcolm got his bearings. A couple feet away, Zeke looked at him amusedly while snapping on his knife holster.
Malcolm’s jaw twitched. “I’m not laughing.”
Zeke’s eyes were narrowed. “You are smiling, though.”
“It’s just…” Malcolm shrugged and let his grin fly free. “Like, can you believe it? They’ve been engaged!”
Malcolm turned his face away and collected his xiphos and grappling hook.
“I know, right?!” Zeke said. “Man, I still can’t believe Annabeth hid it for this long! She sucks at hiding things!”
From outside the cabin, Annabeth peeped her head through the open door. “I heard that!”
“You know, if you told us sooner, we could’ve started planning your wedding sooner,” Zeke said.
“Fair,” Annabeth shrugged.
Percy threw an arm around her. “I think it worked out well, though.”
Annabeth grinned at him. “I think it did, too.”
The group of eight began making their way to the arena. When Zeke began to explain that Annabeth had just made him PM of her wedding, because gods knew she despised dealing with Gantt charts, Malcolm did his best to listen.
And he reminded himself not to extrapolate like a dumbo. (But really, what in the hells of Hades was that offer?)
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Training had gone on with only a few hitches for the Athenians: Malcolm had guided young campers through an obstacle course, during which a daughter of Hebe had lost 15% of her hair to some spinning rods. (*Ahem*, Rhode.) Annabeth had taught Sophie, Zeke, and non-Athenian novices some hand-to-hand combat, resulting in only two minor accidental stabbings. And Claire and Conrad had managed to hold their own in a match against Clarisse and Frank—at least until Conrad re-injured his thigh tripping over Frank scurrying around in beaver form. Percy and Alicia, however, had fared best, the lucky ducks; one-on-one sword-training lessons for Alicia were always chill, and Percy’s oversight guaranteed that she was also just as much a Michelin Man in the arena.
Over lunch reflections with his family, Malcolm figured it had been a fruitful hour and half. According to Conrad, Claire had made progress in reaching her lifting records. (They hushed her grumblings that she still hadn’t matched her old self.) And, with Conrad confined to archery (his least favorite sport but Claire’s favorite—which Malcolm still suspected wasn’t a coincidence), the twins had only dawdled so much when Annabeth had suggested Claire share her archery know-how with him. Small wins.
On top of that, almost all the young trainees seemed to have outperformed their past selves, including Zeke, who was really beginning to master knife flips, and Alicia, who for once hadn’t dug in her heels when Annabeth asked her to run laps with her and Sophie. Sophie herself, with Malcolm’s prodding, had done better at voicing critique to their little sister.
Now, belly full of kale tabbouleh, Malcolm restarted his work brain with the easy stuff. As he reviewed updated population projections, new changes to the tax policy proposals, and accompanying revenue estimates, a notification popped up from Kevin Huang at Public Inquiries.
Kevin: Do you want to tackle this lol
Kevin had attached an email from a local NGO. The email, demanding to keep rents fixed, was laced with accusations that City Council would kick tenants to the curb by getting chummy with real estate developers and landlords.
After sending a “lol sure” Kevin’s way, Malcolm thought out a response. How would he explain this to Alicia?
The New Athens City Council, he wrote, understands that housing affordability is a concern to many residents. It is precisely because of this concern that City Council will not implement rent control.
Based on our research, rent control benefits only residents in rent-controlled units and harms all other residents. In this case, a scheme to eat the rich unfortunately not only fails to feed the poor; it just as well steals from the poor, too.
First, because rent control creates scarcity in the rental market, it raises housing costs over the long term, which especially harms young people and future residents.
Second, evidence from cities with rent control, such as New York City, shows that people with higher incomes will continue to live in rent-controlled units that would have otherwise eventually been rented by people with lower incomes. This arbitrary misallocation of housing is not simply inefficient but also unfair. It is also difficult to fix.
Third, research from the US and Sweden shows that rent control lowers housing quality and can lead to gentrification, ethnic and social segregation, and more street crime.
All these outcomes are in direct opposition to City Council’s efforts to guarantee access to safe, inclusive, and affordable shelter to every resident.
Under the New Athens Housing Plan, City Council is working hard to ensure that our housing policies work not just for the arbitrary first tenants of New Athens but also for young people and future residents, particularly those with lower incomes.
The Housing Plan is in line with the expert advice of virtually all economists, regardless of their political leanings. We can take it from the libertarian Milton Friedman:
“Rent control is a law that supposedly is passed to help the people who are in housing. And it does help those who are in current housing. But the effect of rent control is to create scarcity, and to make it difficult for other people to get housing.”
or from the socialist economist Assar Lindbeck:
“Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities.”
Along with demand-side policies (such as instituting living wages and introducing programs allowing reduced down payment for low-income residents), City Council is focusing on supply-side solutions (such as banning single-family zoning and implementing other zoning bylaws that help create high-density residences). Although supply-side measures do not have a directly visible impact on housing affordability, they are more effective over the long term. We are also working to establish increases in property taxes for a second simultaneous home and those thereafter.
We will be rigorously studying the impacts of the Housing Plan and making adjustments if need be.
We appreciate your engagement on these topics…
In went the rest of his standard closing.
Malcolm refrained from shading politicians who cared more about winning votes than ensuring long-run wellbeing. He’d also just leave landlords and real estate developers out of this, lest that prompt another email.
Malcolm hit send and scrolled to a letter on public safety and militarization. Clarisse had already approved a drafted response mentioning New Athens’s cash bail policies (or a ban thereof); the city’s refusal to require residents from signing sworn affidavits when filing complaints (to encourage the fearful to come forward); and the introduction of body-worn cameras (which could indeed be sped up, Clarisse implied, if people wanted a poorly implemented system).
The constituent at least had some faith in the city’s plans to track misconduct and put in place a system to decertify and punish such members. It was a welcome comment to see, considering that Malcolm was typically only forwarded complaints.
There was, however, another ranty section Clarisse hadn’t yet gotten to and sent his way—four whole paragraphs that really could’ve been boiled down to a few sentences: Why are you spending so much on weapons for the police force? Calling it “security” doesn’t make it better.
Malcolm quickly typed out a short response about some unique particulars about the city’s approach. He mentioned conclusions from public consultation, and also inserted a couple paragraphs he’d presciently prepared, with findings from La Rue (2014) and La Rue and Pace-Robinson (2016). He mentioned as well that the security team’s mandate included managing life-threatening monster attacks, so, of course, they’d be armed—as was every other resident to begin with.
Sending the response back to Clarisse, he chugged some water and turned to a media request. Malcolm skimmed through the article.
City councilors approve yet another major bid for Aeon and Esperanza, sparking further conflict of interest concerns
New Athens, not even officially open, has already raised concerns from to-be residents about its accountability practices.
On Friday, July 8th, City Council approved yet another project proposed by the joint venture comprised by Aeon Architecture and Esperanza Engineering, which are owned by Annabeth Chase and Leo Valdez, respectively. (Each company has won two bids individually and two together.)
Ms. Chase is the half-sister of city planner and city manager Malcolm Pace, who also oversees the city finances. Mr. Valdez is the half-brother of Maaza Vulcan, who heads the Department of Infrastructure. (Valdez is Greek. Maaza is Roman.) According to sources from Camp Half-Blood, Mr. Valdez is also a long-time friend of Mr. Pace.
The project sought by the city, destined for the east of New Athens, includes the design and construction of three residential buildings, a shopping mall, a library, a recreational center, and an office building that will also house the New Athens Innovation Hub.
The public cost of Aeon and Esperanza’s proposal exceeded every other bid—even costing over 30% more than some competing bids.
Some prospective residents are demanding explanations as to why city councilors keep choosing Aeon and Esperanza over nine other architecture and construction companies offering lower bids.
Annabeth Chase is quoted as saying, “It’s evident why Aeon and Esperanza won [the bids]. We offered the most value for money within the city’s budget.” She made no further comments.
Mr. Valdez appeared to clap back at critics in several tweets on Monday:
- “Remind me again which architect the GODS picked to redesign Olympus and the Palace of Atlantis. 🤔”
- “No one beats Esperanza on safety, innovation, and speed.”
Not all residents are convinced. “Where is the accountability?” demands a resident who has asked not to be named. “We can’t just trust or rely on self-regulation, especially when councilors are enriching their family and friends. These approvals are sounding alarm bells for corruption, which is also more common among mega developments.”
Another resident adds, “There ought to be a rule here that not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done. I actually think the project looks good, but the conflict of interest makes me wonder otherwise.”
Some residents are calling for public housing and public infrastructure to eliminate instances of potential conflicts of interest and regulatory capture.
We have reached out to the City Council. Representatives insist that no conflict of interest rules were breached. Ms. Maaza and Mr. Pace have yet to comment.
It was a fair take, Malcolm thought. Though uninformed. Or purposely misleading.
Legal had already preemptively covered their asses and added that six other architecture firms and construction companies had also received contracts—not that the article had mentioned that. Yet anyway.
Meanwhile, Maaza’s team had included a response about needing to partner with the private sector to provide good-quality developments so that the government could focus on avoiding infrastructure gaps and other issues. Her team had also drafted a joint statement for both her and Malcolm, which he just had to okay:
Thank you for raising these valid concerns. We appreciate your dedication to ensuring accountability…
Blah blah blah…
Neither of us were involved in the decision-making processes of any approvals involving Aeon and Esperanza. As the City Council has previously noted, in anticipation of a potential conflict of interest, all applicants submitted proposals anonymously…
Et cetera, et cetera…
From the public documents we saw after the decision was announced, it is clear why the Aeon-Esperanza venture was offered this project. In this case, the companies’ private interests aligned most with the public interest. Compared to the other applications, the Aeon-Esperanza proposal satisfied far more of the city’s (publicly announced) social and environmental objectives, with a bid merely 11% higher than the average. The proposal included the most low-income housing units and had, by far, the most ambitious commitment to the city’s net-zero targets.
Notably, Aeon and Esperanza’s application was the only one that meaningfully considered emissions from the production of building materials; that proposed alternatives to traditional steel and concrete; and that pledged to use materials that capture emissions rather than produce them. While these features were not required by the city, they offer benefits in line with the city’s goals. No other application offered New Athens as great a chance to accelerate the growth of our cleantech sector—an added bonus that councilors allocated funding for, from the New Athens Cleantech Fund.
For those reasons, we think New Athenians can and should be proud of the City Council’s decision.
Malcolm was happy enough with that, but suggested adding a parenthetical for further clarification: (Steel and concrete manufacturing are typically CO₂- and energy-intensive activities. Steel is typically made from coal, and cement requires a lot of energy to be manufactured. Together, these materials contribute to about 16% of the world’s CO₂ emissions.)
He checked over the whole response again for spelling errors and found none. Thank the gods for autocorrect. Text-to-speech functionality also indicated nothing off. Finally, he sent off the draft to Marcella’s team to confirm the GHG stat and hoped that'd be the end of that.
The next request on his plate was a letter from a constituent. The communications team had said they didn’t know how to respond.
Interest piqued, Malcolm opened the attachment.
While humanity is degenerating—
That already made his head flinch back.
—this city should be led by someone with true conscience of privilege and someone with lived experiences of the struggles of marginalized peoples, not another cis, straight, white, neoliberal, capitalist, centrist male with a rich lawyer daddy who fed him access to an Ivy off a silver spoon.
His brows rose with each word.
He had to at least give it to them. The comment was packed impressively. But alas…
Wrong on five counts, misleading on three. Score: 5.25/12. Try again later, he wrote.
Perhaps he could also say that his economist father raked in far bigger bucks as compared to his rich lawyer daddy. And that his rich lawyer daddy still did a lot of pro-bono work and was privileged enough to do so because of said economist.
Why couldn’t that have been this person’s guess?
Ha.
This city should ideally be home to residents who don't assume from the get-go that higher-income earners are W—
Nah. Too petty. Who was to say they even knew the whole picture? So, Malcolm laughed to himself before deleting all his text. Instead, he typed:
I think many people wanted me as city planner and chief policymaker because they knew I wanted to fix issues that your message indicates concern you, too. Come to a town hall if you’d like. I think you’ll find that we agree on more things than you might think,* so I’d look forward to clearing up some misconceptions and collaborating with you in more productive discussions.
* E.g.: frankly, I think it sucks that there are dozens of colleges where students from the wealthiest 1% outnumber those from the bottom 60%. I know I’ve benefited from that unfairness ever since my father and I joined the right family. None of my former neighbors in West Side Chicago got the privileges I was afforded. (For that matter, neither did my “rich lawyer daddy”, who also could’ve told you that.)
Okay. So maybe he wasn’t above being a little snarky.
Malcolm debated the honesty and the overall ethics of his response. Northwestern was far from sucky…. Still, how many years had it taken to pay off a whole BA and 1.5 JDs from there? And who was it anyway who wiped it out? Would it also lead to more trust or just more resentment to admit—albeit implicitly—what income bracket his parents currently fell under?
Not for the first time, Malcolm wondered to himself how many people had voted for him simply because of who his parents were. Any of the three. All of the three. There must’ve been some.
Momentarily taking offense that someone didn’t like him and that others might’ve for reasons he didn’t prefer, Malcolm realized he really didn’t give a hoot. There were more productive things to focus on.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
He felt guilty enough that the same thought occurred to him on the way back to Cabin Six when Alicia, with her furrowed brows and adorable head tilt, asked him things like: ‘Why do boys have beards?’ and ‘Do any animals cook or flavor their food?’ and ‘If mortals have one or two dozen senses, how many do demigods have?’
After providing satisfactory enough responses to her questions and struggling through her physics inquiries that Annabeth really would’ve been better placed to answer, he left Alicia at the coffee table in front of him for some more non-screen free play. He already had his own rather trivial questions heckling his brain.
Occupying a desk in the cabin library, Malcolm’s fingers fidgeted over his keyboard. If he wanted to more objectively understand… her… without so obviously…
Malcolm typed: atlantis trade agreement
From what the results told him, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Atlantic Partnership was an agreement centuries in the making, with past and potential signatories spanning nearly all parts of the ocean. While calling for greater movement of workers, goods, and services, the agreement mandated equal rights and equal pay, and tied manufacturing-induced pollution border adjustments to monetary aid for communities in need. It took all of him to refrain from reading further than that.
From there, Malcolm directed himself to the treaties and general history of the island of Rhódos. He figured if the sea nymph in question was considered a personification of her island, then, well…
Malcolm clicked the first link and scanned through paragraphs:
capital of the Dodecanese… fourth-largest island in Greece… dominant naval power… major Greek trading center… control over the Aegean… Alexandria—
He backed up.
Taxes received in harbor fees indicate Alexandria was one of its major trading partners. Rhodes operated as the middleman for the trade between Alexandria and ports in Europe…
Eyes glazing, his mind conjured an image of Rhode lounging on a chaise while sipping diluted wine and tipping her head back to munch on a bunch of grapes—while on a matching chaise opposite her sat a short, stocky dude with curly, dark blond hair, mindlessly swirling his goblet of wine, neat. Malcolm could picture a set of exuberant mismatched eyes—one dark brown, one blue—and the remark: “Oh my gods! I still remember those elephants. You had to be there, Rhódē. Seriously, they were… epic!”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Rhode would say, sighing perhaps from their repeated conversation, the power of Helios’s summer rays, or the relief from the breeze drifting through the slits of her chiton jumpsuit.
“Parmeníon was a beast. The way he led the pezhétairos….” her companion would say. “I mean, he was totally wrong about attacking at night, but there was no way we would’ve won without him. Ah, I miss the old dude…. I mean, legit, Darius just yeeted outta there. And I don’t blame Parmeníon for letting him escape. It was hilarious.”
Was that how their chats had gone? More or less?
Anyway…
Malcolm dove back into the wormhole. He found that Rhódos’s partnership with Alexandria had lasted until Demetrius attempted to siege the island over Rhódos’s friendly relations with Ptolemy I. He read about how Rhódos had managed to maintain treaties of peace and neutrality with other empires, which helped protect its economy. And he learned that it was Rhódos that had begun to establish formal codes of maritime behavior, as far back as 900 BCE. Every finding sparked half a dozen questions, but he forced himself to follow the text.
There was stuff on Rhódos’s expansion to Caria and Lycia in Asia Minor, along with parts of what became Sicily and France. He also saw a mention of Rhódos’s control over grain trade in the Mediterranean. And then some info on how the island got flack for supporting Perseus in 168 BCE, then later received Cato’s support and avoided war with Rome.
Based on what he read, it seemed to Malcolm that, along with being a naval and mercantile power with many friends, Rhódos’s economic success might have also stemmed from its domestic social policies; liturgies on the island had apparently redistributed wealth and created opportunities for the poor. What's more, Rhódos had boasted prominent schools of philosophy, science, literature, and rhetoric, and also housed experts in history, geography, and architecture. The island had also been a cultural center of art, home to celebrated painters and sculptors, and its monetary standard had even influenced coinage in many eastern Mediterranean states and polities.
Accompanying the text was a collection of photos of coins—Helios’s face embossed on the obverse, with a rose on the reverse.
And then Malcolm was reading too much about coinage and amphorae. Not exactly what he was looking for.
Perusing more pages, he amassed half a dozen unopened tabs at hints to Rhode’s potential activities in and around the US.
Out of curiosity, he opened mortal encyclopedias. The records proved to be pretty worthless after his primary round of research.
Olympian news was only slightly less useful. The latest articles mentioning Rhódos was the tribute to Helios that Apollo had made earlier today. As in the past several years, Apollo graciously shared July 13th, the last day of the Ludi Apollinares, with his now-faded predecessor. Up on Olympus, Apollo acknowledged the Haleion Games on Rhódos that had come before the Romans’ Ludi. He tipped his wreath to Helios for ideating the quadriga combo of four horses to a chariot…. Blah blah blah…. He thanked Helios and his worshippers for a temple, situated on the island most sacred to the titan. He pledged support to mortals for some rebuilding proposals…. Blah blah blah….
Time for a reroute.
Malcolm subtly reangled his computer a smidge, dimmed the brightness of his screen, and gingerly typed out five letters. He cringed as he hit enter.
Photos popped up. He scrolled past those with only a moment’s hesitation.
In terms of current events, Rhode had recently made an appearance at Olympus Fashion Week and had given a speech last month in the Gulf of Mexico to call for greater efforts in tackling ocean acidification.
But in terms of historical information, there was less on her than what he’d found about Rhódos itself. There were no images of anything but her island, and the only real difference was that the encyclopedia entry on Rhode mentioned eight children: Elektryone (a daughter highly respected among mortals) and the Heliadai (seven sons with expertise in seafaring and astrology). They were all gone by now, though. And then there was yet more on Helios and his other consorts and kids.
And that… was it.
He wondered what happened to the records from millennia ago. And where were all the statues of her in Greece? All the temples, the artworks?
Malcolm searched for them.
All the top results were about the Colossus of Rhodes: the tallest statue that had ever been made at the time and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Rhodians had cleverly raised funds for the Colossus by selling the remains of the military equipment that Demetrius had left behind after his failed siege. Malcolm knew the story well. Of course, the Colossus hadn’t even been of her. It had been of her husband. And that, Malcolm saw, was apparently the mortal reconstruction plan Apollo was supporting.
Malcolm searched again for artworks—this time, omitting searches of the Colossus. He hoped what he was looking for wouldn’t be hidden in those axed results.
He came across the Aphrodite of Rhodes, a marble statue found on the island, depicting the goddess of love in a bath—and then did a lot more digging. Eventually, he found a 19th-century oil painting by Sir Frederic Leighton of what could’ve been some random couple embracing each other. Helios and Rhodes, it was titled. In Tate’s collection, but not even on display in their galleries. Maybe it didn’t matter. Aside from the long, dark hair, Leighton’s illustration barely resembled her.
Malcolm searched for altars.
There were temples and shrines around Rhódos that had been made for Helios. Then there was the Acropolis of Rhodes, which seemed promising. Yet, the temples on the Acropolis were dedicated to only Zeus, Athena, Artemis, and, as had been mentioned by the god himself today, Apollo. The closest Malcolm got was a cave sanctuary for an unnamed water spirit.
“The fuck?”
White noise of pencil on paper ceased abruptly as Alicia stared at him.
“Sorry.”
Setting aside the brewing question of how Athena had managed to get a temple on the island of Poseidon’s apparent favorite child (Membership in the Delian League, perhaps?), Malcolm sat up, determined to end his hunt.
Alas, no artworks and no temples to Rhode.
Had she somehow taken to Islamic-like practices and explicitly forbidden any iconography of her?
But no, that wasn’t how the Greeks worked; that wasn’t how gods gained power and kept from fading. Sure, she probably didn’t need that, considering that Kymopoleia seemed blessed enough by her parentage without anyone’s worship. But still. Why would someone with the arrogance to rival that of ancient Romans oppose such gifts?
Then again, what if the lack of statues and artworks was the very point? That Rhode didn’t need any of that, because she knew she was powerful enough?
Be that as it may, Malcolm thought, that theory didn’t explain the decisions of the ancient mortals, who could just have worshipped whomever they wished to.
For some moments, he simply sat among his thirty-odd tabs, stewing in bewilderment and disgust. As he leaned, his chair squeaked, snapping his mind to his physical reality, where Alicia continued her coloring in front of him.
Next to open books on ornithology and melittology, probably loaned to her from Ainsleigh, Alicia remained deep in concentration as she guided her yellow colored pencil within striped ovals.
Two thoughts fused into one.
He remembered Angelou’s boast:
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
What were the lines that preceded those?
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Malcolm faltered at the memory of the view from there: shin on the grass, blue sky overhead, and— And thank the gods Percy wasn’t here to watch him again.
He thought again about their chat last night. The panic and pride of just having been there still lingered under his skin. And he recalled the moment when he’d goaded her… and she’d prodded back with a special challenge for him. He’d have to feel that thrill again.
But how to get from here to there? There was too wide an abyss. Too few proper excuses.
His mind buzzed with ideas. And with his gaze locked on Alicia, the stepping stones materialized.
Malcolm sat up and leaned forward. “What’cha working on, Allie? You drawing for fun? Are you making Annabeth another pretty picture for her birthday? Oh, or are you gifting your nice art to someone else? They do make pretty presents.”
Alicia glanced at him. “No, it’s just for fun.” She got back to coloring.
Twenty more strokes for the current stripe. Forty more into the next—
“Oh!” Alicia squealed. “Oh, maybe we could do some art for Rhode! You know, for her birthday! She’s doing something with an art school, right?”
Malcolm gave her a lengthy moment’s pause and then dropped his jaw. “You know, that’s a really good idea.”
Alicia beamed toothily.
Ah, kids.
Notes:
A:SWL 🌃 312 🌇
🥬🥗
Apologies for bastardizing/parodying/whatever the Star-Spangled Banner. (Happy early Fourth of July, y’all!) Corny or not, I’m way too proud of crafting that line to have removed it.
The lyrics to the songs are, of course, from Jay Z and someone else’s "Watch the Throne". The poem is the same as in chapter 3: "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou.
Feel free to continue sharing your thoughts about what’s (not) working. I take shots, but it’s not like I know what lands. So, I welcome feedback with open arms. 🤗 (But obviously no pressure.)
Feedback form for chapter 1 to chapter 4: part 1. (Thanks for the responses!)
Feedback form for chapter 1 to chapter 4: parts 2 and 3. (Looking forward to reading your thoughts.)
Chapter 5: In which Malcolm doesn't actually hate a party
Notes:
January 1:
Welcome back! I really, really appreciate your feedback! Thank you!! Here’s the dealio. It has now become confusing because I get opposing opinions from different readers and because I also have A Plan for this novel.
A note on what I will do about the taxes and shit...
And here are Cliff’s Notes for chapter 4, with zero mention of taxes, etc.
–
February 8:
meibestgirl, I am overjoyed you’ve come along for the ride and have made this journey more fun for me. sracha1713 and Bud, I sincerely appreciate your continued encouragement. All other readers—wow, there’s more and more of you every time!—thank you for reading.
I had wanted to finish this earlier, but got busy and also got sick for a bit. I hope you are all doing well.
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics). Also, Greek translations will only appear if "Creator's Style" is not hidden.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Percy-versus-Drew saga inflamed Camp Half-Blood for four more unbearable days, until it was finally eclipsed by some Taylor-Kanye phone call drama that swarmed through cabins more forcibly than Gaea’s past attempts to overthrow camp. Malcolm very much wanted to be excluded from any of this brouhaha. But when Drew wasn’t busy gagging at fashion choices left and right, or waging war for her parasocial relationship with Ms. Swift, she remained dead set on lobbying for a CCUVOWM (i.e., carbon capture, utilization, and vault-off-with-monsters) strategy.
“Just letting you all know,” Pravir said, during a council meeting on Monday, “I wouldn’t put it past my siblings to sneak around City Hall. And I wouldn’t put it above them to charmspeak any of you when they’re asking about R&D funding.”
Malcolm gaped. “Sheesh. Well, then we should really fast track those advanced security measures. I’ll talk to Clarisse—”
At that, Pravir scoffed. “I already did. She and Brett are on it, and Chiron’s talking to Harpocrates on Wednesday.”
“Awesome,” Malcolm said. “Thanks.”
Unlike Marcella’s headshakes, Pravir’s came with a hint of an eye roll. “I don’t need headpats for following protocol.”
Malcolm held in a sigh and another (and very snarky) thank you. “‘Kay.” Ass, his brain supplied in reflex.
There’d never be any winning with the dude, Malcolm supposed. Pravir was like Rhode in that sense. Except, where Rhode came with a smorgasbord of moods, running the gamut from outrage to coquetry, Pravir just came (to Malcolm anyway) with two settings: neutral or vicious.
As Ainsleigh narrowed her eyes and Chiara widened hers, catching Malcolm’s eye with a half-a-second look, Rayel said, “Yeah, I kinda like the wholesome vibe we’re trying to create here, though.”
“Yeah! Me, too,” Chiara said. “Okay, so, I’m reviewing the last of the pitches later with you, right, Malcolm?”
Silently thanking the both of them, he replied in the affirmative and welcomed an argument with Bae about means testing. Sorely tempted as he was to agree with Bae just to spite Pravir, he managed to use a level of restraint that would’ve made Athena proud.
Since the City Hall break room didn’t come with a punching bag, Malcolm blew off his steam by putting on the top of his pile a briefing he’d requested from Pravir on equitable academic tracking models—completed by Pravir three days early.
Tracking was one of the few things they’d respectfully skirmished about on the campaign trail—and exactly why Malcolm had wanted him to lead the Education Department. While Malcolm had proposed that New Athens should educate students at their appropriate ability levels without, of course, introducing modern-day segregation in public classrooms, Pravir had said he agreed with the intent but could suggest alternatives to tracking.
His memo was still saying the same thing:
Under the illusion of meritocracy and holistic admissions criteria, public schools using tracking can run afoul of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which the schools may claim to adopt. There is also the danger of mis-tracking in such schools, which can lead to severe underrepresentation of Black and Latino students (from lower-income households) [3, 4].
If it were anyone else, Malcolm wouldn’t think anything of the curiously pointed way this briefing had been written (in that the digs the piece took sounded very much like it was directed at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy). But it was Pravir’s pen that had touched this piece last.
Malcolm carried on.
Tracking does not help to decrease achievement gaps across race or class [3, 5, 6]. In fact, tracking worsens inequality and would further privilege a student who is already blessed with the means to attend elite universities [3, 5, 7].
That the memo used the singular “student” and plural “universities” was not lost upon Malcolm. It also wasn’t lost upon him that these quips were coming from the guy who had gone to frickin’ Princeton, which had to be the worst offender of all the Ivy Plus. Maybe not; he couldn’t confirm. But it was still Princeton, leagues more atrocious than either Columbia or Chicago. Still, Malcolm got the point. And where Pravir had schooled was beside that point. Perhaps it also informed his advice.
Malcolm scrolled further down.
Furthermore, academic tracking might seem beneficial to high-track students, but it harms their ability to socialize with the rest of society [3, 6, 9, 14, 15].
Oh to Hades with you, Pravir.
No other sentence had more than three citations.
They really needed to deck out the break room.
A rigorous reading of the literature would inform policymakers to abandon futile attempts to adopt a tracking system that prevents discrimination and long-term inequality.
Malcolm rolled his eyes. He could just imagine Pravir smirking as he wrote “rigorous”.
Instead, a wealth of research suggests employing a Schoolwide Enrichment Model, which does more to improve outcomes for all students and reduces achievement gaps across race and class....
For his three-page memo, Pravir provided five pages’ worth of references. Malcolm was this close to thanking the guy for his work. And what better reason to thank Pravir than the fact that he had enough research to get away with all the shots he’d taken?
The wise thing to do here, Malcolm concluded, was to (1) not feed the trolliness and (2) abandon his own campaign promise and back Pravir’s. But he still insisted on some sort of school choice—or something to its effect. He’d throw as many fits as needed before he’d allow Alicia’s intellect to waste away just because she happened to be born in 2009.
He sent Pravir his approvals and suggestions four days ahead of schedule. If that meant he’d have to really step on it tomorrow to finish reviewing Mazaa’s latest infrastructure proposal and Marcella’s updated marginal abatement cost curves, so fuckin’ be it. As long as he did it on time (and he would), he was sure Athena wouldn’t mind.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
They really needed that punching bag, Malcolm thought again, now filled with remorse for subjecting a daughter of Tyche to bad statistics.
For the past hour in one of City Hall’s conference room pods, he’d watched Chiara suffer through a (sneakily?) rotated 3D pie chart, fancy shapes scaled to the wrong areas, a few unfortunately truncated graphs, a couple unfortunately untruncated graphs, and countless violations of Tufte’s principles.
He himself had wrestled with whether to interrupt this dunderhead who had wanted a big pool to throw parties at—and who had conveniently forgotten the fact that Camp Half-Blood had clean lakes, or that both camp and New Athens had easy access to Long Island Sound.
But it was worth sitting through all those presentations to discover promising ideas he’d never even thought of. A daughter of Mercury, for instance, had pitched a new business for reusable takeout containers and cutlery, to be shared by restaurants and returned to depots.
Then, a child of Nemesis had proposed establishing a centralized service to rent out disability accommodation tools to organizations, as well as to offer support services to both employees and employers.
And perhaps most fascinating of all of today’s funding requests was for the invention of a son of Trivia and a daughter of Apollo: liquid bandages made out of a lidocaine-nectar-polymer solution. The lidocaine numbed; the nectar healed and prevented the lidocaine from being absorbed into the bloodstream; and the polymer provided the coverage. Clinical trials on demigods had found statistically significant results in numbing and healing effects, as well as infection and scarring prevention. Side effects had been minimal. The duo planned to reinvest resulting profits to continue developing a similar product for satyrs and dryads.
A fourth victory in the battle for funding seemed imminent for the current group: Nils, a son of Nike, and Andi, a son of Ares, who were presenting their idea of a new arena. So far, they had managed to avoid Chiara’s pursed lips, head tilts, and twirls of the purple streak in her hair. Drawn in by the details Nils was outlining, Malcolm envisioned the ways Cabin Six could use the space in their group training. Truly, the arena was astounding. Larger space, attached armory, en-suite showers, first-aid room, cutting-edge safety measures....
Matching Nils’s exuberance, Andi filled in some other details. “Many New Athenians would agree that we need a public state-of-the-art arena like this over what’s currently proposed,” he said. “So, the city can divert funding from outdoor parks and some community centers, and allocate space over here....”
On the projector was a map of New Athens with a large circled area in the southeastern part of the city.
Now it was Malcolm’s turn for a head tilt. They wanted to put in an arena... where restaurants and shops were zoned?
“And as we can see,” Andi said, “the cost fits in the recreation budget for the next two years. We can start with the basics in year 1. And to complete construction and roll out the extra features, we can use the higher recreation budget in year 2—”
Oof.
Shooting what he hoped was a furtive glance to his right, Malcolm could see Chiara’s hands clench in her lap as she grimaced. He had to bite the insides of his mouth to keep himself from snickering at the sight.
“—and a little extra funding,” Andi concluded. “So then finally, New Athenians can have the high-tech arena they deserve—something the goddess of war’s gotta like.”
Mm...
Chiara gave Malcolm another of her half-a-second looks. “Will the goddess of war like this?” she said.
Malcolm faced the guys. “Do you have a contingency plan on how else to secure the funds?”
Nils opened and closed his mouth a couple times.
“Ten percent of it,” Andi said. “But we’d like this to be a public space, so ideally, this would be publicly funded and free for all.”
“The thing about that, though,” Chiara said in near nonchalance, “is that the budget figures you use, including the higher one from year 2, come from revenues from what you want your arena to displace. And if even that won’t cover these costs....”
“Then this grant could cover the rest,” Andi answered.
The guys turned to Malcolm, who returned a contorted smile.
“So, it’s a no,” Nils said.
“Sorry,” said Malcolm.
Andi looked like he was trying not to huff in frustration. “Is there someone else we could talk to? Maybe the rest of the council?”
“So. You’re going for Athena’s personal funding,” Chiara said. “Although the council does vote on big stuff like this, a condition of her agreement with the city is that he’d have to approve recipients.” She pointed at Malcolm.
Nils’s eyes narrowed. “And that’s kosher? Look, I won’t claim to know the rules, but something sounds iffy about a public official having any control over a boatload of outside cash from his mom.”
Malcolm gave him a disarming smile. “We really, really appreciate that you care about”—corruption—“ethical financing,” he said.
Even though you brought it up only when you found out you weren’t going to get the money.
“But let’s be clear,” he added, “Athena is an Olympian, not a corporation. And she’s way too hands-off to be considered a lobbyist. She just acts as a patron who’s helping to protect both the camp and the city.”
You seen the forty-foot statue outside? You mighta passed by it, ya know, every day.
He went on. “Now she’s allowing us to choose what services she can help with. My ‘control’ functions like a first round of applications. It’s a small condition to getting a lot more funding to everyone’s benefit. She wouldn’t be as confident in helping this city so much if I weren’t here. Because what she knows—and what you might like to know—is that I’m not basing this on my opinions or hers. The council looks at data. We’ve already conducted surveys and they—”
“The weird combo menus,” Andi interrupted.
Malcolm figured he was referring to the conjoint profiles that survey participants were to choose from—the different lists of varying tax rates and recreation services, including a mix of cultural and recreation centers, gardens, trails, playgrounds, and more.
“Yes,” he said. “With those ‘weird combo menus’, as you put it, our highly skilled statisticians, like Chiara and Bae, use this method called conjoint analysis—” This was too much. “Which we can get to another time. Or in Bae’s class, better yet.”
As Nils looked back dubiously, Andi said, “And that method is in no way extrapolation. Which I’m sure Bae’s class warns you about.”
Chiara slapped her palms on her lap. “Okay,” she said, “so, basically, if you just ask people how much things are worth to them and how much they’re willing to pay for them, they don’t really know. They just make up some numbers. Because it is difficult to know exactly, right? That’s why we survey people using the... ‘weird combo menus’. It’s something common in industry actually, when marketers try to figure out what to price a product or what features to include in a product.
“Using those ‘menus’, we crunch some numbers from the data and use something called compensating variation. That allows us to figure out how much people value different services. It tells us how much people would give up to get something. That’s actually one way we’re measuring wellbeing.
“So, what the data show is that the average person and even the median person benefits more from a new arts center and some outdoor parks over indoor training facilities.”
Andi shifted on his feet. “We could just get people to vote on this directly, though, especially because New Athens is supposed to be more democratic than the rest of the country. That would be fair.”
Malcolm sighed. You’re here to ask for money, he thought, not to debate our political system.
“But we still can’t get every person to vote on every suggestion,” he said. “And it’s especially ineffective when people don’t have the capacity or time to make all these decisions—and to do it in an optimal way. That’s what the surveys are for, and that’s what we’re for."
“Well, why not set a new precedent?” argued Andi. “We’d gladly vote on these things. You know, maybe it is possible. There’s not that many people here yet. And then you guys could do other things. Like deal with Drew, for example. We can also do our own surveys and petitions, so you actually know what we want, and then you just have to carry it out. Like a democracy. We’re Greek for Zeus’s sake. This is New Athens. The people should get to decide.”
Nils held out an arm. “No, no, no. Dude. That’s actually why Aristotle didn’t like democracy. Mob rule shit.”
Well, well, look who paid attention in Chiron’s philosophy classes.
“Right?” Nils turned to Malcolm. He looked so proud of himself. “In Politeía.”
“Fuck Aristotle,” said Andi.
As Malcolm opened his mouth, realization struck Nils. “No!” he blurted. “Plato wrote Politeía. Aristotle did Politiká. But his views weren’t too too different.”
Andi rolled his eyes so hard, his head violently flinched and rolled along with them. “Fuck the both of them.”
“Both meritable points,” Malcolm cut in as they began to devolve into a bicker fest about slavery-defending sexists and ad hominem arguments. “We’ll see how our current system works first. But, ya know, once we have surpluses, it’d be cool to look at participatory budgeting. So others, even youths, would be as civically engaged as you are. Then people can”—have fun—“responsibly choose as a collective where the money goes.”
“But right now,” said Chiara in a more pointed tone, “the budget is focusing mainly on the essential infrastructure New Athens needs before our March 12th grand opening. Especially things that Camp Half-Blood doesn’t currently have.”
Andi and Nils looked at each other dejectedly. Malcolm thought he should offer some credit—even if he didn’t really mean it.
“Thanks for the idea,” he said. “At least you put thought into it, did some research, and made calculations, which is great. Really. It would be nice to have a new arena for sure. I’d use it. We’ll keep this idea in mind for Phase 2 of New Athens. It’s not a complete no. We just know we can’t do it now.”
“You’re welcome to provide ideas on the parks, though,” Chiara said brightly. “Rowan’s sorting that stuff out, so you can talk to him.”
“Please do,” Malcolm said. “And you should seriously ask Chiron if the features you proposed can be rolled out at Camp Half-Blood somehow.”
Once the meeting had adjourned and Andi and Nils had been escorted out, Malcolm shook his head. “Like we could even fit an arena that big,” he muttered to Chiara. “And damn, the cost.”
Chiara put on a voice. “Yeah, but that’s just, like, details.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
July 22nd arrived. Malcolm put on his nicest jeans.
As his siblings chattered outside the cabin in the warmth of the summer, he finished French braiding Alicia’s hair, tying the ends of her hair with one of those twisty-twisty, bobbly hair ties.
As if it were any Cabin Six field trip, their siblings had implicitly designated Malcolm the carrier of supplies. But this wasn’t a typical field trip. They didn’t need nectar, ambrosia, or medical supplies in Atlantis. They did, however, need that four-foot-tall waterproof cylinder whose very existence was enough to taunt him.
“Hey, Alicia. You did great work on this,” he said, spinning the heavy roll on its circular base. “You should be proud.”
While the words came easily, he had to force himself to dispel the worms that wriggled in his stomach under Alicia’s wondrous scrutiny.
Speaking quietly, he said, “I can carry this, but I think you should be the one to give it to Rhode. You think you can lift it?”
Alicia’s brows scrunched. “It’s not that heavy!” she protested.
Yeah. Only because she was a demigod.
Malcolm held in a laugh. “It is about as tall as you, though.”
Before he could second-guess himself, he held one hand out for Alicia to take, lugging the log in his other arm as they set off outside.
As bulky as the cylinder was, its contents were outweighed by the thoughts in his head. Ten days had passed since Annabeth’s birthday. Ten days theoretically available to... have no time to be covert. And how little reason others would have to say no. But that was irrelevant, Malcolm told himself. Which was both comforting and not, depending on the angle he looked at this from.
He cleared his head as he fell in step with his siblings, and on the way to the beach, he listened in on Alicia’s social studies lesson, with Percy analogizing all seas and oceans to America, and Atlantis to DC. Hearing a hint of a huff on his opposite side, he switched frequencies to Claire and Conrad.
“It was better, though,” Conrad was saying.
“Tell me that the next time you finish a marathon fifteen minutes before I do,” Claire said.
It had actually been closer to twenty if Malcolm could remember correctly, but he wasn’t going to mention that.
“Hey,” Conrad said with the biggest smirk. “At least you were upright.”
“Conrad.” Claire shot him a glare.
“Oh, come on!” he said.
With a grin nearly matching Conrad’s, Annabeth prodded elbows with Malcolm and nudged her head towards the two.
“This guy...” Conrad laughed to him.
“From the Nike Cabin,” Annabeth footnoted. “During training.”
Conrad wheezed. “He... he flexed so hard in front of Claire... he fainted,” he ended, at the highest pitch Malcolm had ever heard come out of him.
Joining him and Annabeth in hysterics, Malcolm received a glower from Claire.
“Oh my gods, stop!” she groaned. Suddenly, she rounded on Conrad. “I don’t talk about Grace.”
“But that’s—” Conrad spluttered. He stopped there.
Claire cocked her head. “How?”
“It’s not like you—” Conrad shut up again.
Claire raised a brow the exact way Athena hmm-ed her kids. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Annabeth quickly averted their eyes and tried not to elbow each other. Conrad then offered some comments on the oh so interesting camp activity schedule for next week.
Once they’d reached the beach, Percy handed them each a shot of nectar that would allow them to “breathe underwater and all that good stuff” for about twelve hours.
Under Percy’s watch, the Athenians one by one took their shots and waded into the water to test the effects. Once underwater, Malcolm took a hesitant breath. No water ran up his nose. When Rhode’s flood had struck the battleground, he hadn’t had the time to process the sensation. Now, completely submerged in the sound, he noticed that he felt a little snug compared to being in the outdoor air, yet warmer than being housed in Percy’s air bubbles.
Looking around him, Malcolm saw Percy guiding Claire, Zeke, and Alicia on how to walk on the ground and found Conrad and Sophie floating around with nervous glances at Annabeth.
“You’re fine,” she said. “Breathe.” Her voice was not muffled but clear.
Sophie stuck out her tongue. “I don’t taste the water.”
Once the Athenians passed Percy’s tutorial, they returned to the surface, where Percy distributed pearls that he likened to Portkeys. Following his instructions, they crushed the pearls beneath their feet.
The bubbly portal that surrounded each of them on the trip to Atlantis seemed like nothing more than entering a closet and emerging in Narnia. The bubbles had quickly popped, revealing an underwater scene by a white building complex. A couple dozen buildings stood before them, adorned with sea stones and abalone shells with rainbow reflections.
Though they had traveled far below the photic zone, their surroundings remained a brighter blue than Malcolm would’ve expected. He couldn’t figure out how sunlight could’ve reached these depths and suspected that that nectar he'd drunk had probably increased his eye sensitivity.
Despite the heavy aroma of beachiness, Malcolm also couldn’t taste the water here either. It smelled saltier, though, and there was a tempting scent of grilled fish that seemed to linger on his tongue.
Marveling at the miracle that he was here, Malcolm tried to take in everything: the plant beds abounding in rivers of colour, jellyfish flickering like string lights, octupi making their own light show... Olympus didn’t have anything like this.
On paths lined with luminescent pearls, Percy led the Athenians towards the palace. They passed a courtyard where a group of water spirits mingled and munched on hors d'oeuvres, and then marched through humongous, open double doors, past guards positioned in strategic areas.
Within the walls of the palace, it was easy to spot Rhode. It wasn’t so much what she was wearing, considering she was snapping pics with the guests who twinned her in all shades of red; one had only to follow the direction of the crowd’s gazes. Percy led the Athenians to a quieter hallway and greeted nearby guests. After several moments of Rhode greeting a few water spirits and laughing at something some dude said, she turned their way, her dress twirling as she did so.
Rhode’s eyes widened as she caught sight of the most recent arrivals. “You’re here!” she said, arms outstretched. Light glinted off this necklace-like thing that seemed to wrap around her under her dress.
Percy came in with a bear hug, and the Athenians exchanged birthday wishes for pressed cheeks as Rhode hugged them one by one. Malcolm’s turn came last.
“Happy birthday,” he said again. Making reacquaintance with a floral whiff, he learned that her hugs came with a little, comforting squeeze. After she let him go, he waited a beat and said, “Alicia has something for you.”
Rhode’s eyes fell back on him for a moment then flew to Alicia and the towering object she was hugging as she hobbled over to Rhode.
“Here you go,” Alicia said brightly.
Rhode gasped excitedly at Alicia, giving her all her attention. “A present? Can I open it?”
“Mm-hmm!” Alicia said, nodding proudly.
Rhode tore apart the wrapping paper, opened the tube, and removed from it a 6x4 loosely rolled sheet of fabrics. Setting aside the case, she magically unfurled the roll, hanging it upright in the air—no, water.
Rhode gaped at the image. Her eyes flitted all over the tapestry, a woven depiction of her and her water horses in action. In the distant backdrop sailed a ship hoisting four flags. Above the ship flew seven little owls.
One of Rhode’s hands flew to her chest. “Oh, Fates, this is gorgeous!”
Malcolm couldn’t help his lips from stretching into a smile. And as much as he hated attention, he also wanted Rhode to look at him. Maybe it was selfish, but he wanted her to know.
Rhode continued studying the tapestry, focusing more seriously on her likeness. The image of her concentrated on something several strides away from the beholder, conveying the intention that opposed the heedless way her hair flew about her. In the air, the train of her silky, floral sundress floated between the forces of her aqua cavalry.
Training her eyes on the horses, the real Rhode ran a finger over the woven ornamentations that formed their manes. Suddenly, she swiveled around.
Malcolm felt the weight of her gaze before turning to face her. Rhode was smiling in that curious way she had back in the Blofises’ kitchen.
Well, ya know... you deserve it.
You said not to stop the—
It was a good game.
Two seconds had gone by—or perhaps not even two. But with everyone there, even that was far too long, and Malcolm needed her attention off him ASAP.
He darted his eyes to Alicia and gestured towards her. “Alicia had the idea to do some art about that Capture the Flag game.”
(Sure, it had taken a couple more comments to have led her all the way there, but he wasn’t lying. She had had that idea.)
“She also helped pick the colors,” Zeke piped up, “and she did the border, too.”
Rhode observed the threads that framed the piece. “I love how it looks. The weaving is perfect and the colors really complement the rest of the piece.” Crouching to Alicia’s level, Rhode took her hand. “Thank you, Alicia,” she said warmly. “I love this. It’s incredibly beautiful.”
Alicia was quiet as she picked at the fabric of her dress with her free hand. She looked as if trying to hold back her smile. Malcolm caught Percy and Annabeth exchanging one of their looks.
“And thank you,” said Rhode, “each and every one of you, for this.” She made eye contact with everyone and looked at Malcolm last. “It’s really so sweet of you.”
Leaving the piece up, she gave more half hugs to his siblings and offered them all a tour of the palace.
Busy people had no time for subtlety, so Malcolm hung back, letting his siblings walk up in front of him. As if tuned to his wishes, Rhode, too, fell behind the pack. But even with the rest of the crew up ahead, Malcolm couldn’t for the life of him do anything but walk at Rhode’s side as she and Percy pointed things out.
It felt too much to even ask how she was. But because his siblings would obviously be alerted if he said nothing, he forced out questions and comments about the palace and the event. He swore he was paying attention when Rhode told them about the art exhibits around and the new art school. And he really was mentally present when she pointed out the food stands out in the courtyard.
When they’d reached the pantry, a group of waiters and waitresses emerged, some carrying buffet refills, some carrying canapés. One approached Rhode’s side and offered a tray of mini dolmades. “For you, Rhódē and guests?”
Rhode took the entire plate. “Chárin soi oída, Achaios. These are ridiculously good. I’ve been gorging on them all day.” One by one, she handed toothpicks to the Athenians. Again, Malcolm was last. “And for you,” she said. Rhode herself stabbed a dolma before offering it to him.
“Thanks,” he said as casually as he could muster. He didn’t know what exactly was in the leaves, but took the toothpick, not trying very hard not to brush his fingers against hers.
Rhode watched him munch on the dolmades. “Good, right?” she said.
Malcolm swallowed his last bite. “Nice tang,” he said. “Well spiced, too.”
Rhode smiled and continued to play hostess, catching up with them all and making casual conversation as she swayed to and fro on her feet, and at one point leaning on Percy while guffawing at one of his deadpans. But it wasn’t long before she had others lingering nearby, sending her none too discrete glances.
“Percy, Annabeth, why don’t you show everyone around?” she said. “Annabeth’s done such an incredible job helping remodel the palace. You should all see it.”
With a promise to see them all later, she attended to her other guests. As she did a 180, so too did her demeanor. Back straightened, shoulders back, upper arms fixed at her sides, she now addressed her guests with a softer, contained voice. “Geiá sou! Pós eíste óloi símera?”
Malcolm wondered if her code switching came with emotional dissonance. How much effort did that take? It looked exhausting to go all in one moment, then go all in the next.
With her constituents, her laughs weren’t as boisterous as they were with Percy, but despite the change in disposition, Rhode’s grin remained nearly as bright. She held her stamina, conversing with person after person, group after group, her dangling gold earrings shaking at each turn of her head, her bangles clinking as she talked with her hands. It seemed she did that more when she was speaking Greek.
Tearing his eyes away, Malcolm directed his attention to Annabeth and Percy’s tour. If he had to rate it, he’d give it 4.5 stars out of 5. One guide was perfect; room after room, she shared expert insights into the decisions behind the natural building materials, open-floor layouts, Greco-Roman geometrics, and even security measures. And then she chose to quiz the other guide on his architectural knowledge.
“And what can you tell us about this area?” Annabeth said, once they’d reached a distinctively contemporary section of the palace.
“This would be the parlor, where Atlantis entertains guests,” Percy said confidently. “Note the horizontal rooflines out there, reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style.”
Perfect marks for knowledgeability.
“Which style specifically?” said Annabeth.
Percy whipped around to face her. “Prairie,” he said with a wink.
One star off for unprofessionalism.
“And then we have overhanging flat roofs,” Percy said gesturing towards the features, yet still staring at Annabeth’s adoring face, “which create broad terraces and balconies. Which is also what Wright did with...”
Robie House. The Emil Bach House. His own home and studio.
Percy raised a questioning brow. “Fallingwater?”
That, too.
Annabeth nodded in awe and pride.
And half a star added, because Malcolm wasn’t enough of a grinch to want to see Annabeth looking anything but joyous.
It was a shame the rest of the world couldn’t see what she’d created. Perhaps he was biased, but it only took Malcolm a quick evaluation to conclude that the Palace of Atlantis outmatched the works of many mortal greats.
Borrowing from the best and bringing in her own takes, she’d managed to co-create something with more form than Louis Sullivan’s towers and more function than the futuristic spectacles of self-venerating starchitects like Zaha Hadid—and with more timelessness, more acclaim, more everything than that fugly, faulty building Frank Gehry had created for MIT. (‘I love his Guggenheim, but gods forbid,’ Annabeth had said when she video-called Malcolm from campus during a visit to her cousin Magnus, ‘if I ever design something like this, please send me back to Tartarus.’ And he swore he would—because an Annabeth who did that would obviously be an imposter.)
It was Annabeth’s signature to make a simultaneous nod to the past and a promise to the future. The palace did the same, fusing Midwestern with classical European, Wright with Burnham, in a very Atlantian way.
Of all her works, Annabeth had said it was the Palace of Atlantis that had brought her most out of her comfort zone. She’d worked with coral; accounted for fish locomotion; forgone her preference for glass walls and simple cubism; opted for protective charms instead of windows; and employed an organic simplicity specific to the marine world—all in all, embracing constraints with an attitude that would have made Gehry proud.
“I like the flowy motifs and detailing on the walls and doors,” said Sophie. “They’re like waves and seaweed.”
“Like the building’s part of the ocean,” Conrad said. “‘Married to the ground.’”
“Quite Wright-esque,” said Claire.
“Who owes it to Sullivan,” Malcolm said, thinking rather of the Wainwright in St. Louis and more so the Guaranty in Buffalo.
Annabeth’s sparkly eyes dished out A-pluses to their matching grays.
“Ooh!” Zeke pointed to the similar patterns on the capital of the nearby pilasters. “And those ones look like eels and cephalopods.”
“What are cephalopods?” said Alicia.
Annabeth answered before anyone else could. “Maybe the original Greek will help. Kephalópodes. Can you break it down?”
Under seven pairs of eyes, Alicia was too focused to waver. “Is it like kephalḗ and pódes?” she said as her eyes brightened. “Head and feet? Oh, like an octopus?!”
“Exactly!” Annabeth offered her and received a high five.
“I like them, too, Annabeth,” Alicia said. “They look really pretty.”
Annabeth’s smile widened. “I’m glad you think so,” she said. “It wasn’t all me, though. This was a joint project. I worked with some local designers to come up with patterns that were simple and modern, but very much still traditional Atlantis. They also made these beautiful sculptures of all kinds of marine life, like that giant squid there. We actually first thought of putting the sculptures by the walls right outside here, but ended up putting them outside to draw people towards the garden.”
And that was what Malcolm loved most about Annabeth’s work. The mark she wanted to make on the world was to create people-centered, context-fitting spaces. More than landmarks or places, her designs were experiences, with a seamlessness that he knew held so many secrets. Because beneath the deceptive simpleness was anything but behind the scenes.
He’d seen all the considerations she’d pondered over for her proposals—lighting, colors, angles, acoustics, crowd flows, and more. Using architectural psychology to influence user behavior, she almost manipulated people by drawing them to certain areas of a space and having them interact a certain way to help them use the space effectively. Whether to chat with a group, enjoy an intimate one-on-one, or find quietness alone... to commute in a jiffy, take a relaxed walk, or chill for hours... she thought of every detail.
Now, seeing Annabeth’s visions come to life, watching her watch people using her spaces as she’d intended, and knowing her work would be used for centuries (if not at least a millennium), ignited a spark of pride in Malcolm that got him grinning like a loon—not too different from when he’d finally witnessed Olympus post-construction.
Malcolm nodded at her. “Looks even more awesome in real life,” he said, causing her to exhale a laugh.
“And now you’ve seen them all,” Annabeth said. “Favorite?”
Malcolm considered her collection of other works in Olympus, New York, California, and Massachusetts.
“He’ll pick something in New Athens,” Conrad guessed. “I still haven’t seen the Bay Area ones, but I’d pick Olympus.”
Malcolm thought for a second. “Well, I will get the honor of actually using those spaces, so yeah. Maybe City Hall. I seriously can’t wait to work there. Or if that apartment unit I just bought on pre-sale is nearly as amazing as your concept art suggests, I could go with that.”
“Annabeth,” Alicia said with her doe eyes, “can I see your other buildings sometime?”
Annabeth wrapped an arm around one of Alicia’s shoulders and drew her in. “When I visit them next, I could bring you with me,” she said, looking down at her littlest sister.
Grinning, Alicia hovered around Annabeth for the rest of the tour, transferring babysitting responsibility over to her, whether Alicia knew it or not.
Walking by Ionic columns that lined the pavilion, they all sauntered back to the festival and encountered yet another magical scene. Atop standing tables, bioluminescent plankton flickered in jars like fireflies. Merwomen and mermen floated around the tables, their tails spinning like rudders and swishing like fish.
Malcolm didn’t know what he’d expected. In hindsight, T-shirts or even dress shirts would’ve probably looked stupid on them, but it was a shock nonetheless that most merpeople were wearing absolutely nothing aside from the common purse or fanny pack. He jokingly wondered if there were textile shortages in the Atlantic. Yet, it somehow seemed less scandalous to see merpeople topless. The clothes they did have on—which tended to be made of fish scales and netting—seemed to act more as jewelry that just drew more attention to their otherwise bare chests. Whether that was normal wear, Atlantian wear, or party wear, Malcolm didn’t know. Not one demigod said a word.
In the center of this pavilion, an orchestra completed the ambience, with flutes, strings, and traditional drums. At the bar, a set of mixologists whipped up drinks while another set taught a group of guests how to make what looked like an ouzo martini slush. Other pavilions had their own theme: A dance floor blasted European pop and EDM under flashing strobe lights, while another pavilion, furnished with huge lounge sofas, played jazz.
And all around the courtyard, guests crowded around buffet tables, stocked with keftedes, all kinds of fish dressed up in all kinds of ways, large bowls of horiatiki salad and watermelon salad, and a host of other dishes. The dessert tables—plural—were filled with baklava, cupcakes, ice-cream, aguas frescas in five colors, and bougatsa in an abundance of flavors: cinnamon, lemon, chocolate and hazelnut, and honey and pistachio. Malcolm figured he could spend hours observing and eating the food alone.
But then he came upon a big picnic area and, to its right, at least five stations dedicated to crafts. A dozen Atlantians to a table were occupied with beadwork, other jewelry, painting, and pottery decor. Several nereids floated around, fundraising for the Atlantian School of Art and Design.
A little tug on his hand told him day care responsibility was transferred to him again. He’d figured Alicia would come back to him, what with Annabeth fielding wishes and questions about her upcoming wedding to a son of Poseidon.
“Mal, can I go there?” Alicia said, pointing to the opposite side of the courtyard, where kids and teens busied themselves with all sorts of activities.
Malcolm let her lead the way. There were stations for wheels of fortune, face painting, an eating contest, cookie decorating, a pin-the-tails-on-Triton game, bubble making, and even a scavenger hunt, which seemed to excite Alicia most despite her apprehension. Malcolm encouraged her to hang with her peers, figuring it’d get her used to parting with one of her security blankets. Estelle couldn’t be the only kid she’d befriend.
At another station, a line of kids and guardians waited their turn to receive goodie bags consisting of a plant, a couple sand dollars, and a slice of cake. Rhode joined the nereids distributing the gifts and chatting with kids, until she sat by a play area to meet a boy who’d just reached the bottom of a slide. His mop of dark curls floated wildly as he beamed and ran towards her for a hug. Rhode returned the gestures but said nothing. Her bangles rattled below her motioning hands, and the boy then pointed to a seating area to Malcolm’s left.
Standing by the nearby benches and watching the duo was a nymph looking about Malcolm’s fathers’ age. Her arctic blue eyes verged on a glare—one more intense than Rhode’s, Drew’s, and even Clarisse’s. Malcolm would’ve thought she was Rhode’s bodyguard if he hadn’t already recognized her face. And though her gaze was fixed upon the play area before her, he suspected she noticed him looking at her.
Time to speak.
Malcolm strolled over. “You’re Galene,” he said.
Finally, the woman trained her frosty eyes on him. “Yes, I am.”
“I’m—”
“I know who you are, Malcolm Pace.”
He couldn’t figure out if her intonation and words sounded more like a threat or more like she was showing off. It kinda reminded him of Athena—which meant he’d had practice.
“There was an article I read about you,” he said. “You wrote a letter and then got hired as Rhode’s Chief of Staff? Must’ve been some letter.”
“She liked it,” Galene said with a self-satisfied smile. “You are mostly correct. I oversaw correspondence first, then I became her Chief of Staff. Aside from some rounds of maternity leave and sabbaticals, I have been at her side ever since.”
He wondered how many “some” was to an immortal. Which reminded him...
“I started reading your textbook,” he said. “I have the 149th edition. That’s quite a feat!”
Galene turned her body to face him head on. The way she evaluated him was almost exactly the way Leo stared down contraptions before disassembling them without a hitch. “I wasn’t aware the tellurian world kept up with the marine world,” she said. “They tend to know little about us.”
“I try to read about different things,” Malcolm said. “I was curious. I wanted to ask— And I’m not sure if either of us would really understand, since our perspectives are so different.... As immortals, is it actually easier to enact long-term policies, or do people still care too much about the short run?”
Galene thought for a second, pausing like she had every other time before she’d spoken. “I’d say you answered your own question,” she said.
Which part?
Galene studied him for a long moment. “And what I would also say to that,” she said, “is that people like you might find it easy to gloss over the here and now.”
Malcolm tried to figure out what kind of people he was. Children of Athena?
“Economists,” Galene clarified. “You care so much about what will happen in the long run. You may think—and be right—that things need to be... corrected. But those ‘corrections’ often spell out pain. Things that cause misery, longing, loss, shame.... They’re very real, and no graph—no equation—can truly account for that.”
You can make those considerations and build that into the modeling, he wanted to protest.
“Oh, you can try,” Galene said, “and I’m sure it’s more helpful than not doing it at all, but it’s not comparable. So, conduct your cost-benefit analyses, but also meet people. Acknowledge their pain. And take care of them.”
And how about people in the future, huh? Or people outside jurisdictional boundaries? Who’s going to do public consultations with them and address their pains?
“I see,” he said.
The tug of Galene’s lips told him she caught him. It was like he was a kid again, and Mama B had caught him returning a slice of sweet potato pie to get a second slice of pecan pie.
“No, I do get it,” Malcolm said sheepishly. “It’s not like you can see any of those personal impacts anywhere on a graph or in the math. And I’ll be wary of that. Would you happen to have any other helpful advice you might want to share? I do appreciate it.”
“An easy one,” Galene offered. “Avoid New Public Management approaches. I understand the temptation of Thatcher and Reagan’s thinking—”
“Now that’s leaning too much into the stereotype,” Malcolm butt in with instant regret. But his mouth plowed on with no care for rudeness. “About ‘people like me’. I’m trying to avoid creating a hollow state.”
Galene’s coolness finally warmed. Her grin felt like a laugh. “I was merely making sure that a Chicago boy doesn’t resemble... a Chicago Boy.”
“Another stereotype,” Malcolm said with mock offense—and he wondered how the hell she even knew where he was from, or perhaps where he’d studied.
Galene laughed for real this time—maybe at her own joke.
“New Athens doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Our approach is to look at evidence. But if what works turns out to be something under New Public Management, for example, so what? It works, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sure you understand that that approach might not always help you. Searching for answers in evidence.”
“Because the approach is still biased?” he guessed.
“I was thinking more along the lines of there being too many uncertainties,” Galene said. “You’ll get stuck. Don’t stick yourself.” After a breath or sigh, she told him slowly, “The worst part of our line of work, I’d say, is all the bad that we do. That we’re forced to do. You want to do good—or perhaps the least bad. But framing it that way... If you have a heart and if you have shame, it is still mind-twistingly challenging to navigate these situations and move on from them.” Her eyes seemed to pierce through his skull. “I don’t mean unpopular decisions,” she said. “I’m sure that’s not much of a problem for you.”
In what way? Malcolm was bursting to ask. Did she think he didn’t care about upsetting constituents? Or did she think New Athenians would generally agree with him?
But he kept to Galene’s pace of speech.
“I mean when there are no Pareto improvements,” she said, “and when you don’t know—when no evidence in the world can truly tell you—what move you should make, what promises you should break, whose trust to violate, which ethical rules you should breach, whom you should hurt.”
Heavy stuff.
Malcolm just nodded. His mind whirred with thoughts about Marcella, Jake, and the committee of demigods, dryads, and satyrs. And then Percy and aquatic life, and Drew and her employees. His constituents were there before him, all asking for aid; yet, there he was, grasping at Pareto improvements out of reach. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how many options he explored, someone was going to be harmed.
“It’s been some 2,600 years since I’ve had this job,” Galene said. “It remains just as difficult today. I don’t even take the heat.”
“Rhode does.”
Galene nodded once. “All four of them.”
“And it’s easier for them,” Malcolm realized.
“No term limits.”
For a moment, they shared a silence and then talked books until Galene’s grandson motioned to her for a potty break. Malcolm bid her thanks and goodbye.
“I wish you the best,” Galene said in farewell. “You seem to have the proper heart, the right head atop your shoulders, and an appropriate level of compunction. Don’t stick yourself.” At that, she swam off with her grandson.
It didn’t take long for dread to worm under his skin and sit its five-ton ass on his chest. Malcolm tried to think of all the things he didn’t know and all the ways he could go wrong.
The only person with some political power who actively hated him was Pravir, but Pravir hadn’t even bothered to run against him as chief policymaker. In fact, no one had. Maybe they’d thought it was pointless, because no one else had dedicated three degrees and nearly all of their work opportunities to plant the seeds of a city-state. Maybe they thought it was rude, since it had been Malcolm’s idea in the first place to build New Athens. Maybe they thought Athena would smite them?
Oh no. What if someone had considered running and an owl had glared at them?
There should’ve been no need to bother about such doubts. He could prove it anyway. Right?
Okay. If Athena didn’t threaten to smite an opponent, his power was legitimate.
(Premise 1) ¬S → L
Athena threatening to smite anyone would have been dumb.
(Premise 2) S → D
Athena wasn’t dumb.
(Premise 3) A → ¬D
So: He knew Athena well enough.... A. Not exactly a statement, but whatever.
A
If A, then not D, per premise 3.
A → ¬D
If not D, then not S, per transposition of premise 2.
¬D → ¬S
And if not S, then L, per premise 1.
¬S → L
Ergo, L.
(Conclusion) :. L
Phew.
But a re-evaluation of his propositional calculus lit his nerves aflame. His first assumption wasn’t exactly accurate. After all, there could be other reasons his position wasn’t at least perceived to be legitimate. After that snarky response that he’d sent to “Your Rich Lawyer Daddy Fed You Access to an Ivy Off a Silver Spoon”, Anonymous had interjected that all the years he’d dedicated to establishing New Athens wasn’t the proof he suggested he’d be most qualified, but rather proof that he was the most privileged. Which... also had a point.
Despite everything he’d seen, maybe there was something he’d forgotten, something he wasn’t seeing anymore. Maybe there was a hidden solution to New Athens’s dilemmas. An answer to his ponderings on pollution and pipelines, populism and protests, promises and popularity.
Or maybe Galene was right. No matter what the council did, this would simply be one of many future righteous mistakes.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm kept an eye out for Alicia until she decided to join Zeke and Sophie’s bubble engineering and science experiments. Determined not to sit at the kids’ table, Malcolm was relieved they could entertain her.
Walking around some more, he ventured beyond the courtyard and happened upon a quaint pedestrian mall teeming with celebrating locals. The scene seemed like a narrower version of Boulder’s Pearl Street, with a rural French whimsy. Restaurants, coffee shops, and little art galleries lined the street among stone walls vined with giant kelp. At every other window sill, vibrant sea anemones, red algae, and greenery burst out of pots. Malcolm figured there must’ve been regulations on how to dress up the street—or perhaps everyone had simply gotten the memo. One of the art galleries had even included paintbrushes in its foliage pots. Among an increasingly jubilant crowd, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from those pots. It struck him how amused he was at such a little peculiarity.
Figuring that New Athenians deserved head-tilting little delights like that around the city (and also aiming to ease the dread of whatever Galene had implanted in him), Malcolm took out his pocket-sized notebook and jotted down some ideas. Before he forgot, he also listed Galene’s book recs and quickly sketched little pictures of other fascinating artifacts he’d seen earlier: the glowing plankton, the sprawling coral, all the variations of plants, animals, fungi, and protists....
“Hello, Officer. Did you catch any fish speeding?”
It took Malcolm several moments to process that Rhode was right by him. Like, right by him.
“Yes, I’m talking to you,” she said.
“Hilarious.” Twiddling his pen, Malcolm waited for her next quip. He really couldn’t think of what to say.
Eyeing his notebook, Rhode began to frown. “Are you working?”
“No. Well, Galene gave me some book recommendations and advice, and the festival setup and general architecture just gave me an idea for the city square.”
“How flattering,” said Rhode. “But that sounds like work. Network, sure, but I didn’t invite you here to take notes.” She shot him a disapproving look, and the notebook disappeared from his hands.
The dread that had come and gone was now replaced with panic. “Are you kidding me?” He had so many ideas in those pages!
“You can have it back tonight,” said Rhode. “There’s so much to do here for everyone. Don’t just observe.”
With an inaudible groan, he debated whether it really was impolite of him and considered how much he’d still want to have given her that present right now.
“I wanted to thank you again for that tapestry,” Rhode said.
Malcolm concluded he would’ve potentially been a little rude if he’d kept at it, and he decidedly told himself he didn’t regret the gift, but he was pissed at her nonetheless. Or for now anyway. Historically, whatever he’d thought of her had kept oscillating between appreciation and annoyance, and he was still unsure what to think about her on average—or if an average was even appropriate.
He didn’t know what to respond. He hadn’t exactly expected her to talk to him alone.
“No worries,” he said. Without permission to talk about work, he figured he had a good enough excuse to ask: “How’ve you been?”
“Well,” Rhode said with a nod.
He could read it off her bright green eyes that he swore seemed greener than before—perhaps a little optical illusion against all that red in her garb.
“Also busy,” she said. “It takes a lot of effort to set this up. We try to switch it up every year, so it doesn’t get boring.”
He couldn’t get how it could.
“But the food’s a different story,” Rhode said. “People like—”
Before she could finish her sentence, a broad-chested merman geared up in armor intruded into their bubble with merely a look at her.
Rhode’s lips parted before she turned to Malcolm. “Sorry. I have to go.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said with a smile before striding away.
Malcolm kept his head on a swivel—but found no signs of peril.
While practically whispering in each other’s ears, Rhode and the merman looked into the distance, where a dozen or so people sat holding posters Malcolm couldn’t make out. Some guests, Malcolm noticed, spared quick glances at the sitting group, but most paid them no attention.
Then a group of party-goers swam in front of him, and Rhode and the merman were swallowed by the crowd. Losing all sight of everyone he knew, he was taken back to all those times he’d been the odd one out in school after school—first for his appearance, then for his neurodivergence.
To ease his jitters, Malcolm employed one of his trusty party tactics and headed for the buffet. Queuing up behind some merpeople, he followed their lead and took a green plate that he found was actually some thick disk-shaped plant. He did not, however, imitate them in taking parsley, drawn instead by grape leaves.
“More dolmades! Good choice!”
A brush on his left arm and a glimpse of red told him Rhode had run into him again.
“The sea bass and the haddock are also really good,” she said. “And the saganaki.”
“Good to know. I might try it later,” he said, opting to stick with the dolmades and the watermelon. Glancing at her, he asked, “Is everything good?”
Rhode leaned in and spoke in his ear, “I personally am not a fan of the bulgur,” she whispered. “But that’s just me. Everything else, I’d eat.”
Malcolm savored the moment.
“Noted.” Lowering his voice, he said, “I was kind of referring to that situation over there.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Rhode said in nonchalance as she piled tabbouleh onto her plate. “I will have to see to them, though.”
She put more heaps of fish onto her plate, and as she explored the options spread out before them, her eyes caught sight of something in the crowd beyond the buffet table.
“Mm!” she yelped. “You should talk to Thaumas. He runs the Atlantian Metropolis. I’ll introduce you.”
Each with an armful of food—Malcolm with a hill, Rhode carrying a mountain—she led him through the chattering crowd to a group of four who were laughing and goodbying by the palace buildings.
“Thaumas!” Rhode called.
“Rhódē!” rumbled a figure in a deep voice, gliding his way over. "Charoúmena genéthlia!"
Thaumas... was a merman. An unfairly hot one. And not in the good way Bae was a looker. Standing next to him and his luscious black hair and well-manicured scales felt more like stepping into the shoes of Mark Antony Flores shooting his shot during Capture the Flag. Not that Malcolm was, of course.
"Pánta mia efcharísti," Thaumas said, coming in with a casual hug and a pair of cheek presses, like he didn't even think about it. Like it was all no biggie.
Thaumas looked like he wanted to say something to Rhode, but left it at a flash of a roguish grin—or what appeared to be that to Malcolm anyway. Rhode simply returned a smile. No scolding. No eye rolls. No scoffs.
It wasn’t like either of them... winked or something. It was the extra sneaking look Thaumas gave her that Malcolm almost missed. And the way she looked back in unquestioned... acknowledgement. It was like they were hiding something.
Seeing one second of paragraphs’ worth of exchange felt like those times he’d tried to piece together the clues behind a mystifying fact, like the first time he tried to grasp the epsilon-delta proof of the squeeze theorem. But the squeeze theorem’s proof had at least put in more effort to remain elusive to him then—as compared to the theorem evident before him right now... involving some other type of squeezing.
He had no desire to know of the other proofs that existed, nor in how many ways this theorem could be proven, how many times, over how many centuries.... That Rhode and Thaumas were making a (dismal) effort to hide their... whatever... was unpleasant enough.
Pulling away from Thaumas’s embrace, Rhode gestured towards Malcolm. "Íthela na sas systíso ton Malcolm. Epivlépi tin anáptyxi tis Néas Athínas. Nómiza óti boreíte na synomilísete."
They said their hellos, and once Rhode had begun to take leave, Thaumas nodded towards her plate. "Eínai aftó gia ména?" he said.
Rhode was quick to respond. "Tha boroúsate na párete to dikó sas fagitó."
Malcolm wanted to laugh. But Rhode did indeed hand Thaumas her entire plate, displaying only an amused exasperation before she said her second round of goodbyes.
Perhaps there was a reason she would do such a thing, Malcolm thought. As he started to wonder about the possibilities (maybe Thaumas had done that for her?), he again reminded himself that he didn’t want to know.
Thaumas took a bite of some grilled fish. "Néa Athína, e?" he said to Malcolm.
"Naí. Eínai i mitéra mou," Malcolm said. Damn everyone who thought it’d make him anything but proud.
Thaumas shrugged. "Aftó synchoreítai." There was that cheeky grin again.
Ugh.
They ended up talking municipal business, and Malcolm learned about the oddities of marine and immortal life.
Restocking on food, they came across Triton—sorry, Lord Triton—a green-skinned, ponytailed, pearl-armored, two-tailed merman who looked as though there were moldy bread under his nose. When Thaumas bowed, Malcolm followed suit.
Conversations with Triton were as tough as Percy once told Malcolm they were. Aside from his general off-putting demeanor, he seemed distracted and kept glancing disapprovingly at the group of people sitting on the ground, away from the festivities. Eventually, Triton swam off in the opposite direction, excusing himself with “business to attend to”.
Rhode, meanwhile, was heading towards the crowd. She had two heaping plates of food on her left arm and another stack on her other arm. Behind her, her security carried an additional two piles of food.
Getting a better look at the group of non-participants, Malcolm could now see their signs, which read: "ΜΑΣ ΒΟΥΛΙΑΖΕΙ ΟΛΟΥΣ Ο ΝΕΡΟΧΥΤΗΣ" and "δέσμευση = οξύτητα".
There was something about a... commitment? Désmefsi meant commitment. Which the people equated to oxýtita: acidity.
"Ti eínai aftó?" Malcolm asked Thaumas.
Thaumas took a breath and faced him. "I Atlantis katéchei metochikó merídio se mia etaireía pou diochetévei dioxeídio ánthraka ston pythmína tis thálassas."
Malcolm could figure out the rest: The ocean, several hundred times greater in mass than the atmosphere, already acted as an efficient carbon sink; blue carbon ecosystems by coasts and at sea naturally stored a third of all CO₂ emissions generated by human activity. But capturing CO₂ in the ocean meant creating carbonic acid in seawater, which could weaken coral reefs and steal carbonate that animals needed to build their shells and skeletons.
Malcolm also pieced together that désmefsi probably also meant sequestration, leaving him quite satisfied he learned a new word.
Up ahead, Rhode happily held out the plates of food to the seated folks. "Parakaló párte to fagitó. Den boreíte na to kánete aftó me ádeio stomáchi, oúte boreíte na synechísete ti synigoría sas chorís kalí diáthesi."
Despite a man’s polite insistence that they’d already eaten lunch, increasingly more eyes were trained on the plates Rhode carried. After a minute or so, a long table and a set of benches appeared between Rhode and the people, where she finally set down her mountains of food.
"Loipón, tha afíso to fagitó edó," she said. "Boreíte na meínete edó an thélete. Boreíte na symmetáschete an thélete. Boreíte na dokimásete lígo apó aftó to fagitó an thélete. Í óchi, an aftó eínai pou protimáte. Eínai epísis entáxei. Allá tha frontíso na ypárchei éna gennaiódoro kommáti apó tin toúrta genethlíon mou gia ólous. Aplós enimeróste mas eán échete kápoious diatrofikoús periorismoús."
Hearing her again suddenly made Malcolm want her to speak Greek to him. He was quite pleased she had done so (a bit anyway) a few weeks ago. But trying to keep up with his conversation with Thaumas reminded him he still had trouble with homonyms and modern words. Demigods, unfortunately, weren’t hardwired to understand scientific jargon.
At that, Malcolm once again got a rise out of the reminder that while Athena kids didn’t magically take up languages—a fitting skill for them, he’d argue—Aphrodite kids were blessed with their bullshit ability to understand French. Athena would've probably argued her children had to earn their fluency.
Rhode could probably speak French, too, Malcolm thought. Seemed like it from Capture the Flag. And Hindi. And sign language.
And here he was, having Thaumas patiently use simpler words and phrases—even speaking English sometimes—to explain to him how ocean acidity had increased by 25% from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the early 21st century. How the protesters had preferred carbon sequestration in coastal ecosystems, in whatever mangroves, seagrasses, and tidal marshes mortals hadn’t yet killed. How Atlantis had figured that working around mortals posed too much risk, hoping instead that the land-abled scientists they’d sent ashore would convince mortals to do their part—especially since coastal ecosystems could store something like 2 to 35 times more carbon than phytoplankton could.
Malcolm felt like an asshole for expecting the dude to trip up somewhere. But Thaumas continued to provide perspectives and advice, recommending books and quoting philosophers. He’d even acknowledged to Malcolm that Athena had played an important role in getting mortals to pay attention to ocean acidification—without any prompting at that.
Still, Malcolm had had enough—of both Thaumas and himself.
In need of a break and a desperate distraction, he did more walking and snacking, and ensconced himself in the crafts area by the art school fundraiser. Reeled in by a paint set, Malcolm stepped in between a couple of nereids and got behind an unoccupied canvas at the corner of the area. His hands longed to claim a brush.
Rhode had said not to take notes at her party? Well, he could paint them instead. Ha.
Using the least amount of effort to keep his mind off a certain merman, Malcolm decided to draw the scenery before him. He quickly sketched his notes, and trained his eyes to detect colors as they appeared, not as his mind told them they were.
He spent nearly ten minutes just observing the water that seemed like air but wasn’t, and patted himself on the back for undertaking a challenging and valuable exercise in appreciating his surroundings.
Once Malcolm was satisfied enough with how to depict the water, the next challenge was to work with the paint, which claimed to be fast-drying. It took a while getting used to how differently paint worked here. Mixing colors was harder than usual, but layering was easier. With some practice on his palette, Malcolm gained control until the brush became an extension of him.
On went layers of blues, greens, and grays, with touches of white, pink, and yellow. Once the background had dried, he began painting the palace: the walls, huge doors, and coral and abalone embellishments. He captured those little intriguing delights around the courtyard: the greenery, the art, the lights; the plants and food carts; the chatter and cheer; the multicolored fish that darted around....
Malcolm drew and painted the people as a mix of passersby, adapting his images as new faces stood in the place of old ones. Then he dropped his jaw (and promptly closed it) when he noticed a couple merpeople casually ripping out seaweed decor and stuffing it in their pie holes. His lips twitched at the sight. They were definitely making it in the painting.
“That’s quite impressive.”
Malcolm realized he had a small audience around him. He felt like a street artist, which felt a bit like he was being displayed in a zoo exhibit, but also a bit like he was teaching kids at camp.
He tried to refocus on his work before he noticed someone among the observers: a woman in an elegant white gown. On her forehead rested an ornament made of crab claws that resembled a crown. As the tale went, she was the most beautiful of all of Nereus’s daughters, who themselves were more stunning than mortals, who likely were attractive enough to begin with. Malcolm wondered if such claims were worth killing Casseiopeia over—because Poseidon had apparently thought no one deserved to live had they ever had the nerve to boast they were prettier than nereids.
“Welcome to Atlantis,” she said.
Malcolm bowed. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
Gods might not have shared DNA, but Rhode seemed to resemble her mother in perhaps the closest godly parent-child combo Malcolm had seen. But while Rhode’s irises gleamed her blue-green hue, Amphitrite’s held a steady mocha brown. Coupled with her well-known no-nonsense attitude, the pinned hair she wore in her signature net had him suspect she was more practical than her daughter.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.
“You must be one of Annabeth’s brothers. Malcolm?”
“That would be correct.”
Amphitrite gestured towards his artwork. “You don’t have to stop painting on my account. I wanted to see the show.”
Malcolm let out a nervous chuckle but did as she wished. Painting in front of a queen was a lot less nerve-racking than he’d figured it’d be.
As he colored in the seaweed-munching merfolk, she asked, “Have you enjoyed yourself so far?”
“I have! The festival seems incredible. This happens every year?”
“Rhode’s birthdays started out small—just family and friends,” Amphitrite said. “As she grew up, she took after her father and kept inviting more people every year. Eventually, she ended up inviting the whole of Atlantis.” Amphitrite seemed to smile at the memory. “She likes to see people together. And our people came to look upon today as the happiest time of the year, so it’s also become our way to celebrate all of Atlantis.”
“I see. That’s interesting,” he said. It seemed so lame to say, but he didn’t know what else to comment. “Do you have... a day?”
“In December,” Amphitrite said. “To honor our warriors. Lord Poseidon holds a celebration similar to today, but not as much fun, Rhode says. I’d agree.”
Malcolm huffed a laugh and tried not to react to the fact that she called her own husband by a title.
“Is it a competition?” he said.
Amphitrite smiled. “Not according to her. Not when there’s a clear winner. And no one’s successfully convinced Triton to make a holiday. He always says there’s already enough of them to go around—which may be true—and that he can’t commit to a specific date, since he so often leaves Atlantis to visit other communities. But he already does more than enough.”
There was an awkward silence as Malcolm continued painting, aided by the petering out of his observers.
“Lady Amphitrite,” he said, “I wanted to thank Atlantis for all the help—”
“I believe it’s in the agreements to refer to the funding as Lord Poseidon’s, not Atlantis’s,” Amphitrite said for only him to hear—and with no hint of displeasure.
Malcolm opened his mouth.
“Understand,” she cut him off again. “New Athens is Lord Poseidon’s business alone. Olympus is also his home, and he has business in the tellurian world. Rhode as well, somewhat. Things work differently here. Sea communities are independent. There are many who don’t take kindly to what they see as interference.”
“Understood.”
Perhaps that was why Amphitrite and Triton seemed more active on “foreign” policy than Poseidon and Rhode, he thought. Perhaps that was also why that trade agreement Rhode was working on was so comprehensive. If regular legislation and regulations wouldn’t be welcome, trade could have been their way to establish labor standards and improve environmental protection.
But the idea of an interstate trade agreement seemed laughable to him. He imagined New York needing to negotiate a deal to export pizzas, cronuts, and Manhattan Specials in return for Illinois’s pizzas and pizza puffs, giardiniera and gyros, and microbrews and Malört....
Nah, no way that’d happen; neither would exchange pizzas, and no one in their right minds would import Malört.
“Do other sea communities not agree with what Atlantis is trying to achieve?” Malcolm asked. “Or is it a matter of pride?”
“Some are afraid we’d take advantage,” Amphitrite said, “but it’s truly not in our interest to betray their trust. We aim to create mutually beneficial situations. It’s good in the long haul.”
Malcolm nodded. “I was talking to Galene about something related to that.” And now he realized that Galene hadn’t ever answered his question. “It’s a repeated game with an infinite number of rounds, so there’ll be no incentive to cheat.”
“Come again?”
Malcolm flushed. Galene would’ve gotten the lingo. “Parties are less likely to”—screw over each other—“behave uncooperatively when they have to deal with each other basically forever, right? Since the parties here are immortal, and punishments are probable, the math works out in favor of cooperating.”
“Our perspective,” Amphitrite told him, “has more to do with relationships and ethics than numbers. We know that if we have strong foundations, the numbers will follow.”
Malcolm was struck once more. As with Galene, he wondered if Amphitrite truly believed that, or if the two of them were perhaps protecting the royal family’s image or something. He actually couldn’t tell. But he highly doubted they were that naïve.
What did it say about a society that didn’t need or didn’t value proper proof? That simply relied on intentions over effectiveness?
As he continued coloring the scenery that had so impressed him earlier, Malcolm evaluated the people he’d drawn and the nation they’d built, wondering if he’d portrayed them wrong. Were people here really that different from New Athenians?
“That approach has paid off historically,” Amphitrite said. “For instance, Rhode demonstrated that well with the island of Rhodes. It’s what makes her well positioned to lead the trade negotiations. She has a knack for it. With whatever she does, really. It’s not because she’s our daughter that she handles big files, and people know that.... Most people.”
Malcolm halted his painting and scowled. “Do people discount Triton’s skills because he’s your son?”
Anphitrite smiled at him. “Not nearly as many, no.”
He wondered if perceptions would’ve been different if it were Rhode who had been God of the Navy. She could probably do what her brother could, as her battle planning had shown. As had her casual, artful methods to defeat packs of armed groups....
“But I guess there are advantages to being underestimated?” he thought aloud. “They tend not to see your ulterior motives, so convincing others to do something actually calculated can become much easier?”
Amphitrite cocked her head as her gaze focused on a spot of nothing a foot away. “I can see how that can be true,” she eventually said. She said nothing else.
But Malcolm wanted more.
“I mean—” he began. “Well, I’m assuming soft power is way more shrewd than people think, isn’t it?”
He trained his eyes to spot the smallest crumbs. Yet, Amphitrite didn’t budge.
“It takes a great deal of cleverness, yes,” she said. “Part of that cleverness is empathy: to understand what others want and how others behave. And that’s something Rhode has always excelled at.”
It was odd, he thought, how much she had to say, tossing around unprompted praise about her children more so than any god he’d met did their own.
Amphitrite’s attention caught on something beyond his shoulder. She wore that beaming expression Malcolm had often witnessed on his fathers’ faces. Following her line of sight, he spotted Rhode speaking to a boy as she held his hand. She then hugged him before sneaking behind a couple of teenage-looking merwomen in uproarious conversation.
Amidst a wild cackle from one of the girls, Rhode threw her arms over their shoulders. “Having fun, ladies? Can I join?” she said to exclamations of “Oh, holy Poseidon!” and “Oh my gods, I love your dress!”
Just as cheerily, she complimented their earrings and then said, “I’m Rhode. What are your names?”
Amphitrite breathed out a faint laugh. “Our people can’t ask for a more wonderful princess and I can’t ask for a better daughter.”
As opposed to the one you disowned.
Malcolm’s mind screamed at him to think of something else, lest Amphitrite was able to read his mind or face.
“And what contributes most to that in their view?” he blurted.
Once more, Amphitrite glanced at Rhode, who was now asking the girls if she could take a photo of them.
“Likely her kindness,” said Amphitrite. “That’s what I keep hearing.”
Kindness hadn’t been anywhere near the top of the list of Rhode’s qualities—at least not on Malcolm’s list. More than kind, Rhode seemed sharp, bold, vivacious, powerful, confident, skilled....
He tried his best not to display his shock in case it would come off the wrong way. He supposed her empathy helped her conduct diplomacy to build relationships and maintain peace. Maybe that was the version people here so often saw. Maybe they didn’t see the Rhode who teased Percy, who felled dozens of soldiers, who masterminded battle after battle.
Likewise, Atlantians would have been privy to more than three days’ worth of observations and a week’s worth of reading of publicly available content. Or, maybe, as prominent as those other qualities were already, maybe her kindness truly exceeded them. Maybe.
“And what would you say?” Malcolm dared to ask.
“Speaking as her mother, or as her colleague?” said Amphitrite.
“Would those answers be different?”
“Perhaps.” Amphitrite thought for a moment. “As her mother, I’m most proud of her independence. As her colleague, her dedication.”
Her answers seemed like opposites. And it seemed kindness didn’t top her list either.
Malcolm somehow felt a bit comforted by her response. He didn’t know if he should’ve been. Why the hell his opinion on Amphitrite’s thoughts would even matter, he reminded himself, was beyond presumptuousness. Yet, it was refreshing to hear.
Malcolm nodded and continued painting, filling in more facial features of passersby, desperately trying to think of something to say to fill the void. But it was Amphitrite who spoke first.
“What do you plan to do with this painting?” she said.
Malcolm shrugged. “I think I’ll leave it here or by the goodie bag area for someone to take if they like it. I hope that’s not considered littering.”
Amphitrite chuckled. “May I?”
Malcolm thought he misheard. He replayed the moment. “You want it? Are you serious?”
“Outside our public business,” she said, “my husband and I curate a public gallery at the palace. Lord Poseidon takes a liking to impressionist and expressionist styles, but I’m fonder of realism. I’d like to acquire this piece and add it to the collection at the palace if that’s all right with you.”
“Oh! Oh, yeah, of course! Please!”
“Wonderful,” she said with a smile. “I’d be willing to talk compensation.”
“No. No. It’s my honor.”
“We do not typically accept gifts.”
“I don’t think I can take money either,” Malcolm said. Already associated with elitism and nepotism, he didn’t want bribery accusations, considering all the money laundering in high art. “Maybe this could go to the art school instead?” he suggested.
Ah, fuck. How presumptuous.
“In a restroom or someplace,” he added.
Amphitrite gave him a sly look. “And why not? It might draw more eyeballs there.”
They shared a laugh. Promising to bring the painting to the palace when it was done, Malcolm spent another fifteen minutes on the scenery. He didn’t forget to snap several pics to show his parents.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Amphitrite’s directions led Malcolm to the palace gallery, where he dropped off his piece with Pherousa, one of her forty-nine sisters.
Pherousa, who looked nothing like Amphitrite, seemed no less kind, taking a full minute plus to take in his scenery. As she studied his work, Malcolm shifted on his feet and got to looking around.
There were paintings hung up on the walls, which Pherousa eventually said were to be relocated to the new art school. The collection, comprising an exhibit titled ‘Memories’, asked Atlantians: What was your favorite moment of the year? The question had been answered by a mix of pros and noobs (which deflated that boost of his ego from having had Amphitrite ask for his work—and yet also made him appreciate her more).
Partly to compare his skills, partly to get ideas from the pros, partly to find amusement in children’s drawings, Malcolm’s eyes flitted across the artworks. He spotted images of a cake, a group of friends, a kid’s birthday party, a mergirl being hugged by a merman, a graduation, a seashell-decorated house, and more everyday snapshots. Because Zeke wasn’t here for his ‘Oh my gods, Malcolm, let’s move to the next room already!’ Malcolm decided he could take his time.
The first two paintings, if he’d been honest, were rather messy. The cake one had clearly been a beginner’s attempt at three-dimensionality. The painting of friends, however, seemed composed of lines of a practiced hand—yet the color combos had left much to be desired. They were still cute, though, Malcolm thought as he stepped up to read their descriptions.
And what had appeared as innocuity revealed itself as a gut-punching horror.
Acacia, age 87, who had a career in engineering, had felt like she’d finally mastered cake baking and was now trying painting. It was cute. But the second artist, Evander, age 241—indeed a professional painter—had lost some of his vision and had found hope in a support group for merfolk suffering from global-warming-induced hypoxia.
The other artworks were all different, yet no different at all.
‘I wanted a magical conch shell for my 5th birthday!’ wrote Vanna, age 5. Next to her sketch, a picture by Alyssa, age 16: ‘♥ His Royal Highness, the Lord Triton himself ♥ carried me in his arms while rescuing my city from a cruise ship’s sewage dump.’
Karan, age 1,567, from a North Atlantic community, had earned her sixth PhD—this time in Creative Writing. Also hailing from the North Atlantic was Stefano, age 13, who had depicted his family’s last outdoor barbecue at their sea-shelled cottage, two months before they were forced to take refuge in Atlantis.
In the past year, Sander, age 90, had managed to swim twenty laps across the global ocean. Around the same time, Penelope, age 632, and her baby had been successfully treated after doctors had detected a toxic amount of plastics in her uterus.
And while Antheia, age 2,572, had celebrated her 1,000th anniversary with her wife with a great big smooch, Felipe, age 8, had recorded a memory of his sister and himself playing with their pet sea lion, Xeno, who had later died from the noxious fumes they’d all suffered from after a past oil spill.
Malcolm’s throat tightened as he blinked away a blur. The tightness crawled to his chest, fueling the same rage he’d felt witnessing monsters terrorizing demigods and dragging away dead mortals. It was the same fury born out of a vicious desire to help these people get even. Born out of a desperate wish it were simple—the way it was so easy to hack down a monster.
But as if sedated with an anesthetic, the ache within him subsided—and Malcolm tasted the sweetness of justification. These stories were exactly what Marcella’s calculations were accounting for.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Party music continued to blare around the palace as Malcolm rejoined the festivities. Taking a cue from the traumatic memories of relatives pulling him to the dance floor, he dodged gregarious locals inviting him over, under the guise of hunger.
It was at the ice-cream stand that he’d reunited with Alicia, Sophie, and Conrad—completing the set of Cabin Sixers who’d take wrestling a manticore over moving their bodies to a beat in public.
As Malcolm treated himself to a watermelon popsicle, Alicia recapped her day’s adventures, showing her siblings the temporary tattoo on her forearm, the beaded bracelet on her wrist, and the stringed bubble squid tied to the belt of her dress. (“A cephalopod, Mal!”) Malcolm was happy to hear about the friendly acquaintances she’d made, amused to know they’d annihilated a piñata in merely four swings, and not so pleased to see the candy collection that had resulted from that carnage. Luckily, he managed to negotiate a deal with her to exchange those sweets for chocolate.
Over dinner, the siblings put their demigodly hearing to work, eavesdropping on some sea gods trash-talking mortal theories on tectonic plates. Just as the gods began to broach the topic of floods, the Athenians suffocated in the hugs of none other than their favorite Cyclops, Tyson.
As much as Malcolm had wanted to hear the shade, it was always a delight to see Tyson’s one big, brown eye light up when regaling them with recent happenings in the forges of Atlantis. It was even more fun to pester him yet again for being too much of a hotshot to want to visit boring, old Camp Half-Blood anymore. This time, Tyson masterfully sidestepped any promises and compensated for a future absence by inviting them to see “something special”.
That something turned out to be located in an amphitheater. And special it was indeed, for Malcolm couldn’t escape the shame of cutting the line with his siblings, past dozens of locals waiting for a shot to get in.
Once seated deep in the crowd, Malcolm watched as the royal family held a ceremony for the Changemakers of the Year. On the stage stood Amphitrite, Rhode, Triton, and Poseidon, with a partner beside each to help them hail awardees as Discoverers, Unifiers, Protectors, and Healers.
Amphitrite and a celebrated reporter began the affair to an eruption of cheers. Exchanging hugs and cheek presses and handing million-drachma checks, they expressed gratitude to the first honorees: the scientists, journalists, and historians who worked together to map the most intricate food webs to date.
Next was Rhode, who recognized a few citizens for leading ground-level efforts in bringing refugees to Atlantis. It took a few tearful tries for the teen sea god accompanying her to get his words out. But when Rhode slung an arm around his shoulders, he managed to finish his speech and hand out awards to two of his new compatriots: a merman who had led a jobs program for new arrivals, and a nereid who had ensured that new homes around Atlantis accommodated the environmental needs of refugees like him.
Then there was Triton, who appeared far less smug than earlier, yet as awkward as Malcolm figured he himself would feel beside this adorable little girl who looked about nine. Triton let her take the lead in naming leading conservationists, and only needed to help her a bit with the details of the honorees’ cleanup of fishing gear, debris, waste, plastics, oil, mercury, and other toxic materials.
The audience’s most rambunctious cheer, however, was dedicated to the old dude at Poseidon’s side. (Malcolm even saw some of the protesters from earlier hooting along on the sidelines.) Though not an awardee, the man—a famed comedian, according to Tyson—stole the show, haltingly, shakingly, patiently, persistently spitting wisecracks about his life post-methylmercury-poisoning. And together, he and Poseidon led the final two hurrahs: one for the key doctors, medical researchers, and selenium producers who made chelation therapy more accessible and less fatal; and one for a comic and a musician, who helped to cure Atlantians’ souls when no good cure existed for their bodies.
Concluding the ceremony, Rhode took center stage again, thanking all for spending the day with her. Upon chants for cake, she laughed and called other Atlantians born on the same day to come join her. As her birthday buddies met her onstage, a few dozen cakes were rolled out with sparklers and bubble wands in place of candles, and thousands began to sing “Chrónia Pollá”.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Two hours later, the art stations had closed and Malcolm busied himself pretending he was hungry. Conrad had taken Alicia and Sophie back to Camp Half-Blood, leaving him to figure out how to get back the damn notebook Rhode had stolen from him. Preferably, away from the dance floor.
The most he was able to do now was observe the scene before him. In the glimpses he took to figure out a plan, he caught yet more mesmerizing oddities of the folks of Atlantis. Like the way some sea gods danced above ground, buoyed in the water. Or how they moved not just side to side, but in vertical movements as well.
And in what was clearly not the time for Malcolm to retrieve his rightful possessions, Rhode danced and sang along with the crowd. Daring another glance, Malcolm saw her shimmy closer to a sea god offering her a hand. Once Rhode’s hand laid on his, he spun her around. Her hair floated in the water as she threw her head back laughing, and they continued to sway their hips to the beat.
In an instant, a sensation bubbled in the pit of Malcolm’s stomach, rising to the surface like a groundhog peeping out of its burrow. Though a rare appearance, it was easy enough to identify the prickle.
His jealousy—he could call it what it was; he wasn’t stupid—felt not like a sting, but an achy poke.
*Poke.* Hey, remember she straight up offered you to offer her something and you acted like she was ridiculous, just to prove... what? What did you prove?
*Poke.* Hey, see her talking to Thaumas again?
Whatever. Malcolm let out a sigh. Whatever, right?
Joining in conversations with his remaining siblings, he poked himself back with reminders that Rhode could do whatever—whomever (ugh)—she wanted.
Though he tucked himself away into corners of the festivities, Rhode proved difficult to escape. Even while dancing, she managed to make her rounds, meeting with group after group. It really would’ve been easy had Malcolm been able to avoid her. But there she was, in that dress and glimmer, having the time of her life. There she was dancing with inches of space from some dudes. There she was laying her hands on them, laughing with one, whispering to another—all invoking ever more prods.
Several more pokes had Malcolm thinking about how Thaumas had called her Rhódē instead of Rhode. How they’d spoken in Greek. How she’d greeted him and easily handed him a plate of food (not that Malcolm particularly wanted that).
He wondered what would’ve happened if he’d just followed along that night on Annabeth’s birthday. Rhode had handed him something on a platter, too.
And of course she’d take his eye roll to mean no. Maybe then she’d assumed his not-a-no was just a polite refusal. And that his gift—not even his personally—was a mere obligation, or more politesse. And maybe it was better she didn’t know of his interest.
It was just... he hadn’t been ready then. Not then or at any point. And how could he want something now but not then—and also not want it now on top of that?
Right now, it seemed that Rhode had decided to move past or move on from where they’d left off that night. That was how Rhode worked, wasn’t it, with her packed schedule leaving no time to be covert? With her gazillion options leaving no need for patience?
But that was okay. C’est la vie and shit.
So, Malcolm didn’t shove the groundhog back inside the hole, no. He poked it back so hard from within him that it flung right out. It made no logical sense after all. Besides, he didn’t even want to be on the floor.
An admirable person, he told himself, deserved to be admired. It should have been—and perhaps was—comforting enough that all these Atlantians had far more wits about them than the ancient mortals had possessed. That was good. He’d even go as far as to agree it was a good thing Thaumas was into her. Because duh.
Though it was gutting, it honestly didn’t even take Malcolm much extra effort to extend that same logic to Thaumas.
He also shoved away that whisper of a wish that he had dark hair instead of his blond. It’d feel hella weird if he actually did have brown or black hair anyway, so that was dumb, too.
In the perimeters of the party, Malcolm focused his attention on the jellyfish lighting up the ocean. Realizing he’d never have the opportunity to see them like this again, he fiddled with the smoothie in his grasp and took notes of the creatures’ movements, shapes, and colors. Mental notes. Someone still hadn’t returned his notebook. Surely the darkness indicated he deserved it back already.
Depositing his empty glass at an appropriate drop off, Malcolm assessed the food once more. But his stomach gave him a hard no, already filled with the excuses he’d made throughout the day. Following an unhurried pit stop and another lingering, leaden-footed walk around the premises, Malcolm couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do here. And go figure, when he actually wanted to find Rhode, she was nowhere to be seen.
He loitered in the courtyard for five more torturous minutes that felt like hours before finally finding a familiar face by one of the standing tables by the palace.
Malcolm made his way over, hoping for this torment to end. “Percy, do you know where Rhode is?”
The spoonful of chocolate cake on the way to Percy’s open mouth stopped mid-flight as Percy side-eyed Malcolm with raised brows.
“She took my notebook,” Malcolm said with more aggravation than necessary. “I need it for work and lesson planning. And I gotta head back.”
Percy shut his mouth. “Oh.” His spoon touched down on his plate and he sighed like Malcolm would in front of shit-starting kids at camp.
For now, Malcolm couldn’t care if it irked Percy. He was playing nice after all, so Percy would just have to take up his issues with her.
For a few moments, Percy’s eyes darted around, as if searching for pieces to slot together. “She was in her wing,” Percy finally said. “She did say she was going to get more dessert, though, so she’ll pass by her entrance hall.”
Percy asked a nearby palace guard, Timaeus, to guide Malcolm there.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
“You’ll wait here,” said Timaeus when they reached a long, dark blue hallway lined with artifacts—but no Rhode.
Naturally, Malcolm decided to study the relics; it made for the best use of his time. His feet led him to a picture of what appeared to be the early days of Rhódos (a beachy, wooded, hilly, rocky, and mountainous land, surrounded by crystalline waters). Then a map of a city in the form of a theater (with a grid system that suggested it had been designed or inspired by the father of European urban planning, the great Hippodamus himself). And a tapestry of a woodland (depicting trees fruiting figs, oranges, and pomegranates, and luscious grass beneath the hooves of chestnut-colored, white-spotted deer that he’d recently read was the dama dama).
It was that thought that made him halt. It was one thing to recognize a Hippodamian plan. He’d known how Piraeus had been designed and he’d had enough chats with Annabeth about the proper arrangement of cities. It was another thing, however, to now know about frickin’ deer species native to a specific island.
Retreating a few steps, he exchanged an awkward look with Timaeus, who was staring at him unabashedly. Perhaps this, Malcolm realized, was what Calypso felt like when he’d do this to her. Malcolm took a cue out of her book and ignored the dude.
Under Timaeus’s watch, he made his way over to another wall and glanced at a bronze vase that curiously could’ve depicted its own creation: a forge’s production process featuring creatures that looked like Telchines. Next to the vase: a papyrus copy of Rhodian sea law, dating back to the fourth century BCE. And then an image of a quadriga adorned with hibiscuses—captioned “Εφευρέθηκε περίπου το 1200 π.Χ”.
A sudden clatter jolted him out of his reverie. Emerging from another entrance, Rhode had walked in mid-bite with a plate of dessert.
“Malcolm? What are you doing here?” she said over a mouthful of cake.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to shock you,” he said. “Percy let me in. He said you’d be here.”
As Timaeus vouched for him with a nod, Rhode swallowed her bite. “Evidently I wasn’t,” she said.
“Sorry,” Malcolm said, “I just got distracted by the pictures and stuff. I was waiting— I hope you still have my notebook. I do need it.” Right as he finished speaking, a familiar weight entered his pocket.
Rhode lifted her plate an inch. “Do you want some cake or bougatsa?” she said.
“Oh, I’m... I’m all right, thank you.”
Malcolm regretted it immediately. And then he didn’t. And then he did. Too late now. Thaumas probably would’ve straight up asked for it himself, he thought grumpily.
“Timaeus, why don’t you grab some cake for yourself?” said Rhode.
After a look and another nod at Rhode, Timaeus exited the hallway.
Rhode’s eyes returned to Malcolm. “Thank you for the tapestry. Again.” She took another bite.
“It was a team effort,” Malcolm said.
Her head-turn and faint scoff just as much acted as an eye roll. He hoped that that’d indicated amusement more than annoyance, but wasn’t entirely convinced he could rule out the latter.
Realizing he might have indirectly insulted her, he added, “It seemed necessary.”
Rhode looked at him. “Alicia thought so?”
“Alicia loves drawing,” Malcolm said.
On the tip of his tongue was the clarification that Alicia had drawn something for her dad every week—usually animals, vehicles, landscapes.... But Malcolm held back the words. He didn’t want to derail them from whatever route they were on.
“And it was Alicia, was it,” Rhode said, “who decided to portray this moment?”
Yeah, didn’t you know? She was right there with us all along when the three of us were looking for her. Sneaky little girl.
Malcolm tried not to blush under her unrelenting gaze. “I did say it was a team effort.”
Rhode smiled. “I hope the team knows I think it’s beautiful.”
“Well, we wouldn’t make it ugly.”
As Rhode took her last bite of cake and vanished her plate, Malcolm swore at himself. Really? After being on a roll, or at least starting the roll... ‘We wouldn’t make it ugly?’ The hell kind of comment is that?
Rhode’s heels clacked closer and he caught a scent of ocean breeze and a subtle yet intoxicating flowery fragrance.
Once she stood beside him, the tapestry appeared in front of them. She took a moment to admire her woven form again—before her eyes found a new subject to study: him.
Now, there were no bystanders to exacerbate his discomfort. Still, it took Malcolm a Herculean effort to shut up and wait for her to speak.
“You’re a brilliant artist,” said Rhode.
Stunned by her bluntness, Malcolm squirmed. “That’s kind of you to say.” He forced himself to meet her eyes. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
Rhode’s slower blink seemed like a nod. “Why this moment?” she asked again.
Malcolm observed the piece. It helped him take her eyes off him; Rhode followed his gaze.
“I—” he broke off.
He felt like a hypocrite. Wasn’t he supposed to compliment without a care as to how he’d be perceived? He’d kind of promised her that, hadn’t he? Yet the words simply wouldn’t come out.
“I think the art can speak for itself,” he said. “Also, I thought your horses were really cool.”
Rhode turned her gaze upon him once more. “This is how you see me?”
And how would that—
I just—
We just obs—
I wasn’t the only—
“Is there something wrong?” Malcolm said, despite his surety that there wasn’t.
Rhode’s eyes flitted to the tapestry and back to him. “Not at all. I do wonder, though... who was responsible for doing... this area?” Her hovering palm circled below her likeness’s neck. And a sly, contained laugh glinted from her eyes.
“Annabeth,” Malcolm replied easily. “With Claire’s help, I think.”
“Ah. And you did...?”
“The horses—”
“The horses.”
“And some of the flowers,” he said. “And your hair.”
Malcolm began to ramble about how he’d wanted to make some things stand out and how he and his siblings tried to achieve that by using varying fabric textures to give a nice three-dimensional look. In a conscientious attempt to justify key decisions, he explained that he and his siblings hadn’t known which eye color to choose, so they’d used Percy’s and tinted it a bluer hue.
But when Rhode began to compliment the choices and the execution, it was like he couldn’t process it, wouldn’t be able to remember it. Like his brain blocked him from knowing, just like those other times he’d forgotten the praise and only remembered the squirming sensation of being superglued to his spot and forced to endure whatever was coming for him.
It wasn’t that he didn’t think he deserved it. It wasn’t that he thought what she said wasn’t true. He damn well knew it was. Spent all that time and effort. But it was the... the overload that destabilized him. And by the time he had decided he was being irrational, Rhode had stopped talking.
Silence fell upon them again, and Malcolm was about to excuse himself—until Rhode said, “Did you enjoy the party?”
“Actually, yeah.” He grinned. “It was really well put together. And the food. And the activities. I even made a painting of the scenery, which I ended up giving to your mother, and I talked to her for a bit.”
Rhode’s eyes widened. “Oh. What did you get to talk about?”
“Mostly the politics of sea deities,” Malcolm said. “She says you’ve been doing a great job.”
Rhode didn’t respond; she simply continued to smile. The silence really wasn’t helping his ADHD with those damn glittering chains on her chest that reflected against the light. Or with any of her.
And his brain was trying to compute again that he knew and was speaking with a polyglot trade-deal-negotiating goddess princess. And she was witty and pretty. And she’d offered him cake and bougatsa. Such a small thing, but he realized now he’d forever regret turning her offer down.
More quickly than he’d ever be able to, Rhode schooled her face into an unreadable—or perhaps neutral—expression. After a moment’s pause, she said, “Was I supposed to know you were watching me for much of today?”
Malcolm momentarily averted his gaze out of reflex as Rhode observed his every move.
Why must you insist on torturing me?
He thought about objecting, but he knew his efforts would be moot. It’d just make him look stupid. And maybe he didn’t want to lie right now. He knew it was only partly because she’d had his notebook, and it felt ruder to tell her that half of the truth than to suggest part of the other half made the whole.
“It’s your birthday,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense not to be looking at you.” That was logical.
“Mm. And maybe you like what I’m wearing,” Rhode said. She looked down at her dress, encouraging him to do so as well.
That was his mistake. In a split second of weakness, he caught every little thing denying that voice in his head that said, It’s really not the clothes at all. But how could he lie?
Having front-row seats was a dreamy nightmare. It was impossible not to notice that body-hugging dress—red of all colors—accentuating her curves, revealing her glowing skin... Or the gold links resting on her chest highlighting the swell of her bust, rising and falling as she breathed. Up close, his mind put forth the question: What would it feel like to touch her? (He blamed the thought on that hug from earlier.)
Malcolm’s eyes darted up and fixed on hers. But his capillaries were as inflamed as her outfit. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that again. As Rhode’s lips stretched into an annoying smile, he blinked more rapidly, as if his eyelids could act as wipers to wash away the heat he felt in his face.
I think as long as you like it...
... offered a shield. Would've put up gates in the middle of their colosseum. For once, he willed them down.
“I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone agrees,” Malcolm said. Right? This wasn’t a controversial opinion.
If Rhode took his admission as a win, she didn’t let it show.
“What does it matter what everyone else feels?” she said. “What do you feel?”
“I... think that... it’s nice,” said Malcolm lamely. Because how were you supposed to compliment a woman’s pretty shapely, rather revealing dress without sounding like a leering douchebag? “It’s like that, I suppose,” he said, gesturing to the tapestry. “It seems like you think the style suits you. I think, as long as you like it, that should be all that matters. You can wear whatever you want, of course.” With a quirk of the corners of his lips, he plastered a quick smile on his face.
“You showed far more concern for my clothing during Capture the Flag and the engagement party,” said Rhode.
This is what he got for keeping those gates down, he supposed. Incessant prods from her spear.
Malcolm just stared. He locked his eyes on her face with no moves to play. He had no spears in hand to parry with.
“And I asked what you felt,” she said, “not what you thought.”
Rhode hadn’t even moved, but there was so little room to breathe. No, she didn’t have a measly spear. She was holding a pitchfork to his throat. Or a trident perhaps.
How had he wanted this? Why had he sought this?
The answer came easily: As awful as this was, it felt better than anyone else being in the arena with her. This claustrophobia was a thrilling suffocation. One he wanted to claim.
But was that really a good idea? To be pinned under her gaze, with those changing shades of green flecks? His own eyes were practically obligated to roam her face, falling on her red lips....
Malcolm cursed himself again. He usually had better control over his impulses. How primitive and dumb that a mere color could overtake his mind. On a quick, desperate count of four—no, eight—he shoved all distractions aside, clearing his head.
“Feeling doesn’t lead to good decision-making,” he said. “Thinking does.”
Rhode’s dark, thick brows scrunched a little. “Do you not listen to your gut?”
“The gut’s just a data point. I think trusting your gut alone will make you more likely to misread situations... and act... suboptimally.”
“Okay,” Rhode said. “What kind of data points do you look at, then?”
“Well,” he said, “the seemingly obvious and not obvious. Like, when looking for keys, you’d look for them under the streetlight, as they say. But you wouldn’t limit your search to that just because it’s brighter there. The keys could be somewhere beyond the streetlight.”
“Beyond the streetlight,” she said. “That’s tricky.”
“But it more accurately reveals the truth.”
“So,” Rhode said, “it would help to ask for more information, wouldn’t it? That’s what I do. You don’t have to wander around in the dark alone....” Her eyes, set on his, flitted from left to right, as if searching the way he was. “When you can just ask someone to switch on another streetlight.”
Malcolm swallowed. “Well, what if the act of asking itself has potentially negative consequences?”
Rhode cocked her head a smidge. “Hmm. Are you talking about being wrong?” she said. “Are you afraid of being wrong?”
At that, Thaumas came to mind, and Malcolm realized that for the past several minutes, he’d forgotten him and all the guys Rhode had danced with. Atlantis had lit a streetlight all right.
It was difficult to think without prying his eyes from hers, but somehow he managed. “I think we can really easily be prone to making wrong assumptions,” he said. “So, we need to challenge them. But it can be difficult to sort out truth from fiction because of our own biases. So I just try to be responsible and careful in what I do. If that’s considered cowardly or boring or whatever, so be it.” He knew full well he hadn’t answered her question.
“Well, I don’t mind being wrong,” said Rhode. “I like to think that some things are worth that risk. And...” She smiled faintly. “It’s just a question. A chance to illuminate a truth.”
But Malcolm hadn’t even thought that far ahead. His mind was coming up blank with what the damn question should even be.
“So, if I may ask one...” said Rhode. Her voice dipped in and out of a whisper. “What do your instincts tell you now? Where would you plot that data point?”
Malcolm took inventory once more. What he noticed right now was how they were alone. How surrounded he felt, even though she was right in front of him. How close she was, even though she’d remained a foot and half away. She had him cornered, even though she held no weapon. Her invisible trident had scraped his throat and was now aimed at his thudding heart. His throat began to constrict. His heartbeat picked up speed....
He knew exactly where he’d plot that.
“They’re telling me to get the hell outta here,” he said almost under his breath.
Rhode’s eyes went searching in his again. “That’s not what your eyes are saying,” she said. “Conflicting data. Tsk tsk. Do we throw out the whole data set?”
Malcolm considered her suggestion and dismissed the momentary panic that had arisen.
Conflicting data. Conflicting data didn’t have to mean bad data. They could simply indicate complexity. And one should appreciate the complexities of life to discover the truth.... Conflicting data could also be an indication to evaluate the data quality. One should figure out what caused such messes. Or maybe the conflicts did mean a need to restart the data collect—
Rhode smiled her trademark amused smile again. “I think you think far too much.”
“Thinking’s kept me alive,” Malcolm countered.
Rhode gave a little laugh. “You’re not in danger here, Malcolm,” she said, with an innocence at complete odds with her illustrated twin behind her. “So, you can stop thinking... and just feel.”
For a long moment, they simply stood in each other’s presence. And despite the muted protests in the far recesses of his mind, Malcolm listened solely to her call and took a small step forward. Reaching out a hand, he brushed the tips of his fingers against Rhode’s.
He felt soft pads and smooth skin.
There was no goal. No reason. No explanation he could figure out to answer why. None of that mattered.
Rhode’s fingers curled around his. “I want you to show me your tapestry; feel me,” she said.
You already did it, he heard. Just do it again.
It was so jarring. It was so different. To always be asked, ‘Malcolm, what do you think?’ To be approached as though he were some book inscribed with easy, objective answers. Or to be seen as merely an equation-writing robot. To have people assume he—because of his relation to Athena or because of the profession he’d chosen—didn’t understand their wants and needs, or care about the way they could hurt... And now to have Rhode stand in front of him, so clearly seeing what had always been there—invisible to some, but so obvious and normal and unshocking to her as the simple fact that he had a face.
It was obvious. As real as any other part of him. As real as the touch of Rhode’s hand. How could it not be real, when Rhode’s fingers, resting in his palm, felt lighter than the weight in his chest?
And the only way Malcolm knew how to lighten it was to let it pour out. Starting with a stroke of his thumb on the back of her palm, he mirrored his motions on his other side. Rhode’s welcoming smile was unlike almost all the others she’d given him before.
Whether she wanted the art explained or translated into a different medium, Malcolm wanted to show it to her. To feel her in the way he’d felt.
Exactly as he’d begun thinking up that scene, he drew from that reservoir of sensations that helped him sketch and thread her spirited horses, flying hair, and determined gaze. Only now, he said it in the way his hands moved. His left laced its fingers through hers. His right brushed up her arm, over her shoulder, and into her hair, threading through dark waves. It was colder than he’d thought, but as silky as he’d imagined.
He liked what he felt.
And then she was touching him, too. Her eyes peered into his resolutely as she laid a hand on his sternum. Five fingers gently grazed up his chest, just under his heart.
It was a courtesy, he supposed, that she left him that bit of privacy. That she let him maintain that secret. Because now his brain was going into overdrive, thinking about how it had been a few years since he’d last done this. Thinking about what led the two of them here. About what in the hell they were both doing. About how delightful and unsettling it was to experience the pleasure of another’s touch. And how she didn’t know, but of course she did. And how that blatant lie of her ignorance was actually more comforting than if she truly were unaware. A courtesy indeed.
As Malcolm continued grazing his fingers in her hair, Rhode began busying herself brushing her fingertips over his dress shirt. Another lie. (As if she weren’t waiting. But for what exactly?)
Malcolm tried to read her. To see what she was seeking. Rhode moved closer just a bit, and his body switched gears. He heeded her permission to simply do. To go by what felt right. And right now, he felt like kissing her.
But how was he to know for sure? He couldn’t tell. So, Malcolm swallowed, braced himself, and asked: “Would it be all right if I kissed you?”
Rhode’s lips spread and she nodded.
Malcolm aimed to her right and landed his lips on her cheek. He felt Rhode’s cheek pull back as she grinned. She reached for his face—and he didn’t even mind, despite how much he hated it when anyone touched his face ever—and angled it to brush his lips with her own.
“Is this okay?” Rhode said against his mouth.
Beneath the tickle of her eyelashes, Malcolm nodded.
Rhode’s lipstick tasted of strawberry and lemon, her breath like chocolate cake. It was an odd combination, but Malcolm didn’t care.
Their first kiss lingered, followed by softer, quicker exchanges. By the fourth, Rhode dove in, meeting Malcolm’s eager desire to savor more of that bittersweet, rich chocolate.
Sometime after this, he thought, he’d remember how he’d stupidly turned down cake with her, but had gotten the glory of tasting it anyway—on her.
He thanked the gods he hadn’t eaten any fish and was grateful to his own prepared ass for being a diligent reapplier of chapstick. He hoped Rhode didn’t mind coconut oil.
A delicious pressure on his bottom lip then dragged him back to the present and sparked a heat within him. Malcolm wanted her to do it again—before he’d attempt it himself.
As he followed Rhode’s lead, her cues, her rhythm, his mind tried once again to fully comprehend the situation. But the palm on his cheek that made its way up to cradle his head eased his doubts, numbing and shrinking his anxieties. Rhode kept her hands where they were, as if telling him she was totally fine with him. There was no need to feel pressured. They were just doing what they were doing. Nothing more than sharing kisses and trading pecks.
One, two, three more—and then she bit harder. Malcolm involuntarily let out something more than a gasp. It wasn’t exactly loud, but she was right fucking there.
But Rhode didn’t seem to mind. She only tried to get more out of him, working her skillful lips and expert tongue against his.
At first, he was adamant about hushing his reactions. But soon enough, it was his consciousness he muted. The sounds—whatever sounds—didn't matter.
And they kept at it, in movements of rush and force, not so much breaking through walls as much as running through open doors.
Overwhelmed by it all, Malcolm felt a discomfort of a sort—something other than measured, thought-out reactions—but a welcome kind of discomfort nonetheless.
It felt like bravery.
And the rewards were glorious.
His own unprompted exploration was met with hers. As he pulled the hand in her soft grip to find her waistline, Rhode’s touch wandered all over his chest. When she reached for his back, Malcolm discovered her hips.
Together, they pulled each other closer, taking what they both wanted as they raced— Raced not each other, but raced something. Time?
It was a game of two, somewhat like a fun version of their checkups during Capture the Flag—rushing further, yet step by step, through cycles of looking back and following along, in a manner that was less give and take than ask and allow.
Thoroughly enjoying himself, Malcolm even found himself grinning, which completely broke off their kiss.
Rhode’s lips traveled to his cheek and trailed down to his neck. It was that that got him feeling horny—or that that made him realize how horny he now was. Malcolm tried his best not to think about it and to just let Rhode do what she was doing. Let her hands travel down his torso. Let her tug at his belt loops. Let her keep inciting those tingling tendrils beneath his skin.
And he was pretty sure Rhode could now feel his growing reaction to her efforts. But just as he thought he’d have to pull away, she only pressed herself further onto him, and the thought vanished.
Between them, Rhode’s fingers snaked between the buttons of his shirt, reaching his skin. When she pulled her lips off his neck, he met her striking eyes with the confirmation: We’re really doing this.
With slow deliberation, Rhode pulled the fabric of his shirt, untucking it from the front. With her gaze still trained on his, she toyed with the bottom buttons of his shirt, waiting.
Instead of nodding, Malcolm fiddled with the bottom-most button himself, his fingers awkwardly bashing against hers as he undid it.
Rhode’s hands slipped under his shirt and landed on his skin, managing to make his eyelids flutter shut by merely stroking her thumbs at his sides.
And oh, good gods. He, too, wanted to feel more of her skin without the damn fabric of the dress in the way. Rhode’s arms were already bare, the middle of her chest was already exposed, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted to get under her clothes.
But the red, red, red that had so excited him earlier was getting to be a bit of a nuisance. There was only so much he could reach.
He tried to be grateful for what he could get. He could still kiss her. He could still touch her, too. And wasn’t that enough of a treat? So, he focused on acquainting himself with the slope of her back, on memorizing her mouth.
Sighing against his lips, Rhode ghosted her fingers over his belt buckle. “Can I?” she said in a breath.
Malcolm nodded, hardly understanding what it was she was asking. But he wanted more. So, hands on her hips became hands on her ass. Her ass, dear gods. Enjoying the moment too much to appreciate the possibility of it, Malcolm just pulled her in.
Rhode kissed him and dipped her fingers further to grip his bulge. Over his own gasp, he heard her let out a whispery moan that did things to him. Her free hand snaked around, slithering into his back pocket. And again, she tugged his lip with her teeth.
Doing combos, huh?
Once she let go, Malcolm smiled. He was nearly laughing.
And then Rhode blanked his mind with another gratifying squeeze.
Moments later, he came to, with a mind as alert and assured as ever. He laid another kiss on her mouth—not long enough for Rhode, it seemed, who chased his lips and won one more.
Without a shred of hesitation, he brushed Rhode’s hair aside, revealing a few millimeters of dark ink on her shoulder, peeking out of her dress. Rhode kept him close, filling her palms with his waist and ass, as she let him learn her through light touches. Taking in the sight of his own skin over hers, he familiarized himself with new revelations.
Why had he been so resistant before? he wondered. Why had he thought this would’ve been anything but right? It felt so good. She felt so good.
There was something extraordinary, he found, about touching one another—something nearly miraculous that something—someone—was physically there. This was something. This was real. And that somehow felt unreal.
Making an effort to make this treasured moment even more of a miracle, Malcolm buried his nose behind Rhode’s ear. Thanks to the goddess herself that she liked heels, he barely had to dip his neck to catch more of that flowery scent from her hair and get his lips on her skin. She held his head there, and he nipped and sucked softly at the pulse point at her throat, tasting a saltiness on her skin that was more ocean than sweat.
At the press of their hips, Rhode curled her fingers around the short hairs at the base of his neck. Her scratching nails left behind the slightest of stings. Her heavy breaths were puffed out in pants, loud and warm next to his ear.
Rhode leaned into him again, earning her another of his gasps.
“Can we please continue this in my room?” she said.
Pulling away, they took a moment to drink each other in. Malcolm zeroed in on Rhode’s full-blown pupils, her smudged lipstick, and her heaving chest pressing onto him. He took another moment for the pair alone and didn’t even feel the slightest bit of remorse before dragging his eyes back up to Rhode’s face.
Despite the heady fog, the demands from his gut could be plotted clear as day.
Malcolm followed her.
Notes:
🐎🌹🐎🐍🐎🌺🐎
Ahhhh. Finally....
I hope that the emotions were conveyed well and that the build up from previous (sub)chapters made the last scene more impactful. Feedback (including constructive criticism) is always welcome and appreciated. I do not bite. If you have a minute, please let me know what you think. 😉
This chapter is probably inundated (🌊pun intended) with “ocean” stuff. But they’re almost all different issues. Because, my oh my, we’re really fucking up the ocean in so many ways. As always, you can check the bibliography if you’re interested in these topics. The issues are all real. I just applied them to the characters.
Chapter 6 will be posted all at once at some point, wholly on AO3 but partly redacted on FF.net due to site rules. 🍓
Chapter 6: In which Malcolm gets a little raunchy
Notes:
Amid all that’s going on in the world right now, I hope this can make someone feel a bit better, even for a little.
In which the author makes good on that “Sex” tag.
Settle down and get comfortable. We have another 13.5k words (40 mins?) today.
I couldn’t manage to keep this rated “M”, so, whichever pertains to you: “You’re very welcome 😛” / “I’m so sorry 🙈”.
Although I think the raunchiness of this chapter is vital to the story, you can read a NON-EXPLICIT, REDACTED VERSION AT THIS FF.net LINK.
This chapter is dedicated to people who sort by “Explicit”. Special thanks to Aesop and the Romans.
(12/31/2023: This chapter got a big overhaul and will still be tweaked. Ch 6 was my first time publishing something smutty and my standards have since risen.)
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics). Also, Latin and Greek translations will only appear if "Creator's Style" is not hidden.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Walking two feet away, Malcolm followed Rhode in a daze, trying not to step on her dress. From the hallway, she led him into another doorless room, where they passed by more artifacts, including a few glass casings of all sorts of jewelry, and several more paintings of beaches and modern cityscapes.
“Really nice artworks,” he said, to which Rhode offered an uncaring “yeah”.
Two rooms later, she pulled open a set of double doors and stood aside to invite him in.
As he stepped inside, a warm glow emanated from hidden ceiling lights, illuminating the light coral and dark teal accents of the room. Malcolm caught sight of a decently sized bed. But as soon as the doors shut behind him, his attention snapped to Rhode.
Rhode flamingoed, leaning on the wall to take off her heels. He watched her set them down carefully, and remained in his standing state as she laid her hands on him once more.
Still, not a word had been uttered by either in her room. He found something erotic in their muteness, as though he and Rhode were hardwired to the most basic of acts. Like the way she so resolutely and incautiously rushed to push his jacket off his shoulders, singularly focused on taking his clothes off.
And when she tossed the garment onto a nearby couch and tiptoed to kiss him again, Malcolm was ever so eager to let his lips return to their new favorite locale. His hands visited destinations new and old over silky smooth fabric—flowy enough to bunch in his grip, thin enough to almost feel her skin. He tried hard not to protest when Rhode pulled away.
“Do you need the restroom?” she asked.
“I was just there,” Malcolm said, still distracted by how much of her he could feel over her clothes.
He paused. Why had he needed to tell her that?
Rhode, too, ceased her movements. “Tell me your hands are clean?”
“Well, I haven’t touched anything since. Besides... you.”
You. And, oh, how warm she was. Was that because her skin was flushed? Or maybe because he’d touched her long enough to heat the fabric of her dress? Oh, and what a thought that was.
And, wait— Hands clean? Did that—?
Oh, fuck. What would it be like to touch her like that? What would Rhode look like in her throes of pleasure?
In him, he felt this... this hunger. A yearning, impatient—
Rhode backed away. “Can you wait here for two minutes?”
Malcolm just nodded, and Rhode set off for what he presumed was her bathroom. And he just stood there, left to wonder if he was really doing this.
His brain responded with a loud, resounding hell yes.
Malcolm could barely register anything else at the moment. Trying to explore the room, his eyes landed on the bed. It was raised on a platform. It looked like a double at least. Maybe a queen? He counted three pillows. Aside from a little lounge area, there was also a desk and a vanity. For some reason, he kinda expected the room to be bigger? Maybe the closet was.
Anticipating Rhode’s return, Malcolm began preening at his hair and clothes. Just as he had the thought to reapply his chapstick, he heard the water closet rush. His heart rate spiked when the tap turned on. Rhode would be back in less than a minute. What would he say? What would he do?
When the door opened, Malcolm was still standing where Rhode had left him. She stood by the doorway for a moment. Her eyes swept over him once—then again—before she stalked towards him.
“Can I rip your shirt off?” she said.
He could only gawk for a moment. “Assuming you mean ripping in a figurative manner?”
Inches from her once more, he noticed his impatience reflected in her almost stormy eyes—and his hesitance mirrored in her stillness.
“Yes,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
Malcolm and Rhode began to unbutton his dress shirt. Every inhale, every exhale, and every swallow felt so loud.
“Just how much experience have you had?” said Rhode as she reached his last button. “Please tell me I’m not going to be the one who has to show you the ropes.”
Malcolm gave her an indignant look. “For the last time, I’m not a virgin.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being one,” said Rhode. “But you’re probably not going to last very long either way, are you?” she mocked as she tugged his shirt off and shoved him to the wall. She looked at him as though she hadn’t just lost a near headful of height. And as she roamed his torso and played with the hairs on his chest, her voice turned all low and gravelly. “I bet you wouldn’t even last three minutes with me.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Make me,” Rhode said, getting in his face.
Malcolm could have rolled his eyes. “That is such a bad line.” But his lips chased hers anyway.
To say Rhode kissed him back would have been an understatement. She devoured him. Rhode wasn’t stormy; she was a hurricane unleashed. It was almost a blur, the way his mind raced to keep up with all the sensations she incited—from the nips from her teeth to the sting of her nails to the touch of her hands. He was hardly keeping up.
Mindful of every inch of his newly exposed skin, she acquainted herself with his body, lightly scratching his chest, thumbing over his nipples, tracing his abs, and then brushing over that old scar on his stomach that had stretched over the years, before her exploring touch found the exit wound on his back.
Rhode didn’t even hesitate. But as her fingers gently traced the uneven skin, Malcolm involuntarily flinched, his lips halting against her mouth. She began to retreat—but he pulled her in again, and her hands journeyed elsewhere as she kissed him harder.
Once Malcolm drew for air, Rhode was almost glaring at him. She spoke clearly and with authority. “If at any point you want to stop or do something else, tell me.”
Malcolm nodded. “You, too.”
Her eyes bored into his. “You can say anything—‘wait’, ‘stop’, ‘no’, ‘don’t’—when you think it’s going to get too far. You’re free to walk out of here at any time.” Then she said more softly, “I’ll make sure you get home safe. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now help me out of this dress.”
Rhode turned around, gathering her long hair away from her back. Malcolm breathed in wafts of barbecued fish.
He found a clasp, which he undid immediately, and reached for the zipper below it. It seemed like a shame to shed something so elegant. Malcolm began to unzip her dress nonetheless. It was surreal. He was there but not there, transfixed in this surely alternate reality, this dream.
Under the fabric, he found another clasp that held together those delicate chains that framed her breasts so exquisitely. Oh, how he now wished he had more fully taken in the sight of her earlier. And so, only a quarter of the way down the zip, he stopped.
“Just making sure,” he said, trying not to think how his voice sounded, “you want it off?”
“So long as you’re comfortable,” Rhode said.
“It’s a really nice dress.” If he could get one more look at her.
“One I don’t want to risk ruining. And if you’ll let me show you,” she said, turning her head to face him with a smolder, “I look better without it.” Pushing her back against him, she ground her ass on his crotch, forcing his eyes shut.
Oh, dear gods.
Down went the zipper—aided by the comfort that there’d be hundreds of photos of her from today.
At once, he pushed her dress off her shoulders and was distracted for a moment by the image that was suddenly revealed. Peeking over her right shoulder was a hammerhead shark, its body curved mid-swim. Malcolm brushed his fingers over the ink, thinking about how perfectly the animal characterized her in an amalgamation of beauty, grace, and danger.
He could barely think as Rhode’s dress fell into a heap on the floor, but the design of her tattoo stuck out. Where had he seen it before?
When Rhode turned in his arms and began to kiss his neck again, Malcolm realized: “You and Percy have matching tattoos?”
Rhode stopped her efforts and shot him an incredulous look. “Are you really going to talk about my brother right now?”
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Where were we?”
Malcolm turned his attention back to the woman before him. And holy shit. Here was Rhode, a fucking literal goddess, clad in only her jewelry and underwear, revealing to him the mystery of what parts of her those captivating golden chains extended to.
It was like a mental release, a relief of a sort, to find the missing pieces that filled in the unknown. He could see now that the thin links that criss-crossed the valley of her bared breasts wrapped around her neck and her waist. But that was hardly the whole picture.
Previously hidden from view, another set of dainty chains circled her hips and each thigh—connected by the same links like a metal garter. On each of her thighs laid an S-shaped pendant— Thigh pendants? His head really couldn’t understand it, but his dick was certainly appreciating the invention—which he noticed were of a hissing serpent and a rose atop a curved, thorny stem. As if that weren’t enough, Rhode had also put on a matching golden anklet. That he presumed no guest at her party knew. Like this was all a sensual secret she had kept to herself—and was now sharing with him.
Malcolm touched the chains on her torso. He’d never seen anything like it before, but it completed her air of regality. Rhode looked like the true princess she was. Majestic and elegant and oh so alluring.
“Are you just going to stare?” she said with a hint of a laugh.
He reached for the links draping her thighs. “Can’t really fault me for enjoying the view.”
She looked proud. “Well, pick up the pace.”
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” His lips twitched anyway.
Tangling a hand in her hair, Malcolm met Rhode in a searing kiss. He could feel her breasts pressing onto his chest. He could feel her nipples perked against his skin. His fingers followed her smooth, sloping form. Waist, hips, ass, thighs... All bared to him, save for a scrap of lace that just barely covered the most intimate part of her.
He felt a lightness in him as he caressed her, and he swore he felt goosebumps form on her arms. Not knowing if his touch tickled her or if Rhode was just chilly in her state of undress (Could she get cold in water?), he rubbed a comforting warmth into her skin.
It took several moments before he could truly apprehend how Rhode was doing the same, and it eased and exhilarated him altogether that she wanted to touch him here, touch him there. What was she doing? Where would she go next? How intensely could she stoke that delicious heat and tightness settling in his loins?
“May I play with our friend here?” she said, unbuckling his belt.
Hell. Please. “By all means,” he managed to say.
Immediately, Rhode unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and peeled them off his ass. Malcolm gasped as she palmed his bulge over nothing but his boxer briefs.
Holy shit.
His length twitched and grew in her hand as she worked him. With a mind of its own, his hips began jerking towards her.
Holy shit.
Rhode went for his neck again, making him sigh loudly. Her lips traveled downwards. From his collarbone. To his chest. To his stomach. And Rhode kept descending. And by now she was kneeling. And then she was hooking her fingers beneath the band of his underwear, tugging it down.
Oh, whoa.
“Uh, if you’re really gonna... shouldn’t I, you know...” He pointed his thumb towards her bathroom. “Freshen up?”
In the dim light of the room, Rhode’s eyes glinted. “I like you already,” she said. “Be quick.”
As he toed off his shoes and socks, Rhode settled on her couch and felt up her thighs the way he wanted to again.
“Use the unscented soap,” she instructed once he reached the doorway.
In the unfamiliar bathroom, Malcolm stripped to nothing and hopped in the shower.
There were five dispensers fixed to the shower wall. None were labeled. Malcolm resorted to trial and error, making him apply the different body washes to different body parts.
Naturally, he had to wonder how a shower worked in the ocean. But after a minute of examining the showerhead, he figured there were better things to discover this hour.
Hopping out quickly, he then cursed. There were no towels. Not even towel racks. Ah, but there were tissues—of a sort? (He couldn’t give a damn about their makings this instant.) So he shook himself off as best he could and patted himself dry in strategic areas, just so he could put his boxer briefs back on. (He had to think twice about that, but he just didn’t have it in him to walk out of here fully nude.) And though nothing, really, could be done about the rest of him, well, maybe Rhode would like the look of a wet man.
Out in her room, Rhode had her eyes closed under brighter lights as she ghosted her fingers over her figure. When her eyes shot open, they zeroed in on his lower half. “You know, red looks good on you, too,” she said.
And if you’ll let me show you, Malcolm thought, I look better without it.
Too chicken to say it, he just grinned back.
He set his jeans down on an armchair and made his way to sit beside Rhode. But she stood first. Her jewelry glimmered in the light as she moved closer.
“You don’t seem like the type,” Rhode said, pinning him under her gaze, “but hit me, choke me, call me names, or secretly record me, and I swear I will turn you into a salmon and eat you.”
The rage in her eyes made her look a little inhuman—and reminded him again that she was a god. The very fact heated him.
But joke or not, her warning didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. Completely out of scope.
“I wouldn’t,” Malcolm promised. “Have you ever done that, though? The salmon part, I mean.”
Rhode didn’t bother to answer. It was a shame, since he was also curious about how she preferred to consume her fish. But right now, she seemed more interested in licking the rivulets of water off his shoulder.
Malcolm burned in the little sucks and open-mouthed kisses that both dried and dampened his skin. And that slight hint of pain from her teeth that got blood circulating to his erection became only more gratifying once she started stroking him again over his boxer briefs, getting him lost and leaking beads of pre-come.
And then Rhode detached her mouth from his neck, breathing warm puffs on his wet skin. She gave him a bright look. “You used my favorite soap.”
I used all of your soaps, Malcolm wanted to say.
“It’s hot,” Rhode said as she breathed in her signature flowery scent on him.
When Malcolm kissed her again, she pulled away with a slight twinge in her brows.
“But I usually...” she said. She reached beneath his underwear, making him whisper a groan with the squeeze she gave him. “... don’t like tasting soap,” she said with a peek at his cock in her hand.
“Uh, no, I... I found it eventually.”
That seemed to satisfy Rhode. “So you do follow directions.” She stroked his foreskin down and brushed her thumb over his slit.
Fire. Everything was fire and heat and hormones.
“I can fulfill requests,” Malcolm protested shakily.
She gave a one-note hmm-ed laugh. “You’re also clean, right?”
Malcolm scoffed in his near-breathless state. “I thought you assumed I was a total virgin.”
“I’m being serious.” She gripped him tighter.
“Yeah, I’m clean,” he grunted. “I swear on the Styx.”
“Good. So am I.” Shoving down his boxer briefs, she finally bared him to her. “Now start the clock.”
Rhode immediately dropped to her knees and took his cock in her warm mouth.
O theoí. Was this pure luck, or had Eros been blessing him? For Rhode to even have offered was a gift.
Very quickly, Malcolm learned that her oral talents apparently didn’t just include those mocking remarks she so frequently dished out. She clearly was far more experienced than anyone he’d ever been with. (Which, to be fair, comprised a very, very small population, and it didn’t help that she was an outlier, bound to skew the results.)
Malcolm didn’t know if he could say he was really clean anymore with all the dirty things she was doing to him. The way her mouth coated his cock in her spit... The way she licked his slit and shoved him in and out of her mouth as she sucked him...
He couldn’t help but gasp sharply as her tongue swiped over the underside, shooting a fiery pleasure up his nerves. The gasps turned into moans as Rhode kept working her tongue on the most sensitive part of him.
When she shifted her focus to the highly innervated ridges at the tip of his foreskin, he felt a rush of amazement—then anger—that she knew how to do this so well.
No, he realized, it wasn’t anger at all. It was jealousy—for every guy who had ever had the pleasure of receiving such treatment throughout her immortal life.
Ultimately, he didn’t care anymore. Because how could he be anything but grateful for how much her obviously impressive experience was benefiting him right now?
Rhode was so… thorough. Sucking and licking, and all the while cupping and fondling his balls... reaching his grundle, stroking and tapping on that sensitive spot... pulling at a cheek with her other hand... She knew precisely how to dismantle a man.
It must’ve been the highest of highs in his life to be in her care. Rhode applied a host of techniques—some even new to him—and created the absolute filthiest sounds he’d ever heard in real life. And it felt so wrong, but so right.
And if the noises straining from his own throat were any indication, Malcolm was in absolute heaven. He needed to hold onto something before he just lost it. But Rhode wasn’t letting up.
Malcolm reached to grab a fistful of her hair to ground himself.
Rhode plunged him deeper into her throat, igniting his nerves with the feel and the sound of her gagging on him.
After the lightning thought of good and fuck, that’s hot and again, again, please, it took half a second and all of him to back the fuck up and make sure she could breathe.
“Shit. Sorry!” he said in an exhale.
After a moment to catch her breath, Rhode dove back in and began to moan.
It was getting harder and harder to stop himself from thrusting into her mouth. Thankfully, she actually helped him this time.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he said, slurring his syllables as she cleared her throat. “Oh, fuck.”
She looked obscene like this. On her knees for him, mouth open, panting, saliva connecting mouth and cock, fuck.
Rhode switched to her hand. Her bangles were clinking, making him even weaker.
Their eyes met as she looked up at him. “Come for me, Malcolm,” she purred.
Holding his gaze, Rhode ran the flat of her tongue along his shaft, glistening with her spit. She sucked the head of his cock and took his length down her throat again—and held herself there, hollowing her cheeks, lips kissing the base, showing him the most wondrous things to man.
When she pulled herself off him, she inhaled sharply, only to dive in again and threaten his knees to buckle. Her throat massaged him as she swallowed around him.
Hearing her say his name, being demanded that he’d be doing this for her... Seeing her, this stunning woman, this goddess, this princess down before him...
The faintest voice in Malcolm’s head nudged him and asked if that should have made a difference at all. And what did it mean that his body cared?
Malcolm suspended judgment and just felt what it was like to have a beautiful goddess blessing him so. What it was like to debauch a royal. What it was like to have the naughty princess defiling him.
Rhode created the most vile sounds of mouth on cock, then jacked him off wearing a look of plain desire. Up and down, drawing up his balls until they were pulsing, she worked his erection until it twitched and jerked out of its own accord in her strokes.
The pressure building and building and building in his cock was dying to fire out of him.
Then a blissful release struck him, sinking into his bones, and Malcolm shot off, groaning loudly as streams of his come landed on the curves of her breasts. And on her stomach. And on her chains.
Ho-ly. Fuuuuck.
Had he said that out loud? Malcolm was so out of it, he couldn’t even tell.
As Rhode caught her breath, mischief danced in her eyes. “I don’t think that was even two minutes,” she said.
The cruelest defeat sank into Malcolm’s bones. How could he have missed her play?
“Aren’t you going to thank me for it?” Rhode said, on the verge of a grin.
Her words left him stumped.
“No?” she said. “Well... I suppose you haven’t been satisfied enough then.”
After a flash of a smile, she took his cock back into her furnace of a mouth and she sucked at the head like she was merely enjoying a lollipop.
Malcolm sucked in a deep breath.
It started out like a tickle. But his grip on her hair tightened as pin needles of pleasure raced in him, lighting a fire in the crown of his cock. If he were more in control, he probably would’ve cared about messing up her hair. But oh, gods, this absolute hellion was just having a blast torturing him.
Biting his lip hard to stop himself from screaming, Malcolm insisted he wasn’t going to lose. No way.
(Except he so was and they both knew it.)
Rhode pulled her mouth off him, remaining just millimeters away. “Thank me like the good boy you are,” she taunted.
Even her breaths were too much. But she plunged him into her mouth again—and swallowed and bobbed. And fuck, he could feel the vibrations of her throat around him as she laughed at him.
Malcolm was making the most pitiable noises. Consumed with too much pleasure, the stings were pushing him past a threshold and into the world of pain.
“Thank you,” he pleaded pathetically.
Releasing him with a pop, Rhode directed a mirthful gaze up at him. “That’s Your Highness to you,” she said. Her tongue, then her thumb brushed over the tip, eliciting a pair of yelps from his traitorous throat.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get there.” Her touch, slick with saliva and come, grazed over his ridged band.
Malcolm’s eyes shut. He was seeing stars. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he gritted out, holding back cries of stop it. This wasn’t what that was for.
Rhode merely tutted in response.
Oh my gods, fuck you, his mind screamed.
“That didn’t sound very convincing to me,” she said.
Malcolm still couldn’t properly construct any thoughts amid her onslaught of pleasure and pain. But there was this conscious part of him that could comprehend. This inkling that indicated that this inhuman before him was fucking insane.
“Look at me,” said Rhode. “Say it like you mean it.”
She brushed a thumb over his tip again, and Malcolm screamed a moan. All the while, Rhode smiled in her greedy-triumphant-entertained way.
Rhode may have been the one on her knees, but he was wrong to have thought she had ever given him any power. She was completely in control here, and he was in way over his head.
Relief found him at once as he caught his breath. Malcolm swallowed the remnants of his pride and looked Rhode straight in the eye.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” he said, his shaky voice broken by whimpers.
Rhode just smiled as she let him go.
Malcolm caught his breath. Slowly coming to grips with reality, he surveyed himself. He was a mess—and felt even more of it once he noticed his boxer briefs had never fully come off.
“Seeing as you can’t satisfy me with this right now,” Rhode said, eyeing his dick before standing up and meeting his eyes, “why don’t you strip and get on the bed?”
As infuriating as it was to have Rhode barking orders at him, Malcolm was eased nonetheless at how easy she made all this. And, sue him, maybe it was also really hot to see her give explicit directions. Call it decisiveness and clarity. Sure.
He slid his underwear down, flinging it to the pile of his jeans. When she raised her brows at his perfect aim and looked at him impressed, he couldn’t figure out if he should’ve felt more satisfied or insulted.
He’d also never been so awed, nor so infuriated—nor this buzzed and this noodly—after being given head, but today was a day of many firsts.
Malcolm walked backwards, pulling her with him by the hands. Her right hand was wet with spit. It should’ve felt gross, but he just felt thankful all over again.
He felt one of his legs hit the bed. Rhode was so close. He could count her eyelashes. He could smell himself on her breath.
With one more step back, he was sitting on the bed. Rhode’s hands escaped his. She pushed him down until he was resting on his forearms, on the softest and smoothest sheets he’d ever encountered.
Her bracelets sounded like soft wind chimes by his ears as she climbed over him. Catching sight of his come dripping down her body, he felt far more thrilled than contrite at her state. She could wipe it off if she wanted to.
They moved up on the bed.
Malcolm watched as Rhode reached down, beneath the lacy black scrap of cloth she apparently deemed underwear. Her hand dug deeper. It would take a Minotaur barging in her bedroom to tear his eyes away. And even then, he’d probably hesitate.
At her gasp, he looked up at her face, dying to know what exactly she was doing. Every little detail hidden to him.
Diligently observing her movements, he imagined and pieced together what he could from the outline of her knuckles and the way they moved. Making estimates from how much of her hand, her wrist, her arm he couldn’t see behind the lace.
He got some sort of answer when out came Rhode’s fingers with a glistening sheen.
“Tell me, Malcolm,” she said, “would you like to taste me?”
Her scent in the air provided enough of an opportunity for a clandestine sniff. He didn’t have to worry there. But he tensed at her question still. Why didn’t Rhode just demand this, too?
“If I say no?” he said.
Her playful expression turned serious. “I wouldn’t force you.”
“That’s not what—” he blurted. “I didn’t actually mean....”
Rhode’s eyes were unrelenting. “Don’t get shy on me now. Ask me for what you want.”
Is this what it’s always like with you? he wondered. Did Rhode always request consent in the form of submission? Because—
“I’m not going to beg you to let me show you a good time,” he said tersely.
But the fight in him already began to subside when he caught Rhode’s eyes flitting to his taut abs.
She drew her gaze back to his face. “Oh, I can always just take pleasure myself.” Her fingers reached the apex of her thighs once more. “That was the plan,” she said, shrugging despite her occupied hands. “Until you came into my wing. You could just watch.”
Her hands traveled back up, over her naked body... smearing the evidence of their combined arousal on her skin... squeezing her tits....
“Whom would that torture more?” said Rhode.
She dipped her fingers into her underwear again. Her movements strained against the offending scrap of cloth that Malcolm’s fingers were desperately itching to tear apart.
“And should I want something other than my own fingers or toys,” she said, letting out a breathy hum as she rolled her hips above him, “I’m sure there are dozens of willing candidates outside who would be more than happy to take your place.”
Malcolm’s eyes flashed.
Rhode wore an infuriating grin. “Ah. Not a fan of that idea, are you?”
Confronted with the truth, he realized Rhode was right. It may have been her pleasure at stake, but it would be his privilege.
Fine.
Malcolm tried not to think too hard—or at all. “Please let me taste you,” he said. (And no other set of words he’d uttered had ever felt so abnormal in his mouth.)
But Rhode did nothing other than continue to touch herself.
“Your Highness,” he added, leaving out any indignation from his tone.
Rhode removed her hand from her underwear, and the divine, sinful scent of her wafted into his nostrils.
She blazed a trail of wet heat on his skin, streaking her slick fingers onto his body—marking him as he had her. Up his trail of hair. Up past his navel. Up his chest. Up along his throat. Up over his Adam’s apple. Up to his chin. And finally...
Malcolm took her fingers into his mouth, thoroughly rolling his tongue around to lick her juices off her. Tasting a tanginess with a hint of salt, he breathily groaned at the realization that he was probably tasting the both of them.
It was another reminder that they both were wanting this, sharing this experience, just them. A reminder of the highs they were reaching in the basicness, the rawness, they were reduced to.
Rhode removed her fingers from his mouth. Once he sucked the remains, she wiped her hand on her outer thigh.
“Wanna come up here?” Malcolm rasped. He nodded up as he dropped his elbows and leaned back down on her bed. He wanted more. And he wanted to fucking give.
Rhode settled over him with a contagious excitement. “You’re exactly what I thought you were,” she said.
And of course. It was like she couldn’t go ten minutes without poking at this part of him under his skin. Without feeding more firewood to the dwindling flames of irritation.
“Do I wanna know?” Malcolm snapped.
Rhode carded her fingers through his hair. “You already know what you are. That’s why you’re here.”
Before he could sufficiently ponder that, she grabbed a pillow and nudged her head up. “You need to be up here. Lift your head,” she ordered.
Rhode rotated the pillow lengthwise and slotted it under his head. They shimmied up her bed in inch-increments to get her to balance on the headboard.
And finally, it was time for payback. He’d show Rhode a good time. He’d make her see it was also her privilege.
Malcolm kissed and nipped at her thighs. He couldn’t slip her underwear down her legs in this position, nor could he remove them with those chains in the way, but, fuck, they needed to come off now.
Unsure and uncaring as to what came over him, he tore the fabric apart and flung it across the room, leaving Rhode clothed in only her jewelry.
She glanced at the fallen projectile. “You’ll pay for that.”
“Or you’ll thank me,” he said.
Perhaps that was unlikely, but she helped him anyway by reaching down to part her lips for him.
Diving in between damp, groomed curls, his tongue reached for her slick flesh, and he feasted to the taste of heaven and sin.
Under the shine of her jewelry, Malcolm lapped between the darker, uneven folds and savored the taste of her. While working the flat of his tongue on the glans of her clit, his fingers traced the jewelry on her legs. Then he gripped her ass and dipped his thumbs into the folds where hip met thigh.
Just as he started to enjoy the plush sensation, Rhode took hold of his left hand. Interlacing her fingers through his, she pinned his hand to her pillow.
Malcolm’s eyes shut as he felt a tingle in his chest burn a path to his throat. He let out a breath against her core before resuming his teasing, licking stripes around and in between her protruding inner lips.
Damn, he was so glad that he’d shaved his scruff. He imagined telling his past self what he’d be shaving for, and tried not to smile. Past-Malcolm probably would’ve freaked the fuck out. And after wondering why the fuck and how the fuck (“Obvious” and “Who cares?”), past-Malcolm definitely would’ve diligently prepared by poring over the latest discoveries surrounding female sexual anatomy.
And sure, he might not have had that much experience—certainly not nearly as much as Rhode possessed—but that wasn’t anything studying couldn’t fix. This was just another challenge. He’d read enough theory in the past. Nothing intimidating to a committed learner (and Athena knew he loved learning).
All he had to do was follow the scientific method and collect feedback by getting his array of senses attuned to Rhode’s cues.
Malcolm stopped messing around and controlled for the first variable.
What did it for her? Straight licks up and down?
After a few rounds of experimentation, Rhode gasped.
Maybe.
Clockwise?
Ten attempts from him. She kept up her heavier breathing.
Could be that, too. But he was looking for something more. Potentially.
Counterclockwise?
Rhode sucked in a breath as her hips jerked.
Aha.
Triumph celebrated, Malcolm kept his tongue at work.
Yes, there really was no reason to be intimidated by Rhode or by sex. This was all just a puzzle—one to be taken apart rather than put together.
With his free hand, he added another variable into play, getting his fingers slick with her wetness. He slid a finger into her. Then another. Sinking deeper, warm slick pressure enveloped his fingers—which, gods, he really hoped didn’t feel cold to her.
He easily located a bumpy ridge and pressed on it. After several trials with varying interaction effects (using mostly Rhode’s noises and movements as proxies), he found that she liked his fingers curled just-so deep. It wasn’t as deep as he’d expected. Maybe she was different. Or perhaps it had been so long since the last time that he’d forgotten.
Pressing on the spot in a constant rhythm as he continued licking her clit, he irrationally mentally prepared for perpetuity.
But there was a third spot to test.
Extricating his pinned hand from Rhode’s grip, he reached up above the thick hairs and— And actually, he could stop there for a sec. He brushed his fingers through her tuft of hair and pulled softly, trying to turn her on even more.
She told him— He assumed she told him she liked it with an additional whispered mmm.
After a while, he reached several inches below her navel. Sliding his fingers beneath the chains on her hip, he pressed lightly above that bone—
No, it was cartilage, right? Or something else? What was the pubic symsiphis? No, wait, it wasn’t that either. Sympsipis. Symphysis?
A touch of his hand zapped him away from wherever the ADHD train had taken him.
Oops.
Rhode repositioned his fingers just over a centimeter down. Hand over his, she pressed down harder over that area.
Pushing the spot pulled back the hood and exposed more of her clitoris, giving him more to lick and suck.
Rhode began gyrating in fractions of an inch—not far enough to make him lose the vital places he discovered, but just enough to help him stimulate her clit from those three sides.
He added a third finger.
And he continued, doing his best to pay attention to the soft noises she made. The stretch made her hiss, the curl made her groan, the licks made her gasp, the rubs made her moan.
Malcolm made sure to log his findings and filed the tactics for next time.
Wait. Next time? He wasn’t guaranteed that. The realization made him all the more determined to make sure Rhode thoroughly enjoyed herself—and him. He swore she’d get the most from him. He’d give nothing but his absolute best.
Ignoring the protests of his tongue and neck muscles, he went on and around the head of her clitoris, even spelling out the whole alphabet: English and Greek, capitalized and lowercase. It was time he worked these muscles out again.
But then Malcolm remembered the feedback he’d received years ago: not to do anything other than what he’d been doing and to just keep going.
He went searching again. He found a particularly effective location-movement-force combo for his tongue—different than before—and stuck to that.
A minute passed by. Maybe three. Maybe more. And judging by the grip of his hair, the tensing of Rhode’s thighs, and the light spasms around his digits, his plan was working.
Her reactions gave him the drive to keep at it. To just keep going.
His tongue swelled her clit. His fingers pressing inside her began emitting squelches. He kept pressing that part above her mound.
By now, Rhode was practically grinding his face. Malcolm’s lips and nose and chin were wet. And dammit his tongue was sore.
But all the ahs and uhs, the hoos and hahs—even when muffled by the thighs sandwiching his ears—were worth his persistence.
After exclaimed sighs filled the air above him, Rhode relaxed the fingers in his hair.
Malcolm finally stopped and looked up. Her head had fallen back, blocking too much of his view of her gorgeous self-satisfied face. Nevertheless, the accomplishment felt like a release of its own.
One-one.
Rhode looked down at him, making an amusing picture of a stack of boobs and double chin, framed by a waterfall of hair. “Not bad, Pace,” she said, before moving away to sit down in front of him.
All that for a “not bad.” Might not have been even eight minutes. And for his first try...
Malcolm sat up and stared at her for a moment. “You want more?” he said. “I’ll give you more.”
In front of him, Rhode spread her legs one by one with the words “hic Rhodus... hic salta” Complete deadpan.
Malcolm actually laughed and cared not one smidge how often she’d probably used that line on other guys.
Rhode broke out into a grin and winked at him. And as he settled down in an effort to regain control, more laughs involuntarily bubbled out of him. But that didn’t seem to bother her. Rhode simply watched him, basking in his laughter with legs still splayed.
“I’ll give it to ya. That was good,” he said. Why ya gotta be so damn funny?
“Thank you.” She beamed with pride. “I wondered if you knew enough Latin. ‘Aftoú gár kaí Rhódos kaí pídima’ doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”
Malcolm smiled. “Not as punchy, no.”
And somehow, he’d forgotten how naked they were right now. But instead of feeling nervous, he took in the moment. He was lounging around with Rhode naked. In her room. On her bed. Just having fun...
Rhode finally shifted. He wondered what she was planning.
Getting up out of bed, she headed over to her bedside table. Naturally, Malcolm’s gaze flickered to her ass. And as she poured water from a pitcher into a glass, Malcolm let himself look. His feasting eyes made him want to snake his arms around her and press kisses into her soft skin.
“Do you want some water?” she said over her shoulder.
Though she’d caught him, it didn’t feel like she was laughing at him this time.
“Water would be nice, thanks,” he said.
Smiling, Rhode handed him the glass and watched as he took a gulp. Her bangles clinked when she took back the glass and sipped from it herself. They took a few more sips, trading the glass back and forth until it was nearly empty.
After setting the glass back on the table, she tied her hair, unknowing that he was always a sucker for a woman with a ponytail. He had the urge to touch all that newly exposed skin. And that shark tattoo of hers... Damn. But ultimately, he was content just watching her settle down again and get comfortable.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. “Ready?”
Rhode’s grin matched his.
They leaned towards each other.
To his surprise, Rhode was gasping after one kiss. Malcolm totally wouldn’t have expected her to be affected by just one. And for a brief moment, he took offense that she was faking her reactions. It seemed weird, too, considering she’d been quiet when he’d eaten her out to completion. And then he remembered where his mouth had been—and noticed that, even now, the water hadn’t completely washed away her taste.
Rhode kissed him again. Daringly, he darted his tongue inside her mouth, inciting more gasps as she drew herself closer.
His cock brushed her thigh. He held back a hiss. Rhode was nearly sitting in his lap. With burning arousal, he held her by the hips, imagining her riding him. Now that got him to breathe out a near growl.
But no, that wasn’t the plan. At least not now.
Rhode let him flip them over and lean her down on her bed. Malcolm started with her lips and began to work his way down with his mouth. The misfortune of having to remove a hand off her to balance himself was quickly forgotten once he took a moment to appreciate her lying under him—and was made all the better with her hands busy over him.
It was so easy to enjoy and lose himself in her suppleness of her body, but Malcolm pulled himself out of his narrow-minded focus and put aside his own inclinations with the aim to figure Rhode out.
He remained watchful for her reactions—every touch asking, You like that? And every sound and movement an opportunity to find how best to be of service. So attentive and studious was he in his approach, it was almost clinical. Perhaps similar to massage therapy.
So very carefully, Malcolm explored the peaks and valleys of Rhode’s figure, not wanting to miss even a centimeter. He gave attention to all the erogenous areas he could think of and found his caress of her hips got her breathing deeply. With more teasing touches down her legs, Rhode’s hips began to shift.
His attention snapped at the call of his own desires, and Malcolm looked up so wondrously at Rhode, simply appreciating this moment. Right as a question began to form in Rhode’s eyes, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Nor could he bear to stand aside anymore.
Equipped with all the things he now knew about Rhode, he dove back into the bubble she’d let him into, comforted that at least he had some idea of what she liked. So if he was overwhelmed with the temptation to press his lips to her hipbone, it was also sensible to go for it, because she probably also would’ve enjoyed it. If he was burning to grip her thighs, it was simply proper; she would’ve wanted it, too.
If these kisses and caresses felt as good for her as it did for him, he would’ve already been pleased. His care definitely seemed productive, with the way Rhode’s fingers had dug in his hair again, keeping him glued to her.
Malcolm gave and gave, planting kisses, skimming over her form, making a home between her legs.
Rhode had hoisted herself up on her forearms now, watching Malcolm occupy himself with her as he would glance at her now and again just to see her chest rise and fall and rise and fall.
From Rhode’s propped-up state, she began cupping her breasts and tweaking her nipples, helping herself to what he couldn’t do.
They were a team again, weren’t they? Why did that bother him?
As Rhode began to gasp, Malcolm teased her with soft, little brushes over her slit, dipping into her just barely.
Somehow, this had devolved into a competition, and he wanted her wanting. Sliding out his fingers, he went in again, just knuckle-deep, eager to evoke her frustration.
“Deeper,” Rhode said.
He acquiesced. He was going to anyway. Rhode had just happened to ask.
Sliding two fingers in her, he located the spongy area. As his tongue darted out to tease her thigh, he delicately grazed that spot inside her.
“Faster.”
He ignored that.
Rhode moved her hips to meet his fingers at a faster pace. A lot of faith she had he wouldn’t accidentally scratch her. And, okay, fine, he wasn’t the only one in control here. But if he couldn’t dictate the rhythm, he could still tease her by varying his pressure.
“Harder,” she said not half a minute later.
Malcolm nearly rolled his eyes. “Will you quit whining?”
“It’s my birthday,” Rhode snapped. “And maybe I’d stop complaining if you could at least match what you did before. Prove it’s not a fluke.”
Gods, she really had it coming for her.
Malcolm deployed every insight he had accumulated in the past half hour. He curled up his fingers hard going in, he stretched her opening coming out. He tugged at her curls and pressed above the hairline. And he lapped up her nectar and sucked at her bundle of nerves—gently, yet with fury.
On and on. And on. And on and on. And on.
His tongue was protesting, but he paid no heed to such protests. And eventually...
“Go a little right,” Rhode said, slightly breathless.
He complied.
Rhode keened. “My right.”
Malcolm heeded her orders.
Throwing her head back as she moaned, Rhode lost her balance and fell on her back.
The harsh movement made them lose their position. In their moment for limb-rearranging, Rhode placed a pillow under her ass, and Malcolm stretched his neck.
It took them half a minute to regain what they’d earlier achieved. But soon enough, she was holding his head even closer to her and throwing a leg over him.
The heel grazing down Malcolm’s spine sent tingles up his nerves. Rhode’s hips bucked, spurring him on. Malcolm didn’t relent the pressure, no matter how tightly her thighs were squeezing him.
But suddenly, her grip on his hair loosened. She clung to her knee instead and snaked her legs around even more of him—yet even that seemed a vain attempt. Her thighs fell open as her muscles slackened. Her hands retreated to her bedsheets. And Rhode began to writhe away and wince.
Malcolm paused. “Are you okay?”
“Why’d’you stop?” she said in another whine. Then she shot up from the bed. “Wait, are you okay?”
“Yeah, no. I was just making sure. You looked... really uncomfortable.”
Rhode shook her head. Laying back down, she undid her ponytail to fan her hair above her. Her chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths.
“Don’t edge me,” she then said. “I want to come.”
The words echoed in his head. I want to come. I want to come. She was asking him.
“It’s...” she said. “I just need help with the... continuing. You can hold me still. If I were alone, I’d either be done by now or be struggling to keep at it.” And in a flash, she met his eyes with a wolfish grin. “But you’re here.”
The corners of his lips quirked. “Got it.”
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “One of those words.”
Leaning down toward her once more, Malcolm restarted slowly before resuming with vigor. He focused his attention on her inner labia, turning his face ninety degrees so he could kiss and suck the lips.
His tongue began pushing her slit, getting her even slicker. Malcolm got his face all up in there, using his energy to make her feel like she’d run a marathon.
Replacing his tongue with his fingers so he could suck the head of her engorged clit, he got Rhode writhing again. Her hips spasmed yet more when the side of his palm put pressure below her navel.
He imagined the same feeling he’d felt earlier. The prickling, needly warmth. Not entirely pleasant, yet somehow more pleasurable because of it. He imagined the pressure that had built into an overwhelming, all-consuming threat of explosion.
On and on and on he went. And then he heard an oh!
Come on. Come on.
“Oh, fuck.” Rhode’s legs were writhing.
That’s it. Malcolm rubbed and pressed and sucked and licked.
Rhode’s cursing turned into a mumble of swears, and his mind broke for half a second at how unbelievably erotic it was that she resorted not just to expletives but to Ancient Greek, something that the mortal women he’d been with had never ignited in him. This was new. Yet more ancient. More… primal.
It turned a cog in his hardwired brain, drawing out his most visceral urges, bringing out the godly side of him, giving him the potential energy to go longer.
And all the same, he was dying to bury himself inside her—to feel her wet heat pulsing around his cock the way she was around his fingers.
He ignored his own growing need and persisted, finding himself craving her ecstasy. Rhode’s throaty moans became near screams as she rode out her climax. And he continued, holding her thighs as steady as he could. He hoped he wasn’t hurting her by keeping her still.
His cock was hanging heavy, and he began losing focus as the linens brushed against him. But Rhode’s wish resounded in his head again, keeping his strength of will intact. ‘I want to come.’ ‘I want to come.’
Rhode clawed at her sheets and writhed away, yelping. Deciding that he wouldn’t stop until she said so, Malcolm kept his mouth at work, but dialed back the intensity to a two.
Even at that gentle pace, Rhode was nearly screaming. Her abdomen contracted until she was nearly sitting to face him.
And he kinda didn’t want to stop.
Another lick, he thought. Another suck. One more. One more. One more.
Rhode fell again. Amid her incessant moaning, Malcolm stopped counting the one mores and set himself on replicating her mercilessness.
Her face screwed up in pleasure as she came again with a long, loud groan.
He heard himself growl as she kept panting and mewling. He needed to grip his dick and stop himself from following her. But his hands were occupied with Rhode. With no other option, he succumbed, rubbing himself onto the sheets as he pleasured her.
Last one. Last one.
He lasted even after he couldn’t last. Grinding himself onto the bed, his body was wracked and on the edge of release. He itched to take himself in hand. But, tempted as he was when he slid his now pruney fingers out of her, he had the resolve to lock her trembling thighs in an iron grip.
Malcolm sucked and licked her clit some more. Rhode’s head turned into her pillow. Her back arched. Her hips wriggled under him. She couldn’t even swear anymore. Another high reduced her to a mess of dry sobs.
He. Kept. Licking.
When Rhode scrambled for a pillow and screamed into it, Malcolm relented and gave her clit a momentary break. Returning to her slit, he darted his tongue in and out and around. But even the lightest brush of his nose on the head of her clit had her bucking her hips violently.
And, fuck it, Malcolm wanted more of that.
He wrapped his lips around 8,000 nerve endings and li—
“Oh, Fates, STOP!” she choked.
Right as he loosened his hold, Rhode jerked away from his mouth with another cry, nearly kicking him in the process.
“Fuuuck,” she whined. “Oh, fuck.” Rhode whimpered faintly in front of him as her sternum quivered.
Unable to take it anymore, Malcolm gave himself a few jerks with his slicked-up fingers, grunting as he finally spilled into his hand with his face to Olympus.
The release cleared a fog in his head and tore his mind in two at the sight of Rhode, still quaking beneath him with one leg crossed tightly over the other.
“You good?” Malcolm said hoarsely.
Eyes still shut, Rhode gave him a barely-there nod.
He curled his lips at the thought that he could elicit those sounds from her. That he could make her chest heave like that, make her legs squeeze together, make her have to wipe away that tear from her eye.
Malcolm caught his breath and wiped away hairs, slick, and spunk on the sheets. He felt his jaw ache.
It took several moments before Rhode rose up on her elbows. Still breathing heavy, she looked victorious. “That was a nice birthday gift.”
And she had still gotten him to do her bidding, he realized. She still had the upper hand.
But was it so wrong though? Surely, even under her command, it was so much better to be a team than adversaries. Why couldn’t it be a coincidence?
Malcolm decided to give up fighting her. What was the point? He liked it anyway. At least right now, right here, he’d gladly surrender.
Rhode seemed to notice the change. “Would you let me tie you up to my bed?” she said, using a lower voice than usual.
Malcolm looked into her lusty eyes with surprise.
“I wouldn’t hurt you at all. I just want to blow your mind,” Rhode said, inching closer to place her hands on his thighs. “And if it comes to it, I don’t want you to accidentally kick me or throw me off. I can’t keep you still the way you did me.”
His mind focused on her last five words. About to break into an immature smirk, his brain was pulled back to focus on the hand now gently wrapped around one of his ankles.
“Well, I don’t want to kick you...” Malcolm said.
Rhode’s eyes flitted left to right. “That doesn’t mean—”
“I am fine with it,” he blurted out.
It was her birthday, right? He could do this for her. (And maybe for himself, too.)
So, Malcolm was on his back again. As Rhode swung a leg over and climbed atop him, he realized he now had not one, but two memories of them in this position.
This time, she was touching him, taking her time to study his front profile. Strangely enough, he found he only barely felt that overload, like from when Rhode had hosed compliments on him about his artistry.
Leaning down, she cupped his cheek and let him kiss her for a while. His hands traveled to her hair, burrowing in her tresses, carefully pulling strands away from her dangly earrings.
He had more to work with, with her down here, so he made sure to reap the benefits. As they kissed, Malcolm stroked over the skin and bone of her neck, honored by the vulnerability she entrusted to him. In this moment. In this entire night. This first-class ticket to an exclusive adventure.
Hopping over the clasps of her body jewelry, he swept down the curve of her back and filled his palms with the swell of her ass. His fingers brushed down her thighs, along those snake and rose adornments. And up and down again he went, letting his hands roam while his limbs still had freedom.
When Rhode sat up, he rose up with her, adamant on keeping his lips on hers. Her smile ended their kiss anyway. Their foreheads touched as she laid a hand on his abs and began leaning him back down.
But Malcolm stayed there, content with kissing her jaw and so at ease being able to graze his fingers through her hair again.
“Show-off,” Rhode said. She didn’t seem to mind, though—and took a moment to trace the product of exercise, diet, and DNA.
He flashed her a grin.
At Rhode’s next attempt, he let her push him back to the bed.
Malcolm swept her hair off her shoulders and noticed how the light reflected off them in a pretty glow. As if he were drawing, he traced the shadows on her skin, before reacquainting himself with her ass. Because he could.
Touching Rhode felt almost therapeutic. This sort of softness didn’t exist at Camp Half-Blood. Like how Rhode took his left hand in both of hers. How she kissed his palm with a delicate peck of her lips.
But Malcolm would’ve been foolish to think Rhode was all that soft. Now she was pressing her lips to his wrist, sparking a heat in him. And now she was producing at will a silky rope of water and circling it around his left wrist. He wondered if she did this often.
This felt more familiar. Like when his heart raced when brought to a fight. When his senses screamed about dangers. When his mind evaluated that he could win the match.
But there was nothing to be lost here with Rhode.
Not knowing what to say and also not wanting to kill the sensual vibe, he let their breaths and the odd rustle of the sheets fill the silence.
With a few more kisses to his wrist, Rhode placed his hand on her chest. Malcolm gazed up in wonder.
“Before this past hour,” she said, “you made such valiant attempts to keep your eyes off my boobs. But it seems you’re actually an ass man.”
Malcolm could’ve laughed at her remark. “Oh, I’m not particular.” He gave a squeeze and let the hand on her thigh join the first.
Rhode’s eyes closed for a moment as she let him play. “Your hands tonight beg to differ,” she said.
On either side of the X on her chest, Malcolm brushed his knuckles against her skin and he got another handful of her tits—feeling their curve, feeling their weight. “Were they feeling left out?” he teased.
“Not anymore.”
Malcolm did another sit-up to lick an indecent stripe up her tit. He tried not to think about what had come over him to even attempt such an act.
Rhode let him work his tongue on her for a few seconds and sighed above him before pushing him back onto her mattress once more.
Malcolm snickered and, just to get a rise out of her, sat up again. For a third time, Rhode pushed him onto his back. This time, she willed the bind around his left wrist to pull towards the side of the bed, keeping him down.
Just as she picked up his right hand, she paused and met his eyes. “Do you want more water?” she said.
“Sure.”
They shared the glass again before returning to the task at hand. In the blink of an eye, Rhode materialized three more cords of water, binding Malcolm’s wrists and ankles to her bed, one by one. She took a long moment to admire her work—and his body.
“How is this?” she said softly. But her eyes blazed darker. (Or was that simply because of the shadow from her hair?) “Is this okay?”
“Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Comfortable?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re not straining anywhere?” Rhode’s fingers ghosted his thighs again.
“No, I’m good.”
His cock twitched from the brush of her fingers, which traveled down the back of his knees, then up again. Her hands were so close to where he wanted them. But Rhode kept up her teasing. And she took her time, raking her eyes over the body sprawled under her.
Just moments ago, Malcolm had figured he’d feel self-conscious in this position. But to be looked at the way she was looking at him now, to be touched the way she was touching him now... he couldn’t remember a time he’d felt sexier.
It was so hot. To be under her, between her, wholly surrounded by Rhode. At her mercy. Just caught in her web—
Malcolm pulled back his limbs violently. The restraints immediately came loose.
“Wait! Shit.” He chuckled nervously. “Oh gods. Ha. Sorry. Just gotta remind myself you’re not Arachne or something.”
Fuck! FUCK!
Inflamed with mortification, Malcolm focused instead on priorities. Arachne was in Tartarus, he told himself. Captured by Annabeth. Slashed to bits by Percy. There was no way she or her creepy-crawly descendants were out for him right now. Spiders didn’t live underwater. At least not this deep.
It was actually funny. No need to feel embarrassed. No. Big. Deal.
Taking expansive breaths, he tried to slow his thundering heart as his eyes consumed the view before him.
Before him was Rhode. He was with a sea nymph goddess, not a monster. A soft, feminine princess, albeit a sharp-tongued vixen. Also a great hugger who smelled like flowers. No, she didn’t have pincers. And what crawled over his skin was her jewelry and her long strands of hair, not dusty cobwebs of spider silk.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Rhode said. “You know, we really don’t have to. There are other—”
“I’ll tell you,” Malcolm said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve…” he began quietly. DO IT, he told himself. “… legit thought about trying this before.” It was difficult to meet her eyes, but he persisted anyhow. “I’ll tell you.”
The admission just made him want it more.
Tonight he’d run with it. It served him well so far to take bounding leaps and trust that Rhode would catch him. He wanted more of her. More from her. More her.
But a part of him doubted his choice to surrender all control to this goddess who knew how to torture him. Or... well... that was the appeal, wasn’t it?
Rhode’s bright eyes fixed on his. “We can try things. Tell me what you like and don’t like.”
“‘Kay.”
Tuning her attention to his body, Rhode brushed across his skin and over his nipples and ticklish spots. Malcolm fidgeted.
“It’s nice,” he said when she paused.
Rhode laid sultry kisses on him, just wet enough that he could feel them as she ventured to other parts of him. His stomach, his chest, his shoulder… His neck, his cheek, his lips… She was all over him, giving him rewards for his surrender.
See, this was definitely a good idea. Malcolm only wished he could touch her and hold her against his body.
“Is there anything I should absolutely avoid?” Rhode asked.
“Not particularly.”
Oh hell no, there were so many things.
“Well,” he said, “as far as I know, I’m not into being hurt either. Oh, and absolutely no... waste of any kind.”
“I won’t.”
“And please don’t tickle me.”
“Okay.”
Malcolm was sure there was more, but he didn’t want to think through them now.
In his silence, Rhode nosed along his ear and began to kiss his face.
“Tell me if there’s anything else, okay?” she said.
“Sure.”
As Rhode peppered his nose and cheekbone with pecks, Malcolm calmed, soothed from all worry. Her mouth reached his, finally allowing him to do something in return. Their lips were probably swollen at this point.
And Malcolm thought about other possibilities, wondering if she liked... switching. What if she—
Well. Oh, damn.
The vision wouldn’t leave him. He imagined her flipping him over... laying her weight on his back... kissing his jaw as softly as she was now… And she’d take her time opening him up with a toy, coaxing moan after moan out of him... And then just ream him into her bed. She’d likely challenge him to come hands-free, too, considering how delightfully mean she could be. Or maybe she would play nice and let him touch himself. Or... she’d reach around to palm the head—
“You like that?” Rhode said. Her fingers wrapped around his stiffening erection.
Malcolm flushed under her gaze, getting even harder in her grasp.
What? No, she couldn’t read his mind.
And he wasn’t questioning his desires, but he certainly wasn’t going to share them with her. Or ask her that.
And it was one thing to think it, but another to do so smack dab in front of her. While they were naked. While she had him tied up, unable to escape her curious mind.
Still, it wasn’t like she knew.
Oh, but Rhode seemed to know some things, though. Like the fact that he would’ve enjoyed this bondage fantasy. She could do a lot with that now that she knew.
How ‘bout the fact that she already was? The fact that he was lying beneath her with all his limbs stretched out. The fact that, even if he told her to stop right now, the potential of a threat—because this certainly had the makings of a threat—would continue beyond tonight. She’d still know.
What the fuck? Surely, this had gone too far. Rhode knew too much. She was holding a deep, dark part of him, a delicate piece of glass tied to the depths of his soul. And she could crumble it so easily if she merely wanted to.
Rhode leaned down to kiss his jaw.
“Malcolm, stop thinking, okay?” she whispered into his neck between her kisses. “Just feel me. And enjoy yourself.”
Malcolm took a breath and flung away his fearful thoughts. He gave a faint nod (for her reassurance), and he reminded himself he trusted her—with this secret and with his body.
He paid no mind to mosquito bites and bruises from training. He thought not of scars from Chicago or New York City or Long Island. At least not until Rhode ran her fingers down his chest, teasing him with light scratches, and stopped near that huge-ass blemish.
“Does this hurt?” she said gently.
“They don’t hurt. At all.”
She sucked at his skin in the crook of his neck. She kissed his lips again and he tugged at her lip, doing the most he could for the only part of her he could reach.
Ultimately, Rhode was still calling the shots, and too soon, her mouth was woefully far. And then she lost the chains draping her chest. (He would’ve also said no.) But Malcolm couldn’t complain too much. Rhode poured a liquid from a bottle that came out of nowhere, and began oiling up her chest.
“You’re going to catch plankton like that,” she said with a grin.
Malcolm shut his trap with a twinge of embarrassment.
With a little laugh, Rhode treated him to a show. After a few minutes, she kissed him again—then pressed herself against him and slid down his body. Her chest built a delectable friction on his torso, and she licked and sucked and breathed on his skin.
It was absurd how many crazy, wonderful things were happening to him today. Part of him couldn’t believe this was real. The worst part was how much he knew he’d forget.
Rhode’s long mane fell over her head and onto his face, tickling his skin as she went down, down, down. Scared he’d think of Arachne again, Malcolm focused on the smell of her hair—on flowers and seafood barbecue.
Rhode rested her forehead on his stomach and pressed her lips to his skin. Then she slithered over him again and encompassed his cock with her breasts.
Ohhh.
Remembering Rhode’s command, Malcolm released the muzzle in his throat and freed the noises that wanted to escape. “Oh, gods, that feels good.”
He felt so embarrassed saying it, but Rhode rewarded him tenfold.
Malcolm felt a tighter hug from her breasts. He tried not to move but couldn’t help the occasional buck. She went up and down and up and down. Eventually, Malcolm dared to work in tandem with her.
She took him in hand as she slid lower. Rhode licked his hip bone and nipped his inner thigh.
Malcolm felt his balls draw up further in reflex. “Ooh, okay, that’s, uh... little uncomfortable.”
She looked at him contritely. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. Just feels a little too threatening,” he said, huffing out a laugh.
Relaxing again, Malcolm felt like he was sinking into the bed. Rhode continued entertaining herself with his body, drawing out intermittent reactions from him.
At some point, she straddled one of his legs and began grinding her slick heat directly on his thigh. Two minutes later, she licked it off him. It felt illegal.
Her tongue headed from his thigh to his cock. He could feel her breaths on his hardness. And her mouth enveloped him once more.
Holding in a shuddered breath, Malcolm glanced down. “You can’t do that again. I cannot take another round of you blowing me if you do wanna ride me,” he said, smiling as Rhode laughed.
Flinging her hair off her face, Rhode glanced at him as she crouched over him.
Malcolm was stiff and full in her hand, and Rhode played with his body some more, digging her fingers into his muscles, fondling his balls, caressing his grundle until his cock was throbbing.
Then her hands returned to her own body. With zero hesitation, she squeezed her breasts and pinched her nipples right in front of his face.
Malcolm pulled at the restraints. They weren’t budging. “You’re such a tease,” he grunted.
Rhode tittered as she shook her head. It would’ve sounded sweet if she weren’t so devilish.
Then she sat on his abs, rubbing her wetness on him. And just as she ground back towards his groin, she rose up off him.
And this was all getting really annoying. A good annoying. But, oh gods, it was getting worse.
“Do you want this?” she said.
There it was again. The Rhodian paradox. Why was it that whenever she gave him the power, it only led to his further submission to her?
Malcolm stopped caring. “Yes. Just fuck me already.”
He didn’t ask nicely, but Rhode didn’t seem to care this time. Or maybe what excused him was his acknowledgement that she would do the fucking.
Rhode reached for a pillow and patted the side of his ass, commanding, “Up.”
The angle change was a blessing. She was closer this way. And even more tantalizing because he still couldn’t fucking do anything.
Rhode’s tickling tresses on his skin made him shiver. Malcolm’s eyes shut when she finally rocked herself on his length, coating him with her wetness. He met her movements, mixing pre-come with slickness. Gods, he was so ready.
“One second,” she said.
From a second bottle that appeared in her hand, she pumped out a squirt. Tossing aside the bottle, she slicked him up and stroked him again. A faint moan escaped his lips. It took another ten seconds for Rhode to give herself some of the slick, and finally—finally—she guided him to her entrance.
As his swelling tip poked into her wet heat, Malcolm could hardly believe his life.
Sighed groans erupted from both parties as she pushed him inside her, inch by inch, letting gravity help her take him deep.
Every second, Malcolm knew, eleven million pieces of information crossed the human mind. One could capture forty-ish pieces and consciously store around seven. Demigods had greater awareness, and Athena’s children could process yet more. But in this moment, Malcolm could only manage three: warm, wet, and snug.
Rhode seated herself with him fully inside her, and they took a long moment to still as her body accommodated him.
Gods, it had been a while since he’d last felt this. But Rhode felt different. Warmer. Slicker. So much better. This must have been what it was like to have sex with a goddess. Or actually…
Idiot! “Rhode, wait! Get off me,” he grunted.
In an instant, she scrambled away, knocking the wind out of him as she balanced her weight on his stomach.
And amid his oofs, he nearly missed the effusive flashes in her eyes. The panic. The tenderness. And—through the cracks—the disappointment.
Malcolm shoved away his prickling guilt, focusing instead on the ease that washed over him at the white lie in the blue-green.
Setting her hands beside his head, Rhode looked down at him expectantly.
He answered the question still blaring in her eyes. “Condom. I don’t have a condom on.”
With a deep exhale, Rhode’s alarm was replaced by a calmness. “There’s really no risk of pregnancy or disease, I swear.”
The room was loud with their breaths and the faint noises of underwater glugs. The smell of arousal and lube lingered around them. And underneath those long eyelashes, Malcolm caught nothing but sincerity.
Right. Of course. She was a goddess. She’d done this for thousands of years. She clearly knew what she was doing. Oh, how very convenient.
Malcolm let out a breath. “Okay.”
At his nod, she sank down onto him again, drawing out another sigh.
“Good,” he said.
So very, very good.
Green into gray, they snapped their hips with a cadence growing out of sync, making them groan and huff. With only so much he could do tied down, Malcolm let her lead. Let her do whatever she wanted to him.
Through sloppy kisses, Rhode set a rhythm, fucking him into her mattress. Her nails dug crescents into his shoulders, and her squeezing legs astride him had her jewelry biting into his skin. Her tongue dipped into his collarbone, teeth grazing and nipping at his skin.
Leaning back, she let out an uhhh and sucked her teeth. “You should see yourself.”
Nah. He was totally fine with the view he had. The view of this voracious woman. Slightly out of control. Pleasured. Wanting. Determined. With her messed up hair tossed around in her movements. Tits bouncing, belly jiggling. Mouth ajar in sharp pants. The sweat on her skin lit by the muted glow of her room.
He was still fucking amazed she was naked. Which was so stupid to think, considering he was inside her.
Fuck, what a sight that was. Her damp, dark thatch meeting his own coarse hairs. His length disappearing into her. Filling her.
The obscenity of the sight just amplified how lewd he already felt. He was sensing everything now. Feeling her rake her nails over his stomach. Hearing the meaty smacks of thighs meeting ass. Appreciating the pressure building through his cock.
“Tied down under me,” Rhode said through her panting. “So thick and hard inside. Your bedhead, blazen eyes, sheen of sweat...” Up and down and around, she rode him and ground down. “Lipstick stains on—ugh—on your skin. Smelling of sex. And my soap.” She groaned. “And your hips canting, mm, so desperately. Just moaning for me. Such a debauched wreck, greedy for a good fuck. You want me so much, don’t you?”
A string of yeses and fucks burst from Malcolm’s throat, inciting an even hungrier look in Rhode’s eyes. “Yeah?” she said. “Tell me. Tell me you want me.”
“Fuck, I want you.” Delirious from her onslaught of pleasure, he repeated the words without a care.
Rhode bounced and grinded her body onto his, making him moan with each slide. Her hands traveled down his chest and happy trail.
With a forceful drop of her hips, she slipped out and missed him on the way down, causing Malcolm to yowl at the crush of his delicates.
“I’m so sorry!” Rhode squealed.
“‘S okay.”
He was in her again.
Rhode was more careful this time. Or just slower. Then her rhythm grew more erratic and she began falling towards him.
“Help me,” she said.
The ropes binding his ankles lengthened. Though she still had him tied up, he could plant his feet on the bed. Malcolm gave her thighs a rest and surged up.
Despite the smarting pain, the pause had made for a good cooldown to catch him from blowing off already. To have him take it all in. Malcolm undulated his hips purposefully, sliding him deeper into her. Why not take their time?
But Rhode began to move, and then they were mismatched in rhythm again. And this just wasn’t...
“C’mon,” Rhode said. “C’mon. More.”
Fulfilling her request, Malcolm sped up. Rhode stilled as he slammed into her at an inhuman pace, intense enough to get her face scrunching.
“That okay?” he checked.
“Yesss,” she gasped. “Yes. Yesss.”
There was enough, then there was more than enough. That was Rhode. Hedonism. Indulgence. Immoderation. To hell with Atlantis. She must’ve come from Sybaris, because nothing else could ever feel this good.
More came with the right amount of speed and force, slickness and friction. More came with no escape.
Craving his release so desperately, willing to do anything to reach his high, Malcolm finally caved. “Can I come, Your Highness?”
Rhode had the audacity to laugh. “I wasn’t going to stop you, mm, or make you ask, ugh, for permission,” she said. “It seems I, ah, conditioned you well.”
Malcolm’s cheeks lit aflame. “Seriously, fuck you.”
He slowed but didn’t stop pounding into her. Because fuck her.
“Yes,” Rhode said with another chortle and a roll of her hips. “Exactly that. But— Oh...”
And how could he hate her at all when she was gasping and humming atop him like this?
“Mm. Thank you for asking,” she said. “Good boys deserve to be rewarded.”
Malcolm wanted to insist to her not to call him a good boy. But he couldn’t argue against it. And why would he disagree, especially when a good boy was what she wanted?
True to Rhode’s word, he was encompassed by the most delicious squeezes of his cock. Timed perfectly, she clenched each time he drew out, leading him yet closer to the edge.
When Malcolm opened his eyes, he saw Rhode concentrating as she looked at him.
Any annoyance in him had vanished, and something told him he should have felt guilty she was abstaining from her own pleasure. But he also felt special that she was making this extra effort for him.
Reaching for her neglected clitoris, Malcolm was held back by her restraints. “Wanna touch you,” he said with a groan of frustration.
Rhode smiled for a sec at him. Sitting up, she rubbed the head of her clit, and used her other hand to play with a breast.
Amid their nonstop thrusts, he imagined it was his own hands feeling her up. He recalled the feeling from earlier. He remembered the weight. The softness and the give.
Blood rushed to his face and neck. His eyes snapped shut. His head lolled back.
And Malcolm was gone.
The pressure in his cock strengthened with such uncontainable fury, and a jet of his seed pulsed out of him seconds later.
Lost in a pure, warm bliss as Rhode continued to ride him, he felt his remaining reserves firing out and coating her walls.
Another purposeful clench drew out another spurt, another moan, and he felt come leak down his cock and dribble out of her.
So dirty with spunk on his thighs and on her ass, his body was wracked again.
The sheets were sticking to his back. And the ropes of water grew tauter, restraining him even more as Rhode kept riding him.
And it was all too much and he was squirming so desperately from the stinging pleasure as a tingling fire rose up his torso and rippled through each limb. He tried to grab something to ground himself, yet clutched nothing but air, and the fire and heat and frenzy in his chest kept building and building and building like little explosions threatening to trigger a kill switch that’d shatter him to pieces.
Already flung off the edge, he started teetering off another cliff, like a never-ending freefall that once more that night pulled him into a world of pain.
But this time, Malcolm welcomed the sensation. He wanted to feel again what too much pleasure felt like. He wanted Rhode to keep going. Let her take from him what she wanted.
This was just like his runs, wasn’t it? Heart racing, muscles howling, he could push his limits. He wanted to withstand the discomfort. He would do what felt impossible.
After what felt to Malcolm like an eternity spent in an agony of pleasure, Rhode hissed out words he didn’t recognize. Judging by the faint flutters from her clenches around him and the precious cries torn out of her throat, it was her turn for relief.
She fell towards him, still rubbing it out on him, squeezing him dry.
Both bodies continued to writhe as their greedy owners gasped and hissed and whimpered, drawing out the last bits of bliss from and for each other, until, finally, Malcolm slipped out of her.
He felt lightheaded. Catching his breath was difficult with Rhode on his chest, and he became extremely conscious about how deeply he was breathing. He didn’t want it to seem like he was trying to push her off or was complaining about her weight on him. But that was fine. He could manage this, too.
As his lungs filled themselves with oxygen, he tried to take in all that had happened between them. Just... “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” Rhode said. “That was...”
Malcolm laid there, unable to move. His muscles were spent and his eyelids too heavy. He was too conked out to think straight. But he was conscious enough to notice any slickness evaporate from his skin and any dried wetness vanish away. He felt clean, if not sweaty.
“Thanks,” he said through a breath. “Happy birthday, Rhode.”
Against the crook of his neck, Malcolm could feel her lips widen. “That’s Your Highness to you,” she said breathily.
Malcolm huffed a laugh, rolling his eyes under his lids. “Happy birthday, Your Highness.”
The last thing he heard before his brain shut down was a murmured thank you.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm dreamed he was walking down an empty beach, with rays of sunshine kissing a pleasant warmth into his skin.
He felt his hand being tugged and fingers slip through his grasp. Jet black hair and a white dress appeared before him, billowing in the wind as the woman at his side took off towards the water.
She laughed as she marked the virgin sand with a trail of footprints, somehow never managing to reach the waves. Chuckling along, Malcolm ran after her.
Under a summer sky, their feet touched down on more and more beach, and as he got closer and closer, his breath began to shorten.
A faster runner than he’d figured. The thought made him grin.
Then finally, strands of black were blinding him, and he felt her cheek turning to catch his lips. With a last laugh, she turned in her arms to face him.
But the darkness in his vision persisted. The tide had risen into a tsunami.
He was going to drown.
Notes:
2️⃣7️⃣ 🦈
And there we have it. Statistical approaches + smut.
But enough about smut! We can talk about children’s fables! The idiomatic proverb Rhode used that Malcolm kept laughing at is based on one of Aesop’s stories known as “The Leap at Rhodes” (link in bibliography).
And finally, another survey. It’s super quick and mostly about rating concerns.
Chapter 7: In which Malcolm faces death
Notes:
Nearly 11k this time, all in one go! Hope you're all well.
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Malcolm woke up screaming.
Every square millimeter of his body was being crushed. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t move. He could almost feel his soul leave his body.
The iciest pressure dug into his pores, like he was being buried alive in the snow dumps of Illinois’s cruelest storms.
Except why couldn’t he just freeze right now? Surely an all-consuming numbness would beat the feeling of being squished to death from every imaginable angle?
Over his own screams, a woman was shrieking. “Mà tòn Día. Ma ton Día! Skatá! SKATÁ!!”
The ground shifted beneath Malcolm’s neck, but something rather cushy was keeping his head perched up.
“Hey. Hey! Malcolm. Drink this!” the voice said.
Sugary pecan dribbled onto his tongue, and he was forced to swallow to breathe.
Instantly, the pain receded. The darkness turned into a blurry red light.
But the fading crushing sensation was replaced by a burn in his chest as trickles of liquid pecan entered his airways.
Just as Malcolm erupted into a coughing fit, his windpipe suddenly cleared.
When he finally blinked away the tears in his eyes, he happened upon the strange sight of Rhode peering over him upside down, looking like she was preparing for the third coming of Gaea.
“I am so sorry!” she cheeped.
Malcolm jerked under the uncomfortable touch of her fingers on his neck, exactly where the nectar he choked on had vanished.
Adjusting his head on her lap, Rhode got into a more comfortable position and swore as she snatched the glass of nectar that fell onto her mattress.
The hand cradling Malcolm’s face went to her hair as she let out a deep breath. Her bangles were clinking like cymbals, and he winced at every note, somehow unable to move.
“Oh Fates,” Rhode said, “you’re still—”
The ropes binding him disappeared, and under the piles of blankets Rhode willed over him right now, he pulled his limbs back to his body with a whimper.
Everything hurt. But, thankfully, the torture had turned from a sitting-on-balls level of pain all over his body to a much more manageable ache.
What the actual fuck?
“What...?” he croaked.
Rhode touched the glass of some drink to his lips. He was too tired to question it or refuse.
“We fell asleep,” she said. “It seems the effects of the nectar were wearing off. But you should be fine for the next twelve hours.”
Malcolm drank a few gulps and groaned. “I... dying.”
“You’re okay now. You’ll be okay,” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Just stay here until the morning. You’re in no condition to move.”
His muscles strained to reach for the glass of nectar. But Rhode swatted his hands away.
With a tired fury, Malcolm tried to glare at her. “Wha—?”
“I just said you’re in no condition to move,” said Rhode with a huff. “Keep still. You’ll get better faster.” She touched the glass to his lips once more and tilted the nectar into his mouth. “Don’t put your pride above your health. It’s not cool.”
I’m not, Malcolm wanted to say. Fucking geez. But his mouth was full, he was tired, and he didn’t want to piss her off.
He sensed his strength return after several more sips, and upon the tell-tale sparks under his skin that signaled he was approaching self-combustion, he backed away a smidge and shook his head.
“Too much?” said Rhode.
“Would be.”
Malcolm tested his muscles. They were still achy as hell, but he figured that was also from the weight of the pile of blankets Rhode had thrown over him. At least he wasn’t cold anymore.
“Feeling much better now,” he said, and met Rhode’s gaze. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Setting the nectar aside, Rhode laid his head on a pillow and sat herself beside him.
Malcolm kept his eyes on her and regretted the decision immediately upon the realization that she was still unclothed. For her part, Rhode appeared totally unfazed.
Flitting glances at his face, she cautiously lifted one of his hands to rest on her knee and used her thumbs to press lines into his wrist and up to his palm.
Malcolm’s lips twitched. “They’re good.” And truly, it was unnecessary. “Does feel better though,” he said anyway.
It was entirely too nice to ever stop. And when Rhode began to massage his other hand, he couldn’t help but curl his fingers to brush her wrist.
Malcolm poked his mind awake after every labored blink. Sleep was taking over, and he fought its forces valiantly.
Well, no. Because there was a better reason to stay awake, wasn’t there? Because right now, he had zero desire to get up and leave Rhode’s bed.
Have to get up, prodded his brain. Leave. Camp. Late.
Right. That reason.
With all his might and none of his pleasure, Malcolm let the dread hovering around him seep into his bones.
Ughhhh.
It took all of him to speak. “What time is it?”
“It’s nearly 2 AM. Our time,” said Rhode, with a final stroke of his wrist. “Just stay until morning. Then you can go back to Camp Half-Blood.”
“Think you just want me here,” he mumbled tiredly.
Then came a broad smile accompanied by a chuckle that his subconscious described to him as sweet and lovely.
Rhode shushed him. “Just rest.”
Proud he actually got her to laugh, Malcolm’s lips tugged into a smile. He stopped fighting the weight of his eyelids and felt the blankets tuck in slightly around him. Four seconds later, he blanked out.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
When Malcolm woke up again, his body felt like sweaty mush. He blinked at the image of a rocky coral wall and teal sheets.
The white noise surrounding him sounded not like the fans at camp, nor the AC in Kenwood, but rather like faint hums and glugs. Almost as though he were swimming. Was he... under... water?
And why did he feel like he was naked? Under a pile of blankets, Malcolm checked to see that he was.
Well, that was unusual. Rather uncomfortable, too.
Trying not to freak at how creepy this felt, he focused his efforts on finding clues.
Looking up, he spotted a glass of nectar on the bedside table. To its right, a note bearing his name rested on a pile of books.
Malcolm, the note read. He heard the written words like an echo.
I hope you’re feeling better. You last had the dose of nectar at 2 AM. It’ll last you 12 hours. Here’s some more if you need.
– R
It was in Greek.
On the other side—the front of the paper actually, judging by how it curled—were Latin letters. English, he guessed. Written halfway. In cursive. He could barely make out any of it.
Feeling like Alice, he heeded the instructions of his savior.
Long, black hair sprawled across a pillow on his left. Looking peaceful as she hugged a pillow, Rhode was resting on the blankets over his, covered by her own quilt that didn’t quite cover her bare shoulders.
How strange that she also didn’t seem to have her cl—
Oh. Oh!
In flashes, the events of the night previous came back to him. Every cliff’s edge he’d leaped from. The quelled fears and wondrous thrills. All the secrets they’d made.
Malcolm turned away his burning face.
That. Actually. Happened.
And then he’d nearly died. All because he slept with her. Wonderful. Another near-death experience to add to his list. Among the records of monsters and street gangs, there was now this sea princess.
What the actual hell? mocked a voice in his head. Was it worth it?
He glanced again at Rhode. In theory, no. In theory, having underwater sex to the point of being knocked out and inching towards death had to be the stupidest decision he had ever made in his life. In practice, however... well, that was a different story.
His mind flooded with memories of their mental tug-of-war games, his inability to resist her, and her glorious rewards for his efforts and submission. This would’ve been one of the better ways to die. It was a complete accident anyway.
But everything else... hadn’t been.
He found himself grinning. Malcolm tore his gaze away from Rhode and just sat there for a minute in her colossal presence while he considered his options.
His body was begging him to hit the sheets again, but the graininess he noticed on his teeth just felt too gross to leave himself be.
Ah, gods. He must’ve also still been wearing his contacts.
With a sigh, he quickly got up.
Trying not to wake her, Malcolm pulled a corner of one of his four blankets over her shoulders and shuffled his bare ass across the chilly room over to his pile of clothes on Rhode’s couch.
Picking out his boxer briefs from the heap, Malcolm slid them on and tried not to be disturbed by the fact that he was now also wearing yesterday’s underwear. He felt clean, though, and then remembered the currently sleeping goddess was to thank for that.
And new campers asked why he never went on any quests. Ha.
Well. It was one reason.
With a last glance at Rhode, Malcolm gently slipped into her bathroom, making a beeline for the facilities. Just as he was about to finally take his contacts out, he met his mirror reflection and reeled at the red marks peppering his chest and neck.
Malcolm swore under his breath and brushed over one experimentally—to an absense of smarting pain. Testing another theory, he scrubbed one vigorously with soapy water, and to his frustrated relief, the mark grew fainter.
He sighed and resigned himself to the task, doing his best not to make a wretched mess of the countertop. Or to think about how much more he was risking corneal infection just because Rhode had practically used him as a lipstick tester.
With 70% of the lipstick stains now a light pink after fifteen minutes of scrubbing, the soap suds and water that ran down his arms and across the countertop were now trickling onto the floor, making his mouth pour out a few too many fucks.
None of this was making any sense. Why he’d ever have to wrestle with lipstick stains on him gods knew what time it was. Why water could drip in water. Why there wasn’t a better solution in the fucking first place to simply—
Tucked in the corner of the countertop, smirking at him just out of arm’s reach, sat a stack of cotton pads and a bottle of makeup remover.
For a moment, he simply stared, fingers slackening as his jaw clenched.
After allowing himself one mental growl, he took a slow, deep breath, wiped off every bit of red he could find, and launched all his disgruntlement in the soaked mess of tissues that he hurled into the trash.
Prowling for more hygiene supplies, he crouched beneath the sink. Just as Malcolm opened the cupboard, the bathroom door opened, and he fought his flinch and that tightening in his chest, remarkably similar to all the times his grandma caught him dressing his wounds.
“You better not be robbing me,” said Rhode.
Malcolm swiveled around in his squat.
She stood in the doorway, tying a bow of a patterned plum robe that might have had some functional purpose were it not for the fact that he could pretty much see through all the lace. His brain protested that there was practically no point to that thing (and thanked her all the same).
Rhode leaned against the door frame. “Looking for something?”
Some time must’ve passed as Malcolm again processed the reality of the past fifteen hours, because she then said, “You know, I can’t help you if you don’t answer me.”
What was she talking about again?
“A toothbrush!” said Malcolm.
Rhode smiled. “There should be some extras deep in the bottom-left corner.”
While Malcolm unboxed his new brush, she uncapped her toothpaste and handed it to him. Once more, he barely tried not to touch her.
And they brushed their teeth together. Though Malcolm would’ve preferred his electric toothbrush and his stannous fluoride toothpaste (and floss and a tongue scraper), the moment nonetheless felt special. That he had the right—
“I can totally get out of here ASAP if you want,” he said immediately after spitting out toothpaste. “Although would it be all right if I use your shower? If not, that’s fine.”
“Go ahead,” said Rhode with a mouthful of toothpaste froth. She waved her hand and busied herself with lining up products on the counter.
As she finished brushing her teeth, Malcolm looked around at the lack of rods on the walls and the absence of plush cotton. He would have even taken thin.
“Right,” he said. “I noticed last night... you don’t have... any... towels?”
“Well, why would I need them? I just step into my clothes,” said Rhode, turning to face him. “Do you want me to dry you when you’re done?”
“Uh.”
“It doesn’t have to be weird,” she said.
Malcolm flushed nonetheless—before Rhode smiled and made a towel appear and held it out to him.
“Turkish cotton,” she offered.
And she wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t even looking away from his body.
Malcolm took the towel. “Do you mind?”
Rhode gave another playful smile as she left her bathroom.
Under the showerhead, a dopey grin took hold, and he laughed silently at the silliness of it all.
But even alone, a half-dozen Rhodes surrounded him with their bright, blazing eyes on him. The one today from just now, so upfront and unashamed in her appreciation. The one on Annabeth’s birthday brunch, unraveling him as his back was turned. The ones yesterday, so welcoming and knowing and wanting and giving. Like when she nodded after he asked if he could kiss her. When she sat on his face and brushed her fingers through his hair. When she crouched over him and rode him to shattering pieces. When she kneeled before him and showed him the definition of carnality.
No. She was making fun of him then, wasn’t she? He’d seen that malicious spark in her gaze as she made him thank her like the good boy she said he was? She’d straight up laughed at him and made him beg.
Gods, how pesty she was. How aggravating. How startling. How thrilling.
And how delightfully soothing that for every not-even-two-minutes, there were a dozen gentle pecks, a handful of whispered comforts in his ear, and a half-written English note.
Lathering himself with the silkiest cleansers, Malcolm familiarized himself with Rhode’s soap scents and their placements—factoids that he suspected only a few of billions had ever learned.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm twiddled his thumbs on Rhode’s couch as she got ready, happily directing his attention away from his wearing of yesterday’s clothes to the show Rhode had put on last night from this very spot.
It wasn’t actually a show, he corrected himself. She just hadn’t cared if he’d watched her. He hadn’t seen much of it anyway. What followed thereafter... Now that had been a show, and one he was everloving grateful to have been invited to. Into.
Right there before his eyes was the bed that would forever have seen the two of them fuck.
Right there to his left was the sacred place she’d let him undress her. Where she had spiked his heart rate with roaming hands and kisses on his neck. Where he had gotten distracted by her—
Rhode exited her bathroom in another ridiculously scanty robe.
Totally normal.
“Is it a child-of-Poseidon thing to get a shark tattoo?” he said.
“We,” Rhode spoke in a lowered voice, “are actually part of a secret cult of stewards who hunt mortals. Triton also has one. It’s above his buttocks.”
Huffing a laugh, Malcolm let the convo die there and watched her lay a selection of blue dresses on her bed. Whether she’d consider it staring, she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
But his curiosity and the unnerving silence forced him to say “How do you pick your outfits?”
Rhode evaluated him for a moment with an amused expression. “I have an informal lunch with some merfolk in the afternoon near the Caribbean. They say it’s for my birthday, but everyone presumes they want to discuss the trade agreement. So, I have to come across as serious, yet not too official, and open to collaboration, yet not a pushover. These dress styles match that. And I want to wear something from their people as a reminder of their historical relationship with Atlantis. This shade of blue,” she said, holding up one of the five options, “was the exact color of the waters in which we last met about strengthening ties to other communities. The blue also means openness. Paired with the gold leaves of the pearls I’ll wear, it specifically indicates unity.”
Malcolm’s brows flew up.
Rhode cracked a smile. “I’m kidding. I just like the dress. But the pearls I’ll be wearing are from them.”
He shook his head at her antics. It made her even giddier.
In the long lull that followed as Rhode went about her room, collecting and depositing clothing and other items here and there, Malcolm refrained from reaching for his phone or notebook and he tried to figure out what else to say to her.
Ultimately, his overactive mind wanted to focus on what she was doing and what every foot of this room looked like. He wondered how much of this image he could memorize.
“What are your plans for today?” asked Rhode, taking a seat at her vanity.
Relieved by the end of that painfully awkward silence, Malcolm sank deeper into the couch. “Reading mostly,” he said. “Prepping classes for the younger campers. Training. Work-wise, I get to catch up or get ahead.”
He provided details upon her questions as he observed her meticulous routine.
“What type of class?” she wanted to know while brushing a skin-colored liquid—foundation?—onto her face. (Understanding and making decisions based on information in daily life, he told her.)
“What kind of training?” she asked, applying lipstick and smacking her lips. (Bouldering and running.)
As he walked her through his New Athenian responsibilities, she moved on to her eyelids, with a sponge and three brushes for one color then another. Then another. Then another.
It took four colors?
“Are you going to keep staring?” Rhode said, continuing her smudging motions.
“Sorry. It’s just... fascinating, I guess. Do you do this every day?”
She turned to look at him like he was a weirdo. Maybe he was. Some people had told him his ADHD-induced staring was weird.
“I mean, as a god, can’t you magically get ready with a snap of your fingers?” he said.
Rhode faced the mirror again to finish blending the colors on her eyelids.
“Where’s the fun in that?” she said. “I do cheat with the hair though. There’s only so much you can do to Greek curls with a busy schedule, and they’re still a pain to deal with sometimes.”
Oh, he could imagine. He’d take it to the grave that his mortal sister’s hair was an absolute pain in his ass. But Sadie would never know. Ever. The oiling, dear gods. The endless deep conditioning and oiling. And the spraying and sectioning and detangling—fingers and comb. And the oiling. The drenched T-shirts and wet floors. And the cleaning. And the oiling.
And, of course, he would never say no to Sadie’s pouty complaints of achy arms, nor her excited requests to “play chess”. Rounds upon rounds of chess. And even purely selfishly, he’d offer because there’d just be more unnecessary T-shirts and spilled hair masks and oily floors otherwise. It had helped that all that chess during hair time had propelled her to become a city champion. At least before she’d lost interest in competing and forced him to draw his pride and motivation solely from achieving longer lengths and less breakage.
So it validated Malcolm beyond belief that Rhode would just cheat with her hair, especially considering how much more manageable it already appeared to be in the first place. And on a Saturday.
And, okay, yes, it irked him, too. Because in the three days—four days now—that he’d seen Rhode, she had sported five different hairstyles. That was just unfair.
Six, counting the momentary ponytail, he then remembered.
He replayed what he could recall from that moment, and just as he was getting to the good part, the sudden clack of Rhode shutting her eyeshadow trays jolted him out of his reverie.
As she began combing her brows, Malcolm fought his dyslexia, trying his hardest to absorb the large letters on the closest of the several palettes Rhode had leaned against the mirror.
AKNED?
ANKED?
NAKED. Probably that.
He usually didn’t struggle with such simple words anymore.
Malcolm gave himself patience. And for a greater challenge, he moved on to the small print and took a few moments to finally make out the words: Urban Decay.
Huh. Sounded like a certain city with depopulation, soaring crime, ever increasing debt...
Rhode must’ve caught his frown. “Are you one of those people who’ll say I shouldn’t wear makeup?” she said, proceeding to make faces at the mirror as she applied her mascara.
Malcolm scoffed. “You can do whatever in Hades you want.”
She paused and turned to face him, one eye done, one eye not. “Really,” she said.
Like I said last night—
I don’t think—
“Screw what I think.”
Rhode extended her eyelashes on the opposite side. “And you don’t think it’s vain,” she said, her statement a question.
Putting away her mascara, she tamed her flyways with another mascara device and picked out pearl earrings from the iridescent abalone shells on her vanity.
Malcolm did think. “It’s self-expression, isn’t it? And it’s kind of an art, right? My mother’s the goddess of crafts. I think I get it.”
It wasn’t like Athena didn’t care about her own beauty either (*cough* Apple of Discord *cough*).
“Hmm” was all Rhode said.
“Wouldn’t...” he tried. “Well, wouldn’t makeup-shaming be worse, since it enforces even more impossible standards?”
“How do we win in this world?” she said as she floofed her hair and positioned strands to fall just so with her earrings.
“Well, how do you? ” he said.
Rhode smiled but didn’t answer, and he felt too weird to mention it hadn’t actually been a rhetorical question.
Looking around her vanity, Rhode directed her attention to his vicinity. “Do you mind passing me the pearl necklace from that cupboard next to you? Third drawer.”
There were at least seven.
“The one with the gold leaves, you said,” Malcolm tried to clarify.
But that only narrowed it down to three.
“The big leaves one?” he asked. “Or the wreath-looking one? Or the, like, hanging one?”
“The wreath-looking one, please.”
Gently picking up her selection, Malcolm brought it to her. It was a sizeable yet delicate piece. he wondered how old it was and how much it cost.
As Rhode struggled to put it on, Malcolm merely flitted glances yet fidgeted nonetheless.
“Do you want me to help?” he said.
Rhode’s eyes found his in the mirror. “It’s okay, I can do it.”
As it turned out, she couldn’t. The loop for the hook had come loose.
“I have some mini pliers in my pocket knife,” Malcolm offered.
Thank you, Leo.
At her say-so, Malcolm kneeled next to her and, under Rhode’s observation, very carefully bent the metal clasp.
Just inches away, he felt the heavy weight of her scrutiny. The only other time she had been this close for this long, he thought, was the night before. And pretty much every time they had been this close...
“He’s a handyman,” she said. “You’re quite talented with your hands, aren’t you?”
“Wow. An actual compliment from you.”
He patted himself on the back for managing to speak so nonchalantly in this proximity.
Rhode erupted in an instant. “I complimented you in many ways last night!”
In a sense, he supposed. He thought back to her many ways, flushing at the thought that they were compliments.
“Well, then, thank you,” he said, just over a mumble.
Rhode inspected the necklace. “You know how to weave,” she said. “Do you know how to sew, too?” she asked.
“Yeah? And my grandmother taught me how to crochet and knit.” His smile grew at the memory of his grandma trying to entertain him with activity after activity when his ADHD had driven her wild.
“Then you could be helpful with my clothing,” Rhode said. “Maybe I could just keep you here as my personal concubine. Perhaps ‘gigolo’ would be a more appropriate term.”
Because the most important part of that suggestion was semantics.
Rhode’s eyes roamed his face. She felt even closer to him now. Too close to be... appropriate—particularly considering her bathrobe attire—and too far to tame his anticipatory exhilaration.
Content with just breathing in that flowery scent (Second to the left, Malcolm remembered. He’d used the one just right of that this morning.), Malcolm nonetheless had the temerity to think they probably would have made out again if Rhode weren’t already wearing lipstick.
“No, I’ll take pity on you,” she said quietly, while his eyes told his brain that wow, her mascaraed lashes really made her green eyes pop. “You did enough begging last night.”
Rhode smiled as Malcolm’s face reddened.
“Do you threaten to imprison everyone you sleep with?” he said.
“I would employ you, not imprison you,” she said. “And I never actually allow them to stay over. Boundaries. Security.”
“Lucky me.”
Mirth turned to gravitas. Gravitas turned to remorse. “That shouldn’t have happened,” she said, reaching for his wrist.
It took Malcolm some effort to process that she’d asked how he was feeling and had offered to have a doctor look at him.
“Well, I’m not dead,” he said.
No, he’d felt very much alive last night. Kind of like the amount of aliveness had sucked up whatever he’d been able to feel, leading him closer to death.
Malcolm imagined merpeople hauling his dead body out of Rhode’s room. He saw his funeral being conducted in Camp Half-Blood or Chicago. Cause of death? Sex with sea goddess. He snorted on the inside at the thought.
Rhode’s brows twitched. “I should have given you more of the nectar beforehand. I really didn’t mean for the both of us to fall asleep.”
“That was on me, too. I should’ve remembered,” Malcolm said. “But who knew it’d be that good, right?” he dared to add.
Rhode’s jaw dropped for a moment. “Excuse me? I knew because I did the work,” she said.
“Mmm, you didn’t do all of it,” he said.
When she stood, he returned to his spot on the couch and promptly looked away as she began putting on her dress.
“There was this part,” he said, “where you were yelling and cursing and thrashing uncontrollably.” He grinned at the memory.
Yeah, he would definitely be storing that in his most treasured memories of proud moments. Her prized scream was like his own reward of a mission accomplished.
Which he wasn’t going to think about right now. Nope. As she was changing in his presence, no less.
Hearing a long zip, he figured he could look now.
And Rhode, thankfully, was now too preoccupied trying to color-match different heels to her dress to notice he’d resorted to clenching his thighs to redirect his blood flow.
“I suppose that’s what I get for bedding an overachiever,” she said, deciding on a pair of white heels.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Rhode eyed him intently. “You’re okay, though? We do have a doctor on staff. It really would be so easy and quick to have her see you.”
“Really, I’m good,” Malcolm said. “Thanks. And I’m not just saying that because guys don’t like going to doctors... which helps decrease their life expectancy....”
Why was he saying this?
“Maybe if I’d... paced myself...” Rhode said on the verge of a grin.
That was new. And not a bad one. Malcolm already wanted her to say it again.
“Oh, I think you did,” he said. “Four times, if I counted correctly. Or maybe five?”
He hadn’t at all counted four. It was for the margin of error.
Rhode laughed—until Malcolm’s stomach grumbled loudly.
Wow. Because that wasn’t awkward.
“I guess we worked up quite an appetite,” Malcolm managed with a grimace.
“I’ll take you to the dining room,” said Rhode. “I’m sure we have leftovers.”
Malcolm smiled at her. “That’s nice of you.”
Following her to the doorway, he realized he wasn’t being the nicest he could be.
“This might be weird to say,” he began, “but it’d probably be rude not to...” Already shriveling under Rhode’s expectant gaze, he cursed himself for a sec for not having thought this through before blabbering. Last night... You should know... “You’re very—like, amazingly—” What was the most fitting word here? “—thorough.”
A smile spread across Rhode’s face. She waggled her brows once at him. “I’m good at what I do.”
“And who?” he blurted out in response.
Whom, his mind yelled.
He ignored it and reveled in her chuckle. And the once-over that followed it.
Stepping through the doorway out her room, Malcolm gained a bounce in his step. He probably couldn’t run at his usual speeds now, but he at least felt an urge and an ability to do a decent jog. Perhaps it was the deadline they were physically walking to that propelled him to overcome his jitters and flood Rhode with inquiries.
As she walked with him out of her wing towards the main palace building, it seemed easy to ask about Atlantis’s trade agreement and ocean de-acidification proposals. Malcolm didn’t even make any pretense about how he had happened to hear about so-and-so or how he had presumed this-and-that would be the case.
Rhode walked slowly (half his typical strides) and talked rapidly (nearly twice his usual speed), delighting Malcolm in her answers. He got an extra kick out of seeing her light up at his questions about how the current deal she was handling related to the ones she negotiated during the early days of her island and what it had been like to codify the first maritime laws.
Heading into another hallway, Rhode momentarily greeted Timaeus, on duty again, and was practically walking sideways at this point as she talked with her hands and told Malcolm about the expansions and rewrites of those codes.
“I can show you this diagram on how sea laws generally developed over the years,” she said. She came to a halt and patted around her hips, only to realize she’d forgotten her bag.
Malcolm stopped walking and faced her head-on. “I did actually see it,” he volunteered. “At least I think it’s the same one. The circular one that branches out with the segments of the different legal areas? It was also in Galene’s textbook.”
Also. There was a lot he said through those two syllables.
For a long while, Rhode simply looked at him intently. Saying or evaluating what, he couldn’t tell. But her stormy irises, fixed solely on him, were stirring up something inside him and heating his loins in the same way they had when she’d asked to rip his shirt off.
She wasn’t even touching him, but his skin remembered how she had reached beneath his shirt to brush her thumbs at his sides.
Malcolm waited. Malcolm swallowed. Malcolm held his breath as he looked back at her.
And then that pressure in his chest that blocked his airways let up when Rhode’s intense stare finally softened.
“I have to get my purse,” she said with a hint of a pout.
He nodded, his smile building at the cute expression.
When another grumble of his stomach resounded in the empty hallway, Malcolm let out a chuckle.
Rhode smiled. “Timaeus can take you to the dining room,” she said. “I’ll see you there.”
Malcolm nodded again, twitching his lips when she brushed against him to head back to her room. He fought his face harder as Timaeus emerged from the next room into the hallway.
Rocking on the balls of his feet, Malcolm bit the insides of his lips and turned to his new companion. “Hi, Timaeus.”
It was no use. His quivering facial muscles couldn’t constrain his grin. He hoped Timaeus wouldn’t be telling Rhode later.
Timaeus gripped his spear tighter as he watched Malcolm struggle. “Follow me,” he said.
“Did you end up having cake?” Malcolm said.
Timaeus said nothing as he led Malcolm into one of the hallways Malcolm and Rhode had whizzed past the night before.
Malcolm took in what he could of the hall’s landscapes and pottery and tried again as they approached the end of the hall. “Do you have both the night and morning shifts?”
“What concerns you about my shifts?” said Timaeus, peering at him with narrowed eyes.
Malcolm shrugged. “Just making conversation.”
“Malcolm?” he heard a familiar deep voice far ahead of him.
Oh! Outside world? Had there been an outside world all this time?
Don’t freak out.
Forcing his feet to move, he placed his thumbs in his pockets and turned his head. “Percy. What’re you doing here?”
After a gape and a long blink, Percy said, “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
Each of the demigods stared at the other. Neither knew what to say. Neither of them moved. It really would have been comical had the Fates chosen anyone else to suffer through this.
Break the silence, dammit. Say something.
“You never mentioned you and Rhode had matching tattoos” happened to be the words that flew out of Malcolm’s mouth.
Shit. Not that.
Percy’s eyes widened even more if it were possible. “And how would you know that?” he said with a knowing look. Looking at maps?
She wasn’t wearing anything. No. She... told me. Yes. It was only her shoulder.
“You’ll get it when you’re older, Percy,” came Rhode’s voice behind him with the clacking of heels.
Damn, he’d had that!
Rhode offered Malcolm an object wrapped in tissue. “Your toothbrush,” she said.
Under Percy’s and Timaeus’s stares, Malcolm’s heart managed to keep beating. He focused instead on Rhode, who took his shy thanks in exchange for a kind smile.
Percy did another obnoxiously long blink as Malcolm pocketed the toothbrush.
“Could you accompany Malcolm while I help get the leftovers?” Rhode asked her brother.
“You don’t have to,” Malcolm muttered, still unable to look at Percy.
“Your siblings might want some. Zeke seemed to really like the cake,” she said with a touch of his arm.
The nerves in his arm were even tinglier in Percy and Timaeus’s presence.
“Ohhh-kaay,” said Percy, still wide-eyed once Rhode set off to the kitchens.
Malcolm wanted to say something to him. Just something. But as he followed Percy and Timaeus into another hallway, he couldn’t figure out what in Hades would be appropriate.
It didn’t help that he was distracted by all the artifacts in that hallway that he hadn’t had the opportunity to study sufficiently the night before.
And with that tapestry of Rhode unfurled for all to see, it was as though there was a spotlight on the person who’d drawn her. What other evidence would have been more blatant of his worship?
Thankfully, Percy had mercy. “Plans for today?” he said, with merely a glance at the artwork. “Just reading, training...?”
Malcolm’s yeah turned into a near squeak as they turned a corner. He swore his heart nearly stopped.
Right then and there, he decided that if he’d ever again doubted his bisexuality, he’d think to this moment.
Because hardly a meter away stood the most gorgeous specimen of man with the perfect tan and the twinkliest eyes and the softest, shiniest fluff of the darkest hair. His unbuttoned red Hawaiian shirt did all the right things to show off his bear-like qualities, from his broad shoulders to his abundant chest hair. And Malcolm was no twig, but this guy was a true husky.
“I’m giving Alicia a swimming lesson before taking Annabeth out to dinner,” came Percy’s voice in the distance. “Where should I— Morning, Dad. Where should I drop her off?”
Malcolm’s brain was too busy trying to comprehend why his instincts were drumming a staccato of warnings.
“Malcolm?” Percy said.
“Um.”
In the smokiest voice he’d ever heard—Smoky? Could voices sound smoky? And how could it sound so smoky if it was so clear, too?—Poseidon greeted his son before addressing their guest. “Ah, Malcolm Pace, isn’t it? We finally meet.”
“Uh,” Malcolm said.
Poseidon was staring him down.
Malcolm made another attempt. “Um. Lord Poseidon.”
He could almost sense his heart rate speeding, as if being underwater amplified the beats.
As he bowed, the pieces were fitting together. That this was not only the father of the woman he had just *ahem* done some genital exercise with. This was the God of Too Many Natural Disasters. This was his mother’s archenemy. This was the largest investor of his life’s work.
How the FUCK had that slipped his mind?
Now it was his instincts—focused on the scent of sandalwood and beach and man—that struggled to catch up to his mind.
Poseidon was studying him with a frown. “Yet another of Athena’s children who decided it would be a splendid idea to commit sacrilege in my domain.”
Shiiiit. He knows? How does he know?
Beside them, a dolphin glided into the dining room. “It’s like all the sex Athena doesn’t have balances out with all the sex her children have,” the dolphin said. “And with yours, it seems.”
That’s it. Malcolm was really going to die.
Was it worth it? a voice in his head asked again.
He wasn’t sure this time. He really should have reevaluated his options last night.
“Shut it, Delphin,” said Rhode, who had come back with Triton, each with two trays of food.
Her presence barely cleared the foggy panic settling in him under Poseidon’s menacing stare. But it was enough to make Malcolm realize he still hadn’t spoken.
His heart was thundering at faster speeds. All he had accomplished so far felt on the verge of destruction.
He swallowed as he faced Poseidon. “I’m so sorry,” he tried. “I really hadn’t meant to.”
Rhode suddenly rounded on him. “You’re sorry?!” she fumed. “You didn’t mean to?!”
“No!” he said. “I’m not. I did.”
“Ah, so you thought you could lie to me,” Poseidon said, with a look nearly as piercing as the spikes of the glowing trident in his hand.
“No, I meant—”
What did he mean? That he hadn’t planned it? What did that matter if he’d still done it? More than once, no less. He’d had hours to have at least realized.
And there was something else to it he couldn’t manage to word.
Two pairs of green eyes—one blacker, one bluer—chained him to the spot. Poseidon was scowling at him. Rhode looked fierce, furious, and inhuman.
“Please don’t turn me into a fish,” Malcolm said in a voice he barely recognized.
Poseidon shot him a dirty look. “I thought Athena’s children were quicker on their feet.”
Malcolm had the brain capacity to be offended.
“In his defense, I’ve never seen him like this,” Percy said, snacking on nori chips. He looked like he was watching prime entertainment. “What happened to you? It’s like your brain’s short-circuited.”
Rhode happened.
Fortunately, his brain could process that that would have been a very unwise thing to say.
But it was so hard to think under the barrage of all these bad emotions he couldn’t even parse at this instant.
He had to find a way out before more trouble brewed. He needed someone’s help, and he wasn’t sure who would come to his aid. Unless...
Malcolm faced Poseidon. “Lord Poseidon, I am sorry I probably—very likely—crossed a professional line. I was requested to visit and to stay. I’d, of course, assumed—and respected that—Princess Rhode had enough of a say in her life to do whatever she wanted. So I obviously didn’t think to question her invitation. Nor would I. And who would I have been to decline Her Highness’s... propositions when I could be of service, especially on her birthday?”
Gods damn gigolo he was.
Poseidon’s trident glowed brighter as he glared.
Okay, Malcolm was really pushing it.
But Poseidon was no longer staring him down. Instead, the lord of the seas faced his daughter. “I think you need to reevaluate your choices.”
Rhode rolled her eyes.
(“One to talk,” muttered Triton.)
Poseidon then turned to Malcolm. “And as for you—”
“Poseidon, leave him alone,” Rhode drawled, way more concerned about spreading feta on crackers.
(“Poseidon,” Triton repeated just over his breath.)
“This is my home as well,” Rhode said, “and I shouldn’t have to remind you that I don’t need your permission.” She dressed another cracker. “What would Mother say?” she then hissed at him, with a momentary glance away from the snack in her hand.
(“Likely that she still doesn’t understand the appeal of casual sex,” Triton supplied.)
But then Rhode redirected her glare to Malcolm, slinking towards him as he was hit with wave upon wave of regret and guilt. He couldn’t fault her, really, for whatever came next.
Lay it on me.
Her gaze fixed on him like daggers pinning him in his place. Malcolm braced himself.
“And it’s not his fault I tied him up to my bed,” she said. “Although he did consent to that.”
Rhode ended her retort with a crunch of her cracker and the smuggest, most satisfying smirk Malcolm had ever witnessed.
Fucking shit. Oh, what a...
In Malcolm’s purview, Percy choked on a bite of spanakopita. Poseidon huffed. Delphin blew a puff of bubbles out his blowhole. And Triton tutted as he flipped a page of his newspaper.
Malcolm’s face was burning as he stood there stupidly, just watching Rhode chew.
Her eyes didn’t even dare him to come at her. They didn’t need to. Not when she already knew she won.
With as much confidence as he could muster, Malcolm spread his arms and said, “Special birthday treat. Happy birthday, Princess.” He sent a wink her way.
Rhode swallowed her bite. “You know, you even didn’t turn this red when I was on my—”
“That is enough, thank you, Rhódē,” Poseidon cut in.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or puke,” Percy muttered. “And Dad, you’ve never complained about Annabeth, so I don’t think you can say this has to do with Athena.”
“Plus, it seems you have even more leverage against her now,” Delphin remarked.
As Delphin horsed around, Malcolm tried to snap out of his slowness. But there was a cloudiness around him he couldn’t quite shake.
A silence persisted until Percy and Delphin struck up a conversation about the food and tried to get Poseidon to join in.
When Rhode leveled her father with a look, Poseidon resigned to offer Malcolm a seat. Which Malcolm was actually pleased about.
Slowly trying to figure out where to sit, he figured a seat next to just Delphin was the best option. Except Delphin wasn’t claiming a spot. Just as Malcolm decided he’d sit next to Percy, Rhode got up from her seat across him to greet her mother with pressed cheeks.
In the doorway beside Amphitrite stood Annabeth, who inconspicuously mouthed a what to him. Malcolm wanted to hide.
“Good morning, Lady Amphitrite,” boomed Poseidon with a small grin and bright eyes.
The queen kissed her husband.
“My lady,” said Delphin, “this is a son of Athena.”
Amphitrite nodded at Malcolm. “Malcolm Pace, yes. We met yesterday. Thank you again for your painting. Pherousa told me it’s hanging at the gallery now.”
Even after reading the room—gratefully, something she did with simply a smile—she had the grace not to express even the slightest shock.
“He’s apparently here as Rhode’s guest,” Delphin added.
Malcolm couldn’t bear to face her; he instead kept his eyes on Delphin, who clearly could’ve just said, ‘This dude bumped uglies with your dear daughter.’
But aside from a discreet look—if any—at her daughter, the matriarch of the Atlantian family graciously acted like there was nothing out of the ordinary.
Amphitrite laid a hand on Malcolm’s arm and said, “It’d be a pleasure to have you join us for breakfast.”
As Malcolm finally faced her, every sordid thing he’d done with Rhode flashed before his eyes. (Gods, why couldn’t he just disappear right now?)
“Thank you,” he said. “But I was thinking I should probably get going actually.”
As Tyson filed in and the dining room filled up—with everyone, Malcolm finally noticed, either in sundresses or T-shirts and shorts—Malcolm squirmed at the reminder that he was the only one wearing evening wear. Even Rhode’s fancier ensemble was clearly a daytime outfit.
“We don’t kick out guests during breakfast. It’s rude. And it is particularly rude to leave upon being offered a meal by the Queen.” The unexpected comment came from Rhode, still looking victorious.
Stop torturing me, dammit.
“Okay,” Malcolm said. With all his might, he faced Amphitrite once more. “Sorry.” He packed everything into that for as long as he could look her in the eyes: Sorry for refusing your offer. Sorry for intruding. Sorry we had a great chat yesterday only for you to find out I hooked up with your daughter.
Still, he tried not to sound sorry enough to offend Rhode, who shot him another glare.
Malcolm was treated to an Atlantian breakfast, with complimentary servings of Poseidon’s obvious disregard for him (better than threats at least), Delphin’s endless amusement (although his jokes did calm the heightened mood), Percy’s second-hand embarrassment (which just made Malcolm more shamefaced), Annabeth’s immediate aid (so obvious and a little too desperate that it was probably backfiring on him), Triton’s needless commentary (at times ruining Annabeth and Percy’s attempts to occupy Poseidon), Tyson’s stunned blinks (after Triton felt the need to update him on today’s happenings), Amphitrite’s generous compliments (the only nice thing Malcolm had going for him right now, though she really should’ve directed everyone’s attention elsewhere), and Rhode’s incessant jabs (what else could he have expected?).
“Do you not like my mother’s recipes?” Rhode asked when he tried to decline a helping of taramasalata, the seventh dish Amphitrite offered, after soft-shell crab, salmon tartare, jellyfish tempura in a gochujang sauce, apple tuna salad, raw oysters with mignonette, and caviar in watermelon with buttermilk-something.
Malcolm couldn’t keep up in any sense.
“I’m sure they’re fantastic. I’m just not really hungry,” he told Amphitrite.
“Didn’t you tell me you were?” said Rhode, helping herself to a third serving of tartare. “That we worked up quite the appetite? I for one am starving.”
“I’m alright,” he said through clenched jaws. His cheeks were warm again.
Will you fucking stop?
Rhode didn’t. “Oh. Well, maybe had you put in more effort last night....”
“I wasn’t aware, Rhode,” Malcolm said. “People like different things, and, you know, I’m always open to immediate feedback. Far be it from me to want to leave someone displeased.”
Throughout brunch, Rhode kept at it. But in front of Amphitrite, Malcolm shut up and tried not to glower. He just took while they continued the stupid game of civility he had figured they’d play during Annabeth’s birthday.
As Malcolm slowly chewed his food, chatter and clatters filled the room, until Triton finally set down the morning’s paper and said, “So... Kymopoleia didn’t visit?”
Rhode huffed as she dipped a huge piece of pita in olive oil. “What did we expect?” she said before tearing a bite off the pita with her teeth.
“She still hasn’t returned my messages,” Poseidon said, picking out a black seed from his watermelon juice.
Amphitrite helped herself to another oyster. “When was the last time she listened to us? Truly, ever since she beheaded Rhode’s dolls, that girl has been totally uncontrollable.”
“You know, I still remember she stuck an octopus to my back,” said Delphin with a faraway look. “It was there for days. I can still feel it sometimes.”
Rhode scrunched her face. “Oh, I was actually a part of that. Sorry, Delphin.” She snickered nonetheless.
“At least you have capacity for remorse,” Triton said, “And you’d never kill an ally in petty rage, much less terrorize this realm the way she did.”
Rhode opened her mouth and closed it, ultimately settling on saying, “She’s not a monster, Triton. She’s our sibling.”
Triton shrugged. “Happens to be. Like some other monsters.” He side-eyed his father and helped himself to some calamari.
“Give her time,” said Poseidon.
Rhode sighed. “It’s been over two millennia. Mother, have you reached out to her?”
“I agree with Lord Poseidon,” said Amphitrite, paying more attention to her stack of mail. “We can give her time.”
Malcolm didn’t miss the way Rhode’s stiffened.
But before Rhode could say anything, Amphitrite waved the letter in her hand. “There’s a letter from Yiorg. He says happy birthday.”
As Rhode reached for it, Amphitrite took it back. “It isn’t addressed to you,” she said with raised brows.
Beside her, Rhode’s face fell.
Amphitrite scanned the letter. “He would like to meet on... ah, the 4th of August at 3. I will be away then. There’s that summit on fishery collapse with Glaukos and the rest.”
“I suppose it will be me then,” Triton said with a sigh. “Didn’t I meet him last time, too?”
Rhode looked around the table. “He wasn’t here yesterday, was he?”
“Why would he have been?” said Triton. “Everyone knows banks are still strained from the wars.”
“Only a few,” Rhode said.
It still made fundraising for New Athens difficult, as Malcolm knew.
“It is still a few,” Poseidon interjected, covering his mouth mid-chew.
“We already decided six years ago,” Amphitrite said, “and in 2008 and during our own crisis in the 80s, that we would not possibly give any of them any extraordinary rescue funds.”
“But it is a good thing the wars ended so quickly,” Poseidon said.
“And it is their own problem they made all those reckless bets,” argued Amphitrite. “Yiorg would have our skins if we reward them for that.”
Poseidon commendably held in his obvious exasperation. “Or if we excuse those wanting to profit from Olympus’s losses. I know. But their depositors suffered, and we could’ve done more. That is all I have been saying.”
“And the regulators already prepared for it and handled it, because Yiorg knows the industry’s nasty tricks and darkest secrets, and no bank of ours failed. That calls for celebration,” Rhode concluded to Triton.
“Celebration!” Triton scoffed. “All this debt already, and still all this exuberance. Spend, spend, spend! Live for the moment! Because we’re Greek! We don’t understand the concept of savings!”
“I have savings, thank you!” said Rhode as gracefully as she could over a mouthful of jellyfish tempura.
“What is it to the people that you do?” Triton said. “And you still ask me when I’m going to make another holiday. Another party. I am not going to contribute to the overheating of this already overleveraged economy, no thank you!”
“As though you would even do it otherwise,” Delphin said, which Amphitrite noted was beside the point.
Poseidon turned to Rhode. “It was a wonderful party. It is never unwelcome to unite and celebrate all of Atlantis, and neither is it your fault some people have no soul.”
“No soul,” remarked Triton. “And yet you sle—?”
“That wasn’t him,” Poseidon said. “For that, you’d have to ask Rhódē, because I do not understand the appeal now either.”
Delphin snorted out of his blowhole and shook his head at Rhode. “Oh, you are truly never living that down,” he said.
“He was completely unrecognizable!” Rhode yelled over the snickers around the table.
“Exactly!” said Poseidon. “When I met him—well, her—she wasn’t a bank regulator.”
“No, he was worse then. He was a financial engineer.” Rhode said, forcing Malcolm to reign in a snuff.
Malcolm was totally going to look up who this Yiorg—most likely a Yiorgos—was to figure out who it was who had managed to bag both King and Princess.
“Isn’t it also on him?” Percy said after finally managing to wipe off the disturbed look on his face, “I mean, it sounds like he’s ticking you off one by one.”
“For all we know,” Delphin said as Poseidon served him another large, spiced octopus leg, “maybe all the letters to Lord Triton and Lady Amphitrite aren’t to express his disapproval. Maybe he simply wants a night with you, too.”
As Amphitrite pursed her lips and Triton pulled a face, Poseidon and Rhode cackled.
Over more rounds of food, the Atlantian family began sharing gossip regarding who had shown up with whom, halted any political conversations with pointed looks at the Athenians, and, to Malcolm’s delight, regaled Annabeth with the comments they’d heard on her palace designs. Until finally, breakfast was ending. Which was great. Or not.
As Malcolm helped them all clear the table with the palace staff, Poseidon approached him head-on. He was only slightly taller than Malcolm, but his shoulders spanned wider, and that was seemingly enough to make Malcolm feel like being towered over.
“Malcolm Pace,” Poseidon said. “See to it that you are not like any of those bankers.”
“Of course,” Malcolm said with a bow. He looked up to Poseidon’s sea green eyes. “And I would like to thank you—in person—for all the funds you’ve contributed to the city.”
Poseidon gave him a long, hard glare and what Malcolm could’ve sworn was a nod.
At that, Rhode finally lost her prolonged politesse and shot Malcolm a pissy look.
And as Rhode, Amphitrite, and the demigods made their way to the gates of the palace, Rhode didn’t once look at him. Maybe it was worse than her rage-filled stare.
In their silence over Annabeth’s explanations to Amphitrite of some design details of the illuminated pathways that even Malcolm hadn’t known, Rhode’s words rang loudly in his ears: ‘You’re sorry? You didn’t mean to?’
If she was trying to guilt-trip him right now by completely ignoring him, it was totally working. Because he was more sorry now, and what he had meant less to do was to offend her in any capacity.
But surely, Malcolm thought as he took in the palace entrance for what was certainly the last time, surely, she should’ve at least understood his predicament. How self-absorbed would she have to have been to care less about the danger he and the city he was in charge of were put in than any little lies that he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her? Or that he would regret it.
That was what that itchy feeling in him and that gnawing in his head were saying, right? That he just shouldn’t have shared last night with Rhode? That none of those wondrous things had been worth it?
Or was it that he regretted them going back to square one? Was that even something he could regret if he had just been momentarily delusional in thinking they wouldn’t come to this again?
As Amphitrite nodded at Malcolm and Annabeth and wished them well, Rhode handed three pearls to Percy and gave him and Annabeth a big hug each.
Her hugs came with a squeeze, Malcolm remembered. Accompanied by that delightful floral scent. And presses of her cheeks.
It felt like a shame to leave like this—not completely because he’d totally lost their battle of wits. When was it they would have met next? The wedding?
“Rhode,” Annabeth said, leaning into her for another half-hug, “can you visit camp again next week? There’ll be a campfire on Friday. It’ll be fun. We also would like your input on our wedding plans, because we really value your opinion. Right, Percy?”
“Right,” Percy said. “You can’t say no to that.”
Behind them, Malcolm’s eyes bored holes into the stone floor. Deep, deep down, he wanted to throttle the both of them. Ultimately, he decided, no, he wasn’t going to be an ass to them. If Annabeth and Percy wanted Rhode to visit camp and hang out, that was within their right. To them, she was family.
So, how was he to say goodbye? There was no way he’d let himself just give in. At the same time, any pretend seemed dumb, considering they both had admitted they’d enjoyed themselves. And not saying anything would’ve been rude. And Amphitrite was here.
Malcolm swallowed all his pride and faced Rhode. “Good luck on the meeting,” he said.
Turning away before Rhode could respond, he thanked Amphitrite with a small bow and passed Percy whispering to Annabeth. “—do everything for them?”
Malcolm ignored them and headed for the gates to let the pearl whisk him back to camp.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
As Annabeth and Percy made their way to Cabin Three with the leftovers Malcolm insisted they keep or deal with however they wanted, Malcolm ignored every camper in his sight and speedily walked as casually as he could to the Athena Cabin.
“There he is!” he heard Claire say through the cabin window.
Malcolm disregarded his urge to turn around, and stayed on course.
The door opened as he reached for the handle.
Mid-quad stretch, Conrad stood aside to let him in. “Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,” he said with a shake of his head.
Fuck.
The cabin, which could house a full ten, had never felt so cramped. Malcolm side-stepped Conrad and dodged Claire’s elbows as she bunned her hair. Ignoring how the pair of them swiveled their heads his direction, he headed to his side of the cabin.
“You weren’t here in the morning,” said Conrad.
“Early morning,” he said in reflex.
They simply looked at him.
As Malcolm emptied his pockets onto his bed, the wrapped-up toothbrush fell onto the covers. He stared at it for a millisecond and immediately hid it on his shelf, pretending to set aside and tiny up his books.
“Don’t I always wake up before everyone?” he said.
“We didn’t see you here last night either,” Claire said.
“Long night,” he replied.
“Probably. I mean, you’re wearing the same clothes,” Conrad said.
Right.
He flashed back to his walk from the beach to the cabin. If the other campers who’d seen him hadn’t automatically thought he had met with city funders or some shit—which was technically true—he now swore every wrinkle in his dress shirt had been magnified for the whole camp to have witnessed.
“And you missed breakfast,” Claire said.
Yup. He had faced it all today: death by sex, death by wrath, death by mortification.
His prior two successes at least gave him hope for surviving the third threat.
“Out and about, sneaking around, so conveniently on the day Cabin Six isn’t following curfew and no one’s keeping tabs?” Conrad said. “What’d you do? Get held up meeting up with someone last night on the way to the cabin?”
They assumed he’d gotten out of Atlantis? Sure, he could let them think that. Instead of...
Claire’s jaw dropped. “Oh my gods. You didn’t. Mal. You’re kidding.”
“I didn’t even say anything!” Malcolm said.
“You didn’t need to!” Claire’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “You’re as red as Apollo’s cows!”
Conrad had to hold the door frame to keep himself from keeling over in hysterics. “I thought you just fell asleep working, like that other time.”
Malcolm turned away and did his best not to mind them as he took off his jacket. He really just wanted to be alone right now.
Conrad was laughing his way out the cabin. But Claire wasn’t leaving.
“O-Oh my gods!” she squealed.
“Screw this,” Malcolm said. “I’m outta here.” In a fit, he swiped up some clean clothes to change into.
“Oh, you’ve definitely been doing some screwing,” Claire said, unable to help herself. “Goldie, save me a spot!” she called to her twin outside.
Malcolm headed to the bathroom.
“No, Mal, wait! Hold up.”
“No, I’m gone.”
“No, seriously!”
Before he could reach the door, Claire lunged on him and dragged him back.
“What the hell, Claire?”
“Sit here. Let me help,” she said, pulling out the chair they’d use to read to Alicia. Her voice dropped. “You have...” Her eyes then focused on the corner of the cabin. “You have... you have what looks like a suggestive mark on the side of your neck.”
Malcolm’s eyes shut. Gods kill me.
Had he sat through the entire brunch with the entire Atlantian Monarchy like that? Had Poseidon seen? Fuck, had Amphitrite?
Wait. It would’ve been covered by the collar of his dress shirt, right? Actually, he wasn’t 100% sure.
Claire dragged him to her side of the cabin once he stopped resisting. “Sit down.” She nodded to the chair.
He plopped down and avoided the nearby mirror.
“I’m not judging,” Claire said. “Although, seriously, are we in high school?”
Didn’t do any of this in high school.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “Just tell me who you met up with.” She grinned exuberantly as she got out supplies from her makeup kit.
Malcolm responded with a glare.
“I’m helping you!” Claire insisted. “I should be heading to my Games training now. But here I am, helping my big brother cover up—” She shut her mouth, lips quivering big time to cover a smirk.
“You can’t tell Conrad,” he said, trying his best to tune out her words.
“Oooh.” Claire paused in contemplation. “But we’re practically the same person. I can’t not tell my twin.”
“What, is this blackmail?”
“Sorry.” Claire proceeded to feather some green stuff on him. “Let’s hope our skin tones match.” She sighed. “Okay, don’t tell me. So, clearly this whole thing wasn’t planned. But for how long have you been hanging with this person? I mean, if you could get this carried away...”
“It’s not like that.”
“So it was, what, a one-time thing?” she said. “Malcolm Pace-Robinson does random... whatever-it-was? Who knew?”
Malcolm kept quiet. Yeah, this was definitely a first. Though it wasn’t exactly random.
“Give me a hint?” Claire said.
A part of him wanted to let out the secret.
But why?
Right as he zoned out, Claire stopped her color correcting and inspected his neck. She cocked her head. “Oh.”
Malcolm didn’t know what that meant.
“Is this person a she?” Claire prodded as she put down her brush.
“What makes you think that?” he said.
Could he not narrow down the possibilities to half the population?
“It seems more probable,” Claire said, “considering this isn’t a hickey. It’s a lipstick stain.”
Right. All that nectar he’d drunk would’ve dealt with any... injuries.
Claire dabbed an alcoholic liquid onto a cotton pad and handed it to him.
“So, is this person a she?” she asked again, watching him smear the pad over his neck.
“Uh-huh.”
“Does she have an Olympian parent?”
Claire took the cotton pad from him and spread it over a spot further back, where he hadn’t yet reached.
Malcolm’s eyes drilled a spot on the floor. “Uh-huh.”
“Do I know her?” Claire said.
He debated how to respond.
“So I’ve met her,” she deduced.
“Uh-huh.”
With a final wipe, she lobbed the cotton pad into the trash and organized her tools. Malcolm was ever so glad to retreat into the bathroom to change.
“She’s not one of my friends, is she?” Claire said on the other side of the door.
Malcolm ran his tongue over his teeth, halting with one ankle through a pant leg.
There had been too long a silence before her question. Which made him suspect she was only asking for his benefit. It was just too blatant. Or perhaps it was still for her own confirmation?
Malcolm scrunched his eyes and gave up, trying not to think about anything more than changing into his clothes.
“Who do you call your friends?” he played along.
“Alice, Mariana, Kayla,” said Claire, listing daughters of Hermes, Aphrodite, and Apollo.
“Then no.”
Once Malcolm opened the bathroom door, he immediately shot her a look. “Isn’t Kayla fresh out of high school? Why would I—? Gods, Claire.”
“You’re 23, Mal,” Claire said. “You’re not that old.”
“Yeah, but relatively? And she’s basically a kid.”
“Okay, good. That would be creepy and weird and awkward,” she said.
And so unnecessary to ask.
As Claire finished putting away her equipment, he gave her the most shameful “thank you” of his life. Still, he felt way better it had only been lipstick.
“Coconut oil would’ve also gotten rid of it. Or an exfoliator,” she said breezily. If it happens again, he heard.
“Okay.”
It hurt his pride, but acting dumb was surely less humiliating than admitting that he’d just missed a spot.
“You’re gonna hold this over me, aren’t you?” he said.
Claire looked away into space. “Well,” she said quietly, “you helped once when my pre-abortion leaked, so...”
For the first time that day, Malcolm burst into a hearty laugh. “Never heard it called that.”
“My bloody buddy?” she said. “Conforming to gender norms?”
With a chuckle herself, Claire looped her arm through his as they made their way to the arena.
“And, ya know...” She shrugged and almost mumbled, “you skipped a whole bunch of classes and wrecked your average for me.”
“Because going to some econ and poli sci classes was so much more important than helping my sister deal with a chronic, agonizing, debilitating, incurable disease.”
“Yeah, and this can be a tiny payback,” Claire said.
Her training get-up provided a reminder of the remains in those small scars on her abdomen—like on his. He still selfishly found a comfort in that, but he knew she did, too.
And thank Apollo for his blessed children that it had taken months—and only months—for a diagnosis, but there had still been too many trials and combos of hormonal therapy and expensive-ass rings and laparoscopies... before she went back training and eventually managed to smash her old records. That was Claire.
“How is it these days?” he said.
Claire nodded her trademark Claire nod: with closed eyes and a smile.
“Good.” Malcolm nodded towards the arena. “Now go kick their asses.”
Notes:
🧜🧜
Hope you enjoyed this.
Aside from some other big things I had going on, I finished my thesis. Which I had somewhat ignored in the past in favor of writing this fic lolol. That's also why this chapter took nearly 4 months to wrap up. But now this fic gets to be my biggest writing priority!
See you next time for chapter 8!
Chapter 8: In which Malcolm comes to his senses
Notes:
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
As it turned out, getting nearly crushed to death came with some annoying side effects.
A thick haze fogged up Malcolm’s thoughts and had him asking the gods for any guidance in dealing with two students by the names of Logan and Vivian, who had decided they didn’t have to take his class seriously simply because, like a growing list of other instructors, Malcolm still refused to give out grades.
Next it was Sophie, who had come to him with yet another puzzle in revamping her study plan. She’d recently opted for more ecology, calculus, and battle strategy over the rest of the summer in order to squeeze in literature and medicine in the fall, and this time, he wasn’t actually sure if he could help her slot the pieces together.
Then Zeke, who pretty much always approached Annabeth first in the rare times he really needed something, had sought him for answers. How true was it that single-parent households fared worse than two-parent households? And how much did having a neurodivergent kid affect a parent’s ability to find a partner? Malcolm had known exactly what to say—but somehow he hadn’t, given the word vomit that hurled out of his mouth. It didn’t help that his dyslexia had suddenly flared into an untamable beast.
Alicia, bless her, gave him some sort of reprieve, even if she’d tearily plodded through the Cabin Six doorway and into his arms after a tutoring session with Chiron. A weeping Alicia came with a simple cure: a dose of robotics.
It had been over a week since Malcolm had stepped foot in Bunker Nine. He’d been busy with that tapestry for Rhode all of last week, and now it felt almost like a betrayal. Any such feeling was totally uncalled for, naturally, but it seemed harder that day to not revive that tired question he’d already put to bed years ago.
Of course it meant nothing that Leo chose to sit an inch away from him. Or held his arm. Or touched his back. Or leaned on his shoulders. Or that Leo winked at him said he was looking fine as hell today. He was the one who’d sat right next to Leo’s favorite spot. And there was certainly a host of other things he’d instigated and let slide over the years that had gotten Leo more casually touchy and jokily flirty towards him over anyone else. Well… anyone else besides the women Leo had dated. Which was another good reminder. Besides, Malcolm didn’t think so little of his friend so as to assume any of that was done consciously. Leo knew after all. So, Malcolm let it be fun. All the compliments and backup plans had always come with a wink anyway. Literally and metaphorically. (… Right?)
Without having completely worked out half those answers by Sunday night, the weekend of cloudiness persisted into Monday, making Malcolm second-, third-, and fourth-guess the work he’d so proudly wrapped up in a bow that month: his calculations for the monthly city budget, his approval of Pravir’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model policy, and his new idea to help jumpstart Jake’s energy company, Vio Life.
Marcella had been holding the fort on that last bit. To increase support for Jake and Co.’s biogas project, she and her team had executed a brilliant outreach strategy that had more or less satisfied City Council’s expectations across the board.
More satyrs than they’d realized had come to appreciate the city's commitment to making fuel out of Long Island’s industrial and municipal waste (but not so much out of forest residues). A greater number—but about as many demigods as expected—had bought into the idea of using co-products of the fuel to make or sell materials for buildings and roads.
But the city’s outreach had done the council few favors with dryads. A vocal group led by a woman named Karyai had convinced a bunch of other wood nymphs to see through City Council’s ploy to tame the controversy by replacing all mentions of “biomethane” with terms like “biogas” or “renewable gas”. The group of dryads also took issue with how a project subsidized by the city could eventually just lead everyone to keep up their wasteful practices and deforestation.
It was a lot already to have approved a pipeline. But with this new idea Malcolm had…
He’d reviewed his pocket notebook to check his sanity. He’d skimmed through papers he’d already read before, consulted Galene’s textbook for advice, and taken a fifteen-minute walk on the beach as Galene’s words followed him with each step. Invisible yet lingering, her commands floated in his periphery: Don’t simply ask, ‘What works?’ Instead, ask, ‘How does the world work?’ That was what he was doing, right? Playing assumption dumption until he found an optimal solution? Perhaps even a Pareto improvement?
The haziness hardly relinquished its grasp on him, so he went to the woods for answers. Shaded from the glare of the dizzying sun, Marcella invited him to her tree, and he sat criss-cross applesauce on a padded patch of woodland grass, just like old times. It was about time certain habits changed, however. So, when Marcella served him some sliced nectarines, Malcolm brought out some roasted chickpeas he’d snagged from the dining pavilion.
When he finally asked for her thoughts on nixing the subsidies for Vio Life to instead buy equity in the company, Marcella assured to him after his torrent of verbal hiccups and faltering qualifiers that, yes, she would support that plan, and, no, he wasn’t being dumb. Which just made Malcolm feel a bit dumber, though considerably less incompetent.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Alas, his lucidity didn’t last for long.
The moment he returned to City Hall, he immediately felt his head spin at the sight of Bae and Chiara with some stats staff in a conference room. But no, Malcolm reminded himself. That was just one of Harpocrates’s tricks. Anyone would feel sick if they tried, even subconsciously, to read lips through the glass.
In the common area of the first floor, he passed by a dozen or so regulars heads down and knee deep in work. The lucky bastards who didn’t have ADHD. At least he didn’t feel bad about saying hi. Per usual, a chorus of hellos and a collection of smiles followed, making him feel like he was finally settling into himself.
With a bouncier step, Malcolm headed up the stairs to his office on the fifth floor, ready to tackle the rest of the day. On the third flight of stairs, he nearly ran into Hubert Gauthier, the son of Hygieia who provided him and Chiara with admin assistance.
“Malcolm! Oh my gods, oh my gods!” Hubert appeared nearly out of breath.
“Are you okay?” Malcolm said. “What’s up?”
“Oh my gods.” With frantic eyes, Hubert shook his head as he walked the way he’d come, falling in step with Malcolm. “So, Kyklos is in a shitstorm. Word is, Pheme cheated on Adrestia with some rando Idahoan, and now Purgo’s up in smokes, and mortals in Suffolk are gonna get sick if we don’t cough up the difference this week.”
Malcolm stopped in his tracks. “What?”
After two tries and two more flights, he finally wrapped his head around the situation. It seemed New Athens’s monopolistic supplier of godly waste management was hiking up its prices because some god who’d caught her girlfriend sleeping with a lady in Boise had blasted the only manufacturer of the filtering systems that kept nectar and ambrosia from infecting mortals.
It was as bonkers as his mind suggested—which was actually rather comforting. Malcolm felt less bewildered than Hubert looked and, as he later found, even less than Pravir had been. Surely that accounted for something. Being able to assure everyone that the city still had spare funding was itself an assurance to himself. It finally seemed like the muddle in his head had fully dissipated.
Just to be sure, he bugged Will for a quick checkup, and—without sharing any scandalous details like the somewhat bad patient he chose to be—received confirmation that he looked a-okay.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Bright and early on Tuesday, Marcella and Jake quietly announced the equity stake that New Athens would take in Vio Life.
Doubling down on the project in such a fashion would actually have mollified many opposers. People wanted more oversight of Vio Life? Well, equity technically meant more city control over the company’s operations. They’d wanted fairness? Equity meant profits to fund dryad-oriented initiatives and businesses. In tandem, Jake announced that his company would use 0.5% of its revenues to fund the same things. All in all, the project seemed a worthwhile addition to diversify the city’s renewables portfolio.
But word must’ve spread before breakfast, because by 8:30, a little gathering had formed outside City Hall.
No city employees wanted to munch on their snacks in the summer air today. Dozens had crowded in the break room on level two, and dozens upon dozens more congregated in the common areas of the floor, giving Malcolm a chance to meet some of the new hires.
By now, he’d perfected his icebreaker questions. (Apparently, even after he would first thank them for having joined the team, “What exactly do you do here?” was too aggressive-sounding an opener for some.) It was like an obligation, but he had to admit it felt like an accomplishment to be able to know everyone’s names—like solving a puzzle.
With a clap of his hands and a pair of air punches, Bae entered the break room. “First protest! Woo! Who wants a smoothie?” he said, volunteering to play bartender.
Pravir was the first to take up the offer. “It’s a pretty bad showing for a protest, if you ask me,” he said, glancing outside at the chanting group of about ten. “They’re here early, though. I’ll give them that.”
The few who were there were apparently still enough to make several employees say they were experiencing scopophobia and even claustrophobia. It was a bit dramatic.
People were looking at Malcolm, as if expecting him to do something or say something. But right now, he just wanted to make himself useful in other ways. So as chatter and drinks flowed around him, he decided he would collect the trash and load the dishes.
Once Malcolm realized he’d taken two mugs too soon from two of the city’s newest employees, he stopped stealing people’s dishes and just stood next to Chiara and Ainsleigh while nursing an iced lemon tea. He ignored the occasional looks, which came even from Ainsleigh, and watched Bae wrestle with the coffee machine gifted from the Hephaestus cabin that employees had named Josephine (Josie for short).
He really didn’t see what the problem was. The protestors were simply exercising their rights, and there was bound to be something like this at some point.
“They’ll go away if you talk to them,” Marcella told him from across the room as she nibbled on pasteli. “If it’s just you, I think.”
“Whatever happened to ‘I think they’d hate you for just saying ‘pipeline’?” said Malcolm.
As their fellow employees hooted with laughter, Marcella grinned. “I might have been wrong actually,” she said. “Everyone’s seen the trash shipment footage. They also saw me propose the idea, so they might not wholly take it out on you. But I also think they would lack the confidence to tell a son of Athena that he is wrong.”
Immediately, a part of Malcolm felt sick. The other part filled him to the brim with mortification.
“I don’t want that,” he said. He instantly found relief behind tart sips of his iced tea.
“For the most part,” Chiara said gently, “I don’t think you really have a say in that.”
“It’s easy to talk to you, though,” said Ainsleigh.
Said the person who unnecessarily looked to him for approval.
Well. Said the person who looked like she found it difficult to speak to him.
“Look,” he loudly declared to the room, “I’m always open to dissent. That’s your responsibility, and I’m totally cool with it. Just ask Pravir.”
Snorts and shrieks of laughter abounded. Even Pravir huffed with a smile as he rolled his eyes.
Marcella said Malcolm could tell the protesters they were respected and tell them they were wrong. (“Based on current knowledge. Our knowledge. What we call knowledge,” Rayel caveated.) But if Malcolm really had to meet the protestors—his colleagues insisted on it for various reasons—he wanted an excuse to go out there.
“No, you can just go,” Bae said.
Malcolm tried not to squirm. “I don’t wanna… provoke them.”
“We’re not showing up in numbers. It’ll be fine,” Chiara said.
Pravir’s typical hell-bent eyes had deadened as they stared into space. “Dude, you’re making this so much more painfully awkward than it needs to be.”
“Okay, fine,” Malcolm said. “But I’m not going to prove anything. I can just… clarify perspectives they might not understand.”
“How is that any different?” chuckled an employee named Justin, one of the members of the statistics department.
“It is!” said Rayel.
So. Off Malcolm went. Alone.
Outside City Hall, six dryads had rooted themselves into the grass, accompanied by three satyrs and a few demigods Malcolm had seen in one of Chiron’s classes. He couldn’t figure out right now if he would’ve preferred to see some of his own students in the mix.
The protesters’ chanting petered out upon his arrival, and each of the five at the front lobbed their own accusations at him.
“You want to reduce energy emissions by using perhaps the worst greenhouse gas as energy. How does that make sense?” said a dryad named Juniper.
“Renewable natural gas may be renewable,” said another wood nymph, “but ‘renewable’ doesn’t mean ‘zero emissions’. Do you know that?”
A satyr jumped in. “By working with fossil gas companies, you’re just delaying the energy transition.”
“New Athens is helping polluters greenwash their business,” added one of the demigods. “Did you even consider that?”
Huh. Marcella was wrong. They weren’t intimidated; they thought he was dumb now. Was there really a chance he had with the people who called Marcella a traitor?
“And then there are the methane leaks!” said Karyai, the evident leader of the posse, as she stared him down. “And City Council keeps saying they’re not an issue, but we all know that’s a complete lie.”
It’s hardly a—
“No, it is a concern,” Malcolm said, “and we’re mitigating that risk. But it is a huge concern of ours. Which is why we—”
“So you understand,” Karyai said, “that we’re not okay with those threats? Because we did not consent to that, and if there’s a leak near our homes…” She shook her head.
“It would be horrible,” Malcolm agreed. “That’s why we’ve put in place a range of safety measures and potential punishments on the company in question. We’re doing everything we can to prevent that from happening.”
She raised her brows. “Except not actually eliminating the risk.”
“It would be nice if we didn’t have to deal with that risk,” he said, “but we did a lot of analysis—a lot—and this happened to be the most immediate and effective way to deal with the waste issue and to reduce Long Island’s emissions.”
No one was questioning him right now. Perhaps Marcella was right after all.
A non-insignificant part of him actually liked it, liked their speechlessness, liked the almost lost expressions on their faces, and he was going to feed that desire, knowing that the more he talked, the truer she would be.
But at the last fraction of a second, the sickness from earlier rose up like bile.
Screw Marcella’s test. She didn’t know the Cabin Six Code, and he had his own test anyway.
“We know of all those issues you brought up,” Malcolm told them. “We were twisting and turning about them for these past few months. And we found that we can’t match the environmental impact we’re making through this project if we weren’t building a pipeline and producing biomethane. This isn’t even cutting into our electrification plans. It’s a last resort for fossil fuel substitutions. The problem is, we can’t openly work with many mortals, nor can we force them to phase out fossil fuels. But we can easily inject their gas grid with a renewable gas. With biomethane. Until we find another solution, this is what we’ve got.”
With a sigh, Karyai finally unstiffened. “Look, Malcolm, we know you want to make an impact. But this project isn’t harmless. The city can’t just overlook how we’re affected and ruin our community.”
We’re not. Your NIMBYism though…
“Especially when dryads stand the most to lose here,” she said. “So, at the very, very, very least, any risk and any damage should be offset with reasonable compensation.”
The others yeah-ed and nodded vigorously.
“Totally,” Malcolm said. “Yeah, we put that in the plan. The new plan. Today’s plan. Did you read the press release?”
Nothing.
Shit, he really should’ve phrased that better.
“It might’ve come out when you were on your way here,” Malcolm said. “But we were planning it for a while.”
As he provided a quick explanation, he remembered he’d heard the comms team debating whether to add that feature in the headline, until someone had said it would have seemed like they were buying the dryads or trying to get good press off them. So that bit had instead been hidden several paragraphs near the end. Perhaps that had been a bad idea.
Karyai eventually spoke. “I don’t think we were consulted on that.”
“Surprise?” he said, offering a smile.
The fear of added bureaucracy and costs held him back from promising final checks with anyone prior to future announcements.
“It’s what you hinted at previously, though,” he said, “so you kind of were? And a lot of it’s from Vio Life, so it’s not all taxpayer money. It’s also their revenues, not profits, because we know they’re not gonna profit for a while.”
“It should’ve been there from the start,” Juniper piped in. “I don’t think we needed to have fought so hard for this.”
You didn’t want us to give nearly this much money to the company, let alone own any bit of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry the whole setup didn’t come to us sooner. This current plan is riskier to the city, but certainly fairer than the previous plans.”
“We’ll look at the press release,” Karyai said.
One by one, the grove of dryads uprooted themselves to leave, with their fellow satyrs and demigods following suit.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “Thanks for coming and for the whole…” He gestured vaguely. “For all the engagement throughout the process. And, uh, feel free to come back anytime.”
Like this was an invite. Though there certainly was a party inside.
“We probably will,” said Karyai drily.
Mission accomplished.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Marcella had to tell him so, but Malcolm took his own win.
As the protest fest wrapped up, he retreated into his office to try to think his way through another looming crisis.
Drew, of course, was still making daily requests for an after-lunch meetup to discuss the financial pressures faced by her business, Yokubō. Time and time again, he had sidestepped her invitations with excuses that he had to babysit Alicia.
Thankfully, Marcella had been handling Drew with grace. Some grace. With each meeting, she had changed into dresses that were ever increasingly out-of-fashion, gleeful to describe Drew’s ire during her one-on-ones with Malcolm.
Though he got a kick out of it each time, it was eating at him endlessly to dawdle on the issue. Percy wanted action. People like 632-year-old Penelope needed safety. Other sea people like eight-year-old Felipe deserved their homes and their pets. Drew wanted answers. And her employees needed stability, even if Drew had apparently already promised that Yokubō would be staying in town.
What to do? What to do?
‘Don’t stick yourself,’ Galene had advised him.
Yeah, well, slapping on a tax or whatever and calling it a day wasn’t a good response to how the world worked. The problems Yokubō posed were still a solution to everything worse out there. Shouldn’t Drew actually have been rewarded for that?
Ugh.
It felt like a cop out, but Marcella and her team would have to figure it out. Hopefully, Percy wouldn’t mind a year’s deadline.
In that time, the city could give him something to help run Ásylo. Anything. Maybe some cash to fund clean-ups and education?
Oof. What a bad look to offload the solutions to him and the kids. There was no way Rayel, Marcella, or Pravir would have cosigned that.
Malcolm cringed with the knowledge that, purely for the sake of avoiding a PR disaster, Percy likely wouldn’t get anything at all.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Considering that every other city councilor had approved the biogas project and the purchase of equity, Malcolm didn’t think they had a right to take issue with the decision. But as if the Fates were conspiring against him, his colleagues had begun hounding him for funding by the time lunch rolled around.
Chiara had likely done it to guilt trip him. (Just last week, he’d said they didn’t have enough money for a randomized controlled trial she wanted to run. It would’ve cost less than how much more the city had shelled out to buy a stake over giving subsidies.)
Pravir had likely done it to be trolly. (According to his email, some New Athenians needed mentoring to master social interaction. Malcolm had rolled his eyes and trashed the email immediately. Sure, the program had been for underprivileged, at-risk youth, but the request would come back to his desk when it wasn’t half a year in advance.)
Others had likely been simply excited for their wish lists to be granted. (Clarisse wanted more members on the security team, Brett wanted a new piece of tech to track CP distributors, Will wanted more public health campaigns, Rayel wanted more internal DEI initiatives, etc., etc., etc.)
As if they all hadn’t heard about the Idaho fiasco yesterday.
The good news was Malcolm’s memory had served him well; there really was spare funding to pay for that mess. The answer was pointed out to him in his office, on the laptop of Adila Darwish, the daughter of Nemesis whom he’d recently chosen to be his right hand on budgetary matters.
“I found this,” she said, making him wince as her sparkly nail poked her screen. “There’s no other option, is there?”
“What do you think?” he replied.
Adila thought for a moment. “I think no one’s going to like it.”
Malcolm nodded, relieved once more that he’d made the right choice.
“You’re sitting in on the council meeting,” he said. “Do you wanna present it to them?”
Adila opened her mouth and looked away from him.
“You’re not gonna take the fall,” he assured.
At that, Adila broke into a laugh. “No, I know. That’d be you,” she said. “Could I just sit in this time? It’s in half an hour and I really don’t feel prepared enough to do it well.”
He considered insisting that she knew everything he knew, saying she could just explain it and not think about “presenting” it, telling her it was really no big deal and she’d be fine, but ultimately backed down. She still had time to fill his shoes.
Twenty minutes later, he met her on the first floor as she slid her arms into the sleeves of her cream-colored blazer.
“You know these meetings are pretty informal, right?” he said as they walked into the conference room together. “But good on you for making the effort.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just thought… You know…”
As he set up the projector, Adila stepped into his space to say, “Actually, I was thinking… I think I can give it a go.”
Malcolm turned to her, a grin spreading across his face. “You got this.”
Smiling back, Adila positioned her hair behind her ears and her shoulders and straightened her blazer. She sat beside him, posture as stiff as Marcella’s while the others filed in.
Around them, Will was flipping through the page corners of his book, Chiara was drumming her newly painted nails on the table, Bae was shaking his leg, Chiron was stroking his beard, Ainsleigh was fidgeting with her hair, Maaza was clicking her pen, and others were getting seated. Amid the torrent of sensory inputs, Adila took audible, expansive breaths.
Malcolm didn’t know if it’d be better to distract her or let her be. He ended up going with his own preference: the latter. It was okay. She’d be fine.
Once everyone had settled around the circular table, he looked once more at Adila, who nodded at his own questioning nod, and kicked off the meeting.
“We got a bunch of requests today,” he said. “We all want more money. I know. Right now, given our cash flow issue, the priority is dealing with the waste management file. Adila’s gonna walk you through all the spare money we have this week.”
She managed to let out a chuckle as she projected their funding spreadsheet onto the wall.
“There’s only one option,” she explained to the others. “We have to use this.”
On the spreadsheet, she highlighted a row corresponding to a million-dollar donation they New Athens had received from Aphrodite a while back.
“It’s not tied to anything,” Adila said. “The notes for program preferences say ‘garden, etc.’, but we don’t need ‘garden, etc.’ yet.”
“No.”
The comment came from Pravir, who shot Adila and Malcolm a disgusted look from across the table.
“This has got to be—” Pravir scoffed. “This reeks of Malcolm’s judgment. This has to be the dumbest…”
“We do not need to resort to insults, child,” said Chiron, when a stunned Adila still hadn’t uttered a response.
Malcolm leaned on the back of his chair and feigned unconcern. “It’s not payback of any kind, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, glancing lazily at Pravir. “You’re really not that important.”
“None of this is personal,” said Pravir.
“No, of course not.”
“Boys,” said Chiron, hushing the snickers and mutterings of the council. “Adila?”
Adila iterated her point: “This is our only solution.”
Despite usually staying on the sidelines, Chiron jumped in. “I must say… if we are ever asked what the money was spent on—and I assure you, we will be—how are we planning to manage that?”
Adila turned to Malcolm with panicked eyes.
“We can say this was pooled,” Malcolm said, already faltering as he said it.
For once, Chiara directed her head tilt at him. “Say that funding from an Olympian was pooled?” she said. “When in other instances they have their names attached to our projects?”
And this, Malcolm thought, was why they should’ve just lumped together all the money from the start, instead of attributing the donations to specific initiatives. This was a mess.
But nooo. Chiron had insisted that the direct links encouraged giving. It was worth it, he had argued, to have to spend extra effort to align the stories City Council told to residents with the stories City Council told the gods—or to have to find ways around any misalignments—if it meant that New Athens could get more funding, and more grants instead of loans.
So now, the councilors had to make sure not to offend the gods. Equally, they had to make sure not to lie to the residents or invoke upon the residents any unconscious biases that might have influenced the councilors to make undemocratic decisions. No thanks to Chiron’s system. It made Malcolm want to tear his hair out.
There would have been other ethical issues to wrestle with if the city lacked funding, Chiron had also pointed out those months ago. Alternatively, there wouldn’t have been any ethical conundrums Malcolm would have the privilege to groan about if there hadn’t been enough money in the first place.
The gods liked ‘ownership’. To know and to brag that they contributed to something. And to be fair, the Council was still managing the city on its own terms. Seemingly. Maybe there already had been some instance in which a god’s involvement had influenced the Council to misallocate some funds. No one could prove it wasn’t true.
So yeah, perhaps it was about time they’d changed this silly system. Malcolm was sure it’d blow up later. He hated being beholden to it, and who knew how future councilors would handle this issue?
“Malcolm, even you know your mother wouldn’t really be okay with ‘miscellaneous’,” Bae said, dragging him away from his thoughts.
Athena was actually getting assigned the most miscellaneous projects and expenses, but Malcolm didn’t feel a need to argue the point, seeing as it was her name that was slapped on all over the city.
“So it’s not unreasonable,” Pravir said, “that my mother won’t like it. Neither will she like having to fund this. Look, let’s just rearrange the funds, so her name doesn’t need to be associated with…”—He scrunched his nose—“waste management.”
Malcolm just sighed and let Adila take the reins.
“We can’t do that,” she said. “Everything else we have right now is already tied to something. Those gods were already promised that.”
And, okay, it was partially on the two of them and the rest of the finance team for working ahead of schedule.
Adila went on. “Option B is to explain to residents why we’ll be taking on debt when we already have the money and when we can’t pay back the debt anytime soon.”
“Ooh, get this. We can get a loan, then repay it next week,” Pravir said, receiving “ah”s, nods, and shrugs from several councilors.
Malcolm tried not to get offended that they thought he, nor the entire finance department, wouldn’t have considered that.
“That’s Option C,” Adila said. “But it also poses its own problems. Imagine announcing that a god’s money was used to pay off a debt. Even if that doesn’t get the gods to start thinking we’re in trouble, it’s not impactful or interesting or simple to say, ‘Oh, thank you. You just repaid the debt we had for a week. From what? Oh, random things.’ Or ‘Oh, we can’t tell you.’ Because Aphrodite isn’t the only god who wouldn’t want to claim this waste management stuff. We’ll end up with the same problem anyway.
“Now, Athena wouldn’t mind footing these expenses, but we don’t have any funds from her right now. And she certainly wouldn’t appreciate us moving around money like shell companies just to hide the fact that we’d use money we have for something we want. We already have a right to do that, and I would hope we have the backbone for more transparency—as everyone around here seems to have promised to New Athenians.”
At that, Adila took a seat.
As Malcolm nodded at her with a smile, he realized she was shaking.
Good job, he mouthed.
Behind pressed lips, she restrained her smile and proceeded to chug half her bottle of water.
Amid a silence, save for a loud sigh from Pravir, assistance finally came in the form of Will.
“They’re right,” Will said. “This is actually necessary. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem. We might as well set a precedent now when it’s a necessary situation.”
Maaza concurred. “And we can still thank Aphrodite for donating to the city. But it is not up to her to decide where any of that goes. Everybody knows that, including the gods.”
“Whether they counted on it happening is a different matter,” Malcolm said, “but, respectfully, we don’t take donations to fulfill the gods’ wishes. They donate because they believe in what we want to do. There’s also less leeway when she’s not a patron god.”
Chiron sighed with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re making my job very difficult, you know.”
Ditto, he thought, but returned Chiron’s smile. “That’s why you chose to do it.”
“And that’s why,” Chiron said, clearly refraining from another sigh, “I will advise you that the city will need to give something up if you want to use her donation for this.”
Resting her chin on her hand, Rayel trained her eyes on the centaur. “Chiron, who are you representing here?”
A clopping noise cut through the air as Chiron shifted on his hooves. “You know I am loyal,” he said, frowning. “But I am being realistic. She may have already promised the donation, but if New Athens wants more funds from her and a productive long-term relationship with her—one beyond the length of all your lives, mind you—the city will need to keep her happy.”
What was it Athena would suggest?
Malcolm thought about how much easier it was to work with Athena, who accepted his decisions with no issue. Who hadn’t needed to be placated or lied to when New Athens had begun looking at Poseidon as its second patron god. Who would—upon just one offhanded ask on Annabeth’s birthday—just offer to invest in their upcoming—
“We don’t need to give something up,” Malcolm said. “We could offer Aphrodite first dibs on our transportation bonds.”
He was met with a combination of bulging and narrowed eyes, a “heh?”, a “come again?”, and Pravir’s “this guy”.
“She’d want transportation bonds,” Malcolm said, ignoring Pravir’s facepalm. “Preserving the value of her money—or even giving her a real return—so we can make the city look pretty in her name? So dirty air and bad vibes don’t reek into her brand new altar? So there’d be more foot traffic around her place of worship? What’s not to love?”
“Besides the obvious?” Will said. “This is, like, two strikes.”
“Or three,” Bae said. “Remember, Ares is trying to sell his cars to New Athenians? She’ll definitely know about that.”
Rayel fixed her piercing eyes onto Bae. “So?”
Bae shrugged. “If she doesn’t take offense, Ares will.”
“What’s it to her?” said Rayel.
“Oh, come on,” Bae said. “Just because it shouldn’t… Just trying to be careful here.”
“Ares isn’t gonna wanna to mess up a city patroned by Athena and Poseidon,” Malcolm pointed out. “That’d be stupid. He has more brains than that. Does he?” He turned to Chiron, who had already put on his be careful face.
Beside Chiron, Chiara whirled her finger in the air. “It’s already soundproof, Chiron. He wouldn’t have heard.”
“That aside, Venus—” Pravir began before waving his hand in correction. “Aphrodite could buy the bonds anyway.”
“Athena wanted to cover the majority of it,” Malcolm said. “We didn’t need another big investor. But if we rejig it a bit, it could suit Aphrodite’s tastes more. So we’d have the waste management money from her current donation, new transportation money, and Athena’s money—from next week—for another investment.”
Reluctantly, the others went along and began by rebranding the transit investments as “beautification bonds”. They included expenses for street plants, park trails, and whatever else they could that would convince the goddess her investment would almost purely be in aesthetics.
As convincingly as they could, the councilors described the new waste costs as an extension of the beautification program. Aphrodite’s donation, they said, would be used to destroy any “funkiness” (Aphrodite apparently despised the word “funky”) and to instill in the city a sensorily splendorous experience. At Ainsleigh’s suggestion, they threw in actual fragrant flowers as part of the expenses.
Pushing themselves a little more to please Aphrodite, they brainstormed some more and rewrote every mention of “waste management” as “visual- and olfactory-targeted therapy”. It would look stupid as fuck to the New Athenians, but the councilors all doubted anyone would notice. Residents didn’t keep up with waste management issues.
Though the whole scheme offered Athena less payback, Malcolm knew her logic made sure she would understand.
He remembered that evening on Olympus when he had sought her approval and aid for his grand idea. How he’d begun to sweat as the elevator of the Empire State Building lifted him to the 600th floor. How he’d willed his shaky hands to stay put as he said, ‘Hi, Mom,’ and asked if she had time to chat. How he’d slowly found his footing and got on a roll as he made his case, telling her about how long he’d thought about this project and about all the time and effort he’d already put into it. And all the while, Athena had simply listened with her hands folded in her lap and the faintest smile on her face before she said, ‘I know.’
So, if anything, Malcolm thought, as sureness, ease, and clarity returned to him at long last, she would be proud.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Chiron was to leave in the evening for another round of fundraising, so he asked Malcolm to visit the Big House at 3 for a quick chat—a request typically reserved for the shit-stirrers. Perhaps Malcolm actually was one now. Decidedly promising himself to hold his ground, he accepted the invite and joined Chiron for tea.
On the deck of the third floor, he found Chiron by one of the several tables, taking in the view of the vast woods, Long Island Sound, and the rest of Camp Half-Blood. Malcolm squeezed past some lawn chairs on his way to Chiron and his tea set. Nose tickled by herbal fumes and summer breeze, he watched a group of shrieky campers slacklining in the basketball court as a nearby bunch set up tonight’s DNC watch party.
“Right on time,” Chiron smiled. “The tea should be ready right now.” He gestured to their usual table. “How is Alicia?”
“She’s all right. Happier these days,” Malcolm said, taking a seat.
Weirdly, Chiron gave him that suspicious look that he often wore when he let newbies plan atrociously dumb Capture the Flag games. Refusing to explain, Chiron simply filled their two cups.
It was dittany, Malcolm found. His cup of tea, not Chiron’s preferred malotira. Perhaps it was some sort of apology?
Chiron let him stew for a while before finally saying, “I need your assistance.”
“We’re already using your system—” Malcolm complained, stopping as Chiron put up a hand.
“This concerns Alicia.”
“Oh? Is this about the guardianship? I thought you sorted the issue in Texas?”
“It’s been sorted. I am her guardian now,” Chiron assured. “No. Alicia… has become very creative.” He paused to mirror Malcolm’s smile. “So creative, in fact, that she will invent her own assignments during my classes. Perhaps it was because I was fundraising when she’d arrived—”
“Thank you,” Malcolm cut in. He still didn’t know where this was going, however.
“Of course. Perhaps it is because I wasn’t there that she is less compliant to my directions than most demigods I’ve mentored.”
Malcolm’s brows knitted. “Seriously? She doesn’t listen to you?” A laugh began to bubble out of him.
“You have no trouble with her, I presume?” Chiron said.
Malcolm laughed harder. “No.”
“Ah. Why do you suppose that is?” Chiron said, before sipping his tea.
Fidgeting with his own teacup, Malcolm tried to think of a time he’d done something Alicia didn’t want, and there really wasn’t a time— Oh.
He glanced at Chiron, who now wore a slight smile. “Am I really…?” Malcolm asked him.
Yeah, he answered when Chiron refused to.
Malcolm winced. “Oops?”
“It’s uncomfortable for you,” Chiron said. “You don’t want to make her upset.”
Malcolm didn’t want to respond to that. It wasn’t even a question anyway.
Once he stopped hiding behind his sips of tea, he went with the easiest of his questions. “What exactly does she do in your class?”
“When I assign something,” Chiron said, “she will say she wants to do it later and then she’ll draw schematics she’s working on with Leo. I’ll try to relate her interests to the task at hand…” he trailed off with a sigh. “And that sometimes works. Even so, it can’t always be that way. It may be summer. She may have lost her father. And she deserves patience and kindness. But it won’t be kind to her if we let this happen for too long.”
‘If you let this happen,’ Malcolm heard.
It was fair and it was truthful, he supposed. And he really couldn’t take much offense, because what was he supposed to know of parenting, really? All he had were, like, a year’s worth of observations he’d just collected that he hadn’t even known he should’ve studied, and memories that were too distant and biased to analyze from the other perspective.
That didn’t, however, mean he’d had nothing to go with. And it really wasn’t a proper excuse. He could’ve known enough. It had been right under his nose. He’d seen Alicia’s reluctance to read books, to run laps, to write almost anything.
“She’s… kind of a perfectionist,” Malcolm realized aloud. “Like Sophie. But the opposite of Sophie.”
Chiron nodded and rewarded him with a refill. “They respond very differently when presented challenges. Alicia doesn’t want to try what she’s afraid she will fail at.”
“While Sophie throws herself into everything.”
“Not unlike someone else I know,” Chiron said. “Does he remember?”
The wormy sensation in Malcolm’s chest made it easiest for him to just say, “Remember what?”
Chiron fought a smile and lowered his voice almost in a whisper. “Malcolm, your lies have always been more obvious than those of the Stolls when they have implicating evidence in their very hands.”
Although Malcolm took the liberty of ignoring the comment, Chiron was too patient. Too seeing all the damn time.
Malcolm looked away for momentary reprieve, running his tongue over his teeth. When he was ready, he returned Chiron’s unrelenting gaze. “The thing about being careful of what you do? Of what you commit yourself to?”
Chiron wasn’t nodding yet.
“Because we have limited resources like time and mental capacity. So we should optimize how we spend them,” Malcolm concluded definitively.
Chiron smiled in his knowing way. “Because,” he said as Malcolm already braced himself, “you are the kind of person who would be good at anything. You are Athena’s child after all. Alicia is, too, and she deserves the guidance that will land her in that same predicament.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
When thought of as instructions, even difficult advice was easy to put into practice, and with all the bouts of brain fog Malcolm suffered that week, it was a godsend to be able to go on autopilot.
On Thursday, Malcolm and Annabeth finally managed to get Alicia to retry rock climbing after they casually threw it out there that her height put her at an advantage. Without a fuss, Alicia let them put her in a harness and sent it in just two tries.
As if all of Camp Half-Blood were conspiring with him and Annabeth, a dozen bystanders had cheered Alicia on and offered congratulatory high-fives once she’d reached the ground. Malcolm kept his own promise to ensure that she would be a very well- and oft-hugged kid.
Taking advantage of Alicia’s high, Malcolm suggested she put aside her robotics play time with Leo to explore something new in Bunker Nine.
When the three of them reached a limestone cliff in the camp woods, Leo conjured a head-sized fireball in his hand and shot it towards the limestone. Flaming lines spread throughout the stone, revealing a red door that swung open for them all on its own.
“Hot,” said Malcolm.
Sending a wink his way, Leo then turned to a grinning Alicia and gestured into the cave. “Play time!” he exclaimed.
She was already on her way in.
The lights were already on, illuminating a workshop the size of an aircraft hangar. By a collection of worktables, over a dozen demigods—most of them children of Hephaestus/Vulcan—were tinkering away with their projects. Several of them stopped their work to greet Alicia, Leo, and Malcolm.
While Leo and Malcolm headed for the other demigods, Alicia had her eyes set on the middle of the room, where Leo’s bronze mechanical pet dragon, Festus, was taking a nap next to a bowl of hot sauce. When she scratched behind his ear, Festus opened his ruby eyes and purred. He turned on his side for belly rubs, which Alicia was happy to provide until she began coughing her way over to Malcolm with tears in her eyes, presumably from the fumes of Festus’s hot sauce.
“Dude, that is a safety hazard,” Malcolm said to Leo, pulling out a chair for Alicia to sit on as she calmed down.
“I’m trying to up Alicia’s spice tolerance,” Leo joked. “The hottest thing she has is currywurst. Poor thing.” He glanced at his siblings at their different worktables. “Yo, what happened to Festus’s sippy cup?”
“He hates it,” said Christopher, one of Leo’s siblings. He held up a steel cylinder at his workstation. “This will officially be his fourth one.”
Leo stomped his way over to scold Festus, who was now pretending to be asleep.
When Alicia managed to overcome her coughing fit, Leo recruited Nyssa, Jake, and Maaza to help teach their protégée some origami engineering.
At first, Alicia merely stood aside, simply observing her mentors showcase their assortment of origami applications: a solar panel, a telescope, some electronic parts, a forceps, a shield, a pair of spears, and a range of other weapons. She was mostly quiet, too, when they taught her the mathematical laws of origami and showed her some how-tos on folding and collapsing paper.
But when they let her poke and play with their builds, she asked several all-over-the-place questions and even responded insightfully when they’d answered her unvoiced queries. And when Nyssa offered her a stack of colorful sheets after the crash course, she gratefully took it to the little table Jake had made for her that summer and started to experiment on her own.
So as not to disrupt her, Leo tapped his fingers in Morse code when providing running commentary on her technique. Malcolm did the same, replying with quick questions and notes.
After a good eight minutes, when Maaza sounded back, ‘You are so loud,’ with her hammer, they resorted to knee nudging to signal when to peek at Alicia’s progress. It was usually when she had her chubby-cheeked game face on.
Soon enough, they lost themselves in their own projects. While Leo mapped out new crease patterns for pop-up shelters, Malcolm went off into another corner to help Jake work out a model of a working retractable sword, conceptually similar to Percy’s own Riptide. They tried at least ten ideas until Jake concluded it was likely mechanically impossible to build it without the help of a child of Hecate. So Malcolm and Jake crashed Leo’s station, letting him take a break while they translated his crease patterns into folds.
Leo got to tapping again until Alicia paused her origami practice to look around the bunker and head to Malcolm and Jake’s side of the worktable.
“You good?” Malcolm said.
She nodded. “Ähm. Jake, can I have one more piece of paper, please?”
“Sure!” he said, scurrying off to get a stack.
“Alicia! Excuse me?” came a cry from Maaza, standing with arms akimbo by the workstation adjacent to Alicia’s little table. “You know you could ask me, right?”
Alicia just shrunk in her shy smile.
“It’s okay,” Jake told her with a wink as he handed her the paper. “I can be your favorite.”
Leo scoffed. “You wish, Mason,” he said. “Allie, Uncle Leo’s your favorite, right?”
“Umm.” She gave him a squirmy shrug.
Unable to take their expectant gazes, Alicia looked instead to Malcolm, who said, “They’re just teasing. You don’t have to answer that.”
So she didn’t answer and just returned to her table, nodding at Maaza, who’d asked if she could join her.
As Jake left to bug Nyssa in a faraway worktable, Malcolm realized that, had Alicia sought something right that second, it wouldn’t have been Jake she’d turn to. Not where he was now. If Maaza hadn’t been sitting right next to her, Alicia would have picked Leo.
It hit him then: Even in Bunker Nine, even in her second home at Camp Half-Blood, whom Alicia would approach and converse with, really depended on whom he was closest to. Or, as he had seen time and time again when picking her up from the bunker, whom Leo was closest to. Like she consciously or subconsciously orbited them, using them as centerpoints around which she could build her bubble of comfort.
Ultimately, Alicia did have favorites, and at the top of the list, he thought as his whole body turned to goo, was him.
Oh gods, it was him.
What was that he was feeling?
Malcolm turned inward for an inspection.
It wasn’t regret. Even if he’d ever allow himself to feel that about her, there had been no choice for it to have been regret anyway. So no, that couldn’t be it.
He also couldn’t say it was— What was it he was trying to pinpoint? Some… desire to escape? To up and at it? What was that called? Whatever it was, he loved Alicia too much for that.
Do you? whispered a voice. Do you actually want this responsibility? Did you ever ask for it?
He crushed the trespasser to dust in an instant, not even going to bother to humor it.
All it was was pressure, wasn’t it? Maybe a teensy bit of fear? Both perfectly acceptable. Even somewhat useful.
But how was it that he could stroll into City Hall, responsible for the wellbeing of thousands, day in, day out, no biggie, only to stress about a single individual? Did he even have a right to be so confident about any of his work decisions? And how was all this Alicia stuff only such a big deal now?
It was, he answered, because he’d never noticed that gravitational force he possessed. He’d only just realized he’d somehow become the greatest, largest mass in her universe. It couldn’t even be considered conceited to think so—not when refusing to acknowledge that fact would’ve made for his greatest act of negligence.
She’d had on some invisible child leash and handed it to him. To him. It wasn’t Athena, because it just couldn’t be. It wasn’t even Chiron, because what did Alicia care about legal documents? She’d essentially chosen him. For every time she came crying to Annabeth, she’d go to him two times at least. She may have slept on Claire’s bed now and then, but it was him she most often woke up. She asked him for comfort when she was scared, him for story time, him for answers to the most impossible questions, him for—
With a bump on his left knee, Malcolm popped out of his ponderings and found himself staring into warm, brown eyes.
He was so achingly close. And this really must’ve been the longest this had ever happened. And there was so much to still see. And Leo was looking and searching and finding—
“Zoning out there, buddy,” said Leo. “Or do you just like looking into my eyes?” He winked.
Of course. And, you know, it didn’t even hurt at all if he was already this used to it.
Malcolm just smiled. “You know me.”
It wasn’t even zoning out as much as it was spiraling. He had enough people who would’ve known the difference.
But wait. Had Leo been talking about before he’d nudged him or after? It only made sense that Leo had nudged him because he was zoning out. But then the comment… It couldn’t be both. He’d said ‘or’. Had Leo just—?
No, Malcolm wasn’t going to think about it. He did his best to erase the moment from his memory and just watched Alicia finish her final origami figure.
“Can you show me what you made, Allie?” Malcolm called to her.
With a giggle that twinged his soul, Alicia scooped up her origami and made a beeline for him and Leo, stopping only for a fallen blue frog. Malcolm was left processing how she’d practically seated herself on his right thigh as she chirped away about her creations (a plane, a bird, an ice-cream scoop with a cone, a frog, and a car) and deposited each piece in their hands.
With a reminder to make time to call his tiny chatterbox of a sister four states away, Malcolm realized this really wasn’t all that different to when Sadie would climb onto his lap and tell him and Tyrone about her day at school. Unlike Sadie, however, Alicia wouldn’t hoist up his arm to ask for a hug, so Malcolm had to do that himself. He dutifully turned himself into a more comfortable chair and went through the motions and emotions of providing her praise and encouragement.
As Alicia returned a broad grin and a high-five to Leo when he proposed they scamper over to the dining pavilion for sundaes, Malcolm found that none of this was really as freakishly huge as he had made it out to be. Alicia didn’t just orbit him, after all.
And this was just too perfect. But he wouldn’t complain.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Having high hopes that Alicia could conquer another challenge, Malcolm brought her to his Friday morning class.
Today, they were doing his students’ favorite exercise: rewriting article headlines—first to add objectivity, then to add different types of media bias.
It was during these classes that his students would be at their giddiest. Most felt like he was sharing secrets with them. (He wasn’t, really.) Some just sought chances to school their annoying older siblings.
Malcolm had his own obvious reasons for repeating these assignments—which is why he’d put forth the Vio Life project as one of the topics of the day. It really felt messed up sometimes that his students were trusting him this much to shape their worldview. He was surprised, frankly, and even concerned that no adult—no one—had raised any hell about how he could’ve been infecting young minds with state propaganda.
But today wasn’t one of those days. Today, he could be proud that one of the groups had taken it upon themselves to tailor their headlines to different mortal and godly news outlets.
Another table had, in fits of laughter and rounds of table-hitting, somewhat accidentally written a somewhat satirical article on the exchange program between New Athens and New Rome. Malcolm had only even found out when they’d hollered for him to help them find a word one of the students insisted existed (“foundling”).
They grinned proudly as they presented their work to him, and he found that the article was actually less satirical and more so a perfect replication of the tone-deaf tendencies of the Olympus News Network. He cracked up at the students’ mention of “class E felony”, and just as he got to the last paragraph hinting at Greco-Roman group therapy, an eraser was thrown, his name was hissed, his forearm was tapped, and his eyes caught those of a satyr named Rafiq from across the room.
He was mouthing Malcolm’s name—silently screaming it, rather—and nudging his head to his right, where Alicia was sitting.
Alicia’s hair, usually fastened in a braid, now curtained her face. She was staring at the papers in front of her, twiddling the pencil she held loosely in her grasp.
Malcolm had seen the sight enough times not to panic anymore, but, gods, if he didn’t feel like a fuck up right now.
A student named Tatiana had pulled up her chair next to Alicia’s and was speaking to her in a hushed voice. Alicia merely wiped her cheeks with her sleeve.
“How are we?” said Malcolm once he reached their table and crouched on Alicia’s other side.
In front of her was one of the kid-friendly articles he’d written specifically for her that spelled out different viewpoints on the biogas project—most of which she’d already learned from him and Jake during one of her Bunker Nine visits. Peeking out underneath the page was a little piece Sophie had put together on origami engineering, which Malcolm had given her full permission to read instead of joining the class.
No one had responded yet. Alicia still hadn’t looked at him, but he could’ve sworn she moved just a bit closer to his side.
“How are we?” he asked again.
“Um. We started,” Tatiana said. “We’re making progress.”
“Alicia was telling us what she knows about the energy project,” Rafiq added. “More than I’ve been paying attention to the whole thing.”
“There was something about anaerobic digesters?” Tatiana said. “Which I’m still not skilled enough to understand, and it’s not even in the articles you gave us. It was really impressive.”
Malcolm sent them a grateful smile. “Allie, do you wanna take a break?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I want to finish this.” She sat up straighter and moved her pencil over the first words of the article in front of her—and again, and again, only managing to add a few extra words by the end of it before restarting her attempt altogether.
Gods damn, this was hard.
“We can all take a break, actually,” he said, and relocated the other four at Alicia’s table to “help” the other students.
“Hey. It’s okay,” he tried again, putting her hair behind her ear to get it out of her face.
But Alicia didn’t look at him. She didn’t even budge an inch. She tried over and over again to read the words in front of her, boring her eyes into the page.
“What do you want to do now?” said Malcolm. “It’s okay if this is too much.”
Another tear rolled down her cheek. “It’s easy.”
“No. It’s not. And that’s okay. We could both listen to it instead. Do you wanna do that? We can use one of the tablets.”
A long, looong moment passed. He was still getting nothing, and this level of discomfort was flying way past his limits.
“Or we can take a break,” Malcolm said again, “Come on. It’s totally okay.”
Chiron would’ve done it, too, he told himself.
Putting Tatiana in charge, Malcolm left the classroom, Alicia in hand. The faint gasps and whispered awws and whined ohhs from his students were way too much, and he internally screamed at them to shut the hell up for Alicia’s sake.
He led her into the corner of an empty classroom. Sitting on the carpeted ground, he pulled her into his lap. The waterworks poured out quickly in his embrace.
“It’s okay,” he kept saying as he rubbed her back and stared into space as Alicia poured out all her tears onto his hoodie.
Once the tempo of her sobbing had slowed, he got up to get tissues, making a mental note to remember to pocket some 24/7, and returned to sit in front of her.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” he said.
As she hugged her knees, Alicia was still trying to stop herself from crying. But no headshakes came, so Malcolm waited for her to speak. After a minute, he decided he’d take the initiative.
“It’s normal to stumble. ‘Stumbling is not falling,’” Malcolm told her, quoting his namesake. It had been his dad’s mantra to him.
“But I don’t w-want to s-stumble either,” Alicia grumbled.
“I know the feeling. It’s really annoying, right?” he said, and she nodded through her sniffles and hiccups. “I mean, it’s already really annoying. But it becomes even more annoying because you know you can learn so quickly. You can understand so, so much, so quickly. Right?”
Alicia gave a one-shoulder shrug and swallowed after a hiccup. “Usually.”
“Yeah. But then there’s this thing blocking you. And it doesn’t even feel like it’s you. It’s this… something else. This foreign thing that’s in your eyes, because how could it possibly be your brain when your brain’s already guessing all the possibilities and trying to put together the pieces you’re trying so hard to just see?”
Her red eyes met his in agreement.
“Is it like that?” he said.
Alicia nodded.
“That’s what it felt like to me. It gets easier with practice, I promise.”
What was it his other father would repeat?
“So, Michael Jordan— Do you know who Michael Jordan is?”
Alicia stared blankly at him.
“Michael Jordan,” he said, “is this legendary, retired basketball player who played for this team called the Chicago Bulls in the ‘80s and ‘90s—”
“Oh. Claire was saying they didn’t qualify for a competition last year?” Alicia said.
The playoffs. And it had technically been this year. But he was surprised Alicia had even paid enough attention to have been able to recite the fact. Maybe Claire had gotten her to remember it to rub it in.
“Well, neither did her team,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, with him, the Bulls won three championships in a row, then he retired and they lost. Then he came back, and they won another three championships. He probably holds a couple hundred records. Incredible athlete.” Bit of an ass.
Her face remained blank.
“Air Jordans are named after him?” Malcolm tried.
Realization dawned upon her. “Oh. The shoe? Oh, is the jumping person him?”
He held back a sigh. “Yeah, so, Michael Jordan once said, ‘I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ Do you know what that means?”
Alicia mused over the words, her gray eyes practically whizzing. “You can already accomplish more because you’ve tried more? But trying more comes with a lot of stumbling?”
“You got it,” he said and put on a proud grin, desperately trying to flip her pout.
“I don’t stumble a lot making robots,” Alicia challenged, using her I’ll-have-you-know tone. “Papi said I’m really good at it, and Uncle Leo says I’m a natural at mechanics.”
Malcolm momentarily rested his aching cheeks. “I know. But maybe you will stumble with it at some point for reasons that don’t have to do with reading. I have with things I’m good at and things I’ve liked. And that’s okay. But when that happens, you’ll just have to keep trying.”
“But it’s making me slow,” she said. Her red eyes hit him with accusation. “I don’t have to be slow if I don’t have to read so many things.”
“You can give yourself patience. I guarantee you, it’ll be worth it to keep trying. Eventually, reading will help you when you get stuck, even with robotics and other areas of engineering. Right now, you’re learning from Leo. But someday,” he said, switching to a sneaky cadence (and it was really getting easier to do this the more he did it), “you’ll read something even he doesn’t know. And then he can learn from you. Yeah? So you’ll keep reading, right?”
Alicia nodded. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she blurted. “I do. And I do try. Really hard.”
“I know.”
“But everything else is easier.”
“And some things will come easier than others,” Malcolm told her. “But the things that are worth doing are worth”—sucking at—“are worth stumbling over.”
Alicia took a few long moments to process his words before she nodded and blinked at him with her soft iron eyes.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
They were a stark contrast to the steely gaze Malcolm happened upon in the Cabin Six library.
Sat next to Zeke at the middle table, Annabeth focused on her laptop screen, biting her lip as she scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.
While Conrad and Sophie examined and critiqued each other’s freshly made figurines on another desk, Percy and Claire organized magazine clippings and ripped pieces of paper from Annabeth’s plastic folder.
“What about water sculptures on the sound?” asked Percy.
“Ooh!” Annabeth said, looking up at him pie-eyed. “That’d be beautiful.”
As Zeke seemingly made a note of it, Malcolm and Alicia settled down next to him and Annabeth and peered at their screens—cluttered with a Gantt chart, a couple spreadsheets, and inspo boards for clothing, dining, and decor.
“We’re all here!” Annabeth realized.
Shutting her laptop, she spread her arms and called Alicia. As Alicia snuggled her in her lap, Annabeth rested her chin on her sister’s head.
“Do you have a date yet?” Malcolm asked, distributing apples that he and Alicia had picked up from the dining pavilion.
“Ish,” Percy said. “We obviously want all the family to be there, so it seems best to do it in New Athens. We’re thinking April or May, so a month or two after the city’s settled and no one’s still freaking out about getting it ready.”
Conrad snorted. “April or May. Hera’s gonna hate that.”
“Well,” said Annabeth, “Hera can go—”
“Babe,” Percy warned with a pointed look at his fiancée, who huffed in response.
Zeke had his pencil at the ready. “And is this going to be an intimate gathering, or are you going full Helen and Paris, or something in between?”
“It seems a little dangerous to draw a line of whom to invite and whom not to,” Sophie pointed out.
“Yeah, and that’s why Athena and Poseidon had the bright idea to invite everybody,” Percy said.
Claire whistled. Conrad followed. Malcolm attempted—and failed—to continue the chain. Yet, the tiniest hoot escaped his lips.
“Aha!” he exclaimed.
Claire gave him a thumbs up.
“Someday, Mal,” Conrad said.
Zeke and Sophie blew air out their noses. And Annabeth looked at them exasperatedly.
Oops.
Malcolm returned to the task at hand. Lowering his voice, he asked, “So I’m guessing they’ve offered to take care of…” On one hand, he rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.
“Yeah, that’s taken care of,” said Percy.
“So we just have to plan it,” Annabeth said. “The fun bit. So.”
Momentarily letting go of Alicia, she upturned her notes one-handed until Percy handed a wrinkled sheet with a mess of their combined scrawls.
“Thank you,” she said to him. She had on that almost devious expression she wore when she was proud of or excited for something.
Percy did one of his subtle, indecipherable head-tilts before Annabeth faced her siblings.
“Okay, so.” She looked up from the paper. “Claire, I know you said you wanted to help with the venue layout—”
“Yes!”
“Can I help with that, too?” said Alicia. (Leo and his siblings had been teaching her blueprinting.)
“Sure you may!” Annabeth said. “And you’ll get to help Percy with security as well. Does that sound good? Great! Conr—”
“Catering!”
“—ad. That checks out. Sophie…” Annabeth checked her notes. “You wanted to try your hand at budgeting?”
Sitting on her hands, Sophie swiveled left and right in her chair. “With some help, yeah,” she said and straightened her back as Claire gently adjusted her posture.
“All right. Thank you,” Annabeth said. “Malcolm, it’d be wonderful if you could do the seating charts.”
No. Gods no. His eyes searched her face, but he found not a hint of humor. “You’re kidding, right?”
Annabeth was funny like that sometimes.
Of all the things she could make him do. He’d be fine with coordinating security or some other logistics. Flower ordering, maybe. But this?
“You’re the fastest at logic games,” she said. “You even took the LSAT for fun and you scored 180.”
“Given 150% of the time,” Malcolm corrected.
“And people with dyslexia and ADHD are entitled to such accommodations,” Annabeth said.
“I didn’t actually need that much.”
“Yeah! Even better!” she said. “Come on. It’s just a really big puzzle.”
“With a tremendous amount of research on everyone’s petty beef.”
“Well, we’re not asking you to do that part,” Percy cut in.
Annabeth’s eyes gleamed. “Lucky for us, we know someone who already knows the drama, so you don’t need to do any of that research,” she said, fanning the air to emphasize her point.
Percy’s face gave absolutely nothing away. But Annabeth? Annabeth looked a little too pleased, a little too proud.
“You do like logic games, don’t you?” she prompted before Malcolm could say anything.
“Do I like them that much?” His voice tried to leave him, as if trying to get out of the situation.
“Look,” said Percy, “this is an important task that Annabeth and I wouldn’t trust just anyone to do. It’s not just making sure that everything goes smoothly at our wedding. At first, we weren’t sold on the idea to invite everyone, but Athena and Poseidon pointed out that it’s in our interest because the other gods could give back some favors… which would be super helpful for our future kids.”
“Some peace would be nice,” Annabeth said, reaching for Percy’s hand with that entirely too satisfied look.
Malcolm knew exactly what their scheme was. He knew exactly the manipulative tricks they were pulling on him. He could still say no. This was still just a question.
Eyes shut for a moment, he tried not to think too hard. “Fine, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you.”
At least Percy and Annabeth were grateful. And it wasn’t like even Malcolm would trust just anyone either to ensure the wellbeing of his sister's future children. And… maybe the process wouldn’t actually be horrible.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Asked by Hubert if he wanted to slot in an 8:40 PM appointment, Malcolm said yes.
In hindsight, he would’ve preferred not to have been warned. The anticipation was gnawing at him all the way down to his nerves and eating into his thoughts. He was as powerless as the poor Brussels sprouts Ainsleigh had shown him the other day, attacked by a caterpillar infestation a Tithonus kid had cursed upon the Demeter Cabin after last week’s Capture the Flag game.
He’d made it five days without it being too much of a bother. It had been clear enough, hadn’t it, that there wasn’t going to be a continuation of… of any of it? There wasn’t supposed to be anything other than quick public hellos, silent treatments otherwise, and flashbacks that bombarded him in his nightly quietude.
These memories had no right to swarm him in the daytime, sweeping ghost touches across his body. They had no business flashing his mind with those images of Rhode, naked and writhing, while he was in his office. No reason to mimic her weight or whispers when he was trying to work.
Squeezing his eyes shut only amplified the chorus of breaths and pants and moans in his ears as he felt her teeth tug on his lip and her mouth envelop his dick. Opening his eyes wasn’t any better; it only served to remind him how the very fingers hovering over his keyboard had been used to pleasure her. They knew how she liked it. They knew her warmth. They knew her slickness. Which was now there, coating his face, nose to chin, gods dammit.
Why, oh why had he tried so hard that night to sear every fucking moment into his skull?
Exhaling an irate sigh, Malcolm slumped in defeat, swiveling in his chair as he tried to clear his mind.
And the moment his head hit the back of his chair, he was there again: his body on silky sheets, his hair combed through with her fingers, his tongue as restless as his heart.
He was just horny. That was it. This was all going to go away once he rubbed one out.
Yeah, there was no way he was going to do that at camp.
The cold shower he ended up taking perhaps hadn’t been the preferable solution, but it had been the only one, and it certainly made dinner more tolerable.
Between bites of tajine, Claire tried her damned hardest to direct their conversations to Malcolm’s role in the wedding planning, but Percy steered him clear of it all. Malcolm was so close to laughing at her fifth failure. Claire losing her patience at someone was already a rarity. Claire narrowing her eyes at Percy? Unheard of.
Percy didn’t even do so much as shrug in response. It was actually pretty disturbing how good he was at lying to their faces. But after the doe eyes Percy made at Annabeth and after the kiss he collected when he leaned on her shoulder, Malcolm reminded himself it was really everyone else who had to worry. In any case, Cabin Six had its secret codes even Percy didn’t know about.
As the clock ticked, the army of caterpillars that had chewed their way into Malcolm’s head began metamorphosing in his stomach. He went through all the regular motions, asking his family (Percy included) about their days, mm-hmming and nodding every so often and meeting their eyes when needed. But the stupid pests had become rabid.
Knowing he’d have to account for inevitable distractions if he was going to finish up any work, he scarfed down his gado-gado salad and quickly excused himself from the pavilion.
The trudging journey to his office, he promised himself, would be the final time he’d weigh this potential regret against counterfactual guilt.
Helping with the seating charts couldn’t have been anything but a bad decision. But there were Annabeth and Percy’s kids to consider. Even selfishly, he didn’t want to get on the wrong foot with them before they were even born.
‘Uncle Malcolm,’ they’d say, ‘were you so much of a self-centered jackass you couldn’t do this itty bitty thing for our safety? Auntie Rhode did all the seating charts on her own. She loves us.’
And she would do it, wouldn’t she? Even with his involvement, she would do it for them.
No. He wouldn’t let her win. And this time would be fairer; Amphitrite wouldn’t be here.
Confident with his game plan, Malcolm got to tackling bigger problems.
He tried once more reaching out to New Rome, begging them as diplomatically as possible to join New Athens’s ten-year plan to transition to a single-payer healthcare system.
Even with its broader coverage, healthcare in New Athens was going to be a problem. The only way their patched-up solution could even work was because Apollo kids, whether they worked in healthcare or not, were going to take over the most expensive treatments, while Apollo himself had promised to fund what his children couldn’t manage. It was like taping a hole in a dam that citizens didn’t even know was filling up.
The city was already beginning to pay a shitload more money than it should have for the less egregiously priced treatments. And that was with private insurers carrying some of the burden of the employed and their dependents.
Malcolm knew they could reach out to Athena as a real last resort, but unless it was an emergency, he didn’t like the idea of asking her to fund unsustainable solutions. He also knew they could dump all public coverage for the employed, but that would just move them backwards.
Bae, Will, and the health department had searched for answers, finding nothing nearby. The mortal US was their very problem; sticking with it would have amounted to perpetuating rights violations.
But even the single-payer Canada sucked ass, with its universal system of major coverage gaps and its nightmarish labyrinth of processes for getting pharmaceuticals to market. What was it Will’s team had found? Around 100 different public drug plans, and, until recently, thirteen provinces and territories to haggle with on prices for every drug? With still that chance a province would decline a deal if it wouldn’t fit their budget? For just the 30% of Canadians covered by public drug plans? Then another 100,000 private plans for another 60% of the population? All that for a population less than California’s? Yeah, no wonder pharma companies hated them. Too many Canadians were just too used to living on top of a meth lab to notice their nation was perpetually striving to rank, like, fourth last in drug affordability.
That was precisely the situation New Athens was in—and why they could never emulate the countries that had nailed it. New Athens was simply too puny.
They’d hoped to partner with New Rome and the godly townships across the country, and Malcolm couldn’t figure out how it was anything but a good idea for them all to band together. They could share a formulary, share an approval process, share a bulk purchasing plan. They could combine what tiny bargaining power they had and decrease all their prices.
But for some reason, the Romans were refusing to change their own system. Something about not wanting to relinquish their decision-making control to extra-jurisdictional entities.
The prevailing theory, floated around every other day by Will, was that their New Roman counterparts were deep in the pockets of godly pharma firms. (Bae, Pravir, and Maaza couldn’t confirm, but they didn’t rule it out either.)
Teaming up with New Rome was their first and only option. Bagging Olympus as a partner was a no-go. Olympus was populated with way too many gods to care about the health needs of other beings.
Then there was Atlantis, which had an entirely different population and a formulary almost completely inapplicable to New Athens. Merpeople, nereids, and sea gods simply didn’t face the same illnesses, nor use the same treatments as demigods, satyrs, dryads, and mortals. Besides, Atlantis also had issues of its own to sort out. A slew of pharma companies had gone bankrupt over the years, and while a research facility in the Atlantis government duly produced all those drugs and sold them at cost, it cost a shit ton, and R&D in the industry had slowed to a crawl, particularly for cures for rare diseases.
Getting nowhere, Malcolm put off the issue again to grapple with more realistic plans. Like having New Athens’s tax department automatically give citizens every benefit they qualified for. That idea had been going full steam ahead, garnering universal adoration from all relevant parties.
When he’d miraculously reached a state of flow detailing all the potential efficiencies, three knocks rapped on his office door, jumpstarting a staccato of itches in his chest.
Despite all the warnings, it took him a moment to recognize his guest.
She wore her hair straight today—sleeker and shorter than all times previous—with an outfit that transported her to some decade he couldn’t identify. She was so unrecognizable that the fluttering pangs left him entirely.
“Hello, Malcolm,” Rhode said, shutting the door. “I was told you would be here.”
He’d expected to tense at the sight of her. He’d told himself he would’ve instantly glared at Rhode. So why was it that his muscles were easing? Why was it that when she looked into his eyes, nearly smiling as if to say, ‘Do you remember?’, all he wanted to do was forget his game plan, forget… what was it that had been so bad?
Breakfast.
Malcolm snapped out of it and turned away from her, putting away his computer and notes.
“Rhode.” Contempt laced his voice.
“You’re not going with ‘Your Highness’?” she said. “It’s so flattering when you say that. It really gets me going.”
The all too familiar flames of embarrassment that had attached to his skin that morning in Atlantis made their triumphant return. Rhode made no comment on it as she strode to his desk.
Malcolm didn’t so much as budge from his chair. “I’m not Atlantian. You’re not my princess.”
“No, I’m not,” she said, resting her palms on the table.
With a bit of effort, he fixed his eyes on her face before his eyeline could descend. A traitorous part of his brain screamed ‘BOOBS’, and he bitch-slapped that inner version of him across the face.
“But that hardly matters, though, does it?” Rhode said. “I don’t need to be your princess for you to cave anyway. Is it because you like it too much?”
Despite the heat in his cheeks, there was a comfort in the position she put him in. Anger would always be easier than wherever it was she’d made a habit of stranding him.
“I’m not going to readily fall at your feet whenever you ask,” he flared.
It didn’t even faze her. “Oh, I know you won’t. You’re more stubborn than that,” she said. “Or you pretend to be.”
Was it possible that Rhode could see his insides? The parts of him playing out a civil war, that now stopped fighting each other to gawk at her?
“Because, you know what?” Rhode said before he could even catch up. “Out of your own will, you still tend to end up doing what I want. No, no. No, actually, you do more. And, oh Fates, it feels… it feels like winning.”
Malcolm’s jaw clenched. “I don’t appreciate being toyed with.”
She was making it easier than he’d expected, and it was almost unfortunate it had to be this way. And then it really was disappointing, because Rhode was now coming around the table, intruding over to his side to sit on his desk.
Her coolness slipped for once when he finally managed to put some bite in his eyes.
“You’re not getting it,” she said hastily as she slid off the table. “You’re not the game, Malcolm. You’re a participant. And there’s no reason you can’t win, too.” The desirous look she wore so easily tamed his glare. “You know, I liked it when you did.”
‘Do you remember?’
Did he remember when he’d finally had the upper hand? When she would’ve been thrashing around uncontrollably if he hadn’t held down her hips?
Did he ever…
Yeah, of course she liked it.
Tearing his eyes away, Malcolm tried to consider his options. But in this calmer state, unfairly devoid of all pissiness, he couldn’t figure out what to say, or even which direction to head in.
“Would you like to play again? Mm?” Rhode said, somehow wiring her mirth and mischief directly into the sensory nerves beneath his skin. “I recall you saying it was good. That I’m… thorough.... I know it’d be good. I keep thinking,” she said slowly, “of last week.”
The funny thing was, he would’ve said no. Saying no took way less effort than saying yes.
But now, there was no need to hurl himself across an abyss when she’d already made the leap for the both of them and held out her hand. All he had to do was take it.
And, really, he was just going to be helpful, wasn’t he? If Rhode needed someone’s hair to comb through and tug while reaching her highs, would he really have wanted it to be anyone’s but his? And if anyone would be the one dragging their lips over her skin—
Without having realized it, he’d spun his chair over to face her.
“You’re a practical person,” Rhode said. “Why don’t we just be truthful and cut the tension instead of dragging it out?”
When she nudged her head up, Malcolm found himself getting to his feet.
Just standing here like this was a thrill. The foot distance felt like a mile, but the memories washed over him all the same, tingling every part of his body that remembered what it felt like to feel good.
“You keep thinking about it?” he said in a low voice, just above a whisper.
Rhode’s lips quirked up the slightest bit. “Don’t you?”
He might have failed to restrain his own smile.
While waiting for her, Malcolm realized she was waiting for him. And this really should’ve been more awkward, but it never would be with her, would it?
Which meant she was making him do the heavy lifting now.
He thought to ask what she’d thought about—except she’d ask him the same, no doubt, and he most certainly did not want to answer that. That wouldn’t be fair. It was perhaps more interesting this way anyway: to know and only be able to wonder.
Neither knowing nor caring why, what he really wanted to do was to back her up into the desk. But when a foot became an inch, Rhode still didn’t budge. Malcolm was almost aching with the longing to feel the plushness of her body, the silkiness of her hair.... Would there be as much give as his hands remembered? Would her hair feel different, straightened like this?
“How practical are we talking?” he said.
Swallowing at the breath tickling his Adam’s apple, he focused his eyes on her busy gaze, which flitted from his mouth to his throat and up again.
With a grinning smirk, Malcolm ducked his neck to catch her line of sight. “Hello?”
“You have to tell me you want me,” said Rhode.
Heart pounding, mouth agape, he tried to find the words.
“If you do,” she said.
It was much too difficult to talk right now. But surely his initiative and enthusiasm would be sufficient.
It was so easy, too. To just bury his fingers in her hair (even softer than his memories had told him). To lay a filthy kiss on her mouth. To make her gasp with a lick.
He didn’t even have to think. Not when she was letting him step between her legs to close that inch gap. Not when she was making him breathe a laugh into her mouth with how quickly she’d reached for his ass.
Letting instinct take over, Malcolm followed flashback traces over the slopes of her body and let Rhode do the same to him. Every touch of his poured relief into the haunting outlines that had grouched about their emptiness the past week. The soft calls of the ghost contours were scorched by blazing cries for more, more, more.
He really did back her up now. Even better, he reached down for her thighs and lifted her up onto his desk.
His desk. Where he worked.
Mind sounding alarms, Malcolm pulled his lips from hers. But the warnings were so muted, he couldn’t find it in him to care that Rhode was still revisiting his body, that she was cradling his head and peppering his neck with kisses... Not even when he looked around his desk. Not even when his eyes darted to the door.
He was under a spell. A heady, buzzing daze so different from his troubles this week. This wasn’t turmoil. This was indulgence. This was like charmspeak. And he didn’t give a shit.
“There’s no one here,” Rhode breathed by his ear.
That was true, wasn’t it? Wasn’t his office also windowless? And hadn’t the city paid a pretty penny for Harpocrates to bless the key spots with the most sensitive information? Locations like his office?
Ha.
“Then why are you whispering?” he said.
Rhode shrugged, drawing his attention to her collarbone, where his lips went next.
“It feels hotter that way,” she murmured.
His body hummed in response.
As payback for her lipstick stains, he wanted to leave her a present. But because he wasn’t a slimeball—or as annoying as she was—he aimed for a spot by her shoulder that she could hide with her hair. Assuming she wouldn’t make it disappear anyway.
And now that he was thinking about this, he realized what he was doing was pointless beyond their now.
But now was fun. Now she had that same floral scent in her hair. (He’d already forgotten which dispenser in her shower that one belonged to. How crushing.)
Now her breathing was heavy and loud, and the scratches of her nails on the nape of his neck were as delicious as he’d remembered. Now he drew out more broken breaths with the scrapes of his teeth over her skin.
Now she was wearing this starkly revealing tank top with the thinnest straps imaginable, and now he could use his tongue to push one off her shoulder.
So it was good enough for now that any mark he could work on her would last for as little as it would.
But it didn’t even get to exist, because before he could get there, Rhode was leaning back to kiss his lips again.
Against her mouth, Malcolm said, “Not with your lipstick.”
Rhode huffed, but by the time he blinked, her lips were nude.
It was more comfortable (and hotter?) seeing it off. Like there was one less barrier between them. Malcolm dove in immediately.
Just as his lips touched hers, Rhode drew back, wriggling in his arms.
“Oh.” Malcolm let go of her in an instant, engulfed as never before by waves of befuddlement, shame, and remorse. “I’m—”
“I just need to fix it on you,” she said.
There was a wet wipe in her hand, and suddenly he was inhaling some solution of fragrance and oils as she dabbed the tissue on and around his lips.
His thundering heartbeat could only slow so much. But under the touch of her delicate fingers, his muscles began to slacken and his nerves began to ease.
Pushing lightly on his jawline, Rhode exposed his throat to her. This was a no-no. Luke Castellan had taught him that many years ago. Malcolm’s instincts were hollering at him, warning about the utter irresponsibility of what he was letting Rhode do to him, but he shut down those notions, holding onto just that sliver that liked the danger. The part titillated by the very idea that Rhode was dragging a light pressure over all the places she’d kissed him. Over the talon marks from the empousa who’d nearly sucked his blood. The one who’d forced him to wonder if he liked to be trapped by a seductive woman. Strangely, it had only ever been a faceless female body who’d come up during those thought experiments (he never really understood why not a guy)—replaced recently by the first person he’d trusted to ask. The very woman he was watching right now, who was dabbing a particularly stubborn mark she’d left where his neck met his shoulder.
“Does this happen every time with you?” Malcolm said.
“It depends on the lipstick,” Rhode muttered, now patting his face with a dry wipe.
“Then why not go for the—”
At once, Rhode dematerialized the tissue in her hand, leaned into him, and trapped the rest of his words in a heated kiss.
Malcolm pried himself away. “You know, that’s rude,” he said raspingly.
She put on a fake smile. “Can you please shut up?”
“That’s actually a lot less rude.”
It hadn’t quite given him the feeling he was winning, but it was helping. He enjoyed being on the other end for a change.
Through his kisses and roaming hands, Malcolm let out every bit of annoyance and frustration he’d stored up because of her. Because of her snarky jabs at breakfast. Because of the heaven she’d shown him that he’d begun to think he would never be able to reach again. Because of her fucking lipstick.
And, oh gods, it had been so, so long. He’d had no one, but she knew. She’d known this whole time and she was here, and now he was on the edge, bursting to just—
“Do you know how long it took to get it off me that morning?” Malcolm finally snapped.
“That’s why you use makeup remover,” Rhode said, with a practically audible eye roll. “Which you already know, because I know you used mine. You got there in the end, didn’t you? So why are you complaining?”
He didn’t respond to that. It was easiest to just ignore his own outburst and kiss her again, joining her in an aimless, fathomless euphoria—a simultaneous flight and free-fall, sparked by lust, propelled by ire, like a permanent, burning itch.
He was barely there, and he suspected neither was she. In desperation, they grasped at each other, creating any friction they could to relieve the incessant ache.
Yet the relief was its own fire. Her touch on his face, cold and tender, heated him anyway.
Stoking the flames, he pulled apart her knees, wedging himself between her legs, trapping her in his embrace.
Rhode broke off their kiss with a sharp breath, suddenly clamping her legs on the outside of his thighs.
Two clashing frenzies began to stir in him. The smaller, quieter of the two grew more bellicose by the millisecond. Half of him was screaming that she was closing her legs; the other insisted that she wanted more.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Malcolm let out a laughing huff. “I was gonna ask you.”
Rhode cupped his face to look him dead in the eyes. “Tell me.”
In spite of the dazzling green that confronted him—or because of it—he had it in him now. “I want you.”
Her lips spread. “Tell me if it’s too much.”
Oh.
He couldn’t even tell himself not to cower for having volunteered that information, because Rhode was pulling his shirt and stealing his breath and his mind and his worry with devouring kisses.
She started jerking her hips against his, inciting a frisson of pleasure through his limbs. It was so intoxicating and so pitifully insufficient. His body cried for more attention, more pressure. But the weight of her hands deserted him entirely, leaving him with a barely contained urge to whine as Rhode began rubbing her own thighs. Malcolm considered searching for his own relief—until he heard the words gasped out of her mouth in hot exhalations: “Would you be okay if I touch myself?”
“Can I do it instead?” he heard himself say.
Rhode looked triumphant now. ‘Look at you…’ he read.
Something that felt like shame crawled over him. But he wasn’t going to lose if he didn’t allow himself to. He wouldn’t again.
Rhode’s heels were strapped to her ankles, so they couldn’t come off now—for worse or for better. But her skirt allowed for easy access. He had to appreciate the efficiency. But at the apex of her thighs, he encountered… buttons?
“It's a bodysuit,” she said breathlessly.
When he felt for them and undid the first, Rhode cocked her head. “I wasn’t sure you’d know how to deal with that.”
“They’re just buttons,” he groused.
“You’re very intuitive.”
He’d never felt so offended by someone making those eyes. She really needed higher standards, he thought gruffly.
Rhode helped him tuck up the bodysuit flap as he pulled aside her underwear (It wasn’t lacy, but what did you know? It was also hardly existent today.), and he went straight past her curls to find, to his utter delight and pride, that she was already wet.
Collecting her slickness, he began rubbing her clit. Rhode’s eyes shut in an instant, and she wound her arms around his neck, cocooning him in her limbs.
Intuitive, he thought. Over buttons. Gods.
But maybe it was her form of encouragement. Maybe her way to express her appreciation was through compliments. Maybe he could do the same.
He could hardly believe he had to build himself up to say it when he was already touching her so intimately. When he was letting her use him. When the both of them knew he wanted it bad.
“I’m not sorry,” Malcolm blurted out. “I wasn’t. About that night. I did want to.”
Chest heaving, Rhode looked at him through heavy blinks. “I realized.”
“I was just tryna—” he began. “I had to—”
It might as well have been him being touched. He could hardly think. Her eyes were so turquoise. She was so pretty.
“Show me you’re not sorry,” she said.
Malcolm devoted the whole of him to doing so. He felt an almost out-of-body sensation—as though he’d become a set of parts working in concert to please this goddess. With a hand buried between her thighs and his other busy with sweeping her hair over her shoulder, he let his skin warm her cold touch, which was now adventuring under his sweatshirt. His legs were happy to be her grounding points, stilling her enough for him to use his mouth to peck and nip at her hammerhead tattoo.
“You can bite a little harder,” Rhode said. “But not too much.”
He dove deeper into the flowery darkness of her hair and took the liberty to sink his teeth in a little more. The little moan he pulled from her had him shifting his hips toward her.
In a matter of seconds, she’d reached for his crotch, dug her nails into his sweatpants over his obvious erection, and pulled down the fabric.
A desperate need to be surrounded by Rhode consumed him, and he pulled her legs around him, sinking in the shivery warmth bubbling in his bones.
Their hands were squished between their gyrating bodies, but he made every effort to still keep his thumb circling her clit, to turn those breathy grunts into needy whines.
Rhode’s wet heat began seeping through his boxer briefs. Malcolm could even see dark, damp spots on his gray cotton, and with more friction, he had to hold back a loud moan—as if Rhode couldn’t anyway see his silent screams.
“Oh, fuck. Please.” That came from her.
And if that didn’t have him on the verge of combusting. It just became even more unbearable in the best possible way as Rhode laid hot, wet kisses on his throat.
“You can get in me quick. The building’s empty,” she said into the crook of his neck.
It was totally not what he’d been considering. But again, she was right. Everyone would be at the campfire.
He’d never done it outside a bedroom. And it didn’t matter that there was no one there, that the room was soundproofed, that no one could get in the building without permission. It felt dirty enough to make him feel wild.
And Malcolm could laugh on the inside at Clarisse’s frustration with her commutes to motels. Until he couldn’t even care about that—because right now, Rhode was helping him yank down his boxer briefs to rest the weight of his cock in her hand.
It was better than anything he’d imagined in his night-dreaming. Because what his selfish evening reveries had never accounted for was the holy miracle that she wanted this.
She. Wanted. This. She wanted him in her hand. She wanted them skin to skin. She wanted his cock. She wanted to make him feel good. And he couldn’t really tell—hell, he still couldn’t even think—but in this instant, that very idea seemed to bring him more pleasure than her actual touch itself.
So it didn’t matter that Rhode was tugging him with too much friction. Or that his thighs were awkwardly trapped in his underwear. Or that they weren’t on the silky sheets of a plush mattress. She could have him however.
Then Rhode was angling him as he pushed into her heat, getting him closer and closer to the highest of heavens. But she groaned suddenly, muttering to him to wait.
He came to in a second, processing that a bottle had appeared in her hand. His mind unfroze yet more as the cold liquid she squeezed out onto him made him twitch. But all of it—all of everything—disappeared from his cares when she slicked him up hastily under her skirt, working him until he grew harder.
Amid her heavy breaths, Rhode let out a noise of complaint as his length brushed against her skirt, now messed with pre-come and lube.
It took him an embarrassingly long moment to actually care enough to feel bad, but he came to her aid, pushing her skirt up, far enough to reveal more tempting expanses of thigh and a glistening dark tuft of hair—a sight as divine as it was profane.
Then Rhode grunted and huffed again, even louder this time, and almost rolled her eyes while she conjured a small towel to sit on.
He barely had time to be amazed, because now he was prodding her slit again, and before he knew it, he was helping her sink the head of his cock inside her slick warmth.
His mind went blank with nothing but bliss. There were no words, no images, no colors, no worries, no thoughts. He might have been nothing right now.
But after a handful of mindless thrusts, the fog cleared, and Rhode came to the forefront.
“Can you touch me?” she said.
“Was getting there.”
In the blur of his domineering senses, he needed several attempts to find a comfortable angle, but he pulled himself together enough—as feeble as his strings were—to work his thumb in a rhythm that got her head tipping back and her cunt fluttering around him.
Rhode rewarded his counter-clockwise circles with gasps and breaths so delicious and broken, they were destroying him, too.
As weak as Malcolm felt already, it seemed so tame compared to the image he saw before him. Held up solely by her legs around him, Rhode tried balancing herself on the table. But her arms wavered under her weight, so Malcolm instinctively loaned his strength to support her back with his free hand, practically lifting her as he bucked his hips towards her all the same.
Remarkably, it barely threw him off. Even the lewd squelching and slapping sounds couldn’t get him to stop.
Rhode was clinging onto him, jerking her hips against his as best as she could as he worked in heavenly tandem. Still, Malcolm craved more and more and more.
To his frustration, Rhode’s hair was annoyingly covering too much of her. But with enough thrusts and an adjusted angle, the dark strands finally fell behind her shoulders.
Yet her silly, little tank top bodysuit was still in the way. So, with a persistence that was almost a fury, he bounced them enough for the second strap to fall off her shoulder.
He wanted more of her skin—so desperate to breathe it in and lick and kiss and touch. It was maddeningly impossible.
He yearned to give her more. He wanted her to come first. To come now.
That much, he could do.
But the more he tried, the further lost he got. She was squeezing him so torturously, and he dove in faster, getting himself that roaring more he hungered for.
“Fuck,” he rasped. “I’m gonna…”
“Going to what?”
Her eyes on him merely turned him on more, but he slid out of her as much as he hated it. Except the legs around his ass didn’t let up.
“No,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell me. Tell me what I do to you, Malcolm.” Her muscles clenched around him, threatening to emit groans from his throat. “Tell me.”
It felt like gods damn everything. He must’ve been literally sparking under his skin. How could he not be if he was this close to exploding?
The way his name sounded on her tongue… Her grip around him so sweet and sinful and snug… The reminder that she—the skillful, clever, marvel of a person… this god—wanted all the rapturous thrills happening to him right now…
Everything about her was pushing and pulling him with such force and he was teetering off a cliff, trying and trying and trying with everything in him to stay put.
“I’m seriously going to lose it if you keep doing that,” he gritted out.
It seemed he’d offered a good enough response. She disappointingly didn’t say his name again, but she gave him an electrifying kiss that sent him to the precipice. Shivering and wrecked from another strong squeeze of her muscles, an involuntary moan ripped out his throat, and Malcolm went hurtling off the edge, exploding into nothing and everything.
At the very edge of his consciousness, he could feel himself shoot off inside her, and that little thought of utter obscenity only shattered him more.
He landed gasping for breath in a dizzying feeling as he and Rhode inhaled each other’s air.
He hadn’t even fully gotten back in his head, but there was enough fuzziness and adoration running through him to have him slavishly busy his thumb again, even as a smarting pain began to envelop his hand.
Malcolm could almost ignore the heat of her around him, warming and tickling with each passing minute. But when lightning strikes inflamed his whole arm, he really couldn’t take it anymore. Whispering an apology as Rhode whined, he set her down on his desk and had the mind to readjust that near useless towel below her, in case it actually did help.
Malcolm struggled with his left, wondering why in his twenty-three years he hadn’t cared to prepare to be this ambidextrous. But he could start now. This could be practice.
With newfound energy, he focused solely on coordinating his awkward muscles to stimulate the glans of her clit.
Admittedly, he tried to cheat at some point and go with straight lines, but Rhode mewled the faintest bit and said, “No, go back to circles.”
“‘Kay.”
He held in his own complaints.
With grunts in her breaths, Rhode fluttered around him sporadically, legs pulling him even further into her as she drew out remaining spurts out of his already softening erection. He lost control once more and momentarily stopped rubbing her clit, but began again, keeping at it through her heavy breathing until she held his arm and said, “Okay.”
After all that and after his own explosive orgasm, it felt so anticlimactic.
He let it be. He remembered his very first time when his first love had chuckled and said, “Yeah, it’s pretty much just that.” Meena had assured him he’d done it right, but he had still lied down next to her and asked himself, That’s it? That’s fucking it? It had seemed totally unfair that it’d felt better for him than what he’d expected, while it’d looked simply meh for her compared to the dramatic examples he’d seen beforehand. But she had then gazed at him with soft, sleepy brown eyes, not even bothering to cover herself, and he’d figured that perhaps not all the lies he’d been fed were terrible.
Right now, Rhode looked nearly as satisfied but twice as drained, seeming genuinely exhausted with how labored her blinks were.
“Damn,” he said. “It’s, what, nearly 1 AM in Atlantis?”
Rhode smiled as her eyes closed once more. “I don’t think they were thinking about that when they invited me to the campfire,” she said, ending with a yawn. “Don’t tell them, but I nearly forgot. I was about to head to bed.”
She magicked away any evidence on them, letting Malcolm comfortably pull up his boxer briefs and sweatpants in the time it took for her to yawn again. He watched her reach between her still splayed legs to adjust her underwear. Then he felt guiltily useless as Rhode whispered curses and leaned to a side with heavy lids to snap on the buttons of her bodysuit.
What an ordeal. For not even ten minutes.
Ten minutes. Which meant—
“Wait,” he said. At the snap of another done button, Malcolm had the nerve to reach for her thighs. “You want me to not be sorry?” he said.
There was a flicker there, he thought, almost hidden in the sea green, that suggested Rhode for once didn’t know where he was going. Devilry found its way to his lips. Stepping just that bit closer between her legs, he traced his thumbs over the fabric covering her skin.
“You like to take more than one, right?” he said.
He slid up her skirt once more and held in a wince as his knees touched down on the hard floor.
Rhode’s smile felt like a laugh. “You can try. We don’t have much time.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
She chuckled then.
The sounds of breathing and rustling filled his office until the sharp unsnaps of the two buttons she’d fixed resounded in the air.
With only the tiniest hesitation, he pulled her underwear aside and dove into her familiar, tantalizing scent. Rhode’s contented breaths turned into a gasp at the first lick. And then all sound was muffled by her thighs.
Tongue poking into her slit, he worked her slickness out of her and tasted their combined essence.
It was weird, he had to admit, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought this through. But he didn’t care. It was proof. An invisible relic they’d created. The lizard brain in him told him that if anyone else were eating her out right now, they’d be tasting him, too. He was just thankful his come wasn’t really there.
As she watched him, he sucked the head of her clit, then flattened his tongue and streaked it over that sacred spot, over and over and over and over—and then, finally, her hips began to flinch.
“Oh. Shit,” came Rhode’s muffled voice. “You better finish this. I’m not going to walk around camp needing to come.”
It offended him at first, but Malcolm decided he wouldn’t take it personally. He lived here; he knew the frustration. And then it just infuriated him because she really didn’t know the half of it.
But after Rhode had been so kind to have gotten him off following a week’s worth of hell (not to mention the glory of last week after months of asceticism), how could he be anything but grateful enough to help her climax again?
After a half-minute of licks, her ass shifted, making him rise up on his knees. And then he saw why: Rhode was lying on his desk. Fuck. Fuck, if anyone came in here, there was no shred of decency to hide what they were doing, save for Rhode’s skirt, and even that was hardly—
NO ONE WORKS AT THIS TIME. EVER.
THE DOOR IS RIGHT THERE.
YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYONE IN THE BUILDING AT 8:50 ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.
The flicks of his tongue were repetitive enough not to have his belligerent mind disrupt Rhode’s pleasure, but for his own sake, Malcolm shut down his thoughts the way she’d taught him and let his baser wants rule him, betting all of his dignity on a five-minute wager.
Whether he could do it in five minutes was another gamble, but he kept at it, lick after lick after lick.
“This…” Rhode said, interrupted by her own shaky gasp. “This… is what I meant. Mm. About you—” Another moany huff. “—doing more. You just pretend—ah—you don’t want me.” Her breaths sounded almost like a laugh. “I didn’t even ask. And you’ll just—ohh—get on your knees for me. Just. So. Eag—ah.”
Annoyance merely spurred competence. He shut her up and got her gasping and shaking like it was his revenge. It may have only proved her point, but right now, this was his job.
Although… it didn’t have to be, did it? He could stop right now. He could get her to ask. To say please.
As if it would have even bothered her in the slightest to say, “Please eat me out.”
Nah. More likely, she’d deadpan a “Please lap your tongue on my clit until I come.”
It wouldn’t prove anything, nor change anything to make her ask. She’d just turn it around and ask if he wanted to do it, wouldn’t she? And then he’d have to ask her for the honor or some shit.
It was easier to just give her what they both wanted.
Only when her hips had bucked in his face, only when her back had lifted off his desk, did Malcolm finally stop.
Rising to his feet, he took a moment to take a mental picture of Rhode sprawled across his desk.
He knew this memory would follow him long after tonight, but he couldn’t help it. Everything just felt new with her—new not just to him but—and right now, he ignored the improbability—as though no one had ever done what they had. All those moments deserved to be commemorated.
As he helped her up, Rhode hit her head on his second monitor. She didn’t groan or complain, but he massaged that spot anyway as he got her to taste herself on his tongue.
Ignoring his own growing neediness, he pressed kisses on her lips until she gradually stopped returning them.
Rhode’s fingers landed on his sensitive, likely swollen lips. “No more,” she whispered, mouth slanting in a smile. Her eyelids were even droopier than before.
Malcolm stepped away. In the space he gave them, Rhode held out a wet wipe he took to clean his face and his hands. She herself used one for her thighs before adjusting her underwear and snapping on her bodysuit.
As he watched her, reality slowly began to sink in, its weight rendering him useless. Rhode was sitting on his desk, where they’d fucked—again—and all she was doing was smoothing out the wrinkles of her skirt and rummaging through her bag for supplies to fix her hair and makeup. He could literally see it, but he could somehow barely comprehend that she was hopping off his desk, patting herself down, and sliding her skirt around for a check.
In a daze, Malcolm extracted the tissues in her grasp and lobbed them into the trash.
When he met Rhode’s eyes, the question of what in the hells of Hades had just happened was overshadowed by another: Who was it who had won this time?
“You’re welcome,” he said.
She took only a moment. “Yeah.” Her eyes dragged over his body as shameless and as proud as ever. “I know.”
Rhode turned her skirt around and headed for the door before he could think up a retort.
“Check your mail soon,” she said on her way out, leaving behind only the echoing clack of her heels.
Malcolm immediately set about cleaning his desk—but there was no trace of anything. Not an object out of place.
A silence quickly permeated his office, ringing incessantly in his ears as an ache—almost a hurt—consumed him.
What was it? Some post-coital dysphoria? Or was it just that he’d lost once again?
But PCD probably didn’t come with this insistence that it wasn’t over, did it?
And if he’d lost, why did he want more?
Was this masochism?
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The stillness of nightfall only burgeoned that twinge in Malcolm’s chest, and he spiraled into that spine-chilling, direful feeling reserved for evenings: that for some reason, there was life at all. That, after all those years, after all those gods had faded and all those empires had fallen, Rhode was still here. That in this eerie phenomenon called life, they had met. And her hair could be so lush and smell so wonderful. And he—or at least his services—had crossed her mind enough times the past seven days for her to have initiated another round of mind-blowing sex.
Come to think of it, was it not odd that sex happened the way it did? Was there really no other way to sustain life?
And again, why did there have to be life at all? Or the existence of anything?
Before he could descend to the nauseating madness, Malcolm had made it to the campfire. It was only a little after 9, and other campers were still arriving—meaning all the excuses he’d prepared had been a complete waste of his time and worry.
In a large grassy clearing with rows of stone benches, hundreds of campers surrounded a twenty-foot tall column of flames. Something was always a little off with the scene. The bonfire crackled and smelled like real fire, but it encased campers in a fuzzy bubble of distributed warmth. Its colors never appeared like a typical fire either, mimicking instead the mood of Camp Half-Blood’s residents.
Today, the fire was bright gold. The licks of flames looked almost joyful, as if the fire were itself singing along with the campers, listening eagerly as they traded whispered secrets, and welcoming new arrivals as they traded handshakes and slushies.
As old campers taught the Romans and the newly claimed demigods campfire songs like “I Am My Own Great-Great-Great-Great Grandpa” and “Down By the Aegean,” Malcolm was tuned to the sound of a loud laugh. Rhode’s laugh.
“That’s… Thank you,” she said, in what looked to be a hearty conversation with a shrugging Connor Stoll.
She didn’t look at Malcolm, and he, too, barely looked at her.
As expected, all the benches had been taken, so Malcolm joined Claire on the grass and talked with her until she was mobbed by her besties Alice (a child of Hermes) and Kayla (a child of Apollo), along with Kayla’s sister Yan.
They didn’t mind his presence, but he searched anyway for Conrad, catching him in the sidelines sitting with Grace and a few of her siblings. Behind them, Clarisse was dragging a grinning Chris away from the throng. Then Malcolm found Annabeth with Percy, Leo, Piper, Grover, and Juniper on the other side of the fire.
As he considered heading over there, a sixteen-year-old-looking brunet approached to sit beside Kayla and Yan.
“Hi, girls!” he said, reaching to give them hugs.
No matter how many times Malcolm had witnessed it, it would forever be weird to see Apollo greet his grown children when he adopted the look of a teenager.
Even in the odd meeting he had with City Council—as the only god who ever bothered to sit with them—Apollo would appear in his mortal form. It was sometimes difficult to take him seriously when he looked like a child. But Malcolm would remind himself that he’d hated mortals doing the same to him when he’d probably known more than they had and definitely seen more than they had.
Which only surfaced the reminder that half the camp had fought two wars looking like that—not including all the others who hadn’t made it.
Malcolm happily left those thoughts in the dust at the call of his name.
“Have you worked it out yet?” Apollo asked him.
Malcolm could only shake his head.
“We could produce every treatment in-house?” Apollo offered. “I’ll send stuff. Don’t worry.”
Malcolm let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Oh my gods, thank you. Thank you. Can I ask you, though, if Olympus could actually—”
“Oh, hold on a sec. Is that… ” Apollo peered beyond Malcolm’s shoulder, utterly transfixed at the scene behind him. “Is that… Rhode?”
“Uh, yeah,” Malcolm said as casually as he could. “Annabeth and Percy invi—”
But Apollo was cutting him off with an apology, and before Malcolm knew it, Apollo had changed into his godly form. No longer an adolescent geek, he stood bronzed and muscled, and his brown hair turned into the most luscious blond that had never irked Malcolm until now.
“Rhode!” Apollo called. His bright blue eyes gleamed with something between wonder and relief.
He passed his children and paid no attention to the fawning campers whom Yan pulled disgusted faces at.
“Do they always have to be so gross?” muttered Kayla.
When Alice shrugged in response with a look at their father, Yan and Kayla shot her a look.
Malcolm looked beyond them, and for a glorious half-second, Rhode caught his eyes before they returned to Apollo.
Apollo… Yeah, he was a god, but… he couldn’t be her type.
Except for the fact that she’d married—married—his predecessor.
Even so, Rhode preferred intuitive good boys, didn’t she?
Like Connor Stoll? Malcolm’s mind asked. Who could get her to belt out a laugh like that? He’d watched enough from a safe distance to know that Connor, even with his hijinks, had a reputation among ladies that was as popular—but almost in direct opposition to—Pravir’s. Connor was an absolute rascal in the way Pravir was upstanding—and a darling in the way Pravir was said to be a stinker.
At least Rhode wasn’t sidling up to Apollo as close as she’d been to Connor. There was probably still enough room between them for Artemis, Poseidon, and Helios combined.
Malcolm took his notebook out of his pocket and flipped through the pages as Rhode greeted Apollo. He trained his ears to block out the campers.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you since—” Apollo was saying. “You know, I don’t even remember when! It’s been eons! Holy Zeus, how are you?”
Rhode’s laugh traveled all the way to Malcolm’s spot. “Oh, I didn’t know we were doing hugs,” she said, continuing to giggle.
The nagging feeling that lodged itself in Malcolm’s gut was amplified and steered in a completely different direction when, beside Claire and Alice, Yan and Kayla faced each other stiffly.
“I keep missing your visits to Olympus,” Apollo said, just as Malcolm saw Drew insert herself in their two-foot circle.
“Oh, gods! Lady Rhode!” she exclaimed.
Rhode smiled as she faced Drew. “You can just call me Rhode, but I appreciate it.”
“Oh! Well, I’m Drew,” she said, completely ignoring Apollo. “I actually saw you a few weeks ago at Olympus Fashion Week. You were sitting on the other side of the runway. I remember you were wearing this gorgeous green maxi with that sweetheart neckline. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Where did you get it?”
They were so engrossed in their chat, in their own bubble they created, that it was now Apollo who was the butter-in.
“Ah, I guess I could’ve run into you there,” he said over Drew’s next inquiries: heels and bracelets. “I usually don’t go. Aphrodite usually gets extra—” He stopped at a mere look from Drew, and the two began a squabble until Apollo just stopped responding to her. “Anyway, Rhode, I’ve asked Poseidon— I wanted to reach out. Um. About…”
Malcolm actually felt for him. There was no way anyone had ever written a manual on how to comfort the widow of a guy who’d already faded way back when only for his evil granddaughter (from a kid the couple didn’t share, no less) to summon him from the depths of Tartarus just five years ago and imprison him so that the cruelest of emperors could absorb the husband’s power and steal his sacred title and yours, since you were the one who’d replaced the husband to begin with and kind of caused him to fade in the first place. Oh, and yeah, it was sort of the late zombie husband who’d caused a whole bunch of those wildfires and droughts in the west because he’d been so angry about everything, but it was okay because it hadn’t been all the wildfires and droughts, and he was okay now because he had returned to Chaos.
As much as Malcolm wanted to know, he couldn’t bring himself to even try to eavesdrop. And then he couldn’t anyway because too many campers were now drowning out Apollo and Rhode with gleeful and scandalized murmurings about how Percy and Drew were finally facing one another after two-and-a-half weeks.
True enough, they were just barely not ignoring each other, until the four of them swiftly split in pairs, with Drew leading Rhode to her siblings and Apollo staying put to ask Percy about his family in Manhattan. But every thirty seconds, Apollo would glance at Rhode, his face etched with plain guilt and concern, in the overdramatic way he often got.
And then Malcolm felt bad he’d even thought Apollo would’ve hit on her. Even if the god hadn’t essentially become more human over the last several years, he probably would’ve never violated Bro Code with Helios.
Still, it was far less of a bother to see Rhode laughing with Connor.
“Yo, does Percy’s sister know he and Drew are, like, sworn enemies?” said one of the new campers to Malcolm’s right.
“Oh my gods, right?” said another.
Malcolm could’ve rolled his eyes. They didn’t even know Percy or Drew. It was sad, frankly, what camp devolved into without any wars to prepare for, but he reminded himself that he’d wanted this.
He just looked around, eavesdropping as the young campers guessed what the Aphrodite Cabin was going to do to Percy in tomorrow’s game of Capture the Flag. They were so sure it was going to happen, since Drew had missed her opportunity for revenge last week when Percy had been in Atlantis.
To Malcolm’s left, a few children of Nike were lobbing taunts at other demigods. He could never understand how some campers couldn’t just keep it in. Unless… it was all a play to sow fear and doubt in their opponents. That would’ve been pretty smart, actually. But that wasn’t how he rolled.
He looked at Claire, who blinked a nod. And they sat quietly, collecting evidence. Something big was going to happen, it seemed. Something explosive. Something that would supposedly annihilate the red team.
He found it strange—even offensive—that no one had told him what it was. He was on the blue team. He was a head counselor—of an Olympian cabin at that. He was a child of Athena.
It was okay, though. Because so what if the children of the minor gods wanted to sort this out themselves? So what if they wanted to plan a game without the influence of their experienced mentors?
“Claire, Malcolm, do you know what it is?” asked Kayla. “What in Hades is everyone talking about?”
The Apollo Cabin had been recruited to Team Red, he remembered. He just gave a sly shrug.
“Whether or not we do know, we wouldn’t tell you, would we?” said Claire.
Yan groaned. “I was hoping to have a chill day tomorrow. You know what? Either of you can kick me out early. Please.”
“Wait,” said a nearby camper. “Apollo and Rhode aren’t joining, are they? Is that why they’re here?”
Word went around the fire, reaching Chiron, who had no answer, then reaching Apollo, who looked at Rhode with a questioning, almost hopeful, shrug.
“I save my participation for the days my siblings announce their engagements,” she said to everyone. “But good luck to both teams!”
With at least a third of the camp already facing her direction, Malcolm chanced a look.
Rhode, Drew, and Mariana were sitting beside each other with perfect posture on a bench perpetually reserved by the Aphrodite kids who didn’t want to sit on the grass. Drew pointed to the laces of Mariana’s fancy, white gym shoes while Mariana stuck out her leg and rolled her ankle. Rhode took long, frequent blinks, nodding often as the daughters of Aphrodite took turns speaking.
The trio remained in Malcolm’s periphery as he tore his gaze away, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rhode and Drew shaking with laughter at something Mariana said. A gust of wind then ruffled their skirts and blew through their dark hair, baring expanses of skin and curves that glowed in the firelight.
And for the nth time, he asked himself: Was he really bi? Really? Spectrum or not, it felt like 99 to 1 right now, and it didn’t seem like that 1 held much statistical significance in this instant. Had it all been for attention he didn’t even want? Was it just to feel more interesting a person? Was he a fraud? Had he simply misunderstood?
With the reminder that he asked himself these same questions every quarter only to come to the same conclusions on each occasion, he ignored those voices to save himself the time and energy.
What he still wondered, however, was how she—all three of them, really—didn’t get cold, dressed how they were.
Half his mind was on Chiron, who now circled the fire to make an announcement about the necessity of leaving detailed enough feedback during cabin checks. But Malcolm let the other half wander. By the time Chiron began recounting tales to the campers about the stars in the night sky, starting with Zoë Nightshade, Malcolm had fully zoned out. (No offense to the Hunter, but he’d heard the story plenty of times before.) And in his periphery, among the hundred or so campers in his sight, he saw Rhode take out a garment from her bag.
Oh, she’d come prepared.
Pulling the sweater over her head, she laid it off one shoulder.
Malcolm held in the involuntary eyebrow twitch. So, was everything warm now, save for the shoulder? Or had that particular shoulder been warm but everything else cold? Or was she only partially cold and this was some happy medium?
As Chiron now droned on about Orion and Ursa Major, Malcolm wondered what drove those fashion decisions.
One-shoulder togas were understandable, given their fabric shape and instructions. But what had made the first person to adopt such a style think, ‘Hey, ya know what would look cool? If I had this item of clothing that would fit me perfectly—if not maybe a little oversized—and wore it in a way that lessens functionality and restricts the movement of my limbs. That’s what.’
A shoulder injury, Malcolm concluded. Maybe a painful infection on the clavicle. But he had to admit that there was some appeal to it. Some… je ne sais quoi.
His eyes drifted again, catching Rhode smiling as she listened to Chiron’s stories. Her fingers flitted to her collarbone and up to her neck—before she looked Malcolm dead in the eye.
It was embarrassing and annoying and exhilarating and wonderful all at once.
Rhode was looking into the fire now, casually nodding as Drew spoke to her again.
It had barely been a second. Perhaps it hadn’t even been that. But it was enough. Malcolm bit the insides of his cheeks hard. Beneath his crossed arms, he pinched his skin to a point it’d leave a mark. But he held it in.
Beside him, Claire moved her head just a bit. She wasn’t looking at him, but he knew better.
The side of his neck prickled. It was as if Rhode hadn’t been across the campfire right now. Now she was right here in his lap, pressing lipstick kisses onto his skin, laughing at him between her pecks.
Malcolm merely looked down, at the blades of grass, at pine needles scattered on the ground. Reaching for one of the clusters, he turned it over in his hands, suddenly wanting to know every little thing about it.
If he’d woken up without lipstick on his face last week, had Rhode removed it for him when he’d been knocked out? Had she then left her remaining red smudges on his body for him to remember what she’d done to him? Had she gone to sleep as she marveled at the mess she’d made of him?
He added the questions to the list of all the things he was desperate to learn. Things he probably never would.
The stars would continue to live in consciousness, their stories passed down by Chiron through the changing crowds. But all the while, the wind would blow away the pine needles as nobody watched.
The pine needles in his hand were tough and spindly. They were crooked here, cut there, and gradated unequally in shades of green. A few were splotched brown at their tips. But nobody looked.
Malcolm inspected them with purpose, yearning to memorize every millimeter that nobody else would ever know. Because nobody else would ever know.
Maybe no one had to know about the pine needles but them alone. The wind would carry them someplace new, where perhaps they would become something new. Something tall and old and there.
Or they could fly into the crackling, gold fire, becoming little specks of ash, and disappear into the summer sky like secrets taken to the grave.
For the myriad knowns of the world, there must’ve been a trillion unknowns. Countless truths in the universe. And in this most peculiar, grand realness, Malcolm thought as he held back a smile, there were things only he and Rhode knew.
Notes:
1🏃2🚶
That everyday, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment I mentioned in that tumblr post was: “Oh, I didn’t know we were doing hugs,” she said, continuing to giggle.
Also, I know I kinda trashed Canada’s healthcare system, but I would still very much prefer to live in their situation. Just thought it would’ve been more interesting to explore how even better-off countries have it bad.
See you next time for chapter 9. While I flesh out certain scenes that take forever to write, I’ll be on tumblr with more behind-the-scenes stuff.
Chapter 9: In which Malcolm picks up a habit
Notes:
My turn to have one of those classic AO3 author’s notes... I had my wallet and like $750 stolen from me, and have been dealing with my stingy bank in the aftermath. (Once again, RJ, I’m still so awed and thankful you’ve made my issue so much less sucky. It’s so kind of you.)
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
By 2:30 PM the following day, Malcolm could piece together more of the red team’s Capture-the-Flag strategy than he could his own team’s.
Campers were already in the arena, gearing up for the match. Dozens were sitting outside by now. A handful were taking selfies in the line for the restrooms.
And Nike still hadn’t shared squat.
If going total hush-hush was the Nike kids’ way to keep a secret, it seemed pretty misguided. The red team’s hopes had been shot last night when their leaders, the Aidos kids, decided to try attacking from a defensive position. Now, the red team’s hopes were fired to the high heavens.
And while there were members on Team Blue like Malcolm and his siblings, who were still restless for answers to Nike’s mystery, there were those like Jake, Drew, and Pollux, who argued with Chiron even louder this week about having to show up at all.
Malcolm couldn’t believe they were trying to hash this out again.
This time, it wasn’t Chiron who ended the debate. When Drew said, “We have businesses to run,” and Pollux insisted, “We’re in our mid-twenties anyway,” and Jake whined, “We do have lives. It’s also not like Rachel Dare has to play”, Clarisse gave them a piece of her mind.
“You have lives,” she said, “because you played Capture the Flag! We don’t know when the next war will be, and New Athens Security isn’t going to save everyone’s asses alone when some new threat hits us! Got it?!”
Infuriated still, Drew spun on her heels to face Malcolm, nearly taking out a newbie camper with her swinging monster of a tote bag. “No one agreed to endless conscription.”
Malcolm was already backtracking his way outta there. “Nah, nah, nah,” he said. “This isn’t the city. This is camp. Talk to Chiron.”
Why she thought only children and teenagers should be subject to conscription was beyond him. Who did she think they were? New Romans?
Pushing aside their arguments from his mind, he ignored that look from Chiron and left the scene to strap on his gear.
Malcolm spent the following ten minutes in the middle of the arena’s ruckus, helping Annabeth put the buzzing nerves of some new kids to ease, answering shy last-minute questions about footwork, and dodging a blow from where Suleiman Azikiwe and Mark Antony Flores were warming up.
The guys were getting better at least, and he told them so, to their great delight. To his delight, they wanted to show him a diving move they’d perfected that he and Clarisse had recently taught them. And true to their word, Suleiman and Mark Antony glided so smoothly across the ground, with flawless control of their swords.
“Amazing,” he said, extending an arm to each to pull them off the floor. “You’re actually going to try winning this time, right?”
“We tried last time, too!” Mark Antony protested.
Suleiman grinned. “Yeah, you should’ve seen. I kicked his ass.”
“Good,” Malcolm said with a nod.
“Hey!”
Laughing as he retreated, Malcolm’s mood immediately soured when he walked into a familiar waft of sweet fruit.
Standing alone among the throng was certified moron and by far the greatest nuisance of a student he’d ever had, Logan Morton, a twelve-year-old child of Aergia. Their groany, fidgety attempts at fixing their armor on them looked almost like an elderly person’s dance moves.
Malcolm fought his inner grump and approached them. “You want help with that?”
“No, I’m good.” Logan barely looked at him—not that they could see much anyway with that stupid mop perpetually covering their eyes.
It was no wonder that armor wouldn’t fit right over baggy streetwear. And their greaves were still upside down.
Before Malcolm could tell them so, another student of his got there first. Vivian Juan, daughter of Providentia.
Vivian?
It was the first time Malcolm had seen the two hang out. Never in a million years had he thought she’d...
“We missed you both last class, “ he said. “The others were having a blast, you know.”
“And so were we. We can have our separate blasts,” said Logan, still trying to fix one greave while Vivian finished putting on their other.
Malcolm ignored their comment. “We’d like to see you back,” he said to the two of them.
He got nothing from Logan.
“Vivian?” Malcolm said. “You were doing well. Were the classes not enough of a challenge for you?”
“Summer camp is supposed to be fun,” said Logan on her behalf.
“Or if not fun,” Vivian said, “then at least useful?”
Over Logan snickering, Malcolm said, “Well, that’s exactly my concern.”
“There are no grades in your class. I have other classes with grades?” she said. She said it like a question, like every other sentence she uttered.
“It’s funny,” came Drew’s voice on Malcolm’s right. “Because Capture the Flag doesn’t have grades either. But, unlike Malcolm’s class, it actually has become one of the most useless parts of camp. And yet, here you are after you also missed arts and crafts classes.”
That was news to Malcolm. But he knew Drew didn’t give grades either.
“Viv,” said Drew, “I have to ask. Why are you wasting your time with vaping losers? It’s a shame to let them squander your potential.”
“Nobody asked for your opinion, Drew,” said Logan.
“Don’t you have turtles and dolphins to kill right now?” Vivian added.
Drew’s jaw set as the duo went off in snickers. “Fuck teenagers,” she gritted.
And you were so much better?
Drew turned to Malcolm for agreement she didn’t get. Not beyond his consciousness at least. He also figured it was beside the point to mention that they were both actually twelve.
Looking even more pissed than before, Drew stomped towards him and hissed, “What is going on with Nike?”
“I’m tryna find out,” he murmured back. He wondered if there were way too many things he agreed on with her.
She scoffed loudly and rolled her eyes. “Useless.”
Before he could even respond, she stormed off towards the steps of the armory entrance and dug out from her tote bag the latest novel she’d matched her makeup with.
It took Malcolm half a minute to realize that she hadn’t been talking about him. Likely.
The first Nike kid he spotted was Grace, who beamed extra brightly today. She was shaking her head at Conrad, who stood right next to her by their neighboring weapons lockers, until she touched his arm and took off to get in line for the restrooms.
Conrad’s twisted smile, a response to Malcolm’s questioning brows, was enough of a shrug.
Malcolm strode up to him, whispering, “You got nothing from Grace?”
“Uh— What?”
It would’ve been imperceptible to any random camper, but Malcolm could see Conrad begin to freak internally.
Because Malcolm loved him, he made a show of checking his own gear and kept his eyes off his brother as he said, “She didn’t tell you anything about what the Nike kids are doing? She knows, doesn’t she?”
“It’s a cabin secret,” Conrad said almost defensively. “But there’s something they’re doing with some Eris kid. That’s all she mentioned.”
“Why an Eris kid?” asked Malcolm in bewilderment before he could process that bit of dejection he caught in Conrad’s voice. Of course, what he had really been asking was: Why not you?
The arm nudge from behind that felt a lot like Annabeth shut him up from running his mouth any more.
“It could just be because kids of minor gods sometimes want to do stuff themselves without having some Olympian steal their show,” she said.
She hadn’t heard anything from Nike either. Meanwhile, Sophie and Zeke were still wandering around to eavesdrop on the red team, and Claire was talking to a Nike dude—apparently the one who had fainted in front of her last week, according to Annabeth and Conrad. (Gods, were they really this desperate?)
Twenty minutes later, more and more blue team members were complaining—loudly now—that the Nike kids had procrastinated so bad, they had nothing. Malcolm would have believed the same, if not for the sneaky looks he swore Grace and her siblings were exchanging.
He could see Grace now. She was whispering and giggling with a daughter of Eris, way closer to each other than any time Claire and her friends would be whenever they hyped up each other to the point of flirting.
Malcolm distracted Conrad with an inquiry on his brother’s library studies.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
It took until 3:15 PM for Holly and Laurel Victor of the Nike cabin to call other cabin counselors for a briefing. Capture the Flag usually started around 3:30.
After all that waiting, Nike decided on some basic-ass pincer maneuver. Two slim flanks were to envelop the red team; a heavy defense was to make it impossible for opponents to infiltrate the blue base; and the Nike kids would wait for an opening to capture Aidos’s flag.
The result? Plenty of side-eyes exchanged by the older campers, a head tilt from Percy, and yet more muttering from Pollux that probably would have been louder if Drew or Jake were still head counselors.
But there was too much to argue at this point (perhaps that had been the whole idea?) and not much anyone could do (because, to calm down campers after the great Athena-Poseidon betrayal two weeks ago, Chiron had imposed a one-month moratorium on such disobedience).
Sent away with orders, Malcolm and Percy returned to the Athenian huddle off the side outside the arena, and recapped Nike’s instructions.
“Okay, quick, what do you think about their plan?” Malcolm said.
“I thought the Aidos kids were trying to attack from defense,” said Sophie. Her eyes began to unfocus as she visualized the play. “If they’re not going to move much, why would Nike pick a double envelopment that relies on the red team advancing heavily?”
“Meaning?” Percy pushed.
“The flanks won’t be doing anything. There’s no fight going on,” she said, with a cadence Malcolm knew by now were the beginnings of her rare rants. “Even defense. They’re putting you there with fifty other campers. The red team is going to be close to the water! And the wings are way too sparse! And they’d be too distant to be effective! They’re also splitting up Annabeth, Malcolm, Claire, and Conrad. And putting Annabeth and Mal towards the back? How does Nike actually plan on getting the flag?!”
“Maybe Nike thinks Aidos will abandon their plan,” Zeke said.
“Not to stereotype,” Claire said, “but the Aidos kids like the quiet and are super patient. I don’t think they’ll draw out their forces just like that. I think actually they’re the ones hoping Nike will abandon their strategy out of impatience until they mess up. Which is a lot more likely if you ask me. I’ve used it against them a bunch of times in one-on-ones. It’s like their fatal flaw.”
“Yeah, so it’s weird Nike wants to play that mind game,” Sophie said. “It’s theirs to lose.”
“Maybe Nike’s evaluation skills are off,” said Zeke.
And yet, just the other day, Malcolm had heard Conrad and Grace in a heated yet gushing discussion about their agreements and disagreements on Sun Tzu’s military advice.
Conrad had the same line of thought. “There has to be something else,” he said.
Zeke shrugged. “Of course, you have to believe that. Otherwise, it means your girlfriend is a total idiot.”
“She’s not an idiot,” Conrad said with a glare. “And she’s not my girlfriend,” he mumbled.
“Who isn’t? He didn’t mention any names,” said Claire, with a smile far too wide. “Are we talking about Holly? Laurel?”
As Conrad looked away, physically turning away even, Annabeth looped her arm through Claire’s, bugging her eyes in warning.
Beside them, Sophie and Percy were still deep in conversation, and Alicia watched the two, absorbing their dialog with whirring eyes.
“And to be clear,” Malcolm said pointedly, while also trying not to look so pointedly at Alicia, “making a mistake doesn’t make one a total idiot.”
“Well, if it’s a big one—” Zeke began.
Now he got both Annabeth and Malcolm’s “shut up” look.
“It’s still part of the learning process,” Annabeth finished. “Especially when trying new things, which is commendable.”
It was like a tense muscle had been massaged away.
Malcolm was so relieved all over again that Annabeth had moved back to New York. If not for the company he missed or the things she knew, then at least for making the constant battle of babysitting half as strenuous.
“So, there are too many people Nike put on defense?” Alicia asked hesitantly.
Malcolm smiled. “I think so, too.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The forest was quiet where Malcolm was positioned, a distance from the frontlines, with teammates too far away to see. This really was so utterly inefficient. Not putting him to use. Worse still, he couldn’t even complain to anyone. Because to top off this whole plan, the Nike kids hadn’t even planned to use earpieces.
He remembered the last time the Nike cabin had led a match, when their team had been forced to retreat because they’d gained so much territory so quickly that they’d become dangerously exposed. At least Malcolm could be proud of that failure. Had they not learned from that mistake? Or perhaps they had, to such extremities that they were now overloading their defense?
Keeping his head on a swivel, he plowed on through this dullness. Seeing nobody. Seeing nothing. Until a golden light flickered in the corner of his eye, towards the middle of the woods.
He ran towards it.
The light grew in seconds. A fire was spreading even higher, even larger, and even faster than he’d see in shut-eye, streaking across the forest in a maze.
His every instinct was begging him to run back, but Malcolm stood his ground.
Before alarm could even settle in, his quick eyes whizzed across the inferno and traced the source of the flames: A blue team soldier, his very teammate (What the fuck? And was that Logan?), held a flamethrower at their hip, expelling Greek fire all around them.
Malcolm could’ve sworn he’d made out a figure behind the maze of fire.
Had that just been in his head? Surely that was— Because this couldn’t— It couldn’t—
He shoved past his flash of panic and ignored the monstrous thought that the entire forest would be lit aflame—and with it, every dryad and satyr and demigod in it.
The others would have to take care of themselves. He had to believe that.
Malcolm focused his eyes to find—
The most bloodcurdling scream pierced his ears from his 10 o’clock.
He could see her now. Vivian. Her petite, writhing body engulfed in flames.
His most visited nightmare had come to life in all of three seconds.
But his feet were planted into the ground. The only part of him moving must’ve been the heart that was threatening to leap out of his chest.
He couldn’t— He just couldn’t— He’d never be able to bear— Not another—
Internally shrieking at himself, Malcolm called upon every shred of his willpower to snap his mind and body out of their lock.
He ran like hell towards the blaze. He yelled at Vivian to run out of the fire. At Logan to put it out. But the two of them were just standing there, in the fire—both of them now—looking at him all dumb and confused.
In fractions of a second, Malcolm noticed other off things. Where there were trees, there was no fire. Where there was fire, there was no smoke. Nor the kerosene-like smell of naphtha.
The pieces slotted together, and at the last millisecond, he restrained the whitest-hottest lash of his anger as he took a suffocating breath.
While the fake flames engulfed him, too, he disarmed himself violently, clenching his jaw as he paced to and fro in front of the two young demigods, who eyed the sword, the knives, and the grappling hook he’d flung so forcefully behind him.
“Why—?” he began. He swore there was steam coming out of his ears. He took another breath. And another. “There’s no reason for any grossly extreme reactions like that here. This isn’t cosplay,” he spat at Vivian.
She nudged her too-big, red-plumed helmet into place to properly meet his eyes. “It’s a game, though?” she said, as Logan insisted, “But we’re playing Capture the Flag.”
“Yeah, we’re playing the part, and we’re also doing it well?” Vivian said. She gestured around them. “Because it’s not like any of this is real?”
And if that didn’t hit him like a ton of bricks.
“Which is why we play the part,” Logan said.
Every evil hiss that had tortured Malcolm over his own moment of evil wisped back into his head. The whole camp was going to find out. The whole camp never could have made that call—had no right—but they were all going to be whispering now.
Malcolm couldn’t even bear to face Vivian and Logan now. But now the two demigods were yelling at him.
“They weren’t gonna actually kill me,” Vivian said, for once losing her upspeaking tendency.
Logan’s face scrunched. “Whoa, wait a sec! Why would you think I’d even do that? Man, that is so... effed up! Why would I...?” They opened and closed their mouth, too enraged to speak.
Vivian took their arm and glared at Malcolm. “Everyone knows the fire’s not real. Clarisse said that during training.”
In a flash, Malcolm rounded on her. “Don’t fucking act like you’re dying if you’re not.”
The hatefulness he felt was reflected right off her.
“Okay,” Vivian said, nearly as heated.
Logan practically pushed her behind them. “You don’t have to yell at her, dude!”
Malcolm ignored them. “Do you understand?” he said to Vivian.
She barely met his eyes. “Yeah. S-sorry.”
Picking up his weapons, Malcolm turned on his heels and headed for the armory, but not quickly enough to have escaped Logan’s “What the heck was that?”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm trudged out of a half-hour, hot-as-hell shower in Cabin Six, gaining a hint of relief from the fogged-up bathroom mirror. But even in the steam, the world was now cold and dry.
He went on autopilot, dressing himself in his dark sweats, and did nothing more than slump under his covers in bed. Neither the pillow he hugged, nor even the artworks of his siblings staring him in the face on warm wooden walls, could rattle the unbending hollowness he felt.
What difference, he asked himself, would it have made if the fire had been real? It would’ve been the same.
But he knew that wasn’t true. Because, this time, it actually hadn’t been his choice.
A single resonant voice ruled his head, surfacing his deepest, darkest shame and his stickiest, bitterest hate.
You did it. You chose to do nothing. You knew—
No, fuck this. What he knew was that this was pathetic.
Easy as it was to reach for his phone, his thumb could only hover over his father’s name.
What was it he sought? A reminder why not to hate his very being? Or someone to silently shout his lungs at for all this torture?
But a promise had been a promise. It had been the only way to help Olympus at all. Just as what he’d done had been the only way—
Eyes squeezed shut, thoughts flashed of the three solid alternatives that haunted him after the fact.
The counterfactuals that would never revive Xiulan and Mikey.
She wasn’t even supposed to be there, Malcolm reminded himself. He’d told her before.
(As if any of that had mattered in the moment. As if he had ever thought Xiulan would have backed out when he already knew she just barely listened to him. As if he hadn’t heard her tell her friends she was growing out her pixie cut. As if her parents hadn’t forced upon her the same rules his fathers had done to him.)
And it wasn’t on him that Mikey had a death wish. Malcolm had warned him, too, over and over and over again.
(As if, with no mortal family to impose it upon him, Mikey had had less of a right to his own selfishness.)
They’d had the risks drilled into their heads. Malcolm knew that. They’d made their own decisions for themselves.
(As if they’d been able to comprehend their choices at thirteen and eleven.)
They’d known, Malcolm told himself forcefully, that they could’ve stayed home like other young demigods.
(As if he hadn’t heard them both credit his training for their preparedness.)
As if, as if, as if.
As if, said a feeble voice, his own life were so expendable.
(As if, hissed a louder one, it could ever be worth their two. As if they would have ever thought he would’ve left them to roast.)
Malcolm dodged and parried the mental assaults, finding mercy only when a loud call from his consciousness said this was useless.
As if there weren’t any better ways to have spent the past—what was it?—three hours at this point, just sitting here, wasting away....
Useless.
How Drew would’ve thought the same.
Was it useless if Drew would’ve agreed? Was it still useless if even she would’ve been disgusted by what he’d done? And to think he’d been looking down on her.
Because as prickly, as miserable, as vain as she could be, Malcolm knew even Drew would never have stooped so low. She had enough hate to this day for every double-crossing snake that ever failed Camp Half-Blood—even if that snake were her own sister. She would have immediately rushed to save a dying camper in front of her, no matter the cost. Maybe she couldn’t have, but she would have tried, wouldn’t she?
Gods, if he couldn’t even live up to Drew’s standards, how could he have ever deserved anyone’s trust to build New Athens? No work he did could ever make up for his own form of betrayal.
Make up for it...
Despair stabbed him in the gut as the parasite of his mind laughed in derision. He hadn’t even so much as thought about Xiulan or Mikey when he’d proposed the city’s creation. How despicable was that?
He had wanted to build this city so he could make up for the world’s failings. For his home’s failings. Yet not his own?
Maybe it would have been better if someone else took over his role. Who? Chiara? She would do a great job, wouldn’t she? Maybe they could switch roles and they could hire other people for the other things he did. Or he could just hide away the rest of his life.
What if he had died then? Maybe along with them. Would that have been better? More forgivable?
Malcolm told himself to snap out of it. It took four tries to simply get to zero.
At his second say-so, he made the effort to look around him, finding his fathers’ most updated manuscript laying on his bedside table, just out of arm’s reach. After two minutes of staring at it, he sighed and shuffled his heavy ass over on his bed to reach for it.
The words on the page weren’t swimming before his eyes, but he still couldn’t read them. Right now, looking at his parents’ work just made him recite held-back tirades he’d already hashed through (with the professionals they’d paid for to mop up their own mess).
His mortal family would’ve never understood. Perhaps they would have if they’d cared. If they’d ever bothered to have any shame.
How awful was it that he was thankful they didn’t? How disgusting was it that he was glad to have kept his promise to them?
Malcolm sat for another half hour, finally lifting his own deadweight when guilt—oh, how useful it was now—made him greet a harpy delivering some mail.
Among a stack of packages—presumably books and crafts supplies—was a purple envelope addressed to him from a certain someone at 4 Leofóros Palátis in Atlantis.
Intrigue pierced through the unshakeable void, and Malcolm latched onto it with all his might.
Interesting. If she wanted to do seating charts by mail instead and—
Replacement black, strappy back lace thong – $21.50
Option 1: Replace damaged product with identical product. Ship to sender.
Malcolm folded back the letter lightning fast. Faster than a 6G roller coaster. Faster than Grover would bleat upon the mention of enchiladas. Faster than Twista could spit his bars. Faster than Merrick Garland’s nomination could be denied.
What? In the hell? Of fucking Hades?
He must have read wrong. Surely, this was dyslexia. Was this even his mail?
What a silly thought. He knew exactly what this “black, strappy back lace thong” looked like, with the lacing and the criss-cross strings.
After checking to see that no one was around, as though he would’ve possibly missed the creaks of the door opening, he gingerly opened the letter again, only a third at a time like the coward he was, and read:
Replacement black, strappy back lace thong – $21.50
Option 1: Replace damaged product with identical product. Ship to sender.
Tempted as he was to burn the letter into nonexistence (and surely there was enough heat in his face to light the paper aflame), Malcolm continued reading.
Option 2: Replace damaged product with refund of exact retail price. Cheque accepted. Electronic funds transfer accepted through New York Currency Exchange, Pulse, and STAR. USD only. Cash not accepted.
Option 3: Replace damaged product with similar product. Must be shipped to sender.
Bank details followed.
With a burning face, Malcolm folded up the paper.
This... wasn’t uncalled for, he decided. Nor was it rude. It was just fair, wasn’t it? Served him right.
Malcolm opened up the letter once more, skimming through it yet again, and gaped at the options Rhode had given him.
Replace damaged product with similar product.
Like he’d go out looking—
A huff escaped his lips. Huffing then turned to silent chuckling, and shock morphed into awe.
Such nerve, Princess.
Though he was sorely tempted to shred the paper to pieces the way he wanted to sever his guilt for having torn apart Rhode’s underwear and surgically remove the complementary mischievous pride that made him feel like a total douche, this was all just too amusing and too much of a keepsake to trash.
For a moment, he considered hiding the letter in between his fathers’ working papers—but figured that would just be gross. And putting it in one of the Rands he was perusing was just offensive to the goddess, not that she’d even know. So he stashed it in his personal copy of Kahneman; there were newer editions in the cabin that his siblings would reach for first.
Malcolm returned to his fathers’ manuscript with a pencil and a lighter heart.
Barely a page in, a patter of footsteps approached the cabin, and he felt as though a host of neon arrows had lit up, all pointing to Rhode’s purple letter.
Conrad, then Claire, burst through the doorway. (He wasn’t going to look at those books on his shelf. He was not.) The twins looked right past his bookshelf, depositing their Capture-the-Flag gear in the laundry basket tucked away in the corner of the cabin.
“Oh, that’s where you are,” Conrad said, surveying Malcolm on his bed.
“Yup” was all he said.
Conrad lifted his brows. “You were kicked out early? Damn. That’s actually—” He began to laugh. “Oh my gods, you should’ve seen the carnage. What they did was a war crime. It was unholy.”
“Actually,” Claire said, peeking behind him as she undid her braid, “there were two war crimes. At least.”
“They faked a surrender,” Conrad elaborated. “Apparently, it was Grace’s idea,” he added with a laugh.
“The Nike kids went all the way up to the red base, pretending to be so unprepared and everything,” Claire said. “They dropped their weapons, got the red team to let down their guard. You know. Then there was the other war crime.”
Conrad shook his head as he undid his shoes, nearly tripping in excitement on his way over to Malcolm. “They made these bombs...”
The sand that had filled up the pit in Malcolm’s gut fell straight to the Underworld.
“Like from Greek fire?” he said.
“No, that was just one of their distractions,” said Claire. “They also had fireworks, paint bombs—although apparently one of them is missing and still hasn’t triggered,” she added with a cringe.
“Oh, and some arrows tipped with tickling curses, too,” Conrad added.
Claire waved off their tangent. “Anyway,” she said, stepping right in front of where Malcolm sat, “imagine... a hundred cans of surströmming... a thousand durians... and ten thousand Szechuan peppercorns.... Turned into concentrate and all mixed together. That was literally their recipe.”
Malcolm’s jaw dropped. His throat immediately closed up as if trying to hold back a retch. “Did the peppercorns at least numb the tongue enough?” he asked with a wince.
“Not with that much heat. Grace told me she and her siblings also put habanero in there, too,” Conrad said. “And Roquefort,” he added with a squeamish face. “As if Swedish fish wasn’t enough.”
“Gods damn,” Malcolm breathed. “Yeah, I think that constitutes torture and inhuman treatment.”
“But at least we had those masks.” Conrad gestured to the pile of black and clear plastic hanging from the laundry basket. “They gave them to us at the front. They didn’t even tell us what for. But the red team?” He shook his head.
Claire’s brows twitched. “They were throwing up all over the forest,” she said with a pout. “The game was actually over in minutes. We were all just stuck there for, like, four hours, trying to help the red team. They could barely move.”
“And the dryads,” Conrad said.
Claire nodded. “Yeah, the dryads have relocated. Chiron is...” She bobbed her head some more. “Chiron is impressed.”
As Conrad and Claire compared the Nike cabin’s swift triumph to the records of the Hunters of Artemis, Malcolm studied his siblings to figure out which between them would’ve had their day less disrupted if they were to lend an ear. (It was so clearly Claire.) But when Alicia, Zeke, and Sophie filed in to tell him their Capture-the-Flag stories and take their turns in the shower, he decided he no longer needed to. He was okay now anyway.
At Zeke’s request, the siblings played several rounds of 7 Wonders in the camp library. Malcolm hardly cared when Claire baited him with the Rhódos gameboard. He happily took the board, held in a complaint at the male figure depicted as the Colossus of Rhodes, and swept up the military points, coming in a close second overall to Sophie.
Eventually, Alicia got too sleepy to play alone, so she sat with Malcolm and nodded off on his arm. As awkward as this position felt (in more than one way), and as soaked as his sleeve was getting from Alicia’s wet hair, Malcolm stayed put. He only stretched his arm when Alicia pattered over to the doorway as a freshly showered Annabeth joined them.
Because of course.
Malcolm could already feel that weighty load trickle back to him in sharp prickles.
Annabeth was smiling in her life-is-normal way, giving hugs and affectionate pats to the youngest of the Athena kids. She ultimately pulled up a chair next to Zeke, who was critiquing Malcolm’s recent moves from across the table.
Of course.
But she didn’t scan everyone’s game boards with her usual gusto. She didn’t nod approvingly at Claire’s obvious lead. She watched Sophie then Malcolm play their turns, before he let her catch his eyes at last.
Of course.
Annabeth shook her head just the teensiest bit. The reminder made Malcolm chew on his lips in contemplation. In an effort to hear her. To heed her.
Then came that head tilt from her: almost an accusation. And it was exactly what he needed to finally breathe out those suffocating pangs.
Just like that, the lights of the cabin no longer glared. The chatter and laughter of his siblings, so muted before, filled all the air and fell onto him like a blanket.
The monster that had clutched its claws into Malcolm’s head scurried off for now.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Equipped with a backlog of ideas to be picked at, Malcolm took Sunday afternoon and evening to turn guilt and grief into pride and peace. He worked for hours without interruption, figuring out cash flows and reading up on Clarisse’s newest public safety plans, until he heard the violent whirring of a coffee grinder outside his office.
That was weird for a Sunday. His weekend escapes had always been quiet.
Curiosity got the better of him. After finally abandoning his desk to open his door, Malcolm thought for a moment that he was hallucinating. Outside his office he found Rhode of all people tamping ground coffee at floor five’s beverage station, looking like she’d just stepped out of a Cirque performance.
He held back the snappy remark, knowing she would retort that he’d apparently decided to dress like a tech bro today.
His second thought was to question which idiot had let her in.
As Rhode fiddled with the espresso machine, Malcolm cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” he said.
Rhode’s fringy garments sashayed as she turned around. “Yes, actually. How do you work this? I’m pressing these buttons, and it’s plugged in, but the machine doesn’t appear to be working.”
Malcolm had never used the coffee machine, but he’d seen Chiara work it nearly every day—at first swearing and these days cooing as she’d hit the corner of the contraption. It was yet another of those coffee makers a few Hephaestus kids had 3D-printed and donated to City Hall. So all of them must’ve perfectly shared the same little bugs. There was one on each floor of the building. This one was named Giuseppe.
Giving a considerable nudge to the left side of the machine, Malcolm got the water running. They worked out the buttons, and soon enough, Giuseppe began filling Rhode’s cup with her coffee of choice. (A long black, Malcolm noted.)
“Aha!” she exclaimed, arms akimbo.
It was like he couldn’t help but mimic her smile.
“Did it,” he said with a nod.
Coffee steam wafted into Rhode’s face when she finally took a sip. Malcolm breathed in the fumes.
“What brings you here?” he tried again.
Rhode merely held out her mug. “Do you want some?” she said.
Tempting as it was, especially with another reason to say yes, he knew it was a bad idea. He thought hard about the caffeine-induced headache he would’ve been bound to feel later, and politely refused.
“Rhode,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“The seating charts for the wedding,” she said. “Percy said the other day that this time would work.”
Like that had been the most important bit.
“How’d you get in?” he said.
“Oh!” she chirped. “A camper by the name of Hubert opened the doors for me.”
It was a satisfying enough answer. And if Malcolm were less tired, he would’ve picked up his phone right now to shoot Hubert a message on the city’s security policies.
Instead, he gestured to his office. “I guess we could start those charts.”
Once Rhode passed through his doorway, her eyes immediately began darting around the room. As she focused on his few pieces of decor on the otherwise bare walls, Malcolm felt as if he were stripping before her eyes. But what did it really matter, given that she’d already seen him naked?
He told himself he wasn’t going to bring up either of their... whatever they’d been, and in the space between them, the air felt thick with all the words unsaid. Which words those would be, Malcolm didn’t know—which just made it easier to simply not utter a single one about those moments they’d shared. Moments that were already starting to feel bygone.
Moments that were surely as fleeting as this very room screamed, with its single desk lit by bright, cheap lighting in the white shipping container walls. There was nothing he didn’t need here either—including a second chair, which Malcolm now had to wheel in from outside.
By the time he returned, he found Rhode resting her eyes on a framed present from his fathers that hung opposite his desk.
“‘Make no little plans’,” Rhode quoted. “Is this motivational poster new? I didn’t see it last time.”
Malcolm had no energy to bite back. “What could’ve possibly distracted you from that masterpiece?” he said.
Rhode might not have replied, but it was like she didn’t even try to pretend either, with the way her eyes were raking his body up and down.
Even amidst their foggy air, a laugh threatened to burst out of him.
“If I give you a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’, will you hang it?” Rhode said.
“Ha.”
They took their seats on either side of the desk (She was here, lying down right here, when you ate her out, reminded his disobedient mind), and Malcolm was forced to fix his eyes upon his second monitor (Where she hit her head when you helped her up, remember?).
He felt fine, even good somehow, in Rhode’s presence, but refused to face her all the same. Malcolm knew he’d have to—knew he would—when this minute would end, but right now, he just couldn’t.
When Rhode set down her coffee mug a little closer to his computer than he would’ve liked, he tamed his inner grouch and said nothing. And as a host of colored pens cluttered his desk, Malcolm kept faking business with his keyboard, with his mouse, with his pencils, with anything but Rhode.
But as the Fates would have it, a whole minute wasn’t even necessary, because when Rhode began scrutinizing the papers on his desk, his eyes snapped towards her in a panic.
But just as quickly, he remembered that outside his office, even he couldn’t see the random spreadsheets of lower-level employees. Malcolm scooped up the New Athens budget files anyway and began locking them up in one of his desk drawers. But, to be sure...
“You could write on this,” he said, studying her reaction when he handed her one of the sheets.
Rhode looked at him like he’d just randomly told her to eat shit. “Where? There’s no space!”
From his perspective, sure, it wasn’t blank, but there was enough of it that was empty. “Okay, I was just checking if you could read it.”
“Read—?” she said. “It’s a picture.”
Malcolm looked at the paper again, seeing only the title of the city’s budget update, dated July 2016. “That’s what it looks like?”
Realization hit her. She gaped. “You handed me a confidential document without even knowing if it was disguised?”
“It’s just a cover page,” Malcolm said. “There’s nothing on it. I’m not stupid.” Relax.
Bye-bye to the perplexion, hello to the stink eye. “You think I would read your confidential documents?” said Rhode.
“Regardless, you think that sounds good enough of an excuse I could use if you were able to?”
Malcolm brushed off his own aggravation to lay down some paper in front of her.
With a huff, Rhode sat up and adjusted her hair as she got settled. “Does Harpocrates charge extra for pictures of quilt patterns?” she muttered. “We get scribbles.”
“I have no idea.”
Malcolm wondered if New Athens was being overcharged. Probably for the quick turnaround. He let it go for now. They could renegotiate rates next year.
As his indignation waned away, the silence recharged his three-foot bubble of electric frisson.
Who would bring it up first? Why hadn’t Rhode done so already? Was she wondering the same thing about him? Had she actually done so already with that look she’d given him earlier?
Malcolm ignored all his burning questions for a moment as he and Rhode shared a chuckle at the discovery that neither of them had started absolutely anything to do with the seating charts.
The reminder as to why that was had him turn to his computer again.
“Did Annabeth and Percy give you a copy of the venue layout?” Malcolm said in an attempt to simply deal.
No, apparently.
And perhaps it had been a bad idea to ask, because Rhode was looking at him now. But maybe that was nice nonetheless.
“So,” Malcolm said, clicking and typing away to create a digital diagram, “their idea was to do the whole thing on top of Long Island Sound.”
Rhode gasped. “That’ll be magical.”
“Yeah, I think the deciding factor was that Poseidon would be able to literally dunk on anyone who might wanna start up shit.”
“I suppose that’s another perk,” she said.
“You could partake, too,” he said, getting a huff out of her. “Or is that not your style?”
“There are usually better ways,” she said after a quiet moment.
He was so ready to spill his guts in wholehearted agreement—until he remembered again that morning of utter humiliation. Surely there had been better ways they both could have handled that. Why had she—?
“What?” said Rhode, peeking up from her note-taking to catch his eye.
Malcolm hadn’t even realized he’d turned to look at her. All he could do right now was shrug faintly and try not to protest when Rhode seemed to put on a sly, knowing smile.
And that was not what this was.
(Was it?)
Certainly not.
(Not right now.)
Malcolm so gladly welcomed the ho-hum task of copying and pasting tables into his file. Yet not two minutes later, his eyes began to glaze over, and he had to battle his boredom with the extra challenge of flinging away thoughts of the other meetups he had shared with the very person just an arm’s reach away. That Rhode was actually jotting things down right now helped him focus. Still...
“When I got either of my master’s degrees or even my bachelor’s degree,” he said, “I never thought I’d be using my education to make seating plans.”
And then there was Rhode with her millennia’s worth of work experience that culminated into this task.
She kept quiet, merely continuing to write.
Paste, paste, paste. Copy, paste, paste, paste. Malcolm felt like putting on some music, but talked himself out of it four times, fearing he’d interrupt her flow. So he set his sight on his screen, ignoring with all his will the blue and purple blur invading his vision.
The symphony of keyboard taps and pen scratches fell off-balance and ended with the delicious call of “Malcolm?”
He prepared himself to meet her eyes. But Rhode was biting her tongue, still jotting something down in red, and Malcolm caught all the wrong details. Like the fact that she couldn’t have been wearing anything beneath her fringy little top. The thing was all but see-through behind its swishing threads.
He really tried to ignore it—and of course, he did—but his stupid mind couldn’t manage to let go of the thought.
Rhode’s lips tugged into a smile. She seemed almost... surprised? Or just pleased? And without a word spoken, Malcolm heard her anyway: Do that again, I dare you. Come on.
“Um.” He turned away to his screen. “So, how do you wanna start?”
“You seem to be starting something already,” she said.
Why was it that when she stared, he was still the one malfunctioning? Did she not at all feel like an electric pulse could zap her right now? How was that fair?
“Just the layout,” he managed, swiveling his monitor in her direction. “No names yet.”
Rhode merely glanced at his progress. “We’ll separate enemies across the area,” she said to him, “then we’ll place their allies away from them. And we’ll scatter the Olympians among other gods.”
“For integration,” Malcolm guessed.
“Exactly,” she said. “Here’s what I have.”
In what couldn’t have been an accident (Could it?), the tips of her fingers brushed against the hairs of his arm as she slid her paper over.
Rings adorned her fingers. Her nails were painted a raspberry color. It felt so offensive she was still acting like she hadn’t touched him with those very hands.
Malcolm focused on the red and green ink on her page. She’d made two lists: what he presumed were the biggest current spats, and random gods who could tame them. Problematic god numero uno was Alastor, god of blood feuds. On her list of conflicts, she’d written at the top: Alastor vs. everybody.
“‘Everybody,’” Malcolm read. If he could whistle, he would’ve. “So, next to him, we could put... Hypnos?”
With Rhode’s agreement, Malcolm began adding names to the diagram and noting her recommendations. Eris (goddess of discord) would accompany Tranquilitas and Philotes (goddesses of stillness and affection) at another table, and farther away, Lyssa (the goddess of mad rage) would be paired with Dike (one of the goddesses of justice).
For a better balance, Malcolm suggested another god of justice to go with Lyssa: Astraea.
“Wrong column,” Rhode said.
“Hmm?” He glanced at her sheet only to find Astraea’s name in red ink. “Goddess of justice?” he questioned Rhode.
“And proud misandrist,” she said. “If we seat her with Lyssa, they’ll probably want to conspire to kill all men.”
Malcolm blinked. “Oh.”
“Or actually,” Rhode thought aloud, “we could seat them together as long as Enyo’s there, too.”
Malcolm’s brows knitted. “Isn’t she a god of destruction?”
“Of war.”
“And isn’t she known for orchestrating the destruction of cities?” he said. “I kinda have a preference for that not happening here.”
“Enyo likes war,” Rhode said. “She likes seeing war. She doesn’t take sides. She’d alert men. She could warn you.”
“While also being likely to instigate some fiasco,” he argued. “Why don’t we just separate Astraea and Lyssa in the first place? And, I don’t know, throw Eunomia in there with Lyssa for some more order. Astraea can go with some other women who aren’t so violent.”
Rhode agreed. “Enyo can still be at Astraea’s table. Without Lyssa, Astraea wouldn’t do anything.”
Malcolm followed her suggestion and put Lyssa in a random faraway table Rhode pointed to.
They moved on to Oizys, the goddess of misery, who apparently didn’t have to be sat with Euphrosyne and could indeed be placed beside their brother Hypnos. According to Rhode, Oizys and Hypnos had overcome their issues a while back and got along great these days.
Just terrific.
Malcolm did everyone a favor and slotted Eirene, the goddess of peace, next to Oizys. Surely Eirene and Hypnos could balance out the miserable, deadly combo of Oizys and Alastor.
“That okay?” he checked with Rhode.
She stared long at their names and seemed to frown.
“What? Something up with her, too?” Malcolm said.
Rhode blinked away her haze. “With?”
“Eirene.”
“No. Nothing. As far as I’m aware.” With a final look, she turned back to her list, quietly drafting more color-coded sets on paper.
They exchanged ideas for another ten minutes until Malcolm took the initiative to add more names to the diagram. Rhode helped him out, and at last, they finished one full table.
“This won’t work,” Rhode said, pointing to that very table. “Dolos and Anteros can’t sit together.”
“And why not?”
“Because Dolos had an affair with him and he’s trying to repair his marriage to Euphrosyne. It’s quite new.”
Malcolm tipped his head back and groaned. “Fucking gods.”
He’d already just heard ‘We can’t put Aphrodite next to Momus nor Aletheia. She’ll refuse to be seen near them because of what they wear’ and ‘No, she’ll want a seat with her back partially to the stage, so she can turn to watch Percy and Annabeth while everyone can also look at her.’
“Why are we doing this again?” he grumbled.
“It’s Percy and Annabeth’s wedding,” Rhode said with an edge in her voice. “Have a little heart. If you care so little about them, you can think of it as conflict prevention using the intelligence I’ve gathered. Although I don’t understand why you’d even need to do that.”
Malcolm just sighed. “Why can’t they just elope? Aha!” He snapped his fingers and pointed in the air. “Bingo. If no one’s invited, there won’t be any wars. They could just do a drive-thru in Vegas or have a courthouse wedding in New York City. That’s real conflict prevention.”
“They would still need witnesses,” Rhode said. “Do you not want to celebrate with them? It’ll be fun to have another big party. We haven’t had any since before the wars.”
“I don’t like parties,” he said. “Even the non-rave ones. Too many people, too much noise, too much ass-kissing.”
“When everyone knows who’s stabbing whom in the back,” she said. “Sounds like my every week. It gets entertaining, though, with all the gossip. You didn’t have to go to my party.”
Malcolm turned to the safety of his screen. “That would have been rude.”
As he added more names into the chart, he could feel Rhode’s eyes land on him.
“But you still went, making you one of the ass-kissers,” she said. “Unless, that is, you actually wanted to see me.”
He couldn’t help it. His eyes journeyed back, finding a glint in her gaze.
“Maybe I wanted to check out Atlantis,” he said, just grateful she hadn’t tortured him with a literal ass-kissing joke. “Meet Galene and Thaumas... Yeah, maybe I wanted to see Thaumas.”
“Should I tell him that?” said Rhode.
He immediately cowered to his computer once more. “No.”
They added more of the Olympians and set aside Hestia as one of their remaining jokers to play. Hera was next.
“We should do Percy and Annabeth a favor and disinvite her,” Rhode groused.
“She’s the goddess of marriage,” Malcolm said.
“Neither of them like her, and she’s been cruel to them. Ergo, we should kick her out.”
“That’s not a sound idea,” he said. “Are you trying to start a war or issues in their marriage?”
“Oh, relax. It was a joke.”
Malcolm didn’t like her looking at him like this.
“You do remember I have a career in politics, yes?” Rhode said.
Right. Duh.
“Let’s put Hebe on her left,” said Rhode, “and Zeus on her right. He should know better than to seek another person that day, and he wouldn’t do it in front of Hebe.” A sigh followed before Rhode tutted with a head shake. “The number of times I’ve heard Poseidon recommend marriage counseling... But they’re too stubborn and proud.”
“Okay, so where do we put Artemis and Apollo?” Malcolm asked as nonchalantly as he could. Gods, it so wasn’t. “Dionysus, at least, should be away from the gods with the feuds,” he added quickly. “Or close to them so he can watch out for any alcohol? I don’t know.”
It was still a useless ask. Rhode simply shrugged and pointed at two random spots in the middle of the venue for the Olympian twins. She had said that neither of them would have been likely to stir up any real trouble, yet maybe it said something (or maybe nothing?) that both spots were basically miles away from any area she would likely be seated at. Malcolm let it slide.
“Can we change that actually?” said Rhode. “Let’s add Artemis here.” She pointed to one of the first tables they worked on.
“You wanna put Artemis with Astraea?” Malcolm confirmed.
Rhode scoffed. “Contrary to popular belief—even from her own followers—Artemis doesn’t actually hate men. She loves Apollo and admires kind male heroes.”
“Okay.” Malcolm followed her instruction. “That was not my impression, judging by how she’s talked about.”
“An asexual, feminist woman doesn’t need to hate men,” Rhode argued. “Just because—”
“I know.”
“—some loud people— I don’t understand—”
“I just had to make sure.”
“—why everyone—”
“I don’t. You know my mom?”
Letting out audible breaths in near unison, Malcolm and Rhode turned back to their tasks.
“Is it weird to you,” Malcolm heard himself say before he could bite his own tongue, “that they’re the gods of the sun and moon?” His only apology was not to stare her down.
“After some two thousand years?” Rhode said. “Is it weird to me that they now have those positions, as they have had for over two thousand years already?”
But then why had she— When Apollo— “Just because it’s been two thousand years...” he began quietly.
Something caught, judging by the way she looked away. Remorse filled his belly.
Still, Malcolm couldn’t help but wonder. What if it had still been Helios and Selene in charge of the sun and moon, just as their sister Eos pulled her chariot across the sky at dawn to this day?
Rhode wouldn’t be sitting across from him, that was for sure.
Maybe he and Rhode could’ve met up some other way. He seriously wondered how difficult it would be to stay away from her with a spouse in the picture. All sexually active gods cheated, didn’t they? And it wasn’t as though Helios had been faithful to her. So, perhaps it would’ve been more up to the two of them....
“Let’s put Dionysus at Apate’s table or somewhere close by,” Rhode said.
“‘Kay. And then maybe Hephaestus somewhere near Astraea’s table?” Malcolm said. “Unless we want just Artemis there? But there has to be some guy there, and he’s not, like, a hateable dude, right?”
“Y—” She groaned. “He and Eunomia slept together again and they don’t know what to do about it. It’s confusing.”
“I can imagine.”
Malcolm regretted it as soon as he said it.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, Rhode made no comment.
It was all right, he told himself. What was more pressing were their seating charts. Like why they were catering to Astraea at all. And, seriously, what did it really matter if Hephaestus and Eunomia had hooked up again?
He and Rhode kept working. They added Hermes. They added Demeter. And then a big family table by the main stage, neighbored by a list of parents and siblings. The pixels screaming “Malcolm” and “Rhode” were far too close for his comfort. Rhode still had said nothing hinting at... yeah. Malcolm left all their names seatless, saying, “We can all just sit wherever we want.” He didn’t even move the Chases away from the Athenians.
Just as he thought he could live with this charade his whole life, Rhode began capping her pens, looking in the direction of the door. When she finished the last dregs of her coffee, Malcolm found he was even going to miss her awful scrutiny.
“No one’s ever around this time?” Rhode said.
“They tend to have this thing called a ‘social life’,” he said, “so no. They’re all done before dinner. And, of course, they don’t work on Sundays.”
“Then maybe we better make use of the opportunity,” she said, cutting her eyes straight to him.
As she came around to his side of the desk to plop her ass down in front of him, nudging aside his mouse, he instinctively made space for her. But for a moment, Malcolm could only stare.
“Are you making this a thing?” he said, equally flattered as he was flustered.
“You don’t have to complicate this,” Rhode said. “You can just give in. If you want.” Her head nudged in the direction of the framed poster. “Make no little plans, Malcolm.”
He doubted it made sense even to her, but he huffed a laugh anyway.
Ignoring the why, Malcolm went straight into evaluating the logistics. “I’d at least need the bathroom first.”
“Okay,” Rhode said. “Then come back.”
“You’re serious.”
“Go. And come back,” she said. “Wash your hands.”
Malcolm scoffed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You didn’t last time before you touched me,” she said.
He just stood with his mouth slightly ajar, an apology at the tip of his tongue. But before he could get a word out, Rhode waved her hand to shoo him out.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
So impatient was she, she didn’t even wait for him to come back. Malcolm met Rhode right outside the restroom door, and she walked straight into him, making him retreat into the bathroom.
Okay, that’s how you wanna do it, huh?
He was nearly chuckling as he reached behind her to push the door shut. It was so awkward with all this waiting and silence, and he was just barely containing his laughter.
Rhode’s smile didn’t nearly match his, yet she reached for him like a woman starved, forging almost tickling trails over his body with her eager, diligent touch.
But she was too short today to be able to catch his lips. Even when she tiptoed in her sandals, Malcolm didn’t even have to tilt back his head for her to miss a kiss. He found it hilarious.
But any laughs threatening to bubble up popped away amid the rush incited by his own hands, which met her waist, pulled her into him, and found once more that she was solid and soft and here. Right here with him in this thing of theirs and no one else’s.
Add it to the record. He’d make it good.
And somehow it seemed easier today. When all he’d done was brush her hair over her shoulders, Rhode fluttered her eyes shut and squeezed tight around his middle. Skimming over the straps of her top had her flash her gaze at him in hunger. A mere brush of her bare, plushy midriff got her stomach to quaver, and combing through the fringes of her top had her reaching towards him.
Malcolm’s smile grew at Rhode’s growing impatience.
So this was what it was like to be the clearer-headed half.
“How do you want me?” he said.
Never mind the fact that she was already burning paths over him like she was claiming her territory.
Rhode tiptoed again to reach for his mouth. “Now.”
“Okay.”
Gods knew why he had to say that.
Malcolm wanted to think that the waiting made it all sweeter, but once again, he just felt stupid for making them go through that when he could’ve had her soft lips claiming his own from the get-go.
Rhode tasted chocolatey and nutty. Rich and bitter. How incredible that whatever he denied himself from having, he could taste on her tongue.
Her lips were supple. Her tongue insistent. And her teeth. Oh, how they stung him in pleasure.
Kissing Rhode wasn’t as effortless as their last time, Malcolm had to admit. Last time had been driven by instinct. Everything about now was deliberate. And yet it still felt so easy.
To know instantly that he was doing what she wanted. ‘Now.’ She was practically giving him free rein—because anything he would do would surely find itself in the realm of her desires.
It was so freeing to give into Rhode. To his own wants. To follow her in this little adventure and carve out what next into the universe like a hot knife through butter. They were placing this into time.
He wanted this? Well, so did she. Was there ever a thing so simple?
Malcolm spun them ’round and lifted Rhode onto the sink countertop. It got a moan out of her—the wrong kind.
“It’s wet, you know,” she muttered, even as she pulled him to her by the shirt.
“Sorry.” Malcolm kissed an apology into her jaw and trusted she’d dry the surface and her skirt herself. “I was going with the ‘now’.”
His lips found hers again.
For a moment, Malcolm fully lost himself in the feeling of Rhode’s hands threading through his hair. But once he caught himself, he snapped out of the daze and returned with the reminder of his mission.
He led his hands to her knees, feeling so delightfully naughty as he groped under her skirt to caress those thighs of hers he adored.
“Get up,” he said, helping to lift Rhode as she balanced herself on the countertop.
With sweet deliberation, he fished for fabric and dragged her underwear down her thighs.
“Ah,” Rhode said. “He has class now.”
Malcolm paused, having reached only her knees.
It was one more of their secrets aired. One more thing he couldn’t hide from her.
“Don’t you dare rip another,” she said.
“I am so sorry.” He could barely even look at her.
But as much as it felt like he’d messed up, he grasped onto the implication that she wanted there to be other times.
Rhode seated herself on the countertop again, and, as if in tune (for, like, the first time ever) she and Malcolm immediately reached their left hands to deftly slip the straps of her jeweled sandals off her feet.
Before her shoes even clattered onto the tile floor, Rhode and Malcolm reached for one another, each with a task in mind. Rhode was doing her best to pull down his sweatpants, but she was going to have to struggle with that herself. Malcolm could feel in the recesses of his mind that she was now gripping his bulge over his boxers, but he honestly didn’t even care.
He was hyperfixated on rolling down her underwear and pulling it through her right foot. A thong again. Pink today. There were flowers in the lace. He held it in a gentle grip, taking care not to let it tear. And to his great surprise, he discovered that, in his attempt to secure her underwear on her left thigh to keep it from falling onto the floor, he got remarkably hornier sliding the lace back on her.
Shit. Rhode wanted him to buy her lingerie. Was this what it would feel like to pick one out and, if she let him, put it on her?
Was that weird? Nobody did that. Did they? Who in their right mind would prefer to put lingerie on someone instead of taking it off?
A loud zip—or unzip—cut his ponderings short as Rhode reached behind her. Right before his eyes, the soft swells of her bust fell free. He’d fixated on them almost every night for a week. And here they were, so naked and glorious.
“Hang it up there,” said Rhode. She held her top up to him and nodded to the bag holder on the door behind him.
It seemed so mean, so tantalizingly cruel, that she’d make him leave her side when she was in this state of undress. Malcolm obliged her anyway.
He saw now that she’d pulled his sweatpants down to his thighs and slid his boxers past the top of his ass, but he kept them as they were. It took only two truncated steps and an arm’s reach to hang the garment on the bag holder.
“And this,” Rhode said when he returned. She extended a leg, where her underwear dangled off her left ankle.
She was wearing a golden anklet, he finally noticed, and her toes were painted in a white polish that made her skin look tanner.
Malcolm couldn’t even speak, but he did as he was told.
Just holding her lingerie, completely detached from her body, felt so indecent. Being responsible for it was almost unbearable. Oh, this was going to haunt him for sure.
He returned to Rhode again, instantly commencing his favorite therapeutic hack of the month: stroking his fingers over her bare legs.
In a bizarre moment that made him question reality, he found her legs were now smoother than when he’d got his hands on them just minutes ago. He swore to the gods his senses weren’t faulty.
First taking offense she’d thought he gave a fuck, he then shamed himself for assuming it had to be about him. But it was too late to pretend he hadn’t noticed. Rhode looked at him as if to say “What?” and, really, his pause and confused, experimental pets had kidded no one.
Malcolm decided to solve their little glitch with a somewhat apologetic kiss. Except Rhode didn’t let him. Her fingers traced his parted lips instead, and when gray met green, Malcolm swore not to waver.
“My panties would look so good in your mouth, though. Don’t you think?” she said.
It was like that glitch hadn’t happened at all.
Malcolm’s breath caught. He let it out and forced out the words: “Is that what you want?”
At least that was what he’d intended to say. What he heard himself mumble was instead: “If that’s what you want.”
He found it wasn’t a lie.
Rhode’s irises darkened as she let out an audible breath. She said nothing, did nothing, to relieve him from this discomfort. To help him up from this pit. Just forced himself to live with what he’d said.
Lucky for him, it was so easy to be distracted. Commanded by all the blood that had rushed south, he just took all of her in: from her parted lips and hungry stare, to the curves he could almost feel with merely a look... Nipples he could brush or tweak or kiss or lick or nip... All the lush dips and mounds that he longed to explore with his thumbs or his tongue.... She’d given him complete discretion, and he didn’t know where to start.
“You’re not going to do anything?” Rhode said with a teasing smile and a glance at her tits. She rolled her shoulders back and puffed out her chest. “This was what you wanted last time, wasn’t it? Unless I’m wrong?”
Malcolm opened and closed his mouth a couple times. “Maybe,” he confessed.
Even he couldn’t believe his attempt to play it cool.
“Maybe what?” Rhode said, with a tug at his shirt, helping Malcolm lift it off himself.
As he dropped the shirt beside her, the familiar weight of her gaze landed on his naked chest. He didn’t miss how her eyes lingered on his disfiguring scars. And for a moment, he had a burning urge to say he was sorry, to step away even, because surely someone as beautiful as Rhode would prefer—
Malcolm tossed away that ridiculous notion and pressed contrite kisses into Rhode’s shoulder for even for a second thinking so little of her. The guilt just made him want to please her more.
So, he followed her lead and let her meld him to her body. As Rhode reached for his back, tracing the planes of his sore muscles, Malcolm sank into his bones, breathing out his stress into a scent of flowers. He trailed his nose to her earlobe, landing another kiss in thanks. A little shudder went through her when he did it again, and then it was his turn to shiver as Rhode ran her fingers through his hair to encourage more of his secret apologies.
“Maybe what?” she said again.
“Maybe”—another kiss—“you’re right.”
Rhode faced him, catching his lips with hers, and she and Malcolm leisured in traded pecks and breaths.
“I don’t like maybes,” she said.
Her lashes tickled his face as she rested her forehead against his.
Emboldened by the memories he called upon of all the times her eyes had raked across his body, Malcolm finally filled his palms with her tits, taking turns squeezing them and brushing his fingers over the supple flesh.
“That’s nice,” Rhode breathed.
“Does this feel like a maybe?” he said, pinching the dark peaks until she gasped and left light scratches down his shoulders.
Malcolm left a few more open-mouthed kisses on her skin.
“Does this”— He hitched up her skirt and pulled her thighs around him, grinding his erection against her—“feel like a maybe?”
“I don’t know. You tell me,” said Rhode shakily.
Malcolm ground his hips into hers until she whimpered. He could only hold back his own little groan because he’d prepared for it. But, fuck, her wet heat was dampening his boxers. His cock was stirring under the cotton, dying to escape its confines and sink into her.
Another press of their hips didn’t seem like enough. Rhode still looked at him, demanding more. So he ground into her again and gave her what she wanted.
“There’s no maybe here,” he said with conviction.
They weren’t a maybe anymore. They’d made their permanent mark. No matter what happened, the Fates couldn’t take it back.
Malcolm laughed under his breath at that thought, and then aloud, and Rhode even joined him this time—until her attention was consumed by every part of him she could reach.
Her touches grew more intentful. She dragged lines of friction over his skin, sending warm chills through his arms. Pleasure tingled its way to his groin, and he dug his fingers just that little bit into her thighs.
Malcolm was twitching in frustrated bliss at this point, and he knew Rhode could feel it. Her eyelids fluttered, and she was panting puffs he could feel on his face, then staring at their hips, separated only by a single, heated piece of fabric.
Abruptly sliding her ass back, she removed the rings from her fingers at lightning speed and set them unceremoniously by the sink, where they rattled and rang in Malcolm’s ears for a long moment.
“You can touch me,” said Rhode, splaying her legs apart.
Anything, said his inner voice.
Between her thighs, his digits curled and parted through her coarser curls. And just as he began silently questioning her inconsistent touchiness about her body hair, he was struck by disappointment for both their sakes. She was hardly wet. Like, almost not at all. Maybe his boxers had soaked up her wetness. He could still see it on the cotton. And maybe today was just one of those days.
He told himself it didn’t bother him, and immediately worked to solve their problem, pressing rather than stroking, combing through the hair, remaining patient.
He should’ve known better. Rhode had said “now”. Her trusty godly abilities conjured a gel, and in their shared cocoon, his right hand fumbled with the both of hers as they took care to slick her up.
With his hand buried between her thighs, starting his circling, Rhode kissed his pecs as she shoved his boxers down. Her fingers traced down his trail, and now she was pinning her laser focus onto his exposed cock.
My eyes are up here.
Eyes still on her prize, she smiled as she told him her hands were now clean; she’d made sure of it. Malcolm laughed as he sighed under her touch.
The moment was interrupted as his neck decided to warn him it would strain. But he decided he could handle it right now.
Everything was right about this. They were in tune, in shared knowledge and wants. Exchanging favors for the same goal. Letting each other study and salivate.
And to think Rhode would’ve minded him looking how he did. Ha. No. If anything, it was his doubt that would have made him less worthy of her.
Malcolm wanted to make it up to her again. Something more than these servile circles on her clit.
“What do you want right now exactly?” he said.
“I want to feel good.”
The words fell from her lips so easily, before he could even suggest the options in his mind.
Clarity reached Rhode’s eyes amid her own haze, and she began fondling his balls and circling every inch of his cock with a deliciously tight, pumping grip that sent tingling thrills down his spine.
“Do you want that?” she said. And now she was speeding up, making his muscles tense as he fought so hard to hold on. “Will you be good for me?”
Rhode looked him straight in his eyes. If only he could keep his there. His eyes shut against his will, and his knees began to weaken. Moans were escaping in his breaths as he stiffened unbearably in her strokes.
“Just like that,” she said breathily. Hungrily. Like he was easy. Like she was winning.
“You know I’m good,” Malcolm said, trying to reclaim his dignity. He focused on his circles again.
“Yeah, I do,” said Rhode.
And she was winning. The brushes she thumbed over his slit were throwing him into a void of delirium, and he had to tell himself to get his finger busy again.
“And you know what I do with good boys, don’t you?” she said.
Lightning shocks shot through him as she stroked the ridgy underside of his cock.
You fuck ’em.
You reward them.
“You can’t resist them,” Malcolm said with triumph.
Rhode let out a laugh, even as a moany breath escaped her. “No, I suppose not.”
His barely contained whine the instant she took her hands off him was followed by a soundless complaint that the hands she’d laid on his lubed-up bits were now in his hair. (Did she really not realize? Or had she cleaned them again? Hopefully?!)
“They’re just so good to me,” she said.
Before he knew it, Rhode tugged at his hair and melded her mouth onto his. Malcolm suspected it was to shut him up (little did she know he’d had nothing), but he enjoyed her demands and her pride in her kisses, and returned them in full. His annoyance withered away with the touch she dragged onto his shoulders. And then she was climbing onto him, wrapping around him with her legs, and locking her ankles right over his ass.
Malcolm held up her weight and looked up at her, straight into her yearning eyes. This had to be the perfect way to worship Rhode.
He tried to make it a little more perfect by drawing up her skirt between them. It didn’t completely work; the sparkles of her skirt’s fringe remained scratchy on his stomach. Still, he hardly had it in him to care, because, at long last, he was nestled so warmly between her labia.
It was surreal to be this intimate and share so much with her—this space, this time, this air. And now their bodies.
Malcolm gazed into her eyes, at a loss for words for how everything had come to this. Was she realizing that, too?
Yeah, probably not.
That didn’t matter. It pleased him enough seeing Rhode’s lust-struck eyes fix into his as he lined himself to her entrance.
“Now?” he asked, trying for a joke.
Rhode chuckled through a widening grin.
Yeah, they could share laughter, too, couldn’t they?
“That was ages ago,” she said.
Taking that as a yes, he sank her around the very tip of him. Rhode’s grip tightened on his shoulders as he breached her. It almost didn’t register, with half his head fuzzy with decadence and gratitude, but the wakened half made her reactions his own accolade. Gods damn, the way he could make her lips part, make her gasp, make her knit her brows and scrunch her face—
Fuck. Right. Neither of them had even opened her up earlier.
‘Ages ago.’ How naïve. Doing this ages ago would’ve been impossible. Doing it at all was even needless.
Malcolm shut down that selfish half of his mind and shoved it away when it crankily refused to budge. He stilled for a moment, letting Rhode get used to his girth. And he needed her to know that she was wrong.
“Everything else counted,” he said.
“I still want this,” Rhode told him. She dug into his shoulders as she let herself fall around him.
In his silent groan, that vicious part of him returned with a ferocity, clambering in his way to embed him fully inside her. It told him it was right for how Rhode was puffing coffee breaths into his face again and literally agreeing with an elongated yes.
It was her and it right now; Malcolm was just there. As it overwhelmed her with its want once more, she fulfilled it with all the goodness of life. And he was just watching, judging the both of them. Because he just couldn’t imagine how this could possibly be comfortable for her.
So, screw the both of them. Malcolm finally took over. He forced a slow pace, taming Rhode’s reactions considerably, and maintained the rhythm for long enough for her to get used to him.
Glide after heavenly glide, he kept at it, before he picked up into a steady bounce.
Soon enough, he and that sleaze of an instinct were melded together again. He didn’t fight it anymore. In turn, it finally shut the hell up and let him feel good again. Malcolm let the pleasure wash over him as he fucked into Rhode.
They rutted in silence. It felt like forever had passed.
He wished she would say something, because his mind was now going to all sorts of places when he just wanted to stay here with her. He tried to focus on the way her walls were hugging him so perfectly. He tried directing his attention to the friction of her bouncing tits on his chest.
But a list began forming of all the tasks he hadn’t gotten to before their seating planning. And when he got to a tenth item, Rhode—mouthy, annoying Rhode—still hadn’t said anything. She was breathing pretty raggedly, sure, but now, she was looking at the wall behind him. Or, gods forbid, the door.
It was high time he pulled his weight, wasn’t it?
Geez, was this what he did to her in all the times he’d been stumped and shy?
No, he wouldn’t feel guilty. This position had been her idea, so it wasn’t on him to—
He groaned so vehemently in his head. Gods damn. Fine.
Holding in a sigh, Malcolm closed his eyes, focusing on the feel of Rhode around him and under his touch. His hands squeezed the globes of her ass.
“You’re incredible,” he said.
Wonder lit up her eyes as she looked at him.
Fuck, yeah. He was on a roll.
“You’re—” And now this felt like too much—and it was that somehow that got him full-on horny again. But the words were lost, and she was waiting, and so was he, and so he closed his eyes and thrust into her harder and deeper to let himself think. “A surprise. Constantly.”
Rhode remained silent—still just breathing, only breathing—but she moved a little more, riding him from up there. And she was still looking at him, searching his eyes expectantly.
“It’s so—” Malcolm said. “You’re so—” He couldn’t take the pressure. He deliberately closed his eyes and called out the faintest groan. “Fuck.”
A louder, bigger puff of coffee air heated the tip of his nose. She looked like she believed it—and like she liked it. But her pants and mewls were still missing.
Malcolm wanted to touch her so she could truly join him in sin. He could get her there if she could just turn around. But he didn’t want that either. He didn’t want to see Rhode in the mirror. He wanted the real deal, just like this, gazing up at her face, just a breath away.
“Can’t reach your clit,” he complained, hoping Rhode would have a solution or at least give acknowledgement to the plight.
“Later,” she said.
She was looking like she’d beaten him. And this was really getting to be too common an occurrence, but now he was just glad she was fully into their thing again, even fluttering around every slick slide of his cock.
Pleasure was finally overtaking him. It nearly won out, but Malcolm remembered his fight.
“But you can’t come without—” he said. “Can you?”
“Later,” said Rhode again.
There was a voice in his head asking why on earth—and then there was another asking if that voice was his own voice and what that made him right now. But the little inklings were all too far away for him to care. Nothing could beat the force of Rhode’s command—a tenderness that hit him with so much force that he couldn’t feel anything but... special.
“Tell me you want me,” she said.
He could say only her name.
“Come on, Malcolm.” Her breaths shook as he kept sinking her onto him. “Tell me you want me. I saw you looking at me earlier. I saw you trying not to. You didn’t say anything then. So, tell me now.”
“I want you,” he gasped out in his weakness.
He knew the moment he said it that it wasn’t true. There was something there he knew he’d always refuse. In his heart of hearts, he knew it was misguided. Rhode couldn’t be wanted. It just wouldn’t do.
“I want...” he began to protest.
He felt he wanted to just sit back and watch, and help if she wanted. He didn’t want her. Not one bit.
But, gods, her temptations made him selfish. Whatever his head was saying, his hips, his cock, his hands, his mouth, his eyes were all wanting her for his own sake.
Malcolm caved—couldn’t help it when Rhode was gliding around him so wet and snug. When she was tugging at his roots and kissing his face and raking her nails over his skin.
“Oh gods, please,” he breathed. He wasn’t faking it now.
In a move that made him feel like her disobedient little plaything, Rhode gripped his chin, forcing him to face her fierce stare. She looked so greedy, she might as well have been angry.
“Don’t beg the other gods,” she said sternly. “Beg me.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Agreement purred in his bones, reconciling the war between mind and body, and the hottest heat flared all throughout him from being manhandled by someone this short. Whom he was carrying. Just enabling her to do this to him.
He was so damn weak. His eyes shut again, and he hissed in blind pleasure, straying further and further from grace.
Malcolm refused to be weak.
“Rhode... Please,” he said, proceeding to swear and groan at another of her clenches around him.
Malcolm looked up at her. Her hair had fallen onto his face, blocking out everything but black and teal, flowers and coffee, plushness and warmth, and he vowed nothing would undermine his reverence. This instantaneous obsession that simmered with a rage. She thought he would just take having this gift forced upon him while she refused his decency? Like he wouldn’t fucking notice the joy in her eyes had steeled into concentration? Fuck that.
(Gods, he felt special.)
He was really going to lose it.
“Rhode, let me touch you,” he grunted.
Sparks lit up her bright, blue-green eyes. “Oh, you’re so good to me. I love it.”
Her thumbs caressed his cheeks, and they were too soft for the cascades of pleasure threatening to drift him away. And Rhode was doing nothing to stop that pressure in his cock from building. She had tricked him into following her straight to the edge of a cliff, only for her to push him between her and the fall.
All this pressure was going to fire out of him. He could barely hold it back, but there she was, laying kisses on his temples and his lips until she was sullying her own name, in her own mouth, with the vulgarities he uttered in the same breath.
“Seriously, let me help,” he said brokenly.
Even as he hovered Rhode over the countertop to set her down, she just hoisted herself up higher and held onto him tighter, almost slamming onto him and contracting around him as torturously as she could.
“Come for me,” she said. “I want you to let go.”
The next moment smashed into him with barely an ounce of his consent, yet Malcolm couldn’t bother to mind. Then he couldn’t even care that he didn’t mind it. He shot off, pulsing inside her as she kissed him through a moan, and they held each other tight, silencing themselves to absolutely no one.
Sometime in the middle of it, when her lips left his, Malcolm got the inkling that she was watching him. She was.
And he knew his body wasn’t done enjoying his climax, but he climbed himself out of the high. After the two seconds it took to steer his mind to rightness, he set Rhode down, thankfully without her protest, and immediately began rubbing circles over her clit. It felt like a lifetime had passed since she had climbed onto him, and now he wanted to do right by her, make it up to her, thank her.
She was immediately convulsing around him and whimpering as he touched her. And holy hell, she was velvety lava at this point. So much was getting to be too much. But he couldn’t move. She’d wrapped a leg around him, her voice asking—pleading—him to stay inside her.
Weak as he was, Malcolm felt stronger. To some degree, Rhode needed him right now.
So, he nodded faintly and stayed put. He couldn’t help the rasped curses that fell from his lips, but he kept circling her nub, watching her all the while as he let her use his body to reach her orgasm.
When his body broke and he spilled into her again, it felt like an offering. Rhode moaned faintly and rippled around him—as though accepting his sacrifice. She pulled him closer in her arms as her other leg wrapped around his ass, locking him in. And as if that hadn’t been enough, her hips ground into him, rocking him inside her. Malcolm cursed at the blessing.
The prickling fire at the crown of his cock was rushing through the whole length of him now. He could hear his anguished moans.
“I’m so close,” Rhode whined.
He saw her parted lips and needy eyes. He felt her breaths ghosting his face. And Malcolm just knew. It was so simple. He was going to do everything right. He would ride this out as much as he could, simply because she’d asked for it.
As he savored everything he could from it—this buzz of tormenting pleasure that now raced to his head—Rhode took off to her own world.
It was perhaps coincidental that his indulgence was as impatient for her ecstasy as his body was for the escape from it, but Malcolm was grateful for the fluke.
Granted his own permission, he plucked her nipple, practically pulling her by the tit, the way her chest arched toward him. And on and on, he drew circles on her clit, going and going and going—until finally, she cried out and tipped her head back, hitting the mirror with a loud thump and another groan.
Still dizzy from unceasing excess, Malcolm didn’t stop. He merely slowed his pace, getting Rhode to moan again and swear obscenities. He wandered his digits lower to where they were joined as one, taking it all in again, before coming to a standstill.
“Another one?” he said.
With heavy lids, Rhode opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Since you’re offering.”
“I actually need to get out of you now,” he said.
Mercifully, Rhode finally unhooked her legs from around him.
The towel she made appear when he slid out of her helped with the messiness only to a degree, but neither particularly cared right now. Rhode especially didn’t seem to mind; she didn’t even whoosh them into cleanliness per usual. Instead, she helped Malcolm wipe himself up by hand. Impractical as it was, he wouldn’t have traded it for anything else.
It didn’t take long to make her come again. Rhode was already close to another edge, and Malcolm had learned from his triumphs and errors. He knew she liked it gentler after her initial climax. Knew she’d prefer circles, not lines. And he knew what she was like on the brink of orgasm.
He broke her down again in steps, and when she arched towards him, panting in his face with her eyes shut, he tangled a hand in her hair so she wouldn’t hit the mirror again when she was falling apart.
Through it all, he even managed to stay perfectly silent and unfazed, no matter how odd the sounds became with her twitching hips. In fact, he did even better than Rhode, who broke into a flash of a laugh before he managed to sweep her away into carefree ecstasy.
With her head out of harm’s way, Malcolm stroked her thighs ever so lightly and indulged in the sight of her blissed-out state.
Her face tilted skyward in her descent. He watched her chest rise and fall, and synchronized his breaths with hers. Then he matched his caresses in the same tempo.
When Rhode opened her eyes, he didn’t stop. He didn’t even avert his gaze. For once, he didn’t care. She looked harmless like this. (But silently, his mind had already prepared a fallback anyway: it was just decent to help her come down.)
A full minute passed before she licked her lips, swallowed, and sighed with finality.
Perfect.
Malcolm dropped to his knees. The sentiment was clear enough on his face. Oh, you thought we were done?
He actually caught Rhode’s brows twitch, until a dazzling smile spread across her face.
He was really liking being able to amaze her like this. One day, he wouldn’t be able to surprise her anymore, but for now, he took the win—even if she did raise her chin so haughtily to tell him what he was.
Rhode really didn’t get it. He didn’t want to be good. He wanted to be the best he could be.
Malcolm rested her thighs on his shoulders and took his time. Figured she needed it. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. So, with the utmost care, he spent time with her legs, even kissed her knees.
He blazed a wet trail of kisses and nips down each of her inner thighs.
“I almost can’t believe you,” said Rhode—the first thing either of them had said in a while. She was already (or still?) breathless.
Malcolm smiled, his chest so warm with delight.
When he finally licked inside of her, her legs tensed under his hold. Rhode’s eyes focused on him; he could feel them almost as much as the jizz collecting on his tongue. With just another shy lick, she sat up straight.
Great. Now he was worrying her.
Malcolm dove in and decided he didn’t give a shit, no matter how nasty a voice in his head tried to insist this was. Hadn’t he been curious what this was like anyway? Did it matter it was his own?
He could think to however many minutes ago it had been when she had climbed atop him, wrapped her limbs around him, and told him to take his release from her—and for no reason other than her awe... of him. He wished never to forget how she’d looked at him in that moment.
With the evidence on his taste buds, he could now appreciate what he hadn’t at the time: There was no higher praise than Rhode imploring that he come first and now and with her body.
He could worry later (if he needed to at all) about the Pavlovian response he was likely creating. The conditioning, after all, was not the problem but a solution.
Rejuvenated by this heady feeling, Malcolm kissed her there like he would kiss her mouth. Licked her there how he would’ve licked her tongue. He drew deep breaths out of her lungs, even some high-pitched mewls like he had wanted to hear earlier. Whatever he didn’t want in his mouth, he just lapped back onto her, letting it fall down on her as he dragged his tongue over her clit.
His self-conditioning might’ve even been working, but he tuned it out, favoring Rhode’s pleasure right now.
Malcolm darted his tongue inside her again and then swirled it around her labia. He couldn’t help but swallow from all the spit—and, oh, it was actually turning him on. Interesting. He wondered how much of it had to do with Rhode being in the picture. Would he ever do this for somebody else?
More of her juices and more of his come dripped down her ass and onto the towel beneath her, and he made it his mission to draw it all out.
And still, he kept his mouth on her, building up a hot stir in her until it raced through her nerves, leaving Rhode writhing and shaking, so incessant and loud that she needed to hold onto him now.
He pressed on, tasting them both as she clamped onto his head and jerked her hips and scratched at his scalp—and moaned one last time.
All was still again.
Malcolm leaned back as Rhode’s knees pressed together. The fan whirred loudly above them as they recuperated, and for an eon, neither he nor Rhode moved.
He basked in the calmness and tried to tame and ignore his dick, which was just ruining this whole vibe, saying, Hello? Hello?! I’m here!
Rhode, totally unaware of his problem, began running her fingers through his hair. Malcolm didn’t want to stop her.
He was still kneeling in front of her, and his face was warming up now. It wasn’t from the view under her skirt nor even from what he’d done so much as from the fact that he was still keeping his head bowed.
He knew Rhode would never think it of him, but he took this moment to relish in the heat and the shivers from humbly serving her in every single way she desired.
“One more,” said Rhode.
Malcolm looked up at her at last. “Aren’t you greedy?” But he was already nudging her legs open. “It’s cool. I kinda like—”
“For you.” She said it almost like he was misbehaving.
How bewildering.
“Oh,” he said dumbly.
“Yes, oh.” She was smiling again. “If you can take it.”
After reaching down to peck his lips, Rhode hopped off the countertop, landing barefoot on the tile to pull Malcolm off the floor and stoop down before him.
But he’d instinctively reached for her, holding her up by the forearms before her knees could touch the ground.
“You don’t have to...” he said.
She raised her brows. “You don’t want it?” Her gaze fell to his crotch, and vindication bloomed, then hid, in her eyes. “I’m not saying you being hard right now means you have to or want to go again, but we could if you want.”
“This is...” Malcolm gestured to the restroom around them and glanced at the toilet they’d ignored up ‘til now. “You’re wearing something nice.” Even if it was only her skirt left.
Rhode practically rolled her eyes. “I’m always wearing something nice,” she said. “It’s okay. I can stand it for a few minutes.” She looked down at his dick and grinned. “Or just one. Or less.”
A pang pierced into his chest, and Malcolm stifled a sigh. “Here I am, trying to be nice to you...” he muttered.
“And I’m offering you a blowjob!” she exclaimed. “Tell me, how am I not being nice?”
“Because you’re just playing your countdown game—”
“Well, I don’t want it to take more than a minute,” Rhode replied, “because, as you said, the bathroom probably is a little filthy.”
“That’s why I said you don’t have to!”
“I want to!”
Straight from her fury, Rhode began to laugh. In Malcolm’s confused state, she took his hands in hers and placed them over her breasts. It didn’t help with the confusion.
“You’re turning down head,” she said, “because you want to be good to me. Is that right?”
He still couldn’t think straight with his hands sandwiched between her boobs and her own hands. But something told him she was wrong. Or did he only want to believe that she was?
“Maybe,” he said, to piss her off.
“Give me an answer.” There was a warning edge to her voice. “If you don’t say anything, I’ll take it to mean I crossed a line.”
“Yes,” he said immediately, no matter how annoyed he was that she was cheating. “You didn’t— The answer is yes.”
Truthfully, he still didn’t know 100%, but he wasn’t going to let her believe that she’d done anything wrong when she hadn’t.
Whatever it was confounding him slipped away with a look at her.
Good, her eyes were saying, like she was starting another game. He just didn’t know what it was.
And he still couldn’t figure it out, because too much of his brain was occupied with the heavenly feeling of her soft flesh. The way it gave under his touch.
“So, what if I tell you,” Rhode said, “that this is what I want? Because I have a weakness for generous, well-behaved men? Would you want to please me now?”
Malcolm thought it over, ignoring everything but her face. “You want me to please you by letting you...” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Rhode suddenly shoved his hands off her. “Was this something you apologized to Poseidon for?” she snapped.
Malcolm sputtered. “U— Why are you bringing him into this?!”
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” she said angrily. “I want you to want me however you do.”
Looking into her darkened eyes, Malcolm remembered how wickedly thorough she had been their first time. That diligence had haunted him in his nights and got him twitching right now. And in this moment, he couldn’t help but let himself want. (She did, too, he remembered.)
“Okay,” he said, “then since you actually want to—I assumed you didn’t—”
“I would tell you!”
“—you can totally go ahead.”
Once more, Rhode’s anger washed away in an instant as amusement took its place. “Oh, no, no, no,” she said. Her eyes were gleaming. “You made a big fuss about this. You know the rules.”
Malcolm remained mum in the silence. How could he—?
He scrunched his brows a little.
“No, don’t play dumb, Malcolm. I can already see it in your eyes.”
“You’re so predictable,” he said in a scoff.
Rhode’s lips curled at the corners. “I may not play fair, but I play honestly. You know that. Come on, Malcolm. Ask me,” she said, ending in a whisper.
“Okay.” He swallowed and tried not to think—about all this pressure or about how he could really go for some water right now. “You wanna blow me? Go right ahead.”
“No.”
A moment passed.
“Please?” he tried.
Rhode made a show of thinking about it and seemed convinced enough to skim a hand down his bare chest and entertain herself with feeling up his right arm. Malcolm’s muscles flexed beneath her cold touch. He shivered yet more as her fingers dipped to his abs.
When Rhode found his eyes again and lightly raked her nails over the skin just by his navel, it was clear enough he wouldn’t be getting any more than this.
Malcolm let out a breath. “It would be... spectacular... if you could.”
“If I could...?” she said, venturing farther down to finally grip his hardening cock.
It felt so dirty. It was so wrong. And so necessary when she brushed over his tip, triggering the words to fly out of his mouth: “Go down on me.”
He’d never asked anyone in his life.
Rhode smiled like she knew—like she won. She kissed him with a devouring passion. And just as he was getting into it, she laughed at him in his face.
“You know, in this time, you could’ve already come again?” she said. “Not very practical,” she commented with a shake of her head.
After she expelled another hearty laugh, which Malcolm so gladly ignored, Rhode got a hold of herself and immediately dropped to her knees.
“I’m still going to count,” she said, sitting haphazardly on the ground. “I have a record to beat.”
“Gods, you’re so annoyi—” he cut off as an involuntary moan escaped his throat when her wet, fiery mouth enveloped him.
Her hummed laugh made him groan.
“And you’re so stubbornly good to me,” she said, when she caught her breath.
Malcolm knew in his bones that Rhode was torturing him out of spite, but the wet stripe of her tongue over his entire length felt like nothing other than a reward. He was only taken to higher raptures as she jerked him in her hand and squeezed the head of his cock, forcing him to stifle his sounds.
Rhode tutted. “‘Spectacular,’ you said. Make it a real spectacle. I want to hear you.”
How he regretted saying it now. Part of him wanted to never see her again, even as he subconsciously thanked her for all the tingling flames growing in his loins.
But his fears and worries got lost—were crushed into nonexistence—in the violence at play here. The way Rhode was ripping sounds from his throat, practically striking blows to his knees, blinding him, rendering him absolutely helpless. ‘Til he was nothing more than an amorphous blob in the universe, made entirely of pleasure.
Surrendering at last, he needed to summon no courage to look down.
A filthy sight greeted him and reminded him he was real. Malcolm could see himself filling Rhode’s mouth. He watched her pretty lips drag over his cock, could feel her reaching her tongue out as far as she could, saw her bright eyes set on him, and he felt almost feral.
He could break down the bathroom walls if he wanted to. Power was raging in his veins, his control was deteriorating, desperation was taking its place, his decency was crumbling into smithereens, and he just needed.
He needed to thrust into her throat or pull her by the hair onto him over and over until he came. He needed it so badly, his fingers were going to bruise his thighs. So badly, his back was going to snap from holding his hips still. An unexplainable, vicious desire was swallowing him, whispering at him to lash out.
“Your sparkly skirt is on the floor,” he growled.
Rhode’s eyes shut, and Malcolm felt the delightful vibrations of her hum sending him to the heavens.
He pulled himself back to earth.
“Oh my gods,” he breathed. His jaw actually dropped an inch. “That turns you on?”
The confusion did a lot to calm him.
Rhode ignored his commentary as far as he could tell, but did nothing to dispute his accusation, with the way she was still working him in her mouth—perhaps even more fervently than before.
It was astounding. Unthinkable. So infernal. So bothersome. She was barefoot and fully topless. She wasn’t wearing any underwear for Zeus’s sake. She was clothed only in that skirt, with its expensive sparkly, delicate fringe threads on the gods-damn floor of this bathroom. And she was sucking him off.
This hadn’t been his intention whatsoever. This wasn’t the duty she’d entrusted him with. But now he felt he needed her to do this. And he shouldn’t have wanted this, but it was just too good.
He had hardly asked, but she was still on the floor this second. He hadn’t even asked for her best, but she was stuffing him into her throat, her nose rubbing against his hairs. He sure as shit hadn’t asked for the pops and slurps, but she was doing them anyway.
“This is so unnecessary,” Malcolm said. A smile tugged at his lips just the same.
As he reached to brush through her dark waves, he watched her sink him slowly into her mouth and pull herself away only to dive back in.
“Is that not what makes it better?” Rhode said when she needed to take another breath.
Her voice was raspy from their use of her throat. It was like she didn’t care about it. It was like she didn’t care how she looked either, sitting so lazily, so un-princessly, on the floor. Didn’t care what she was doing, how she kissed at the tip of him, sucked at him, and pressed him into the side of her mouth.
As if in a trance, with all his self-consciousness severed from him, his fingertips brushed over her soft cheek, over the bulging outline she made out of his cock.
Rhode took him in again, hollowing her cheeks and getting him even closer to the edge.
Malcolm’s mind fell in a loop as he reeled yet again that she was offering her devil of a mouth and sacrificing her pretty clothes so that she could give him this.
It only got worse. Gods, so much worse. The spit coating her lips and chin began dripping onto her chest. Pinned under Rhode’s dark turquoise eyes, he let go completely, giving up all control over his body, over everything that would happen. His thighs were tiring as her throat trembled around him, struggling with his size, and he was finally coming again—on her tongue, on her chin, on her neck. And now dribbles of come were pouring onto her tits, mingling with her saliva. It might’ve been the most sordid thing he’d ever seen, much less been a part of.
He hadn’t asked for any of this. He couldn’t imagine what he’d ever done to deserve such outrageous—truly, outrageous—generosity. And from her? From this god?
Rhode kept licking his cock, even after he’d spilled everything he had in him. It was like she could never get dirty enough.
Call it reflex, call it immaturity, call it foresight.... Before his body had fully reassembled itself, his mind scrambled to find the upper hand.
“You’re so welcome,” he said as Rhode got up to stand.
She huffed, like he was himself now questioning why the hell he was playing a card he’d already lost with. Should’ve known it would be an automatic defeat. She was too classy to even retort, which just made his loss twice as egregious.
Luckily, Malcolm had the energy to only care so much right now.
Side by side, they cleaned and clothed themselves, catching their breaths in silence. As he washed his hands and fixed his hair, Rhode dabbed her fresh, wet face with a tissue and applied her lipstick, completing her routine with a silent smack.
“Did you get my letter?” she said, putting on her rings as she glanced at him in the mirror.
Man, all this time, and he still hadn’t prepared a response.
Rhode turned to face him for real this time. “I didn’t even charge you the taxes I paid,” she said. “Or... You know how to sew, you said. I’ll send it to you.”
“Do not send it to me.”
“You rip it, you stitch it.”
“I am not stitching it,” he said. His cheeks would’ve been redder if he weren’t so out of sex at this point.
“Then buy me a new one,” said Rhode. “It’s very likely beyond repair anyhow.”
Surely she was joking. Surely.
“Oh, for the record,” she said, “however many minutes? It wasn’t for a lack of my skill. I purposely made you last longer.” She stepped towards him, pressing herself flush against his body, every inch from thigh to shoulder. “A reward,” she whispered in his ear.
For a good boy.
In the mirror, Malcolm saw Rhode tangle a hand up in his hair and pull at his sleeve to land a fierce kiss—and then a peck—on the skin of his collar.
Her weight pushed against him as she brushed past, and his shirt snapped into place, covering the pink stains.
He watched her speechlessly as she walked to the restroom door only to turn around and wink at him.
“Thank you, by the way,” she said, leaving him even more dumbfounded as she disappeared before him in a fog.
Turning around, Malcolm met his reflection again, catching his messed up hair he now had to deal with again, and eyed the hidden pink marks under his shirt. His nerves were humming too contentedly for him to mind at all.
He took off his shirt once more. But as soon as he took a soapy tissue to his shoulder, the lipstick marks faded on their own.
Huh.
His fascination faded quickly when he noticed on his way to his office that some form of ire had risen from his belly to find a home in his chest.
He couldn’t figure out if it was some delayed annoyance (from prior denial perhaps?) or if watching something on his body disappear was just too trippy for his liking (how convenient, though). Or if Rhode’s control over his body was a step too far. (For marking him? Or for remotely correcting her own potential error as soon as she might have remembered?) Or if it was that he actually wanted to deal with her lipstick stains himself. (... No comment... But actually, likely no.) Or if it was another of his stupid defeats he was bothered by. (He didn’t really think so.) Or maybe if it was because Rhode had started this crazy game again. (No way in Hades.)
Malcolm ignored the unnecessary feeling and decided not to let it bother him. It was impossible to let it with this new trove of memories to treasure.
He cleared his desk, found a new meeting invite from Drew to ignore, and locked up the building with a laugh threatening to break out of him, even as he felt the urge to hide his face. Had they really just done all that again, just right here?
Once mouthwash and a shower made him new, he fought through his drowsiness the rest of the day planning next week’s lessons and helping Annabeth with the training briefs they were preparing with Clarisse and Pollux. He squeezed it all in before Alicia silently asked him for another bedtime story.
The other Athena kids hit the sheets one by one, but Malcolm laid awake in bed with the picture of that damn underwear behind his eyelids. He wondered how to escape from the trap he’d fallen into. The trap he’d so stupidly designed himself.
Tonight was different. Tonight, he could hardly bear to think of all the things he and Rhode had done. Pulling his covers over his head, turning into his pillow, squeezing his eyes shut... They were hardly a reprieve when he could still feel the heat on his face, because he could feel his past self tearing the fabric in his hands, and now Rhode was making him pay. She was making him admit it. Making him apologize only by embarrassing himself in submitting to her.
It was so obnoxiously brilliant, he wanted to shout his praises at her and laugh with her and kiss her for it—if only he could overcome his shame.
Malcolm felt it would never go away.
But that was a comfort itself. Rhode had shared with him yet another secret.
In trying to beat his embarrassment with forced acceptance, a snicker escaped him, which he hid behind a session of deep breaths. None of his siblings stirred, thank gods, and at long last, he fell into slumber.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm dreamed Claire found out all about the underwear incident. He dreamed Conrad laughed his way out the cabin as Claire spilled the deets. He dreamed Alicia was hounding him again, this time in betrayed tears, asking, “What are strawberries, Mal? Why won’t you tell me?”
The only fire following him in his dream was that in his face, cooled finally by the cold fingers on his cheeks.
But they were Rhode’s, and he was alone with her, and she had on her gorgeous, annoying smile. She was in his lap as he sat on a chair dug in sand that he somehow knew she’d tied him to.
As he looked up at her long curls blowing in salty air, her thumbs grazed over his lips.
“Are you man enough to buy me another one?” she said. “Or do I need to ask somebody else?”
The Malcolm whose eyes he was seeing through must not have been him, because that Malcolm so easily said, “Why would you want somebody else? You picked me.”
“I want my thong back, Malcolm,” Rhode said with a pout.
Tranquil splashes of ocean were laving over his bare feet. Rhode’s dress felt damp against his legs. But they paid attention only to the frayed, black fabric she dangled in his face and set between his jaws.
“Rhode...” Malcolm learned it wasn’t difficult to speak through such a small scrap of lace. “Rhode...” He said it as though he were playfully chiding her and soothing her all the same. Like it was something he knew she needed.
When Rhode finally cut her petulant eyes toward him, he heard himself say, “I already made you one.”
Malcolm’s dream ended before he could see her reaction. He was still sleeping soundly as Eos rode across the sky, and by the time her shift was over, his dream had vanished from consciousness.
He woke up nearly two hours into Apollo’s chariot duties, with the makings of a wide grin and the discomfort of a little morning surprise. Something told him he needed to stash the book hiding Rhode’s letter deeper in his bookshelf.
Since he couldn’t morally be seen in this state, he skipped his run for a shower. He hogged more time than he typically needed and basked under the spray of warm water as yesterday made a round in his head. Malcolm’s eyes shut again as he flushed, but he was laughing.
And as he joined city employees for a Monday breakfast, the rounds looped in his head with no one the wiser.
Notes:
Because part 2 surely wasn’t enough to get anyone anywhere lolol, I hope at least that it was well-written and interesting.
I purposely tried to make some things more cryptic and loose(?) than I’d originally drafted, and I’m wondering if I got the balance right and if there's still some interesting sort of mystery left over. Lemme know if anything’s confusing or whatever!
Again, I’ll be on tumblr with extra story stuff while I finish the next chapter. Everything on chapter 9 so far: Harpocrates | Connecting dots | A hint from way back when: No quests | More character-building sexy time! | Capture the Flag planning
Drop anything into the ask box if you want.
Wishing you all a happy March!
Rachel says everybody better beware 🧢🖤😈🔱🗡️
Chapter 10: In which Malcolm inspects cabins
Notes:
06/04/23:
So surprised and delighted there are considerably more readers! Hi, y'all! 👋 To older readers, sorry for the delay! There's a lot going on behind the scenes, I promise! I will never abandon this fic. 💕08/18/23:
Hiiiiiiii!!!!! I’m alive! And I am so very sorry! I was sick and worked overtime for weeks on end. So I took a break for fun & health reasons. Highly recommend doing some trails and going to tourist attractions at home. Hope you’re all taking care of yourselves. 💜
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Malcolm’s workday went by as Mondays typically did. Everything happened at weekend speed.
Aside from Pravir’s team and their overdelivered education projects, the tax folks, led by Alvin, a son of Apollo, proved to be an exception.
Alvin had done a bang-up job starting up the automatic tax collection and benefits delivery system Malcolm had so badly wanted. In exactly ten minutes, Alvin and Vera (a daughter of Mnemosyne) walked him through their updates like rookie realtors showing him a home. It was so obvious that they’d prepared their presentation over the weekend, and Malcolm supposed he should’ve been flattered, but it was more just amusing they’d thought they had needed to do this. But if that extra prep meant it would have helped push them to launch the program in October, he was happy for it.
For once, the only snags in the way were technical kinks. If only his meetings with fellow councilors could feel so breezy.
Over merely three meetings, Malcolm heard he was too much of a socialist (Bae), that he was not so secretly a conservative (Pravir), that he was ignoring cost-benefit analyses (Chiara), and that he should upend his supposed utilitarian worldview (Rayel).
Clarisse kept breaking out in snorts when he told her over their monthly catch-up. Malcolm did not, however, find much humor when she recapped similar complaints she’d gotten from the security team she oversaw: too tough, too soft, too blind, too compensating. Ultimately, she and Malcolm were both too busy to have the capacity to care. At least that’s what Malcolm told himself.
He gladly distracted himself during the team bonding lunch Rayel’s team had organized in the auditorium (catered by the upcoming New Athenian restaurant Phyllosophers), and turned to the less stressful puzzle of meeting more newbies and memorizing more names.
To further numb his clashing mind, he willfully perked up his ears at the flocks of rumors flying about him as he passed around some galatopita.
Supposedly, a group of dryads and Demeter kids were concocting some vengeful scheme. The woods had taken too big a hit in this past month’s Capture the Flag games, and they were mad as hell. But Malcolm doubted any of their plans were ever as vindictive as the gossipers were describing.
It was hardly a secret either that several campers were going to fake still being sick from the battle two days ago. Either they wanted respite from cabin inspection duty, or they sought pity points for their messy rooms. Not very noble, but Malcolm was actually thankful—because today, even if he’d get no help in carrying out the most soul-sucking of camp duties, it was possible he wouldn’t be tortured with as much small talk.
Rumor also had it that Bae was taken off the market by a mystery woman—and by now, Malcolm really couldn’t care.
But what he also heard through the grapevine was that Drew had finally cooled off her lobbying efforts ever since she had kissed a son of Eris. She was apparently so happy now, that for the first time ever, Yokubō was having a sale… of up to 5% off. Hearing the news brought Malcolm a little relief and no small amount of befuddlement. He didn’t even know why he was surprised that he got surprised at all. Every time he thought he’d figured Drew out, something more bizarre was bound to pop up.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Apparently, Adila was ill from Saturday’s surströmming, which delayed the city finance meeting by four hours—or longer if she kept throwing up. That just meant she and Malcolm would be even more pressed this week building up a bigger funding buffer after that waste incident. Chiron had just told them today that lending was drying up as more and more gods were taking summer vacations.
Forced to switch up his afternoon plans, Malcolm headed to the cabins straight after lunch. He had gratefully recovered from his own sickness, but felt no less jittery than before. After all, he had his own scandalous secret that was still laying there for anyone to see later, so long as whoever was inspecting Cabin Six picked up that book on his shelf. But no one, he reminded himself, was going to snoop through some standard, five-year-old text on behavioral economics. No one.
Now, if other campers could have hidden their stuff just as well, that would have been fantastic. Over the years, he’d incidentally found too many unmentionables during his past inspections: opened condom wrappers left on bedside tables, bullet vibrators not-so-hidden in blankets, some spicy-looking novels he might have spotted at a Target… He hoped upon hope that he wouldn’t have to deal with those again.
But after counting to three, following two rounds of unanswered knocks at the door of the Eucleia cabin, he was greeted by one most unwelcome sight. In a two-seater couch in a far corner of the room, three bodies were smushed together in a single pile of limbs—thankfully all clothed enough.
Malcolm’s clipboard immediately flew up to cover his face—or them.
“I knocked!” he yelled, as Angelique, the sole child of Eucleia, exclaimed, “The rules say no two people alone!”
She’d been sitting on the laps of two dudes, whom Malcolm identified as Rohan and Elias, sons of Hecate and Aphrodite. All three were teaching assistants in Chiara’s coding boot camp, Malcolm realized. Interesting. Did she know?
“Oh my gods, babe,” said Rohan.
“I’m gonna step out for a sec,” Malcolm said, reaching for the door handle.
“No!” Angelique ordered. “We’re not breaking any rules! There’s no need! No rules were broken!”
“Ange, I think we’re past that. We don’t have pants on,” Elias whispered loudly, with a laugh in his voice.
From the sound of it, they were hastily reclothing themselves. Thank the gods, because Malcolm was stuck. If he opened the door, everyone outside looking this way could’ve seen those three.
Middle of the frickin’ day, he thought. In direct view of an opened door. Holy Zeus.
“But there’s nothing in the rules about that!” Angelique squeaked.
To mute a laugh, Malcolm literally had to bite his cheeks.
“And it’s not like we’re naked,” Angelique said. “People see way more in the showers, come on.”
“I didn’t see anything, and Chiron’s not gonna find out,” Malcolm said, still struggling to force a calmness as he stared at the door. “I just have a meeting later, so I had to start inspections early. My mistake. And you’re right. You didn’t break any rules.” (Chiron, of course, was too much of a nice nelly to even utter or write out the loopholes.) Gods damn, his cheeks were hurting.
“Angelique!” Elias said teasingly. “Did you add one of us just to not break the rules?”
“No!”
“No, no, babe,” Rohan said, “that’s why Jelly’s here. Because we needed a third, so we wouldn’t break Chiron’s prudish rules.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Elias.
“Hey, you two are in my cabin,” Angelique said.
“Yeah,” said Elias, “because the rules say no two people.”
“And we needed a free cabin,” Rohan added, “and you’re the only resident here.”
The guys laughed as she groaned at them.
“Okay!” Malcolm interrupted, still facing the door. “So, can I…?” He twirled his finger around.
Angelique let him. “And the other counselor?” she said. “Where would they be? There’s supposed to be two checking, right?”
Rohan snorted. “Did you want someone else to catch us?”
“I was just curious!” she said.
“Gotta know for later, right, honey?” said Elias.
“Shut up, you little shits.”
Malcolm did them a favor and ignored all that as he began surveying the cabin. “It was meant to be Isadora. Aglaea counselor,” he said. “She’s at the Yokubō sale.”
“Oh, is that today?” Angelique said, flying off the couch. “Shit, we should go!”
“Maybe later?” said Rohan. “I think we have plans.”
“I second that,” said Elias.
“Bruh! He’s still here,” hissed Angelique.
Malcolm moved on to the bathroom. “I didn’t hear anything.” He walked around as quickly as he could and jotted his feedback as quickly as he could. “I’ll be out of your hair,” he said. “Chiron just asked for more detail from everyone, so...”
Malcolm did get it—especially after the Ares and Nemesis counselors had screwed over the Hermes cabin with a bad mark over a prank. But inspections had never felt so intrusive. And so needless, seeing as everything here was spotless and topped off with the smell of lavender. (How anyone could get it on in a room smelling like grandma, Malcolm didn’t know.)
As Malcolm’s pen scratched on the page, marking the perfection that was the bedroom area—which, he figured, was perhaps why they hadn’t used this part of the cabin, unless it was another rule-thing Angelique didn’t want to break—he heard the creaks of the floor creeping closer and closer.
“Really excited about the automatic filing and automatic benefits, by the way,” Angelique said. “I think that’s awesome.”
A grin broke out of Malcolm’s face as he looked up from his inspection sheet mid-word to glance at her leaning on a bedpost. Rohan and Elias were still on the couch, noticeably farther apart but clearly unable to stop eyeing each other.
“I am so happy you know about that,” he said, turning all his attention to Angelique.
She shrugged as she tugged at the ends of her hair. “I do taxes for my dad and step-mom. They kinda don’t care.”
Malcolm’s smile wiped off his face in an instant. “If ever you don’t want to, we have people who can help with that,” he said.
“It’s only for residents’ filings,” Angelique said.
Malcolm took a moment to think. “I think we could work around that. You’re still a dependent, right?” He assumed so, anyway. TAs at camp tended to be sixteen or seventeen.
“This is the last year, but yeah,” she said.
“Okay, hold on.” Malcolm pulled out his phone and sent Angelique Alvin’s contact.
“I’ll tell ‘em you sent me?” she said.
Malcolm smiled. “No, he’s a good guy. He’s the one leading the program, so if there’s anything you want to see, he’s the guy to tell. Tell him anything. Tell him something. I think he’d like that. I don’t know what they can do beyond this year, though.”
“It’s okay. I don’t really care,” Angelique said, still playing with her hair. “I just needed to know how much was supposed to be spent on me.”
Oh Hades.
It would’ve been too awkward to walk towards her, so Malcolm did his best to lower his voice. “There’s plenty of other services, too,” he said.
“Oh, yeah, we’ve combed through the site and made lists of things, so I’m pretty familiar,” Angelique said. “Thanks.”
We?
Did it say something about him that he was more floored by that than her shitty situation?
As Malcolm evaluated the implications of that yes, Angelique freaked silently in joy, galloping towards the grinning guys, who reached for her hands and whispered exclamations to her, as though Malcolm couldn’t hear them.
How could these three teenage dorks all have sorted shit out so simply?
It was not something to consider this second, and fortunately, for all their sakes, it took less than a minute for Malcolm to survey the rest of the cabin.
“Perfect marks,” he said to Angelique before bowing his way through the door. “As you were.”
A loud snort sounded when he left, followed by Angelique’s wail. “Oh my gods, I’m gonna die.”
“Oh, just you wait, beautiful,” said Elias.
Malcolm scrammed.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The next inspection was going to take a lot longer. Malcolm just knew it.
The Dionysus cabin was littered with rainbow post-its of scrawled beer recipes. An entire wall noted costs and contribution margins, ratings and difficulty level, IBUs and ABVs. On a table, three books were opened to pages on target gravity, with stacks of notes beside them half cleaned up by the man himself, Pollux, who looked like he’d just emerged from a post-workout shower.
He hadn’t even noticed Malcolm yet, who hung by the open door, still waiting for permission to enter. Instead, Pollux had his violet eyes focused on the dozens of post-its he was reorganizing—in a way Malcolm realized was more to clean up his mind than to clean up the cabin.
Malcolm still felt the tiny sting of the loss. Was this jealousy?
“Is today the day?” he called out.
Once Pollux had swiveled around, he shook his head as he laughed, sending more droplets dripping down his blond hair to his crop top. “You’re still trying?” he said. “Way to go, making a guy feel wanted. No. I’m not gonna miss my shot at winning all that market share. Come on. Somebody has to set high standards for the microbreweries in our city, man!” He chuckled again. “Look, if it fails and I’m clawing for any pension, I’ll come running.”
“That’s the spirit!” Malcolm said, starting his checks with the Cabin Twelve bedroom, probably the tidiest area here. “How’s Gemini coming along though?” he added, glancing at Pollux.
The widest grin spread across Pollux’s face. “Oh, man, it’s been sick! We might open up earlier than planned actually. I guess it helps when your dad lives here,” he said cheekily.
As Malcolm went around with his inspections, Pollux told him more about his beer company. He even stopped cleaning up right now—which was really such a waste of opportunity because Malcolm was actually trying to be lenient.
While Malcolm kept noting the little infractions, Pollux was still busy talking about his favorite new recipes, with the most nutty malt extracts or the most woodsy hops.
“Not to suck my own dick,” he said, “but I think our stout’s the best beer I’ve ever tasted.”
When Malcolm moved onto the cabin’s study area, Pollux tagged along and told him he’d just finalized his first nitros and other specials but was still trying to perfect vegan beers of all kinds. Apparently, it wasn’t so easy to find good alternatives to fish glue and gelatin.
“You’re gonna tell me if it’s not good, right?” Pollux said. “Like, if it looks ugly, you’ll tell me, right?”
“Oh, I think you’d know better than me,” Malcolm said. “So, just so you know, I’m gonna have to give the cabin a B-minus.”
True enough, Pollux didn’t care. And now he was talking about decor and how he and Annabeth had decided on neon lights and plants instead of the typical industrial look that plagued many a bar.
“I can’t wait to see it. I’m sure it’ll be awesome,” Malcolm said, taking backwards steps to the cabin door as casually as he could.
“Oh, hey, you should come check it out!” Pollux said. “I’ll round up the guys. I’m giving tours soon.” He spread his arms. “Free flights! You don’t have to drink a whole flight, but you can still do the tasting.”
Malcolm thanked him. “I will if my assistant lets me,” he said.
Truthfully, Hubert let him do anything. And truthfully, Malcolm also knew he couldn’t bail on everything.
“I’ll make him let me,” Malcolm amended.
Pollux got to giving a run-down of that tour he was planning, only stopping after Malcolm slowly managed to step out to the grass, nodding and nodding.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Going from the most solitary cabins to the most chaotic one of all always induced a mind-imploding, ear-exploding whiplash.
The Hermes cabin was definitely neater than in past years, but no one ever seemed to get that the cabin would’ve looked a lot less messy if half the people just weren’t present during inspections.
Malcolm tried not to disturb the residents as he made a round.
While Connor was talking to a couple young demigods who wanted to go on quests, and Ishaan was recounting how he’d lost an eye during the Titan War, Travis was telling some other kids not to worry and that they would be claimed soon, thanks to Percy. He also told them how much worse it had been back then because no one had wanted to date unclaimed demigods for fear of incest.
It was impossible for Malcolm not to feel pinpricks of guilt recording the disarray here. Hermes was always going to be stuck with the unadjusted folks, who were also bound to cause at least half the mess in the cabin. Who could blame those kids for not knowing where to put their things or if they should have unpacked at all?
Elsewhere on the bottom floor, two twenty-somethings named Nadine and Raphael were lounging on bean bags with their youngest siblings, instructing them how to respond if some camper or some mortal started picking a fight. It comforted Malcolm to hear it. Newbie campers used to get fucking terrible advice from their past leaders, who had been nothing more than dumb teens—which left him to wonder what stupid shit he had told his siblings in the past.
The bedroom upstairs did look a lot cleaner. There were only six people using the space right now.
Tucked away in the corner, a teenager named Katherine was lying down on a half-made bed, writing on one of the scraps of paper that surrounded her. On the floor at the foot of her bed, a son of Apollo was picking the strings of his guitar as he melodically read out her words.
On another bed, siblings Alice Miyazawa, Julia Feingold, and Chris Rodriguez were crowding around an Iris message to their honorary sister named Simone, an Oizys kid. Last Malcolm had heard, Chris and Travis had rushed her to Mount Sinai again about half a year ago after Chris had found her in her NYU dorm. That reminded him. He needed to ask Grover if the satyrs needed more resources to find the demigods they still hadn’t heard from.
Last, Malcolm spotted Bae in the back of the cabin depositing clothes, folders, and electronics into a couple boxes and a duffel bag. It felt too private to see him like this—fidgety in a way he barely was at work, reaching for his phone every so often from his bunk. Malcolm didn’t count this mess. He had to admit the sight had him longing to check out of the chaos of camp, like, yesterday. But surely another three months was manageable. There was another thought that hit him as well: He now had new intel people would’ve been dying for.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm’s legs grew laden as he approached the Eleos cabin. He was actually consoled to see it messier today. The last time he’d been here—must’ve been four years ago—the cabin had looked like it hadn’t even been broken into. And still today, only three beds were used.
A heaviness began to cloak him—at first a gradual, familiar touch, and then a sudden, suffocating mass. As the stinging ache seeped in, Malcolm took in the objects before his eyes, matching his breaths to the count of four.
A pungent waft of wood and citrus emanated from a wooden, onion-shaped device on a nearby table. Vapor kept puffing out of the spout of the diffuser as he counted over and over. And although the smell of orange blossom (what he read off a bottle label anyway) was actually a helpful enough pick-me-up, Malcolm willingly held onto the ache. It was what was right.
With that acceptance, he turned to the sound of nonstop clicks that were starting to bug the hell out of his poor ears.
Only one resident was present right now, and just Malcolm’s luck, it had to be Jeffrey Zhu, Cabin Thirty-Two’s oldest resident.
Malcolm swallowed a lump and half his remorse. “Hi.”
Jeffrey glanced at him for the briefest second from his video game. “Hi.”
The mouse-clicking continued.
Malcolm got to inspecting, rounding up on every mark, most times by half, sometimes by one. Once he made his way back to the living room, the clicks stopped and Jeffrey took a loud breath.
“Getting somewhere with those essays?” Malcolm said with a look at the teen.
Jeffrey sank into his gaming chair. “I’m just…” He stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I don’t even know why I should go. Outside is like…”
“Being in limbo sometimes,” Malcolm said.
Jeffrey looked at him, consternation in his brows. “No, it’s more like… being repelled from it. All the time,” he said. “I mean, we can’t even say anything about our own lives. I don’t know what to say. ‘Look at my straight As’? ‘I play piano well’? ‘I helped win a decathlon’? ‘I teach kids chess’? ‘I graduated early’? They don’t care.” Sighing again, he sat up straight and started to swivel in his chair. “Whatever. I already removed some of that stuff. It’s just boring.”
Malcolm opened his mouth—but Jeffrey beat him to it.
“And everything interesting,” Jeffrey said, “is something I can’t talk about. I can’t say I’ve fought a handful of monsters in my life. And I don’t even have ADHD or dyslexia, so I have nothing they’re into. Unless, you know, I invent something or start something or whatever in the next five months before this is due.”
Malcolm reined in his protest. Jeffrey was smart enough to know it all. So Malcolm joined him in a sigh.
He dug at the problem anyway. How much was Jeffrey getting in his own way? Did a part of him really believe he was fucking boring? Did it matter in this case whether he internalized it or not?
“Did… you sneak it in somehow?” Jeffrey said, finally glancing at Malcolm again. “You can sit by the way.”
Malcolm gingerly took a seat by the table across the room. “I didn’t mention any of it,” he said. “No, I was lucky enough that something… formative, shall we say, had already happened in the mortal world.”
“Oh.”
“They didn’t have to know it was godly-related when it was only half the story,” Malcolm said with a grimace. “Although, honestly, I wouldn’t know how to. You know. Talk about this.”
Everyone was so clueless. The world had been in jeopardy. Multiple times. And everyone else was just so dumb.
Jeffrey eyed him with suspicion. “A child of Athena couldn’t figure it out? Wow. And you did stuff.” The chair stopped swiveling, and his voice softened as he began to mumble. “I mean, I didn’t even do anything, so… Y’know, to me… things just happened.”
“Being there is also… something, y’know,” Malcolm told him.
Use actual words, gods damn.
But he couldn’t. And at this point, Jeffrey wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear to look back.
“I wasn’t even here,” Jeffrey said after an audible breath. “I was at home.”
“But you knew,” Malcolm said. “That’s what I’m saying. And your sister was on the front lines.” He was nearly whispering at this point. Or did everything just feel quieter because his mind had erupted in a cacophony of regret and blame and self-loathing?
“That still doesn’t solve my problem,” said Jeffrey. “I don’t want to lie about what happened to Xiulan. I hate it whenever my dad says she had some rare heart disease. It sounds like no one was at fault.”
Malcolm’s eyes bore into that chip on the table. His chest was splitting, torn so viciously and permanently. Something was gripping his airways. Through the invisible flames and silent screams, he had to remember to breathe.
1. 2. 3. 4.
1. 2. 3. 4.
1. 2—
“Sorry,” said Jeffrey. “That must bring up stuff. I don’t have to—”
“No, it’s— She was your sister. You can always…” Malcolm was choking again as he faced Jeffrey. “Again, I am truly so sorry. I really am—”
“Dude, no. Just—” Jeffrey looked almost pissed. “I know none of you should’ve been there,” he said, only looking away when Malcolm couldn’t take it anymore. “Everyone was a kid. I mean, you were only three years older than her. And, what, two years younger than I am now? And I still feel like a kid. That’s crazy. That’s beyond insane. To have to…”
Malcolm let out the smallest laugh. “It took a long time for me to realize that,” he said.
But that didn’t mean he deserved this leeway. Why had he even agreed? Had he no shame? No manners? No morals? No—
“It’s always been so weird,” Jeffrey said, “that people who were there find it so hard to realize. Whenever I talk to others about it, too, it’s like, how do you not know? Really. How do you not know? ‘Cause I thought, you know, being there… that should make it the most obvious it can possibly get, right? But I think it’s just more obvious to me as someone… removed from it. Does that make sense? Because you and Xiulan and everyone did, and I didn’t. Because you did, I didn’t have to. I know that. So whatever happened… It wasn’t supposed to happen anyway.”
Malcolm didn’t know what to say. He tried to latch onto anything. A way to hold on. He found nothing and kept plummeting.
“I just…” Jeffrey ran a hand through his hair. He looked around, as if his answers were sprinkled around the cabin. “I’ve wanted to… I feel like I should say ‘thank you’,” he said, finally setting his eyes on Malcolm again.
No. No, damn him, he had no idea. How could he—? No.
Lumps were forming in Malcolm’s eyes, but he called upon every shred of his willpower to look straight back at Jeffrey anyway. Because that was the polite thing to do.
“But… it doesn’t seem right,” Jeffrey said. “I feel like that normalizes it or makes it sound like it was okay when it’s not.”
Malcolm told himself—forced himself—to actually listen to Jeffrey. And Annabeth. And his therapists. And his own voice of reason. He already knew this, so he could stay in this moment. He wasn’t falling. He was steady, and he was here.
“That…” Malcolm began. “Um. That sounds a lot better than ‘thank you’. So, thank you.”
The tears in his eyes were beginning to overflow, and he breathed as silently as he could, looking at Jeffrey but only seeing that empty bed in the corner of his eye. Taking in the cabin Xiulan never got to see. Even after all that charity, even after accepting what he knew was such simple logic, part of him still wanted to say he was sorry and yet demanded never to be forgiven.
Fortunately, he did know better. And fortunately, Jeffrey’s words were a ladder up the pit.
“Okay, so. There’s a theme here,” Malcolm said. He might have sniffled. “Not like you have to define yourself by tragedy, but— So, um, you could project your thoughts about demigod child soldiers and the failings of the gods onto a parallel mortal issue that you care about. You wanna do stats, right?”
“Yeah?”
“So, um.” Malcolm swallowed. He couldn’t be bothered to wipe his face. He let himself ramble. “Maybe like… something probably understudied affecting youths that people with power don’t care to do much about. Maybe it’s a specific climate issue. Or a health one. Maybe guns? Maybe… I hear there’re kids whose neurological health is being damaged by methylmercury. You could pick one or two and have those be your proxies to talk about your actual life and what you wanna do and what inspires you or bothers you. That’s probably easier than creating a new, fake personality. Bonus points if you can use statistical concepts. Or if there’s something a lot less dramatic that inspired you, you could use that, even if it wasn’t the most important thing to you. Or maybe it’s a big question you have. Maybe about connecting statistics to stuff on the ground and figuring that out. I’ve heard you ask Bae about that. You could write a story around that.”
Jeffrey’s eyes were bulging. “Wow. That was good.”
Malcolm didn’t think it really was, but he accepted it for Jeffrey’s sake.
“I think it might help if you remove yourself from it a bit,” he said, managing a smile as Jeffrey scrambled for his laptop. “You and Xiulan liked riddles and puzzles, right?”
“Yeah.” Jeffrey actually smiled.
Oh gods, it hurt.
“So, if… James… needs to describe something to get somewhere,” Malcolm said, “but he can’t say it exactly and he doesn’t wanna lie, what is it he should say? And maybe for another essay, you could use the godly stuff, the real stuff, and make it sound like a metaphor. Okay, I don’t know. It sounds pretentious. But actually— Yeah, I bet they could dig that. They like Western classics, don’t they? You know all that stuff.”
Jeffrey looked amazed. “That actually sounds easier. A little. Maybe a lot, actually.”
He joined Malcolm’s table, and for the next fifteen minutes, clicked and clacked away almost without pause as they worked on some personal statements and other essay responses together.
Jeffrey looked so different from her, Malcolm thought, but Malcolm could see her in the same way their brows would furrow when they put their minds to something.
A new wave of grief struck Malcolm all over again. How cruel that Xiulan wasn’t here to have helped her brother instead. Or to have been the one seeking help with college applications. She hadn’t even graduated high school. She hadn’t even gotten to high school. There were no framed photos glaring at Malcolm as he sat in this very cabin. Perhaps non-existence was torturous enough. And still, he had the gall to chat with her brother about his dream schools like everything was cool.
Malcolm cast away all those haunting whispers and focused his attention on Jeffrey.
“Okay. I mean, I’ll write all the essays and apply anyway,” Jeffrey told him when he finally stopped typing. “But maybe I could actually just work here for a while. My dad’s already pissed I didn’t apply for this year, but… honestly, I just don’t like being out there. I’ve tried convincing myself I’ve been making such a big deal out of it, but… I really don’t like it. And I wanna see the development here. So maybe I could defer and, in the meantime, find a job at Yokubō or something and see all the stuff happen. It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, you know. School’s gonna be there anytime.”
Once in a lifetime… It was strange to think. He was the reason behind that.
“Yokubō?” Malcolm said, really trying not to judge.
Jeffrey looked sheepish. “She pays well and, unlike Vio Life and some others, doesn’t require a degree to work there. I mean, it’s an asset, but you’re not completely disqualified if you don’t have one. There’s even some education money.”
“You have options,” Malcolm reminded him. “You’ll do great at whatever. But if you need help—with anything, okay?—let me know.”
Jeffrey expressed his gratitude with a smile too bright for Malcolm to deserve.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm’s inspection list mentioned Aphrodite first, but he headed to the Hephaestus cabin instead. By now, only the corners of his eyes were itchy.
Nyssa Barrera was out front, rushing in his way to the vault door entrance. Left and right, she mirrored his steps, and held up her index finger.
“Half,” Malcolm conceded. “I’m already behind.”
After a full minute and then some, during which he inquired about her latest builds (a foot massager and a portable desalinator), she finally moved aside.
“See?” she said innocently as she gestured him in. “It’s all clean!”
Malcolm huffed as he smiled.
A robot vacuum was still running when he walked in. Aside from that, however, the Hephaestus kids had managed to tidy up pretty much everything. All the beds were retracted into the basement, all the toolboxes and junk parts sat nicely on various shelves, and all their beverages had been stashed away. Oddly missing from behind the doors was a metal container double Malcolm’s size that no outsider could open—and that Malcolm always pretended not to know about.
Looked like he’d have an easy time inspecting Cabin Nine. Thank Hephaestus.
All the better, the five tons on his chest all but vanished when Leo looked towards him with his signature elfish spark. So stupidly unknowing how much Malcolm needed it, Leo threw his arm around him—and turned them both 60 degrees until they faced the staircase.
On the bottom steps of the staircase, two of Leo’s siblings were tweaking their sister Camille’s prosthetic. The younger of the two stood to attention at once, shuffling toward Leo and Malcolm as he wiped his hands on his shorts.
“This little guy has a complaint,” said Leo. He gestured to the fifteen-year-old-looking kid who was already an inch taller than him and who was now hissing, “Leo!”
“You tell him, Aminah,” Leo said.
“I told you,” said the kid. “That’s my mom’s name.”
Leo looked at his brother and gave a pointed glance at Malcolm.
The kid shrank. “Hi.” He gave the most awkward wave—like a rainbow. “I’m, um.” He swallowed. “I’m Harmon bin Aminah. Or Harmon Aminah. Or just Harmon. Like I said, Aminah’s my mom’s name.” A lot of blinking followed. “Uh, it’s just… I mean, I know it’s—” His knees were literally weakening and Malcolm tried not to direct his attention to that. “It’s already better than others out there, but I was thinking, you know, that, um, the city’s website can still be more modernized and, you know, more inviting. Yeah.” At this point, he was rocking on the balls of his feet, leaning like a long flower blown by a gust of wind.
“And?” Leo pressed.
“And I have some ideas.” Harmon’s posture was slowly curving into itself, until Nyssa gently shoved a folder into his chest.
Malcolm wasn’t like Leo. Malcolm had mercy.
“Is that your portfolio?” he asked Harmon. “May I see?”
When Harmon showed him his work, Malcolm nodded very obviously and approvingly. It wasn’t hard to do. The kid was gonna go places.
“So, you’re a designer?” Malcolm said.
“And developer!” Harmon said excitedly. “I know there aren’t any postings about this, and it’s already August, and I’m still in school, but if New Athens can accept any internships…?” His pitch raised with each word.
“I’ll ask Vanessa Lawson from our comms unit to reach out to you. Thank you,” Malcolm said.
Use people’s names, came his pop’s voice.
“Thanks, Harmon.”
“Oh my gods, really?” Harmon said in a fraction of a breath. A barrage of thank yous followed immediately.
Finally, the weight of Leo’s body left Malcolm’s side. Leo had that smile on his face—the one he wore whenever Alicia showed him something she’d made.
“Sorry it took longer,” Leo said. “We actually cleaned out that box this time.”
A loud sigh and a satisfying click sounded in front of them, where Camille locked her arm in place—all the while shooting daggers at Leo. “Dude! Cabin secret! Why would you tell him about the box?”
“I didn’t!” Leo said. “He knows about the box.”
“I know about the box,” Malcolm admitted. Did truly no one else know? Did that make him—? Anyway… “So it’s looking like this A”—he gestured around him—“could be an A-plus. Congrats.”
“The things you do for me,” Leo said, throwing him a wink.
Malcolm laughed. “You know it.”
Once he made his official round, with Leo following along every second to recap Alicia’s origami progress, Malcolm exited the cabin.
“See? It wasn’t that hard, was it?” he heard Leo say, with a gentleness Malcolm had never heard from him. He had a feeling he would’ve been upset about it sometime. But now, it barely even fazed him.
“He seems a lot chiller up close,” Harmon said.
Holding in his laugh, Malcolm headed to his final stop.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Outside Cabin Ten, a posse of Aphrodite kids had gathered together to head to Drew’s sale, chatting among themselves about whether Bae was actually seeing a girl and who she could be. Their older sister Rosalyn, however, stayed back to sit under a tree with Shannon, a daughter of Astraea.
How those two had become so close, Malcolm couldn’t imagine. Shannon had to be the most sex-negative of campers—far more puritanical than Camp Half-Blood’s oft abashed mentors Chiron and Coach Hedge. And Rosalyn was the daughter of the sex goddess. The two women even looked like total opposites. (Rosalyn was tall; Shannon was short. Rosalyn was built; Shannon was scrawny. Rosalyn had short, dark curls; Shannon had long, blonde hair. Rosalyn mostly wore bright colors; Shannon only ever wore white.) Yet they hung around each other every single day: during training, at Annabeth’s birthday, and even over every meal in the dining pavilion, where they often lamented over the grossest goss they had heard on other campers.
Perhaps that was it.
This time, it seemed they had something to say about Chiara and Will. Malcolm kept his head down and zeroed in on their voices.
“I just don’t know if I’m part of that crowd,” Rosalyn said.
“You deserve to be there,” Shannon said. “You should actually lead them. Seriously.”
Rosalyn scoffed a laugh. “That’s sweet of you. I just don’t know if I know enough of the lingo and stuff. Not like you do.”
“I’m more part of the problem, though. I really can’t,” Shannon said. “Plus, there’s already way too many people there who look like me.”
“Well, you’re not wrong there,” Rosalyn said. “Mm. I still don’t know, girl. I mean— Malcolm!”
He nearly jumped. His heart sure felt like it did. Was it that obvious he’d been eavesdropping? Did it even count as eavesdropping if they were all out in public within a ten-foot radius?
“I have nothing to do with this,” Rosalyn said, apparently too annoyed to use her newly adopted voice as she pointed to the cabin. “None of us had anything to do with this, you hear?”
Before Malcolm could even utter a sound, Rosalyn was already returning to her convo with Shannon. He trudged on.
Outside the doorway, he greeted Claire’s friend Mariana Aguilar, who was so intently thumbing a text with an uncontainable smile that she didn’t so much as look at him when he asked if he could come in. Even when she waved him in, she was still silently giggling at her screen.
Despite the extra time the Aphrodite kids had had, or perhaps because of it, their cabin resembled a shipwreck more than any other time Malcolm had seen. The state of it was usually pretty bad, but this was… This was something else.
The paint bomb that Claire had mentioned had been misplaced? Well, he found it all right—on every square foot of the cabin. The entire rainbow had thrown up on every wall, every bookshelf and makeup cabinet, every table and chair, every single bed.
Underneath the paint, books and magazines were thrown about. Trophies and medals were misaligned in their case. A plant had been tipped over. Cushions were everywhere on the floor. A pillow had exploded.
After a young kid greeted him with a wince, and mouthed an apology before strutting out, Malcolm’s mouth was still agape.
The door shut behind him.
And out from the shadows emerged Drew, wearing nearly as much paint as the cabin.
Malcolm sighed—an oscillation among exasperation, amusement, and wariness in a single, long breath. “Is this an ambush?”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Drew didn’t look the least bit sorry. She just got back to diligently wiping off a blue splatter on the wall with her pink rubber-gloved hands.
“I swear to the gods,” she said, “when these camps don’t mindlessly forgive traitors who get our family and friends killed, they keep electing leaders who have no experience or otherwise no idea what in Hades they’re doing.”
Malcolm’s head was clear enough now to know he didn’t deserve to be grouped with everyone on both their lists. His offense got him immediately itching to dock points off the cabin’s score. But damn, he already felt too lazy.
With a deep breath, he ignored his own complaints and forced himself to wade through the lethal combo of paint, perfume, and hairspray to start filling out the cabin checklist.
Paint splatters on every surface of the cabin. Scraps of paper and tissues littering the floor.
“You know, I’ll have to log this interaction anyway,” he said.
“Which is exactly what you do with the others, huh?” Drew said.
Malcolm kept making his round, not bothering to respond.
Magazines scattered in at least a dozen places. Clothes not folded, in heaps on ~5 chairs, 2 sofas, 1 bed—
It was only one bed. All fifteen others were more or less perfect. Why should fifteen others have to collectively suffer—
“You know,” Drew said. She had stopped scrubbing and strode beside him right now—but Malcolm refused to let her intimidate him. “When I got back to camp, I couldn’t believe you became head counselor again.”
Malcolm ignored that and continued with his listing.
Pens, markers, sketches all over desks.
“I mean, who the fuck wants to do cabin inspections?” Drew goaded.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “No one wanted to do it.”
“Mm, yeah.” Despite there being no one else present, Drew stepped even closer to him—her designer overalls were practically brushing his arm at this point—and dropped her voice to a near whisper. “But it has… other benefits, doesn’t it?”
They were totally, completely, entirely alone, Malcolm realized again, and part of him was eager—was begging—for answers. In all of two months, no one had ever suggested this before. (Of course, it had to be Drew who was on his wavelength. Gods.) And now the answers he was dying for were dangled right before him. Surely he could be forgiven for bending a knee to curiosity? (Damn. And now he knew exactly that no one could trust him with Pandora’s pithos. How disturbing.)
“You could’ve taken one meeting,” said Drew the instant Malcolm put down his cabin checklist clipboard.
“And Marcella’s been taking them when she can, since I’ve been busy. Isn’t she lovely?” he replied.
“Marcella,” Drew said, coming round to face him, “is, at this point, wearing colored plastic bags. Talking to her’s a lost cause if she doesn’t bother to show respect. At least you put in effort.” She gestured to his outfit of the day and peered intently at his attire.
It was always so uncomfortable. This excruciating experience of having a laser pointed at him from feet to legs to hips to chest. Drew lingered there and then at his arms, then down again, then finally to his face. It was how she evaluated everyone. She always looked too long, picking apart their ‘fits until they felt judged. Like when she would put on a disgusted face at Leo’s cargos. This evaluation merely brought out the same annoyance. But wait. What?
Having already forgotten his selection for today, Malcolm looked down at his basic black henley and dark jeans. “You call this ‘effort’?”
“They’re decent enough pieces. Decent brands, too,” Drew said. “And they’re obviously tailored to fit your body. Those aren’t standard sizes.” She said it like it was evident. Then she waved a finger at his collarbone. “The shoulders are too wide and the sleeves are too big for a standard shirt that length. It’s the right length, but not, like, two sizes too small like all those other gym bros here wear. And you didn’t even roll up your pant legs, yet your thighs are a size up from a pant size that length.”
Why was she looking at his thighs?
“It’s always the same. Except some of your sweats,” she concluded with a scrunch of her nose. “They tend to be a little long, so they kinda wear you.”
In Malcolm’s extensive, stunned silence, Drew cocked her head, giving him a sly smile. “Was no one supposed to know?”
“I really just have to wear stuff that won’t embarrass my family” was his excuse. “That’s, like, all I have.” All he was supposed to have.
Drew looked him up and down again. “I mean, it’s still boring as hell, to be honest, but it fits your persona, so it makes sense,” she said as she nodded.
Malcolm blinked. “My boring persona.” He was so shocked, he could actually put aside his affront to revel in this absurdity.
“Your branding,” Drew said with a tone of obviousness, her head bobbing again.
Just like that, Malcolm’s world had flipped. Like it had been in his family’s Secret Santa mind games when he was lied to by the person he trusted most to be on his side. He wondered if he even knew himself. But he could contemplate that later.
“Okay, anyway. I still gotta…” Malcolm vaguely gestured around him with his pen.
“So, look,” Drew cut in. “None of you understand the industry, which is why you’re siding—”
“It isn’t for Percy,” Malcolm said. He was so annoyed, he was already turning away and picking up his clipboard to start noting smaller things he could’ve excused: hair pins, hair ties, hair curlers, hair rollers, hair gel—
“I get that, okay,” Drew said, getting in his way again. “It looks nice for you. But it’s just so dumb to expect no clothes to be produced or sold here—”
“We don’t expect no clothes—”
”—and to just say that it’s adding to the plastic problem. That’s not the right picture, nor the right solution. Not supporting us just means you’re giving an edge to all those unethical multinational giants with fucking awful labor practices—”
“Don’t you also produce clothes in China?” he interrupted.
Drew was silent for a moment as she dared to glare at him. “It’s pretty racist to assume that every Chinese supplier operates like that.”
Shame came over him.
“Okay, you’re right. That’s stupid. I’m sorry,” he said.
Shame washed away from him.
Drew was still glaring. “I do random checks every year on my way to visit family in Tokyo,” she said. “I’ve sworn on the Styx never to use anything but humane and fair trade practices. I didn’t have to, but I did. Because anything else isn’t good enough.”
It wasn’t anger in her eyes, Malcolm realized. It was nothing more than her zeal and drive. And as Drew ranted on about the way she ran her business, he could understand so clearly now why so many people fell for her. But something in Malcolm told him—griped silently—that not everyone did it for the right reasons.
That same something in him was also so disgusted by himself for feeling so drawn to her right now when he didn’t even like her. That was just gross on his part—not just because he didn’t want to be attracted to her. It was gross, he realized, because it wasn’t fair. She wasn’t asking for any sort of fixation from someone like him. He didn’t like her.
Yet, as Drew was raving about wages and benefits and total compensation, something made Malcolm feel he could trust her. Pravir had warned the New Athens Council that his own sister could charmspeak any of them. But Malcolm knew now that she wouldn’t even try to. Never for this at least.
“... and no one else does all of that, but we do. And where does that leave me?” Drew said, her face filled with fury. “Practically punished for trying to do business the ethical way. Surely you get that.”
Malcolm cleared his mind… from any… distractions. “Yeah, but we just can’t subsidize a clothing company that caters to millionaires when we’re not even subsidizing fruits and vegetables,” he said. (Yet anyway. It was hardly a lie.)
“We cater to millionaires,” Drew began. “No, we survive off millionaires—because they subsidize our products for the average consumer. I’m willing to charge less so people around here can finally look nice. And because, unlike me or you, no one wants to buy ethical clothing!” she said. She was squeezing the sponge in her hand so hard, paint began to drip onto her protective shoe coverings and slide onto the floor. “I’m trying to solve that!”
“That… may be true,” Malcolm said. No one had ever briefed him on Drew’s business model. He had never looked it up, or bothered to ask, and now he chastised himself for such a lack of curiosity. “But I don’t think you want to be the company that people hate on because the money you got—or should’ve paid—could’ve been directed to healthy food for the poor. That is, healthy food that’s produced in an ethical manner. So, surely, you get that, too.”
Drew looked away and let out a loud sigh.
Malcolm figured he could throw her a bone. “I get that you’re better than the others,” he said. “If you actually need some capital injection and, I don’t know, for some reason can’t or don’t wanna get a loan, maybe it’s not from the city of New Athens itself.”
Drew merely huffed again, scrubbing furiously at a paint stain on the nearest bedpost.
No?
“You could just reach out to actual investors,” he tried again. “Surely you’ll figure out how to be in the black.”
“I’ve met with, like, a hundred mortals,” said Drew. “And you know what? They did want me, and I could even choose among them. But then they started getting fussy and bitchy, and I had to buy out some of their shares until I had majority again, because I moved our HQ to this city and couldn’t justify to them marketing-wise or even finance-wise that our expenses”—she took a breath—“are considerably higher than the costs of our competitors who are ethical, partly because they don’t care to do enough and partly because we hire veterans and youth at risk for our domestic operations. That’s all nil and unjustified to them.”
“And that’s great that you wanted to do that,” Malcolm said, wary of how Drew was beginning to scrape chips of wood off the bedpost with merely her sponge.
“It’s fucking hard, Malcolm. You know, maybe I could move all these jobs elsewhere.”
His eyebrows shot up for a half-second. “First of all,” he said, “you’re not gonna do that.”
Drew leveled him with a malicious stare. “Watch it make the news that the leader of New Athens disappeared dozens of jobs because he thought a businesswoman was bluffing.”
Malcolm nearly rolled his eyes. “You’re not gonna do that.”
In a rare moment, Drew’s shoulders slumped a bit. “People believe it anyway,” she said. “So let me be the bad guy.”
“I don’t need that, and neither do you,” he scoffed. “Second, we all know that the Olympians alone have, like, a billion or more. At least one of them’s always looking for investment opportunities.”
Drew’s hair flipped as she turned violently towards him. “I’m not asking my mom for money,” she fumed. “And even if I wanted to, you know I wouldn’t ever hear the end of it about how it was never really my work or my team’s.”
And he knew exactly. He knew now she was fucking amazing. He knew she was so mesmerizing. He knew he’d say yes to anything she said. It was the simplest thing in the world, and nothing that had ever been could be as obvious and true.
Malcolm felt the haze linger. And he forgave her for it. He’d already known all of that.
But Drew’s eyes raced to his in panic. In apology. In fear. “I didn’t mean—” she said so quietly, he almost couldn’t hear her.
Malcolm shook his head a smidge as the luscious daze cleared his consciousness, returning all his worries and fears and frustrations home. He felt as though he had finally returned into his shell of a body, back into the control room of his brain. “It really didn’t…” he said in a breath.
Drew retreated a step. Stiff as a board, she zoomed her wide eyes anywhere but at him as she took slower and slower breaths—the tactic he’d seen her use before to rein in her powers.
“To your point, our parents can be really helpful, though,” Malcolm said, with the most casual emphasis on “our”.
Drew just took another deep inhale and sighed it out. “I’m not going to ask her, okay?” she said calmly. “It’s different for you and your situation. Obviously, you can’t pay for this yourself and aren’t even expected to put any of your money in, and you’re also a dude.” And now her tone was picking up again. “I can’t ask my mother when all the credit—”
Malcolm lost 30% of his remaining nonchalance. “Doesn’t have to be your mom.”
Drew scrutinized him for a moment. Her eyes began glazing in thought before they focused again on him. “She’s not gonna wanna…”
“And why not?”
Drew’s stare was nearly as hard as it ever got, but her brown eyes began gradually warming. Beneath her glacial features, she was now looking at him in question—until her lips formed a small smile. It kinda looked… sincere.
“I’m glad I voted for you as city planner, city manager, whatever it was. It’s ridiculous you have so many roles,” she joked. “I can sometimes barely keep up with my two.”
Malcolm returned to the inspection sheet. “Not like there was another option to vote for,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I was indifferent about it before,” Drew said. “Now, I can be glad I did.”
She said it like it was some inside joke they had, and it was funny enough to chuckle at—and Malcolm did, while simultaneously trying to piece together what it was Drew might have been after. Surely, she wouldn’t just think he would actually hand out any sort of favors.
Wait, was that what this appeared like? Was she trying to take advantage of his relation to Athena? Why, oh why, had he even offered the little help he’d given?
But no. He wasn’t offering anything, really, other than an idea. And maybe an implicit referral. Right? He wasn’t giving up city funds.
Malcolm tried not to regret his decision as he sidestepped a puddle of paint.
Oh. He let out another chuckle. “Yeah, I’m still flunking the cabin for tidiness. You’re still gonna have to deal with Chiron and your siblings about the extra chores.”
Drew gave him a lopsided smile. “Yeah, I figured. It was worth it.” After a moment, she asked, “You really think she would want to?”
“I really don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Malcolm said simply. And somehow voicing such a simple truth felt so… so… so wrong, he didn’t even want to go there.
In silence, Drew let him inspect the rest of the cabin. She cleaned quietly, shooting him glances every now and then, and he tried not to feel bad that he was giving a 1 out of 5 mark right before her eyes. At least it was over with.
But as Malcolm headed for the door, Drew blocked his exit.
“There is something else,” she said.
She was so very, very close. Malcolm was fully aware that if anyone were to come in here, they would’ve gotten the wrong idea. But Drew had made sure there wouldn’t be anyone. She’d given them both the most plausible excuse for him to stay this long. And now more than ever, Malcolm actually liked being in her presence. It was intoxicating.
When she took a breath, he could even hear it. “How much do you know about the fashion industry’s supply chain? Specifics?” she said.
Malcolm shook his head and cautiously backed up a few inches. He tried not to focus on the paint smear on Drew’s cheek. Or the silky shine of her raven hair. Or the delicate strands that had fallen from her bun to frame her face.
For a long time, Drew looked in his eyes, and gradually, indecision turned to resoluteness. “We’re actually trying to figure out how to fix another plastic issue. That’s what none of you understand. The clothing materials are only one of the problems. For quality reasons, basically all clothes have to be wrapped in plastic during transport. Then we take them out of their plastic bags to display them in stores. The best we can do is expensive, better plastic. So, if there has to be a tax on the materials, which we still need to use so far for quests and training—which make those clothes necessities—”
You hate both quests and training, he thought. (But, okay, she still made the best gear. And, yeah, okay, they were necessities, so perhaps they deserved some tax exemptions. Perhaps.)
“—it could be offset by research funding for shipping innovation,” she said coyly, before insisting, “Net prototyping and implementation. If the city puts up a prize challenge to solve that shipping issue… have engineers team up with fashion experts… we’ll win it. And someone from Cabin Nine can share the winnings. I could pick the right person.”
Under her unrelenting gaze, Malcolm took out his trusty notebook and scribbled down her suggestion. It wasn’t perfect, but her main idea was sound. He totally ignored the last bit.
“We’ll look into that,” he said. “No promises.” He honestly preferred the idea of wage subsidies. Except… if every employer in New Athens was already hiring veterans and youth at risk, maybe there was no point.
“You know it makes sense,” Drew said, all knowing and... sultry-looking.
Malcolm shoved that aside. That probably hadn’t even been her intent. The curse of Aphrodite’s kids… They could never turn off their hotness. It really didn’t help that Drew’s pride in herself was so obvious in her smile. Why was he so weak for that?
Or was this high just something he was conflating with his own satisfaction of having learned something entirely new?
Yes, he thought. Let it be that.
“You know, I really don’t care who’d win,” Malcolm said.
“But you know who would,” Drew said proudly, “and you know it’d be fair.”
“But it’s not gonna look fair—” Malcolm began. “You could ask anybody to team up with you. I wouldn’t give a shit. That wouldn’t be why I’d agree to this. You do realize how much more suspicious it could look if you win with—” That was as far as he could go. It already felt so wrong to speak this plainly. But Leo would’ve been so out of place. So against Drew’s… branding.
As Drew pondered over his ramble and tried working out her loose ends, Malcolm pocketed his stuff and sighed. “Nyssa’s probably the best materials engineer,” he said. “She’s great at transport stuff, too.”
Drew crossed her arms. “Nyssa Barrera despises me.”
But she was a woman. It just looked more fitting to Yokubō. “Even better,” Malcolm said. “What, you don’t think you can win her over?”
There was an awkward, lengthy silence. And although Malcolm figured she hadn’t needed to be that honest about this whole other problem, he suddenly began to hate this entire idea. Who was to say the city couldn’t hit Drew on both counts? Why should taxpayers have to pay for finding a solution to that other issue, if Drew and whoever could just figure it out on their own? Why did they really need to be compensated to do the right thing? Hell, they could’ve made money off finding these solutions anyway. How wasn’t that enough of an incentive?
“By the way,” Drew said, taking Malcolm out of his silent raging, “black looks good on you. It brings out your eyes.”
It was startling. It was confusing. It was… kinda nice? (She was an expert after all, his mind told him.) And holy fuck, was it mortifying. There was nowhere he could hide right now. He felt so exposed.
But Malcolm let out a chuckle. “My grandma told me that. Which is funny, considering she hates glaukôpis.”
Drew’s brows twitched. “The Gray-Eyed One,” she said.
Malcolm had barely told anyone about that. Why in Hades was he telling flippin’ Drew?
As he collected himself, Drew smiled for a moment, and only a moment. And then Malcolm’s entire world was swallowed by awkwardness again, and he was totally going to get the fuck outta here, except his unease was just going to get more unbearable if he picked now to take off. But, shit, he couldn’t leave anyway. Drew was still blocking the door.
“You know,” she said, “you don’t have to laugh or crack a joke when someone gives you a compliment.”
Okay, he really just should’ve left earlier. Even a window break-out wouldn’t have been as painful as this.
“Unless,” Drew said, “it’s because they made you uncomfortable. In which case, sorry?”
Malcolm had a strong urge to itch at his neck. “You didn’t really.”
I just don’t really care for your opinion on what I wear.
“Then I’m not really sorry,” Drew said.
Malcolm gave a customary laugh.
“Oh,” she said, “and that wasn’t an invitation to come onto me, by the way. Just so we’re clear.”
His eyebrows rose. “I wasn’t going to? And I didn’t think it was that?” he said over Drew’s immediate addition of “I didn’t mean that as an insult”—which made him blubber out the very same sentiment.
It so wasn’t fair that Drew appeared totally composed while he felt like such a mess right now. In fact, she was still talking, oh so unfairly casual and poised.
“I’m just not interested in dating or sex with anyone at this stage of my life,” she said, “and too many fucking weebs have tried turning much less into a hell of a lot more in the past.”
“Oh,” Malcolm managed to reply, putting on what he hoped was an expression of vicarious empathetic annoyance, free from pity and any complaints of TMI.
Never wanted to sleep with you or date you, but okay.
“And that’s not me being coy,” Drew rushed to say. “And it’s not a challenge either,” she added with a light glare.
“That… sounds annoying,” Malcolm said lamely.
His skin was crawling. Gods, get me out of here.
“But in this case…” Drew said. “Well, it’s the first time in a while I can say that, this time, it’s just bad timing.”
Malcolm processed that once. He processed that twice. He processed that thrice. And he still couldn’t figure out what in Athena’s name would make Drew even think—
“And you’re also in my boat, with the work being priority, right?” she said. “Given the gazillion roles and, you know, the persona.”
Yeah, that’s it.
“My boring persona,” Malcolm said.
“It’s a persona,” Drew said playfully. “I know no one’s that bland. I like a good mystery.”
Following yet another glance at his clothes, Drew peered into his eyes, as if she were hunting for deeper secrets.
What if there wasn’t one?
With a final, conclusive “okay,” Malcolm squeezed past Drew and exited the Aphrodite Cabin, wondering what it said about him that once more in the past couple years, he’d attracted a second—maybe a third?—clever asshole.
Second, he corrected himself. He’d never sleep with an asshole.
Drew had given him several things to process during his next run. He truly didn’t know if he could ever figure them all out. But what he did know was that he wouldn’t ever be sharing this incident with Conrad or Claire. Not even Annabeth.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The dining pavilion was even more packed than usual that night. A new intake of demigods had arrived that afternoon, and as usual, Grover and the other satyrs had handed the newbies off to some cabin counselor other than Malcolm to go through orientation. They knew him well.
To head to the fire of food offerings campers burned for the gods, Malcolm went as far away from the Aphrodite table as he could get. He found the perfect excuse, at the Nemesis table, where he could do a little check up on Adila, who finally looked like she could hold down her meals. Was it wildly uncomfortable, not least because he’d just seen her an hour ago and had never bothered to interact with any of the Nemesis kids outside work and training and teaching? Yes. But they seemed flattered he popped by, even if they were a little surprised, and at least he didn’t have to be anywhere near Drew.
Not that Drew would ever hint to anyone about any of what happened, he told himself. Would she?
As Malcolm shuffled in line to burn his dinner, he now refused to make eye-contact with just about anybody. There were prickles of guilt swarming him that he couldn’t make sense of. He knew he’d done nothing wrong.
With that mantra and the smell of smoky lamb and peppers he now associated with being at home, Malcolm eased and found his mind directed to all the little peculiarities he’d discovered today. How laughable was it, that between him and Drew, somehow she was the celibate one right now? What even was this life? And how was it that Harmon, or even Alvin and Vera, or whoever else, could find it so nerve-wracking to approach him? Everything seemed hilarious right now.
And then nothing was, because Rachel was lumbering in line behind him, her typical cheery colors replaced by dark eyebags and a deep-set frown.
Malcolm let three campers cut him in line and fell into step with Rachel. “You okay?” he said.
“Oh, I’m great!” Rachel said, with the widest smile and the most crazed eyes. “I binge-watched the Great Olympian Baking Show until five in the morning! I literally can’t stop!”
That was something Malcolm knew she and Annabeth and Piper watched only together—with Hazel, too, if she was around. And now he realized that the kids around them were eyeing Rachel as if she were about to prophesize imminent mass death.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to catch up on that,” he said as he and Rachel could finally make their offerings. “Did you see that episode when Poseidon was making loukoumades for the Games Week showstopper?”
The flames licked higher as if Athena was happier about that than the dozen olives he’d just burned.
“Oh man,” Rachel snickered, “when Hestia spat it out?! Hestia! I knew the seaweed wouldn’t work.”
“The technical saved him, didn’t it?” Malcolm remembered.
“Oh yeah, Demeter loved his plakous.”
They chatted all the way to the Athena table, and only when they’d sat down did Rachel turn off her crazy eyes.
“I haven’t slept in days,” she whispered, slurring her words together. With a long groan, she rested her fluffy ginger mop on Annabeth’s shoulder.
Annabeth patted her head. “Maybe we can help?” she said.
Rachel sat up and took a reluctant bite of her cassoulet. “It’s gonna sound dumb,” she said, “but I see the alphabet.”
“They spell out anything?” Malcolm asked.
He drowned out as best he could the chatter around him about wedding planning updates and ignored as best he could Percy’s multiple glances at him.
“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “They just keep showing up in order. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Lots of delta. And then there’s this… almost explosion of omicron. And something about… I think toilet paper? Like…” She shrugged, utterly lost as she stared into space, before she reached for some pine nuts on the table. “Oh, also,” she said with a chuckle, “my new therapist just dropped me because she keeps getting freaked out when I tell her stuff. And now she needs to see a therapist.”
“Yikes,” said Conrad.
“Hey, you’ve joined the club,” Percy said, offering her a high-five.
Rachel laughed at last. It didn’t stop her from poking at her dinner. Even after Annabeth cheered her up with churros (Rachel’s ultimate favorite dish), Rachel could only smile so much.
Malcolm had nothing to add to the discussion. He felt almost ashamed he couldn’t be of help. It always sucked to see Rachel overcome by such sadness and dread. Each time served as a sorry, albeit useful, reminder his job was actually pretty easy. And surely, if Rachel could be brave enough to take on all the dooms of the world, he could stand to commit way more than what he was doing now.
Resolutely, Malcolm penciled in some more time over the next week to deal with Clarisse’s confusions on criminal databases and, of course, the whole Yokubō thing. His evenings were pretty free mid-week.
“Heard you met with Drew,” said Percy.
“Wow, word travels fast.” Malcolm tightened his burrito roll, trying again not to feel bad. He’d had every right.
Percy didn’t appear upset, though. “I also heard you told her the tax is still on the table.”
A flicker of guilt burned inside Malcolm. He really needed to get better at that. “You know I can’t talk about these things,” he said.
Percy relented. He looked around the table and then to the offerings area, where Claire was now sacrificing some baklava to Athena. “How are the seating plans going?” he said.
Malcolm also couldn’t talk about some of those things. “Going,” he replied, immediately taking another bite out of his burrito. He and Rhode hadn’t even finalized a full table that other day. But there were drafts of, like, eight. That counted for something.
Percy just nodded.
Beside him, Annabeth trained her piercing steel eyes on Malcolm. “Rhode’s visiting again, by the way,” she said with all the nonchalance she could probably muster. “On Wednesday, right?” She turned to Percy.
“Yeah. She told me Wednesday,” Percy said, proceeding to steal fries off Annabeth’s plate.
Malcolm just responded with an indifferent “hmm” and took a ginormous bite out of his burrito.
He couldn’t wait for Wednesday.
Notes:
💭📕🏃📗🚶
The devil in me ships Malcolm and Drew lol. See, they would’ve been a true Enemies to Lovers ship. 😈
The next chapter will come out whenever. Not going to promise anything this time. (Sorry again for that two-month gap!)
Also, I’ve mentioned open challenges AKA prize competitions a few times in this fic. In case you’re not familiar with them, what I’m referring to are the competitions exactly like those on Challenge.gov and MIT Solve.
Chapter 11: In which Malcolm gets psychoanalyzed
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Amid the problems piling on Malcolm’s desk, Wednesday training felt like a dreamscape, where the only things that mattered this instant were passing on survival skills to hopelessly untrained kids and joining in Annabeth and Clarisse’s half-jokes about Percy’s codependency on his sword, Riptide. It was practically a miracle that Annabeth had finally convinced Percy to pick up her spare knife.
When they weren’t studying the different fighting styles of Bae and his Roman buddies, Malcolm and Clarisse made rounds in the arena, excusing annoyingly deathly mistakes committed by their trainees and correcting only the most glaringly fatal of them.
Irritating as their childish antics were, Malcolm had long ignored the incessant giggles and comic book exclamations of the kids. Them laughing now didn’t mean their new skills wouldn’t kick into action on the battlefield or during a monster attack.
Today, Malcolm was more worked up about how that cupboard and those foldable plastic chairs were such a sorry excuse for a medical station. Or how the cracks in the floor and old ventilation may have simulated real-life fighting conditions but were needless in the first place. It was difficult to accept the sad state of the arena when he’d seen that pipedream concept Andi and Nils had proposed.
With nothing to compare the arena to, the kids could remain so blissfully ignorant. But they were more focused today, too. Perhaps by the end of it, they would have outlasted even Percy, who took only ten minutes to abandon his knife practice before he switched to his sword. But before earning even one close loss, he cut his practice short and scooted off to the sidelines.
Crazily enough, Rhode was there, her florals and flouncy fabrics so visually misplaced against the scratched walls and sweaty grime of the arena.
Malcolm caught her eyes in an instant. Or rather, he had caught hers—because until Percy reached within her foot radius, Rhode had zero misgivings with staring Malcolm straight down. With that one look, Malcolm could almost hear the call of his name, a memory always just around the corner that he had just let haunt his nights. How special her voice made his very name sound… Malcolm. It was like Rhode was right there in an instant, making sounds in his ear and telling him he was being good for her. Murmuring that she loved it.
“Malcolm.”
He let himself savor it, recalling fiery kisses and pressing hips.
“Malcolm.”
Malcolm’s eyes focused to find Clarisse at his two o’clock.
“What’s up?” he said.
Ever so slightly, Clarisse’s eyes narrowed. “I asked what’s up.” It was so embarrassingly polite that she now seemed interested only in some Tyche kid’s footwork practice playing out to Malcolm’s right. “Is it…”
“No,” Malcolm said, the instant her brows began to hint at a pinch. “Yeah, no, I’m good.”
Good. That was what Rhode said he was, wasn’t it?
“Just checking,” Clarisse said nearly under her breath.
Right. Because if Annabeth had known that very day, how wouldn’t Clarisse? The events of Saturday had totally left his mind. He’d just gotten by a full half day without the nauseating shame of flipping out on two children. Merely stupid children. And yet, four days after the fact, his self-righteousness could still cut through any remorse lingering in his bones.
Just yesterday, he reminded himself, Will had had to get his heart checked upon collapsing at someone’s mere mention of a demon. And it had only been last month that Clarisse had taken a day off work.
It would’ve been easier, Malcolm thought sorely, if the new campers could just comprehend that the history Chiron taught them hadn’t even been a decade removed. It would’ve been simpler if any of the kids could shed any stupid notions of impropriety or health concerns to just bother to ask about what had happened and how much it had sucked. It would’ve been better if no mortal parent ever opted their demigod children out of knowledge so basic and horrific.
“You heard,” he said. Because he could do better than Clarisse, Malcolm took his eyes off his sword and actually looked her in the eyes. Tried to anyway.
“I heard,” Clarisse muttered. She continued studying their trainee’s balance techniques.
For a long moment, the kids filled up Malcolm and Clarisse’s silence, giving them time to figure out what else was to be said.
Clarisse spread her arms haphazardly. “We could still…”
“When has this ever been my…?”
But that wasn’t wholly true, Malcolm remembered, and it felt like a lie to even suggest it when it had been Clarisse who had come to him, and then him to her, after Connor had told all of Camp Half-Blood that—
The memory faded at the quirk of Clarisse’s shoulders.
“Still,” she offered.
Malcolm gripped his xíphos, catching Clarisse doing the same in the corner of his eye. Her faint smirk was met with his matching smile—right as they whooshed their swords into a clang.
Clarisse had blocked him, naturally. But Malcolm had expected that and immediately swung for her hip and blocked her retaliatory blow—and he kept his eyes on Clarisse.
When she forced him to dodge a blade at his throat so early in their match, he had the mind to be embarrassed. But he concentrated on the fight.
With two quick jabs he lobbed faster than Clarisse could comprehend, she lost her grip on her sword and grunted in pain. But the move sent Malcolm’s own blade in a spin. He caught the hilt in his left hand, feeling like he was putting on a performance.
Clarisse gave him no break. Before he could even switch hands, she grabbed the long knife she kept at her thigh and jutted it into his armor. That was okay. This was good. Her sword was still on the ground. Her right wrist was surely sore. Malcolm was better left-handed than she was. And he was in fact still focusing on their fight.
But by the time he had snagged her armor twice, Clarisse had already got him three times. With a fourth stab into his armor, a few kids began shrieking. One wailed, “I don’t like this!” But Malcolm kept jabbing and parrying—still directing his attention to Clarisse.
He was losing, he knew. Even worse, his back was to the entrance. Second by second, Clarisse was pummeling him. With no plans other than to recuperate, Malcolm maneuvered them to switch sides. It was his usual way to regain a bit more confidence. Except now it wasn’t giving him the same comfort he usually felt when facing the largest door in.
Three more near misses from Clarisse, and there it was! He had it. He’d found an opening—her legs, which she typically forgot to guard—and thrust his sword in her weak spot.
It was a trap. Clarisse blocked him mid-swing, threw her knife at his face, and nearly clipped his ear off.
A millisecond of flaming, screaming panic seared Malcolm’s mind, matching the shrieks of the kids and the rush in his ears. A touch of shame met his soul, overcome by the rush of pride he felt for Clarisse. Nonetheless…
Tricked into believing this exercise was life or death, Malcolm forgot everything for a moment and let his body go on autopilot. Twenty-three years of his muscles, trained by the mind, faced their latest test. He went where his body took him. He wasn’t going to turn his head.
Clarisse was right. It felt good to do this—to simply focus on nothing other than each passing second, every one of them worth an age. It wouldn’t be long until the noobs would really be challenged in a swordfight. Then they’d understand why it was so easy to come back for more.
Reunited with her fallen sword, Clarisse was incessant, but now so was Malcolm. Only silence stood between the two, save for their symphony of clashes. This wasn’t a show after all. They had no penchant for goading. Sweat was glistening on their faces, determination was burning in their eyes, their muscles were doubtlessly groaning, and Malcolm and Clarisse persisted in their thrilling test of muscle, instinct, and the slightest capacity for strategic thought. In a melody of swift movements, they formed a choreography from pieces they had practiced together thousands of times before.
They were neck and neck now, parrying each assault, returning every attempt at a blow. Six more impasses, then Clarisse swung her sword hard. Dodging her strike, Malcolm rolled to the ground and tripped her, giving him a direct view of the entrance. He rose quickly, eyes stuck on Clarisse, who reached for her sword as he kicked it aside.
But before he could poke his sword at her neck to claim victory, Clarisse swung out her leg until he fell towards her. With a growl, she threw him off with all the strength she would dare show the new campers.
Malcolm flew a full eight yards, greeted by a storm of dust and dirt to his face as he landed on his left shoulder. He swore ragefully in silence as sparks of pain shot all throughout his neck and arm and chest.
With his attention pulled to the entrance, he heard Annabeth’s voice in a faraway muffle, telling the kids not to do any of this—at least not before properly training. The next thing he heard was Clarisse.
“Nice try, motherfucker.” She was panting as she said it.
Malcolm conceded, but found a personal win anyhow; he had successfully never looked at the entrance. Not even once.
“You didn’t let me win, did you?” said Clarisse, giving him a dirty look.
Malcolm scoffed. “Do you doubt yourself that much?”
“It hasn’t felt this easy,” she said mockingly.
Malcolm’s hand flew to his heart. “Oof.”
The light in Clarisse’s eyes told him she was celebrating her second victory in seconds—at least before her smile was wiped clean off. But Malcolm gave her her silent wish—and the truth. He was okay. He didn’t say “fine”.
By the next time he turned around, Rhode was gone.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm incidentally found her on his way to the showers, her long, lush hair too voluminous today to be missed. On opposite benches outside the dining pavilion, Rhode and Alicia were sharing a table—and seemingly, a conversation in German—while Annabeth, twinning Alicia with a pair of braids, looked to be sketching something beside them. (Probably her house, Malcolm figured, which he had essentially forced her to redesign after City Council had banned single-family zoning.)
Right as Alicia saw him, a grin overtook her face, so chubby-cheeked and guileless—and even more unfairly adorable now because she’d finally lost that wiggly canine yesterday. Malcolm was smiling before he knew it. Curse the Fates, he just had to quirk his eyebrows in hello right as Rhode turned his way.
A panic ignited in his chest in an instant. Malcolm couldn’t bear to look right at Rhode; it felt inappropriate somehow. But he couldn’t not acknowledge her; that would’ve been rude. He really should’ve thought it out better. Because it was only after he’d wiped off that smile for Alicia—dimmed enough for him to totally lose it by the time he reached Rhode’s eyes—that he realized she could’ve taken the apparent frown as an insult. This was Rhode, after all.
Throwing away his remorse, Malcolm headed to the showers and stopped cursing himself. It never did him well to dwell on such fripperies. And if Rhode took offense to a lie, well, that would’ve been her problem.
But there were laser eyes on his back, he could feel it—and refused to turn around. Perhaps Rhode wasn’t even looking anyway.
Yet there was no doubt she was when Malcolm later spotted her lingering outside City Hall. Arms akimbo, there she had been, examining the corrugated steel walls with the floor-to-ceiling windows that saved the structure from looking like a dump. That was, until Malcolm’s footstep crunches of grass alerted her to his presence.
With the few dozen city employees still around past 6 PM, Malcolm wondered just how many times Rhode had spun around, expecting him to appear.
“Have you made any progress?” said Rhode in greeting. She actually didn’t look upset in the least.
“Hello to you, too,” said Malcolm.
He tried not to care that his hair was still wet, ‘cause this just wasn’t the best look. But did she really think he had it in him to figure out godly drama alone? That was way more credit than he—
“Any options you have yet? It’s been several days already,” Rhode whispered as she fell in step with him into the building. “I’m assuming you’ve been spending all this time browsing through catalogs and choosing only the best styles.”
Malcolm nearly stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t even reached the center of the entrance hall.
“If I like it,” Rhode said, “I’ll even wear it.”
“I’m not buying you underwear,” Malcolm snapped in a whisper. But his dumb mind was already conjuring the possibilities—combos of colors and patterns enrobing (or flaunting) that bit of booty. He liked that last pink one actually. Really, he enjoyed all of them.
Having instinctually headed to the stairs in his reverie, Malcolm thought better and rerouted himself and Rhode past the few stragglers on the ground floor—the custodians, Mark and Janet, who returned his hello; Brett and his crew, who looked too busy to bother with a greeting; and Maaza and Adila, who only stopped him for the briefest clarification—and towards the elevators. Rhode’s heels clacked behind him all the while.
Malcolm felt exposed with Rhode this close. Relief hit him when the doors of the elevator shut behind them—and it left him immediately when Rhode turned to face him.
“Tit for tat,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t even have to be the exact piece. Just make sure it’s lingerie. And make sure it looks good. My ass looked amazing in that.”
Hell yeah, it had.
It took a painful ten more seconds for the doors to open to the fifth floor and literally give him an out. Malcolm didn’t bother to walk at Rhode’s slower pace. She could speed up in whatever impractical shoes she was wearing.
But by the time he reached his office, he found himself regrettably having to wait even longer to hold the door open for Rhode, who scoffed when he made a show of checking his watch.
“Why, thank you,” she said with her pesky, supposedly courteous smile. She halted before him, just inches away.
She was taller today than three days ago, and her long, shiny, spiral earrings were bouncing light into Malcolm’s eyes and making him worry they’d get caught in her hair. Especially with today’s ‘do, so very curly and parted this much to a side, the earrings she’d chosen looked even more hazardous. He remembered untangling her tresses from those other dangly earrings she had worn on that night they’d shared. Perhaps he would help with that again later…
“Would you just go in so I can get you a chair?” he said, shoving away those intrusive thoughts.
“Are we actually going to need it?” said Rhode.
Malcolm tried his hardest to keep his face straight. “I’m still getting you one.” Even if…. Even if that animal in him was dancing and hooting at her smile.
A mental groan of joy erupted as Rhode walked into his office. That signature floral scent of hers wafted into his nostrils, letting him recall lost memories. It had been enough times by now that he could detect the familiar fruity, musky notes. What a shame that one couldn’t recall scents at will the way one could recall images.
Moments later, when the two of them had settled in, Malcolm chided himself for being even mildly disappointed that Rhode really had just sat in her own chair. Out went her colorful gel pens before he had even attempted to take out the paper he had set aside for her.
Though Malcolm kept his eyes away, catching only the briefest glimpses of Rhode’s movements, he could fill in the blanks anyway. Hands going up to her collar, elbow popping out like that, torso re-angled… She was fixing her hair to one side. A flash of a thought came to him that he’d seen that before. And now Malcolm could just tell that Rhode’s brows were now pinching that little bit right now, the way they did when she was getting to business.
It really felt regrettable that he had to start reviewing Annabeth’s venue tweaks and so unfortunate that he had to make adjustments to that diagram he’d created. But what else was he to do when Rhode was listing more sets of godly rivals and allies?
How stupid of him to have expected her not to use that damn chair.
“How’s Atlantis?” Malcolm asked after a scant five minutes.
Rhode seemed to smile, even as she said, “As usual. The problems never end.” The sigh let out felt to Malcolm like something she wouldn’t share with just anyone.
“The protests you saw have died down a little,” she said. “Triton came back from his rescue missions with more bad news. Typical. I went, too. It’s horrible. More people are taking refuge in Atlantis, at a rate nearing our housing growth. Potential signatories of our trade deal are raising more issues about this and that and this and that. Money laundering is big in our news now. The media say our agencies are squabbling about who is to blame. It’s quite ridiculous. We’re going to sort that out with our bank regulators on Friday. There’s always something. How is New Athens coming along?”
“Better than I thought,” Malcolm admitted.
That sounded insulting.
“I thought it’d be worse,” he clarified, “but it seems like people are really getting it and working together. It’s almost weird sometimes.”
Rhode peeked at him from her notes. “That’s good to know. Poseidon would appreciate hearing that.”
Malcolm also appreciated hearing that.
“If it interests him,” he said, “you can also tell him we finished the underground levels of the city center and most surrounding areas. The multilevel streets are all done for sure. One level for cars, another for transit. What else? The soundfront trail’s also done. There’s a five-mile long pedestrian walkway now. We should also have enough energy to sustain us for fifteen months before we need to expand capacity. It’s really shaping up.”
Rhode hummed before peering at his screen.
“Can I?” she said, motioning to his mouse.
Malcolm gave it up and examined her notes in exchange. No rings adorned Rhode’s fingers today. Instead, a shiny bangle circling and re-circling her forearm flashed into his eyes.
While Malcolm studied the intertwined snakes and thornless stemmed roses of her armlet, Rhode kept busy on his computer, rearranging old setups from some new intel she’d heard. It was only fair for Malcolm to make himself useful by translating her new lists of rivalries into propositional logic.
But gods damn was he bored.
His brain had scattered into a jumble of thoughts: the next Cabin Six field trip (probably to the Morgan or the Frick), what to challenge Alicia with next (maybe archery), when exactly New Athens’s infrastructure bank could be set up (because Adila and Maaza were antsy that the next council could screw up their current plans), and—without any of his own protest—that flowery fragrance that was so mischievously coating his office.
It really wasn’t his fault. Barely anyone at Camp Half-Blood wore perfume or had soaps or shampoos this strong. (The best Malcolm could personally do was olive oil.) Camp had a scent-free policy, not to mention a shared empathy for all the demigods hypersensitive to prominent odors.
Rhode didn’t abide by the rules, and Malcolm was glad for it. A little too much. A normal breath right now was enough to carry him away and tempt him to close his eyes and take it in—and remember.
Remarkably, after he and Rhode returned to their respective tasks, he found he wasn’t the only one zoning out. After every handful of rivals Rhode newly listed on paper, she’d sigh and fiddle with her pens and take a moment to get back on track. With longer lists came more sighs. More fidgeting. More glances. And now Rhode was resting her head on her hand as she penned more sets of names. And then she was staring into space.
Malcolm knew all this, of course, because Rhode had been there, ever present in his sights. But he didn’t cower now, even in the moments he glanced at her head on, nor was he shying away or feeling the heat of any blush when she looked at him. He wasn’t even laughing.
Soon enough, those ‘Do you also realize how gods damn boring this is?’ looks turned into ‘Remember when we…?’ exchanges. Then those ‘Remember when we…?’ exchanges felt like they had ‘Do you maybe wanna…?’ questions at their edges.
When they were trying to wrap up one table and Rhode was relaying to him some ancient drama between Fornax and Despoina on who had stolen whose portokalópita recipe, Malcolm didn’t want to bother. He knew he was only paying attention because Rhode was the one talking about it, and he swore right now he could listen to her for all twenty-four hours in a day. So he kept nodding, kept asking more questions. Perhaps only to get her to keep talking. What the fuck did he care about who had made the better cake or who had poached the most staff from the other over the years?
But just as Rhode was recounting to him how awful their brawls in Olympus’s farmers markets could get, her voice trailed off. And there was just silence.
Malcolm’s breaths felt too loud. It felt like a timer was about to go off. In the heat of their slyer smiles and antsier eyes, he could only stand so much.
“I feel like we should get one table fully done,” he said, even as a grin finally split across his face.
That also didn’t stop him from clearing his desk when Rhode rolled back her own chair. In what felt like ages, she brought herself over to his side of the table—which was looking more like their designated side for fun-time. Malcolm just watched, keeping his hands to himself when Rhode squeezed in between him and that spot he’d cleared.
That table was never going to get done today.
“The wedding is in May,” she said as she leaned on his desk.
“It’s only the beginning of August,” he agreed, standing at last.
This whole thing was a farce, of course. New drama would emerge in the months leading up to the wedding.
Today, it was Malcolm who took the first step. Already so giddy that his kiss at the corner of her red lips could get Rhode to shed her boredom and wear a smile, his thrill rose to higher heights as he bunched up the silky smooth skirt of her dress, ever so glad it wouldn’t wrinkle. Because, oh lord, he was going to do things with it.
Even though none of this felt new anymore and Malcolm wasn’t second-guessing his unquestionably indecent caresses, all those other times they’d shared still hadn’t prepared him for the way Rhode was pulling up his sweatshirt to lay her hands on his skin.
Malcolm shivered under her touch. Literal shivers. That armlet of hers was a shock to his skin, and her fingers were stupidly chilly again. (Maybe his AC was set too cold? He set a mental reminder to turn it down next time she came over.)
The torture of his muscles still yelling and whining at him from having been torn was worth it for Rhode to busy herself with the faintest chisels as she wore that dreamy look in her eyes.
“I have to say I’ve been enjoying it though,” she said. “It’s easy.”
Which was funny, because Malcolm credited all of his own ease to her. Like hell would he be doing this with someone else. Like hell could he. The way it was so easy right now to stand here as she started groping his ass and tracing his arms. The way it was so easy to brush Rhode’s hair over her shoulder and take her dress strap down with it. To just admire uninterrupted expanses of her bare skin, so smooth and soothing, calling out with each of his strokes a breath out of stress.
“I’m not really complaining either,” Malcolm said, utterly delighted to witness that little shiver of hers when he ran the back of his fingers over her arm.
It was like a reward for them both for the punishment of arranging those silly, drama-filled seating charts.
Dodging Rhode’s earrings, Malcolm trailed kisses down her neck. Her sighs were heaven and her fragrance smelled like prowess and tenderness. Hades, this was so much better than godly drama. So long as his lips could land on her skin, he wanted to be wrapped up in her scent, no matter the grievances of his delicate nose, nor the gripes of his strained neck.
Rhode sighed under his lips. “I like when you do that,” she breathed.
Suddenly, what Malcolm had was a measly pittance. The highs he got from Rhode’s flowery hair were leading him to intoxication, and he wanted more. He wanted to kiss her all over her shoulders and her collar and her jaw and her mouth. He’d kiss her all over her tits, too, if she’d let him. Gods, he craved those gasps of hers. He ached for her tickling fingers to keep skimming over his body, loving how she invigorated and eased him all at once.
But soon enough, Rhode had had enough. Her warmed hands had left the shelter of his sweatshirt, and now she was stilling his wandering hands in her grip, shying away from his kiss—
Had he missed something? It had seemed like—
No. No, Rhode was turning in his arms and keeping his touch on her waist. She was resting her fluffy head of curls on his shoulder and making him hold her body weight.
Okay.
It took a moment for Malcolm’s mind to clear from worry—and only half a second for him to dare to pull Rhode’s hips back to stoke the flame of the match she had struck in him.
“You’re braver today, aren’t you?” Rhode said as she reached back to thread her fingers through his hair.
Malcolm could hear the laugh in her voice. Gods damn this goddess.
“Just matching your energy,” he said, landing more kisses along her collar. “It’s only fair to pay it back.”
He couldn’t tell if it was a reward or punishment that she responded with a tingly scratch of his nape.
“Let’s be clear. You started this,” said Rhode.
Occupied with his kisses, Malcolm said anyway, “No, I fucking didn’t.”
Rhode scoffed (Or had her breath hitched?). “‘No, I fucking didn’t,’ he says, after clearly eye-fucking me across the table.”
That doesn’t sufficiently… start this, he thought to retort. He didn’t go that route.
“I was bored,” he said. “You were bored.”
Rhode chuckled. “Yeah, yeah. Just admit you want me bad, and I’ll give you more.”
Malcolm tilted Rhode’s chin up to plant a kiss on her mouth. Even if she’d asked for it, it felt so selfish to do—to direct her body to his wishes, to take from her, to feel so good doing it. That it in him paid no mind. What did his concerns matter after all, when Rhode was nudging her hips back and letting him freely grind his bulge against her? She may have been fully clothed, but gods damn, between his sweatpants and her silk dress, he could find his way into the cleft of her ass anyway. The fire was raging now, and Malcolm couldn’t even blame it on himself—not when Rhode was kissing him back and pushing against him, too. That was enough wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Body and mind were struggling for dominance. Malcolm couldn’t comprehend how to continue—or how not to. It felt too good. It felt too bad.
When Rhode guided his hands up over the soft swell of her breasts, Malcolm really had to stop. Frozen still, his face turned to Olympus for mercy—yet the gods were no help when there was a particular one of them adamant on debasing him. He couldn’t think of a single way to pleasure Rhode like this, but she didn’t give him the capacity to brainstorm or plan, now that she was palming his stiffening cock over his sweatpants.
It was all too much and not enough, and Malcolm was desperate to be of more service—and yet dying to take himself in hand. His greedy eyes darted around, eager to find where and how to unzip Rhode’s dress.
This at least started to feel familiar. He had mused on Rhode like this just that other night, picturing this very scene, this hope of disrobing her how he had that one glorious evening, baring the entirety of her back so he could see and touch and kiss her.
The picture was incomplete right now without a way to see her beautiful face. He had solved that in his reveries with a mirror so that they could both watch her (it seemed too vulgar to consider watching his own self). But now… What a shame they weren’t in the bathroom this time.
And yet, maybe none of that mattered when Rhode had practically melded herself to him with every inch she could. How could she get any closer than this?
But then Rhode was resting her palms on his desk, far too far right now. Malcolm figured he could kiss her if she leaned on him again. Or perhaps if he could meet her down there, drape over her… Maybe lift her skirt and at her command just push in—
“Meh.” Rhode stood up straight once more. “Actually, yeah. I’d prefer to sit.”
Puffs of laughter escaped Malcolm’s lips. He chuckled more, remembering Rhode insisting the same when they’d prowled the forest together.
Rhode paid his laughs no mind, proceeding to lean against him again (oh, how delightful) and twirl around in his arms (gods be damned, this was such a better view).
“Lift me onto—” she began.
Malcolm already had before she could finish her request. Already reached for her knees to slot himself between her limbs. Already began making more room for her so she could sit on his desk more comfortably.
It wasn’t the most efficient way he could move aside all that equipment and stationery, ‘cause Rhode was in the way. And what a maddening shame, because Malcolm wanted nothing more right now than to get his hands back on her and her gorgeous hips. But he couldn’t bear the thought of stepping out from between her knees, and she wasn’t helping him either, the way she was distracting him with her touches, making him slow.
“Would they still schedule this for us if they knew all the things we do together?” Rhode said, now feeling up his biceps. Devious woman she was, her leg was climbing up his side.
But who was he to judge when he was reaching under her skirt and up her thighs?
“I’m sure they have some idea,” Malcolm said. He began his strokes over the lace she’d picked out for today. “They just act like we’re innocent preteens going on playdates.”
Rhode chuckled. “I think it’s illegal to say ‘playdate’ with your hand between someone’s legs.”
Malcolm removed said hand.
“No, come back here,” she said, reaching for him. “I’m the one who’s older than you.”
The reminder had him realize how much less experienced he was at… everything. Rhode knew the secrets of the world he longed to discover. She knew… What didn’t she know?
“What do you want right now?” he asked.
I’m taking orders, he thought to add. What can I get you to start? It was funny enough. Rhode would’ve laughed. But there was enough of him holding back the words—enough of him that insisted he most certainly was not her pet. Yet the fingers she brushed through his hair were making him feel otherwise. Were challenging him to make do on his instinctive desire to do whatever she asked of him.
“Just keep doing what you were doing,” she said. Her green eyes began to study him. “What do you want right now?”
Malcolm finally cowered, but met her gaze anyway. Absolutely nothing was going through his head. “Do whatever,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
“Okay,” said Rhode, even as she looked like she was holding back a protest.
Malcolm felt guilty, then not, then ashamed again for not living up to her wishes.
But the warring sentiments muted, letting him easily stroke Rhode’s legs as he always did. While she was sliding under his clothes per usual, settling into her preferences. She always took time to explore him like this, didn’t she?
Wow. They had a routine by now. Wasn’t that something?
Malcolm reached the apex of her thighs once more and drew soft lines over Rhode’s barely there underwear. When she leaned in to kiss him, it took so much of him to back just an inch away.
“Is this your…” he began. “Is this one of those smudgy lipsticks?”
Rhode’s eyes were so startlingly vivid this close—as shocking as her too-red lips. “It can be. I feel like I want to paint your chest with it,” she said.
Fuck, how did she come up with this shit?
And why couldn’t he just ask her for anything he’d fantasized about? Why couldn’t he even remember any of those daydreams right now?
The pads of Rhode’s fingers were tickling him under his shirt now, tracing over his skin like a teaser for all that was to come.
“Only if you want,” she said.
It sure seemed like she did, the way her gaze was so laser-focused on his chest.
Malcolm refrained from sighing. “Just give me a wipe later,” he said. “I’ll deal with it.”
When Rhode looked back at him, it was like she understood. Malcolm accepted what he figured was a silent apology for last time.
“Okay,” she said.
It felt like an oath.
With that, Malcolm kissed Rhode on the mouth, lipstick and all, and let her ruin him. He hadn’t stopped his light strokes either. The only time he had to was to take off his shirt to fuel Rhode’s greed. If she wanted, he would’ve even let her put on more lipstick. He wondered if she was already, just magically replacing the rouge—even with a smudgier one. How else would he have counted ten perfect stains after the first three faint ones? There was even one right around a nipple. Gods, how bizarre. But Malcolm took her scarlet kisses all the same. They looked so bold for how carefully her lips fell on his skin.
And for a moment, he was just amazed that he and Rhode could have silent conversations at this point. Of course, that tiny shred of doubt peeping up in his head was still absolutely going to test this theory, but Malcolm felt he knew already. He never really had to say it out loud, did he?
But actually, would Rhode truly know not to—
“You’re going somewhere,” she said, her breath ghosting his pec.
Maybe she really did understand.
With a sheepish, little smile, Malcolm flung away his thought and re-entered their shared space.
It was Rhode’s slow, heavy breathing that got him to realize that his fingers hadn’t stopped.
Malcolm would’ve been fine with just this. It was enough of a luxury to relax in pools of green and sensuous wafts, to simmer in this heat… exchanging, adventuring pets… building up the puffs in his face with every inch of covered ground.
Rhode was the one to look away first. Her barely-red-now lips descended upon Malcolm’s clavicle, immediately reminding him why he was so stupid for wanting so little when he could afford all this luxury.
But Malcolm ignored that selfish inkling and kept caressing Rhode over her dampening lace. He didn’t even know what color it was today. Frankly, he didn’t care.
Right now, the only things worth any note were how his chest was stained with red lipstick; how Rhode was wrapping a leg around him, lodging her heel between his shins; and how in this great, big world of possibility, their bubble had become so small and familiar. It felt like they had something of each other’s, no matter where they would go. It seemed so strange—even transcendental—to think. That no matter how far away they were, perhaps they could grow only so far apart.
Or perhaps he was being delusional.
Malcolm wouldn’t pay attention to that voice right now. Because between his skin and Rhode’s lips (and every other gods damn person in the world), he wore all of her lipstick right now.
He couldn’t figure out which one of them had more of a right to brag about it. Was it Rhode, who got to decorate him like this? Or his own self, for being the one to be clothed in her?
“I brought a little something fun to help me,” Rhode said with a shakier cadence. “Since you were complaining so much last time that you couldn’t.” She flashed him a cheeky grin.
“‘Complaining,’” Malcolm said with a huff. “I complai— I just think it’s better when it’s more mutual.”
Rhode smiled her knowing smile. “I know you do.”
“And you don’t?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” she said.
Malcolm leaned back to shoot her a look—not that it stopped his efforts to work her up even more with his circling. “Why do you make such a big deal out of this stuff? Like you’re holding something over me for things I do or things I believe that you also like.”
It had been one of the only things he’d pondered over during his most recent morning run. The only thing he’d concluded in that half hour was that Drew still didn’t know shit about him, which wasn’t her fault… which he supposed made her partially right. But Rhode’s mystery remained a big question mark.
As her fingers dug into his hair again, she looked into his eyes in apparent confusion. “Is that how you feel?” she said. “Like I’m holding something over you?”
“It feels like you’re trying to.”
Even now, even this hair thing, felt like some power move—even if it felt too nice to refuse. Although an outraged part of Malcolm said it was stupid to think such a thing, considering he’d just felt up her ass because he’d wanted to, this hair thing felt different. It felt like it had intent.
“Are you gonna tell me you aren’t?” he said.
Rhode’s eyes left him for a relieving moment before they pinned him down again with that uncomfortably unnatural, blue-green hue. “Do you want an honest answer?” she said.
“Okay, shoot.” But he already knew, didn’t he? “Do you like feeling like you’re in charge? Is that it?”
“If there’s someone holding something over you here,” Rhode said, “I am not the likelier culprit.”
Malcolm held a breath. Never had he considered… Could it be that this was really just… self-imposed?
“But you are a little?” he pressed.
Rhode shrugged. “I’ll admit I enjoy you like that,” she said. Her touch traveled to Malcolm’s aching shoulders—with none of his protest. “It’s… fun. You let me play with it. You purposely give me the ideas. You perpetuate it.”
Now he really didn’t want Rhode’s eyes on him, much less in his shirtless state. This was far too much to handle. Fuck, he couldn’t cope.
“Are you going to tell me you don’t?” she said, so mercilessly.
Did he like his pleasure with a side of humiliation?
Humiliation? Was that even what it was?
“You do like control, though,” Malcolm argued. It was, after all, one reason why he loved making her lose it—and his more purposeful circles over her clit were certainly getting her there, drawing out heavier breaths and hissier gasps. “Like, you need to have it. Even when you do things for me. You always want to take control. Every time we do this, there’s always something we have to fight over that you’ll have to win.”
Rhode’s brows twitched. “What, just because I like—? Because I ask or point out—? You’re the one offering me orgasms. Excuse me for being honest enough to admit I enjoy that.” Suddenly, her eyes were sparked with a secret. “But you do like it, too, don’t you? You wouldn’t be offering otherwise, would you?”
“There we go again,” he said.
Rhode huffed amusedly—which turned to heavy breaths when Malcolm changed his motions between her thighs.
“You know, you don’t have to do this,” she said.
Malcolm couldn’t answer. All he could do was build her up and watch as she would wrinkle his fingertips.
There was a moment—a parenthetical conversation, parallel to the one they were in the middle of—where Rhode uttered her desires for him to follow (going his left, up, then a little down), getting him to elicit little noises from her, forcing her to hold on tighter.
But then Rhode was almost chuckling as she returned to their main frequency. “You really don’t have to.” She gasped again and stressed her syllables as if they would help her hold on. “But you’re not going to stop… until I’m fully satisfied, are you?”
If her words were a vise, Malcolm wanted to be held forever.
“Why are you doing this for me?” said Rhode through her breaths. “Tell me.”
Malcolm’s curiosity was eating him alive. Gods, he was dying from embarrassment. His skin was tingling, his heart was pounding, his throat was closing. What could this be but humiliation? Some stupid shame in his duty, his responsibility, his—
“Again, I didn’t ask,” Rhode said. “Oh, I want it,” she told him when he’d momentarily slowed and questioned her with a look. “But I didn’t ask.”
Malcolm couldn’t understand that. He wouldn’t have done any of this if she hadn’t asked. He was too much of a coward to just do any of this unprompted, and he knew it.
But it was that look on her face that he desired—that made him brave, if one could even call it that. Her eyes were so wanting, her brows so expressive with need. Everything about her was calling him, entrancing him even more than Drew’s accidental charmspeak. Malcolm wanted this undoubtedly. Unreservedly. This felt like the right thing to do.
But how dumb was that reason?
Yet however dumb it was didn’t seem dumb enough, because he still wasn’t going to let up one bit.
He had no clue why he was doing this for her when it made him so… so—
“I can help narrow it down,” Rhode said, before continuing in his silence, “It’s not for reciprocity. You do this without return. I’m not even touching you right now.” She glanced down below his navel as she dug her fingers into his arms and went up, up, up, and back into his hair, making him feel so powerless. “And you barely cared the other times. I’ve cared more than you, haven’t I?”
Maybe his standards were just lower.
“I don’t think it’s because of ego,” Rhode continued as her fingers began brushing over his neck. She thankfully missed his fluttering blink as her eyes closed for a long moment in bliss. “I mean, it can’t be that. You blush every time, don’t you, Malcolm?”
As Rhode stroked his cheeks, Malcolm yanked her underwear aside. The punishment of direct contact got her whimpering as her bright eyes shut again. Malcolm himself had to refrain from making a noise. Gods, she was so wet.
“Am I getting warmer?” said Rhode, scrutinizing him once more.
Malcolm still said nothing.
“I think you are,” she said, nearly laughing while she brushed a cold thumb over his cheek.
Rhode was smiling too much right this second, which Malcolm rectified by keeping up his light pressure and speed. Make her focus on the real thing going on here.
“I think,” she said breathily, “you like fighting.”
Malcolm scoffed. He knew himself enough to know better.
“You don’t think so? I think,” Rhode pushed, “you like feeling trapped—in certain circumstances.”
Oh, he hardly thought—
“You like when I do it, don’t you?” Rhode said.
Malcolm felt he was glowing. Clothed in her red kisses and more naked than ever.
And, okay, so what? Maybe her power plays were a bit of a kink. Yes, his kink. But even that was hardly about him though; it was her. And so what if—?
“I think you like it so much…” Rhode said, pausing to take a few shaky breaths as he kept circling that slick nub, “you’ll trap yourself, even… if I don’t do it for you.”
Malcolm’s busy fingers stilled against her. He had a hundred things to say—if he could say them—but he didn’t want to fight. In any case, Rhode was grinding against his hand now, reminding him of his job. So he continued his circling.
“But why?” she whispered, hinting or perhaps inadvertently showing him all the answers she had asked for. “You really don’t have to do this,” she said.
Did she really not get it? How could he not when he knew she was nearly moaning? How could he not when she looked at him like she needed this? How could he not when she kept coming back to him, knowing what she’d get from him?
Was this all because he just liked Rhode’s control—or whatever one could call it? Even though she’d said he fed her desire to act upon it? What was the root of all this? Where did it all begin?
Head in a tizzy, Malcolm carried Rhode through her pitiable whimpers, past the point her eyes clamped shut, past her sharp gasps, past the rasps in her breath, past her uttered “fuck”s and “ah”s. Rhode was writhing against him, holding onto him tight, and her hips were shaking, her legs were trembling, and Malcolm was taking her up higher and higher crests, eager to watch her come at last.
When she did, Rhode didn’t curl into him like she had previous times. No, this time, she had leaned back and let him watch her fall into her highs. It was like she was getting a hit off him, utterly unconcerned about anything other than bathing in ecstasy.
Rhode came back down a moment after he ceased his motions. It took another beat for her glazed eyes to focus on Malcolm. A smile broke free from her lips.
Gods, he wished he could get used to watching that. He knew he could watch her like that every day and it would never have gotten old. It didn’t matter how delusional the thought was; it was true. It would’ve been a wholly other thing if he were asking her for that.
Malcolm spoke only when Rhode had slowed her breaths. “You want another?” he said. Because, hey, if this was the only day it’d work in a while and his hand wasn’t flaring yet…
Rhode began to laugh—a bright, infectious sound that forced Malcolm’s lips to quiver into a smile. “Ask me again in a minute,” she said. In the meantime, she seemed content studying her artwork on his chest, smearing the color she’d painted him with over his skin. “Do you still want this on you?” she said.
It was taking so much to admit it. Rhode always demanded far too much.
“It’ll be easy to take it off now,” she said. “I can get a tissue.”
What came out of Malcolm’s mouth was a mumble. “No, it’s okay. Later’s good.”
In between her smudging, Rhode traced lines over his skin. Tan lines, he realized. Of which, he also realized for the first time, she had none. Oh, the hardships of being mortal...
“In the meantime,” Rhode said, almost whispering, “do you want me to make you come?”
Even as Malcolm couldn’t hold back a smile, he couldn’t figure out how to just say “yes”. A simple, single, monosyllabic “yes”.
“What a treat,” he said.
His whole world narrowed down to the utter thrill of Rhode’s fingers sneaking down his sweatpants, past the band of his boxer briefs, and around his cock, getting him flushed in an instant. Asked if it was okay dry, Malcolm said yes. Pleasure rippled through his nerves as Rhode began experimenting, and with more of her teeth-gritting touches, the call for attention in Malcolm’s loins surged into need. He held in his sighs, growing ever stiffer and heavier in the smaller hand he had come to know.
It was no fair Rhode got to sit while he still had to stand. High heels or not, it wasn’t as if she was using her legs right now. But no, she just sat on her ass as she worked him in her hand, while he had to make do with biting the inside of his mouth and holding onto the table on either of her sides.
Never once would he complain or possess such entitlement so as to be choosy. But that was exactly it. Did Rhode realize he hadn’t asked her for this either?
“Do you want this?” she said.
And now Malcolm wondered if he really could uphold those immodest claims, because Rhode’s hand had maddeningly crawled out of his underwear.
“You seem very tense,” she said. “And you’re not…” Her eyes flitted around. “You’re not touching me—my body—either. Do you actually not like it dry?”
Malcolm’s annoyance flared in an instant and subsided only with effort. “Do you just like to hear it? Or do you always need to hear it?”
“You have to tell me,” said Rhode. “I like when you do.”
That wasn’t clear enough of an answer. It hardly mattered.
“It’s good,” he said.
Rhode’s touch returned, making his body sigh with relief. “Yeah?” she said.
Barring no holds, she got him caving to her almost immediately. Malcolm was so eager to touch her and kiss her and tease her all at once as she sped up her sliding grip. But he did nothing more than let himself breathe.
“Yeah,” he said, choking back a groan. “I mean, of course.”
“Of course?” Rhode’s lips may have hinted at humor, but her eyes hinted at suspicion.
Malcolm had nowhere else to look but Rhode’s inescapable gaze. It was fucking unbearable.
“It’s always good with you,” he said. Whispered, the words felt less of an admission. They were for Rhode’s diligence alone; the wily part of her didn’t need to know. “I said I’d tell you,” he added.
“Right. I like to be sure.” With every glide and every stroke, Rhode drove him into further madness, and began looking more and more like her playful self. “You would tell me, right?”
“Obviously.”
It felt like a lie to swear upon it when there were bound to be reasons—reasons he couldn’t place this instant—that would have made it difficult. Because it almost didn’t matter. And it was easy to promise when he just knew it would never come to it.
With that comfort, Malcolm finally began to let go. It wasn’t entitlement, he told himself, if he wanted to touch her; Rhode had basically pre-approved it. So perhaps he could indulge a bit. Just a little…
Malcolm’s eyes fixated to a flattened lock of hair. He reached up to fix that curl. The strands twirled around his finger were softer than he remembered—and so, so very black.
“Concentrate,” said Rhode.
You know I have ADHD, right? Malcolm thought to say. But fair enough, she obviously didn’t want to give him a handjob forever. In any case, he knew it always felt better in those times he could shut off the world and pretend his impending orgasm was the only thing he had to care about.
Taking one, two breaths through Rhode’s constant strokes, Malcolm turned his attention downward, pinpointing his focus to all those nerve endings she was making a marvelous nuisance of. They cared not what he thought or wished, seeking and loving only her attention. He followed suit, keeping his gray eyes trained on Rhode’s green ones.
But with more of Rhode’s pumping grip, Malcolm’s need to dive into a kiss became almost a desperation. Except Rhode probably wasn’t going to allow that. Distractions and shit. But all that energy building and building within him needed to go somewhere. It was filling him to the brim, fighting to break past his seams.
As Rhode kept going, working her hand around him, Malcolm directed all that desire to his own self, making him burn even more. Despite himself, an irresistible urge stirred in him to map the contours of her body. Now he gave himself permission to surrender further. He gathered Rhode’s skirt up to her hips and let himself admire her wide expanse of thigh, so alluring and supple, the way they gave under his touch. And still, his faint pets over her thighs seemed like a big, fat lie.
“Focus,” Rhode ordered.
Even as he fought a huff of laughter, Malcolm knew he was lighting up pink. If that was her reaction to a lie, what if he’d shown her the truth?
“You do know I have ADHD,” he said this time. A true statement—and total bullshit.
“Let me help, then,” said Rhode. “Focus.” Immediately, she stroked the underside of his cock, jolting Malcolm with an immediate whip of pleasure. “Feel that?” she said. She repeated the motion, absolutely delighting to see him struggle. “Focus. Right there. Only there.”
Rhode kept at it. Malcolm couldn’t keep up. She talked him through it, putting blinders on him with her words, feeding him with more arousal than he could handle. More than he knew how to hold onto.
He could grip her thighs, but with the way Rhode was unrelentingly, no matter how gently, stroking over the ridge of him, the outflux just wasn’t enough.
Malcolm tried changing his stance, even wound Rhode’s legs around him, but Rhode had no plans of stopping her victory laps. As if one hand wasn’t enough, she slipped her other in Malcolm’s pants to graze a finger down his sack and cradle his balls.
At that, his overflowing pleasure began its escape, broken free from his body in something like a whimper.
The faintest smirk formed on Rhode’s lips. “That’s what I like to hear. I’m going to remember you looking like this.”
Malcolm wondered for how long. Ten, fifty, or two hundred years on, would she remember how she held him in her hand—the grip she used, the size of him, their moments of tandem? Would she remember how, as he was lazily fondling her, she got him so fucking weak? Would she remember how she was steadily carrying him to the heavens with the way she was caressing and jerking and squeezing him with every committed stroke until—
Until all of a sudden, she stopped, eyes blown wide.
“Oh Fates, I almost forgot!” Rhode said.
It wasn’t difficult for Malcolm to silence his complaints when Rhode was smiling so excitedly.
“If you want, we could use this,” she said. In her hand was a silicone pair of parallel rings, with a mound attached that definitely stored a motor. “It’s new, of course. It’ll also help me,” she said to his hopefully not visibly dumbstruck face.
“Wow. I— I thought— I mean— When you said it’d—” Malcolm thought, if anything, she would’ve brought a vibrator. That would’ve been the obvious thing. A… cock ring—WHAT THE FUCK? And was that second larger ring for his balls? —was… It also looked like it’d fit a little too big?
“Only if you want,” said Rhode.
Uhhh.
Malcolm felt the shame creep up his spine again. But, of course, even this was a no brainer. “As long as you put it on. My hands are very busy at the moment.” His knuckles grazed under silk as he visited her bare ass, more than happy to have an excuse to limit any participation in what felt like such an outrageous event.
Rhode gave him a mischievous smile. “I wanted to anyway.”
And surely the novelty of this was a reason to say yes.
It was as though it was his first time again, with every shred of awkwardness torn from him and all of the pleasure offered. All it felt like was making another memory with Rhode—one that he would never make with anyone else.
Rhode voiced another of her parentheticals: “Let me know if anything’s uncomfortable. Promise?”
It sounded naughty. Like even that would’ve been their dirty, little secret.
“Promise,” he said.
Gone was any of that unnecessary embarrassment. Now he was just excited to venture again into untrodden territory with Rhode.
Malcolm couldn’t help it. He had to kiss her. And he was having so much fun with the simple pleasure of her lips, until her smile broke it off.
“I need to see,” said Rhode. She looked at him again, lighting up in a satisfied smile when he nodded.
He felt like he’d pleased her.
Squirming even more from having too many eyes on his parts, Malcolm studied Rhode instead. He watched the breaths in her chest. He remembered what she looked like under her clothes. Imagined her naked form quivering with gratification. He could’ve sworn her inhales sharpened when she trailed a hand down his chest to his erection, taking her sweet time with his body.
Malcolm held his breath and gulped as Rhode really got down to business. After producing a little container of lube, she used a finger to spread it around the inner part of the silicone rings.
“So handy,” Malcolm said, managing to speak in spite of his still bewildered state.
He hoped the strokes and squeezes he’d given her ass had covered up his frequent blinking and loud breathing.
Rhode had a proud glint in her momentary glance. “At work, they call me resourceful,” she said matter-of-factly as she now worked to slick him up.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” he said, earning him one of her smiles.
He was so grateful she hadn’t made him ask for this.
It was absolutely insane. She could easily get him—them—a brand new sex toy out of the blue, but he still refused to replace the underwear of hers that he’d torn. Not that he ever would. But perhaps he could pay her back in other ways. Like now.
With careful fingers, Rhode fit his delicates snugly through their respective rings. It thankfully wasn’t too late to do it painfully, and although the silicone wasn’t stretchy like he’d imagined, he risked only a little discomfort (and thanked his lucky stars that the toy hadn’t been as cold as he’d expected). To his surprise, he felt an extension of some sort, an inch long—maybe two—that jutted out towards his tailbone. It must’ve connected to the larger ring. He presumed it helped the toy stay in place. How sensible.
“There,” said Rhode.
Malcolm sneaked only a peek, catching the startling image of himself wrapped up in her fingers and her toy, and promptly flitted his eyes back to her face.
When he told her he was good, the tiny scrunch of her brows eased—and then she winked and replied, “Yeah, you are.”
Malcolm almost glared, almost huffed, almost had the mind to shut this shit down.
But because Rhode was resourceful and attentive and had probably wanted this enough to have thought this all through, she materialized a towel onto his chair and asked him to sit there.
Malcolm’s jeans were now down to his knees. How and when Rhode had gotten them there, he had no clue, but before he could fully squirm at how it felt to be de-panted before someone, he sat his bare ass on her towel, finding it cushy and comfortable.
Rhode climbed onto him, in what room his chair had left. As tiny as the bubble they’d shared had already been, she was even further into his space now, legs astride his own and ass hovering over his thighs. He couldn’t figure out how she was comfortable still wearing her heels.
Silky fabric tickled Malcolm’s stomach as Rhode fanned out the skirt of her dress over their thighs. It was more comfortable this way—as if, perhaps when hidden, their actions weren’t so scandalous.
“You have a ridiculously big chair,” said Rhode.
“The fidgeting necessitates it.”
“I think it’s for me,” she whispered sneakily.
“Yeah, I totally knew this was gonna happen.”
It was only because Malcolm was holding onto Rhode that she didn’t slip back as she laughed. She didn’t seem concerned with her balance, which was just annoying—but maybe also flattering? Malcolm split the difference and went with amusing.
In any case, he accepted responsibility and pushed off the floor to give Rhode ample space. The chair rolled away from his cluttered desk of her pens and his pencils, of her lists of drama-shifting gods and his scrawled notes on the first half of Clarisse’s latest security update. All so out of scope right now.
Malcolm swiveled the chair until they were out of view, lest he subject Rhode to more of his inattentive tendencies.
Except… the crumpled sweatshirt on his desk snagged Rhode’s elbow and fell to the floor.
“Oops! I’ll get it,” said Rhode, reaching towards the fallen pullover.
“What? No,” he said, “you’re gonna topple over. I’m closer to the ground.”
She couldn’t argue there and finally laid her hands on shoulders to hold on. Malcolm took a moment to enjoy her touch before inching his way to his sweatshirt and flinging it to his desk. She didn’t have to know.
A second parting with his sweatshirt, the towel under his bare ass, the constraining pants at his knees… They were a startling reminder of his nearly nude state. The thought made his heart drop to his gut, but for only a second, because right before his eyes, separated by just the fabric of her dress, Rhode was evidently touching herself.
His nerves may not have liked it, but Malcolm knew it wasn’t a problem. It was 7 PM. This was a windowless office, blessed by the god of secrets. This room was the safest, most secluded part of all of camp. And Rhode was sharing with him the cover of her dress, under which she was now curling a hand around his erection.
It was crazy to think—and gods, so amazing—that she had such a one-track mind that she couldn’t even stand three days without fucking him. It was a silly thought, but that didn’t negate the facts. Last time had been Sunday. Today was Wednesday.
Rhode appeared so focused right now. Malcolm longed to get there with her, feeling so behind and guilty and frustrated and jealous that it was never as easy for him.
So what a gift it was to have Rhode sink around him, robbing him of his sprawling thoughts. All he knew right now was Rhode and her snug, wet heat treating him to rapture. And just when he’d come back, he took off once more as Rhode reached between them to switch on a button.
“Oh,” Malcolm groaned. A layer of consciousness had left him for good.
Fuck, the vibrations were unearthly. And holy Zeus, they were everywhere. The delicious buzz, light as it might have been, spread way beyond the motor between him and Rhode. The pulses traveled all throughout the toy, stimulating everything from his balls to the base of his cock. Better yet—and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t put it together before—there was another motor massaging the distance from his balls to his taint. At a higher speed, he knew he could lose it.
“W—” Malcolm held back a wait, full well knowing Rhode would interpret that in the least generous way, because Rhode was Rhode. “Whoa. Isn’t this supposed to help you?”
Rhode flashed him a roguish look as she started canting her hips. “It is,” she said. “It really turns me on to hear you complain and beg.”
Malcolm couldn’t help but laugh, even as lust fired paths through his limbs. “That sounds so fucked up.”
“I heard it as I said it,” Rhode said with a grimace before chuckling along with him. “It’s still the best.”
The best. Something involving him was her best.
Malcolm felt giddy and fuzzy at that and suddenly nervous for how intently—how expectantly—Rhode was looking at him.
You want me to complain and beg? he thought.
Malcolm wasn’t going to. He didn’t know how. It was also difficult to think with his cock enveloped, his balls hugged, and grundle attended to with absolutely no reprieve.
Or maybe…
Are you already close again?
No.
You are getting there, right?
No.
Then he finally had it—and let irritation seep out in his words. “You really couldn’t have picked another toy?”
Rhode’s radiant eyes and that smile at the edge of her lips made him barrel through the gates of his hesitation and even pick up more derision on the way.
“You couldn’t have let me eat you out first?” he said.
Seriously, he deserved props for not feeling hopelessly awkward saying such things.
“Oh, you always get to that anyway, don’t you?” she said.
Wow, this was his reputation, huh?
“What if I don’t let you this time?” said Rhode.
Malcolm huffed. “I can complain for an eternity. But I’m not begging.”
Rhode’s lips widened to a smile as she panted atop him, hips ever in motion. “You always get to that anyway, too, though.” Then she put her lips to his ear—and he didn’t know if this was another of their parenthetical conversations or if it was something to keep in confidence or if this was just her rubbing it in—and said, “And it gets me off so much when you do.”
Warm shivers ran through Malcolm’s insides, and he felt all shades of red once more, yet he couldn’t help but feel proud he could satisfy her exactly as she liked—and even somewhat touched somehow that they now shared yet another secret.
Malcolm was drowning in Rhode’s accusations now, but she wasn’t done with dunking him under. “Did you forget?” she said. “Or were you so lost in your pleasure those times you were begging that you didn’t realize you were?”
Was it possible to get redder?
Infuriation propelled Malcolm to get back at Rhode. All he could do was give her more. He clung to her waist, securing her in place to buck his hips up. The chair jumped on its wheels. And again. And again. Even as Rhode’s gasps grew louder and the toy droned ever more, he couldn’t be bothered to care about the noise of their fucking. Malcolm’s mind was racing in fury, wanting to beat Rhode at her game. But he couldn’t think how to with his body so uncooperative and thankful.
“Okay, my thighs are sore,” Rhode said with a sigh, even as she kept rocking her hips. “Can you—?
Amid the pleasure she granted him, Malcolm managed a scoff. “Who was the one who just worked out? Yeah, I saw you.”
He granted her wish anyway, holding her by the fleshy globes of her ass to surge into her, how and when he liked it.
With Rhode having given him the reins, her body felt even more like heaven. Like a third home. Like an exhilarating, luscious refuge from all tribulations. Gods, he wanted to claim this space inside her. Let it be only him she’d give this honor to.
If only he could stand to be that disgustingly possessive. It would’ve felt (it did feel) so right and good, like they belonged here like this, Rhode around him and him inside her…
And what a stupid, stupid thought.
Malcolm’s own self was refuting that Rhode should’ve been here and was yet finding more satisfaction that she was anyway. Maybe it was because of it. Because they weren’t supposed to. Because maybe this was wrong.
His frenetic, buzzed up nerves told him no, to keep going and never stop. This thing with Rhode may have been born by accident, but neither could deny it was growing into less and less of a surprise, and there was nothing more flattering than the fact that every step they had taken to get here had been their choice.
“I know you saw me,” said Rhode. Her words grew shaky as his speed picked up further. “And I know that you know. I looked right at you, long enough to imagine you picking me up like our last couple times. That’s how eyes work, Malcolm.”
Malcolm almost faltered, utterly stunned that she would just say that. It was even more astonishing it could have even been true. There she had been in that crowd, surrounded by at least a dozen other eligible men, all while she focused on him. Imagined him. Them. His hands on her. His strength holding her up. With her legs wrapped around him, sinking around him. Caught in that visual in the middle of the day with people around her.
A more functional part of his mind took note of her admission. So she liked being picked up, huh? Liked being held like this? Liked being handled?
“I like your other kind of complaining better,” said Rhode.
Malcolm stopped for a sec to huff a laugh. Just how damn ridiculous— “You are so irritating. Did you know that?”
“And yet…”
Rhode took advantage of his stillness to grind onto that vibrator between them. Malcolm instinctively helped her, causing a little mewl to come out of her.
And she was smiling so widely again. “And you called me predictable. We both know what you are, Malcolm.”
“You really think you have me all figured out,” he said.
How absurd was it—if after twelve years, Drew thought she knew almost nothing, how could Rhode in half a month presume to know so much?
How idiotic was it that he almost achingly wanted to believe Rhode knew him anyway? But no. The possibility was so threatening and exhilarating and soothing, it couldn’t possibly be true.
“What do you suppose I think you are?” she said, looking like she could laugh, even as she was losing her breath.
It aggravated Malcolm so much to see her smile like this—so aware, so unfocused on their goal.
“You think,” he said, “I’m submissive.”
And surely his thrusts were proving the opposite, throwing them both against the walls of oblivion—enough for the damn chair to jump—so he could lead them both to break apart.
Rhode’s words were strained. “It’d be easier if you let yourself think you were. But it’s more fun like this.”
“Doesn’t mean I am,” he said.
She really struggled to speak now, failing once, then twice as he refused to relent. Then any wicked amusement he got from silencing her crumbled under the irrepressible burden of feeling like an asshole.
“No,” Rhode said once he slowed, “because you’re better than that, aren’t you?” She rocked her hips again in a steady beat, letting him find and match her rhythm in a duet of an addictive, almost intolerable pleasure. “If I want something, you’ll already come running. I don’t think a submissive person really does that. Or, well, maybe you’re the proactive kind,” she pondered.
“I?” Malcolm said. “I come—? That’s you. You’re the one who comes to me.”
“And why do you suppose I do?” said Rhode, making her hips roll even more purposefully in their shared cadence.
“You can’t just flip it like that!”
“Can’t I?” Rhode said, like it didn’t matter or didn’t count that she was so wet around him. “See, you do whatever you want in the most obstinate way. It just so happens that you want what I want.”
Her words got a rage boiling under his skin—a fury so vicious, Malcolm had to hold back the way he was gripping her ass. “I don’t just fucking do whatever I want. That’s repulsive,” he gritted out. “Are you seriously insinuating—”
Rhode cut him off as she pressed onto his shoulders, pushing him back onto the chair. The ache of Malcolm’s worn muscles began to sting so delightfully and wretchedly.
“And in all of our times together, what have you possibly wanted,” she spat, “that would’ve been too vile to do to me, hmm?”
When Malcolm stilled in silence, Rhode worked her thighs again. It stirred him up again to see her—to feel her—taking him like this. Gods, she looked so hot when she was so angry. So powerful.
“No comment?” said Rhode.
Malcolm put his brain back together—not an easy feat with those rings and motors. “I wouldn’t—”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” she said.
“But it’s not a coincidence.” It felt so personal to say—more personal than Malcolm had meant. “You say it like it’s a coincidence,” he said, so urgently compelled to defend himself. “Why would it ever be a coincidence?”
“Thank you,” said Rhode through a breath.
Her anger had faded so instantly, but it only enraged Malcolm more—so much so, his hands completely flew off her.
“Why the fuck would you thank someone for that?” he said.
“It’s just acknowledgement and encouragement!” Rhode snapped. “Why do you make such a fuss out of everything? I already told you, I know.” She began moving again. “Get your hands back on me,” she said, hushed.
When Malcolm followed, Rhode took the opportunity to turn up the device again. Nothing in the world could’ve stopped that noise out of his throat. In the clutches of desire, he could no longer hold onto his anger or self. Everything was so far out of reach. All he could do was heed Rhode’s demand and explore the delights of her curves.
“I know what you are,” said Rhode, sounding almost victorious. She held him yet closer as his hips remembered their task. “So, we can do this now. We can do this some other weekend. I’ll be nice, and you can keep being your bullheaded self.”
“You really have those flipped.”
“You used to be quieter. You’re fun when you’re shy,” Rhode said with a laugh. “But this is fun, too.”
She laughed again, even through his concerted efforts to get her sighing and gasping.
There was so little chance he’d ever best her. Malcolm felt it so clearly now: a part of him didn’t want to win, even as more of him opposed the thought of giving up.
And there was Rhode, taking the liberty he’d given her to touch his face and trace her thumb over his lips. The distinct fumes of nail polish he inhaled made it all even more annoying, yet Malcolm couldn’t bring himself to tell Rhode no. He didn’t even want her to stop claiming him, to stop choosing him. Somehow this needling itch stoked up something needful in him. He just didn’t want to stop. On and on he went, sprinting with her to chase their highs.
Only when Rhode let out a moan in her gasp and he surfaced from the drowning of his consciousness did Malcolm comprehend that none of what she’d said had been an insult. That her most biting, lashed-out remarks to him were nothing other than the highest of compliments turned him all weak and warm. He was doing everything right, and she knew it. ‘I know what you are.’
A thick, invisible barrier between them had come down—and he was going to get the most of it. Was going to kiss her, but she was breathing heavily. Was going to get her hair out of her face, but she had wanted his hands on her body. Was going to set her on the table, but she’d asked for the chair.
It was entirely possible Rhode understood all of that.
Malcolm was dying to give more, and with so much annoyance for Rhode in store, it was easy for him to borrow a morsel for this very moment.
“I can’t fucking touch you. Is this even working for you?” he bit out, sounding vicious to his own ears.
He didn’t miss that newly lit spark in her eyes before they fluttered shut. Rhode’s eyes were hazy, but she was conscious enough to turn up her toy even more. Amid her own grunt, his restrained moan of surprise came out, and he held back his urge to beg for just that little more that would have sent him over the cliff.
It was ludicrous. Rhode, whether she’d admit it or not, was just as obstinate. Maybe even more.
What a curious wonder it was. She was so unlike that image he’d drawn of her for that tapestry—that goddess looking past any onlooker, occupying herself with who knew what, minding her own busy business. Well, now here Rhode was, right before him, in his lap, making him her business.
She was here and she wasn’t letting up. Even as she struggled to keep her eyes open, she trained them on his face just to watch him as she had before and as she would do again because she believed he was good.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. Come on, Malcolm.”
She was greedy. She was generous. She was kind and so mean.
Malcolm writhed and floundered, unable to fight the torrent of arousal taking over his whole self when Rhode was convincing him that right here, right now, the only thing that mattered was his own climax. It wasn’t difficult to believe when she was looking at him so expectantly. His pleasure and control was at their crosshairs, ready to be combusted and blasted apart, and as Rhode shattered him into a million fragments of bliss, Malcolm felt nothing less than whole.
He laid there, boneless in his adrenaline rush, and Rhode kissed him and touched him—and frickin’ rode him—like there wasn’t a thing in the world more captivating than him.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
They didn’t stop. They didn’t need to, not when Malcolm was far from done. The obstructing rings were keeping him from blowing his entire load, and that one little death of his—if it was already one—just wasn’t enough for Rhode, what with the way she was going. Perhaps it wasn’t enough for Malcolm either.
His heart was ticking, his skin was burning, his veins must’ve been laced with what could’ve only been C-4. Maybe Semtex. He was trapped in a pressure cooker, so unsustainable and destructive, it couldn’t have been anything other than a bomb, trigger-ready for detonation.
So why wouldn’t it go off?
As Rhode took and took, rocking up and down his length, drenching him and heating him so good, his release fought valiantly to get through the tight constriction. It felt like forever. It was enough to have to hold back a scream. If it weren’t for Rhode’s presence, he would’ve called it ages ago, no matter the disappointment, no matter the frustration. This lethal pair of too much pressure and too little control was downright unconscionable.
But Rhode was here, right here holding him, making sure he wasn’t facing this alone (even if she was the very one responsible for all this turmoil). Gods, she was here, and torturous as she was, it was everything Malcolm wanted right now. She was gyrating in his lap like a belly dancer, painting his body in her—first with her lipstick stains, and now with her sweat and her slick.
His body said keep me. His conscience ignored such brainlessness.
Rhode was taking him anyway. Her lips claimed Malcolm once again, and even as he retaliated with tongue and teeth, he couldn’t win. Her torrent of pleasure had embedded itself in him, down to his very atoms. He had no way—no desire—to fend her off.
Malcolm gave her every last bit of him he could give, letting her ride him as her dark-as-night mane fell over him and their thighs heated with a sweaty friction. Her waves were bouncing in his face. Falling strands were inciting shivers over his skin. One long hair got on his tongue, and why did that have to happen?
Seriously, if Rhode had possessed the foresight to just tie her damn hair, he wouldn’t now have to fish her hair out of his mouth mid-climax or dodge her strands or pull them back behind her shoulders or hold in his grumblings over these inefficient nuisances that were so stupendously easy to prevent.
Yet now that it was clear why Rhode was coming to him, and now that she had shown him again that she would give him everything he could ask for and more, Malcolm promised he would reciprocate in kind. The least he could do was not complain.
Seconds—or lifetimes—went by with no relief. Rhode still had him dangling from the precipice. Ever and ever closer to the end he yearned for, Malcolm’s face had grown warm. His ears must’ve been red (perhaps partly from the filthy noises escaping the cover of Rhode’s skirt?).
All the heat and frustration coursing through his limbs were going to tear him to pieces before he could fall again—if he didn’t go feral first.
That was a lie. Everything Malcolm wanted to do just proved his own damn self wrong. He had given up his gropes on Rhode’s ass to collect her hair off her pretty face. Even as he wound her thick, long waves around his hand, he traded off the urge to yank, letting himself only grip the handful of hair and press his lips to her collar.
With his mouth still busy and Rhode still mercilessly rocking her hips on him, Malcolm was running out of air. At this point, he was hardly able to do more than brush his lips over her bronzed skin. So compelled to keep kissing her, Malcolm might have given Rhode his last breaths.
He fought his body just to lay down more pecks and nibbles, marking a trail where no one but he could reach right now—all as evil flashes lit up his mind to slide Rhode off him, turn her around, bend her over his desk, and steal her breath with a sharp pull of the hair still wrapped around his hand.
Flashes tore through Malcolm’s mind, playing out the times Rhode had pulled at his own hair. The little bite she had once requested. The push she had given him ‘til his back reached her bed. But even in Malcolm’s haze of lust, he knew in his bones that if Rhode wanted it rough, he must’ve been the last person she would’ve come to.
Or… was he the first?
That was no way to think, he scolded himself. Hadn’t she just admitted that she liked him because he would never dare do such things?
“What do you want? What can I do?” he murmured, nosing along Rhode’s shoulder.
Rhode kept grinding against that buzzing vibrator attached to him, but managed to speak. “Lean back. Let me watch,” she said. “I can’t fuck you properly like this.”
Malcolm fell back and let go of Rhode’s hair. True to her word, she began riding him good and proper, even while she cursed her weak thighs. Her eyes blazed all over his face and naked form as she kept going. It could’ve been five seconds. It could’ve been a minute. With nothing to distract him from Rhode’s warm, sliding grip, Malcolm finally cracked, with the last of his release finally freed from its constraints.
Soon enough, Rhode was circling her hips again and shuddering against him, and her breaths were turning more erratic than he’d ever heard; it was her turn to lose control. Desperately, she held him tight through her little noises, entwining herself so tightly around him like she was falling to her death. Her hair fell over him once more, blocking the light until Malcolm’s world was enrobed by that flowery familiarity.
Reaching up, Malcolm planted kisses on Rhode’s neck and down to the inked shark at her shoulder. And just as her muscles relaxed the barest bit, he pressed her by the ass into the vibrations torturing them both. Her hips were shaking even more now—and she had nowhere to turn with her legs splayed at his sides, no chance to back away from the motor attacking her clit.
“Shit, you’re—” Rhode gasped.
So wickedly ardent, Malcolm held Rhode closer as she held a scream in her throat. “One more?”
She was trembling, even in his grip, making pathetic sounds she couldn’t contain—but she didn’t back away. Rhode hung on like a bull rider, desperately holding onto him, panting into his face, swearing and squealing until she shattered at last.
“Okay, okay,” Rhode said finally, whimpering even after Malcolm let go. “Fuuck.” Under her disheveled hair and gleaming eyes, her smile was like a laugh. “Always the overachiever, you. Oh, Fates. I can never do that alone.”
She didn’t even bother holding onto him when she leaned back to switch off the vibrations. Didn’t even give him a warning. But Malcolm caught on and kept her from falling.
“Hold on a minute?” said Rhode. “I just need…” She came back into their bubble until her forehead rested on the backrest of the chair. “A minute.”
Malcolm let her have it. Sure, his thighs were going to get antsy from her weight, and, sure, he kinda wanted a little space from all this stickiness and sweat. The silicone was also feeling more unyielding and unwelcome by the second, and now that Rhode was practically hugging him, her metal armlet was going to leave an indent on his achy shoulder. But Malcolm didn’t let those foolish complaints deprive him of this moment. Nestled against her pillowy breasts, he took this occasion as a chance to savor Rhode’s signature scent. It was like getting another high.
Mindlessly enough, he exchanged comforting, little rubs on Rhode’s thighs for those caresses on his arms. All of Malcolm’s focus had to be devoted to matching his inhales with her exhales, because there just wasn’t enough room to breathe comfortably. Every now and then, he would still twitch inside her. And every now and then, she would still flutter around him. No one had ever gotten this much in his space like Rhode did, and he had surely never taken up someone else’s space like he was doing to Rhode now. He couldn’t imagine how anything else could’ve felt more intimate.
It felt almost unfair to Malcolm that his most personal, private moments ever were shared with someone like Rhode. Logistically, he realized, it made sense. He had never let himself do this before, just sit still inside someone even with protection. Of course such moments had been only with Rhode. (Whatever that spelled out about his future, he didn’t feel the need to consider now.)
This... intimacy... if that was still what he wanted to call it, was also starting to feel sloppier and grosser by the second. Yet perhaps still needing another minute, Rhode hadn’t yet done her trick to clean them off.
Fuck, he needed another shower.
Fuck, did he even care?
“You good?” Murmured into her hair, his words felt like another of their parentheticals. Or, Malcolm thought, perhaps this was their real conversation after all that play. He was beginning to think he’d never figure out which frequency was their actual default.
“Yeah,” Rhode whispered back. “How was it?”
“Um. Different. Kinda insane. But good. Definitely good,” he said, and added, “I’m not just saying that.”
“I figured you’d be up for something new. You’re the type of person who’d like trying new things, aren’t you?”
A laugh threatened to bubble out of Malcolm. He wouldn’t have lied though. He kinda liked that idea. Except he was the type of spoilsport to care about truth. “What—” the hell “—makes you say that?”
Rhode’s voice was muffled near Malcolm’s ear. “Isn’t there some correlation between intellect and openness to new experiences?” She said it like she had expected him to know that—which, yes, of course he did, but...
“Well, I like learning new things,” he said, figuring that surely, there was still a limit to how outlandish and extraneous those experiences were.
When Rhode leaned back to look at him, she finally held on—to his arms. She hadn’t yet stopped caressing his skin.
Malcolm did his best to ignore the impending antsiness of his numb thighs, paid little attention to how Rhode could obviously feel he was softening inside her and starting to slip out as she moved, cared not that the ends of her hair was still tickling his chest. Still lightheaded from orgasms (and, he was starting to think, also post-workout hunger), he focused only on her blue-green irises peering into his beneath her long blinks.
“Thank you for letting me teach you,” she said.
Malcolm decided then that there was no need to be embarrassed, nor even to feel inadequate. He settled deeper into his desk chair, accepting his fate that he would just chill with Rhode for as long as he could take it, cramped up together in this chair as if the rest of his office were lava.
The eventual rise of Rhode’s hips only brought more attention to the mucky mess of fluids beneath her skirt, but gradually, the reminder that Malcolm wouldn’t have to put up with these discomforts for much longer grew into a regret that Rhode would have to leave.
For now, Malcolm held back a frown, determined to feel only the cozy comfort of Rhode’s thighs and the needling delight of Rhode smearing her lipstick stains over his chest while the clock ticked behind her.
Geez. 7:43 PM meant 12:43 in Atlantis.
But Rhode did want more, and despite Malcolm’s adoring, silent promises, he couldn’t give her everything. The utter relief on her face from having just gotten her third orgasm had turned to a very flattering disappointment that she couldn’t make him come another time, too (fuck, what an incredible day), but Malcolm assured her he was just worn out from exercise. One long one had already been plenty.
With throats cleared and limbs untangled (and a moment of hobbling on his tingling legs like a baby giraffe), he and Rhode removed the toy from his bits and wiped her lipstick off him.
As they exchanged his water bottle, Malcolm’s mind peppered the silence with three ways to ask her when she’d want to do this again. He went with none of them.
But when Rhode dared to thank him, just like last time—just a straight up, simple “thank you”—Malcolm found the courage. Yet before he could even utter a sound, Rhode was filling up the air, telling him, “I was so relieved you were free today. No other day was going to work.”
He wondered for how long she meant. He didn’t ask.
“Which one of them told you I was free?” he said. “Who do you schedule this with? Percy?”
Rhode made a face as she nodded. “Sometimes, Annabeth actually. I can’t believe they’re actually trying to set us up.” For a moment, she stared into space, as if musing over the idea—the ridiculous idea that their siblings were even trying. “You do know they are, right?”
“I’m not an idiot. Of course I know that,” he muttered. “It is so weird. I mean, it’s... convenient, but...”
“Oh, it’s deluded,” Rhode said with a chuckle. “But we don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules or expectations but our own, wouldn’t you say?”
When he threw away their tissues by the door, her gaze wandered to his ass oh so shamelessly. Then once he’d returned to her, her eyes streaked across his bare chest and arms, even as she took swigs of his water. (Gods damn, he felt so proud.)
Malcolm found it hard to want to put his shirt back on right now. It seemed only fair to let her look when he, too, was feasting his eyes. His excuse to remain shirtless came when Rhode handed him his water bottle. His hands were full, okay?
“So… when d’you wanna do this again?” he said, and tried not to cower or blush at the sly look she gave him. “Come on, do we really need them to keep buttting in?”
“You have a point,” Rhode said.
Only now did Malcolm reach for his shirt. Rhode was already busy cleaning herself up and fixing her hair. When she began untangling a spiral earring caught in her hair, Malcolm had the urge to offer assistance.
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
Ah damn, she already managed to unstick all the strands.
Rhode began yawning then, and Malcolm felt so inconsiderate for having asked.
Could be earlier if this is too late. Maybe 4:30?
He bit his tongue.
“My schedule’s filling up,” said Rhode. She stared into space. “The deal is occupying me this week... Some unrelated conflict to mediate... The laundering thing... So many meetings...”
“The preparation for the meetings,” Malcolm said, getting a grunt of agreement from her. He began silently running through his own list.
“Let me see,” said Rhode. After rummaging through her bag to find her phone, she began tapping away. “Let’s see what Galene has for me. Oh. I’m supposed to visit a school tomorrow. Okay. And then I have the jobs program after. Lunch with some potential signatories. The same sort of thing the day after...”
“And the bank thing. You said it was on Friday.”
Rhode looked at him. In a rare moment, she blew out a breath, stewing in a silence that sounded like a groan.
Relaxed, she was not, and yet she also appeared... more at ease? As if just looking stressed was perhaps less of a stress.
For a heavenly second, Malcolm imagined kissing away her worries and burdens while she griped to him about her work. Something other than maintaining her princess composure. It looked like a back ache.
“I... I don’t know,” said Rhode as she gracelessly plopped her phone back into her bag, “but... soon? A busy woman still has needs. And... it is easy. Like this.” She yawned again.
Easier than going to Thaumas or someone else in Atlantis? This is easier?
“I presume it’s the same for you?” Rhode said.
Malcolm’s lips curled into a smile. “I live in a fucking summer camp. With kids.”
Rhode laughed. “Why am I asking?” Then she pouted for a half second. “Oh, poor you.”
After erupting in another laugh, she was kissing him again, and Malcolm didn’t know why, but he was kissing her back. He especially didn’t know why her hands on his hips were getting closer to the band of his sweatpants.
Against her lips, he breathed a laugh. “I told you, that’s not gonna work right now.”
“I know,” Rhode said, with one of those trademark mischievous looks. “It’s for when you think about me next.”
In their sanctuary housed in his office walls, Malcolm chased after her lips, while she chased after his cock.
“You’ll remember?” Rhode said, lingering by his mouth.
Malcolm didn’t answer with anything other than another smile his stupid face couldn’t hold back, and Rhode didn’t push him to respond, thankfully.
When he bid her a good night, she wished him—maybe more prescribed him—sweet dreams, then disappeared in a fog.
A snaking wisp of gray lingered in the air until it dissipated all too soon before Malcolm’s eyes. The room felt colder without it.
Slumping into his chair, Malcolm ruffled through Clarisse’s security update and trained his unruly eyes to try to catch any missteps.
The rest of the first page from where he had left off was a ten minute battle, but after the office pantry provided Malcolm with a hefty chickpea salad for dinner and a shot of nectar for dessert, the subsequent pages became less of a slog. Clarisse and Chiron had already done the work for him, clearly planning for every kind of monster attack and godly conflict that could wreak havoc upon his beloved city. Still, Malcolm skimmed through the pages of the report in search of errors and oversights. But oh, who was he kidding? Of course they had done at least as good a job as he ever could.
In a jiffy, he cleared half the stuff on his desk for tomorrow and sped to Cabin Six. It was still just 9:30 PM. Sophie would be waiting for him to go over her newly scoped out self-directed studies, and Alicia would be tucked in bed soon for her bedtime story. Hopefully, everyone else had sorted out their stuff.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Rhode was right. It was easy. It felt pretty much like a guarantee at this point.
So when Alicia got sick on Thursday, Malcolm took extra care not to catch her cold. It helped a ton that, since Percy was helping clean up some far off area of the Atlantic, Annabeth had the bright idea to move Alicia to the Poseidon cabin. The plan? Alicia would rest in one of the several unused beds in the calm quiet of Cabin Three, where Annabeth could work and watch over her. It would limit contagion, too.
If Malcolm were honest, Annabeth was really taking liberties with what she could do in Poseidon’s domain. Yet she was insistent (even a little defensive?) that Poseidon was certainly not going to mind housing a sick child, even one of Athena’s. Whom did Malcolm take him for?
Well, excuse him.
In moments like these, Malcolm remembered that Annabeth now—for a while, actually—had her own, separate family. It wasn’t personal, he knew that. Marriages loosened ties to old family members. That was what research said. Why would he have expected Annabeth to have been different? That bitter truth had slowly come to fruition over the years, even before the upcoming nuptials. Annabeth talked to him less. Answered fewer calls. Went on fewer Cabin Six field trips. Played fewer board games.
It wasn’t entirely difficult to let go of that selfishness. It just made sense that she had more people to dote on her and make exceptions for her.
And since today’s exception was benefiting Malcolm, he couldn’t complain too much. For the first time in months, Alicia was off his hands for a whole day. Thank Poseidon, because Malcolm needed to work longer nights covering the work Adila hadn’t done when she’d been ill, and for once he would be able to concentrate without the guilt of child abandonment. The sheer amount he got done after turning off his Pick up Alicia alarms was astounding.
Yet, Malcolm would’ve been lying if he said that had been the only new factor boosting his productivity. Despite the constant surprise visits he had received from Rhode, perhaps it was better that he never really knew when she was coming around. Her rewards were looming over him, spurring him to reach his targets. He’d do good work and clear his schedule, then they’d fuck.
Rhode could’ve been doing the same, he figured. After caring for everyone and their problems, was she letting loose and getting her fix when she was with him? Was she finally able to put herself first when they were alone together? Did she want him to do the same? Was that what this was for? He was so down for that. He would gladly reward her, too—maybe with less arguing next time. (The wrong kind, at least.)
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Rhode’s “soon” ended up being that very Friday, and as luck would have it, Malcolm was already wearing his best chinos and an eye-popping work shirt (blue this time).
He ended up seeing Rhode three times that day, first after he had wrapped up his teaching and headed to the dining pavilion for a snack.
Under the glare of the sun, he had almost missed Rhode sitting there at a table in the shade in another of her floral print dresses, eating lamb and a legit parsley tabbouleh, the worst of all salads, with Dionysus (who had his hand around one of Pollux’s non-alcoholic beers) and Hestia (who was sipping what looked to be a tea). Malcolm had only noticed Rhode upon his double take hearing Hestia and Dionysus arguing about Fornax and Despoina’s most recent culinary dispute.
Then it was in the crafts center. While Malcolm worked away on airbags with Alicia and Leo, thinking he would enjoy Nyssa and Lou Ellen’s origami workshop that was due to start, he had heard heels click upon the tile floor and looked up to find Rhode and her florals. As Malcolm looked up from Alicia’s paper folding, Rhode had strolled in with Drew and three pink freddos. The duo passed Conrad and Grace in the corner (whom Malcolm was trying his best to let be), passed four tablefuls of campers, and joined Valentina’s station… right in front of Malcolm, Alicia, and Leo’s.
Malcolm was only paying half attention to Leo’s chattering beside him, but he heard enough to put together that Leo wanted to race to see who could be first to cut out three squares of nylon for Alicia. After chiding Leo’s lack of self-preservation for the nth time, Malcolm nonetheless felt compelled enough not to lose.
Rhode made it difficult. As she and Valentina pressed cheeks and hugged, Malcolm couldn’t help but think he knew exactly what that felt like. He had known it first.
When Valentina said she was ecstatic that Rhode had made it and Rhode replied that her evening work meeting today had fortunately been canceled, Malcolm was proud he had known which (a negotiation with a trade signatory) and why (the community had signed on a day earlier).
Then when Drew showed Valentina that Rhode had gifted her a pair of earrings, and Drew admitted to designing a floral dress she thought Rhode might’ve liked, Malcolm thought to himself that he had it better. Rhode herself had asked him—him—for clothing. Far more intimate clothing.
That no one else knew those things didn’t make them less true. (And that he still had no plans to give that article of clothing to her didn’t make it less of a compliment.)
As could be expected, Leo celebrated his victory and mocked Malcolm for his slowness. Malcolm merely continued cutting out the squares for Alicia, accepting the arm Leo threw around him while his taunts kept coming.
“I’m after precision,” Malcolm just said, fully knowing Leo wouldn’t have compromised his own.
Malcolm had so successfully minded his own business making that last nylon square that he hadn’t had the capacity to realize that Rhode would come by to say hi. Of course she would have; Alicia was here with him. And because Rhode was here now, apparently it meant that Drew had to look at him, too.
Three of Malcolm’s worlds were colliding and on the verge of spilling out his most closely guarded secrets. He hadn’t realized how much he had appreciated how separate the Fates had kept them all before. The panic in his mind was quelled somewhat with Drew opting out of the three-way collision to organize her supplies, yet his heart murmured anxiously as Rhode approached.
Upon Rhode’s greeting, Alicia stopped her work to say hi to her with a few sentences in German. Malcolm gave merely a one-worded hello. And Leo simply uttered a quick introduction before getting back to business.
Yeah, no, he didn’t. Up from its comfy resting spot on Malcolm’s shoulder, Leo’s arm fell in an instant. And, of course, his flirty side just had to come out, making Malcolm feel some type of way he didn’t want to dissect right now. There was no reason Leo had to hold onto Rhode’s hand those extra two seconds—the same hand that had taken a liking to feeling up Malcolm’s ass. The same hand whose fingers had once been in his mouth. Leo’s “Hello, hello” was also something he had so frequently drawled to Malcolm before. Why did he have to use it on Rhode? And why was Leo offering to make or repair anything for her, telling her he was her guy?
“How very handy!” said Rhode.
“That’s me,” Leo said. He didn’t wink, but he didn’t have to.
Malcolm thought to butt in with something about that Capture the Flag game, or Atlantis, or seating charts. Something Leo wouldn’t even begin to understand.
You’re really racking up those signatures, aren’t you?
Any new intel from Dionysus or Hestia we gotta account for?
Is Fornax up to some new shit?
He thought to say any of those things. He wasn’t going to.
“You’re a maker. An inventor,” Rhode said to Leo, earning her one of his delighted grins. “Can you sew, too?” she said. Her lips curled as Malcolm flashed her a look.
Thankfully, Leo didn’t seem to notice. “Naturally,” he said. “I’ve done tool belts, parachutes, you name it.”
“Hmm. Anything artsy or delicate?” Rhode said, with the briefest pause before her last word.
Even as the purples, yellows, whites, and greens of Rhode’s dress begged him to admire her, Malcolm refused to look up from his thoughtless origami folding. He wasn’t even sure right now what he was trying to create or test. But no one, not even Rhode, had to see the kick of satisfaction he got, knowing that even when he was wholly left out of the equation, Rhode just shoved him in.
Come to think of it, breakfast at Atlantis had been a pain in the ass—but it had been his and no one else’s here.
“You know, I do know someone who can,” Leo said matter-of-factly.
“Malcolm kann,” Alicia piped up. Her glaringly obvious sentence wasn’t quite enough for Malcolm to wish for his little sister to shut up, except even after she blew her nose on a tissue he handed her, she. Just. Kept. Blabbing. “Wie das große… ähm… Tapestry?”
Malcolm bored his eyes into the orange paper he couldn’t possibly fold anymore. He had to resort to unfolding and refolding, rotating and flipping. Weaving wasn’t sewing, he thought to point out, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge—let alone encourage—any discussion on a recent art piece Leo had known nothing about. Let him think it had been Alicia’s project.
For a moment, Malcolm could feel Rhode’s eyes on him, “Man kann ‘Wandteppich’ sagen,” she said to Alicia. “‘Wie den großen Wandteppich.’”
Alicia’s back straightened. “Ach so,” she said brightly, and seemingly repeated Rhode’s words. “Also, er lehrte mich das Weben.” Maybe it was just that Malcolm couldn’t understand, but the words tumbled from Alicia’s lips with a rapid-fire cadence he had almost never heard from her. It was a delight to watch. “Er hat mir das Nähen nicht beigebracht, aber er hat auch meine Lieblingshose repariert. Es gab ein Loch am Knie, weil ich gefallen war.” The biggest smile split her face as Rhode’s brows pinched with what looked like concern, but Alicia jabbered even more. “Und dann hat er das Loch mit einem Flicken abgedeckt, der die Form eines Herzens hatte...”
Seeing Alicia so giddy and chatty reminded Malcolm that he should’ve been grateful that, with Rhode, Alicia had some opportunity to practice her father’s language. What he shouldn’t have been was relieved that Leo wouldn’t have understood whatever it was she was yapping about. Then Malcolm just loathed himself more that he couldn’t even speak in her tongue. He hadn’t even set aside time to try learning it. How terrible of a brother was he?
Lost in reflection, it took a while for Malcolm to notice that Leo had stopped adoring Alicia and had started at some point to observe him. Malcolm’s watch told him he had forty seconds until Nyssa and Lou Ellen would start their workshop. Forty seconds to cut off Leo’s questioning.
Pretending not to have noticed, Malcolm whizzed his eyes around, away from Leo, inspected the exacto knife Leo had loaned to him, as if there had been anything off with it, and as soon as Alicia appeared to finish her latest sentence, he turned to face Rhode. “Are we supposed to work on Annabeth and Percy’s seating charts later?”
“I think so,” Rhode said, clearly trying to read him. “It’s six, yes?”
How many times you want it?
“Five works. That’s already ten for you,” Malcolm said as clinically as he could.
“Five,” she agreed. She wasn’t smiling—at least not in her lips. Malcolm could’ve sworn her eyes had.
Drew then called Rhode back with a pat on her bare shoulder, upon which Malcolm remembered how he had touched her there when Rhode had gotten him to unzip her birthday dress. The events that had followed ran through his mind, even after Nyssa and Lou Ellen had begun their workshop.
It felt like deception to keep his mouth shut, but Malcolm lied anyway. Leo never had to know Rhode had so eagerly blown Malcolm twice. He didn’t have to know it would’ve been three times if Malcolm had let her continue in one of those instances. Leo also didn’t need to know that Rhode had sat naked on Malcolm’s thigh and fucking licked her wetness off him. And Leo especially didn’t have to know that in two weeks, Malcolm had gotten to do so many simpler things with Rhode that he had used to imagine doing with Leo: sleeping in her bed, showering in her bathroom, kissing her dozens of times... Did railing her count? Because apparently with Rhode, that had become one of the simpler things they did.
This really wasn’t the time to get this restless and heated (or as excited as he was beginning to get under the table), so Malcolm contrived some interest in Drew’s offer to help Nyssa pass around origami sheets. Drew hadn’t even made the face she usually would make at Nyssa’s baggy T-shirt and baggy shorts. Malcolm stupidly even felt a hint of pride.
The feat must have earned him a granted wish, so a minute later, he gave himself a final glance. He found Drew and Rhode gushing at each other over color combos.
It was a mistake. Leo was now eyeing him with suspicion, scraping his stool legs on the tile floor to scooch close enough that his arm was touching Malcolm’s.
“So… whatever happened between you two?” muttered Leo, so close that his breath ghosted Malcolm’s ear.
“Who?” was all Malcolm could think to say. There hadn’t— There couldn’t have been enough clues. So how would’ve Leo known about—
Drew, Leo mouthed. Then his brows scrunched that tiny bit, the way they would before he would tackle a Rubik’s cube in mere seconds. His eyes flew back to the front—whether at Nyssa and Lou Ellen or Drew, Valentina, and Rhode, Malcolm didn’t know.
“Are you insane?” Malcolm whispered, throwing him a glare.
“You were looking at her,” Leo said. “And smiling. Weirdly.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Dude, I saw. Multiple times. There’s something different going on.”
The words flew out of Malcolm’s mouth before he could stop them. “And what’s it to you?”
Leo’s mouth opened but he spluttered nothing for a second. “It’s Drew. It’s weird, is what it is. I’ve heard enough from Pipes. Did she hypnotize you?”
Malcolm scoffed. “There’s no way she would do that.” He refrained from defending her more, or reminding Leo that he had known Drew longer than he’d known Leo himself. Neither of those statements would’ve helped his case.
Driven as Malcolm might have been to mind his own folding, Rhode’s presence was like a buzzing fly, and before he could help it, he caved again, finding Rhode and Drew working with Nyssa on folding patterns and materials for some runway costumes. Nyssa really seemed bored by the exercise, but she wasn’t shooting stinkers at Drew.
Leo’s silence didn’t help redirect Malcolm’s focus. At one point, Alicia had even had to repeat a question for Malcolm to process it. His ears had been too preoccupied with eavesdropping on the ladies’ brainstorming. Malcolm even cut his answers short to hear better.
Right now, from what Malcolm’s ears could put together, Valentina was showing Drew and Rhode a mockup knife that, perhaps with Hecate’s magic, could expand out from a lipstick container. It was inspired, Valentina said, by the KGB’s lipstick pistols.
“Fates, that’s perfect,” said Rhode.
“Oh, that’s deadly,” said Drew.
“No, no!” Rhode exclaimed. “That’s exactly it! It really is perfect to use lipstick as a cover.”
Malcolm had to stop folding his paper to hear her hushed voice.
“—know how lipstick used to contain so much more lead than it does now?” Rhode said, receiving the affirmative from the daughters of Aphrodite. “I’ve wondered how many I accidentally poisoned with it,” Rhode muttered. “It wasn’t as if I would have died. However…”
Leo’s head swiveled to face Malcolm as his brown eyes grew bug-eyed.
“Girl, you are morbid!” said Valentina, just as Drew began her ranting assurances to Rhode that it had been no fault of Rhode’s and to blame a lack of proper regulations and enforcement, no matter how long ago.
Malcolm just made fold after fold for Alicia and pretended to pay all his attention to her fourth completed airbag prototype. After Leo nudged him, Malcolm returned the most ignorant “What?” But when Malcolm heard Rhode express her appreciation, he did sneak an inconspicuous glance, finding two of the three raven-haired heads in a casually long embrace.
There was a foreign (yet also familiar?) discomfort seeing them like that. It had been like… What had it been? It felt like loneliness in a crowd, which was unusual. And it wasn’t like during Annabeth’s birthday; he had more just been annoyed then. Inconvenienced, rather. No, this was something provoking something almost hurtful. Envy?
Right. This was like second grade lunch, where he’d sit at the edge of the cafeteria table and watch time go by and just be glad if no fights had broken out yet. Did it matter that no one invited him over or genuinely wanted to talk to him if it meant he’d be left in peace?
Touchy Malcolm was not, so why was he taking issue that he wasn’t close enough to have such moments with even a friend like Leo (because it sure as hell would never be Clarisse)?
That was silly to think. He had his siblings, and Drew and Rhode didn’t even know each other. Not really.
This was also a well needed reminder, Malcolm told himself petulantly, that Rhode would share only so much of herself with him.
Just because he had accumulated some four hours of reading about her and her island, and just because she had let him fuck her on four different occasions, didn’t mean he knew her. It was frankly concerning that he had even entertained the thought.
He didn’t know Rhode. So be it.
Malcolm flung away the ridiculous complaints and collected a fan and a timer for Alicia to test her mini airbags.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The third time Malcolm spotted Rhode came just shy of 5 PM. His day felt instantly better.
For a whole hour and half prior, he’d been occupied by a committee on New Athens’s entry and residency requirements, which had devolved into a raucous debate on border patrol. It must’ve been the fastest Malcolm had ever wrapped up and left a meeting.
Malcolm had immediately headed to City Hall, penciling in some time later to wrap up that whole mess, when he passed by Rhode already hanging around the entrance. Next to a few younger demigods, she was seemingly texting on her phone, trying, Malcolm assumed, to avoid a conversation.
In between his slow steps, Malcolm heard the crunch of the grass behind him. He reined in a smirk. By the time he reached the building, Rhode had actually caught up. They put on the briefest conversation about the seating charts in front of Janet and Mark, who just looked to be eavesdropping as they slowly mopped the floor and carefully took out trash, but neither Malcolm nor Rhode felt the need to speak until they were inside his office.
“Lock the door?” said Rhode in a whisper.
Malcolm did. He hadn’t gotten an extra chair. He did, however, turn up the temperature.
“You got two more signatories on board,” he noted.
Rhode just stared at him for a moment, before—he couldn’t have described it any other way—she attacked him with all his new favorite things. She ran her fingers through his hair, kissed his throat, scratched his nape, nipped that spot on his neck, claimed his mouth... All without lipstick.
After letting Rhode have her fun with him for all of twenty seconds, Malcolm pulled away with a laugh and took her hands in his. “Seriously?” he said.
Rhode stood there slightly breathless, with only a smile on her lips.
When Malcolm returned the favor and lifted her up, Rhode’s newly unrestrained hands flew to caress his cheeks—and just maybe he no longer hated having someone else’s hands on his face.
Hips to shoulders, Rhode’s curves pressed against his body so delightfully, making Malcolm blank out with the beginnings of bliss. Her expert lips were on his again, and her thighs—gods, he could never get enough of them—were back in his hands, back where he could wind her legs around his ass so he could crawl up her skirts and greet her skin to skin.
The moan Rhode whispered into his mouth gave Malcolm a better idea—which promptly left his mind when Rhode rocked against his hips. But with a few mental nudges, he came to and set her on his desk.
Then he kneeled before Rhode and made her come. Because it just felt right.
And then again with her back on his desk. Because she deserved it.
It was for the principle of it—and perhaps also because it was an easy way to kinda annoy Rhode—that he told her and her busy hands that he didn’t need payback. He knew there would be a next time anyway.
“Please?” said Rhode.
Malcolm’s lips quirked into a smile. “Well… look who’s begging.”
Rhode looked at him with a laugh in her grin. “If only it worked on me.” In a flash, she turned on her bedroom eyes and ran a hand through his hair, feeling her way down his chest with the other. “Let me touch you, Malcolm. It’s been a while.”
Malcolm barked a short laugh. “It’s been two days!”
“But would you have wanted me yesterday?” said Rhode. “Maybe you thought about me.”
“That’s not presumptuous at all.”
“But is it true?” she said.
He didn’t like that question. It was partly true.
“I’m doing you a favor,” Rhode told him. “I can make you feel good. I don’t know when I’ll be back next. I might be back on Tuesday. I think.”
Not if she wanted to avoid Apollo, she wouldn’t. Malcolm would have to tell her later.
“Do you really want to wait for a maybe all the way next week when I’m here right now? All that pent up neediness when you have so much else to think about... I know how that feels. You don’t need that. Especially not when you live here. Let me make you come.”
But that hadn’t been his plan, and it felt like losing to give in.
Just this once, said one part of him. Please.
How unfair that his instincts were teaming up with Rhode. How low of her to be in a conspiracy with his body. Malcolm swore his whole self was aching with want, as if this was a problem that could only be solved by Rhode’s touch.
“It’ll help avoid all that frustration later,” she said, so unfairly making her way down his abs. “But I at least have my own bedroom.”
Malcolm scrunched his face, needing no help in remembering every frustrated night she cursed him with ever since her birthday. “You’re too good at this.”
“It’s really not that difficult,” Rhode said.
She was totally right, and Malcolm knew he could’ve tried harder, but found euphoria in the easy loss. Once he leaned into her, Rhode kissed the corner of his lips and did what she could to free his soft sounds of praise.
Her teasing lips weren’t the only part of her keeping busy. Her deft fingers were untucking, unbuttoning, and unzipping, unraveling the mess that that meeting had made of his head.
Finally, Rhode let him catch her lips—but only for moments at a time. She would draw back, peck him, let him win, then mess with him again. If her idea was to get him complaining and begging again, he was totally getting there.
With another ghost of a kiss, Rhode beamed at him. “I’ll never really know what you taste like. You always taste of me,” she said. “Remind me to kiss you more first.”
Remind her? Malcolm wanted to laugh. Truly, the thought of asking—or reminding Rhode next time—seemed ridiculous. And maybe he wanted to taste like devotion and skill.
Just as he debated whether he should have held her by the hair to capture her mouth in a kiss, his whole mind was stolen by the nasty sounds of her working him in her hand.
Rhode’s fluttering kisses on his face were too soft and sweet for what she was doing down there. It made him feel dirtier and daintier all at once.
“Are your hands just going to dangle there?” said Rhode. “You can feel me up, you know.”
Malcolm was almost certain at least half the reason she’d said that was purely to vex him. It only partly worked; he was too turned on to feel embarrassed right now. And now he was too busy bunching up the flowers on the flowy skirt of her dress. Dragging the fabric up her thighs. Gripping what he could of her ass. Running over the curve of her back, relearning and memorizing what he so sorely missed.
“There we go.” The smile in Rhode’s eyes spread to her lips. “Actually feel me.”
As she kept working him, Malcolm kept wandering, kept daring to touch her until he reached the smooth skin of her shoulder. He never once found a goosebump or shiver. (Noted: 68 degrees next time.)
Rhode tightened her grip, throwing fuel into the fire that was his cock, but Malcolm still needed to summon his courage to take down two straps from her left shoulder. One purple, one red.
Curse the entire Camp Half-Blood he couldn’t see the full red set together.
His fury gave him guts. Malcolm wanted to see Rhode as messy as she made him feel. Wanted to touch her as wantonly as she did him.
Behind her long locks, he fished for the clasp of her dress and undid it, and immediately tugged down her zipper before he could doubt himself. The echo of the zip almost gave him pause, but Malcolm took advantage of his inertia and kept unzipping until his fingers had reacquainted themselves with Rhode’s ass.
With her hands still busy getting him off, Rhode shimmied her other shoulder out from the other pair of straps. The front of her dress fell in a heap at her lap. It was such a breeze now for Malcolm to unhook her bra and hang its straps on her arms.
Now when his gaze swept over Rhode’s curves, so did his faltering, persisting touch. Maybe it was Rhode’s comment last time about how he had been braver and less quiet that made him more self-conscious. Maybe her nakedness would always make him more timid. Maybe he had pushed it so much two days ago and kept wanting to hide his face at the mere thought of the raunchy acts he had committed with her that robbed him of his courage. Maybe it was Leo that made him doubt—although why would it have been when that had never held him back from Rhode before?
Whatever the snag, Malcolm learned once more how well Rhode could snatch his worries away. Following his urges didn’t deserve to be the taboo his scruples or fears or whatever told him it was. Seeing Rhode’s breaths turn ragged with every supple inch of her he pressed into and caressed, his attempt to be considerate even felt like selfishness now. Rhode couldn’t touch herself when she was already touching him; he would have to for her.
While half Malcolm’s mind was stolen by the fiery pathways Rhode shot through his loins, the other half set itself on getting at what drew out more of her pleasured sighs.
With his focus pulled to its new mission, Malcolm grew more numb to Rhode’s tugs, but damn if it didn’t feel good to get two handfuls of her tits.
“And to think you wouldn’t have done this until I said so,” Rhode said, so obviously amused.
Malcolm could just hear her tutting him silently. It was times like this when maybe his dalliances with Rhode didn’t make him feel as good as he remembered.
A dominating voice in his head scorned such slander, yelling at him how he could even think something so awful when she was graciously letting him grope all over her top half and had so angelically offered him a handjob and was still going at it despite his difficulties. (Sexual dysfunction? whispered another voice.) Almost violently, memories were shoved to the front of Malcolm’s mind, showing him the many times Rhode had made him feel magnitudes upon magnitudes better than he could’ve possibly imagined.
The thoughts reignited his lust, helping him appreciate the sight of Rhode half naked and so gloriously messy for him, with her dress shoved down and her bra straps dangling from as far down as the wrist she used to jack him off.
In all this time, she couldn’t have let him go to fling her bra off, even for a second?
Managing to hold in a huff of laughter, Malcolm caught Rhode’s contemplative gaze. They were totally on two different pages here. But the mischief that soon emerged in her eyes told him she was up to only good.
“Can you do something for me?” she said.
“What?” His breath came out less shaky than he expected.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?” Why? Malcolm wanted to protest. He didn’t want to lose sight of this vision before him, with Rhode’s eyes so knowing and skin so bare.
“Come on,” Rhode murmured. “Close your eyes. Get out of your head and feel me.”
He thought he already had been—and he damn well could have listed five points of evidence to back it up. Feeling nothing more than called out and somewhat insulted, Malcolm kept his mouth shut anyway. How ironic that she was making him overthink.
“You’re thinking too much to enjoy this as much as you could,” Rhode said.
No, shit, Rhode. Wonder why.
Well now he had to do what she said, even if it had been her fault.
(Had it really?)
Shutting his eyes with all this consternation was uncomfortable as hell, but Malcolm tried his best to let go of his ire and chase the pleasure he had had before.
He pictured Rhode exactly as he had seen her (what a fucking waste of an opportunity) and adventured with his imagination and his wandering hands.
If anything, Malcolm figured he had to be grateful that Rhode didn’t complain about his lack of focus and that she actually cared enough for him to get his pleasure.
Aaand this totally wasn’t what she wanted him to think about.
But somehow it helped. Because as annoying as she was, she would do this for him. Rhode cared so much she would even manipulate—no, that was too harsh a term—she would rescue him from his own self to make sure he could reap as much pleasure as possible. Like some Machiavellian generosity. She thought he deserved that.
And actually, with all the assumptions she dared to make about him—right or wrong wasn’t the point—wasn’t it just wondrous that she thought she knew him? What if the craze and hunger Rhode made him feel was somehow… reciprocal?
She had her own bedroom, she had said. Had she imagined his naked return to it how he had imagined it just last night? Maybe Rhode had daydreamed about working him in her hands and getting him crazy, exactly as she was doing now. He also had dreamed the opposite last night. What if he could leave her with something to think about in bed tonight?
In another helpful vision, he imagined Rhode on her back, with her curly locks sprawled across those dark teal sheets of hers. Her knees would be bent and her splayed thighs would bare her to him. Maybe via IM? So far away from her, he would ache to touch her. Except now he could map out Rhode’s figure. Soft and gentle as always, her curves urged him to take himself in hand and work himself with long strokes up and down—exactly how he was feeling it right now, oh how very nice.
This dream felt utterly perfect, and that was before it was interrupted by the surprise of Rhode’s lips on his neck, jolting Malcolm with the reminder that this was all real.
Eyes still closed, he found her thighs again and sighed out the remnants of his tension through light caresses over her, all as Rhode’s strokes led him to some void where only pleasure lived.
The sound of Rhode jerking him got only louder in pitch blackness, but Malcolm shoved aside his concern that he never should’ve heard that in his offfice. The raunchy noises only served to get him thicker and harder in her grip.
If he focused, he could actually hear Rhode’s inhales quickening in tandem with her quickening pumps. He could feel her breath on his chin and just knew she was watching his face—every twitch and shift.
“If we were on a bed...” she began, and he never felt his mind so invaded or connected to someone else’s. “Or if I were on the floor...” Her breaths hitched between his steadier ones, yet Rhode never ceased her loud, demanding strokes. “I would get my mouth on you,” she said, just above a whisper.
As her thumb brushed over his slit, the memories returned to Malcolm with a ferocity—the vision of her lips around his cock, the pressure, her tongue, the suction, her throat—and with a groan he couldn’t hold back, Malcolm spilled into her hand.
All over her knuckles.
Fuck.
And partly on her dress. Over a pale yellow flower. And there he still was, groping at Rhode’s ass, staring so dumbly at her hand covered with his splatters of come.
Oh gods, fuck.
“Sorry,” said Malcolm. His cheeks were flushed—probably a mix of adrenaline and embarrassment.
Familiar Rhodian mischief greeted him in the green. “Why?”
It’s just—
Before Malcolm could even complete the thought, Rhode had cleaned them both instantly and helped tuck him in and zip him up. He watched vacuously as Rhode pulled out a cardigan from her bag and wrapped it around her waist, covering that spot he had stained. She tucked her hair behind her ears, looking all prim and proper and prepared to take on the day.
While Malcolm put the rest of himself back together, Rhode seized her chance to claim his desk chair. She began swiveling around like nothing had happened, betraying the truth with only her deep inhalations, evident in her rising and falling breasts, and that cunning, Rhodian twinkle in her gaze.
Malcolm found his lips twisting into a smile. Huh. Why should he have been sorry? Perhaps he was out of his depth, as he so often was with Rhode, but she had enough wits and wisdom for the both of them, didn’t she?
“You look happy,” she noted.
Malcolm’s grin flew free. “How could I not be? Gods damn, you,” he said, sharing a laugh with her.
He hoped to have more chances to see the pride she wore right now. Maybe he also wanted to be someone who would reliably bring it out of her.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The seating charts came after, in what time was left. After he and Rhode took bathroom breaks one by one, Malcolm had come back carrying a glass of water for Rhode and wheeling in a smart board—and still no chair. Rhode was already sitting on his, so he stood instead and collected one of her pre-prepared lists of enemies and allies to standardize all her notes.
Miraculously—or understandably—Malcolm could actually think better now. As Rhode worked on another list, using info she said she had just gathered from Dionysus and Hestia, Malcolm translated onto the board all her jottings, new and old, into propositional calculus. And if he was still going to keep her handwritten notes despite having already simplified them, it was in case they needed to refer to something later on. But those papers would be stored in his left drawer, deep under his pile of policy wishlists and a hundred half-baked city plans.
Fifteen minutes after the fact, the taste of Rhode still lingered on his tongue. It crossed his mind that he could tell her so. In five simple words, he could share that with her. But he didn’t—even when he had caught up with Rhode’s list and had nothing to do right now but stare at the board and the little progress he and Rhode had made in actually slotting guests into seats. He wondered if Rhode was checking out his ass again. She had been so obvious about it that other time.
Malcolm convinced himself he was brave enough to face her. And no, Rhode wasn’t occupied with his behind—but neither was she paying attention to her list-making. He could see her, still on his chair, looking tensed and almost dazed.
“You look a little worked up,” Malcolm told her.
Rhode smiled a little. “I’m okay.” Her words turned into a mumble. “Just some leftover...” Amid the barest fidget, she glanced at him before she looked away into space.
Malcolm tried casually setting down the marker in his hand and drew closer to the side of his desk, just a corner away from Rhode. He perused her notes for a bit.
“Well, I’m here,” he offered with all his nonchalance. “If you want a third.”
Rhode’s eyes flew to his. “You’re serious.” Her smile widened. “Of course, you are.”
Her laugh-like grin didn’t feel like a joke. Could he really be some doormat if he, too, loved all of it?
Rhode looked at their work again, then abandoned it to stare at him instead. Her eyes didn’t leave him at any point as he used some hand sanitizer that had found a home on his desk yesterday. When Malcolm could finally get to airing off his hands, Rhode hopped her ass onto her part of the table, where his keyboard usually lay. So patiently, she waited in silence, merely eyeing him all the while.
His hands had just dried off when Rhode slipped her underwear down her skirt and proceeded to place it inches away from his mouse.
Fuckin’ red. On his desk.
What it’d take for him to forget that sight…
In Malcolm’s struck state, Rhode had spread her thighs apart. If she was already partly on the journey, Malcolm figured it wouldn’t take long. But tempting as her scent was to get to his knees and feast again, alas, his tongue was already overworked, and he wasn’t keen on averaging down his oral performance. It certainly wouldn’t do if he really wanted to get Rhode at least as addicted to him as she’d made him.
As he touched her, he could see lust fire up in her darker irises, could spot the tension of her face, could hear the breaths she inhaled—and it was like he was getting a high. Clue by clue revealed so quickly as evidence, the product of his work was instantaneous. He didn’t even have to wait minutes (much less six months, a year, five years, ten years, or more). There was no stressing, no second-guessing about whether he was doing good or bad or not enough. He could see it on the spot. Rhode’s gasps, her eyes, her touches told him outright. He could see right here, right now, from the way Rhode bit her lip, the way she let out a whimper, the way she whispered a swear and purred his name. How much of it was even exaggerated didn’t quite matter. These were her cues to show him the truth.
It was like he was mentally getting off, if one could call it that. It was the way Rhode held onto him and threaded her fingers through his hair, the way she pinched her brows and groaned ever so softly in the back of her throat—and finally kissed his lips—to tell him that he’d done good. He’d gotten it right.
They both knew he didn’t have to end it there. So Malcolm went for another round. He circled and circled until Rhode’s hips twitched and jerked again. Not half a minute later, she even handed him a small vibrator, telling him, “It’ll make it quicker. I can’t really do it myself.”
He obliged her, and in just two seconds, she was squeaking. By eight seconds, her legs were shaking, her torso was trembling, her cries were getting even more pitiful. And yet Rhode held on like the bravest, greediest Sybarite there ever was. Malcolm helped her get more, letting her cling onto him as tight as she wanted to, as her own body tried to get away from the intense stimulation. Gods damn, she was so over the top.
Four times then. Not five or six, but perhaps it was fitting. After all, hadn’t Sybaris been broken down and rebuilt ‘til its fourth form?
Once he had turned off the device and Rhode’s cries of pleasure had turned into deep, heavy breaths, Malcolm wracked his brain for something to say. So very unhelpfully, his mind sought to know if Rhode had ever visited Sybaris at all.
How did the alleged arrogance of the Sybarites compare to that of the Rhodians? Had she championed the hedonistic city as it pioneered the very concept of intellectual property? Had she been there to see Sybaris grant those exclusive, one-year rights to chefs for their new recipes? Was that why she had such an interest in Fornax and Despoina’s spats?
Desperate as Malcolm was to learn any and all of that, he filed away his questions like those few dozen tabs he had collected on Rhódos that still littered his mind.
But the bother those smattering specks would cause, he knew, were nothing compared to the blaring sight of Rhode, eyes closed, mouth in an ‘O’.
Malcolm didn’t have to curse it now. That was a tomorrow problem. (Maybe also a tonight problem.) Right now, he was too busy picturing Rhode blowing smoke rings in his face.
Why did that feel sexy when he knew it was gross?
The image was thankfully erased as Rhode let out what he could only describe as a giddy giggle.
“Oh,” she sighed, beaming so brightly as she caught her breath. “I could sleep so well right now.”
Malcolm kissed her again, sealing one more secret between them.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
If life was to be lived, Malcolm felt he was now doing it. Now more than ever, he was learning things and doing things he had never bothered to learn and do before out of cowardice. Two months ago, it had hit him that he had never been so at peace, getting to do exactly what he wanted for years to do.
Today, on what should’ve been another plain, ol’ Sunday, Malcolm could believe it even less. With Alicia back at Cabin Six (where it was “less salty”), snuggling up to him on a couch as he read her Order of the Phoenix, and with his momentary thought of Rhode’s three visits in six days, he couldn’t imagine how anything could have ever surpassed this.
Well, actually he could. Alicia had sneezed on him thrice this past hour alone. Just enough times to overtake that fuzzy, swelling feeling he got when she clung to his arm—enough to call to mind that he still didn’t want kids. Probably. Claire popping painkillers in front of him for her endo reminded him he didn’t quite care regardless. And it wasn’t as though he would find a fitting partner anyway.
With the end of the chapter, his siblings claimed their time, fighting for more words in on the happenings and learnings this past week. Malcolm jostled less than usual for his turn. It wasn’t entirely because he didn’t want to give Alicia a splitting headache in his excitement. It wasn’t even because his mouth was dry and tired from having talked for the past forty minutes. Partly, it had to do with the souvenirs Rhode had given him that managed to worm their way into his head again. Mostly, Malcolm just didn’t have the negligence to share newly collected factoids about weaponized makeup and marine trade deals.
As the Fates would have it, it wasn’t his failure he had to worry about. When he was finally pulled into conversation as Annabeth consulted him on diversifying the truckload of seafood and meat that was her and Percy’s wedding menu, Percy offhandedly commented something about Malcolm having liked Amphitrite’s brunch salads.
After all that time Percy had given nothing away, after all that effort Annabeth had put in walking on eggshells, Malcolm couldn’t believe Percy could just spill the beans like that. It seemed, neither could Percy. Malcolm could see the regret and disappointment strike Percy’s face the very second his words had flown out of his mouth.
Like two peas in a pod, Claire and Conrad had found each other’s gazes, saying who knew what in their twin pair of bugged eyes. Malcolm could see it, but they were at least discrete about it.
Meanwhile, Zeke and Sophie, Malcolm could see, were going bananas with this new info; their eyes whizzed in his direction for nary a moment but one too long.
Malcolm said nothing.
“Did the salad come in a combo meal with strawberries?” Conrad jested.
Malcolm had just known Claire had told him.
Annabeth shot her younger brother a look, which he cowered under, and at this point, Malcolm could actually feel grateful for her interference.
Poor Alicia had that look about her.
Don’t look at me, he begged.
She was sick, Malcolm thought. She had other things to worry about now. But he just knew. She might have had to double her lifespan before reaching her menarche, but she had gotten way too inquisitive for her siblings (read: him) to leave her in the dark even now.
“I want everyone to know,” Percy announced, “Alicia’s been improving so much in our swimming lessons.”
The quiet chaos at Cabin Six was only a touch mellower than the rumor-filled chatter swirling around the campfire later that night.
Campers passed along news that the Hunters of Artemis would be doing some recruitment next week, that Apollo would visit camp again tomorrow to help build the New Athens hospital, and that Chiron would be dipping in and out this week for another round of New Athens fundraising.
Rumor had it that Bae was moving out, that Connor was getting a dog, that Drew had kissed that Eris teen only to get Malcolm alone to lobby or brainwash him, and that Pollux was the one now plotting for favoritism.
And rumor had it that perhaps Bae wasn’t the only city councilor with a mystery friend. Malcolm couldn’t be bothered to figure out who.
Notes:
💋
📑👮Part 1: Happy new year to all o’ y’all!
Part 2: Perfectionism, unbelievable work chaos, and a bad illness got the better of me. That’s why part 2 is a little late. It’s not that I didn’t care, I promise.
I had nearly updated this 2 or 3 times, but couldn’t bring myself to hit post. Now you can read a better version.
Chapter 12: In which Malcolm meddles in godly drama
Notes:
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics). Also, translations will only appear if “Creator’s Style” is not hidden.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
On Monday, Malcolm found himself in another heated argument on who could visit and live in New Athens. New Athens Security (i.e., Clarisse) wanted more restrictions and some checks on, say, pro-Olympus empousai. Stats (i.e., Chiara) wanted an entry point to track flows of people in and out of the city. Finance (i.e., Malcolm until Adila took over) didn’t like either of those costs but wanted other limits on how many mortals and non-mortals could come in.
This time, the arguments devolved into a near shouting match, when Sam, a child of Hermes who headed the Office of Newcomers, lambasted all of them for their “bigoted” takes and argued that every adult anyway had to register to get benefits and certain services. Sam had pointed five times (by Malcolm’s count) to the copy of the New Athens Constitution on the wall of the conference room, as if that alone justified the total lack of border protection.
Enough was enough. After months of escalating disagreements behind closed doors, it was time for all departments to hold hands and jump off a cliff. So, after City Council finally put the matter to a vote the next day and decided that there would be no patrol or tracking of who came and left, Malcolm and Clarisse grinned and bore it, announcing to the public that this was a city, not a fortress, and any security or finance issues would have to adapt to the situation.
There were other terms Malcolm didn’t like, but with so much he was doing already, he just didn’t have the capacity to micromanage other departments or push other councilors. He had done his part anyway. As Galene had also told him, he couldn’t not make mistakes—not that he’d be forgiven for them. But Malcolm figured Galene at least should’ve been happy he wasn’t getting hung up on perfecting something, even if he was sure she had so many other things to do than to keep tabs on him.
Knowing he would ruminate on any of these missteps in the future, Malcolm moved on to other issues for now. Some anonymous future resident had put forth a proposal that was gaining traction on the godly Internet, asking that New Athens be rid of all statues and temples of any god. The idea wasn’t terrible, Malcolm thought. Just terribly naive. Malcolm also wondered if the author was the same person who kept attacking his credentials. Maybe he was getting jaded.
As he made his way back to City Hall after dropping off Alicia at Bunker Nine, he made a weekly reminder in his calendar to pray to Soteria and make sure she would be the first non-Olympian to get an altar. Then he furiously typed up some points on his phone that the comms team could respond with: (1) that New Athens was a partnership with the gods—many of whom had granted blessings to the city, and (2) that anyone who took issue with that was free to seek a home in the mortal world or could attempt to build their own city without any godly help and see how far that would take them.
(He completely deleted the second part.)
Now why Kevin and the others on the comms team thought they had to defer to him for a response, Malcolm didn’t quite get. It was their help he needed.
His focus shifted to that new Vio Life problem. On his Bunker Nine visit just now, Malcolm had seen Jake and his work buddies struggle with algae—what they wanted to use as backup in case the fall weather made their typical feedstocks too wet to efficiently convert into fuel. Percy could’ve helped with their algae troubles, Malcolm figured. He noted that down. Or... Rhode.
Rhode... Rhode, who would know plenty more about algae than Percy ever would. Rhode, who trespassed even more of his dreams these days, with her soft skin and sly schemes. Rhode, whom Hubert had said was waiting for him right this second at City Hall.
Her arrival today was two days earlier than Malcolm had anticipated at the very, very least. But even if she had returned to camp earlier than he had expected, he questioned why he would spend their precious minutes together asking her about algae moisture instead of extending his services to her. Chatting about plasma gasification probably wasn’t going to get Rhode to shed her work stress and whisper her sweet moans in his ear. Gods, Malcolm was still reeling from when she had instructed him to sit on his desk chair so she could squish in the chair with him, her legs astride his thighs, her skirt over their—
“Ope!”
A thudding crash jolted him from his reverie.
Halted in his tracks as he turned a corner around the newly built Aether Cabin, Malcolm steadied whomever was underneath the three-foot tall pile of crates he had collided into. His only hint was a pair of hands speckled with dirt and the black hair ties around each tanned wrist.
“Sorry,” chirped a voice. Ainsleigh’s head just barely peeped out from the side of the containers she was carrying, with what looked to be soil and gardening supplies. The tools nearly hopped out of her crates, but with a teetering step, she regained her footing.
“No, you’re fine,” Malcolm said. “Sorry, lemme just sneak right past ya.”
Except there was no way to do so; it seemed they were headed in the same direction. Mostly. Ainsleigh, too, would be heading to City Hall after dropping off her gardening kit at the Demeter Cabin.
And there went his ten long awaited minutes of P&Q.
Although, Malcolm thought, if it had to be anyone intruding, at least it would be one of the quietest of all campers.
Malcolm’s conscience forced him to take two of Ainsleigh’s three crates, which she was all too relieved by. She talked about nothing else the whole two-minute walk to her cabin.
The Demeter Cabin truly was a cabin—the most cabin-looking cabin of all cabins at camp. But what it lacked in architectural creativity, it made up for in natural beauty. The cabin was its own oasis, structured by trees, decorated by flowers, and swallowed by ivy.
The vines were a hundred memories of walks along the Quad in green, gold, and white. They took Malcolm to his father’s lunch breaks and lessons in the castley buildings and to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House just steps away. They led him to the gothic wonders he had sneaked around with Annabeth half a lifetime ago. All to say that Malcolm had always treasured the presence of Cabin Four.
Yet never before had Malcolm appreciated that floral whiff of that soap he had used that July night and morning after. He had smelled it on him for hours that day.
Only three of Ainsleigh’s siblings seemed to be home right now, including Billie and Miranda, whose looks Malcolm was so tempted to ignore, until he had enough shame to say hi. Lucky for him, the ladies scurried off with the three cases of Ainsleigh’s supplies. That left him only in the company of more awkwardness as he stood outside, waiting for Ainsleigh to finish helping a young brother of hers fix some flower wreath decor.
Even stopping to smell the flowers outside the cabin, Malcolm still couldn’t pinpoint which one it was that resembled that soap. He thought better than to ask. And perhaps if he was lucky, he would even catch it later in his office. If he could ever reach his office.
Malcolm filled in his seconds shooting a couple texts to his family and even managed to catch up with Leo’s brother, Harmon, who had to eye Malcolm only two times now before he got enough guts to greet him. Harmon seemed to be doing well in his new design role, which Malcolm got to hear all about. At this rate, he was sure Rhode would leave his office before he could even see her.
His antsiness continued to swarm him as Pollux popped by from the Dionysus Cabin. And no, Malcolm hadn’t forgotten the brewery tour Pollux had invited him to. Hubert had just informed Malcolm yesterday that it would take place in two weeks’ time. But now Pollux was already striking up a chat about city progress and tax laws, which Malcolm kept as brief as he could, glancing every now and then at City Hall in the far off distance, as if expecting to see Rhode in some sundress huffing out of the building.
Thankfully, before Pollux could rope him into another social outing, Ainsleigh came to Malcolm’s rescue—as much as she was able to anyway. She merely lingered by, but it gave him enough of an excuse to hightail it and begin their trek to City Hall.
“Were you hanging out with Leo earlier?” she asked on their walk. “I thought I saw him.”
Malcolm tried not to react. He’d had practice. She must’ve been lady #4—or was it #5?—to have ever asked him about Leo.
“Dropping off Alicia at Bunker Nine,” he said. “It’s her favorite place at camp.”
Also his. Which you’d know if you knew him enough.
Ainsleigh awwed the way so many did whenever he talked about Alicia. “How often do you two do your Bunker Nine hangouts?” she said, going all high-pitched. That also tended to happen when people talked about Alicia. Or was she talking about Leo? Because that also tended to happen when some ladies talked about Leo.
“Twice a week?” Malcolm thought aloud. “Yeah.” It had once been up to four. Huh. Well, Alicia had other activities now. Like bouldering. And practicing her German.
Before Malcolm could fully ponder those implications, he heard yet another call of his name—this time from the porch of the Nemesis Cabin, where a green-looking Adila weakly waved to him in the middle of her breathing exercises. She was the one person here he would’ve canceled Rhode for, except he wasn’t going to do anything other than wish her a speedy recovery. The sooner Adila got to normal, the sooner she could take over as CFO and relieve him of a third of his job. It felt like a dishonor to Athena to even think it, but in this minute he felt weak.
Ainsleigh brought him right out of his pathetic woe.
“Poor thing,” she said. “I heard she still has a stomach bug.”
“I thought it was what the Nike kids did?” Malcolm said.
Ainsleigh merely shrugged.
“And what were you up to?” Malcolm asked her. “Done your hero’s work for the day, growing veg, I assume?”
Ainsleigh smiled. “Hero?” she said.
“Farmers are heroic.”
Ainsleigh’s face lit up in humor. “Do you say that as a Midwesterner?”
Malcolm nearly laughed. “I say that as someone who likes food.”
She chuckled at that. Malcolm thought Leo would’ve made a better joke.
“That wasn’t for farming actually,” she said. “There’s actually this thing. Um.” Her smile slipped away at once. “It’s been about a month, and huge patches of grass by the woods haven’t recovered from all the saltwater that drenched that whole area. It’s dead.”
Warmth washed over Malcolm’s face as he lumbered along next to Ainsleigh. He knew it wasn’t the sun.
“And that was before the stink bombs,” Ainsleigh pointed out. “Billie and I at least managed to fix the Brussels sprouts that the Tithonus kids had cursed, but the grass is still a problem. It’s, like I said, dead. The saltwater was toxic.”
“Oh, that’s my fault,” Malcolm said. He forced himself to meet her gaze. “Your siblings were doing too good a job getting to me. I asked Rhode to save me from them. And again when I was facing Bae and some others.”
Rhode’s voice crept in his ear. ‘Are you familiar with Gaugamela?’ Her words had been only for him to hear. Her aid only for him to have.
So much had happened over the past four weeks, it felt like half a year at least had gone by.
“So it was you. Half you,” Ainsleigh groused. But she looked a lot less mad.
“I’m really sorry,” Malcolm said, honest to gods trying his best to muster up his rightful guilt.
“Well, it’s not really you.”
“I mean... I kinda knew— I knew what Rhode would do,” Malcolm said. “That was the point. I scattered the petrified sea shells around, so she could use them. I don’t know why— I should’ve realized the grass would’ve been affected.” Come to think of it, he’d even seen it last week, but the brown patches had forced him to school his betraying lips in front of Zeke and Sophie. “I will keep it in mind for the future,” he promised, almost offering assistance. He’d check first if Hubert could find an opening in his schedule.
“It’s okay,” Ainsleigh said. “Although I hope it doesn’t happen again. It’s not, right? I mean, there have been regular visits these days, but I didn’t think there would be another Capture-the-Flag match like that.”
“Regular visits?”
They had strolled far beyond the cabins and into a wide clearing, and it was such a struggle to find excuses not to look at Ainsleigh. Malcolm caught sight of a pegasus, then another, then a group of dryads, all as his insides sounded an alarm.
“Our new resident Barbie doll,” Ainsleigh said. “It’s impressive how she gets around camp in those stilettos. Even the Aphrodite kids eventually give up on heels like that.”
Something in Malcolm screamed and shriveled even more now as he tried not to outwardly squirm. Whether it was Drew, now Ainsleigh, and random guys every now and then, why did people just—? Funnily enough, it was Drew who understood his unsavory takes best.
“I guess it fits the persona,” Malcolm said. “President Barbie. Matches the whole princess thing Rhode has going on and the other stuff she does.”
“Right. She’s a princess, too. And an actual goddess.” Ainsleigh said. “You know, it shouldn’t be easy to forget she’s not even part human—considering, you know—but I don’t know, she just seems like she’s Percy’s sister, not like one of those gods, even Apollo.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Malcolm said slowly.
Not completely. He really didn’t think of Rhode as Percy’s sister. And just because Rhode was less out of touch than other gods didn’t mean he’d ever forgotten she was one. But, he supposed, if he could ever forget Rhode’s aqua cavalry and sofa and all her convenient tricks in getting the both of them necessary supplies and interesting tools mid-action, perhaps he could kinda see what Ainsleigh was getting at. Kinda?
“Hestia’s like that, too, I guess,” Ainsleigh said. “Except Hestia’s kind of like that because she’s an actual child. I guess that’s Apollo’s approach, too.”
Malcolm didn’t think he had ever heard Ainsleigh talk so much. Where were all these loud opinions during council meetings?
“Still,” she said, “we people are, like, the antithesis of that.”
“Of?”
“Um, glamor, I suppose.”
Did you know I have a boring persona? It’s just branding, apparently.
“What is it they say now?” Ainsleigh said. “Being… excessive or something?”
It was funny now. Drew would’ve been laughing, or rather, smirking to herself and eyeing Ainsleigh in disdain—and holy Zeus, he had to stop thinking about her.
“I think it’s being ‘extra’,” Malcolm said.
Ainsleigh laughed. “Right. Well, the extra-ness helps with all the fawning happening, doesn’t it?”
Malcolm internally erupted in another yell. Thank the gods they were just a few minutes away from their destination.
“I’d guess she’s likable regardless,” he said.
“I guess. Definitely more than other gods,” Ainsleigh whispered, and Malcolm couldn’t help but huff a laugh. “It’s not that high of a bar,” Ainsleigh added.
Malcolm was so stunned trying to process that she of all people would just insult the gods without expecting crazy shit that he legit had nothing to reply.
He didn’t need to figure it out. Ainsleigh didn’t leave much room for silence as she casually commented, “I actually thought you two didn’t get along.”
Malcolm cursed himself. Was that why she was ranting to him? He really should’ve been more careful at Annabeth’s birthday or wherever else he had publicly argued with Rhode. Annabeth and Percy did not deserve a story like that going around.
With a shrug, Malcolm said as nonchalantly as he could, “Our parents have been archenemies. We’re bound to argue a bit, I guess. A bit. But we’re cool. Yeah, we’re, um, we’re cool. Annabeth and Percy made us work together on seating arrangements for their wedding, so she and I”—it felt so intimate saying those words—“are in charge of ensuring no wars break out.” He sighed then. “Just another thing to do on top of everything else,” he grunted.
“You seem more tired or stressed recently. Is working with your archenemy what’s causing the eyebags?” Ainsleigh teased.
“Ha.” Oh, you have no idea.
He and Rhode were certainly… ahem… working. And while actually working, he had lost concentration more times than he wanted to admit, remembering what they’d done and imagining—no, planning—what else to do. Which was actually what he had wanted to do had he been able to take this stroll alone.
“Rhode’s not an archenemy,” Malcolm said.
“Yeah, sorry, I shouldn’t—” Ainsleigh rushed to say. “Especially, she’s extended family, and...”
Malcolm squirmed on the inside with all sorts of silent, high-pitched noises.
“It’s just kinda refreshing,” Ainsleigh said, “to see a guy not drool over her, you know. I don’t know what it is with some of these people. It’s like they lose their dignity trying—practically begging—to get her attention.”
There was a great irony there that Malcolm was so amused by, he literally couldn’t help but laugh. A little sound escaped him; his face had broken—but it was okay. It wasn’t like Ainsleigh could piece together the memories playing in his mind. She just cast him another gleaming glance mid-ramble about guys doing the same whenever Aphrodite visited. Malcolm was too absorbed in his thoughts to fully pay attention.
Yet the greater irony, he realized, was this: how many more times had he never had to beg or even approach Rhode himself?
“Oh, hold on,” Ainsleigh said, realizing something. She could scarcely look him in the face. “Um. I don’t think I should’ve assumed. It’s not like everyone would theoretically— I mean, people can be interested in other…”
Eyes on her, Malcolm cocked his head, feeling so much validation. No one had ever told him he seemed gay. Asexual maybe, but not gay. Leo himself could barely acknowledge it outside his homiesexual remarks.
Ainsleigh kept babbling. “I mean, it’s not like you— You might not even— Well, not that I know, but it doesn’t seem like you’ve ever dated any girl.”
Not at camp.
“I mean, at camp obviously,” she said. “Unless you have an unknown girlfriend outside camp.”
Not anymore.
But that was okay. The present was better, or so he told himself when he irrationally wondered What if? and felt more relieved than wistful that the only ex of his he cared to count as an ex was all the way across the Atlantic. That meant it couldn’t hurt. That meant there wasn’t an option. That meant he could have the present. Besides, he had to be happy for her and the millions of people she was trying to help, compared to his measly thousands.
“Well, first of all,” Malcolm said, “not everyone has to date.”
“Oh, of course! Yeah, I know exactly,” Ainsleigh rushed to say. “I never really wanted to…” she trailed off.
With City Hall in full view, Malcolm thanked Athena he would be spared from further awkwardness. But he couldn’t help the little troll in him. “But there’s definitely no girlfriend outside camp. ‘Cause I’m kinda married already,” he whispered to Ainsleigh, eager for her reaction.
Ainsleigh stared at him with wide eyes. “Oh!” she exclaimed, beginning to chuckle. “To Leo?”
Malcolm belted a loud, uncontrollable laugh. “To the city,” he said, gesturing to their workplace in front of him.
“Ah, yes.” Ainsleigh smiled.
“Which reminds me,” Malcolm said, “I should be getting back to her. Or him.”
Ainsleigh nodded.
It felt easy to say to her. Did it even count since she kinda already knew? Did it count if he didn’t even say it outright?
If Malcolm were a proper wingman, he might have considered telling Leo about Ainsleigh, given how much she mentioned him and hung around when Leo was around. Malcolm just couldn’t be bothered. Never mind how uncomfortably that conversation would have played out.
Ainsleigh began to laugh again as they entered the building. “I’m just saying, it’s a little weird to be married to the city when the city’s named after your mom.” She pulled a face.
“Oh, gods, please don’t say that,” Malcolm moaned.
“You’re the one who said it.”
“And you won’t be repeating it.”
She full-on grinned. “No.”
Bet Billie and Miranda would be laughing later this evening.
Because Malcolm knew Ainsleigh wasn’t extra enough to warrant an elevator, they took the stairs up to level 5. Even there, Malcolm still didn’t manage to lose her tail. She apparently needed to go over some questions with him. This time, he didn’t even stop his mind from complaining.
“By the way, how’s Alicia doing?” she said. “I used to give her strawberries. She used to taste-test them and ask me a whole bunch of questions. She was obsessed. But now she looks like she wants to gag at the sight.”
Yeah. Malcolm had finally sat her down to give her the talk. It had been mortifyingly unpleasant all the way through, but it had gone pretty well. Alicia was now informed. Absolutely disgusted, too, but informed. He had lost it when she handed him an essay the very next day that she had written on why boys should have periods. Alicia had made a whole bunch of misspellings and grammatical errors, but she had been enraged enough not to care. That, too, had been surprising. It was also totally surprising to have been personally slut-shamed by a six-year-old—before she knew better anyway—but Alicia hadn’t seemed too guilty about it. Malcolm blamed the shock.
“She’s recently decided she’s not a fan of strawberries,” Malcolm said. “Or grapes.”
Grapes were “bad strawberries”, as Alicia had put it.
No need to explain further. This was a family thing.
On the fifth floor, Hubert was leaning on the doorway to his office, yakking in French. At least that was until he backed out of Malcolm’s office and rushed to tell him, “Chiara’s calling me. Your 3:30 is here.”
It was 3:42 at this point.
Through the doorway, Malcolm spotted Rhode, sitting on his chair, as her thumbs flew in a frenzy over her phone.
Ainsleigh shot her brows up at Malcolm, which he straight up ignored. That didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten a little rise of annoyance out of the sight.
Rhode hadn’t even looked up. “Shut the door, would you? I was just about to start without y— Oh, hello.” Switching moods as quickly as her father was known to, she immediately employed a more welcoming tone.
About to—?
Ainsleigh couldn’t seem to manage to say anything.
Malcolm avoided either of their gazes.
All poised and elegant after just swiveling in his chair, Rhode dropped her phone and stood to greet Ainsleigh, wearing her princessly smile and kind eyes that she managed not to look fake. “I don’t think I’ve met you. I’m Rhódē. People call me Rhode.” She held out her hand.
Ainsleigh took it. “I’m Ainsleigh.”
“And you’re cute,” Rhode said, quickly looking over her and completely disregarding Malcolm.
Wow. Right in front of him, she’d just—?
Like Leo all over again.
Was it flirting? Gods, Malcolm never knew anymore.
“I love the cherry blossoms,” Rhode added excitedly, referring to the couple of pink flowers in Ainsleigh’s hair. “They’re gorgeous.”
Ainsleigh thanked her almost embarrassedly. “My mom’s Demeter, so, you know,” she explained, injecting a jokey tone in her voice, “I kinda like plants.”
Rhode still didn’t bother to look at Malcolm—who claimed his rightful spot in his own chair as Rhode said, “Did you grow them?”
“I did actually, yeah,” Ainsleigh said with a laugh.
“Well, they really are beautiful and so unique,” said Rhode. “I use sakura soap sometimes. Mmm, it smells divine. My favorite, though, is—”
“Jasmine?” Ainsleigh said. “I tend to smell jasmine near you. It’s really nice.”
So that’s what it was. Jasmine. Jasmine. Malcolm caught the scent (her usual—still not the one he had tried identifying earlier), labeled it, and logged it in his brain.
Maybe when he finally moved into his own place, he could get jasmine candles. It wasn’t Rhode, he told himself. She just had good taste.
“I think there’s also bergamot,” Ainsleigh said. “And maybe lemon… pomegranate… peony… a bit of sandalwood….”
Rhode’s mouth flew open. “You can just do that? That’s so impressive!”
While Rhode gushed over Ainsleigh’s abilities (the 729th time Malcolm wished Athena had blessed her children with neat party tricks) and Ainsleigh merely blushed, and as they doled out more compliments to each other about rompers and pocketed dresses, Malcolm wondered why Rhode couldn’t be this nice to him.
It wasn’t as hot, said that shameless part of him. Sexy was better, even if her torment felt worse.
And now as Malcolm cleared Rhode’s stuff from his side of his desk, the ladies were deep in conversation about Ainsleigh’s hair braiding techniques and the stitching of Rhode’s tote bag, spelling out the words ‘If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake’.
Malcolm looked away from them and furtively glanced at the clock, already shifting his mental calendar to try to get back to Alicia on time.
Get a move on it. I don’t got all day, people.
He itched to do something.
Ah. Snacks. He could eat his three bananas while Rhode and Ainsleigh chattered.
“Either of you want something from the snack bar?” he said.
Ainsleigh, ever so polite, refused.
“Rhode,” Malcolm said. “Coffee?”
She agreed.
Once Malcolm returned with a long black, he found Rhode and Ainsleigh still chatting away about flowers. Third-wheeling in his own office, he laid out the bananas for him and, just in case, some pasteli and nuts for his guests.
It was a good call. Rhode immediately reached for the pasteli before volunteering to set up their seating charts on his smart board. Malcolm, too, could nourish himself as Ainsleigh rummaged through her sling for a notepad, sitting, he realized, on the extra chair only Rhode ever occupied.
“So,” Ainsleigh began, “the official opening is March 12th…” She said it like a question.
Malcolm mm-hmmed through a bite. We all know that.
“By the way, why then?” she asked.
Chewing gave Malcolm time to think. “It was enough of a buffer to get the right things set up.” He took another big bite.
Ainsleigh nodded in silence, clearly hesitant to inquire further. Malcolm didn’t care. He didn’t want to be asked.
“Right,” Ainsleigh said. “Anyway, I’m trying to leave enough room for the street beautification to plant the right flowers in the right places.”
Ah. Street beautification. And here he was currently working out cash flows and debt when there were flowers to worry about.
Malcolm held down his stupid temper and listened.
“I’ve been brainstorming and looking at plants in season,” Ainsleigh said, “and thinking about what will best fit those ideas you shared for the agora and the city square, for example. But I wanted to ask: aside from the sketches you shared, was there a particular look you wanted to go for?”
Girl, you can make your own decisions.
Is what Nana would say. Malcolm wasn’t like Nana.
“Well,” he said, “you can pick whatever is nice and fits the budget. You’re the expert and you have creative freedom, so I trust your decisions.”
“Oh! That’s kind of you,” Ainsleigh said with another of her smiles.
No, that’s your job.
Maybe he was a little like Nana.
“Do you have a preference, though?” Ainsleigh asked. “A favorite flower or…?”
Never thought about it. “Uh... I don’t know...” Pick anything.
Jasmine, said a voice.
Fuck no. Anything else.
The whole of New Athens could smell like Rhode. How heavenly.
And, gods, how creepy.
“Um.” The sooner you pick, Malcolm told himself, the sooner you can get back to real issues. “Violets?” he said.
He saw violets mentioned somewhere recently. Who knew where? It was probably mentioned in an article or poem he had read at night. That must’ve been why he didn’t remember.
Rhode turned from the smart board to look at him—maybe judging his choice, what with the way her brows twitched. Nevertheless: “Violets are nice,” she said, somehow feeling a need to provide her input. “They seem sweet and also badass.”
“Cool. Violets then,” Malcolm told Ainsleigh.
He ignored the fact that he was certain he couldn’t pick them out of a lineup of blue or purple flowers. Nor did he know how a violet could look “badass”. Maybe he didn’t know because he couldn’t recognize one?
Ainsleigh’s eyes brightened. “Violets are actually pretty interesting,” she said, smiling again as she sat up straighter. “They smell sweet, but their scent comes and goes because they have ionones, which shut off, or short-circuit, your smell receptors. They kind of temporarily steal our sense of smell. So, every time you smell it, it’s kind of a new experience.”
“Oh, that’s really cool. I didn’t know plants could do that,” Malcolm said.
Something to read about on his break, among the hundreds of things he’d already listed and perhaps among the dozens he would forget. Ionones really would’ve been helpful during that Capture-the-Flag game, wouldn’t they? Or would everyone have just smelled the surströmming over and over again before they could have even gotten used to the stench?
“Do you have a favorite flower?” Malcolm asked.
Ainsleigh furrowed her brows, eyes darting around as she struggled with her thoughts.
Hades, what had he started?
“It changes every day,” she said after a long moment. “Today, I’ll go with cherry blossoms.”
“It’d be nice to have cherry blossom trees in the spring,” Malcolm said, glancing at the flowers in her hair. “And whenever else Demeter kids can make them bloom. As long as it fits the budget.”
Rhode, stocked on flower opinions apparently, suggested New Athens have a public rose garden. “They’re sexy,” she said.
Ainsleigh looked at her almost shyly. “Your name, Rhódē, means rose, right?”
“I thought it meant snake,” Malcolm piped up, full well knowing Ainsleigh’s translation was the more common of the two.
“There did use to be many snakes on my island,” Rhode said, staring into space. “But also flowers. My parents can’t agree on the meaning, but they liked the name.” Offering nothing else, she returned her attention to the board.
Malcolm wondered. How could Poseidon and Amphitrite go from names like Triton and Rhode to something like Kymopoleia? Maybe that was why the banished princess was so troublesome. And why was he even thinking about such trivial things right now?
“Ainsleigh, was there anything else?” he asked.
“Um, I think that’s fine for now,” she said, smiling again. “I’ll add some violets. And cherry blossoms.”
Oh-kay… “All right. Thanks. And, again, you really can do whatever you like,” Malcolm said.
“As long as it fits the budget,” Ainsleigh said, beaming from ear to ear.
“Exactly,” he said, throwing on a “Can’t wait to see it!”, hoping she would believe him. He was starting not to be able to think past a few weeks.
Ainsleigh smiled even wider if it were possible. “It was nice meeting you, Rhode. See you, Malcolm. Thanks for the chat. And for the snacks.” Jovial as always, she headed to the door, giving well wishes on their war prevention as Malcolm and Rhode bid her goodbye. “Oh,” she said, turning around, “would you like me to leave the door open or closed?”
“Uh, closed, please,” Malcolm said.
Rhode had the grace not to look at him—at least not until Ainsleigh had shut his door, leaving him in the discomfort of the goddess’s presence. Her glance spelled out a knowing amusement that immediately made Malcolm feel she had the upper hand, especially when she returned her attention to the board before he could think to defend himself.
Malcolm waited long enough for Ainsleigh to have reached her own office before quietly saying, “Wow. You’re really good at schmoozing.”
“It’s not schmoozing if it’s genuine,” said Rhode. “It’s called building relationships. You should learn it.”
Malcolm remained unfazed. “I’m not too concerned with having everyone like me. Being friendly is one thing. Schmoozing is a whole other.”
Rhode took a moment to study him with all sorts of confusion—from incredulity to irritation. “When you represent and help run a nation that spans the whole world, especially as a woman, you have to be well-liked,” she replied.
That shut him up.
“That’s not what I was referring to,” said Malcolm in their silence.
“Well, that’s what I’m telling you. You’re the leader of New Athens. Doing this should be useful to you.”
“Well, that’s why I’m mostly behind the scenes,” he said. “Or try to be anyway. People knew I ran to be the policymaker. Chiron’s the spokesperson, and people reporting to me do engage with residents. And I do meet people myself. That’s why I didn’t mind being head counselor of the Athena Cabin again. It’s an excuse to engage with stakeholders without them thinking of it that way. It’s just not a main part of my job.”
Even this far above the surface, he could feel Galene’s frosty eyes mow him down in silent castigation.
But the thought of fundraising... Ha! That was a big, fat no fucking way.
“You still might as well be nice to people and gain allies instead of adversaries,” said Rhode. “As Lincoln once said, ‘Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’”
“He probably didn’t actually say that,” Malcolm said.
Rhode stared at him.
“There’s no record of him saying that,” Malcolm explained. “The quote’s most probably misattributed.”
Rhode’s eyes left his as she huffed. “See, this is exactly what you shouldn’t do.”
Malcolm thought to point out that he totally wouldn’t have told Ainsleigh the same thing.
“You can try harder,” Rhode said. “I’m sure you don’t actually need an instruction manual for this, do you?”
“Or I just don’t like people.”
“So, for whom are you building New Athens?” said Rhode, looking all teacherly as she spun to face him, standing in front of the board with her marker in hand.
Malcolm thought for a moment, trying not to get distracted by the thought of Rhode instructing him like this on oceanography—or how a ponytail to gather up her layered waves would’ve looked fantastic on her right now. If she were on his desk, perhaps he could bury his face in the bare crook of her neck the way she’d told him she liked.
“The idea of people—in the abstract—is nice,” he said. “The reality is quite different.”
Not that there weren’t exceptions.
“Ohh, is that why you spend all your time holed up in this office instead of ever making any friends?” Rhode said, putting on a pout. “Your siblings don’t count,” she added before he could retort. “Neither do Percy and Annabeth’s friends you happen to hang out with.”
“They’re all still my friends,” Malcolm said. “I’m probably closer to a few than Annabeth and Percy are.” Maybe one. “I’m surprised. Never making friends. Eípe o gáidaros ton peteinó kephála.”
Rhode scoffed. “Excuse me? I have hundreds of friends at least.”
“You hung out with seemingly random colleagues and, like, thousands of constituents—strangers—on your birthday.”
“Because it’s a nation-wide festival!” said Rhode.
“And did you have a separate celebration?”
“What for?” she exclaimed. “Everyone’s already there, including my friends.”
“Are they really friends?” Malcolm said. “Or are they contacts? Or constituents? Subjects? Supporters? Allies? Who do you actually talk to regularly outside your family? In the past, what, four weeks, I’ve only ever heard you and Percy talk about hanging out with Galene, who is your cousin and your employee.”
“I have other cousins!” Rhode argued. “There’s a whole group of nearly one hundred, mind you, and we meet up on our regular day trips we do together. Our last one was in Nafplio.”
“And when was that? Your last regular day trip?”
Rhode was silent for a moment. “April,” she said.
“Oh, four months ago,” Malcolm said, dripping with sarcasm. “I suppose that feels like just yesterday to a god. I meet up with my friends multiple times a week.”
“Excuse me if I’m busy,” said Rhode.
“Well, so am I.”
“You live together at Camp Half-Blood!”
“And we can’t teleport, because we’re not gods,” Malcolm said. “Where are you going with this? Don’t enough of you live in Atlantis anyway?”
It seemed they had reached a stalemate. Which was seeming more and more ridiculous to Malcolm because he realized they were more or less in the same boat.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” he said.
Rhode whipped her head around to look at him. “Oh, I didn’t realize I needed your opinion on the matter.”
Didn’t realize I needed yours on flowers.
“I’m just saying,” Malcolm said calmly, “I think there’s research that shows that people can only really have the capacity for about five actual best friends? If it’s family, why should that matter? Isn’t it better it’s them and not other people?”
Was he going to go for it? Yeah, he was. Only because Rhode was being so snappish.
“And at least, as far as I know, none of my siblings have tried to kill another sibling,” he said with nonchalance.
“I am well aware that Kymopoleia has issues, thank you,” Rhode said stiffly.
“Oh,” Malcolm feigned, “well, there were also Antaeus, Chrysaor, Polyphemus, Procrustes…” He counted off the names on his fingers. “How many have tried to kill Percy? I’m going alphabetical order here. Who am I missing?”
“Are we actually going to work today,” said Rhode, “or do you want to continue talking at me about how deranged some of my siblings can be?”
Malcolm turned on his computer at last. “Where do we put those siblings?” he said.
“If you cared to focus,” Rhode began, and pointed to her work on the board filled with three lists of names, “we still have all these gods to assign seats to before we start on more.”
When Malcolm poked around their seating charts to finally make himself useful, Rhode paused her scribbling. Her body went rigid as she turned to face him—just barely.
“I meant that as a broadly applicable, rude comment,” she said. “That had nothing to do with you being neurodivergent.”
In his scoff, Malcolm barked a laugh. “Here I was, so hurt. Just pained, really.”
“Oh, shut up,” Rhode mumbled.
They began working, exchanging ideas on whom to put where, never once looking at the other.
Malcolm felt no impulse today to do so much as glance at Rhode, at least not until she came over to sit down and steal a banana from his stash. He really tried not to be annoyed. (Why was he bothered anyway? How was Rhode to know he was enough of a weirdo to want to eat three entire bananas in one sitting?) But there was no quelling his ire when Rhode conjured up a plate and fork and used the fork to slice the stolen banana and eat said slices with said fork. Just so incredibly inefficient. Truly royalty, this one. How Ainsleigh couldn’t see it, Malcolm didn’t know.
“What?” erupted Rhode. “I’m hungry. I haven’t had dinner. I can work while I eat.”
“You need your bananas plated and sliced?” Malcolm said.
It was like Rhode hadn’t considered how peculiar it was. “Habit,” she said. “I learned the hard way that I cannot eat a banana in public. It’s too phallic an object to put anywhere near my face.”
If I recall correctly, you never minded in the least.
“It’s just a fruit,” Malcolm said.
Rhode scoffed. “Tell everyone else that. I don’t want any more compromising photos.”
“Why would I—?”
“I said, it’s a habit,” Rhode said tersely.
They dove into the seating charts again, muttering comments now and then across the desk as they reviewed Rhode’s new lists of problematic and peaceful deities.
Four minutes in, Malcolm couldn’t bear it. He headed to the door. “Do you like chickpeas or chicken?”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Rhode was noticeably unpeeved when he returned with a chicken couscous for her and a chickpea salad for him. He could have dinner early. Maybe he’d have the other banana when Cabin Six would be having their dinner.
She immediately created some space for them as he approached. Usually when they cleared his desk, it was to fool around. Malcolm wondered if that was also what came to Rhode’s mind.
He deduced it was not, because instead of any sneaky glances, what Rhode gave him instead was a heartfelt “thank you”—zero hesitation. It was a nice change of pace. And, Malcolm thought, perhaps with food in their bellies, they wouldn’t bicker so much.
They ate without a word. Chewing just sounded so loud right now. It really wasn’t difficult not to look at Rhode, no matter how contrived.
“Did you know,” she said, cutting through their silence, “that China recently banned livestreams of people seductively eating bananas? Or women at least. I don’t know which I’m more offended by: losing the right to erotically eat bananas or having men stare at me while I’m putting in my mouth what they imagine is their own cock.”
Malcolm tried not to think about how salacious the words sounded coming from her mouth.
“If I want to do something,” Rhode said, “and there are other consenting parties, but it’s unlawful?”
“Then the state’s not libertarian enough?” he suggested. “Though it still depends on the context.”
“So maybe it’s worse to lose the right,” Rhode decided. “But… well, I don’t mind people complimenting my talents, but not when I’m eating. And I’ll work with most anything; I don’t need them cut. You know that.” She glanced at him before spooning another helping of couscous. “The ethics of that are a whole other debate.”
Oh my gods. “Are you always like this?” Malcolm said.
Rhode’s eyebrows lifted. Malcolm waited a long moment for her to stop chewing.
“What’s your point?” she said.
“You’re a politician? When you serve the public—”
“Oh, and politicians can’t ever share sexual thoughts, can they? In any capacity, public or not.”
“Just the female ones,” he said. Really, how did she not feel any terror that blabbing anything like this to random hookup buddies wouldn’t end up on the front page the next day?
There was way too long a silence. She just turned to her couscous.
“It was a joke,” Malcolm said. “I was being sarcastic.”
Rhode rolled her eyes. “I know that. And now you’ve completely ruined the joke.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to take it like a joke,” he said.
“It wasn’t funny enough to warrant a laugh.”
“Suit yourself.”
They were quiet again, merely eating and looking away from one another, until Rhode finished her meal and said once more, “Thank you for the food. And the coffee.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Rhode seemed displeased. “No.”
“No,” Malcolm repeated in question.
“No, I don’t appreciate that.” Rhode’s eyes turned cold. “You don’t trust my judgment? Or value my opinions?”
Maybe when your standards are this low.
Malcolm bit back the comment. “It’s food,” he said. “I microwaved prepared food from the fridge. I pressed one button to get the coffee.”
So eerily quick to change moods, Rhode had warmed up again, half shrugging, half bobbing her head about. “But,” she said, “you thought about it. And you did it. And this is how I take my coffee.”
Why did that make Malcolm’s cheeks go warm?
“By the way,” Malcolm said, remembering his previous shame, “she was pissed we ruined the grass in the forest during Capture the Flag.” He was smiling now, even more as Rhode’s face twisted in horror. “She’s been trying to fix the saltwater damage all this time. Oops?”
“She couldn’t have told me that?” Rhode said. “I could tell she didn’t like me, but I just thought— I didn’t know I’d also done something. Why didn’t you say anything? You should’ve said! I could’ve apologized!”
Malcolm promised to let Ainsleigh know. “You seemed to be in her good books anyway,” he said.
“Schmoozing,” said Rhode.
“I thought it was building relationships if it’s genuine.”
Rhode cracked a smile. “Touché.”
It looked like she wanted to say something else.
“What?” he said.
Rhode just did a half shrug, half head shake. It was like she was laughing at him.
Malcolm could only continue to awkwardly have his last bites as Rhode cleaned up and wiped his desk.
“Thanks for clearing the desk,” he said.
Rhode stared at him. “Now you’re making fun of me.”
“No.” That might have been a little sarcastic.
She just huffed and got to work again.
So it seemed even playing nice didn’t turn up the heat—or maybe that was why?
It would’ve gone so differently if Ainsleigh had never invaded their bubble, Malcolm grumbled silently. If it hadn’t been for Ainsleigh, he could have started a squabble with Rhode but one that would’ve led them to the right direction. Maybe ‘Is that where you’re supposed to be sitting?’ Surely he could’ve filled in the blanks and gotten all the way to ‘The chair fits two.’ And instead they had ended up here, where he had to feel gross for even wishing for something else.
That aside, Malcolm wondered— No, he told himself—could see it plain—that Rhode remained somewhere in his periphery. If Leo was still closer and yet miles away, it would’ve been beyond dumb to delude himself into thinking he knew Rhode enough—as if there were even a level that would be enough or any level he had a right to think was enough.
And, sure, half the time Rhode wore floral dresses, that same jasmine aroma, and the taste of coffee. But her moods were as unpredictable as her hairstyles. She was generous even when he expected her to make fun of him; insulted when he didn’t mean offense; kind when he did mean offense; quiet when he figured she’d rant…
Or maybe his receptors were broken. Maybe she did that to throw him off. If Rhode had chosen her schmoozy persona for Ainsleigh, what had she chosen for him, now and before?
Like today. What was this right now? While he had expected Rhode to give him lowdowns only on a need-to-know basis on more sensitive issues, she blithely gossiped to him about one god after another.
Rhode’s looser lips today told him of the famine-spreading “total asswipe” that was Limos. That didn’t mean she didn’t have a few choice words about Hermes and Demeter for their experiments with monocropping and their blaming Limos for their failures. Limos was to sit far, far away from them.
Ate, according to Rhode, was “a wretch”. After a thousand years since Zeus had cast her away from Olympus, Ate was done with causing discord among mortals, for they had seemingly taken her hobby away from her. She wanted bigger challenges. For centuries she had made her way around godly townships and enclaves as part of her thousand-year plan to return to Olympus. (Malcolm made another mental note to sacrifice his next meals to Soteria.) Rhode wanted to deal with Ate by having Argus or someone surveil her.
Meanwhile, Comus (“Poor thing,” said Rhode) was in shambles. With gambling debts still under his name, he had spent every drachma he had left suing Tyche for a laundry list of torts: negligence, personal injury, domestic abuse, intentional infliction of emotional distress… According to Comus, Tyche was a feeder. Malcolm wrote “Comus → ¬Tyche” under his running list of propositions and slotted the two gods far away from one another.
Although Malcolm really wanted to hear about people like Aegle (a river nymph Helios had hooked up with) or Neaira (another river nymph Helios had hooked up with) or Klymene (a sea nymph Helios had hooked up with) or Perseis (another sea nymph Helios had hooked up with), Rhode had only brought up Neaira. Or at least it was someone named Neaira, because Rhode only had good things to say about her.
This Neaira was a wildcard they could seat next to any problematic sea god or goddess. After Atlantis had this Neaira investigate selenium price-fixing just last year (“I knew it was happening! I called it!” Rhode said), her cover had been blown, but she had earned a fearsome reputation among industry. (“Imagine how fun that would be,” Rhode said. “And she doesn’t even shapeshift.”) Malcolm put an asterisk by Neaira’s name and followed Rhode’s suggestion to have her sit near—but not with—Phorcys.
“Does this have anything to do with the nymph trafficking ring he’s running in the Mississippi River?” Malcolm asked.
Rhode didn’t say. “Can you believe he has to attend?” she said. After a moment longer with her lists, she added, “She does know, by the way. I’m not simply putting her in harm’s way. She agreed. Triton will be joining her. She’s not going to handle it alone. And you will swear on the Styx you won’t tell anyone—not that you would ever blab or even know anyone to blab to.”
Malcolm swore on the Styx.
“Is that what you’d prefer doing?” he asked. “You said it was fun what she did.”
Rhode took a moment, licking her lips, a temptation he dragged his eyes away from. “I can’t do that work,” she said. “I have to deal with the agreements and standards, the meetings with execs and diplomats, the liaising among organizations, the typical community investments. It’s all very safe.”
“But you’re trying to take Neaira’s job away. And Triton’s,” Malcolm said. “Which is harder.”
“Is that your goal for New Athens? Mass unemployment?”
He chuckled.
Rhode went quiet as she looked back at him. “You can only hope it’s working—not that we don’t have an entire agency collecting every scrap of data to try to find out if I’m useful or not. But does it even find anything conclusive? Not really.”
“Because it’s harder.”
“At least Triton knows when he’s done a good job.”
“Did you— Were you allowed to fight in the wars?” Malcolm asked.
“Of course, I did,” Rhode said immediately. “But not quite like you.”
There was a part of Malcolm that resented that. “Someone has to do your kind of work,” he said anyway.
“Trust me, I know. I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I meant, as a diplomat, there are certain... lengths you can go to and certain lengths you can’t. While you have demigods, like you, I’m sure, fighting with every fiber of their mortal being—”
Malcolm fought to keep his eyes on Rhode’s, and it was such bullshit, but he couldn’t possibly bear Rhode to find out otherwise. His chest could rip all it wanted right now, but he refused any shivers of shame.
“—you then have gods like me, who are only ‘allowed’, as you put it, to defend their own home to the very best of their abilities when everybody becomes beyond desperate, and only then. We didn’t quite get that far.”
The tear searing through Malcolm stitched itself up.
“It’s harder, in a way,” he said. I get it. “But there are other responsibilities, right? If you have hope for the long term?” He turned back to her notes, with Rhode following suit.
She cleared her throat, beginning another long silence between the two of them. Even as Malcolm fixed his eyes on his computer, scrolling around the tables he and Rhode had marked over Long Island Sound, nothing was processing. His attention was preoccupied with Rhode adjusting her hair, Rhode fiddling with her bracelet, Rhode playing with her pens.... Only when she told him to scroll back a second did he emerge from the cloud. Guilt worked wonders.
“We should move Koalemos farther away from the front,” she said. “Athena shouldn’t see him or his antics at all. Move him to that table in front of Eunomia. We can put Philophrosyne with Koalemos, too.”
Malcolm hesitated to do as Rhode said. “What did she do to deserve that?”
Rhode peered at him in question. “They’re together.”
He had to pick up his jaw. “She’s with him? How did that— Oh, I guess I can see why.”
“They’ve been together for something like forty years,” Rhode said.
Malcolm made a face. “What does she see in him?”
“Maybe she got dicknotized,” she said with a shrug.
“But he’s such a...”
Malcolm was starting to get too invested in this. His daily newspaper reading sessions now involved him perusing the gossip rags. Two days ago, he had read that Koalemos had been kicked out of another bar on Olympus for starting a fight.
“And she’ll quell any trouble he causes before your mother curses him,” said Rhode.
Malcolm eyed the names on his screen. “It actually seems gross to not give her a break from him. Why don’t we pretend we don’t know—”
“Everybody knows,” said Rhode.
“Still,” Malcolm said. “I mean, maybe she should sit with Astraea. Maybe that’ll do it.”
Rhode set down her pen. “What makes you think Philophrosyne is going to believe a word Astrea tells her?”
“She’d at least listen, right? ‘Cause she’s nice enough to do that?” he said.
“Philophrosyne’s specialty is showing kindness,” said Rhode, “but it’s sad and quite pathetic, as everyone can see, that she forgets to show it to herself. She’s not going to want to overcome her problems through vengeance like Astraea would. As you may have noticed before, there isn’t really a god of self-respect. It’s always about being humble or having temperance or refraining from outwardly dishonorable behavior. She wants to be kind to him. That’s who she is.”
“Then maybe she could sit near someone like you?” Malcolm suggested. “Not you, but, you know.”
“You think I’m like Astraea?” Rhode said with contempt.
“I mean, someone who can show her her life doesn’t have to involve the idiocy Koalemos brings. I don’t think either you or Astraea would put up with someone like Koalemos.”
“That is precisely what my work entails. Working around and making nice with pests like him,” she said.
“I mean personally.”
“People like me,” said Rhode, “don’t like talking about their personal lives to strangers.”
Is that also why your bios are basically blank? Malcolm thought to ask.
“You’re the listening type,” Malcolm surmised.
“It’s a lot more fun,” she said.
He certainly didn’t think so. “But we know about the problem.”
“We can’t fix everyone’s problems through this seating chart,” said Rhode, clearly losing her patience. “The task is to mitigate and manage conflict for Percy and Annabeth. Philophrosyne has been with Koalemos for forty years. She can go by another day with the oaf he is—assuming, of course, that she doesn’t dump him before May.”
“It’s already been forty years,” Malcolm said. “That’s just sad. I don’t get it. She has everything going for her. She has that foundation for children she runs and that other one for the homeless, and from what I’ve read, they’re not tax shelters or vanity projects. She’s earned Zeus’s Medal of Virtue, like, sixty times. Why doesn’t she just leave him?”
“You say that,” Rhode said. “It’s only forty years.”
Malcolm’s jaw dropped. “Are gods just slow? No offense.”
“Completely taken,” said Rhode coldly. “When you have all the time in the world, you don’t give up so easily. Those who aren’t immortal seem so impatient.”
“And immortals don’t start things easily without a deadline,” Malcolm said.
“Fair enough.”
They moved onto her second list: the remaining gods who had already had a cabin at camp. It was all very boring after the insanity Malcolm had heard, but his eyes caught on one particular name.
“Do you know where to put Hecate?” he said.
Rhode’s sigh sounded something like an ugh. “I don’t think so.”
Malcolm continued to type out her notes. “What do you know about her?” Other than the fact that she had hooked up with Helios when you were married to him? “Is she, like, still problematic? I mean, she sent some empousai after Percy and was on Kronos’s side…”
“I don’t really hear too much about her. I know she’s powerful,” said Rhode.
“But she kinda belongs in your red list, right?”
“I suppose.”
“We’re going off your knowledge here. I don’t know shit.”
“How very convenient for you,” said Rhode.
“Okay, based on what I know, Zeus probably still wants to keep an eye on her,” Malcolm guessed. “We could put her in his line of sight, maybe? Or put her farther back, maybe near Eirene, who can keep peace.”
Rhode didn’t bother responding.
“Rhode, yes or no?”
“I’m thinking,” she said, almost curtly. She sighed again. “No. We can bring her up front with Artemis.”
Malcolm’s brows scrunched. “So far, everyone up front was on the Olympians’ side in the two wars. That’s fair.”
“Again,” said Rhode, “it’s not about fairness. It’s about peace, remember? And two wars ago hardly matters. Enough switched sides in the end; it’s forgiven. It’s the Giant War that’s the issue,” she muttered.
“But why is that an issue? I mean, if there are other reasons, that’s fine. We can kick her off to some other table if she’s just a jerk or—”
“It would very likely humiliate her if it was hinted in any way that she wasn’t exactly loyal,” said Rhode. “Not everyone knows she was playing both sides.”
Malcolm’s jaw fell to the floor once more. “Even after she got a cabin here?” he hissed.
“That’s what our intelligence found,” Rhode said.
“Which was?”
Rhode looked up from their notes, glaring the faintest bit. “I’m only telling you this because of the wedding. That’s all you need to know.”
“What if there was some issue concerning her in New Athens?” he said. “You really wouldn’t want to share that information? As a city Poseidon is a patron of?”
“And why would any issue arise? It seems you don’t like her already,” Rhode said easily.
Malcolm still didn’t catch even a flicker of a clue.
“Doesn’t this all just mean we have to start from scratch with all these other gods?” he said. “They’re all obviously being supervised. How can we even manage to avoid humiliating all of them?”
“With them,” Rhode said, “it’s more about potential, rather than already committed acts against Olympus—most were actually on the Olympian side—and there are no secrets. They’re not being backed into a corner. They’ve chosen those reputations. With her—”
Aha! Maybe?
“—it’s about letting her save face and giving her an exit from our enemies. So, we will pretend she was with us all along.”
Malcolm cooled his fire-hot fury and let Rhode direct their focus to other gods.
A full two hours had passed since Ainsleigh had left, and with each passing minute, any conversation between him and Rhode just seemed to loudly declare that there wouldn’t be any fun happening today. To be honest, Malcolm couldn’t even regret his part in their spats earlier. He didn’t apologize or mention any of them, but then again, neither did Rhode.
All he could do was pretend not to care, wishing all the same that Rhode had minded. Not once had she asked him, or even hinted, for any favors. The only thing she asked from him was to go over the “alien math” he was doing on the side of their chart.
When Malcolm’s explanations strayed too far on a tangent about Boole, De Morgan, and especially Leibniz (a son of Athena), he realized he had talked too much. To make up for his chattiness, Malcolm suggested they apply symbolic logic to some sea god drama. He anyway wanted a peek into Rhode’s (or perhaps Atlantis’s) diplomacy strategies. It took until he noticed Rhode stifling her yawns and forcing her eyes open that he realized that by asking his many questions, he was still talking too much.
He didn’t get it. Even after he had shut up, Rhode still made no effort to leave. After the third time she yawned, it was Malcolm who excused her.
“I can come back this week,” she said. “We don’t necessarily have to...”
Bang?
Rhode gestured to their surroundings. “Work on this.”
Oh.
“This week’s exhausting,” she said.
When she yawned again, Malcolm was forced to hold back his own yawn. It was barely 6 PM.
Asked to keep her colored pens in his desk drawers, because Rhode was apparently so tired of transporting them, Malcolm agreed without hesitation.
“I’ll keep them safe until…”
“Tomorrow?” Rhode said, perking up.
“Ah.” Malcolm’s face scrunched. “So, um... We’re figuring out stuff with pharmacy benefit managers tomorrow, so Apollo’s visiting from three to six. And sometimes, he stays for dinner.”
Face falling into a frown, Rhode pursed her lips. “Okay, I’ll figure something out,” she said. “I truly didn’t expect we would have finished ten entire tables today. And there must be fifteen more in progress.”
“If Annabeth or Percy ask,” Malcolm said, “we’ve only done five.”
“That’ll buy me three more visits,” she said, smiling through a yawn.
“Oh my gods, go to bed,” he said.
Rhode smiled faintly. “Good night.”
Malcolm let his impulse rule him. “Sweet dreams,” he said.
She actually puffed out a laugh. “Oh, I’m already having them. I think I’ve been asleep the past twenty minutes.”
Oh, yeah? What about? Malcolm couldn’t hold back his smile. “Go. To bed.”
He watched a fog enrobe Rhode completely until she disappeared.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Without warning, Rhode returned to his office on Friday at 5:01 PM. Malcolm only restrained a gleeful grin because he legitimately barely recognized her. Even after his double take, he had to wonder whether this woman with super long, super straight hair who was encroaching on his space was really Rhode, and why after he had said hello, she was watching him with shifty eyes.
“Hey,” he said simply.
Malcolm felt so rude for still typing as Rhode approached. Damn the Fates, that joint communiqué still needed his edits. Apollo had personally asked him to look over it.
“I’ll wait,” said Rhode. She didn’t look particularly happy about it.
How Rhode would even have known of Apollo’s involvement in whatever he was doing right now, Malcolm didn’t know, but it was like the sun god was in the room with them, dimming any chances of their fun. Rhode certainly didn’t look to be in the mood to start any fun. If anything, she seemed... confused?
So yeah, this totally was Malcolm’s own fault. Hadn’t Rhode said they hadn’t even had to bother with seating charts the next time he saw her? If only he had gotten through his training fast enough to have wrapped up his lesson planning fast enough to have put the finishing touches to this document fast enough to have prevented Rhode from looking at him like this. Yet here she was, having returned to him as quickly as she was able, as she had promised, while he was making her wait. And now she was wheeling up her chair to the smart board. And so now he had to fire up the board for her instead of finishing up his draft.
“Just a few minutes,” Malcolm lied. “Or actually maybe, like, ten.”
He didn’t tell her a heads up would’ve been nice. Why would he when, really, the surprises felt more special?
“Yeah, it’s okay,” Rhode said, returning to their charts as Malcolm kept typing away with a pit deepening in his gut.
Every time Malcolm stopped typing to proofread, Rhode glanced his way. It really wasn’t helping, especially when he noticed the second and third times that there was still a furrow in her brows. He was so annoyed at himself.
Even with Rhode’s back to him, he found it impossible to focus. This whole look of hers today... Maybe it was the hair, maybe the dark makeup, maybe the blazer she had on... (It really wasn’t actually that her hand kept going to her back.) Rhode just looked older today. As if Malcolm needed another reminder that he wasn’t anywhere near her age. He wouldn’t have said the realization was disturbing. It was just... discomforting.
Perhaps he should’ve worn one of his better dress shirts today. Not like he’d known Rhode was going to come by.
Of the eighteen minutes he actually took to wrap up, at least two were spent trying to figure out how to tell Rhode he was done. ‘You ready’? (She was the one waiting.) ‘I’m ready’? (How shameless.) ‘We doing the seating charts again today?’ (Why would he complain?) Thank the gods she couldn’t see him struggle.
“Sorry, was that past ten minutes?” he said eventually.
“No, just about,” Rhode said, wheeling herself back to his desk. “I,” she began, wearing that perplexed look again, “do not remember a thing you said about those logical propositions.”
“Oh.”
Malcolm’s excitement faded a little—which, as he told himself, was rather ridiculous. If that had been the reason for her unease, then that meant (1) she had actually been thinking about seating charts instead of him all this while, which meant (2) her disappointment must’ve had nothing to do with him.
“But I remember that Gottfried Leibniz was apparently your brother,” said Rhode, “and I think I have the signs down—like the ‘and’ and ‘or’ and ‘not’. But that’s pretty much it.”
Malcolm threw off any offense, choosing instead to cling onto the humor in this and maybe also a bit of flattery.
“Well, you were practically asleep then,” he said.
And she hadn’t wanted to leave last time either, had she?
“I tried,” said Rhode, glancing at the letters and signs she’d written in small print at the corner of the board.
The letters swam in his eyes, but he didn’t need to read all the letters to piece together the first two names: (Platon ⋂ Despina)
“Platon and Despina?” Malcolm said. “I assume that’s right. I think you said last time they’re long-time friends?”
“That’s the easiest,” Rhode said. “Seemingly the next easiest was the Paulina-Antheia relationship. They’ve been feuding since their divorce, so I wrote...” She gestured to the board again.
It took a few seconds for Malcolm to find the right names. ¬Paulina ⋂ Antheia, he read. Following that: ¬(Paulina ⋂ Antheia) and ¬(Paulina ⋃ Antheia).
“Uh-huh,” Malcolm said. Nuh-uh, he thought.
“I tried to put it in parentheses like you usually have them. And then I got stuck,” Rhode concluded. Her face scrunched ever so cutely as she grimaced.
They wheeled over to the board. There was a foot in between him and Rhode, but Malcolm couldn’t bring himself to get more than three inches closer. It already felt like they were already so misplaced this close together.
He could see the cogs turning in Rhode’s head as he helped her work out that ¬(Pa and A) was the same thing as ¬Pa or ¬A. He kept watching, catching her frown less as she thought aloud and asked if ¬(Pa or A) equaled ¬Pa and ¬A. He saw Rhode’s eyes light up their bluer hue when he confirmed it. Through mindful glances (because at this point, Malcolm had definitely done too much staring), he saw her work out for herself that none of the options were really what they needed, which was Pa → ¬A.
“Or the other way, right?” Rhode said excitedly. “If Antheia, then not Paulina.”
A bright, big smile had formed on her lips. Her eyes were glued to the board and she didn’t even touch Malcolm, save for an accidental nudge of her blue heel on his shin that he savored like an idiot, but, you know, stupid as it seemed, this was actually better than sex.
So when Rhode eagerly began rewriting some other statements and peered at him for confirmation, Malcolm could only encourage her until she came up with (Despina ⋃ Evangelina) → ¬Antheia. She full-on beamed at him once he had given her enough hints to write out Platon → ¬(Dimitrios ⋃ Sokratis).
By the time Rhode wanted to use Alastor’s dramas to experiment with more logical statements, her chair was only an inch apart from Malcolm’s. It was only partly his doing.
“Okay, these are too simple,” Rhode said.
Malcolm smiled. “Look at her. She’s an expert now.”
“It’s not that.” Rhode laughed. “He’s such an irredeemable fuckwad, it’s too easy.”
According to Rhode, the guy had been the one who had gotten Artemis and Apollo fighting over Orion. He had been to blame for cursing Zeus with paranoia, leading the king of the gods to incite a bunch of his feuds with the other Olympians. He had put demigods at war with each other. There was also a theory that it had been Alastor poisoning some of the harvests that Demeter blamed Limos for. Alastor was also why Iris and Hermes didn’t get along.
“And I’m half sure he got Poseidon and Athena to hate each other,” Rhode said, “because some of those stories about my father that mortals told aren’t true, and Alastor had a penchant for sending ridiculous not-so-blind items to Roman writers.”
Perhaps Ovid, Malcolm guessed.
“Now, all of Apollo’s feuds,” Rhode went on, barely uttering his name, “I don’t know about. The whole Marsyas thing might have really been the work of the jealous idiot himself. Niobe, though, might have been Alastor’s work. I just don’t see how Artemis would have helped him kill all those innocent children over a mere dumb boast.”
Malcolm wasn’t sure. He’d heard enough times of shootings over shit like potato chips and Instagram posts. If that could be normal for some mortals, why not egotistical gods? Who was to say Apollo hadn’t been such an example?
“Anyway, you’re going to have to look into all this,” Rhode said.
Rhode had rolled her chair back to his desk, Malcolm at her tail, and out from her purse, she handed him a list of names of wood nymphs and satyrs. “I truly have no idea about them and their relationships with him, and I am not going to ask around, so you are going to have to clarify all of this with him or anybody else who knows, because I would rather give up all my dresses than run into him again or let him think I’m inquiring about him.”
Malcolm surveyed the list on the page. Reading all the names Rhode had written already had him dreading those chats. He wondered if he could just ask Chiron for all the answers.
“I’ll also leave your name out of it,” Malcolm said, and swore he wouldn’t even tell anyone they had spoken about this.
Rhode cast him a look of relief. “I would appreciate that.”
Not that Malcolm would have ratted her out in any case, but there was something else about Rhode’s request—something exciting, something even possessive—that made him keen to seal his lips for her.
That said, Malcolm didn’t voice the thirty-odd questions still clamoring in his head. For how long has all this awkwardness and avoidance been going on? What was it like to see Helios fade from existence? What was it like to know he was being replaced by a guy like Apollo? Did you know it was coming? Did Helios? Did you try to stop it? Did Apollo ever reach out before it all went down? Did you know Helios had come back for a blip? Could you tell? Did Apollo want domain over the sun so badly—
“He didn’t start bothering me until five years ago,” said Rhode, still with an edge to her voice. “It was better when he didn’t remember I existed. You see him far more than Percy does. Maybe you can help in getting him to quit it, without, you know, making it obvious or giving anything away. He simply refuses to listen to Poseidon.”
This whole conversation felt unreal. Rhode must’ve been desperate, because Malcolm couldn’t think of a single reason he should have heard this monologue at all.
Rhode still wasn’t looking at him. She was too busy clicking around their diagram on his computer. “Ooh,” she said, “maybe tell him I’m not in the right place for it. That I’ll come to him when I’m ready. And that he isn’t helping. Or is that too far? I think that’s too far. I take that back. There wouldn’t be any coming back from that.”
“I suppose not,” Malcolm said.
Rhode’s mouse-clicking only got louder as her eyes grew a more intense sea green. “Maybe Poseidon’s lying about how big his hints to him have become,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. Last week it was, ‘You can’t speak for your daughter, Poseidon! This is the 21st century in the common era!’ Ugh, take a hint!” She threw her hands in the air, taking the mouse along with her.
Malcolm could only imagine coaxing Rhode to relax her tense shoulders, which looked even stiffer than her typical princess posture. Maybe he could offer a good shoulder rub. Or refer her to a service anyway. Wasn’t like he had a license to operate. Then again, neither did she as far as he knew, even though she had massaged his hands that early morning in her room. He’d just be returning the favor, right?
“Even after the campfire,” said Rhode, still moving around new names on the seating chart, “he hosted another of his ‘Rebuild the Colossus’ events, and he told Poseidon to invite me as a partner in the initiative.”
Her stern glare bore into the screen of the monitor. The angrier Rhode got, the more Malcolm swore he could feel a powerful, tense energy radiating from across his desk. He had to wonder how similar to Kymopoleia she was—or Percy’s stories of her anyway.
“That… sounds insulting,” Malcolm guessed, even if he couldn’t fully understand the logic.
Obviously, working together was a no-no, but even if it was for Helios? Would Rhode rather have rebuilt the Colossus herself, if she had the pull? Was that something she wanted at all?
Malcolm remembered how lonely it had been to be a demigod before coming to Camp Half-Blood. How isolating and tragic would it feel to carry the memory and what was it—Love? Admiration? Respect?—for someone who became irrelevant, when no one else alive understood?
“I think it’s the guilt,” Malcolm said. Something in him felt compelled to defend Apollo—or at least clarify the god’s intentions. “And—I mean, I’m definitely not saying you have to just because he wants to—but I think he also just wants to talk to someone who knew… who knew Helios, ‘cause... maybe no one he knows knew him.”
Rhode scoffed. “That is not my problem.” Her glare at the seating charts didn’t let up.
It really seemed like she was missing the big picture here.
“Apollo did... meet him five years ago,” Malcolm said carefully. “He could’ve—not like I know, but—he could’ve passed along a message for you? Could be that?”
There was a silence that grew as awkward as Malcolm felt at the reminder of how inconsequential he was to Rhode’s entire existence. That truth was almost embarrassing. Frankly, it was weird that he’d already gotten so used to Rhode that he’d sometimes forgotten that fact. And it was even more bizarre that after nearly an hour today, and all those other times, he yet again found Rhode within his three-foot radius. How odd was it that her gel pens were stored in his desk drawer these days, now scattered across the table amidst his own writing utensils and papers?
Malcolm’s thoughts snapped away as Rhode stole his keyboard without a word, slotting more names to tables.
“I would still rather give up all my dresses,” she then declared. “No, I wouldn’t. I would rather burn my entire closet.”
Malcolm’s lips fell ajar. “I thought that would’ve been the more conflicting thing. Last words and all.”
Either Rhode despised Apollo that much or… Or?
“I do not need anyone,” Rhode said, stormier than he had ever seen her, stormier than when he had pissed her off that time on his chair, than when he had thrown her under the bus during breakfast, “least of all that pushy pillock, to know what Helios felt about me.”
That actually sounded really sweet. It was, Malcolm realized, the first time he had heard Rhode say her late husband’s name. He wondered if anyone in Rhode’s mind and in all her years could ever hold a candle to the titan of the sun. What if somehow, someday, theoretically...
No, gods damn, that was absurd. Even in theory.
Like she would even utter the name “Malcolm” after— How many years?
Well, actually, the city changed things, didn’t it? How long would it be until no one remembered him?
Did he even care? Maybe he just wanted Athena to remember. And if anyone else, hey, why not Rhode—who he now found was shooting a look his way.
Whether she was amused or bemused, he couldn’t quite tell, but damn, for how long had he zoned out in front of her?
As Malcolm bit back a useless apology, his attention anchored itself to their last topic of conversation. A swarm of thirty more questions about Rhode and Helios swirled through his head now. All that godly drama he couldn’t bother with, and the only tea he was dying to be spilled was contained so carefully in its cup—as were his questions.
Rhode quickly left the subject behind, asking Malcolm’s opinion on which tables could be moved near Alastor’s. Malcolm knew it was his job anyway to work with Rhode on the seating charts, but it felt great that she’d asked. Yet what really did something was when she reached for his water bottle.
First her striking aged-up look. Then her rage-filled, fiery beauty. And now she was stealing his water. Tick, tick, tick.
“Can I?” Rhode said, already holding his bottle. “I’ve been talking so much.”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.”
As Malcolm did his best to go over his ideas, he thought of offering Rhode a proper drink. He refused, and watched Rhode take sips of his water, and okay, so he might have lied before, pretending to believe that co-writing logical propositions was any better than Rhode coming onto him. How likely was it really that they would go by two meetings (and six days at this point) without either of them getting off at the hands of the other?
Yet he and Rhode continued to work on the seating charts.
It took time, but Malcolm managed to forget about all the things they weren’t doing right now. But when he mindlessly applied his chapstick—a routine thing, he could swear it—Rhode’s eyes flew to his mouth. He hadn’t even known it was a move he could pull, but now he could test it out.
“I’m going to the restroom,” he said.
Rhode’s eyes hadn’t left his face as he stood. “Does that mean you want me to follow?”
Success!
“I legit need the restroom,” he said, nearly chuckling. He added, “The bathroom… isn’t really comfortable, right? It’s also not blessed by Harpocrates.”
Levity returned to Rhode’s bluer eyes. “Maybe that’s the fun of it,” she suggested.
“No. Hell no.” Malcolm was sure there were still stragglers outside.
“I was only kidding!” Rhode said, slightly exasperated. “I’ll wait.” She sneaked a sneaky look at him, following his frame until he left her sight.
Curse their luck, right as Malcolm began heading back, Bae followed him all the way to his office, hounding him yet again to get New Athens a universal basic income program going.
Fates, Malcolm thought, hadn’t he—and Rhode—been patient enough?
Malcolm had also been patient enough the past couple months to let Bae entertain his UBI idea with other city councilors. It was easy to be patient when Malcolm had never needed to expend his energy fighting Bae on this. Pravir had always been present to decry the idea as moronic. Except Pravir wasn’t here right now, and Malcolm actually cared to be polite.
“Bae, this really isn’t the time for this,” Malcolm told him, itching to return to Rhode. It was anyway past 6.
“Or,” Bae said, “we might as well do it from the get-go and then see—”
“That it’s a joke.” Before he could stop himself, the words had tumbled out of Malcolm’s mouth, and with Rhode on the other side of the door, he was on a roll. “It’s not equitable. So, it’s not useful. Hell, it’s not even affordable. So, it’s out of the question. You’re not turning me.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait! Wait a sec,” Bae said, stepping in on Malcolm’s way to Rhode. “Let’s just hash it out for a sec and actually try to figure out the math and the design. Then you can tell me no. You’ve seen the polls about it.”
Malcolm scoffed. “You know exactly that the public has no idea of the math behind it. Run the poll showing basic multiplication, compare it to our entire budget, and see if they say the same. Convince somebody else. You’re not turning me.”
Bae didn’t leave him, even when Malcolm finally entered his office. “I don’t get why you’re not even open to experim— Oh, Rhode! Hi!” Bae said, literally taken aback.
Rhode was perfectly poised returning Bae’s greeting. How did she greet Malcolm? With A Look, as she drummed her nails on his desk, while sitting on his chair.
Malcolm couldn’t even be offended. He tried to shoot his own look back—one that said, I’m trying.
“You were completely right,” Rhode told him. “This chair helps with the back ache.”
“Like I said,” Malcolm said casually. “Glad it helps.” He took a seat on the extra chair. (It really was far less comfortable, which just ballooned his guilt to the heavens.)
Rhode even attempted to return to the seating charts, but Bae seemed to think it was appropriate to lean on the doorway and ask, “Hey, Rhode. Doesn’t Atlantis have a UBI pilot going on?”
With a nudge to Malcolm’s leg under his desk, Rhode flitted her eyes to his for a half second. “We do,” she told Bae, who delivered a pointed glance at Malcolm. “We haven’t seen the results, but I’m looking forward to them.” At that, she turned her chair away from Bae, nudged her heel against Malcolm’s leg again, and picked up her pen, even if she didn’t look away from Bae yet.
Bae brazenly hummed. “Yeah, I say we owe it to people to respect their autonomy and dignity,” he said. “I’m sure that factored into Atlantis’s reasoning to implement the program.”
“Definitely,” said Rhode. This time, she actually began to write in her notes in her different pen colors, resorting only to momentary glances at Bae now. Whether it was another lie or she genuinely started on the seating charts yet again, Malcolm couldn’t tell, but he, too, made a show of occupying himself with their work.
“See, Malcolm? We can take a cue from our patron god’s realm,” said Bae.
You can take a cue and get outta here.
Malcolm felt another tap on his leg.
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “I mean, Atlantis is so well known for its small, libertarian government and totally believes it’s sufficient to throw small sums of money at people and call it a day. It definitely would never in the course of all its history ever work to serve the least well-off by building wrap-around social protection services instead of leaving them to figure out everything on their own. Because, you know, being impoverished means you only lack money, not petty things like community infrastructure—”
“I never said—”
“—or the arts. So, giving more than just money would be completely unfair and highly undignified for its people, wouldn’t it, Rhode?”
Again, maybe it was worth it to forgo the sex just to see pride spark up Rhode’s eyes and know she was holding back a smile that he alone had put on her face.
Malcolm dug in some more. “And it’s not like Atlantis would be so impractical and cheap by taking some of that money away to, oh I don’t know, protect the oceans and invest in education and healthcare and all sorts of things. Because Atlantis can just trust that people would pitch in enough to improve their own welfare and societal outcomes. Because it really is that simple. So, Atlantis would never need money for that. Did I get that right?”
Rhode licked her lips and turned to Bae. “You’re interested in a universal cash transfer program, yes?”
“Right-o. Not that it has to be as dumb as Malcolm’s suggesting.” Bae resettled himself on the other side of the doorway.
Dude, just leave, Malcolm died to say. Get out of the building.
“Technically,” said Rhode, “our pilot is targeted.”
It was Malcolm’s turn to pointedly glance and hum at Bae—but Malcolm didn’t need to. The thought was enough, especially when Rhode dared to add, “That’s what you actually wanted, right?” She was looking at Malcolm. “You want cash transfers given only to the poor.”
Malcolm wished he could climb over his desk to kiss her right now.
“Look, it’s still worth trying,” Bae grumbled. “We actually have the opportunity here to build the services on top of the cash, not the other way around. That’s efficient.”
“It’s not going to work properly,” Malcolm said as calmly as he could. “If we give ‘enough’, there’ll still be glaring gaps.”
Bae threw his hands up and headed out. “Nice seeing you, Rhode.”
“Yes,” Rhode said smiling, “you, too.”
As soon as Malcolm shut his door—because Bae simply hadn’t—Rhode sighed and slumped in his chair. Curled up against the backrest, she jotted more things on the sheet of paper resting on her thigh, taking a second’s break only to adjust the awkward positioning of her legs.
It was impossible for Malcolm not to picture Rhode curled up against him instead. Maybe with her head on his shoulder. It was so bizarre, it literally made his brows twitch. He thought of more critical, pertinent things. Like her horrible posture. It was nagging at him that she was slouching, that she had kept grasping at her back earlier. Well, with this posture, no wonder she was aching. He could see it now; her neck was going to cramp.
“There’s a leg rest,” Malcolm said. There was a tiny part of him whining at the turn of events, which he straight-up ignored. “From the bottom of the seat. You pull it out.”
Rhode was amazed. “I need to get one of these,” she said. Now her heels were undoubtedly on the cushion. And now she was taking them off, and it was all feeling so homey and intimate—and so intrusive as Rhode turned herself further away to curl up deeper into his chair again with her sheet of paper, pen at the ready.
The whiny part of Malcolm, driven no doubt by his heated loins, had him saying, “You really wanna do the charts, don’t you?”
“Well, now I do. He made me start a new table!” Rhode said in annoyance. “Maybe we should’ve thrown another petrified sea shell at him.”
Malcolm snickered.
“I can still help you later,” Rhode offered. “Let me just finish this bit.” She turned away from him and began writing again. “Unless you want...” She glanced at him and smirked. “... me to finish you first?”
With a back ache? Malcolm contemplated. Yeah, no thanks.
As if she could read his mind, Rhode said, “I am not debilitated. I can totally do it. I wouldn’t want you to wait.”
Malcolm’s brows shot up. “Okay. What’s the new table you started though?”
Rhode sat up. With actually proper posture. “Do you know Iola and Astacus?”
“Nope.” Was he going to regret asking?
“She owns this conglomerate called Alethes,” Rhode began.
Hades, why was he pulling them deeper into this?
“Oh, they make food containers and togas and toothpaste and stuff, right?” Malcolm said anyway.
“Yes, and pots and kitchenware and food and beauty products and underwear,” said Rhode. “Astacus owns a different company called Tartarucha. It’s a lingerie boutique. He’s in fierce competition with Iola, especially since he refused to sell his company to her. Normally, she wouldn’t care, since Alethes is huge, but she hates him in particular for that or whatever other reason. Which reminds me. The replacement I requested? I think I got the original from one of Alethes’s brands: Sanctitty. That’s two Ts. Well, one, then two, for a total of three Ts.”
Malcolm held down his brows and stiffened his twitching lips. “Three Ts.”
“They have gorgeous and rather durable intimates,” Rhode said, before murmuring nonchalantly, “Although I don’t think they account for demigods tearing them off you.” She flashed him a mischievous look. “Still, it is one of the better brands. You know, I’ll even let you use my membership discount. It is for me, after all.”
Oh, now you offer the discount.
“But I wouldn’t mind something from Tartarucha,” Rhode said. “Just a prettier thing, not one of the out-there options, because they can get quite... out there. But if you do see a particularly intriguing one, you could show it to me first. Otherwise, just get it from Sanctitty.”
Malcolm was going to ignore all that for as long as he could.
“Sanctitty,” he said, only to be met with Rhode’s smirky face.
“You just said that because you wanted to say ‘titty,’” she said.
“No, I said ‘sanctity’.”
“No, you said sanc-titty.”
Malcolm’s smile escaped its confines, and he and Rhode resettled into their rhythm.
It was dumb and inconsiderate to be upset they had returned to the seating charts, so Malcolm scrapped the stupid, uninvited feelings and listened to Rhode’s other spiels about gods he’d never heard of. He tried his best to care. Honestly, he did.
“So let’s have Molpagoras on that table perhaps,” Rhode was saying twenty minutes later. “He’s very popular with the ladies and gents and known for his orgy parties…. That’s good for Astacus’s business and his hobbies.”
Malcolm’s insides squirmed. It was a hell of a lot easier to try to break up Philophrosyne and Koalemos than engage in this.
“And how would people know about Molpagoras’s orgy parties?” Malcolm asked, hesitant but steadfast. He felt weirdly left out.
“He sends invitations,” Rhode told him, absentmindedly twisting her hair around her finger as she studied the chart. “Ooh. Let’s also put Aristides next to Leonida. They’ve been eyeing each other for decades. Plus, she’s been quite vocal about desperately wanting a lay for the past ten or so years, and he’s quite good.”
And you would know?
Yeah, she would know. Come to think of it, what made Malcolm assume that in this past week she hadn’t hooked up with anyone else? Did that have anything to do with why she wanted it less today? What if yesterday when they were supposed to meet, were it not for Apollo...
“Have you hooked up with anyone else since your birthday?” Malcolm asked as nonchalantly as he could.
Rhode glanced up at him. “Excuse me?”
“Have you hooked up with anyone else since your birthday?” he repeated. He could imagine Thaumas offering.
Rhode looked almost humored. “Excuse me?”
“Are you really gonna make me ask again?”
Rhode’s face went blank. “If I said I have? What do you expect to do with that information?”
Malcolm knew he shouldn’t have cared. He probably would have preferred living in ignorant bliss. But now the image of Rhode and Thaumas, of her and a faceless stranger, then another rando, wouldn’t leave him and he had to know.
“I want to make sure I’m not contracting STIs,” Malcolm said.
Rhode gaped at him with the glariest glare she had ever shot at him as she scoffed once, then once more. “You are horribly blunt, Pace. And offensive.”
“I’ll take safety over tact,” Malcolm fired back easily. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“What do you think?” said Rhode.
“How would I know?”
“Let’s say I have,” she said. “Let’s say I am. What would you do?”
Malcolm’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he didn’t lash out with it. Every muscle from his jaw to his neck to all his limbs had tensed.
“Maybe there was this one man,” said Rhode as a greedy spark lit up her eyes. “Or two men. Maybe it was at the same time.”
Oh, Hades— “Rhode. This isn’t a game. Seriously.”
“I don’t have any STIs!” she practically yelled.
That didn’t answer the question.
“I always keep up with the godly boosters,” Rhode said. “If I got anything or even so much as suspected I did, I would tell you and do so immediately. Do you honestly think I would be so stupid or so cruel not to think about that? As if I wouldn’t— Do you seriously believe I would negligently pass on— That if it happened, I wouldn’t—” She scoffed again.
“I mean, all you did was ask me,” Malcolm said, regretting he had even brought this up—but he still had to know. “I didn’t lie, and I know for a fact that I didn’t have any, but if someone else did...” He erupted again. “And people aren’t inherently stupid for—”
“I am over three thousand years old!” Rhode said over him. “I can fully take care of myself. And the men I sleep with. As I do. And no. I have not been hooking up with anyone else.”
Oh. Good.
Now he felt dumb. And oh so delighted.
“You really couldn’t have said no?” Malcolm said. “It was that hard?”
“Fuck you, Malcolm.” With a rage eclipsing even her wrath toward Apollo, Rhode continued to curse at him in Greek.
It really shouldn’t have stirred something in Malcolm, but his body just had to remember Rhode shoving him up against her wall, down her mattress, into his chair... His shoulders, which Clarisse had just barely injured that other day, were stinging so deliciously again under the ghost of Rhode’s touch as she fumed, “When have I ever given you the impression—?”
Damn it, he really shouldn’t have asked. Not like that.
“Why,” she raged, “would you even sleep with anyone you think would— It’d be different if you had asked in my room, but all these times— How many times— All our work— You think I—? You’d still— You really believe—? ” She was truly too enraged to speak. “You honestly—? Genuinely, fuck you.”
And fuck it, he just as much tossed aside the pen in his hand. “Do you still want to?” he said. “You couldn’t go three days before, and it’s been six now. You said you wanted it last time. Which was supposed to be yesterday. You kinda already asked this time. I’m surprised you haven’t thrown yourself at me yet.”
Proud he could throw those words out like that, Malcolm still couldn’t fight his guilt that Rhode looked even more offended.
He spread his arms. “An apology,” he offered.
“An apology,” said Rhode, “begins with truth. You want this, don’t you?”
“I can also want to give an apology. If you want.”
“Oh, and will you come first again this time?” she said.
Malcolm fell speechless. Had that been happening? She’d been keeping track? All he had known was that Rhode had been more than satisfied with him. Or so he had thought. Gods, how hadn’t he even noticed?
“You’re the one who’s too good at this,” he said, trying for a little something sultry. “And you know that. Am I supposed to be sorry?”
“You’re supposed to apologize, remember?” said Rhode.
In his heart, he really did feel it—but other parts were still crying out for relief.
Rhode made no moves right now, but her little cues helped a lot. Her disappearing frown was enough to have Malcolm be the one to haul his ass to her side (his, really) of the desk. Her barely outstretched hands had him help her out of his chair. Her upturned face had him reaching for her lips. But Malcolm didn’t wait to rub her back. His thumbs gently dug into either side of her spine in long, repeated strokes that got her muscles relaxing.
Rhode broke off from his lips and glared at him. “I’m still furious,” she said. “I cannot believe you would think I would do that. I’m legitimately mad.” But her hands were busy skimming over his shoulders.
Malcolm had the nerve to brush Rhode’s hair off her angry face. “That’s what the apology’s for,” he said. Feeling extra annoying, he swept her hair off her shoulder.
Rhode was still glowering, but then again, she now had a hand in his back pocket. Malcolm dove in again for a kiss, keeping his back rub going until he got her sighing into his mouth.
After six long days with zero relief, the wait wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t bad—pressing bodies and tangled limbs and heated kisses were never bad with Rhode—but it wasn’t worth it. Waiting just didn’t make it better when Malcolm always wanted more. Maybe a trip to Rhode’s bedroom would’ve been worth it.
With little initiative from Rhode and the inconvenient conditions of today, they hit snag after snag. Rhode didn’t let him take off her blazer, saying it was too cold. (Dammit, he hadn’t turned up his thermostat earlier.) Also, she was wearing leather pants today. They just weren’t the easiest to take off. (Malcolm had never so much appreciated her dresses. How could she give up all her dresses or burn her whole wardrobe?) With a great deal of effort, made even more difficult because Rhode was barely helping, he got her pants down, only to be greeted by her bodysuit. (Great. Another layer.)
Malcolm unsnapped the buttons as Rhode kept gazing at and fondling his arms, and to his surprise, he met her, just her, right underneath. Also to his surprise, he silently remarked that while he had taken to grooming himself a little more, she had done the opposite. That had to be somewhat of a compliment, right?
“No underwear,” Malcolm said, barely over a breath. “Yeah, you planned for this, didn’t you?”
Rhode looked almost disgusted, even if she was tracing his back muscles. “Don’t act so scandalized. The bodysuit is the underwear.”
Malcolm’s brows furrowed. “You’ve worn them together,” he said.
“I was probably already wearing it,” Rhode said. “And that’s just when the lines won’t show. I’m wearing leather pants. Why am I explaining this to you? Get on with it.”
Malcolm lifted Rhode by the thighs and set her bare ass on his desk, noticing in a flash that she had produced a cushy towel to sit on. He dropped to his knees.
Immediately, Rhode said, “You don’t always have to do that.”
Malcolm looked up at her. “I thought you liked it. And wanted me to get on with it?”
“Well, yes.”
“I have been dying to do this for a week.”
“Oh. So committed.”
Her comment didn’t even bother him. “Pass the hand sanitizer?” he said, nodding up to the corner of his desk.
“Of course, you keep one here now,” Rhode muttered.
Malcolm didn’t deny it. Because, yeah, of course.
Rhode took a moment to get it. A much longer moment than required.
Malcolm stood again. “Hey, only if you want,” he said. “We can do whatever you want.” He tried not to be disappointed—although perhaps he was more confused than anything. “That includes finishing up that new table.”
“No, I don’t want— Just—” Rhode’s hands went to his forearms. “Just do the outside.” She barely looked at him.
Malcolm almost considered backing out, except Rhode got very specific and chatty about what she wanted and remained just as handsy. Just do the outside. Be slower than usual. Don’t move me too much. I’m keeping the blazer on. I’m cold.
He let it all go. He had longed too long for her and her taste and her twitching hips and her whimpers too much to complain about her complaints.
Rhode tasted different than his memories. It was dumb to think, but she tasted angrier. Perhaps just sharper. That didn’t stop him from putting his face to use. It was only him here these days, so he had to do his best, didn’t he?
If Malcolm could have it his way, her hands would be all up in his hair like usual. She didn’t do it, but maybe today he deserved some aloofness. That was what the apology was for. But even at his best and even when he took care to rub warmth into the cool skin of her legs, Rhode was still mouthy with his mouth on her.
“Just outside,” she said.
Yeah, he’d heard already. Every command was more motivation to show her he could listen.
Pride swelled within him as Rhode’s hips finally began to shift.
“You’re lucky you’re good,” she said.
It really wasn’t luck, Malcolm wanted to retort, but he let it slide.
He thought of the many things Rhode had achieved this past week and swore to give back some goodness to her. She deserved it and more. One orgasm for all the work she had done, another for having to put up with Apollo, another as an actual apology.
Of course, Rhode just had to ruin his plans. After getting just one, she pulled Malcolm up by the shirt and had the gall to dodge his kiss. He had never before felt so used. It might have been the only time he had ever remotely resented his desire to help her.
The sting didn’t last for even a second, because Rhode apparently wanted her lips on his neck instead and took the liberty to steal his heat under his shirt.
Malcolm went for seconds. Her second. All while Rhode got to conveniently rock against his busy fingers, her warmer hands had crawled out of his shirt and up to his hair, straying farther and farther from where he needed them most.
He felt he was losing it, left unattended, unable to kiss any part of her, and— Oh, was that how she had felt when he was eating her out? Was that why she had pulled him by the shirt so brashly? Frankly, it had felt a little rude to be hauled over to her like that. Arrogant as the idea was, it was too gratifying not to revel in. But it was such an annoying reminder. Any desperation Rhode was feeling, Malcolm was gladly relieving for her while he itched and ached for something. Didn’t she realize he’d be filled with the same kind of desperation?
At her second crest, Rhode left a stinging bite into his shirt, digging half-moon crescents in one arm and working a mark into Malcolm’s neck, but at least she wasn’t making any noises. Not that anyone outside could hear. Theoretically anyway, but why take any chances?
Rhode kissed the bite and laid pecks up his neck and only to the corner of his mouth—never once letting him reach her lips.
Malcolm suspected Rhode could’ve had another, but she shoved him off her and dressed herself. Probably for the better. Bae was working late today, and Malcolm had seen Ainsleigh and Brett outside, too. At this point, it was possible they had all headed to dinner already, but that wasn’t a guarantee these days.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said, even more remorseful now.
Saying nothing, Rhode shot him a stinker like she remembered again what had gotten them there.
Malcolm had just barely gotten out a quick prayer to Harpocrates under his breath re: the past fifteen minutes, when Rhode commanded, “We’re not done. Sit down.”
“Oh,” Malcolm said blankly, taking a seat on his own chair.
Everyone and everything but Rhode faded from consciousness as that scene he had imagined played out in real life. And, okay, no, he didn’t exactly take Rhode by the hand to cozy up in his arms, nor did he even attempt it, but Rhode was sitting in his lap nonetheless. Close enough.
It wasn't as comfortable as he had pictured. Too much of Rhode’s bony ass was distributed on his left thigh. Also, a couch would’ve been preferable. He got to thinking of that, too. Whose couch and where, he didn’t know. What if it was a new sofa of his in two, three months, in the privacy of his own apartment? Why not?
Malcolm began another backrub, proud to get Rhode sighing again and relaxing against him.
“You’re going to be quiet,” she whispered, and unbuttoned his pants.
Fidgeting for some space, Rhode rubbed up against all the right parts, forcing Malcolm to hold his breath. Rhode’s little lap dance ended when she had enough room to tug down his zipper, and ugh, finally, finally, she curled a hand around him.
Malcolm restrained his sighs as a warmth bloomed through him, getting more addictive by the millisecond.
A week had made Rhode feel foreign, and it only left Malcolm feeling even further out of his depth. It certainly didn’t help that Rhode took her time, exploring and scrutinizing him like she didn’t know him.
“I’ve thought about that face,” she said. “The way you get so needy for me. The way you lose your breath.”
It was easiest for Malcolm to close his eyes and enjoy her caresses.
“No, look at me.” Rhode lifted his chin, even as Malcolm felt like squirming. “Say, ‘Please, Your Highness.’” She was close to laughing.
And she had said she wasn’t into control. Had she met herself?
“Why do you keep insisting that?” he said. He almost wanted to stop massaging her back.
“Because I like it when you cave,” Rhode told him, with a fierce, triumphant gaze. “When you surrender yourself, so lost in the moment when you just want it terribly. It even feels like you want to worship me, when you look at me like that,” she said wondrously. “No one even says it but you.”
“I don’t say it.”
And yet as Rhode got him gasping, Malcolm protested why it was only him making her feel worshiped.
“Then what are those memories I think about when I’m trying to come?” Rhode’s grip tightened just a bit more— almost enough. “Were they another man? Or was it you?”
This wasn’t fair.
“Were they these lips?” said Rhode, brushing her thumb over his mouth.
Chemicals wafted into Malcolm’s nose from her fresh coat of nail polish.
“You’ll have to remind me, Malcolm. There have been so many men,” said Rhode. “But which one does it the way I love? Who does it best?”
Her fingers wove into his hair. Maybe he was the one curled up against her.
This really wasn’t fair. He was the dirtiest doormat of a dude—the only one groveling at her.
Yet, said the rational part of his brain, what could he be mad about when he reaped all the benefits? Her ass on his thighs... That grip of hers, these tugs... Just for him. All he was doing was making up for the oversight of stupid mortals on her island, and he certainly was not stupid.
And he was so desperate, so close. So close. Just a minute or two more. If Rhode would just go a little faster, squeeze a little tighter, just an inch more of him.
Sparked and sizzling, Malcolm reached for a kiss. Rhode tugged at his hair instead.
“Rhode,” he whispered.
“Not ‘Rhode’.”
“Rhódē.”
“Oh, I like that,” she said. “But try again.”
“Lady Rhódē.”
“Too many people say that. I’m not at work. Try again.”
Malcolm wanted release so bad he hardly cared anymore about his pride. Muffling a groan in his throat, he went with: “Princess.”
Rhode’s eyes left him in thought, even as she kept stroking him. “I’ll accept that. It’s different when you say it,” she said, looking high on a power trip, and Malcolm just knew he couldn’t stand a chance. “What is it you want? What do you want, Malcolm?”
A shiver surged through him when she said his name. And in this moment, with Rhode this close, trying to coax pleasure into him and out of him, he wanted to give her anything. Never mind that he was losing feeling in his left thigh.
At complete odds with the fuzzy feelings, his instincts were only concerned with himself. At some point, and even he didn’t know when, he had stopped massaging her back. His hands were busy cupping the globes of her ass, and while the shift of her weight did get some feeling back to his leg, even he knew that wasn’t the full point of his groping.
Nothing was enough. He wanted to peel Rhode’s clothes off but there wasn’t an inch he could budge or sneak his hands into. He couldn’t even take off her blazer. He wanted to bury his face in the plushness of her tits, but this wasn’t the angle and she had too many layers in the way.
Malcolm tried to blank his mind lest he get overtaken by baser desires and do something embarrassing. Rhode had other plans that got him choking back groans. How could he help it? He’d been pent up for a whole damn week.
“What do you want?” said Rhode, lips ghosting his, never once meeting his kiss.
“Just a bit more,” he said in a whisper.
Had he imagined it or was she slowing down?
“More?” Rhode said. She looked down at her hand fisted around his cock. But she was going too light, too far down, too slow. “More what?” she said. “What do you want?”
Malcolm might’ve said it if Rhode hadn’t sounded so impatient this time. There was a hint of something unpleasant in her tone. Maybe he wouldn’t enjoy this after all.
But Rhode returned to her flattery. “You want something that’ll get you thinking about me every hour of every day? Is that what you want?”
All he had to do was say it. Just one simple word.
“Tease.”
He could’ve just said please, and he’d probably have been on the way there.
Rhode hummed.
Malcolm sensed his peril, but the thrill intoxicated him—like stepping into the camp arena, but with a rush of a warning that made training with Clarisse feel like child’s play.
He threw it back at Rhode anyway. “You speaking from experience? Every hour of every day, huh? And there’s nobody else you’re fucking.”
Rhode merely smiled in amusement. “You will be thinking about me, won’t you? You already do, don’t you?”
“Not always” felt both too pathetic and too rude to say. “You wish” was just cruel. Malcolm said nothing.
But perhaps Rhode was confident in her suspicions because now she was standing—his cock still in hand—and crouching to take him in her mouth, eyes still on him. And Malcolm was gods-damn melting. How had he ever doubted her? Gods, what an angel she was. He’d be reminiscing about this every day until she returned.
Enveloped by the heat of her lips and her hand, he got thicker and harder than he had ever remembered. His need blazed like a fury, and he fought to keep quiet like Rhode had asked. But that gods-damn Semtex laced his veins again, and without those rings she had put on him, there would be nothing holding back his release.
This was more frustration than he had ever known how to handle. Nothing else mattered. Rhode was taking care of it. He could see it in the eyes that met his shamelessly. A master of the craft, Rhode fit even more of him in. And bobbed. And licked him on the way up. Kissed the tip of him. Dove in again. And stood to wipe her hands. And step away. And collect her heels.
“Oh, come on. That’s cold,” Malcolm grunted. Steam could’ve blown out from his ears. “That is so cold.”
There was a pathetic part of him starting to cry on the inside. He’d never do this to her. (He would first have to have the will to. Or the viciousness.)
“You didn’t tell me what you wanted. I didn’t know,” Rhode said with a shrug. She had gotten on one shoe and began working on the other. Teetering on one heel, she had to lean on his desk to put the other on before collecting her things. “Besides, you’ve got two working hands. Nobody’s stopping you.” She tossed her purse down and crossed her arms. “Help yourself.”
Malcolm’s hands, stiff on his knees, didn’t budge. He didn’t know what it meant to win right now—or at least not to lose.
Do it and she’d watch, like she was asking? Or not do it and let her plan to disappoint him succeed?
Worshiping her wasn’t supposed to mean jerking off to her right in front of her. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
His dick was out in the world between them, still complaining so furiously and clownishly. All the while, Rhode just stood there, as Malcolm tried to find the right—or any appropriate—course of action. He wondered if it was better that she was looking at his face rather than his crotch. It seemed strange to think it was probably worse it was his face.
Rhode must’ve gotten bored by it all, because now her cool touch landed on his flaming thighs as she leaned over him. “You want me to do it for you?” she said. “You know I do it so well. You’ve told me enough times.”
Malcolm was close enough to kiss her. The word he needed was stuck in his throat. His pride was holding it hostage.
Why couldn’t he let himself say such a simple word?
Why again had he looked forward to this? Why had he wanted this so bad?
Now Rhode was struggling to kneel in front of him again. Malcolm couldn’t fucking stand the sight. Her heels weren’t letting her do this easily, but as he watched dumbly in protest, she sat on the ground anyway, even spreading apart his thighs to scooch herself closer.
“Just tell me, and I’ll be nice. I’ll be the best you’ll ever have it,” Rhode said sweetly before her eyes sparked in excitement. “No. You don’t have to tell me.” She inched nearer. “Just put it in my mouth. I’ll be so good.”
Rhode couldn’t even keep her face straight for five seconds, but they had been a turbulent eternity of mortification to Malcolm, who suddenly wanted to be as far away from here as possible.
In an instant, he pulled up his boxer briefs and his pants and gruffed, “Get off the floor.”
Rhode scoffed again. “It’s so easy.” It was like she was laughing as she began to shake her head. “It’s easy! You don’t even have to say it. It won’t even take a second. I’m still here.” She inched even closer. “Here,” she said. “One more chance. Just take off your trousers and put it in. I’ll make it worth it. I mean it.” She opened her mouth again, looking like a crime.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Malcolm said. “Don’t you have a back ache? And I have stuff to get to anyway.”
Suspicion filled Rhode’s gaze. “But if I asked you to help me right now because I have one more in me, you still would, wouldn’t you?”
Would he really? If he didn’t even know, how could she? Or was he lying to himself? Because if she did have one more in her...
Malcolm got ahold of himself. “You know, I’m not some toy of yours you can get off on whenever you like,” he said.
“I don’t ask my toys, do I?” said Rhode, unimpressed. “I’m asking you. You wouldn’t have to, but you would, wouldn’t you? And you were the one who offered to begin with.”
“I try to reciprocate in kindness,” Malcolm said, and even before all the words had left his mouth, he knew it had been the wrong thing to say.
“Oh!” Rhode’s hand flew to her chest as she stood. “Oh, you want me to be kind?” she said. “I ought to check my head, because I seem to distinctly recall you accusing me of being an airhead lacking basic decency. As if I’m some sloppy, thoughtless—”
“I did not— You’re not—” Malcolm protested weakly, rising on his feet to apologize again.
But it felt unfair to have to comfort her when he was the one still with the raging hard-on. And yet it didn’t even feel right to complain about that when Rhode’s eyes were filled with a fury looking more inhuman by the millisecond (even if the sight just made it harder for his blood to rush back to his brain).
“It could’ve been something less dramatic,” Malcolm argued, “like a cold sore or whatever.”
Rhode didn’t waver. “You like me nicer?” she said. “Maybe next time don’t insult me or insinuate that I’m some heartless imbecile when I have only shown you otherwise.”
Malcolm didn’t know if he was imagining things, but it almost felt like he could literally feel Rhode’s anger charging the air, rolling through him in shuddering waves. His instincts brought him to that time an empousa had choked him with her talons.
Malcolm ousted the false warning and neared their distance. “Still want a next time, huh?”
“Only when my batteries have run out,” Rhode said.
Malcolm chuckled. “That...” He took a step closer, enjoying his ability to stand above her, even as she cheated with heels. “... is an amazing excuse.”
He wasn’t even clenching his muscles anymore. Completely ignoring his dick crying out for help, he let his eyes drift over her, letting his mind roam wild to Rhode’s room and her bed and her writhing in it, building herself up with the pulses of her vibrator, so very close to a second peak before the poor, overworked batteries gave out in an instant—and oh, how she’d want to wail and throw her toy to the wall and, in her desperation, long for his touch, his lips, his body instead.
Realization flickered in Rhode’s eyes. She tiptoed in an instant— No, she must have increased her own height, up until she met him eye to eye. “Ánte gamísou.,” she said.
Dark hair swatted Malcolm in the face as Rhode headed to his door.
“Maybe next time,” he said, grinning through his discomfort as his body screamed for now.
Rhode spun around. “You watch it. I might even hold you to that.”
“Next time.”
For once, Rhode didn’t have the last word. Once she shut his door, Malcolm didn’t know if it had been worth it.
Why then was he smiling?
Three minutes later, questions about security policies and expected deficits stared back at him unrelenting and unsolved to his poor mind. He had something to take care of—and he knew the perfect inspiration.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
From City Hall to the dining hall, back to City Hall, and then off to Cabin Six, Malcolm kept replaying the new moments, thinking through all his mistakes the way he would analyze a sword-fighting match.
What was so wrong with him that he couldn’t have asked Rhode for relief like she could so easily do?
It was all just so new, right? That she was only the third person he had done anything with, that he had barely done anything before, and for Rhode to take it way out of bounds… Well, not literally out of bounds, but for sure way beyond his comfort zone. Wasn’t it that?
Something told Malcolm he was making excuses. Something told him he was a disappointment to her and at least a partial failure of a man. But something also told him Rhode had already known and didn’t care. Why else would she have tortured him how she had?
Right now, even he couldn’t care. It was past 10 PM and despite leaving some things on his to-do list for tomorrow, he was absolutely drained.
When he returned to the Athena cabin, only Zeke was asleep, probably after exhausting himself on camp activities as he did every time he had only a month left until he’d leave for school.
If only Alicia could’ve tired herself out the same way. She was wide awake in terror right now, making Claire field questions on pain and bleeding. Because Annabeth wasn’t here, even Sophie was helping. Malcolm tried his best, but he was only able to say he would be there if ever anything happened. His uselessness got him to read to Alicia for an extra fifteen minutes tonight.
Malcolm really would have ended his night there, except Sophie also wanted him to “quickly” look over her one-woman science fair. Claire and Conrad had already given her their input, he wanted to argue, except Sophie wanted more and she wanted his. Fair enough; Malcolm had seen all her other science projects anyway.
Besides, Malcolm knew his brother was stressing about what would happen once Grace took off to college, so he wasn’t sure Conrad had been in the right headspace to give what Sophie deemed sufficient feedback.
Claire, thank the gods, needed nothing but an ordinary daily hug. She also whispered to Malcolm that Conrad no longer denied that Grace was his girlfriend. It was certainly interesting, but hypocrisy would’ve landed Malcolm in the hell that was Claire’s nosiness, so he just wasn’t going to ask or comment anything other than an “oh”.
It took until half past eleven for Malcolm to get some time to himself. Deciding again to leave any remaining work for tomorrow, he thought of making progress on the backlog of reading he had set out for the year, already knowing back then he was going to fail.
It hadn’t even been ten minutes that he’d spent in the cabin library before Malcolm threw aside the Rand he had started rage reading last month. Then he considered plodding through Rumsfeld’s memoir. It was two months ago he had vowed to study precisely why to ridicule and despise him. But he figured he knew the gist already, and did he really need to know the details at this instant? He also just couldn’t be bothered to pick up Cruz’s Time for Truth.
It felt better to set aside all the garbage and spend his time on his fathers’ most updated manuscript, and then after, he could end his day with cozy poems.
Every so often, his thoughts strayed to work for New Athens and to-dos for his sleeping family members (why he kept his notebook handy) and back to Rhode (he wrote down nothing).
Blame it on Whitman and the fact that no writing meant a perpetual muddle, Rhode took up center stage.
Actually acting on Rhode’s command (that one—the one he would never voice much less jot down) was still out of the question, but that wasn’t to say the imaginary scene wasn’t running through Malcolm’s head. It felt so filthily indecent and dirty to do what she had asked. Sure, he could hold her hair, and he had before, but actually... lining up... and sticking— Hades, it was so un-him. But if he couldn’t do what Rhode asked...
What was more important was making it up to her for his offenses. And still, as much as he wanted that, he needed to know how to win. He had some stupid itch to get on her level, even— “Embarrass” wasn’t the word. He didn’t want to embarrass her. And more than impress her, he wanted to one-up her. Maybe one win could get his discomfort, his defeat, to wash away.
There was a delicate balance to strike. Any more screw ups, and he would essentially be convincing Rhode to look elsewhere.
It wasn’t something he wanted to think about. But horrid as the idea was, it was a better one than the actual horrors that had awoken him and kept him up just that other night before. Small wins?
Was there something he could say next time—something to prove it wasn’t a fluke that he’d been (partially) able to hold his own today? Something to thrill him and keep Rhode engaged without making a fool of himself...
‘Could’ve waterboarded me with how wet you were. Just gushing.’ He could say that next time.
But what a hyperbole. And who the hell said ‘gushing’? There was also a possibility that Rhode would have found jokes about waterboarding dreadfully unfunny.
Okay, so maybe, say, if Rhode were ever to sit on his chair again without permission: ‘If you wanted somewhere else to sit, there’s always my lap. Or my face.’
Just thinking that was making Malcolm’s face explode from heat. Even having his face coated in Rhode’s slickness felt cooler than this. And if he couldn’t stand even thinking of saying it in the dark with no one looking at him, how was he supposed to say it aloud to her face?
Perhaps nothing Malcolm could ever think of would have helped him win. He’d already known it. Rhode would agree to every outrageous thing he could say or do. More than that, she’d make fun of him for even saying or doing it. Or she’d make fun of him for not being able to. It wasn’t fair.
Fuck. How had he ever thought he could outmatch a god?
Notes:
🪻🪻
My dude is struggling lol. He’s probably now realizing he’s in the kind of godly dramas he’s meddling in.
I’m sorry it took so long to wrap up this chapter! I was busy and got distracted. But also, it was double the length I thought it would be, so you’re getting more!
Happy election week! ❤️🤍💙
A peek into my fave parts of this chapter: Architectural references | Violets
There's some info about Malcolm's views on universal basic income in the bibliography.
Chapter 13: In which Malcolm is sick and tired
Notes:
Holy moly this was 18k words lmao. This chapter is partly my excuse to feature more Clarisse, Percabeth, and family time. But there is PLENTY of Rhode, don’t you worry. 😉 Also, does anyone remember Mark Antony Flores from chapter 2 (also chapter 9)? 👀
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Why in Zeus’s holy name, would the council appoint Clarisse La Rue to be head of security, given her history of severe bullying?”
Malcolm’s head pounded as he tried to digest the inquiry from across the amphitheater. It was August 18th, merely ten hours into a long-ass day (thanks again, Percy). All he wanted to do was get his work out of the way and hit the hay, but at the end of the town hall, three other meetings, and a hopefully productive solo work session, he was going to have to trek all the way to Manhattan for his new beloved bro’s birthday party that may or may not have included a vindictive goddess he was either trying to make amends with or retaliate against—and he neither knew which of those options he would act upon, nor wanted to ask her brother if she was going to attend.
Malcolm hadn’t seen Rhode in an entire week. On the first couple days, her absence was consolation. His face had already been burning up at the mere memory of his humiliation last time, and frankly, he needed a break from the torturous goddess. The thought of that tapestry hopefully still hanging somewhere in Atlantis right now (if Rhode hadn’t taken it down yet) just compounded his embarrassment. It was starting to make him feel ill.
On day 3, he decided he had to get over his nerves, because he needed to prepare for whenever Rhode would’ve been visiting. After all, she could’ve asked him for a show next time. She could’ve demanded that he ask her for her hands or her mouth. Either of those cases, he realized, would’ve been a display of her forgiveness. Or she could’ve acted aloof and had him make all the moves. Thinking through all that was nauseating.
On day 4, Malcolm stopped deluding himself. The malaise that followed him had nothing to do with that incident with Rhode but rather with Alicia’s cold finally getting to him.
Then, day 5 had blasted by and part of him began wondering if Rhode was looking for someone else to make fun of—or someone she didn’t have to. It always seemed unlikely whenever he had thought about it. But the horror had given him pause—enough to chide himself for his own embarrassment and force himself to figure out how to act in any of his predicted events. And dammit, next time, he was going to have the upper hand.
Rhode’s promise had still haunted him, and in one dream he had woken up from (Alicia had gotten scared again), the sap he’d embodied had done all he could to earn Rhode’s forgiveness. Now, why did it seem easier to beg Rhode to let him give than to ask if he could get—? Well, you know. That he had woken up in a totally inappropriate state in Cabin Six (Athena, forgive him), needing to attend to Alicia no less (how did any parent handle this?), was surely an indication that his body had missed Rhode far too much.
By day 6, Malcolm was feverishly waiting every hour past 5 PM. Not that it had even made sense that Rhode would’ve even wanted to visit when he hadn’t even recovered. It made even less sense when he looked up Rhode’s published weekly schedule. But the logic hadn’t made him care less.
Malcolm had tried to make the best of it. The benefit of Rhode’s prolonged absence was that it gave him the sense of urgency to tick off all his tasks before her eventual arrival—and the trust to let department heads like Pravir, Rayel, and Alvin handle their business, even if Malcolm would’ve otherwise wanted to check their work.
Now, the good thing about being sick was that Malcolm was totally comfortable hugging the pathogen-carrying culprit again. Alicia had been a little too sorry, and he’d had to remind himself she didn’t understand his ribbing was just a joke.
The other good thing was that, by being able to guilt Alicia, he got her to read to him and even teach him some German. As a surprise reward, he was going to take her to that BMW motorcycle museum in Long Island. Alicia had only just admitted to him that in addition to making her own car, she really wanted to make her own bike and race on it someday. Not even Beryl Swain or Katja Poensgen could do that. So perhaps he could take Alicia to the museum next week when his head wasn’t going to fucking explode—
Because, of course, he had been so occupied with filling the thermos in his hand and replacing the mountains of tissues in each of his pockets that he had forgotten to grab the painkillers from his desk drawer.
Malcolm reached for another tissue as some thirty-and-half pairs of eyes bore into him. That included Anastasios Florakis, one of the journalists who had given him grief last week for letting companies buy the right to pollute—and who was apparently still speaking.
Right. The question.
“—so it’s clear that history informs, and there are well-documented accounts of her bullying,” Anastasios said. “Some people haven’t conveniently forgotten all those incidents.”
Malcolm’s head throbbed relentlessly as Rayel and Anastasios got into a squabbling match about having already “addressed the issue” or having merely “talked about it”.
When Chiron silenced them with a gentle call, most of the audience turned their attention to Malcolm.
Why, Malcolm wondered, had he wanted this job again?
Following a lengthy silence that really must’ve been five seconds max, he caved. “I personally asked her to consider it,” he said. “To consider becoming head of security.”
Yeah, it did him no favors among his critics, but he could trade their approval for the trust of the one who mattered.
A voice in his head asked if he was really willing to go down for Clarisse, but the rational part of his brain reminded him it wasn’t even a relevant question. Chiara and Rayel had just told him a couple days ago that too many women supported Clarisse for her to take a tumble.
“It’s in a place as radical and logical as New Athens,” Malcolm continued, “where we value expertise and welcome positive, transformational change. And as supporters of a progressive justice system would agree with, second chances are important—”
“But it wasn’t just once or twice, was it?” Anastasios said. “Just because you personally weren’t at the end of it doesn’t mean others didn’t experience it. There are other experts who have never harassed anyone, let alone dozens of people throughout years of their life. My older brother was bullied for years by Clarisse La Rue and still has scars on his body from that traumatic time. He finds it difficult to visit camp partly because of those experiences.”
The violent squirms racking Malcolm’s insides were only partly his second-hand embarrassment. He forged on, fighting the whispers in his ears, saying, You’re corrupt.
“Evidently, we didn’t appoint fifteen-year-old Clarisse La Rue as head of security,” he said. “Or someone who would continue to act like that. Neither would she want that to happen. Being brought up a certain way as a child does not make you that same way as an adult. Clarisse La Rue is the most knowledgeable, experienced, and committed person in this entire city on matters of police reform and youth at risk. She’s both a practitioner and a researcher in her field, which no one else who was in contention could remotely claim to be.
“You may not have been there to see it”—because you’re too young, like 99% of the other idealists annoying me every week—“and it’s difficult for many to have conversations about the wars”—because you people don’t even bother to ask us about them—“but dozens of us still alive witnessed how she slayed a drakon single-handedly, without armor. That’s the zeal Clarisse approaches her job with. She’s deeply loyal to the entire community. Week after week, many of us see her watch out for us and our fellow residents, even when she isn’t on duty. That’s how much she cares.”
“We’re talking about someone, who, straight out of college, joined the NYPD—” Anastasios said.
“Who tried to improve any bit of it she could,” Malcolm insisted. “Unlike every other person living here, she’s seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t. She understands the challenges more than other candidates did. And she hasn’t hidden her history, nor excused it. If anything, she can grasp more than others what factors can lead someone down a wrong path and what it takes to course-correct. That’s what the youth assistance programs are for. So, I have no time for that narrative some people are pushing about her. It’s just plain wrong.”
“Well, thankfully, you do have to make time for it, because that’s your job,” said Anastasios. ”So, back to her stint at the NYPD, what can you tell us about the results of her time there?”
Malcolm narrowed his eyes the faintest bit. “I mean, as anyone here would suspect and, I think, more than anyone here could achieve. The way they harassed, demoted, and fired her for serving and protecting the Bronx community goes to show she must’ve done many things right, like saving a handful of would-be victims from the police themselves. Because she did.”
Even as six or so onlookers seemed to ease and three others looked upon Malcolm with intrigue, Anastasios remained unconvinced. “So, it’s interesting you say that,” he said. “You of all people... You often talk about how intentions aren’t sufficient. And one of our journalists discovered that once La Rue interfered in a case, a woman in her precinct named Gloria Moreno died by—”
“You’re not seriously—” Malcolm erupted before biting the insides of his mouth.
“Like I was saying,” Anastasios said, “she died. And the reports suggest that it was by suicide.”
As their audience whispered and murmured amongst themselves, Rayel butt in. “Is that known, or was that a coverup by the NYPD? Because you do know that mortal police like to shift blame away from themselves.”
She had to shut up, Malcolm begged.
“It is documented,” Anastasios said, “that Gloria Moreno had suffered more abuse after the involvement of your appointed head of security.”
Unclenching his jaw, Malcolm took a deep breath. “Clarisse did what anyone could’ve in that situation.”
“You knew about this?” Anastasios said. “And you didn’t care to bring it up to the committee? Because after I interviewed Rayel Perez, it was clear she wasn’t made aware. From what our team could put together, she didn’t leave Gloria Moreno’s bullies alone, like Gloria herself had asked. Instead, La Rue provoked them.”
Fuck all the way off. Malcolm was grinding his teeth, mind flashing to the first time Clarisse had ever phoned him out of the blue and out of town. It was always easier for her to go out of her way to find his weapons and then go out of her way to find him, throw his xíphos to him, demanding a sword-fighting match, than it was to simply scroll through her selective list of contacts and call him. Or—what could’ve taken even less time—to just send him an Iris message.
“I know,” Malcolm fumed, “that the only person there who tried to help that mortal woman isn’t among the many people you should be blaming for her death.”
“But there are other people you could’ve asked who have a record of leading a healthier policing culture,” Anastasios pointed out.
Malcolm knew what he was getting at. “Sure,” he said, “and she’s not the only one leading the charge. We have a whole team of godly experts aside from Clarisse La Rue who are advising the security team.”
“But did you invite them at all to throw their hat into the ring?” said Anastasios.
Fuck. Fuck, Malcolm felt so greasy. He could see his approval drop several percentage points. As far as he knew, no one was keeping track. He didn’t know if it helped not to know.
“The city always intended to ask for their help in an advisory capacity,” Malcolm said, feeling no different than dipping in a bath of oil. “They have their own roles in their own godly communities.”
“But when we asked a few, including some on Olympus, if they would’ve wanted to fill the position, several said yes, but they had no idea the position was open to them,” Anastasios said. “So, just yes or no, did you ever ask any of them if they wanted to take up the role as head of security?”
“I did not,” Malcolm said to his smug face. “They were still welcome—”
“That’s a no, then,” Anastasios said. “You also didn’t recuse yourself, like you did with your friend Leo Valdez, even though Clarisse La Rue is also your personal friend.”
Malcolm was silent, hot under everyone’s stares.
“I’m sorry, that was a question,” said Anastasios.
“It was?” Malcolm feigned. “I did vote to appoint Clarisse La Rue. The security leadership appointment was one of the council’s earlier decisions. We’ve updated our procedural rules since those early days. But do remind me how many votes she got, because I don’t recall it being one-nil. Here’s the key thing: every other experienced person we considered was a god. Very few gods intend to live here. To many of us on the council, that was a huge mismatch.
“Here’s the other thing: we prioritize effectiveness. You care so much about things ‘looking ethical’. To a large extent, I don’t care about appearances—I don’t care if it looks ethical—unless it works. Appointing a god as head of security would be ineffective and therefore unethical in its own way.”
Anastasios didn’t do much as nod. “So, what I’m hearing,” he said, “is your participation in the vote today wouldn’t fly with the current Ethics Code of New Athens. Can you confirm that?”
Again, Malcolm tried not to falter. He blew his nose to take a second to think, but found that the path was clear enough.
“We can consider it an oversight on my part,” he said, as soon as he wouldn’t waver. “We could remove my vote to fit the current code. That’s fine. I’m only pointing out that, considering I’m her only close friend here, that doesn’t change the outcome of the council’s collective vote.”
The damage was done. Anastasios went on and on about him pressuring colleagues and—when Chiron had the balls to give him more time—about Clarisse getting preferential treatment from her other friends on the council.
“Like Will Solace,” suggested Anastasios. “They spent a lot of time together across many years before the vote.”
Will looked surprised. Standing, he addressed the amphitheater. “We served as head counselors at the same time for a while. We also wrote a paper together on effective intersections between policing and public health services. I thought we were...” He shrugged. “Colleagues? Work friends? But, you know, I think I can speak for others when I say this. You have a certain kinship with everyone who fought alongside you in war. That’s one part of the understanding Clarisse has that Malcolm mentioned. You were asking if we’re friends. We do share... a connection?” He shrugged again. “I’ve seen the value she’s brought to the community. I’d be proud to call her a friend, if she feels the same.”
But Anastasios had another trick up his sleeve. “Rayel Perez also seems to be her friend,” he said.
“Oh!” said Rayel. Seated to Malcolm’s left, two rows deep into the amphitheater, she shuffled to center stage once more. “Um, no. Well, I’m more of a fan,” she said with a laugh. “Clarisse and I have never really interacted outside of work. Well, aside from when I learned that she stopped a guy here from roofieing a girl I know at one of the parties at camp. And that’s partially what Malcolm was hinting at when he said Clarisse watches out for us.
“But may I just add—?” She laid a hand on her chest. “And I say this as an ‘outsider’—as someone from New Rome—and also as one of the people responsible for drafting the ethics code. The tricky thing here is for city councilors to appear neutral when we all make up an incredibly close-knit community. Most of us are on a first-name basis. We all eat together and train together. We create crafts together, learn Greek and Latin together. We are a community.
“If we weren’t, it would be easier, wouldn’t it? Because the other option, to avoid these controversies, is for us not to put in the effort to know our neighbors and to disengage from the community—and for you as the public to not care to know your representatives and other public servants.
“By the time Clarisse’s term is up, maybe we’re all friends and so you’d argue that none of us can vote for each other. But I’m not sure—I’m highly doubtful—that the answer is to hire only outsiders when it’s people who are from here who are much likelier to understand the community. That’s something we’re keeping in mind as we’re considering our future and our procedures.”
Malcolm bristled, asking gods why Rayel had had to go about it that way. Yeah, okay, camp was a bit sunshine and rainbows, and that seeped into City Hall, but he was hardly chummy with his appointees or employees. Did she have to put it in everyone’s minds like that?
Anastasios looked just as displeased as Malcolm felt. “And what I’m hearing now,” Anastasios said, “is that you would rather choose a bully from the community than a paragon of virtue from outside the community. Heard.”
It was tricky, but Malcolm forced his face still as Anastasios went on, prodding, “After today, what can we expect to change in New Athens’s security leadership?”
Malcolm squirmed again. “Deferring to the council vote, public support—”
“Do you have proof of that?”
“—and the relative ease of the security team’s progress, there is no need, no intention, to change the security leadership team at the moment. That said, we appreciate your interest, and should we ever suspect there would be an issue with our current setup, we’ll be sure to refer to your comments and any concerns the general public may have, if they have any.
“In any case,” Malcolm concluded, “I’d agree that it’s a good idea to incorporate more experts from the godly world, who naturally, have been doing their jobs longer than we’ve been alive. It’s only that currently, as I’ve said, the biggest security concerns raised by this community, regarding either victims or perpetrators, involve demigods and the connection demigods have to issues in the mortal world and the recent wars. That will likely change as our population grows, so your point would be an excellent idea to consider. Thank you so much.”
Malcolm told himself not to be mad. The guy was doing his job.
“I believe that’s your time, Anastasios,” Chiron said with that twinkle of pride in his eyes. Malcolm tried not to feel betrayed.
Chiron looked around the amphitheater, not once glancing at Malcolm. “Next question?”
There were a few follow-ups from other journalists: Why was Clarisse’s role not elected by the population but appointed by the council? Why hadn’t Clarisse arrested either person involved in that so-called case of “mutual rape”? Why was Clarisse allowed to militarize the security team? Why was City Council fear-mongering about potential wars and monster attacks? And what, pray tell, could safeguard citizens from militarization when the heads of the city and its security team were children of the most formidable gods of war?
Malcolm took the lead, addressing all the journalists, citizens, and interest groups patiently, even as he raged on the inside. Every question felt like a personal attack. Even as the queries strayed from security issues, his fury just wouldn’t go away.
Why, asked another reporter now, did New Athens have no credible intention to introduce UBI when every New Athenian union, most tech execs, several donor gods, and the general public supported the policy?
At all costs, Malcolm stopped himself from facing, let alone glowering at, Bae. It wasn’t like the guy had planted the question. (Right?)
To his fortune, Malcolm didn’t need to bother to hide behind a tissue to take a moment. On the other side of the amphitheater, Pravir fielded that question, letting Malcolm calm his heart rate and cage his glare.
Malcolm was still barely there but quickly caught on to the fact that, for some reason, no one dared to ask Pravir any follow-up questions. Gratified as Malcolm was that they could move on to other issues, it just didn’t feel fair.
The final inquest of the town hall was directed to Bae: “I was wondering about this recent article,” said a young Roman woman Malcolm had seen during Claire’s Games training sessions. “About how it said that the city is ‘making guinea pigs out of vulnerable people’ and ‘treating them as lab experiments’ by denying some people things like housing services for a number of years. Can you explain why you decided to do that?”
Bae nodded at first, silent for a moment before he said, “I’m going to pass this to Chiara Benvenuti, the Director of the Department of Statistics. Chiara?”
“That’s a great question,” Chiara said, enthused as any other time anyone asked her about her field of expertise, so much so that Malcolm could see she was holding back her excitement. “I’m glad you asked that.”
As Chiara’s effusiveness flowed out in her answers, the last of Malcolm’s cold rage melted away. It felt like so long ago when New Athens had been nothing more than an idea—when Chiara, whom Malcolm had barely known at the time, had instantly become one of New Athens’s loudest supporters. She had outwardly expressed the excitement he had struggled to do and hyped up his city to the rest of Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter, until New Athens had become theirs and then everybody else’s.
Taking another breath, Malcolm brought his full self to the now and finally dared to glance at Bae. Bae sat with his elbows planted on his knees, his knuckles hiding what Malcolm was sure was a smile. Among the crowd, Malcolm caught at least three of Bae’s students light up and sit straighter, no doubt trying to catch their teacher’s eyes.
At ease at last, Malcolm bit the insides of his lips and watched Chiara take the reins.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm had budgeted four days to get over his illness, but that prayer had been left unfulfilled. Even missing Percy’s birthday festivities in Manhattan had barely helped.
(Rhode hadn’t shown up in either Manhattan nor Long Island, having apparently already celebrated with Percy in Atlantis a day prior. Except Percy hadn’t bothered to mention the fact, and Malcolm found he was left disappointed.)
Now that it was Saturday, day five of his cold, Malcolm found himself stuffing more tissues and painkillers into the pockets of his combat pants before this week’s Capture-the-Flag match.
When Malcolm joined Clarisse and other trainers at the armory, she somehow thought she had to thank him. He only said, “Yeah.”
For two days, he hadn’t been able to catch her at work. Outside work, she had stuck to her boyfriend, Chris, who had told whomever it concerned that they were busy on apparently pre-planned dates.
Malcolm didn’t even bother to ask Clarisse how she was. Not right now, not like this, not when he knew. (That also wasn’t to say he wasn’t going to ask Chris the second he could.)
Today, the youngsters didn’t hound Clarisse for tips or approval like they usually did, even if both teams had fought for Ares to join their side. After a while, despite Chris’s pointed looks and elbow nudges, Clarisse didn’t end up making her typical rounds around the armory.
Malcolm didn’t either, baiting her with more roasts than he’d probably ever done, taking breaks only so Chris, Annabeth, Percy, and other longtime campers could have their turns. It took a minute, but Clarisse beat their taunts with her own warnings of what they would face out on the pitch. Then she took lead in drilling safety rules into the impulsive prepubescents they’d just armed with weapons.
When the Nike kids tried sneaking into the forest, she shut that shit down and sent them back to their cabin to collectively write another, better 2,000-word essay reflecting upon the conventions and protocols they had willfully violated.
Honestly, the least Clarisse could’ve done for Malcolm was un-ban the Nike cabin from this week’s game. If committing war crimes meant being excused from future Capture-the-Flag matches, Malcolm would’ve lied if he said he weren’t as tempted as Drew, Jake, and Pollux were sure to be, venting their frustrations to Clarisse and Chiron yet again this week. Part of Malcolm knew he wasn’t going to join their weekly ranting ritual only to avoid embarrassing himself and his mother.
But seriously, right now, punishing Nike was punishing Malcolm. The young demigods leading both sides of the battle, Hebe‘s and Hypnos’s children, had thought themselves into a corner, unable to emerge with any direction. Chiron certainly would’ve failed them if he still gave out grades for this sort of thing. And maybe he should have, Malcolm thought. A glaring F would have driven the message home: perfectionists and slow pokes didn’t end war.
For the third time ever, Malcolm wished he had thought to bring his notebook to a match. At least then he could’ve been using his waking hours productively.
For nearly two hours, the Hebe cabin had him stationed at the outskirts of their base in the forest just to stand and keep watch in case Hypnos’s team came to steal Hebe’s flag. Surprise, surprise, nobody showed up. He hated to wonder how the Hebe kids were wasting Percy’s skills away.
Despite his complaints, Malcolm decided to at least try to take it in stride. Perhaps this challenge was Athena’s lesson to him that war required patience. (In the back of his mind, he knew it wasn’t likely. Sure, Sun Tzu may have said that a patient leader could see opportunities where others saw delays, except this patience had nothing to do with calculated restraint—only ineptitude.)
So, for nearly two hours, Malcolm stood guard, intermittently erupting into coughing fits and sporadically inhaling cough drops. Understandably, the two young teammates shadowing him, Katerina and Valerio, kept backing away.
Some more water would’ve been great, too, but Hebe’s base had run out and Percy was nowhere near. Malcolm made a mental note to teach Cabin Eighteen about stocking supplies again.
By Zeus’s grace, he finally heard twigs snapping some twenty yards away at his three o’clock.
Malcolm signaled the news to the two demigods.
Valerio stared blankly. Katerina furrowed her brows and shrugged.
Malcolm filed away another note to get them in another session of hand signal lessons.
As he translated his gestures in spoken word, more trees in front of them began rustling.
Snake-like shadows whistled through the branches. Ten trees across, Malcolm counted. This thing could dash at least a hundred feet every two seconds without petering out.
In his periphery, Katerina and Valerio darted their eyes to him in alarm.
Also duly noted; they needed to work on keeping their sight on the enemy.
“Can you check it out first, then tell us?” said Katerina.
Malcolm forced down a groan. You know, at your age, we all took responsibility, he wanted to gripe. He didn’t, because he most definitely was not going to be known as an old fart.
Malcolm sighed, but he was dying to end his boredom. “Sure. If it’s too much now, there’s also next week,” he assured them.
Gripping his sword and grappling hook, he headed deeper and deeper into the forest, adrenaline shooting through his veins with each rustle around him.
Carefully, Malcolm stalked his way over to the creaks and whooshes, ready to pounce or duck.
Maybe it was a child of the Anemoi: Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, and Eurus. Hypnos had recruited all of them. And since the rustle of the trees traveled southeast, maybe the Notus or Euros kids had something to do with it?
They were behind him now. A whole squad, by the sound of them—left and right, too.
Malcolm whipped around, seeing nothing.
He pivoted sharply. Still caught nothing.
He stilled for a moment, darting back where he came from as the rustles headed to the base.
The swishes of the leaves stopped at an abrupt thirty feet. Strange. Was there a plan here?
Malcolm surveyed the forest again, finding only a faraway deer.
But the shadowy snake high in the trees appeared at his five o’clock, whizzing farther into the forest.
He followed it. He must’ve been two hundred feet or more away from his post by now. Katerina and Valerio were probably safe from the horrific danger of getting off their asses.
When the trees rustled around him again, heading south, Malcolm jerked around once more.
Icy-looking daggers shot past him, missing him by a foot on each side.
He could hardly explain it. His xíphos was stolen out from his grasp like someone else was holding it within his own hand, and before he knew it, his elbows were tugged back.
In the picosecond he registered the familiar pressure of silky ropes of water, another familiar figure in a familiar fog wafted into existence six feet in front of him.
Malcolm spent the next nanosecond griping about all the ways her attire was impractical on the battlefield. Forget sandals; she had slides on. And sure, her dress—green today—would have camouflaged her more today than her choice of blue and orange last time, but the hair. She still couldn’t tie her hair. (And yet, Malcolm pondered over in the next microsecond, she had still beat him.) He could see the strands flowing in the breeze before the fog cleared to reveal her face—a friendly face, here at last after a lonelier, sickly, more boring week.
Eyes nearly as green as her sundress, Rhode sauntered nearer, looking all refreshed unlike Malcolm’s sweaty, miserable state, and said, “Gotcha! I think my batteries ran out.”
Malcolm’s arms were still tied behind his back. For a long moment, he merely stared at Rhode. “What?”
“My batteries ran out,” she stated more slowly.
The ropes binding him slithered away. But Malcolm hadn’t done anything more than blink. “Are you being serious right now?” he said.
Rhode shrugged. “I guess I forgot to charge them. But look,” she said, stretching out her arms. “We have the rest of the camp to ourselves.” A smile spread across her face as she looked to the trees around them. “You know, that was actually quite fun. I never get to do this. It was tricky to try to draw out just you. Not too bad an effort, wouldn’t you say?”
Malcolm shut his eyes and opened them to find Rhode still before him. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You took me out of the game... because you were horny?”
Rhode didn’t budge an inch. “Why do you want to engage in battles that won’t amount to anything? Why be their pawn? Based on what I saw, you’re not even leading the game, and it was going nowhere.”
“How does that—? Why—?”
“Because we can,” Rhode said simply. “Face it. Would you rather be stuck here or would you rather get back to work—hopefully, after a quickie? That’s stress relieving in two ways if you think about it. You don’t even have to think that hard about it.”
Yeah, that was tempting. The work part. Mostly.
“And,” Rhode said, pausing, “maybe it was cruel of me to give you short shrift last time. Maybe”—she raked her eyes over Malcolm’s body—“I want to make you come apart.” After way too long, her eyes met his. “My apology.”
It didn’t look like Rhode was fooling him, even with such pleasureful words he’d never heard directed to him before.
“What are you going to do?” said Rhode as Malcolm looked around again in thought. “Can you in good conscience rejoin the game even though you’ve clearly been defeated?”
Pieces were clicking into place in Malcolm’s head. “You know, Poseidon isn’t even on the other team.”
“Oh. Oops.” Rhode didn’t even look sorry.
For a moment, Malcolm considered just walking away from her. The moment passed.
He picked up his sword by Rhode’s feet. “I am half thankful,” he muttered, and gestured to the woods behind him. “I don’t have time for this.” He led them away from the forest, noticing that Rhode’s arm was brushing up against his. There was, he remembered, a particular reason why he had no time. “You know, I have a cold.”
“Yeah, you sound horrible,” she said.
Maybe Malcolm didn’t look as gross or as weak as he felt, because Rhode wasn’t drawing away. In any case, he still had to slow his pace for her to keep up with his strides.
“That’s a third reason to get some stress relief,” she said. “Don’t orgasms help with headaches? Do you have a headache? Not that you need one to get one.”
Malcolm did have a headache, but he wouldn’t say that. “You should really reconsider.”
“I doubt you could pass whatever you have on to me,” Rhode said. “Why are you even in the woods playing Capture the Flag? Shouldn’t you be resting?”
Malcolm scoffed a laugh. “That’s cute. Do you think a demigod—an Olympian demigod—can opt out of monster attacks or battles when they catch a cold?”
Rhode surveyed the scene with dramatic flair. “I don’t see any monsters or real battles here. Do you?”
“The point is the preparation.”
“You can prepare,” Rhode said, “by taking care of yourself first. And if you are under the weather, just don’t go out where monsters are. It’s not worth it. Stockpile food and medicine. How very simple. Don’t tell me you don’t do that.”
Malcolm couldn’t deny it.
“Yeah, exactly,” said Rhode.
Pointed out so obviously, it felt dumber to Malcolm to have even been in the forest at all with all this armor strapped on instead of working out the city budget with a bowl of hot soup and chamomile. Adila had warned him recently that at the rate every department was building their part of New Athens, treating Finance’s projections as simply a conservative allowance, the city could run a larger debt in the coming months than anyone—even he—had foreseen.
“Here.” Rhode held out a cup of steaming nectar. “Food and medicine, I guess you could say.”
Malcolm knew by now that showing any shock as he thanked her would have offended her, so he held in his surprise.
Rhode looked annoyed anyway. “I swear, Chiron has always been too strict about these things.”
Malcolm snickered into his cup as he drank the nectar. Someone tell him why no one had introduced hot nectar to him because this perfectly hot sugary pecan and butter felt all at once like a hug and a cooling kiss on his forehead.
For sure, it was better than his own attempt at making pecan pie for his own birthday this May. He had followed Mama B’s every instruction to a T and was far from a terrible baker, but the pie just hadn’t tasted right in the end. But maybe that had to do with how she had so quickly forgotten that he had made himself her specialty. Or that she had called him his dad’s name until she looked in his eyes.
Malcolm swallowed another bittersweet sip, vowing to remake pecan pie anyway next May.
“There’s no rule about it,” he said.
“Okay, but does he forbid it,” said Rhode, “or at least discourage it so the impressionable mentees he partly raised when they were children don’t lose sight of their own needs, trying to measure up to some ideal? Or does he instead guilt them for doing simple things like taking care of their own health?”
“Wow, you got some beef with him?” Malcolm said. He didn’t argue that it wasn’t actually for Chiron’s sake that he had joined the game. “Have you been trash talking him with Alicia? Is that what your conversations in German are about? Because she has beef with him, too.”
“Really?” Rhode’s bluer gaze filled with intrigue. “I’m going to ask her later. I don’t have ‘beef’ with anyone.”
Mm-hmm. Apollo ring a bell?
“After all these years, Chiron really just hasn’t changed,” she said.
Malcolm wanted to ask, but right now he couldn’t care. It felt better to cruise in silence with Rhode, accompanied by only the symphony of crunching twigs under their feet and the breeze blowing by their ears. He also didn’t have to care to silence their rustling through the forest over the clamor they were getting farther and farther away from. There wasn’t even anyone behind them.
Rhode studied him and suddenly had her head in a swivel, too. “Do you expect anyone to be around here?” she said. “We’re hardly in the woods anymore.”
“Just a habit” was all Malcolm said. He returned to his last sips of hot nectar and let Rhode take his empty cup from him wordlessly.
Apollo hadn’t relinquished the glare of his rays, but Malcolm felt less dizzy now. Unfortunately, what steaming nectar couldn’t help with was heat. With each passing minute, he just felt grosser and sweatier than before.
Malcolm took a few steps away from Rhode, getting his weapons out of her way so he could unfasten his cuirass.
“Oh, Fates,” said Rhode, watching as Malcolm fumbled with the buckles, “he’s stripping already, out in the woods.”
“I’m just taking off my armor!” Malcolm sputtered. “The nectar was hot! I wasn’t—”
“I know,” Rhode said with a snicker.
“You’re a troll.”
“This troll is going to cure your headache, so do— Oh look, there’s shelter!” Rhode began heading to a shed far in front of them.
“That’s an outhouse,” Malcolm pointed out.
Rhode spun to face him, her dress twirling at his shins. “Well, it’s something,” she said. “Where did you plan to go instead? A cabin? Shall we take over the Poseidon cabin? Or Athena’s?” She wore an incredulous, disgusted look. “I am not my father.”
“I don’t know. I was thinking City Hall,” said Malcolm.
Rhode ugh-ed him. “That is so far. You’ll go in there with your armor?”
“There’s an armory on the way.”
“That is too much time.” She looked agitated.
“Wow, she’s real horny,” Malcolm said.
It didn’t faze Rhode. “That is precisely the point.”
At her urging, he followed her in, and as soon as he laid down his sword and armor on the ground by the door, she reached for his shirt.
“Wait a sec,” Malcolm said, sneaking past her to the old sink countertop stained by soap marks.
Rhode’s brows twitched. “What are you doing?”
“I need to wash my hands,” said Malcolm. “Do you want grime inside you? I don’t think so.”
“Oh, inside me?” Rhode’s eyes sparked with mischief. “That is so kind of you to offer.”
Okay, so they were back to this then, were they?
“You’re the one who desperately wants a fuck,” Malcolm said. “Couldn’t even wait until the game was over,” he added in a mutter.
As he wet and lathered soap up to his arms, Rhode eyed him all too intently. Judging by her gaze, she had a forearm thing. Interesting.
“Haven’t we established how silly it is you were out there in this state?” she said in annoyance.
And yet I’m here.
Any flattering sentiments he felt over Rhode being annoyed for him dissipated when he noticed her stare at his ass while he remained bent over the sink. He could hear her breathing. Well, that was flattering in another sense.
Was she so needy because of hormones? Was she ovulating or something? How could she literally not even wait for ten minutes to go somewhere more comfortable? Gods. Malcolm could see it in her now. Her breaths were heavier. Her movements were more fidgety. Her eyes didn’t leave him.
Still, he scrubbed long enough to go over the “Happy Birthday” song thrice. Long enough for Rhode to shift her weight on her feet. Long enough for her to have to look around at the moss-covered wooden walls; the dusty, shingled roof; the cracked tile floor; and the bundles of dried pine and juniper contained in a wooden box—only to fix her eyes upon him again.
“Gotta be careful, you know,” Malcolm said, finally rinsing off and beginning to dry his hands with a paper towel.
It satisfied him so much to see her roll her eyes and shift impatiently.
And then Malcolm really had to sneeze, so he returned to the sink. Rhode practically began pacing. In the time he began washing his hands again, he became aware of the physical reality versus the concept.
“I’m not even in the mood right now,” he realized.
“Do you want me to put you in the mood?” said Rhode.
What a question. Malcolm remained silent as he shook off his hands in thought. He wondered how to dry his hands now. There were no paper towels left. He had just used the last two and he didn’t trust the hand dryer not to blow more bacteria onto him. He stood awkwardly with his arms out, unable to say anything.
“Yes or no?” said Rhode. She produced new paper towels and shoved them in his hands.
Moments went by in silence, while Malcolm simply opened and closed and opened and closed his mouth like a fish.
“Is it a no?” she said.
“No,” he said—and clarified, “By that I mean yes.”
Rhode rubbed her hands over her hips. “I’m confused.”
“Maybe ask better questions,” Malcolm muttered.
“I’m trying to be considerate.” She was glaring now. “Just tell me if you want to, because I’d like to get off. Whether or not that involves you, I’d like to do it now. I didn’t have to be here.”
Neither did I, he thought.
But she was here. Because he was reliable, wasn’t he? A reliable tongue. A reliable set of hands. A reliable dick. Even if in the past week she had gotten it from someone else (hypothetically—because Malcolm and his daring ego were so sure now that she hadn’t), Rhode had come back to him to make her come. Gone through all the inconvenience of looking for him and capturing him, in a forest, not even caring he was sick. Or, well, she did care where it counted. And she didn’t where it counted.
Come to think of it, it was a wonder that Rhode was still here—and gorgeous as ever with yet another sundress Malcolm hadn’t seen on her before, the soft fabric fitting over her curves the way he imagined he would appreciate fitting his hands. It was going to be tricky to slide those sleeves off her arms, and he would have to think up some solution not to get her dress dirty, but the ease of all this happening how he liked was hardly the point. Not a chance in hell would he have wanted anyone else taking his place. It wasn’t like it would’ve taken long to get him going, right? This was Rhode.
“I can help,” Malcolm said. “Let me help.”
Rhode took a moment to speak. “It’s supposed to involve you. If you want.”
Yeah, he’d gotten that the second she had trapped him.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“I’m not going to leave you hanging,” she said, sounding impatient, as if she had any right to be. “We need to deal with that headache of yours, don’t we?”
We? So she wasn’t going to ask him to do it himself this time?
In a five second silence that felt like minutes, Malcolm searched for any ounce of guilt off Rhode’s face, even willing to be generous here, but it seemed she was too busy staring at him again. He tried to remember if she had even looked remotely sheepish before.
“Take off your shirt?” she asked.
Malcolm gave it a second’s thought before lifting his shirt off. When he pulled it over his eyes, Rhode was already two steps closer.
“Let me touch you?” she said, heaving breaths as she looked up at him.
Rhode let out a loud exhale as Malcolm spread his arms in invitation. Her breaths ghosted his chest as he studied her dazed eyes—almost like she was the one with focus issues.
Even her caresses couldn’t put him anywhere close to the same universe she was in. He was peering in from a faraway portal surely, while his body was already inside wherever she was.
It was purely out of reflex, he realized, that he had reached for her. He had no recollection of a thought to do so. How much of her own explorations were as thoughtless when she touched him like this?
Just as Malcolm got the sense that Rhode may have been too into his body, her eyes flitted to his face.
“Unbutton your pants,” she said.
“There’s um—” Malcolm gave himself a moment to enjoy Rhode’s fingertips dragging through his chest hairs as he took his own time grazing the stitching of the soft cotton at her back. “There’s no button,” he said, looking down.
Rhode’s eyes swept down him—as did her hands, right over his drumming heartbeat and swelled breath and sunken scar before she dug her thumbs into the waistband of his combat joggers, pulling them down.
Breath hitched, Malcolm leaned in, just inches away from her lips. He held back at the last second.
In their silence, the haze in Rhode’s eyes cleared a little, burning a bright sea green. But as Malcolm’s eyes drifted again to her lips, tempted once more, her gaze, suddenly darker, had softened.
“You’re not going to get me sick,” she said.
Malcolm had totally forgotten about that. Funny she thought he was nicer.
(It wasn’t funny, said a voice in his head.)
He forgave himself, and even Rhode a little, and allowed his touch to travel to her hips, spurring her roaming hands to grow hungrier. The second he angled her face to kiss her, she devoured him. He followed her pace and force. But he needed air. When he sniffled, Rhode didn’t care.
(Now he had to worry about snot. Gods, how unsexy.)
But ten fingertips were brushing up his thighs, tending to that little flame Rhode had started. Yet, it still felt almost incidental, as if this were happening to another person whose body he inhabited.
Malcolm pulled away for a breather. Something about this just felt weirder than usual. And what if he did want payback?
Rhode looked down. “Are you going to make me do all the work for you?” she said. She sounded deliberate. Careful.
“You’re the one who asked,” Malcolm said, keeping his voice steady. ”So, yeah, you’re gonna do the work.”
Rhode may have huffed, but she looked no less pleased. Maybe that was what she had wanted.
Malcolm looked around the outhouse, then at Rhode, for answers. “How are we gonna do this?” Even if the air didn’t reek, touching any square inch of this place seemed like a horrendous idea.
“I was thinking—” Rhode turned around and dropped her elbows onto the counter, glancing back at him for confirmation.
“You trying to get out of doing the work?” Malcolm said.
“I’m trying to get you to fuck me,” said Rhode.
Immediately, she leaned into his crotch, gyrating herself against him, and while Malcolm’s hands did go to her hips again out of reflex, and while Rhode did let out a little whimper, this little stunt wasn’t gonna cut it. Besides, she could get it like that from any guy, and it kinda also seemed selfish of her.
“This just looks lazy on your part,” Malcolm said.
“What? I’m doing the work. I’m moving,” Rhode argued.
But Malcolm felt little more than a pair of hands and a dick.
He reached around Rhode, laid his shirt flat between the sinks, and twisted her around to lift her up—which he could totally tell she enjoyed.
She sat her ass down on his shirt as he directed. Good. Because he couldn’t stand the thought of getting germs on her dress.
“Why even ask me if you’re going to decide for yourself?” said Rhode with a huff. “I really don’t particularly care how we fuck. Just get inside me and help me come.” She sighed again. “And same for you,” she added.
It was difficult not to feel like an afterthought.
Yet, Rhode cared even less about getting sweat remnants on her dress, what with the way she pressed up against his skin. That? That was on her. Malcolm wanted no further blame for ruining her clothes.
And now Rhode was busy yanking up the fabric of her skirt squished between their hips. “What’s the problem?” she said, eagerly trying to press herself close to Malcolm, getting them as naked as she could. “You don’t like doggystyle? We’ve never even done it like that.”
Malcolm kneeled to the ground. “You don’t like this more?”
“How isn’t this lazier?” exclaimed Rhode incredulously.
“All things being equal—because it’s hardly your effort we’re expending here—do you not like this more?”
“Whatever it is, can you just get on with it?”
“Do you like being eaten out more?” Malcolm insisted.
Rhode huffed as she dragged her underwear down her legs, only to vanish them entirely. “Not necessarily.”
Huh? “Isn’t this more effective at getting you off?” he said, only getting a shrug from Rhode.
“Well, yes,” she said. “I don’t care. Now would you please—” Her sigh sounded a lot like a grumble. “Do something, dammit!”
Malcolm really didn’t appreciate her complaints, but he felt guilty enough to listen.
He was met with his own disbelief. His words came out in a frustrated whine. “How are you so wet?” They had just started. They hadn’t even used lube yet. “What the fuck?” he said under his breath.
Impressed, he got to work immediately, hardly teasing her with kisses on her thighs before he worked his mouth up to her clit. She was utterly drenched. It felt like a cheat. He had barely done anything.
As Malcolm worked Rhode up, aiming to give her a luxurious tease (in an outhouse, dear lord), her hips got even more restless. She began making faint sounds, culminating into a cry of “I need you inside me.”
Malcolm didn’t do as Rhode said. He kept his teasing combo, licking softly, letting up, breathing on her, and kissing and suckling until she moaned, repeating the motions despite her complaints and despite his own instincts not to let up.
There was a massive disconnect between how gently he stroked and licked and kissed her and how annoyed he wanted her to be—how vengeful he felt. But Malcolm trusted his gut. His gentleness was part of his spite.
“Malcolm,” he heard past the thighs cupping his ears.
He ignored her.
“Malcolm, get inside me.”
Rhode sounded even whinier now, and, yo, this was nice. Yeah, he wasn’t going to lose this time.
“Malcolm.”
Malcolm couldn’t help but smile, but got back to work in an instant with an innocent “Hmm?”
“Come up here,” said Rhode. Her fingers had combed through his hair, gently tugging to coax him up.
Malcolm peered up from between her thighs. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
With another groan, Rhode rolled her hips towards him. Down went her caress, tracing his face all the way to his wet chin. “Fuck, your face.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s what you’re doing.”
Rhode tried again to get him up, but his stronger grip at her thighs didn’t even let her move. “Come up here,” she said. “Stop teasing.”
Try all she liked, complain however she wanted, it was just better to be a little shit, so Malcolm dove back between Rhode’s legs, venturing into her heat with his tongue. As he alternated between kitten licks inside and long drags over her nub, she alternated between pleasured moans and displeased groans, fidgeting her hips ever more restlessly. Each new complaint had him take a second to kiss, lick, or bite her thighs, which served only to draw out further protests and get her legs even wetter.
In his half-seconds to sniffle and breathe, Malcolm would glance up at Rhode, trying to calculate how much more of nothing she could take. If the flood drenching her thighs didn’t spell it out, her face certainly did, looking so heated with her brows pinched like that.
Aww, poor soul.
This was revenge, he knew, and at some point (he was putting off the thought), it wouldn’t even matter, because in the end, he knew he wasn’t going to leave Rhode hanging.
It was easy enough to slip two of his fingers inside with zero prep, just a knuckle deep. He gave her a break, then gave her two knuckles’ worth.
His instincts blared at him to find that ridgy, spongy area with his fingertips and curl them and curl them and curl them again—but Malcolm got ahold of himself and just grazed over the spot.
Rhode didn’t groan. She was stewing right now, glaring at him as he tried not to smirk.
Who? Me?
And then he was just enjoying himself, giving her three digits or two; two knuckles or one; licks or sucks, past the point Rhode grunted, “Okay, I get the point!”
What had been the point exactly? He barely remembered. Something about annoying her.
“Fucking come up here, I swear to the Fates...” Rhode grumbled.
“What?” said Malcolm, standing at last. “You swear to the Fates...”
“Get inside me.” Even pissed off, Rhode couldn’t even sound angry. Her whole face was pleading with him. She coiled her legs around him, pulling him closer as she whispered by his lips. “Give it to me. I really need to come on your dick.”
Come to think of it, it really shouldn’t have been surprising enough to Malcolm to have his brows shoot up his forehead, but it was frankly so ridiculous to hear such words of filth directed at him that he nearly laughed.
Besides, it didn’t even work like that with her—not when she couldn’t come just on his dick alone. She could barely come like that, if at all. How did this make any sense?
But Rhode whined—legit whined and gasped and whimpered—when she freed his cock from his combat pants and began stroking him in a steady rhythm. She swore as she nudged him just barely inside her sheath.
Malcolm was surprised to have piped up a semi already. There really must’ve been a wire disconnected from his body to his brain.
And here was Rhode, looking like a filthy mess when he wasn’t even really inside her yet.
“Fuck. Someday,” she said through her teeth, “you’re going to be in my mouth and I’m going to tease you like this and you’ll want to cry.”
Malcolm only huffed out a laugh at her crazy talk. But he had to give it to her. It was like she bypassed his muddled head and found a direct way to please his body, getting him twitching in her hands.
Soon enough, Malcolm found himself needing to dig his fingers into her sides to stifle some sort of sound. Still unable to match her energy, he let Rhode’s lips crash into his all the same. When he pulled away once, then twice, it wasn’t even to sniffle. And even when it was, Rhode just pressed a quick path of kisses down to his jaw.
Maybe it was the way she was totally graceless and needy now, maybe it was only because he still wasn’t as horny as she was, but whatever it was, Malcolm had never so much felt like a body—one to be worked up at her beck and call so he could serve only her. He had staved himself off nearly any and all releases until she wanted to play with him, like he was saving himself for her. It was still three months away until he’d have his own place. What other choice did he have now?
And now that she was here, begging him to ravish her, he could only give so much. Like, with his soft circling right now, just how many more times would Rhode tell him to get inside her? Once more, he learned, then again—now with a “please”. It really would’ve been fantastic if he weren’t under the weather right now and if they were back in Rhode’s bedroom.
Malcolm wondered if she would’ve done more dirty talk with a guy who wasn’t so squirmy about all this. (His mind, of course, said, Duh.) It was no less gratifying.
Screw it, Malcolm thought. If he couldn’t control his headspace or his body, he could still claim victory in his own way. His winning also didn’t mean Rhode had to totally lose, because that itself would’ve been another win for him. She would come first this time—and many times before he got his. Because he just didn’t care as much as she did. Because none of this could bother him.
Rhode didn’t take it without a fight. She got really busy with his dick, working it in her hands, making him almost forget, even as she panted against him.
But Malcolm fought back. Sure, it was harder when his insides started to flutter and his throat bobbed as he remembered how addictive she was. But he was adamant: he was going to get her coming first.
Rhode’s nose dragged along his jawline. She moaned faintly as she peppered his cheek with more pecks and splotched his neck with open-mouthed kisses, until she violently jerked back, gagging as she wiped her mouth. “Ugh, what is that? Sunscreen?”
Malcolm’s face fell into her neck as he burst with laughter at the absolutely satisfying albeit unintended karma. “See, unlike lipstick, it’s actually necessary.”
Rhode huffed as she materialized tissues to wipe her tongue, making faces and making Malcolm laugh more. “You ever seen those videos of disgusted cats?” he said. “That’s what you look like.”
“I’m just going to ignore that,” said Rhode. She used a wet wipe to rub the sunscreen off his neck. “I’ve never in all my life—I’m not even joking—had a more inconvenient quickie.”
She hadn’t even asked for permission like she usually did, but Malcolm tilted his head to the right anyway to give her more room.
“Hey, you picked the time and place,” he said.
“And the man,” she muttered, getting a new wipe for his face.
Right now, the man—or his body—felt like it was partly hers to do with. It felt weird. But part of Malcolm relished in the sensation. She had picked him, hadn’t she? What could be better than that?
Rhode peeked down for a split second. “Can you get yourself ready?”
Okay, so she hadn’t forgotten.
As the butterflies swarmed Malcolm’s insides, he came up blank with the proper course of action.
“Just for thirty seconds while I get this off you,” said Rhode.
It wasn’t totally comfortable, but Malcolm suspected it was partly that that got him ready in twenty. And you know what? Because he could do more for Rhode, he dragged her closer to him and off the countertop, getting her to make noises and shut her eyes in bliss by just nestling himself between her labia.
Her breaths touched his cheek as she jolted against him now, even as she inspected whether the newest wipe in her hand had any more sunscreen residue.
Rhode must have been satisfied with her cleaning because she was back pressing her lips into his shoulder and the crook of his neck. She kept skimming all over his bare chest, her own chest heaving, as Malcolm kept teasing her.
“Could’ve gotten in the shower for this,” he thought aloud as he finally eased in again, hearing Rhode’s moany breath loud by his ear.
“Not like there’s anyone there now either,” Malcolm muttered.
He needed a little more self-help and thankfully Rhode was too occupied with kissing his skin and pulling his hair to have the time or thought to annoy him. With the right combo of grip and speed—and the added lewdness of having an audience, he’d made it through that portal.
“But no, she went for the fuckin’ toilets,” he said. “Couldn’t even wait fifteen minutes for this.”
Now, it wasn’t entirely for her that he buried himself in her heat. It was only 80% for Rhode that he plunged deeper, until they had no space left to themselves. Those pitiful gasps escaping her lips were only 60% hers.
With a thick press in, a whine escaped Rhode’s lips—kind of a whisper, kind of a squeal, kind of a cry.
“Is that what you wanted?” he said just over a whisper.
She whined again. That sound was his. That was for him. Half for him. And he wanted so much more—so much they hadn’t prepared for. They had barely bothered with any fingers before this. Would starting at a snail’s pace be enough prep?
Highly conscious of her reactions, catching no winces or pinches in Rhode’s face, Malcolm asked anyway, “You comfortable?”
Rhode snapped her eyes shut and let out a tight breath. “Are you being intentionally slow?” she gritted out.
Malcolm huffed. “Maybe I should get you like this all the time.”
“Is that a request or a promise?” said Rhode as she jerked her hips towards his.
“I just thought,” he said patiently, yet barely biting back his own annoyance, “it would be wise to properly open you up first.”
“I already did,” she said, smiling wide as she corrected him. “And it wasn’t puny.”
Malcolm was shook. “And you still needed me?”
“Yes.”
It was like his brain broke.
“You really think too much,” Rhode said, shaking her head before grumbling, “Fucking fuck me already. How many times must I say please?”
Malcolm scoffed a laugh as Rhode fell back into her sea of pleasure.
Another plunge got her muttering, “Oh, fuck, that’s delicious.”
And when Malcolm drew out—completely out, Rhode groaned.
“Why?” she said, glaring.
Malcolm felt a smirk in his lips. “‘Cause I wanted to hear that.”
He was starting to get affected though. Right as Rhode was on the verge of an outburst, he pushed in again. Eyes shut, she whimpered as he breached her.
Gods damn she took him so well. He’d forgotten how good. He may have hid his noises and his stupid faces of bliss, but Rhode had no qualms about hers.
“Ohhh, Fates,” she murmured, sounds turning into a garbled mess.
Everything he did now got her urging him on, yet nothing was enough for Rhode. Her legs had wrapped around his ass. She had climbed onto him, pressed the cotton of her dress flush against his skin, and teamed up with gravity to get her falling around him.
“Oh, Fates. I think I’m—” She squealed again.
Malcolm couldn’t even be proud of himself—not when he hadn’t even tried.
But good for her, he guessed.
One by one, kisses lined his newly cleansed forehead, then his scalp, as Malcolm gave her more. Her breasts landed right on his chin, in what couldn’t have been an accident. Rhode’s little pecks weren’t enough. Lowering herself (as Malcolm still supported her weight), she trailed her lips to his neck, suckling and teasing him with her teeth.
Malcolm nearly forgot his hatred of such delicious attention, but he pulled Rhode’s hair near the roots until she growled.
“Don’t fucking bite me,” he spat.
That one mark she had left in him last time had been plenty, even if he did have access to nectar at City Hall and mysteriously found makeup remover wipes in the bathroom.
If Rhode could tell, she didn’t seem to care. She only looked down at him with wild, greedy eyes, which closed as he dared to tug her hair again.
With each passing second, with every push in and drag out, Malcolm could hardly comprehend his reality.
They had lost their gratifying slick friction he’d enjoyed every other time before. Now he was nothing other than soaked and drenched to his balls. It was all Rhode.
“Seriously,” he grunted, “how are you so wet?”
Being frustrated with want had never felt so much like a problem.
But however little he could handle it, Rhode was just gone. It looked like she needed help, needed her wildness tamed until she found calm again. She whined and writhed like she was itching and desperate. In her own world, she had left him for the heavens she wanted him to get her to, while he remained, again, pulled to the earth by the weight of his consciousness, watching a goddess quiver and quake on his dick.
What their distance did let him do was let his eyes wander where they wished. He followed them over her lips (oh, how badly he wanted to lay his mouth on them), over her jaw (a hot little lick there would do), until he made a beeline to the rise and fall of her breasts (he bet she wouldn’t mind him burying his face in them).
What a shame she was still clothed—after all this time while she had raked her eyes over his chest Zeus knew how many times.
Malcolm could get back at her for that. First, he sat her down on the countertop. Why exert his energy holding her up when he could see so little of her? Nah. Two:
“Be honest,” he said. “Are your batteries really dead?”
Rhode emerged from her rapture. She looked slightly annoyed—exactly how he wanted her—but another thrust in had that irritation leave her face. Every other push got her sighing.
“Was this what happened that other time?” Malcolm said. “Before the campfire? What were you doing then, before? Huh?”
He couldn’t tell if she groaned in annoyance or pleasure. It satisfied him either way.
“Were you already trying to get off, thinking about that night we spent at yours,” Malcolm said, “and then you just couldn’t finish? ‘Cause you said you were heading to bed, didn’t you?”
“You remember?” Rhode shot back. “The campfire... was weeks ago. Have you been thinking about it?”
“That wasn’t a denial.”
No longer did Malcolm feel inept. Maybe being sick cleared his daze.
“I was thinking about—” Rhode lost her breath. “—when you were begging for me,” she said.
Malcolm slowed as she kept speaking.
“I wanted the real thing,” said Rhode. She said it so casually, so unthinkingly, even dropping her gaze to where they were joined, reaching for his cock just about fully inside her. “And now that it’s here, he’s barely using it,” she said disparagingly.
“Barely?”
“I asked for a quickie. You go at this speed?”
That just made Malcolm want to slow down more. “Why do you always want to go so fast? How is that even good?”
“What gave you the idea it can’t be good?” said Rhode, interrupted by her own gasp. She was shooting daggers at him. “I’m a woman, so I’m dainty?”
Even that didn’t guilt him. Malcolm swallowed the urge to point to evidence that he had been told by two past flames to keep a slower pace.
“You mean to tell me,” he said, “it doesn’t feel better when it’s slower than some jackhammering? You can’t even breathe properly when we’ve gone that fast. How is that enjoyable?”
“It can be hot! Sue me.”
Again, Rhode rocked her hips onto him with what effort she could give, fighting against his rhythm.
“Just a little more,” she whined.
Rhode was such a liar. She told him to pick it up three more times, insisting on it each time until Malcolm complied. It was the only way to shut her up.
All Malcolm could do was watch, annoyed that he was taking part in this nonsense as she mewled like she was enjoying it.
“More,” said Rhode. “Malcolm. Please.”
He refused. “Save your breaths,” he said.
”You’re—” Rhode’s breath caught again. “You’re—” Now she groaned. “—holding out on me. Don’t.”
Malcolm shook his head and slowed a little more. “You just can’t take it.” He scoffed and kept his pace. “You know, actually, you are dainty. Like when you complain your thighs are sore after not even a minute. Making me do everything. I doubt you even do cardio.” He scoffed again at the thought.
“Then what— What do you call this?” said Rhode.
“This doesn’t—!” Malcolm erupted.
Gods dammit, she was right. Ish.
“This should be cardio,” he said, continuing to speak over her “Aha!”
“At most,” he emphasized. “But somehow, for you, this is like some never-ending high-intensity interval training.”
“There you go,” Rhode breathed.
“It shouldn’t be is my point. You’re barely contributing to any physical effort here. Moving an inch doesn’t count. So dammit, save your breaths.”
As she gasped again and let out another whimper, she shook her head, almost in amusement.
“What?” Malcolm snapped.
Rhode didn’t say. She kissed him though, which really interrupted their rhythm, but she wasn’t fighting against his pace anymore.
“I said save your breaths,” Malcolm said.
“Didn’t. Hear that.”
Rhode kissed him again. Or she tried to anyway until he thought better of it. She responded with groany moans, crying out, “Yes. Give me. Every inch. Just like. That.”
Her growing desperation was a problem. Several problems. The more she begged for it, the harder it would be to keep her on edge—and the longer he kept her like this, the closer she got to hyperventilating.
Rhode was panting, not even bothering to lead anymore. “Don’t. Stop,” she said.
That speck of uncertainty led to discomfort, building into a jitter. But also...
“To be sure,” Malcolm said, slowing down again, “you said ‘don’t stop’ and not ‘don’t’ and ‘stop’, right?”
“Oh Fates.”
“See, this is why exercise is important,” Malcolm said. “There’d be no room for confusion.”
Rhode practically growled. Malcolm laughed.
“Do one actual cardio workout before next time,” he said, “and then maybe I’ll consider going faster.”
“Excuse. Me?”
“You’re so out of shape. I mean, you look amazing, obviously,” he said when offense struck Rhode’s face, “but for your own health, it helps to work out. Exercise isn’t just for longevity or looks. You can’t just push it off to the next century.”
“I didn’t. Ask.”
“You did when you wanted to go faster. I’m telling you my conditions. You’re going to have to work your way up if you don’t want me to hold out on you, because this pace being above your aerobic threshold is a problem.”
“One more time,” Rhode gritted out, losing her breath at the last word, “and I will leave.”
Malcolm finally felt a little guilty. Rhode looked frustrated, and he didn’t know if she was bluffing. He didn’t know either if it was all the effort she had made to keep talking, but she looked upset. No, she looked disappointed. And, well, he certainly couldn’t have that.
“Keep going,” she said.
Malcolm really couldn’t help it. “Okay, that’s clearer.”
Him lifting her ass off the counter was insurance. Like this, she couldn’t control their speed, but neither could she leave. Besides, she always loved when he carried her, and it was extra stimulation for her. At least he hoped so. If he could angle them just right, maybe her clit could rub against him.
With Rhode in his arms, Malcolm wondered how much else he could get away with. So when she kissed him, rough and nowhere close to their most satisfying, he broke it off and urged her to breathe.
Either Rhode wasn’t listening or she really just didn’t know, because the way she was going was straight to dizziness. Malcolm actually had to direct her to expand her lungs on each inhale and lengthen each exhale.
“Slower and deeper,” he reminded her ten seconds later. ”And I can totally read off your face that you wanna make a joke about that. No. Just breathe properly for a sec. You need to build back your CO₂ to get more blood into your brain.”
Rhode’s brows scrunched. “How are— How’re you still talking?”
“You’re not helping yourself,” he chided. “Breathe.”
Telling Rhode off probably didn’t work quite like he wanted it to because she didn’t seem pissed at all. If anything, those huffs he heard—slower and deeper—really were Rhode’s attempt to do as he had said. Gradually, her inhales deepened and her exhales slowed.
Her efforts earned her a scorching kiss—and a little speed. A little. Malcolm still refused to knock her breaths out of her.
Then it was his own breathing he had to worry about as Rhode tightened her embrace around his neck, drawing herself closer.
“You’re too good. At doing what I need,” she grunted.
Gods, forget getting the upper hand. That felt even better to hear.
And she was totally playing him like a fiddle, wasn’t she?
“Right there,” she said, after he didn’t even do anything differently. “Oh, that’s so good.” She moaned again. “Oh, keep fucking me.”
The words flew over him, even as he continued to grant her wish.
“Look at that,” Malcolm said. “She lost her attitude. But hey, she can speak now.”
Rhode’s eyes snapped open, blistering Malcolm with what fury she could manage. “What has gotten into you?”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing. Nothing much. That’s why I came here. So you could.”
Malcolm physically took a beat, but got going before Rhode could complain again.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
Ultimately, nothing could get him to stop enjoying Rhode’s dirty mind. It kept him in her thoughts after all.
Rhode’s lips quirked up in the corners as she steadied her breaths.
No less humored and only a little less heated than she, Malcolm sat her back down on his shirt to reward her properly. His hips were still busy, but the two hands that had held her up had two better uses. One found her clit; the other searched above her pubic bone for that spot that would bring pleasure to... well, some other part of her clitoral complex.
Rhode just sighed but smiled as she helped him relocate it.
Damn, he’d never gotten it right. Maybe someday.
“You just ace all tests, don’t you?” she said. “Except lewdness, of course. I wouldn’t exactly call anything you just said lewd, sexy as it was when you tried taking charge.”
Malcolm’s first thought was that her speech was still a little shaky, but he could give her props. It was still a massive improvement from before.
But as he digested her words, he tried his best not to falter, even for a second. But he would’ve been lying if he said he could completely shake off what was surely an insult.
“But,” said Rhode, hand running through his hair, “since you like being praised, would some encouragement help you be less shy?” Her brows scrunched in thought, even as she breathed heavily.
“What? I don’t like…” he began.
Did he?
Wait, did Rhode think he had some sort of praise kink?
“Let me try,” she said. Pulling him closer again, she put on a sultry tone, saying, “You’re very hot when you get nasty.”
Malcolm’s head tilted. “No.” It even felt like a lie.
“Oh.” Rhode’s brows furrowed. “The compliments seemed to— work before.”
She may not have been out of breath from the slower speed he forced, but Malcolm supposed his relentless focus between her thighs couldn’t have helped.
“I’m trying to think of examples. But you’re entirely too proper,” Rhode said.
Was that a problem for her? Another problem?
Malcolm got ahold of himself. He couldn’t believe he remotely cared.
“Oh!” Rhode’s eyes lit up. “There was that time you pulled my tit,” she said, stumbling over her words as Malcolm incidentally circled a new, achingly sensitive spot. “Remember?”
Yeah, he so wasn’t going to carry out that suggestion for a while. At least until he forgot this very moment.
“Oh, and that other time you licked it,” Rhode said, moaning again. “That felt nice. That felt hot.”
Something there helped. But the things she’d told him suddenly felt... fake. At least a little. Perhaps she had exaggerated them all. Malcolm hated the thought that every compliment, every remark, every kiss, every touch she had ever given him had been this contrived. This was already taking him out of the moment, and he just knew he was going to stew with this for weeks to come.
But wherever Rhode was at this very second, whatever her intentions, her desperation neither looked nor felt fake.
“Fuck. I feel so hot right now. Can’t take this off,” she groaned, trying to shimmy the sleeves of her dress off her shoulders.
In a split second, Malcolm pieced together that he could get those sleeves off with his teeth. Did he offer? No shot. He was too damn busy stewing already.
Malcolm decided he didn’t have time for that this month. With too many questions littering his mind even now, he went with: “Is that why you say it? You thought I wanted to hear it?”
Rhode’s gaze made him feel naked. “I like your reactions,” she said.
“Oh, so it’s for you.”
“It’s like you,” Rhode said, going a little quiet—at least until his thumb hit the most sensitive of those 8,000 nerves. “I say it because you deserve to hear it.” She was smiling now. “I also like your reactions.”
Well, she was getting one now. Maybe it was her reactions that got to him. Her shamelessness. Maybe it wasn’t the praise.
“The muscles on you,” Rhode said. She hummed as she ran her hands over him. Her hips were twitching even more now.
“I think you like saying it more than I like hearing it,” Malcolm said. “Not that I hate it. But I think it’s a you thing.”
Yeah, said that voice in the back of his mind. Let’s just ignore that reaction you got out of that comment earlier.
“Then what is it?” said Rhode. “Because there’s something. At least it seems like it.”
She was working it out until he worked her out too much for her to think through it. He kinda didn’t want her to. He wanted her like this, overcome with pleasure she could only deal with with her yeses and squeals.
Half of him was reveling in her moans, enjoying her eyes bunching tight, her thighs trembling, her fingers threading through his hair. The other half wondered—until Rhode fell back, slouching against the mirror, hands falling to his shoulders for balance.
This was by far the least princessly Malcolm had ever seen her. But she was in her own world, finally getting relief, just as he got a moment’s relief from her too inquisitive nature.
Rhode got her bearings slowly. She looked at him with lazy eyes, like she had nothing to do.
There. He had done his job.
It was one thing to let her ride through it as he annoyed her, but Rhode was fully done now. Why then was he still going? Why in Hades did anyone like coming second? He couldn’t get off like this, with Rhode just sitting here, doing fuck all but look at him as he pushed and dragged and pushed and dragged. Could he? In any case, Malcolm thought, he had made other plans, hadn’t he?
Easily ignoring his body’s requests (not yet demands), he slid out and started to pull his pants back up. “Can you…?” He gestured downstairs.
Rhode hadn’t moved. She still held his shirt hostage beneath her ass. “Is that it?” she said. Her hands fell from his shoulders, even as she sat up.
“What do you mean?” Malcolm said, managing a straight face.
“You didn’t...” Rhode said, frown evident in her eyebrows. “I meant it. I can help clear that headache of yours.”
It was a self-sacrifice, but right now, it was one worth making.
“I don’t think I can, not that it wasn’t fun,” he said. ”So, can you help—?” He gestured below again. “It’s just easier—”
Rhode didn’t take heed. “You usually offer more,” she said.
Did she have to make it so difficult?
“A quickie still means three for you?” Malcolm said.
“Well, you’ve gotten me used to it,” said Rhode.
This was totally ruining those plans of his.
But if she was the one still asking, the one wanting... then maybe not?
“Why don’t you start?” he said.
Rhode did it so easily. A devilish smile spread across her face, drawing Malcolm a step closer as she planted a foot on the sink counter.
“I like when you’re nasty,” she tried again.
Malcolm huffed a laugh, and Rhode’s smile grew even more mischievous.
“You’re laughing, but something there worked, didn’t it?” she said.
Malcolm took stock. “It mostly just feels embarrassing.”
“I don’t have to,” said Rhode. “What would you like me to do?”
“This is for you,” he corrected.
Even he didn’t believe it. That just upped the pressure, but Malcolm ignored that. Still, he wondered what would ever compel him to pleasure himself in front of her the way she was doing right now before him. So unashamed. So guiltless. So... normally.
Following a final sniffle before he approached Rhode, Malcolm skimmed over her splayed thighs and neared her lips. Rhode was the one who kissed him.
“You asked earlier,” she whispered between her kisses. “I was in bed. A late day, I know.”
Malcolm drew away, brows scrunching as he felt like glaring (and maybe he did). “You haven’t eaten?”
“I had nectar,” Rhode said sheepishly.
And you wanna do cardio, Malcolm thought.
He let his gripes go.
But, as a glance at his watch told him, it was nearly 5 PM in Atlantis.
Again, he let it go.
His glance also told him Rhode was still busying her fingertips between her thighs.
“I woke up at one, I think,” she said. “I think I was up for three hours. I was trying to get there. It got annoyingly difficult to get there again. But I really wanted it.” She let out a sigh against his lips before claiming them for a moment. “I just thought about being flipped over and, you know, fucked into my mattress. But I couldn’t do it.”
And neither could Malcolm apparently. He tried to picture it... Earlier, if he'd just followed Rhode’s suggestion—with his hands already gripping her hips, would it really have been that difficult... What was it really? Awkward? Embarrassing? Unnerving? Malcolm had no desire to get into that right now. Thankfully, he had something else to ruminate over.
“So, this is your fourth we’re working on?” he said.
“Fifth.”
“Hades,” he breathed. “What’s your record?”
Rhode got a little out of it as she thought. “In a day, or in a session?”
“Well, how long is a session?” asked Malcolm. “What counts as a session?”
Her eyes left him in momentary contemplation. “Is it still a session to you if it lasts more than a twenty-four-hour period?”
“Jesus!”
Rhode’s brows shot up at his dad’s preferred cuss.
Malcolm’s mouth was still ajar. “How?”
He could see her arm still moving, undeniably helping her fingers draw circles.
“It was a long time ago,” Rhode said defensively. “I was on holiday, okay?”
“But— Was there literally nothing better to do back then? Gods.” Malcolm blew out a breath, watching Rhode half-roll her eyes at him and sigh. “So, how many?” he said.
Rhode opened her mouth only to shut it in silence.
“How’s this?” she said after a moment. “If you happen to get me to that number, I’ll tell you. But don’t make it a thing.”
“Deal.”
Malcolm blinked away images of how he’d gotten Rhode out of control before. He kept himself busy with her thighs, swirling patterns over the soft, plush flesh. It took restraint not to dig in and squeeze. Where was his stress ball when he needed it? Then again, did he need one when he had Rhode in front of him to calm him from dread in the best way?
Watching Rhode swallow and breathe and blow strands off her face only served to pick up his heart rate.
“What’s your record?” she said.
“Whatever your birthday was,” Malcolm freely admitted.
“Surely, you can count that high.”
“Four. That was already crazy,” he said, smiling as Rhode grinned.
“Can I count to five?“ she said. “Not today. When you want.”
Malcolm chuckled before sniffling again. “Fuck it, sure. I don’t think you’ll be able to count that high.”
Rhode’s nose scrunched. “Well, fuck you, too.”
“You know what I meant.”
He squeezed one thigh in a soft warning—and ohhh, how heavenly. Gods, if he weren’t careful, her thighs could be the death of him.
How perfect she dug a hand through his hair again.
“You can touch me or get in me again now. Whatever you want,” she said before kissing him once.
As Rhode made him bear the weight of her forehead, a comfy quiet fell between them. Everything Malcolm could sense felt in sync, save for the little disturbance that was the flutter of Rhode’s eyelashes. No wonder it felt quiet. Rhode was following his breaths, he realized. She was also... studying him?
“So, five today, huh?” Malcolm said.
“I didn’t have time this week,” said Rhode. “I wanted you to get inside me. You just know how to make me feel good, don’t you?”
Malcolm’s skin tingled at her admission. His instincts rushed through his body, needing to do anything and everything for Rhode.
That worked.
And then he got it. Maybe she did, too. But Rhode kept quiet as Malcolm let his urges drag her back to the edge of the counter, back towards him.
“Let’s get that headache out of you,” said Rhode.
It was rather touching.
“Can you do that for me?” she asked.
But that... That did things to him.
Oh, she definitely knew what worked, regardless of whether she knew why. Because, no, it wasn’t submission. It was, Malcolm figured, that she needed him.
“It’d make me feel better,” Rhode said, looking absolutely pleased, though she didn’t rub it in with even the faintest hint of a smirk.
Yeah. It wasn’t about giving in to her. It was his own gratification of fulfilling her wishes. Of putting his skills to use. It was the reminder that he was, to put it modestly, being helpful.
Never had it been so easy to push up Rhode’s skirt, revealing all of her thighs.
Lest he remain a hindrance to Rhode’s desires, her needs, Malcolm gave himself a couple tugs and eased into her again and was pulled into paradise as her legs wrapped around him.
The long drag backward left them both moaning. When he saw her, he could finally feel how she looked. Just like that, he was back in the comforts of that bubble of theirs, tethered in space together by pure want.
He touched her like he was starving, urged ever more by her ahs and ohs. Her orders to “keep going” were an addictive melody he had to repeat with another dive in and another. Again, he hoisted her ass up, getting her cursing even more as he sank further into her depths, submerged by her scent, her softness, her sighs and swears.
“I like when you do that for me,” Rhode said, no doubt 100% aware of what she was doing to him. “I’m still so hot for you,” she said. “You get me so desperate for it. So desperate to come.”
Okay, she definitely knew, because that just sounded ridiculous. That she didn’t do her “good boy” schtick just confirmed it to Malcolm.
“What do you need?” he said. Craving closeness at every inch, he furiously shoved up what more he could of the dress in their way, reveling in the friction of their sweaty skin.
Rhode held on as she writhed against him. “Exactly this. I don’t even have to tell you. Ugh,” she squeaked, “feels so good.”
He knew how to make it better. In the little space they had, he snaked a hand underneath the flared cotton once again blocking him from her and started his gentle circling.
“You feel so good,” she said.
Rhode said it plain, didn’t even whisper it, like it was a simple truth, not even a secret opinion. She said it like maybe he should have responded with his own remarks—but he couldn’t, entirely too hesitant in his perplexing mess of competence and incompetence.
Flushed from head to toe, Malcolm said it all with his fingers instead. Call it effectiveness. Words couldn’t get her thighs as wet as this.
“You’re getting me so close again,” she said.
Her words felt no less manufactured, but those whines of hers were convincing enough to get him to reach a high—and if that was what she wanted, he could give it to her.
Malcolm heard himself curse before his mind clouded over, and he surged into Rhode again and again, holding her ass down to take him until bliss hit him everywhere and she whimpered at his release.
He found his cheek on pillows far more luxurious than his own in Chicago and way too soft to clear his haze.
“See? Wasn’t that good?” she said with a low voice. Both her hands were in his hair as she kept him trapped on her tits.
Malcolm’s delirium didn’t stop him from laying pecks upon her chest. A part of his consciousness was already complaining how much of a problem Rhode was. Too seeing, too generous, too pretty, too much for him to resist. Even worse, Rhode did look pleased, but once again, she didn’t even rub it in when he gazed down at her. Did she no longer have any faith he could cope with her torment? Like he needed her to dull the blade of her wit?
Indulging Rhode in more kisses and daring gropes didn’t even bait her to bite back. Instead, she was limp in Malcolm’s arms, taking slower and slower breaths.
It took half a minute, maybe less, to bring Rhode to her fifth of the day. She made no noise or spectacle for this one, keeping totally still but for her twitching hips, but as he pushed and dragged and circled and squeezed, Malcolm remained caught up in a whirlwind all the same as he kissed all over her cleavage. He laid more pecks upon Rhode’s chest, over every inch of exposed skin, leaving his last kiss for her lips. It felt like the proper thing to do.
“Feel better?” she said.
“Stress relief,” said Malcolm, still waiting for the dizzying fog to clear from his head.
Rhode was smiling. “For me, too.”
With each passing millisecond he met her gaze, the bloodrush in Malcolm’s head grew evermore into a frenzied ache.
This hadn’t happened before. He knew orgasms didn’t always cure headaches. So, perhaps it was a gamble he just happened to lose this inopportune moment. Rhode didn’t have to know that.
Except she would want to.
“Okay, I might feel dizzier,” Malcolm said with a soft laugh. Looking in her eyes, it felt like an admission. Maybe that was why?
Rhode’s eyes went wide—and a little greener? “Oh, then we shouldn’t have...”
“No,” Malcolm said. “No, I liked it.” Just not this second. “It... It usually works.” Perhaps it was progress that admitting it felt like next to nothing. Malcolm sniffled, noticing that Rhode had just cleaned them up in an instant. “It could just be dehydration,” he said. “Or fatigue. I didn’t account for that.”
Rhode handed him more tissues. “Like I said, you shouldn’t have even been out there.”
They shouldn’t have been in here either, Malcolm gathered again as he blew his nose. But that didn’t stop this little hideaway from feeling like a refuge. Where there was no pressure (once he remembered there wasn’t any). Where he could just ease up for one precious moment.
When he was done with his grossly snotty business, Rhode reached for his hands. Her fingers felt even more delicate in his palms than when they were on his face.
“Press here,” she said, guiding his left hand to pinch a point between his right thumb and index finger. “Then later, the other hand.”
It didn’t particularly do anything, but Malcolm didn’t want to question Rhode.
Carefully, she cradled his head with her cooler touch. The ache faded a little as she robbed his dizzying heat. As Malcolm relaxed into Rhode’s touch, she grazed her thumbs down his forehead, and gently pressed two points between his brows.
Malcolm’s eyelashes grazed her palms as he blinked. After a long moment, he closed his eyes.
“This helps me when I have headaches,” said Rhode.
Malcolm smiled. “Not orgasms? I didn’t recall this being on offer.”
Rhode chuckled. “Well, orgasms, too. They don’t make me dizzy.”
Just too much of a good thing, he thought to say. He had a feeling the remark would’ve nudged her away.
As Rhode traced his brows and pressed at his temples, Malcolm breathed through her motions, doing his best to give Rhode a fair shot in actually treating his headache. He just had to stop worrying about his twitching lips and what his face looked like.
He still didn’t know if the pressure was going away at all, but it was nice to be taken care of for once. It was like they weren’t in this grimy outhouse but back in her bed and he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Rhode pressed at more pressure points, between his brows and in the back of his neck, giving him more excuses to stay.
Ultimately, all the excuses put together were no match for the anxious prodding of his consciousness. Malcolm submitted to that nagging pest.
He opened his eyes to watch Rhode, keeping his own irritant self at bay. She looked like she could use a nap. Or perhaps she was just relaxed enough that she wouldn’t need one. Her brows weren’t as tame today; he could see shorter hairs straying from the pair of thicker curves. But her eyes were now bluer and calmer (but darker?) than the lust-drunk greens he had just witnessed—except what shades of green had they been, he couldn’t quite remember.
However long it would take to decode Rhode, Malcolm wanted to be along for the ride.
The thorn in his head poked him again.
“We should really leave,” he said.
Rhode’s hands left him at last. “Yeah, I need to shower. I’m so sweaty after all that cardio.” A faint smirk graced her lips as she pulled him in for a soft kiss.
Too dizzy to argue, Malcolm met Rhode’s lips in the laugh in his breath, drawing her nearer until her chest pressed against his once more.
He could feel her leave before he could see it. Chilly, wispy tendrils were tickling his heated skin, and Malcolm surged for one final kiss until Rhode’s fog whisked her away.
When the mist blinding him cleared, he was looking at himself in the mirror, half-naked with his pants down his ass. The August heat seeped even more into Malcolm’s cheeks. All that remained on the countertop was his orange camp shirt, another cup of warm nectar, and a new box of facial tissues. A glass of ice appeared before his very eyes.
He couldn’t help but laugh, wishing Rhode hadn’t left yet. How was she to know how grateful he was?
Malcolm pulled his shirt on, frankly amazed that Rhode had wanted to fuck him like this. During the daytime. So urgently after a week. Even like this in this fugly, orange T-shirt. Even in his slightly sweaty, slightly sunburnt state. Even with his runny nose. What the hell?
There was a wet spot on the front of his shirt. Gods damn.
Wetting the shirt only made it look weirder. He’d just have to put his armor on again. No biggie.
Crisis resolved, he was out the door with his second dose of nectar.
Not twenty feet away, Mark Antony Flores was pacing frantically, red-faced and squinting in the sun. “Malcolm!” he chirped. “Oh! Is... there anyone in there? I needed the bathroom. IBS, you know. Every game is just too long, you know. So, um, yeah, anyone in there?”
Malcolm’s jaw clenched and twitched as his face heated once more. His mouth opened and shut. “No?”
How long—?
Nope, nope, nope! Malcolm thought of showers instead and the dining pavilion and his office, and why couldn’t she just have waited—
Holy Hades. Damn you, Rhode.
But that wasn’t right. She had twice given him nectar. Which Mark Antony’s gaze had zeroed in on before he scampered inside the outhouse, leaving Malcolm swearing to all of Hades in his head.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Loaded with a jittery adrenaline rush that failed to leave him even after he showered and knocked out some work off his to-do list, Malcolm headed to the sparsely populated dining pavilion for Annabeth and Percy’s monthly wedding plan check-in. Heading one end of the Cabin Six table, Annabeth was ping-ponging dress codes with Piper, while Zeke jotted notes from Claire and Sophie on what sounded like budgetary targets. Conrad was mysteriously away.
Malcolm overshot them, passed by Percy hogging Hazel and Frank on Annabeth’s laptop at the center of the throng, and made a beeline to the end of the table, to Alicia, who was so engrossed and smiley in another chat in German with Rhode.
Claire looked devious when she saw him. But Malcolm sat across from Rhode anyway, who offered muffins made by Amphitrite and muttered a quick hello, like they hadn’t just banged hours ago.
His choice of seat had little to do with Rhode. He mostly just wanted to sit near his disease vector. And he knew he really should’ve stopped calling Alicia such things in his head, even if meant lovingly, but no one was going to know.
Admittedly, he also needed to tell Rhode about the Mark Antony thing because he just couldn’t bear suffering it alone. And he needed to figure out how to return the now-washed cup and glass she had left for him, which were currently hidden in his office.
Alicia hadn’t stopped her exciting tale, hadn’t even drawn her eyes from her tutor’s, when she gave Malcolm her bench space and sat on his thigh. It didn’t seem fair. The smile Malcolm would fight so hard for sometimes, Rhode won so easily. Well, with all the effort she had already spent to become fluent anyway. He’d just have to try harder.
It felt like it should’ve gone the other way, but when Malcolm wrapped his arms around Alicia, he immediately realized she was comforting him, totally unaware. Her shower-damp hair was wetting the maroon phoenix of his hoodie and smudging his glasses (and dammit, he’d forgotten his lens wipe), but he didn’t move and gave himself one moment to do nothing. Scratch that. He gave himself another moment and then another, taking lemon-scented meditative breaths. And hey, wouldn’t you know? He could actually smell things now.
As Alicia continued her giggly, rambunctious story for Rhode, Malcolm found it harder to rein in his smile. He kinda wished he could join in, but for now, he remained content catching a few words in the long string of Alicia and Rhode’s syllables. (Over the past week of sickness, Malcolm had drilled in a dozen words and practiced stringing them into sentences with his virus vendor.)
Focusing on their conversation helped to get his attention away from Rhode and her second green dress of the day. Then again, trying to pick out words only had him stare intermittently at her mouth, forcing ghost kisses over his lips. The soft pecks, the long explorations, the urgent messes... How many other kinds were there?
After everything Rhode had done for him today, it was more than enough just to be... around.
Malcolm wished he could’ve used the stress ball in his pocket, but handed it to Alicia when calming down her fidgety legs with a tap.
It was hitting him for a second how utterly ridiculous it was that this little girl had lasted in the game longer than he had. Of course, it helped that no god had singled her out for elimination. But, you know, still.
It didn’t take long before the burden of his workload weighed on his shoulders again, but Malcolm shoved it off. The growing deficits of New Athens weren’t going to stop him from practicing braids in Alicia’s hair. Right now, no city problems were going to stop him from listening to Annabeth share wedding plans or enjoying Percy bubbling with weightless laughter. Right now, he needed a break.
Malcolm was still trying to think up ways to get Rhode alone later when Leo boisterously greeted them all. Stealing everyone’s attention, Leo stole a nearby stool to take the unoccupied end of the table near Malcolm.
“Gray sweats today,” said Leo with a chef’s kiss and a wink. ”Looking real cozy. I mean, who wouldn’t wanna cozy up with that?”
Malcolm scowled at him in the middle of a four-strand Dutch braid.
“What?” said Leo.
Malcolm didn’t know if it was because Alicia was there or because Rhode was, but for the record, only his hoodie was gray. His shorts were black.
Rhode— Actually, Malcolm had no idea what was running through her mind when her eyes left Alicia’s at long last. “Guten Abend, Leopold,” she said.
“It’s Leonidas,” Malcolm corrected.
“Is it really?” Rhode said, smiling wider as she began to face Leo with almost a sweet longing.
It helped that Malcolm could figure out why, but the feeling poked at him nevertheless.
“Like the chocolate brand,” said Alicia, grinning wide. “Because he’s sweet.” It was what Leo said to everyone. Alicia had obviously been trained into it by the dork himself.
“Tasteless other times,” Malcolm said to not particularly anyone.
Leo clutched his chest, eyes wide with disbelief. “But you like your chocolate darker.”
Malcolm thought for once Leo wasn’t going to wink. He thought wrong. Malcolm could barely commit to an eye roll. “Okay, get out. You’re gonna get sick.”
“But they’re here?” said Leo.
“This buggy buddy of mine,” Malcolm said, resting his chin atop the head of a gigglier Alicia as he held her unfinished braid, “is already immune”— because she contaminated me in the first place— “and Rhode can’t catch weak-ass mortal viruses anyway. Get outta here.” It felt a little mean to shoo Leo away, and it had a little to do with wanting Rhode’s company alone (Alicia notwithstanding), but Malcolm also didn’t wish this cold on anyone. “Save yourself,” he said.
Whether Rhode didn’t realize it or didn’t care—or maybe discomforting Malcolm was her whole idea—she didn’t let Leo go. “I knew a Leonidas once,” she said. “A long time ago.”
Over two thousand years ago, Malcolm remembered.
“Wait a sec. Is this Leonídas o Rhódios?” Claire butt in. “The greatest athlete in all of ancient Greece?”
A grin overtook Rhode’s face. “Our four-time Triastes,” she said to Claire, and bypassed Malcolm entirely to explain to Leo, “he won all three foot races in four consecutive Games. Twelve wreaths!”
Good gods, now that was the kind of impression Malcolm hoped he would leave upon her, even if Rhode would never have told anyone about him. Was it too much to hope for? To just want? Wanting it was different from expecting it, right?
Malcolm had to calm his tits and tame his burgeoning ego and newfound greed because something told him this was just getting dangerously misguided. Like, what if Rhode only did this with Rhodians? And besides, it wasn’t as though Malcolm would have altered his behavior anyway—or even been any less proud of himself if Rhode didn’t remember him this way in two thousand years’ time (oh, holy Zeus, it was sounding beyond ridiculous by the second). So, what did it matter?
Leo’s whistle shook him from his thoughts.
“Now why doesn’t anyone ask,” Leo said, “if I’m named after that guy instead of a loser of a battle who might have had his head put on a stake?”
“Him, I did not know,” said Rhode. “I didn’t visit Sparta much. But I wouldn’t say it’s fair to call him a loser. Many consider him a hero.”
“Wait, back to your Leonidas,” said Claire. “Was it true he was a son of Hermes or was he a mortal?”
“A mortal.”
“Ah, so that’s not cheating. Also, I read he was cute,” Claire said with intrigue.
“Oh, are you kidding? He was hot,” said Rhode.
Alicia giggled at that, which made Malcolm chuckle.
Maybe a memory of him like that was easier to hope for, even if he only partly played a role in his looks.
“And he was very sweet,” Rhode went on. “So good with kids. He coached some future Rhodian Olympians. What really sealed the deal... To this day, no one has had more individual victories in the Olympic Games than he,” she said, mmhmm-ing as Alicia wow-ed.
“Well... at least until last week,” Claire pointed out. She cringed more and more contritely with every no Rhode uttered.
“Sorry,” said Claire.
Rhode was still in denial.
“After over two thousand years, come on. That’s just greedy,” Malcolm said. “So an American beats a Rhodian’s record. It still took over two millennia to do.”
Rhode frowned. “But that was the only sports-related thing I ever cared about.”
Was that a good enough excuse, Malcolm thought, for why mortals hadn’t named those games on Rhódos after her? Who was to say? After all, maybe even Helios hadn’t liked sports.
As Malcolm held back his noiseless complaints, Rhode’s pout turned into a glare. “Who was it?” she said.
Claire was barely audible as she looked back at Rhode warily and said, “Michael Phelps.”
“Percy, maybe you should compete and beat him for me,” Rhode said. “Surely, you can easily win fourteen gold medals by yourself.”
Percy chuckled. “I couldn’t possibly. Claire would judge me forever,” he said, laughing as Claire bumped her shoulder into his arm. “Okay, how’s this?” Percy then said. “What if I donate the money from all the gold medals? What is that? Fourteen times... what is it they win? $25,000? What is that? Someone help me.”
“350,000,” Claire muttered.
“Yeah, could you look me in the eye—? No, look at Rhode. Look at her and tell her the people of Atlantis and all those sea creatures don’t deserve $350,000 of aid I could put in Ásylo.”
Claire huffed, nose in the air. “Those are separate questions.”
They squabbled in jest until Percy called over Leo for structural engineering advice on setting up his and Annabeth’s wedding venue on Long Island Sound.
Even after Leo left, Malcolm hid from Rhode’s eyes. He kept practicing more complex braids in Alicia’s hair, deep in focus until Annabeth’s voice took center stage.
“Mal?” she called. “Did you know Ray’s coming over?”
“To the wedding?”
Malcolm hadn’t even included Ray in the seating charts—but he had included three other siblings they hadn’t seen in a while. In person at least. Every few weeks, they doted over Alicia over IM and dished stories to her of Malcolm and Annabeth from half a lifetime ago.
“I mean, yeah, to the wedding,” Annabeth said, “but he’s visiting this week.”
Malcolm halted mid-braid and looked at Annabeth, his glance carrying his questions without a word.
Annabeth shrugged. “He just messaged me out of the blue.”
“That’s ironic,” Claire said Malcolm’s way over Alicia’s head. “Or very in character actually.”
“So, now you have to invite him to the wedding,” Malcolm deduced.
“What’s one more person?” said Annabeth.
Yeah, okay. If some rando, rankling god like Alastor—or hell, even Poseidon’s worst children—would be attending the wedding, what was one more slot to fit in at the family table?
“I don’t think I know Ray, do I?” said Piper, glancing at the Athenians around the table. “Do I?”
Aside from the family, it was Piper here—and Rhode—and then again it was Ray, so Malcolm let himself mutter, “Yeah, exactly.”
“Hmm?” went Piper.
Maybe he had said too much. Piper was studying them all now, her eyes suddenly darting like a pinball Malcolm’s distance away. And if he was the target on her right, the target on her left must’ve been...
With a gasp, Piper clutched Annabeth’s forearm with both hands. Malcolm cursed himself.
“Annabeth!” Piper said. “If you don’t want to do the white dress, what do you think about going with a sea green one, while Percy wears a gray tux? Or silver. How ‘bout that?”
Screw Mark Antony for putting Malcolm on edge.
Over his thunderous heart, Hazel was oohing from the laptop. “That’s so sweet, Pipes.”
“Oh my gods, I love that!” Annabeth exclaimed, beaming as she grabbed Piper’s hands on her arm. “No, seriously, I love it! It’s perfect. What do you think, Percy?”
Percy’s eyes softened as he got all doe-eyed at Annabeth. “I like that a lot. Thanks for that,” he said to Piper.
Piper aww-shucksed but accepted the credit ecstatically anyway. “Yeah, okay, I gotta give credit to Malcolm and Rhode. They complement each other really well.” She gestured towards, presumably, their attire. Because it wasn’t like Piper was looking at their faces.
“The colors,” Claire blurted anyway, only daring to side-eye them—Malcolm’s hoodie and Rhode’s dress, rather. “The colors do fit well.”
Even Zeke chimed in with an awkward chuckle. “Yeah, Piper. I see your vision. Maybe a darker green. And the gray won’t be heather.”
“What shades and textures are you thinking, Annabeth?” said Sophie.
“Maybe something natural like linen for the ceremony,” she said, “and something glossier for the reception? Piper, can you help us with some swatches?”
Through it all, one voice seemed suspiciously quiet. Or perhaps it was in Malcolm’s head, because it sounded to him like Leo was trying to pick out whatever Frank was telling him about a recent hangout among the demigod gang who had sailed to Greece on Leo’s ship.
The only person who could bear to look Malcolm in the eyes was Rhode herself, who shared with him what seemed like a soundless scoff. She paid the others no mind otherwise and continued chatting with Alicia in German like nothing had happened. Malcolm carried on his braiding and stole the hair tie off Claire’s wrist to tie up Alicia’s hair.
Had he and Rhode been in his office, he could imagine they’d share a second to laugh. It’s deluded, she would say again. They’re being legitimately ridiculous, she might have said this time. But convenient, he would agree.
Right now, all Malcolm was allowed was to sit in Rhode’s presence, planning out his next few media literacy lessons in his notebook with his free hand while Alicia hugged his other arm.
With each passing minute, he was bursting to warn Rhode they had been caught earlier. And sure, he could’ve texted it to her later, but he also couldn’t just ask for her number, least of all in front of everyone.
Despite his complaints, Malcolm knew he had the better end of the deal. Hell, he’d already had more time with Rhode today than anyone here. So, if Percy—gods, especially Percy—wanted to invade that bubble of theirs... if he wanted to sit at the end of the table between them... if he wanted to call over Leo to share another of Amphitrite’s muffins, how could Malcolm grump about anything? Even if his mouth remained shut even after Rhode announced she needed to meet Galene for dinner.
How was Galene doing? How was the trade deal coming along? Was that new art school funded enough to intake as many people as Rhode wanted? Was it true she and Amphitrite were arguing behind the scenes about ending mortgage stress tests to let more refugees buy homes or was that just gossipy bullshit? Malcolm couldn’t ask. Percy was wondering about whether Rhode could tag along his and Triton’s next gyre cleanup sesh and if she thought Poseidon was really going to recreate his failed Bake-Off showstopper like he threatened on Percy’s birthday. Even Percy had more questions, but Rhode really had to get going.
“I also have Zumba scheduled in the morning, so I’m trying not to have a late night,” she told him.
“Zumba?” Percy said over a mouthful of muffin. “Since when?”
“Since I’ll get myself a treat if I do it,” Rhode said.
Over Piper’s enthused encouragement, Malcolm had to cover his entire face and fake a coughing fit to stifle his laugh.
He arose from his fit to find another mug of nectar on the table.
Notes:
🐦🔥
📉
Has anyone been stressed recently? I’ve been stressed recently. Nearly all of this chapter and the next was written before January, but I took a break from this fic for weeks. Now it feels fun again. Hopefully that lasts.Stay safe and stay sane, y’all. 💕 It’s wild out there. Wishing you and your loved ones well. 🥺
Some BTS stuff on my tumblr: Rejected opening lines | ...
Chapter 14: In which Malcolm gets dragged into the hot seat
Notes:
Well, it's not yet April in Hawaii, so I didn't break my promise to update in March.
I dedicate this chapter to the Chicagoans! 😘
You get to meet another Athena sibling, who was mentioned way back in chapter 3 and the previous chapter. The scene he’s in is a bit like an extra, un-deleted scene I only thought of in November (while almost everything in this fic, including every future chapter, was planned and roughly drafted long before 2024). Feel free to skip if it's not your thing lol.
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
At first, Malcolm thought he was being hit on. Yeah, it was conceited, but he had spent a little extra time getting ready today, and why else would Bae have shared that secret smile he hid from Chiara?
Then, before a security committee meeting, Brett Young had given him a little nod—maybe not just to curry favor for program funding. It wasn’t anything like his previous requests to Malcolm to up the budget of New Athens’s one-man Digital and Aetherial Crimes Unit. Or was it that Brett was beefing with Maaza, whom Malcolm had handpicked as his replacement as Finance head, and maybe Brett was gunning for that role? But that didn’t seem likely. He had been the one to write his own job description.
It didn’t even end there. Because when Malcolm backed out of handling camp’s newest intake of demigods yet again, Fikri, head of the Aristaeus cabin, let him go, but not without waggling his brows once, saying, “You’ve really been busy, huh?”
Malcolm shrugged it off as a mostly ineffective guilt trip. He only pieced it together a little after 11 while circling New Athens’s newly finished Syntagma Square, hopping from one open food truck to the next, tugging Alicia along by the hand.
While Malcolm tried not to awe at every tile, plant, and lamppost in his sights, remembering when all of this had been nothing more than hasty scratches on a tissue, Alicia wasn’t particularly impressed by any part of the city, save for the underground road and metro being tested under their very feet. Her coolness, however, couldn’t get Malcolm to wipe that stupidly big grin off his face. Even with dozens of eyes swinging to him every now and then, how could he play it cool when he had seen a good handful of people marvel at the tram currently parked on the brand-new tracks at the perimeter of the square? How could he not gawk with pride at those squealing and pointing at and snapping pics with the blue and white hyacinths and siclo— Cyclomen? Cyclamens? Cyclamen? Whatever they were—that Ainsleigh had chosen? Kayla and Austin had even told him they loved the food, like he’d had anything to do with it.
So unable to contain his joy, Malcolm found it in him to whisper to Jess at Cream of the Crop, Peter at Woks of Life, and Kostas at Gyro Hero that he wanted to personally and privately foot every customer’s lunch bills. Today being a volunteer day made little difference to him financially or productively.
It was all well and good. Delightful even. Kostas had grabbed his head and smacked his cheek, which Malcolm absolutely blushed at. But, oh boy, was it a total mistake, because Kostas’s business partner Costi (a friend of Pravir Malcolm had probably never even talked to) clapped Malcolm on the shoulder with a knowing smirk.
“Did something happen recently?” Costi said in his ear, far closer than Malcolm would have ever wanted him.
This... was not how Malcolm wanted to start his Monday of another hectic week.
Malcolm should’ve properly pondered the implications of that question. Who would’ve guessed that denial wasn’t a fix-all?
Having dropped off Alicia with Annabeth, he strolled past half-built storefronts and restaurants and through the heavy wooden doors of New Athens’s very first brewery. No signs had greeted him outside, but inside, a massive black wall screamed the name GEMINI, featuring the outline of two bottles meeting in a clink. A rich, woodsy sweetness and something faintly sour hit his nose as Malcolm felt Dionysus’s fanciful riches meet Annabeth’s minimalist touch, both fusing together into Pollux’s dream come to life.
Jitters greeted Malcolm in what otherwise looked like the skeleton of a cozy resto and bar, but that was mostly because the sole free spot at the single occupied table for six meant he’d have to sit with his back to the doors and windows. It wasn’t his preference (nor anyone at camp’s), but last in meant last pick. Fair.
The extra half of Alicia’s pork gyro suddenly felt even more jumpy and unnecessary when he spotted that the seat closest to the exit was claimed by a binder belonging to the brewery owner himself. Pollux just... really wasn’t as great a fighter. It wasn’t egoistic so much as practical to note. Worse yet, Pollux was hardly a match for Pravir, whose jacket claimed the chair farthest away from the door.
Malcolm shoved the surely irrelevant thoughts from his mind, but glanced behind him again before taking the seat beside Marquise Thompson. He barely got a greeting. Marquise was already lost in discussion with Robert Atkins across the table, trading the-only-war-is-class-war arguments—the kind that would’ve had Pravir shredding Malcolm if he ever lost his marbles enough to remotely entertain their views. Now, was it just Malcolm Pravir had it out for, or would he have lashed out just the same if he hadn’t been working the taps with Pollux behind the bar? Malcolm wasn’t sure.
Next to Robert sat Brett. Until Malcolm had arrived, Brett hadn’t even looked like he was paying attention, even if he seemed happier than Malcolm had ever seen him—not that Malcolm had seen much of him these days anyway. The guy was a perpetual grump, but Malcolm couldn’t blame him. Working alone could be fun, but not if it meant trawling through the dark web or investigating Iris’s hacked aethers. But right now, Brett was too busy taking in the warm pendant lights and hanging plants above Pollux and Pravir’s heads, the towering metal tanks and thick snaking pipes in what looked like a factory peeping behind the bar, and seemingly now, Malcolm’s hair and button-up. Up and down and up.
“Hey, man. So, what’s up with Adila?” was apparently Brett’s way to start a conversation. “It’s like you always have to keep covering for her.”
Brett and Adila were always getting heated about Brett going over time, over budget, and out of jurisdiction. Malcolm loathed it, but he actually had to side with Brett most times.
“If I knew, I still wouldn’t tell you,” Malcolm said. “She’s just on sick leave.” He would have been lying if he said he didn’t feel a little validation.
Brett raised his brows. “Bad enough not to even try to catch up? I sent her details about this new scam going around camp, and I just got crickets. I’ll send it to you. It’s called Asfales. It looks like Discordia’s running it, but it has Dolos written all over it.” He shook his head. “Please tell me our pensions aren’t in that.”
That was nowhere in Malcolm’s purview, though he wouldn’t have been surprised if they were all unknowingly investing in Sphragis, that crypto Athena not so privately favored, created by one of Dike and Aletheia’s sons, Evgenios. If Malcolm’s memory served him right, Olympus and Atlantis were already piloting a few of Evgenios’s systems: Archeion for voting and Petralusis for political financing.
Making a mental note that he didn’t have the time to nosedive into dozens of articles and papers on blockchain experiments, and logging another reminder to catch up with Adila, Malcolm turned his focus to Brett. “How’s everything on your end?” he said.
Brett always just shrugged. “It is what it is. Just tell her this stuff is also enabling all the shit I’m taking down.”
Brett and Adila were also talking to each other through Malcolm and anyone around.
Gratefully, the glint that was sparking up Brett’s eyes told Malcolm he wasn’t too bothered by his work to be sulky today.
“Okay, I gotta ask,” Brett said. ”I mean, we all know, right?” He gestured outside behind Malcolm’s shoulder. “How’d you tap that?”
Before Malcolm could fully follow the question, he had already followed Brett’s gaze. Malcolm caught Leo, Chiara, and randos sweating in tennis gear; Will and Nico sharing an ice cream; and Drew handing out cupcakes to Valentina and Rhode.
“What?” Malcolm didn’t know where to go from here.
Brett leaned forward. “How. In Hades. Did you manage to tap that?” he said through his teeth, quietly enough for Marquise and Robert not to hear him over their own chatter.
No sound came out Malcolm’s throat.
“Am I allowed to say her name? Can she hear? Percy’s sister,” Brett said pointedly, glancing outside.
Malcolm was swearing up a silent storm with every word Brett spoke.
“A kid told my brother that you had her,” said Brett, “and how he explained it, it was just too random to be a misunderstanding. I don’t see why he would lie.”
Malcolm fidgeted, dying to feign innocence. Percy’s sister... Estelle? No. Gods. EWW. Kymopoleia? Why bring her into this? Ugh. He weighed his options and found no way out of this. Deflecting this particular situation wasn’t exactly ideal either.
“I think this should go without saying,” Malcolm said, “but Rhode is not a ‘that’. And, clearly, no one ‘has’ her.”
Acknowledging that would probably be the first step.
And come to think of it, Malcolm thought, “tapping” had never been a non-weird metaphor either.
“Wait, so you did?” Brett said, eyes wide as Malcolm buried himself in Pollux’s menu. “Duuuude,” he exclaimed. He let out an impressed scoff. “Dude! Damn!”
“I didn’t say that,” Malcolm mumbled.
But, yeah, damn. How he had ever gotten used to those opportunities seemed bizarre to him even now. But he was begging to do something. So when he spotted Pollux and Pravir coming over with six flights of five little beers each, Malcolm speed-walked over. And when everyone got settled and Pollux began introducing them to his creations (a blonde, a wheat beer, a Pilsner, an IPA, and a porter), Malcolm pretended he was fully engrossed in Pollux's every word, nodding and commenting on his tasting instructions.
“‘Taste it, don’t chug it,’” Malcolm repeated, but he could hear Brett saying to Robert, “It’s true apparently.”
“I thought Bae’d be pulling in more,” Marquise said next to Malcolm. “You seen the jawline on that guy? But Rhode and you. Man.”
“Whoa, back up a sec,” Pravir said, finger in rewind. He looked at Malcolm. “You fucked her? That was you.”
Pollux gaped. “What?”
There was a tiny—okay, maybe not so tiny—part of Malcolm that wanted to laugh at Pravir. Most of him just wanted the guy to have never known any little crumb about him and Rhode. But Pollux knowing about her seemed like the worst of all.
“Mr. Holier Than Thou...” Pravir said. A look of realization swept across his face. “That is a diabolical strategy. I’m actually impressed.”
“There wasn’t—” Malcolm insisted.
“‘Hey, I won’t fight over you like a caveman like dose guys over by dere. I’m the nice guy,’” Pravir said, feigning a Midwestern accent.
Malcolm didn’t even sound like that.
“I didn’t— That has nothing—” he stammered, drowned out by a storm of voices.
“Is that how it works now?“ Marquise said. “Instead of them playing hard to get, girls want you to do that? I’m so out of the loop.”
Brett took a long look at Marquise. “I have always been of the opinion that thinking you need to play someone for you to get their attention is a self-own,” he said.
“I mean, it’s just wanting different things, right?” Pravir said.
“Well, if you lie—” said Brett.
Pravir raised his luscious brows. “To give her what she wants?”
“Or get what you want?” Brett said.
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around this,” Pollux said. “You and Rhode...”
“Yeah, he hit it. You can read it off his face.” Marquise wore a broad smirk. “If I were you, I’d get a lottery ticket, because, my man, you have been blessed. Got everything going for you. The city, the hookup... yo, even Alicia.”
“I don’t think anyone at camp has actually smashed a god,” said Brett. “Leo’s thing with Calypso doesn’t count. And despite everyone trying to hit it with Apollo, he doesn’t seem interested in anyone.”
“He seemed to be into Rhode, didn’t he? Did anyone else get that vibe?” said Pollux.
Malcolm didn’t even bother to correct Pollux, even as Robert gave false credence to the theory. Malcolm was too busy trying not to outwardly squirm as Marquise patted his back, and also too preoccupied with trying not to recoil even on the inside at the image of Leo with Calypso, which just made all this twice as gross.
Amid his silent cacophony, the chaos around him couldn’t be contained.
Robert was shaking his head. “I mean, I heard someone say you smashed her, but I didn’t think— Dude. You’re almost siblings.”
“Can you not say smash? Or hit?” Malcolm managed to say.
Robert’s eyes widened. “But nothing about the siblings part?! Why has no one mentioned that?”
“Come on, we’re all related. Who cares about that?” said Brett, which he immediately followed up with, “Just... how is she?” just under Robert’s “I do! Why does no one else? Why does anyone date anyone here? It’s so bizarre!”
“You can just smile or nod,” said Brett.
“How is she?” Malcolm repeated. His face was burning, but oh, let him have fun.
Brett’s eyes were mirrored by everyone else’s. “Can’t be the usual, right?”
Under Brett and Robert’s giddy stares, Malcolm did his best to school his face. “Uh. Rhode...” he said, “is currently in the process of brokering a trade deal with a bunch of sea gods and titans. So, she’s probably busy with that and also with other Atlantian responsibilities, plus Annabeth and Percy’s wedding. But doing all right overall, it seems. That’s how she is.”
Aside from hot and fiery and insane and unreal and so un-fucking-believable.
Upon a moment’s reflection, even saying what he had felt slimy. He could feel Rhode’s glare burning through him if she had ever caught wind he was speaking on her behalf.
Marquise nudged a punch to Malcolm’s right arm. “Bro.”
Malcolm felt redder.
The flights on the table remained untouched.
“We’re here for Pollux’s beers,” he said, “not any of this.”
Malcolm started with the blonde farthest to his left.
“He’s being modest. This can come with the beer,” Pollux said. He gaped at Malcolm. “Wowza!”
Malcolm held up his little glass. “It’s really light and crisp,” he told Pollux.
“You can’t just shrug it off and act like it’s nothing,” said Robert.
“Like you’re too cool for it. Nah,” Marquise said. “That’s something you gotta acknowledge. A god. My gods.”
“I—” Malcolm broke off. He couldn’t even believe he was here.
“And that’s no matter how it went,” Marquise said. “For what it’s worth, if I were in your shoes, man... I’d have fucked it up, you know? It’s not easy maintaining performance with any chick, but to do it with a girl with experience? A real woman? I don’t think I’d even be able to fulfill the job, you know what I’m saying? Hot take? I don’t think anyone can really enjoy it like that.”
“What?” chimed in Pravir.
Malcolm desperately tried to think up a question about the blonde ale he was hiding behind.
“At least if you care about doing a good job,” Marquise explained. “That’s the problem with girls really out of your league. You’ll just be watching a clock, trying to hit ten minutes at least. That’s not enjoyable. That’s just pressure.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Pollux with a contemplative nod, “that’s the reality of it. That didn’t even cross my mind, the torture that’d be.”
Pravir eyed them dubiously. “If you have enough experience, it’s all the same.”
“Nah, man, I don’t think so,” said Marquise. “There are expectations.”
“Yeah, but with enough experience, the expectations are the same,” Pravir argued. “It’s just the girl that’s different. The woman. You can work with that.”
Marquise tsked. “Nah, nah. That just tells me you don’t care to make it real good for her. Guys typically think it’s just duration and size, you know what I’m saying? It’s not just that. You gotta care for real. Give her sparks, you know what I’m saying? That’s real different. That’s different with every chick. Back me up here.” He nudged Malcolm’s arm. “Not the same, right?”
“Again, I’m really not gonna provide any input here,” Malcolm said. He turned to his left once more. “How did you and Annabeth decide on the type of flooring? How did you treat the concrete?”
Pollux was cut off by Marquise and Pravir before he could likely even think to answer.
“I’m saying,” Marquise said, “being honest here, it’s harder to give her the sparks if she has experience—”
Robert agreed.
“No, you just listen,” Pravir said. “It makes no difference. You don’t have to treat them differently in that sense.”
“But there’s so much pressure if she expects a lot,” said Marquise. “And to do it before your clock runs out?”
“Yeah, she seems like the type to expect a lot,” said Robert.
Pravir set down his first tasting glass. “Makes you wonder why she went for him then.”
Brett choked on his ale as Marquise said, “Damn, Prav. You a savage.”
“You do remember he’s your boss, right?” Pollux said.
“I’m not really,” Malcolm clarified, while Pravir said, “Not even in Pluto.”
Malcolm sniffed the second beer—what Pollux had introduced earlier as a wheat beer. There was a sourness to it that was just... odd. Perhaps even bad—to his tastes anyway. What did Pollux really expect him to contribute in improving what he knew nothing about?
“How long did it take to brew this one?” he asked.
“This one took two weeks,” Pollux said proudly.
The others were still bickering, while Brett said, “Prav, at least she went for him. That’s better than you.”
“Can we not devolve into this...?” Malcolm said.
“Yeah,” Pollux cut in, “let’s not put another man down to bring one up. In either case,” he looked pointedly to Pravir and Brett.
But Pollux’s voice, too far off in the corner, was drowned out by Marquise telling Pravir, “I don’t think you get it. She’s a goddess.”
“Yeah,” said Pravir obviously.
“Yeah, she’s a goddess,” Marquise said again. “So, you gotta pull out all the freaky shit, you know what I’m saying? Otherwise it’s just boring, right? Think about it. She must be over two thousand. That’s a fuckin’ lot of competition.”
“And,” Brett added, smirking with a hint of mischief, “well, she keeps coming round to see him, so... You’re wrong somewhere, Prav.”
“Really,” said Pollux in amazement. “How do I not know this?”
In the moment’s silence, he reintroduced everyone to their second and third beers.
This time, it was Malcolm who couldn’t let it go. “She keeps coming round because we’re helping with the wedding,” he lied. Ish. “Annabeth and Percy trusted us to handle some security stuff for their wedding. I’d also rather some random god not blow up the city we’re building, so...”
“Damn. No pressure,” said Marquise, already onto his Pilsner. He raised it to Pollux. “This is good, man. Crisp like the first, but more bitter, yet easier to drink than the second.”
Malcolm agreed—silently.
“And it’s a shit ton of work we have to do because they’re allowing everyone to attend,” Malcolm said. “There’s so much drama. At first it can seem funny or surprising, but collectively it’s just... a lot.”
“Wow, you must really love her because I would not put myself through that fresh hell for any of my sisters,” said Robert. “I’d tell her to just sign the papers and be done with it.”
Brett snorted. “Well, at least you got to sneak off with her. Rhode obviously. Not Annabeth.”
Robert laughed and pushed at Brett’s shoulder.
Malcolm realized he’d miscalculated. Not one of the guys asked him to dish any bit of godly drama.
“Worth it?” said Robert.
Malcolm hadn’t even managed to form his thoughts before Pollux came to his rescue. “Guys, lay off him. He’s clearly uncomfortable.” His hand came to rest on Malcolm’s arm.
Yes, but— “I just don’t think— We shouldn’t—” Malcolm tried to say. “We shouldn’t be talking about her like...”
“Like what?” said Brett. “It’s not like she doesn’t like the attention. She flirts with everyone! Gods, even me. I was surprised. She wasn’t even just being nice. She legit complimented my arms. I’m gonna remember that forever. She’s advertising all the time. If it’s not the dresses, it’s those thin, see-through tops. Let me just say, I’ve never been so happy about the Free the Nipple campaign. I thought it must’ve been an accident the first time, but then it happened again.”
“Why is that such a big deal to you?” Malcolm half-spat.
“Uh, tsch. It’s almost like we were wired this way for some strange evolutionary reason?” Brett said. “It’s not like that. They’re just there. I notice. So does everyone. As if you didn’t. Swear on the Styx you didn’t.”
Malcolm refused to engage.
“You can’t, right? I rest my case.”
“We try our best to evolve, but it’s just in our DNA,” Pravir said, his shrug as loose and unbothered as he was with any arguments with Brett.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it advertising,” said Pollux, as Brett butt in, “It’s literally signaling. That’s advertising.”
“Or cultural difference,” Pollux suggested, “I’ve heard that girls dress like that in Atlantis. There’s non-judgmental sexual freedom there. They’re like sirens, right? And sirens are basically weapons of mass seduction. But maybe it’s not intentional, ya know. The flirting, I’d say, is advertising, though.”
Marquise nodded. “Word. It’s more what she says to you than what she wears.”
“Exactly,” Malcolm said.
“Just because she reveals that bountiful rack, that doesn’t mean she’s flirting,” Marquise added.
“Okay, seriously?” said Malcolm.
“Whoa, whoa. Be for fuckin’ real. Bountiful?” said Brett. “She just showcases them well, I’ll give you that. Like, it’s perfect, her and Aphrodite. When they were both here.” His whistley “ooh” morphed into a sort of giggle.
Malcolm let out an annoyed sigh, which he regretted the second Pollux side-eyed him. But seriously, why had Pollux even invited him to this?
“For the last time, will you stop drooling over my mother?” Pravir glared.
Brett shrugged. “I keep forgetting. My bad. My bad.”
Pravir rolled his eyes.
Malcolm wished Bae hadn’t been excused from this outing. But nooo, he’d just had to take half the day off to fly to a meeting in Boston. Malcolm would get even soon enough.
Malcolm figured if he could pull Pollux and Robert into conversation, they could absorb Brett through sheer proximity. No way could Brett keep talking past two of them to reach Marquise.
But Marquise was going, “Nah, nah, don’t insult her like that. She’s a proper ten,” prompting a vehement retort from Brett:
“It’s not an insult,” he said. “It’s not a bad thing. I’m just calling it like I see it. Who says only the most voluptuous are sexy?”
“I’ll say, though, her nose is for an acquired taste,” said Robert. “A god can choose any nose, right? Why go for that one?”
“Dude,” said Malcolm.
Pravir narrowed his eyes at Robert. “You’re really gonna shame noses?”
“Easy for you to say. You have the best one,” Marquise said. “The way it slopes like that? That’s a perfect ten.” He winked as he threatened to boop Pravir’s nose.
“Okay, can we just be done with all this?” Malcolm cut in. “Discussing body parts and shit? It really doesn’t seem either appropriate or respectful,” he said tersely. “Even if we weren’t at a workplace event.”
“We’re not at work,” said Brett, “so you can chill. It’s—”
“It’s quasi-work at least.”
“—just us. Also—”
“Four of us work for the city.”
“—Percy’s not anywhere near here, and we swear to the gods—on the Styx—not to tell him. I do at least.”
Robert’s eyes were wide. “Oh gods, if he finds out you and his sister...”
Oh, but he knew first actually, Malcolm thought. Or second, after Timaeus.
“Just because her brother isn’t here doesn’t make it okay for you to talk about her,” Malcolm said through gritted teeth. “She doesn’t need to have a brother.”
“Ey, it’s not like girls don’t talk either,” Brett said. “We can appreciate attractive people. People talk about Bae and Percy all the time. That’s it. It’s cool. Like Blanche Devereaux said, ‘Kissing and telling is half the fun.’”
Brett was met with blank stares and a “Who?”
“Is that a camper?” said Robert.
Marquise and Pravir shrugged to each other. Pollux looked at Malcolm, who also shrugged.
Brett scoffed, shaking his head at all of them. “Has no one here seen ‘The Golden Girls’?”
“Why the fuck would we?” said Pravir.
Marquise waved Brett off, while Brett pffted them all, told them they were missing out, and muttered something about some “baddie” named Rue McClanahan.
“Weird as this revelation was,” Robert said, gesturing to Brett in judgy circle gestures, “he’s right. Rhode’s probably talking about you to her girlfriends in great detail.”
“No,” Malcolm said.
Pravir laughed a full-belly laugh. “Malcolm, do you know women? Other than your sisters? You’re only kidding yourself if you think women don’t do that.”
Malcolm suddenly thought of Rhode’s vacations with her cousins. There were a hundred of them. But the thought was ludicrous. She wouldn’t do that. All those secrets were theirs alone.
He scoffed at Pravir.
“No, I’m serious,” Pravir said.
“How would that excuse you?” Malcolm said, just under Robert’s booming voice: “Yeah. Every. Sordid. Detail. I hope for your sake she liked your performance and your size—”
(“How many times I gotta tell you? It’s not just about that,” Marquise interjected.)
“—‘cause you gotta be careful with chicks, man,” Robert was saying. “I had an ex who shared a bunch of things about me to her friends, down to the inch—and the curve.”
“Oh wow,” said Pollux.
“Damn,” said Brett.
Robert either didn’t see or didn’t mind the cringing faces around the table. “But the performance especially,” he went on. “I was fourteen then, so I didn’t know shit I know now, and, like, who the hell even knows what they’re doing at that age? But she just, you know.... Everything.”
“Fourteen?” Malcolm cut in. “Not that it’s not wrong otherwise—”
“It wasn’t wrong,” Robert grunted. “Don’t make it out to be something it wasn’t. I wanted it all to happen.”
“It’s not about—” Malcolm began. “You just said—”
“Man, don’t project some bull that isn’t there. It’s not like that. I wasn’t some fuckin’ victim. There are actual victims. Use your energy on those women. Clarisse is dealing with a case now, right? That one that happened at the Big House? What are you doing to help that girl?”
The other guys grew quiet, merely swirling or hardly sipping their IPAs. Malcolm’s own glass went untouched.
“But it doesn’t always go south,” Robert said. “I had another girl who talked to her friends about me and showed ‘em my pics and everything. She actually got me more girls. Lol. You win some, you lose some.”
“So, you didn’t know then, too,” Malcolm said, looking up from the too citrusy, too bitter IPA Pollux had likely perfected. “That she shared photos of you.”
Pravir was mouthing something that looked a helluva lot like Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
Malcolm tuned him out.
“Well. It got me laid,” Robert shrugged. “Several times. I ended up learning a lot from them. The chicks dig the moves. It paid off. You just have to put yourself out there.”
As Malcolm opened his mouth, Pravir glared at him from behind Robert with the most venomous fury, shaking his head and mouthing his obscenities again.
“Bro,” Brett said. He let out the barest chuckle as he observed the different glasses in his flight. “No lie. That’s still kind of fucked up.” He took a swig of the porter in his fifth glass. “I couldn’t handle that even today.” He downed the rest of his porter. “That’s crazy.”
Pollux opened and closed his mouth and frowned at Brett’s empty glass.
“You’re gonna tell him not to say women are crazy?” Robert joked, nodding at Malcolm.
“I mean, it sounds like they were,” Malcolm muttered. “Sounds like you can call them whatever you want to.” Starting with—
“Freaky,” Robert thought aloud. “I think you can say freaky. That’s not offensive, right?”
“Yeah, it’s crazy someone would...” Pollux murmured. “That’s...” He wore a wry smile. “That’s so crazy, I would’ve flipped personally. I would’ve told Clarisse.”
“Depends on how you see it though,” Robert said. “I never regretted it. What would you say, Brett? ‘Life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock?’”
Brett threw up a finger, making Robert crack up and dodge a shove.
“Back to the topic at hand...” Robert said, raising a brow at Malcolm. “So, once and for all, was she happy at least? Are you giving anyone else a shot? Unless you don’t want to say because it was bad.”
Malcolm wasn’t going to fall for that.
As Brett chuckled, Pollux tried to tame his friends, and over their voices, Malcolm bit out, “You can think whatever in Hades you want to think. But I don’t talk.”
Pravir just about rolled his eyes. “Okay, dude.”
Malcolm only huffed. Yeah, no. He wasn’t going to apologize.
“Ever the gentleman,” Pollux said, clearly desperate to defuse the situation.
Malcolm’s breath caught in his throat, unable to shake the gnawing feeling that he had caused such a fuss. He thought better of it, deciding that it was Pollux who should’ve felt more guilty for dragging him here and not properly performing his host duties.
“That is how he got her,” Brett said, smirking again.
Malcolm didn’t even know how to respond.
“I get it,” Marquise said. “Woman like that? I wouldn’t wanna share.”
Malcolm bit back another verbal jab. “I just hope that in another meetup, the conversations won’t sink to such basement levels of respect,” he said tersely.
Pollux offered to set up some ground rules.
“Whoa, let’s be clear,” said Brett, “we aren’t doing anything to her. You’re the one who fucked her. And in a shitty-ass bathroom. The outhouse?” He shook his head, making a face. “Were you that nice to her that she didn’t even mind?”
Marquise agreed. “That’s disrespect, is what it is. That woman and her fine ass do not deserve that dumpy bathroom. Do better.”
“And, seriously,” said Pravir. “She’s a goddess. A literal goddess. And she’s royalty. She should be treated like she is. A hotel in Manhattan—”
“Four star at least,” butt in Marquise.
“Four star,” Pravir agreed, “is the minimum. Minimum. A camp bathroom. Not even the nicer ones, which are already dumpy. The forest outhouse? What a fucking tragedy. Whatever she tells you, she’s probably just being nice. That’s ridiculous. Gods damn. You don’t deserve her attention.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm hadn’t even been close to finishing his flight, yet he hardly felt sorry to Pollux for trying to find every excuse to leave the tour. He was already simmering when Pollux took them around the brewery.
Malcolm learned a lot on that tour. He learned a lot about mash tuns and fermentation tanks to cryo hops and nitro widgets—and he also learned that he was pathetic enough to fake a pit stop just to set an alarm to allow him to head back to work.
He was still steaming by the time he reached his office. Since when, he raged, were some gossipy women’s ethics your guiding posts for basic decency? It’s not like girls don’t talk either? That’s not even empirically equivalent vice versa. Men and women don’t respond to the other’s looks in the same way.
He had half a mind to shove the evidence in their faces. Susan Fiske’s MRI paper would do them and everyone they interacted with some good.
A voice in Malcolm’s head waded through his ranting. Then why didn’t you tell them?
What was it he should have said?
‘You know—’
Not ‘you know’.
How about... ‘So, there was this Princeton study…’
Perhaps that’s better.
‘So, there was this Princeton study—Princeton. Maybe Prav knows, since he went there—that found that heterosexual women and men don’t process each other’s looks in the same manner.’
Okay...
‘The researchers did fMRI scans on straight men and women looking at images of people of the opposite sex in...’
In?
‘In scantily clad clothing.’ Would that work?
Yeah, whatever.
‘And the MRI scans showed that men tend to—’
No, they’d be defensive. ‘Men’s brains.’
‘The fMRI scans showed that the parts of the men’s brains that tended to activate were the premotor cortex and posterior middle temporal gyrus—the parts of the brain that get activated when using tools.
‘So, that more than kinda suggests that straight men tend to perceive women in bikinis how people perceive things like tables and chairs and lamps and stuff—as things to be acted upon rather than as independent agents to be interacted with.
‘The same isn’t exactly true for women. Because a study from Belgium found that the tool-use parts of the brain were activated in women only when the women looked at guys who were extremely muscular. And even then, it wasn’t to the same extent as when men would look at women. So, maybe reflect on that a bit.’
As if he’d never be able to get past the second sentence.
Was this the kind of people who’d be living in New Athens? The kind of people who’d shape the city?
GTFO.
Malcolm began thinking up more approaches, knowing he should’ve given up his silent ranting to do his real job. (Because this isn’t important? said his consciousness.)
After another ten minutes brooding in a clingy rage, he yanked out his writing utensils, slamming his desk drawer right as his door opened without so much as a knock.
“Don’t tell me I have to put up with this right now,” he heard at a distance of a nary ten feet.
Rhode strolled in, sipping a coffee as she closed his door.
“Why are you in such a pissy mood?” she said. ”I thought someone would’ve fucked you good enough a few days ago to keep a smile on your face. Oh wait.” She frowned. “Is it another headache?”
Malcolm took a sec. “Some people were being rude,” he said quietly.
Rhode raised her brows. “I thought you weren’t concerned about having everyone like you.”
Malcolm hesitated to respond. “It wasn’t really me they were talking about,” he mumbled. “People already know, by the way. About the bathroom. Someone, I guess, heard.”
A heat washed over him as Rhode took her seat, saying nothing. A part of Malcolm thought he owed her an explanation. But what for? And even so, how?
“I was invited to drinks with these five guys,” he began, “You might remember them, I don’t know. Three work here. Marquise, Pravir, Brett. Well...”
A furrow touched Rhode’s brows. “Is Brett the one wearing green today?” she said. “The one who helped get me this coffee?”
She stared into the mug in her hand, sharing Malcolm’s contemplative silence.
“And so,” Rhode said after a moment, “you told them I wasn’t just a fine piece of ass, exquisite as it may be?”
“Do you think I’d say that?” Malcolm snapped to his immediate regret.
Behind her coffee, Rhode scoffed. “Please. You’re too much of a good boy to say such indecent things.”
Malcolm could do no more than watch Rhode take sips of her coffee. “You don’t...” he said, “talk about me... right?”
“Oh, of course,” Rhode said, putting down her mug. “You were actually a topic of discussion earlier today. When Triton and I met with a head regulator, initially to discuss access to financial services, we instead got to talking all about you.”
“Well, obviously not him,” Malcolm said. “Why would you even bring him— And wha—? You slept with the dude!”
“What?” Rhode flinched. “No, I didn’t!”
Malcolm scoffed. “Everyone talked about it—not that that was okay, but—”
“It never—”
“During breakfast—”
“—happened!
“—Delphin was saying you and Poseidon both did it with him.”
“That was—” Amid Rhode’s glare, realization struck her. She sat up straight, wearing a haughty expression. “No, we— We,” she emphasized, “separate those roles very clearly. We don’t share the American system, where the agency in charge of financial stability somehow gets involved in market conduct rules.”
For fuck’s sake, Malcolm read off her face.
“That’s one reason this country caused such a horrific financial crisis,” said Rhode. “Instead of focusing on keeping—or even building—any real trust in the financial system, your regulators caused instability by pressuring banks to expand housing credit.”
“Okay, hold on,” Malcolm said. “Not that the Fed doesn’t suck”—Nana wasn’t here; Malcolm could trash her former employer all he liked—“but that wasn’t the cause—”
“I said one reason.”
“—and redlining is still messed up. Being denied loans for—”
“Yes, because nothing screams equality quite like a recession hitting a nation,” mocked Rhode. “See, Yiorgos, Atlantis’s macroprudential regulator, whom I slept with, thank you very much,” she said, pressing her hand to her chest, “acts to ensure that the entire system is trustworthy and resilient, not just a sliver of it, the way America—or Olympus, for that matter—operates—”
“I know what macroprudential means,” Malcolm retorted, jaw clenching.
“Yes,” said Rhode, “and it also means he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if the poor want to get mortgages to get their dream homes, or if people are charged higher monthly fees than they want, or if more and more youths and progressives don’t want banks to turn a healthy profit.”
“There’s still a way to—”
“When stability and peace are on the line,” Rhode said over him, “we do not give competing mandates to agencies like his, and we let him overrule our other less important regulators. Because, again, we split those roles—”
“Okay,” Malcolm said, “but you can still— Don’t change the subject!”
“You were the one who asked!” said Rhode. “I’m just explaining the difference! I slept with the superintendent of our prudential regulator, not the commissioner of our financial consumer agency. They are different people. Different organizations. Different responsibilities. I would like to make that clear.”
Rhode had never seemed so alike the other gods Malcolm had met as she did right now—so offended and condescending, looking as disgusted as Triton did with his resting bitch face, like there was fruit rotting under her nose.
All this counted as—What was it now?—reason #9 why Rhode didn’t fit into his life. She and Nana would argue for days about the Federal Reserve. Now, why that was relevant didn’t so much matter to Malcolm as all the grounds he was compiling to keep Rhode at an arm’s distance.
“I don’t broadcast our escapades,” said Rhode.
“You did, though.” Malcolm’s elbows pressed into the table, his body inching forward with every sentence he uttered to push her away. “Breakfast ring a bell? Your family breakfast. With your parents.”
“Gods do not work like that,” said Rhode. “You know that. I know you’re not obtuse. Poseidon and Amphitrite are also my friends.”
“It’s still fucking weird.” Malcolm wasn’t going to bring up the fact that she had moaned ‘Poseidôna’ in bed with him. Rhode would have just yelled about that, and he already knew it was how Ancient Greeks swore anyway. It wasn’t even the issue here when he had a laundry list of other grievances.
“‘Weird’ is subjective,” Rhode said. “That is a social construct, and I’m surprised you don’t—”
“No, what’s weirder,” Malcolm cut in, “is that you’d just tell them what we did. Percy was there. Triton was there. Delphin was there. Poseidon was there. And it wasn’t news to you that I have a huge-ass working relationship with him or that angering him could threaten the longevity of New Athens. And you’re still changing the subject. Just tell me.”
Now it was Rhode’s turn to shoot daggers at him. “You talked to him about sleeping with me. You did that.”
They were two feet away at this point, both leaning farther across the desk with each angered point lobbied at the other.
“Not like you did,” Malcolm countered. “He already knew we hooked up. Hades, Delphin knew. How? Did you mention it to them before they showed up to the dining room?”
“Not like— I just said you were joining us for breakfast!” said Rhode. “It was only implied. I brought it up to save your ass so they wouldn’t find an intruder in the palace! You’re very welcome!”
“But I didn’t mention details. Which you were about to share more of before Poseidon interrupted you.”
“Well, you were pinning everything on me, like it was my—” Rhode cut herself off and took a breath.
In what must have taken just two seconds, her face was devoid of all anger. It never got less eerie to Malcolm to watch.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. I won’t.”
Won’t.
A clamp gripped Malcolm’s heart. Blood was rushing in his ears, and gods, he really didn’t want to know. Know more. “Did you, though?” he said. “Aside from that?”
“It was just—” Rhode looked away.
Malcolm’s stomach heaved. “So you did,” he said.
What once felt solid, even if precious, cracked along its surface, spidering towards its core, threatening to splinter into dust.
He wanted to crawl out of his skin, bury it, and bury himself, too.
To think he had thought he’d known Rhode. Could’ve trusted her. Held her up as some exemplary person who just perfectly handled all the things that counted, and yet... And yet that schmuck was right. ‘Do you know women?’ Did he know Rhode? Apparently not in the least.
“It was just Galene,” Rhode began, “and it—”
“Oh my gods,” Malcolm said in a breath, recoiling into his chair, squirming into himself. “Oh my gods, I met her! She knows me. Oh my gods.”
“She’s my closest friend!” Rhode argued. “I only explicitly mentioned a count, okay? And maybe I implied you seem to really like giving oral. Implied. That was—”
“What the fuck for?”
“—basically it! It’s not even a bad thing!”
“How does that matter?”
“But that was it!” Rhode said. “That was it. It was just a conversation about me.”
“Yeah, and what am I?” Malcolm shot back.
“I was only telling her about my problems,” she said, “which just so happened to involve you. Or am I not allowed to talk about my problems with anyone? If something made me uncomfortable—”
“That’s different,” Malcolm said with a glower.
“Well, I still didn’t exactly give a play-by-play,” Rhode rushed through her explanation, eyes flicking toward him, then away, “and it’s not like she’d want to hear about you.”
Malcolm calmed down a smidge, but his dread wouldn’t leave him. “You said— You explicitly mentioned what?”
He never did like her countdowns.
Rhode glanced away again, shoulders rising in a barely-there shrug. “Just... how many times,” she mumbled. “But I’m not going to do even that again. Okay? And it was only that. Okay, maybe—I can’t remember—maybe I said I liked how... you reacted to me.”
Malcolm shut his eyes. “How explicitly?”
“Definitely not,” Rhode said firmly. “It was more about... how it—how we—just worked. It was only metaphorical, not anything physical, obviously. And it was only about that one night. Okay, and then after—”
“Wow, it’s all coming back now,” Malcolm said scathingly.
“No. It’s just little things,” Rhode insisted. “Vague things. I just mentioned it wasn’t a fluke. And I mean, she knows my itineraries, so, of course, she knows we fuck, so in that sense it’s also implied that I’ve enjoyed it, because why else would I bother? So, I probably also implied that you keep giving me numerous orgasms, because I’m sure I said something vague like you were too good to just quit or something of that sort, but I don’t... update her on particulars. Again, it was about me.”
Malcolm had never seen Rhode ramble like this before. He decided he enjoyed it—getting, or just seeing, her so flustered. About how she needed him, no less. Maybe he could get—partly; just partly—why Robert had said he wasn’t bothered being gossiped about by his exes.
“Earlier...” Malcolm backtracked. “‘How many times’ what?”
Rhode wasn’t rambling anymore. Now she just glared at him. “If you were this dense, I doubt I would have ever slept with you.”
The silence that came was oddly not as tense as Malcolm would have expected.
He figured it was his turn. But despite trying to meet Rhode’s eyes, she was transfixed on her coffee mug. “I’m sorry for bringing it up to your— To Poseidon,” he said, getting only a second’s glance from her. “I wouldn’t have alluded to it if he didn’t know. But still. And for... essentially pinning it on you.”
Rhode was quiet as she looked at him.
“That was my way out of getting in trouble with him,” Malcolm admitted, “and that wasn’t cool. So,” he paused to muster up his honesty, “I’m sorry.”
Rhode stared into her coffee again, circling the rim of the mug. “I would’ve had your back,” she said after a moment. “I told you. I did have your back, if you had just let me. It’s one thing you didn’t think I would by default. Whatever. But you didn’t even turn to me for help. You just apologized. To him. And said you didn’t mean to sleep with me.”
Malcolm had to be grateful Rhode wasn’t looking at him because he swore she could’ve burned a hole straight through his desk.
“It was like being lied to the entire night and the morning,” she gritted out. “To be treated like scrap when I let you sleep on my bed. And use my bathroom and my soap and my toothpaste. After I gave you blankets and wrote you a note. After we chatted about work. And you said you didn’t mean it.”
“I was trying to say that it wasn’t planned,” Malcolm said.
Rhode’s glare swung toward him at last. “What difference does that make?”
“I know. It was dumb. Sorry.”
“And you did want to, didn’t you?” Rhode pressed.
Malcolm shifted. “I only really thought about it when the opportunity presented itself—”
“So, you didn’t really?” she said. “And all of this...” She gestured between them and around the desk.
“Of course, I wanted to.” Malcolm’s face must have been glowing, what with how hot he felt. “But there really wasn’t some sort of... scheme or something.” It wasn’t planned, he silently argued. “That’s... That’s what one of the guys seems to think. As if there’d been some trick. I don’t do that. Like, that’s not what the tapestry was for.”
Okay, it felt a little like a lie, but it was true enough.
Rhode was still staring him down.
“I didn’t want to make that for you to get anything in return,” Malcolm said.
It still felt like a lie.
“I mean, it was an excuse,” he clarified. “To talk to you and sort of tell you without... I didn’t have to make it. That’s also why my siblings made it.”
But that’s so you could hide.
“You deserved it anyway,” Malcolm said. “It didn’t have to be from me. Is what I’m saying.”
But why pick so obvious a scene that only you saw? prodded his intruding conscience.
I didn’t want— “I didn’t expect anything from it. It’s not like how the guys were suggesting...” he trailed off.
There was a difference, Malcolm insisted to himself. He turned away to his computer, starting to set up their seating charts.
“What were they saying?” said Rhode.
Now he was the one who couldn’t look at her.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Their comments can’t be anything worse than what’s been on tabloids and the like.”
“Tabloids,” he repeated.
Rhode didn’t look as remotely uncomfortable as he felt. “First, it was on papyrus scrolls.” She put on a voice. “‘Rhódē is growing up into a fine woman.’ I was a young girl then. Now, different type of paper, same type of garbage. ‘Vote: Who has the better body? The Princess or the Queen?’ ‘Are Princess Rhódē’s breasts natural? Did she augment them? Expert weighs in and says they 100% match the original—but only sometimes. See photos inside.’”
Malcolm frowned.
“And then it’s the comments people make. ‘Why did she have to upsize? Is any part of her original?’ ‘No, she clearly changed her body. I would, too, if I had the means to shape-shift like any descendant of Nereus. Don’t be naive. They all do work on themselves. Lucky them.’ And how can we forget ‘Is Rhode expecting? Oh, no, she seemed to be bloating! We like seeing women like that. It’s a nice reminder she’s a real person.’ So do you really think I haven’t read worse?”
Malcolm still wasn’t going to tell her. “Sounds tough,” he said.
“You can’t afford not to be tough when you grow up like that,” Rhode said. “They didn’t do that to Kymopoleia, who, well... was unfortunately sent away. Triton didn’t quite get that treatment either.”
“Course not.”
“Well, the worst of them learned their lesson eventually. Babás kept unleashing his wrath,” said Rhode, twiddling one of Malcolm’s pencils as she reminisced.
Malcolm wondered to what lengths Poseidon would go to protect his favorite child from that. As awful as her experiences must have been, would unleashing a hurricane or an earthquake seriously ever have been appropriate?
Could it have been that that had changed the womanizing sea god? Because from what Malcolm had read and heard, this was a guy who had so often used to commit rape by fraud.
Which just made Malcolm feel dumb as shit for having ever apologized to him.
“Luckily for me,” said Rhode, “I’m a bit too arrogant to think their opinions matter. I’m certainly not going to let anyone prevent me from eating or dressing how I want.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” Malcolm said, trying to read her. “The objectification and catcalling and leering?”
Rhode kept twirling his pencil in her hands. “I usually ignore them. But if that’s how they’re going to be, then sometimes, I’ll use it to my advantage. Sometimes,” she said, meeting Malcolm’s eyes, “it’s easier to achieve something when they’re not paying attention to the right things. Of course, sometimes it’s more difficult when they don’t pay enough attention.” Rhode stared into space. “And then sometimes—say, if they think I’m inept, and it prevents me from getting my work done—I’m tempted to put them in their place. Very subtly, of course. There’s an art to it.”
Malcolm had always enjoyed Rhode sharing her secrets, but this time, he found he didn’t like them remotely.
“But sometimes, it’s easier to hold that card,” she went on. “It’s annoying, but not terribly difficult to play up their egos when I know the truth, because that becomes something else I know that they do not.”
“But they’d still think you don’t,” Malcolm argued.
“I don’t like wasting time entertaining stupid opinions,” Rhode said, putting down his pencil at last. “And I don’t mind being looked at and desired. Even if they are lecherous, I can relish in knowing that they want me but will never have me.”
There were so many things Malcolm found wrong with that, but he pinpointed the one that bothered him most. “It’s not scary,” he said, “that the crazies could lash out and hurt you? Like, if, to them, it’s more about power than desire?”
“It wouldn’t be my fault,” Rhode said, tone steely as her gaze.
“That’s not at all what I said.”
Rhode’s eyes didn’t let up, seemingly evaluating him as he was her.
A torrent of jumbled questions was rushing through Malcolm’s mind. For one, what did it mean to have a sexual relationship with someone who freely admitted—even straight to his face—that she used her body for power? What did it mean when Rhode had told him before that she liked it when he worshiped her? How much of that was actually just their joke? Her joke? What difference did it make that he had been the one to offer his worship in the first place? But to what extent had it been his choice? Was there anything he lost in giving her everything he’d given already? Where, after all this time, did he even stand? How much of Rhode’s interest was her crave for desire and pleasure, how much of it was her crave for power?
Malcolm’s ruminations, even more jumbled than the questions themselves, floated away as Rhode set down her coffee mug in a faint, jolting thud.
Her lips curved into a subtle smile. “There you are.”
He could... he could have asked her to clear it up, couldn’t he?
But Malcolm knew there was no need. A few runs and showers would have led him to the same, simple ice-cold truth his gut was already telling him.
Because, honestly, had he really dived into some misguided reality (how oxymoronically obvious) that he was anything more than a source of amusement and orgasms to the god sitting across his desk?
You’ve known her for five weeks, and that’s pushing it, blared his trusty conscience.
What, seriously, had he thought they were now?
Confronted so directly with such an assailing question, it seemed ridiculous to even entertain it.
For Zeus’s sake, she’s a god, Malcolm told himself. You’re a little blip of fun. Get with the program.
“You know, some people would say staring is rude,” said Rhode. “I don’t mind.”
But Malcolm did know rolling his eyes would’ve been offensive. “That was accidental,” he said, letting up at last.
Rhode just chuckled.
He let her have it. Her own little delusions couldn’t hurt him.
“It used to go differently, didn’t it?” said Rhode with a twinkle in her eyes.
“What?”
”Maybe it still does,” she murmured.
She rose to her feet, leaning towards him across his desk—and something told Malcolm he wouldn’t bother with such bullshit with anyone else. But somehow, it was different with Rhode. Somehow, he welcomed her blatant challenge even now, keeping his gaze glued to her face. She was on the edge of a smirk, spilling out of the top of her dress and into his periphery, and he knew how tempting they were, how utterly soft they felt, how much he would melt with some personal time with them—but he knew he wasn’t weak.
“What I really like,” Rhode said, “is when men can’t help themselves from looking, but then try so hard to look away. Then they keep their eyes on my face for far too long and blink too many times to be normal. It’s quite amusing—and charming, in its way.” She smiled. “In particular, I’m a bit of a sucker for those who feel guilty for no reason when their fingers just itch to reach out and touch.”
Okay? Malcolm thought. He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone more outspokenly self-obsessed.
Rhode’s words grew playful as she leaned closer towards him. “And in their shyness, they hold themselves back, even when given permission.”
Malcolm didn’t like where this was going.
“But then,” she said, her forearms fully on his desk at this point, “they turn confident and shameless once they snap and succumb to their most primal desires while remaining their courteous selves, just... unfiltered. And passionate. It’s like a secret. A confession. And only to me. It’s just... that they’re so quiet and unassuming—I don’t mean completely meek—”
Malcolm knew he was asking for it, but he let his words shoot out, wanting to put Rhode on the spot and be her target all the same. “Then what do you mean? Because this is starting to sound like backhanded compliments.”
“Oh, did you identify with that?” Rhode said innocently. “It’s not backhanded. It’s just a rather delightful paradox. You are unassuming, but of course you’re not plain. I mean, look at you. You are timid—not in every capacity. You are reserved. Maybe that’s the better word. Reserved. But damn do you know how to fuck. But you’re so...”
Malcolm supposed this was just confirmation. Her own confession. So, he was her kink of sorts. That’s what this was. So, it worked both ways. Only fair.
Malcolm tried so hard to look unbothered. He couldn’t help but swallow, and maybe he was blinking more than usual as Rhode’s gaze remained fixed upon him, brimming with intrigue.
Right now, he felt more exposed than being naked to her. It was as though she had stripped away his skin and bones and saw his very being. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he could go anywhere in the world but would never be able to hide from Rhode.
It was so hard to keep himself from looking down or away, and he swore he just had dry eyes and it was that making him blink this many times.
Rhode was clearly trying not to laugh as she muttered, “So quiet.”
At last, she stood upright, ruining his eyeline, but even then Malcolm didn’t cave. His eyes followed hers without hesitation.
“No one’s irresistible,” he said. “That’s what assholes think to try to justify their assholery. And maybe it’s not shyness. Maybe it’s called just being respectful.”
Heel-click by heel-clack, Rhode approached his side of the table. Malcolm may not have let himself touch her right now, but nothing was stopping him from inhaling Rhode’s jasmine soap.
“Maybe,” she said, squishing herself in between Malcolm and his desk, “it’s an excuse to be a coward who won’t admit what he wants.”
Nudging her shin between Malcolm’s legs, Rhode rolled his chair nearly a foot backwards. The wheels were dragging already—another little stress added to his plate.
Malcolm’s eyes hadn’t left hers. “I’d rather err towards being a respectful coward than a harassing asshole,” he said.
“That is obvious.” There was practically an eye-roll in Rhode’s voice. “But you can’t use that reason when you have the permission. We are so beyond that.”
She said it like they were somewhere together, just then. This stupid adventure.
Rhode’s gaze flickered over his entire body. “And I know being quiet doesn’t inherently mean there’s no desire. So, why do you have to feel guilty for looking? Or touching? Or saying you want it? Or acting on it?” Her voice had fallen into a near whisper. “Like last time we were here.”
Hearing her echoes in his mind—those nasty words, ‘Put it in my mouth’—Malcolm still wouldn’t look away from her eyes. It was so hard to, but any lower, even to her lips, and he knew the inertia would doom him.
“It’s like— You’re not a mere set of body parts,” he said.
Rhode smiled. “But I know you know that.” It felt like she was explaining something how he would to Alicia—but with far less patience. “Same excuse,” she said. “Are you afraid to tell yourself you want me? I already know you do. You’ve begged enough before. We’ve been through this, the Fates know how many times.
“So, this is me telling you for the future,” she went on, “that you can remove the unnecessary steps and go straight to listening to what you want. We’ve done it before. You can just tell me without the whole song and dance.” Rhode sighed. “I know you. I’m trying to make this easy for you.”
Okay, now Malcolm could tell why he kept falling into his delusions. And for a blip, Rhode actually looked kind. Or she sounded kind, but she looked way too satisfied to fool him.
Malcolm swept his delusions away. He wasn’t like those guys she could trick. Sure, he might have given in easily those other times, but this time was different. This time, Malcolm would prove her wrong.
“Is this all a game to you?” he said. “You just assume everyone wants you, and use sex to toy with the ones who hold back—or who don’t just jump at someone like rabid jerks?”
“I told you,” Rhode said, losing even more of her patience, “you’re not the game. You’re a participant. And you’re very welcome to join in on the fun.” All of a sudden, her eyes sparked with mischief. “You’ll tell me if anything’s unwelcome?” she said as she pushed herself off his desk.
“Why? What do you want?” said Malcolm.
Rhode didn’t say. “You’ll tell me?”
“Course.”
Malcolm couldn’t deny her. He was dying to know what she wanted to do to him. What would be today’s challenge?
As Rhode slid her thighs on either side of him, Malcolm kept his gaze on her face, eyes widening the closer she got.
“There are people outside,” he said.
“I know how to be quiet,” Rhode whispered. “But they can’t exactly hear us, can they?”
Malcolm wasn’t sure that mattered. What he said instead was: “Did you lock the door on the way in?”
“What do you think?”
No clue.
Rhode didn’t bother telling him. “Now, show me how much you ‘respect’ me,” she said. “Eyes up here.”
“They are.”
“Keep them there and try not to touch,” said Rhode. “Although I really wouldn’t mind if you do. Or if you ask for more.” Her eyes roamed his face. “So, if you want something, just ask. You don’t have the excuse that it’s somehow inappropriate. You don’t get to hide behind that anymore. It’s not just an excuse; it’s a lie.”
The thing was, Malcolm had come up with a way to ask her if she led him to that point he’d gotten stuck the other time. And the sentence was there in his throat, even if it was nowhere near ready to spill out from his tongue: I want your mouth. He was saving the words for when he really needed it—which was certainly not now.
Malcolm heard the rustling of Rhode’s dress, already begging to know what she was up to. As the weight of the fabric landed on his stomach, playful ocean blues morphed into a serious aquamarine.
“You’re okay?” she asked.
Malcolm gave Rhode a small nod. “And I’ll be better when you lose.”
Rhode made an amused sound like a “ha” in her throat. “We’ll see about that,” she said, shuffling herself closer with a steady hand on his shoulder.
It felt like so much. To be straddled by her, completely surrounded by her. He wasn’t even doing anything. He was just there, his arms having to dangle beside the chair so as not to touch her. And still, she was this close, still keeping a hand on him like she was depending on him.
“You said no touching,” Malcolm reminded her.
“Who said I had to restrain myself?”
“Isn’t it only fair that the rules are the same?”
“Fine,” Rhode huffed, taking back her hand.
Malcolm started counting. All he had to do was get to four and start over. He could totally do that.
He focused on Rhode’s makeup. She had on a light pink eyeshadow today. It probably matched her dress. He tried to remember what she was wearing. Was it another floral number? He could almost see—
No. Pink. Shimmery pink. The color by Rhode’s eyes was lighter—almost white—closer to her nose, but darker in the outer corners.
There was actually a bit of dark purple here and there. Or was that from little clumps of mascara?
Mascara. Which Rhode had put more of on her top lashes than her bottom lashes.
1. 2. 3. 4.
Never had Malcolm observed makeup so attentively. He could probably recreate her current look, he thought. Maybe paint on paper. He could draw those eyes. Well, he already had, but he hadn’t gotten the privilege of filling in the details. That had been Annabeth’s job.
He couldn’t figure out how to paint glitter though. He’d never attempted it. Maybe he could use the end tip of a paintbrush to make the finest dotted speckles of gray, white, and color? Or would he need shimmery paints to help him out? Would that have been cheating?
And how about her brows? So elegantly trimmed into shape right now. She was just really neat. Couldn’t he just use those eyebrow pencils themselves to paint them?
A series of gasps and moans of breaths tickled Malcolm’s face. He could imagine Rhode reaching—
Malcolm forced other images into his mind as he counted: The Arts and Crafts Center. A wooden easel. Camp’s too many matted paintbrushes. His old palette of paints.
As Rhode’s little noises rang loud in his ears, Malcolm told himself she was playing up her reactions.
1. 2. 3. 4.
It wasn’t enough. Her fragrance and her sighs hung in the air, leading him straight to ruin. But even as Rhode teased and tempted him with her pleading whimpers, something told Malcolm he could manage it. He wouldn’t cower. He wouldn’t lose.
He needed to work his mind. Or just focus on pinpointing the color of Rhode’s eyes once she opened them—and there! A delightful blue-green.
Funnily enough, the hues were familiar now, and not just because he’d gazed upon her face plenty the past month. He knew that hue in that shade like the back of his hand.
Malcolm started counting again. Franklin. Wells. La Salle. Clark.
Rhode shimmied the straps of her dress off her shoulders. “I wanted to do this last time,” she said. “It was so hot, remember? We were really sweating up a storm last time.”
Malcolm swallowed—and felt compelled to do so again when Rhode inched towards him, if only his mouth weren’t so dry. Ugh, he could remember the crook of her neck, the little dip in her collarbones when she came, those shoulders all silken and supple, luminous in the light. He could almost feel his cheek on her shoulder. Could picture his lips tracing the radiant glow.
And now, judging by the brushes Malcolm could feel against his chest, Rhode was probably pulling down the top of her dress.
“He’s blinking again,” she said.
As Rhode’s trademark amusement peeked out from her mask of indifference, Malcolm didn’t just feel played and outmaneuvered by Rhode; more than ever before, he felt manipulated.
“Don’t you want to touch me?” she whispered.
The inkling of betrayal left him as soon as it had come. Because as draining as it was to dissociate himself from this moment, it was equally taxing not to replay how Rhode had laid pecks upon his face that very first night, or when she questioned why he had any need to be sorry for coming into her hand.
Uh, where was he again? La Salle? No, Clark, right? Clark... Fuck, what came after Clark?
“This isn’t as good,” Rhode complained with a hint of a whine. “I really do want your hands on me.”
“You’re not getting them,” Malcolm said.
See? He could make it hard for her, too.
But now it was too hard not to drift his attention to the light weight that pushed against his chest, robbing him of what little space he had left to breathe.
Malcolm inhaled as he ran through the blocks again, breathing in the vast openness. He remembered gazing upon the monstrous splendor of the Mart after Franklin, strolling by the cubic, white and red structures between Wells and La Salle, finding glass pillars glimmering reflections of the old on the way to Clark, passing by more glass towers, and then—
Dearborn. Dearborn came after. He could see the cream corncob towers of Marina City. The vertical slabs of black and white heading to State—
“Don’t you want to touch me?” said Rhode. “Don’t you want your lips on me? You know I’ll enjoy it. I’ll get there faster if you do it for me. If you must know, that’s how it usually goes.”
Malcolm tried his best to tune out Rhode’s temptations. Which meant, no, he didn’t yet fail. Damn her though. She couldn’t just say those things—such frustrating, outlandish words of treasure.
Ahem. State. He was at State, passing by the wedding-cake-silhouette of the neoclassical Jewelers’ Building. And now he reached Wabash, beholding that gorgeously sky blue, stunning eyesore, neighboring Wrigley’s white terra cotta. Between the sleek, steel-and-glass colossus and ornate Beaux-Arts-meets-Spanish-Revival monument, Malcolm took a moment to watch a water taxi docking, taking tourists up to Mag Mile—
But how was he going to keep still? He could feel Rhode’s legs twitching against his. He could hear her—
1. 2. 3. 4.
Back on Franklin, he zoomed through Wacker Drive, finding his way back to Michigan Avenue. But now, all he could see was Rhode in his lap, bracketing his thighs. He could picture her on a couch with him. On a bed. Four-star, said the guys. Well, LondonHouse fit the bill. He’d once seen its snazzy rooftop bar, but what did the hotel rooms look like? Would he or Rhode even care? The when and the how didn’t matter. They had made enough happen. What was LondonHouse in comparison?
Fuck, that was insanity.
Malcolm blinked away the flashes of sheets and warmth and nakedness.
As Rhode’s hand brushed against his hips and as she sat more of her weight on his thighs, Malcolm swallowed again, focusing on the shifting turquoise hues as he traveled, block by block, to the Neo-Gothic beauty that was Tribune Tower at Columbus, to the Modernist silhouette of Lake Point Tower at Lake Shore Drive.
But Rhode wasn’t satisfied yet. Didn’t that mean he should help her? Just touch her like she wanted?
Malcolm took a shallow breath and zoomed back to the Orleans Bridge. He went back and forth from Franklin to LSD. He ran out of laps.
He named the drawbridges. He counted the clock towers. He picked apart the colors of each block. Art Deco in white, bricks of red, glass colored blue, tradition in tan... The flowing turquoise turning aquamarine beneath pale, glittery pink dust...
Malcolm zeroed in on Rhode’s eyes, catching the vivid blue-green of summer days. The colors deepened where he lingered, sheltered from the sun by the nearby greenery—and the dark glass of the Westin. Its front-row views of the river slicing between skyscrapers were something to boast about. He could picture the bougie riverfront terrace, fit for a woman with extravagant taste. Would she have been sipping a cocktail by the fire pit, or celebrating something special with something bubbly and a special friend?
Malcolm scrubbed the thought from his mind. Rhode was just getting off on his lap, not coming home to him.
But maybe she was the kind of person who would’ve liked to be shown the Corncobs and be sneaked into something as drab as a parking lot to watch a glorious sunset in peace and quiet.
Except why go there when the Langham—Five stars, was it?—was right across the street? Would he even be interested in those views if they had a fresh bed to mess up?
But perhaps they’d make it out to sunset, if Rhode got hungry early, with her internal clock six hours ahead. Maybe they could make a stop at the Purple Pig, tucked behind the Wrigley Building, just a street across. Would she like those Bib-earning Mediterranean dishes, or would they have been too try-hard for her tastes?
No, no, it didn’t matter. Malcolm was out of there, gazing across the street at the intricate spires of Tribune Tower, down to the building walls embedded with stone fragments from the world’s most impressive landmarks. How many of those older monuments, Malcolm longed to know, had Rhode already seen?
But in all her years and travels, had she ever witnessed a man-made marvel as dark and sleek as the gracefully curvy Lake Point Tower? What wonders had those eyes witnessed? Malcolm wanted to know everything.
Oh shit, he couldn’t keep going. He had run out of space. He didn’t care to tour Navy Pier, couldn’t even picture it. Something was off.
The waters in his sights didn’t match the darker, bluer abyss of Lake Michigan. These waters were lighter. Greener. Oh, but he knew that hue, didn’t he? It was the cloudier green of his favorite river in springtime.
Malcolm headed back, counting backwards.
Lake Shore. Columbus. Michigan. Wabash.
“This would be faster if you were the one touching me,” said Rhode.
“You’ll just have to manage,” Malcolm said. “If you can.”
State. Dearborn. Clark. La Salle.
“You really won’t help?” Rhode said, brows pinched so pitifully.
Malcolm shook his head at her dirty tricks as his mind let the jasmine and the pure musk of Rhode seep into his consciousness.
“Are you even paying attention?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re doing math in your head. Am I boring you?” She was already sitting on his lap. Now she fully pressed into his chest.
Malcolm’s eyes shut. “You’re cheating,” he whispered.
“My hands aren’t on you.”
Malcolm got ahold of himself and, despite Rhode’s threats of pleasure, opened his eyes before he cheated. He took it a breath at a time. A step at a time.
Wells.
Franklin.
“Don’t zone out,” said Rhode. “Look at me.”
“I am.”
Rhode gasped as she wriggled in his lap. “What’s that in your pocket?”
“You can’t do that,” Malcolm gritted out.
“It’s moving,” she said, feigning surprise.
“Shut up.”
“Do you think it’s looking for me?” said Rhode. “Does it miss me? It must’ve been lonely without me. Not loved up enough. Poor thing. I can give it what it wants if you won’t.”
She was the one gasping now. Or they both were.
“Would you like that, Malcolm?” she said. “You may be the muscle, but I know how you like me to do the real work. You know, I’m a hard worker, especially when it comes to hard things.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, even as he held in a swear.
Rhode rolled herself a centimeter closer, pressing their stomachs, leaving absolutely zero room for her chest, which Malcolm could just see—could picture so exquisitely squished up—
Fuck. Malcolm kept his gaze steady. Peering into turquoise hues, he thought of other curves. 333 West Wacker was a favorite of his, nestled between Franklin and Lake, curving with the bend of the river. The way it mirrored the snaking blue-green waters at summertime and shifted in the changing light.
He could see the waters now. Aquamarine. He found himself suddenly cruising south. The river looked greener here. And it only made sense his breaths had hitched. There was so little space between the buildings here. It was always a little claustrophobic going down the bend of the South Branch.
His eyes wanted to go down. He wanted to go down. Down the bridge of Rhode’s nose. Down to her plush lips.
His own mind saved him with the screech of the L’s railcars as his chair rolled an inch, covering up Rhode’s grunt.
Had she truly jerked her hips into his on purpose?
Didn’t matter.
“How about that offer?” Rhode whispered.
Malcolm restarted his exercise. Eyes up here, she had said.
He was back at Lake. Another train passed by. Rhode shifted her gaze down. Glimmers of pink filled up his vision as Malcolm lost sight of the greener shade. He tilted his chin skyward.
Skyward was 150 North Riverside, that elegant, slender highrise filling up that long vacant lot, looking physically impossible, the way it teetered on a heel of a sort—as his willpower was experiencing right now.
The breaths on Malcolm’s face were the tempting scent of iced coffee in the warm breeze of a summer’s day. That’s why he was feeling hot. There was no shade at the front of the boat. Rocky as he felt, he was going to keep his hands at his sides. Malcolm wasn’t seeing Rhode. He was witnessing the intricately detailed limestone masterpiece that was the Civic Opera House. Utterly majestic on the inside. Fit for a princess. Yeah, he knew a thing about grandeur.
Grandeur was crystal chandeliers glimmering gold like the golden drop earrings in his periphery. Grandeur was the multicolored fire curtain of the theater inside: coral like Rhode’s room, dark red like her birthday dress, gold like her body chains, and pink like the lips a breath away.
Above Rhode’s sighs, Malcolm could hear her slick stimulations. Behind the coffee wafting into his nose, he could smell her. Saliva coated his tongue as he remembered her taste, tangy as her wit.
(“If only you were touching me,” said Rhode.)
Grandeur was being surrounded by Rhode as she rocked above him. Grandeur was when her thighs bracketed his head, when her legs weighed down his back. He was just going to have to remember.
Grandeur was being privy to Rhode’s secrets and rants. Getting to learn what made her come. Being asked if she could drink from his water bottle. If she could get off while she sat in his lap, uncaringly (or deliberately?) nudging against his crotch.
Malcolm swallowed. Just the thought of her wetness was mouthwatering, apparently. How many times had he had the luxury of eating her out? On three, four occasions? Lucky bastard.
Rhode’s eyes were even greener than before now. Too green. That wasn’t right. In the shadows of skyscrapers and bridges, Malcolm remembered the river a darker shade of blue.
Where was he?
The chair rolled and creaked as Rhode fidgeted over his length, growing with her every—
Wacker. Malcolm was on Wacker again, back at the Orleans Bridge, where another train went rumbling past, erasing his traitorous thoughts.
He started counting again, getting to four, overcoming every hurdle, counting every bridge.
Orleans. Lake. Randolph. Washington.
Right. He had reached the opera house.
But what else was there? He was past all his favorites. There was nothing he loved past the Lyric Opera Bridge.
He wasn’t on the riverboat, straddled by skyscrapers anymore. He was straddled by Rhode. She was surely bending, if not breaking, the rules with how tightly her thighs were sandwiching his. His hands were so close to her legs. He just wanted to dig his fingers into her heft, squeeze like she had said she wanted, like she had asked from him, wanting him to cave. His body begged to touch himself or, better yet, to grip her ass and help her grind on him.
Rhode furrowed her brows and took longer blinks, as though it were difficult to keep her eyes open. Malcolm found it harder to count. Everything was closing in on him and there was no room for escape. It was all too tight—too tight of a space between the high-rises, too tight in his pants—and that was before Rhode decided to press her whole ass down on him with all of her weight and not a shred of care for their rules.
“Cheater,” he whispered.
Rhode didn’t even let off.
But that also didn’t have to matter. He could win, even if she cheated.
Rhode’s hair tickled his arms as she rocked above him, exhaling coffee breath. Curls of black were annoyingly covering her eyes, tangled with her lashes. Malcolm wanted to move the strands behind her ear. His fingers itched so bad to—
Monroe. He was at Monroe.
Turning skyward again, Malcolm was saved by the heights of Sears Tower. He was up in the clouds, heading for the white spires above the cluster of nine black tubes of glass. But he might as well have been freefalling from the heights of the Skydeck, because he couldn’t escape Rhode’s whimpers or her scent.
Malcolm grounded himself with a flex of his thighs, still unable to do anything with his hands.
(“Who’s moving now?” said Rhode.)
Malcolm wasn’t falling. He was still up there, merely swaying with the building in high winds. That didn’t mean he’d tumble. It didn’t mean he’d break. So what if it swayed some fifteen centimeters? It was solid.
Malcolm steeled his resolve. But a loud zip undid his intention as Rhode leaned away, only to presumably pull her dress down all the way to her stomach, holy fuck.
Adams, Malcolm forced into his brain.
But everything else at Adams looked drab compared to what he’d seen. Compared to what he could see. He saw nothing but Rhode shutting her eyes and tipping her head back, her chest barely under his face.
Jackson.
Rhode bit her lip hard, and another little whimper escaped from her throat.
Van Buren.
A shocking bright blue aquamarine met him as Rhode opened her eyes—a lighter blue than he had ever seen the Chicago River. It took him right out.
Was it over?
Malcolm remained on alert, keeping his hands stiff as they dangled beside his chair. A few flexes of his thighs hopefully went unnoticed by Rhode.
Through his quickened breath, he watched as her own settled into calm, content sighs.
Rhode stared for a moment and gave him a hard kiss, which she cut off before he could savor it, and before he knew it, she was standing and fixing her dress (he still kept his eyes away) and reaching for a tissue to wipe her hand and her thighs.
Malcolm’s intrusive, resentful thoughts pictured Rhode instead asking him to lick it all off her. The funny thing was, he knew certainly he wouldn’t have said no. No, he would have had to say something like, “That is incredibly tempting, but not today.”
It took until Rhode threw her tissues in the trash at the corner of the office for Malcolm to finally be able to breathe properly.
“I win,” he declared. “And unlike someone, I didn’t even cheat.”
As Rhode fixed her sleeves, she began to laugh, and continued chuckling as she brushed down her dress and cleaned herself up.
Malcolm fixed his eyes on his trash can. Now he knew what he’d think about every time he threw away a protein bar wrapper. She so hadn’t needed to use any tissues.
“I think we have very different definitions of winning,” said Rhode. “I’m feeling wonderfully sated right now.”
Malcolm was dying to know if she had faked her glowing sheen—or if he was just imagining it.
Rhode shrugged a little, staring into space. “I could go a few more rounds. But this is fine, too. And you”—her eyes fell to his crotch—“look uncomfortably stiff as a rock. Does that feel like winning to you?”
Malcolm’s world seemed to stop. All his mental thoughts dropped at once as a single one took center stage: all this time, all these weeks, he and Rhode had been playing different games. And no matter what the outcome of his, she won hers.
“A Pyrrhic victory,” he tried to argue, “is still—”
“Such a waste, especially when the whole battle was so needless,” said Rhode.
“I mean, I still proved my point,” Malcolm said, barely convinced himself.
“Your point.” Rhode stared at him again. Seconds went by in silence. “I really can’t understand why you insist on torturing yourself.” She was even shaking her head. “See you around, Malcolm.”
“You’re going?”
Rhode’s eyes gleamed. “Why? Is there something you want me to take care of?” Her grin was a silent laugh.
We didn’t even start working on the seating charts, Malcolm thought to say.
I want your mouth on me, pleaded his body.
“Don’t answer that,” Rhode said immediately. “Even if you did have it in you to ask me, I’m supposed to be here today for Annabeth. We’re looking at wedding gowns and other dresses with some other friends of hers, so I actually can’t be too late for that. Sorry.” She even looked apologetic.
“I was actually thinking about the seating charts,” Malcolm said.
Or that he just wanted to look at her. Be near her. That was all there needed to be.
Rhode smiled. “Uh-huh.”
More of her delusions, then. But now it was just insulting.
Rhode headed to the door, heels clacking in her wake. She swayed her hips too exaggeratedly to be unintentional, and damn, Malcolm did look, which just felt like an insult to himself.
Of course, he found Rhode wearing a big-ass smile, dress fanning as she swiveled around. “You can tuck that memory of me for later. Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.
Rhode unlocked the door and shut it behind her before Malcolm could say a word.
He didn’t know whether to be more appreciative or annoyed. But gods, he was a fool. A very uncomfortable fool by his own doing.
He would just have had to wait it out. He wasn’t going to the work restroom again to— Well, at least not without Rhode. After that first time she’d left him high and dry, it may have been necessary to give himself a hand in the toilets. He’d convinced himself it had just been an ordinary, obligatory bodily function—absolutely unavoidable to get him to focus again. Which it was. But once was enough.
Now, it was the principle of it. He would not be defeated by even Rhode. And sure, he may not have been able to control his reactions to her, but he could control his thoughts with her gone—and his blood flow. This was an easy fix. Squats and push-ups while brainstorming new budget rules? Easy peasy. And efficient.
By his thirty-sixth squat, his answers were piecing together. He could admit it now: the city was doing far too much now to last over the long run.
Satisfied with his frustrating conclusion, Malcolm dropped to his hands and toes, counting his push-ups as he thought up fixes.
But wait. What was that on the ground?
All over his floor, stuck in each and every caster of his desk chair, he found strands upon strands of hair—black, long and almost all curly.
Images seared behind his eyelids of Mark and Janet mopping floors and taking out garbage that other week while he took Rhode up here.
His cheeks burned. There was no undoing all this evidence. He’d just have to ask Rhode to add this to her clean-up routine next time.
For now, Malcolm sat his ass on the ground, tugging and prying as the casters refused to be freed from Rhode’s hair.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
To clear his head (and figuratively air out his office), Malcolm took three flights down to the zen garden on the second floor.
Among the bushes and rocks, he paced to and fro, struggling to quiet his city worries and his playbacks of Rhode. Getting a minute of calm nothingness was hopeless, not to mention useless.
Grabbing his phone, he typed up polite threats to all department directors to rein in their spending, and urged them to consider which of their promises were absolutely necessary for Phase 1 of New Athens. Plus, if any director didn’t take steps to control their department’s overtime hours, they could instead opt to cut entire employees. If they wanted to risk that, that was their choice.
Malcolm looked up to find he was being watched. Outside the garden, Hubert accompanied a man as tall as Clarisse but lankier than any adults at camp. Malcolm never had the expectation or foresight to see him here. He could’ve even mistaken him for a total stranger were it not for the pressed navy suit that just kinda screamed him.
Zen time was over.
Malcolm barreled through the doors and over their chitchat. “Ray? What—? Wow. How’d you find yourself here?”
Malcolm didn’t get a hug. Ray wasn’t the huggy type. But he did clap Malcolm on the shoulder.
“I’m just checking in,” his brother said with a smile. “I thought I should drop by and see New Athens. I saw all your town halls.”
Malcolm blinked. “You did?”
Ray clapped him on the back and asked to meet Chiara and Bae.
And so a scant ten minutes later, after wondering whether he should have made preemptive apologies to the two of them, Malcolm led Chiara and Bae to the second floor conference room, where Hubert was hopefully just entertaining Ray with small talk.
Bless his heart, Hubert was talking about budget shortfalls until Malcolm shooed him to deal with Adila.
“So, you’re here on a surprise visit, Malcolm said?” asked Chiara.
Ray sat up, crossing a leg over his knee. “As Malcolm might have mentioned,” he said, “I run a large crisis management firm.”
Literally never.
“I may have received a tip from an anonymous equine,” said Ray, “that you’re a couple steps away from a PR catastrophe.”
“Excuse me?” said Chiara.
“I beg your biggest pardon,” said Bae.
Malcolm could barely register the offense. “You showed up here for that?” he said as lightly as he could. He could barely bear it. “You couldn’t, I don’t know, IM?” From the guy who quite literally phoned it in when Annabeth was in Tartarus?
“New York’s only hours away,” said Ray. “I’m still based in Massachusetts. By the way, I saw that two of you studied around Boston.”
Dear gods.
“Yeah, it was so funny,” Chiara said, her hand going to Bae’s shoulder. “We actually met during our last year, hunting down a hydra in Davis Square. There were so many monsters in Somerville, it was ridiculous.”
Malcolm had heard the hydra story enough times to be able to recite the entire tale himself.
Ray didn’t ask. He just nodded. “I don’t think I ever went to Davis Square. I was in Cambridge.”
So was Bae, Malcolm thought. Except no one would ever catch him lording it over anyone.
“Oh really? Where?” said Malcolm with every ounce of sarcasm. It was like popping a cyst to let out the pus. Where were you, he died to say, when your sister was in the deepest depths of hell?
Ray’s attention flicked to him. “Ah, the inferiority complex of little brothers,” he said with a smile.
The most embarrassing part, Malcolm thought, was that he knew Ray was hardly even talking about being siblings.
“You really could’ve gone to the Boston area with all of us,” Ray said, grinning wide. “You’ve always had it in you, and you would’ve done great if you had enough faith in yourself to try and weren’t so insistent on living the high life in New York City.”
Malcolm let all of Ray’s words roll off him, wishing at the same time he had apologized in advance to the two people he was really starting to call a few of his closest friends—and hoping they weren’t judging the entire Athena cabin.
“Or Chicago, yeah,” Malcolm said.
Ray cocked his head in confusion. “Your dad’s or your pop’s?”
Do you seriously not know? What if it had been neither?
“My pop’s,” Malcolm said
Worse than Galene, Ray couldn’t even refrain from bugging his eyes and wrinkling his nose. “Now there’s a plot twist!”
Malcolm could hear his unspoken words: From starry-eyed idealism... to betrayals of human rights and democracy... Ray wasn’t the first to shade his school, nor would he be the last. Malcolm just had to contend with that.
“Well, you seem happy enough. I’m glad,” said Ray.
On Malcolm’s right, Chiara glanced at him with a look that screamed, Is he for real?
To her right, Bae looked like he was mortified himself—maybe even more than Malcolm felt. Cambridge things, Malcolm supposed.
“Yeah, I don’t know if a joyride was his goal,” Bae said. “It’s literally called ‘where fun goes to die’. Isn’t that why U of C says... what is it? ‘If I wanted an A, I’d go to Harvard’? How many As did they give you, man?” he asked Ray with a disarming smile. Then to Chiara, Bae said none too softly. “I cross-registered when I wanted a lighter course load. They were my easiest courses.”
All the while, she seemed comically invested in the stark white wall and the plain wooden floor and the cushion of her seat.
“Ray, shall we get the show on the road and see what you have to offer us?” said Bae.
Malcolm was still trying not to burst into a snicker. He’d forgotten how snide Bae could be behind closed doors.
Even then, Ray didn’t crack. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Chiron said it was critical, so I came here as soon as I could to help. So, why don’t we start by establishing a baseline?” Without pause, he reached for his tablet, already scribbling down notes. “Let’s say this is one of your town halls. A journalist says, ‘There’s talk that you’re designing policies using research—your own research—that values lives in dollars. What’s the going rate for the life of a demigod these days? And what is it for different gods and satyrs and nymphs? And what about mine?’”
“Seriously?” said Malcolm.
Bae wore a smile. “Nobody reads those papers.”
“Because we also don’t publish them. It’s internal analysis,” said Chiara.
Ray’s eyes flitted across all three of them. “Are you locking in those answers?”
“We’re talking to you,” said Chiara.
The sigh Ray let out appeared almost sympathetic to Malcolm. “I can see it from afar,” Ray said. “Sooner or later, it will come out. I’m not even here, but I can guess how you’d do things.” He was looking at Malcolm. “And with you two having prominent roles,” he said to Chiara and Bae, “and the statistics department having star status somehow, I just know. Harpocrates—I’m assuming you’re using his services—can hide your confidential documents, but he can’t hide a loose-lipped employee. And you would be wise to know that it’s a problem.”
That people would know or that someone would tattletale or that we’re doing it? Malcolm thought.
Chiara sat a little straighter. “Can you repeat the question?”
Ray recited it word for word.
“I appreciate you asking this question,” Chiara said with a nod and a warm smile. “So, I think what you’re referring to is the analysis we do when we decide things like whether to implement a program, or what have you, that can save lives. And this method really isn’t ever about any specific, identifiable individual, and we definitely don’t value different people’s lives differently. What we ac—”
As Ray mimicked the sound of a buzzer, Chiara fell silent.
Malcolm whipped his head around. “What was that for?” he said, filled to the brim of his skull with shame. In his periphery, Chiara still had her mouth open. “Did it sound like Chiara was done?”
“Did that sound like a good answer to you?” said Ray.
“Well, how can anyone tell?” said Bae. “We couldn’t exactly hear much of it, could we?”
“You know what she’s getting at,” said Ray. “They wouldn’t get it.”
“I don’t think you give people enough credit,” said Bae. “A large share of residents know statistics. We make everyone learn it.”
“And you’re going to rely on them retaining those skills perfectly forever,” said Ray mockingly. “The point is, she already sounds cold and insensitive, and people motivated to loathe you are impatient and they want their ‘gotcha’ moment. And…” He threw a hand up and minutely shook his head in disappointment. “You completely fell for that. The key isn’t to nitpick the small technicalities straight off the bat; it’s to address the larger issue head-on. ‘You put a price on life?’ ‘Oh, not on an individual’s life, but in general, yes. Yes, we do.’ Do you not hear it? It’s very simple. Focus on easing tensions, not proving you’re technically correct. That’s how you end up in a disaster: when you don’t think first.”
“You don’t have to be rude to Chiara,” Malcolm seethed. “Who has a name. And isn’t cold or insensitive.”
This time, it was like Ray had to close his eyes for a breath when he sighed in disappointment. “And you fell for that, too,” he told Malcolm. He checked off two things on his tablet. “How are you going to react when a constituent is rude or belligerent? Are you going to yell back?”
Malcolm’s jaw clenched. “Dude. Chill.”
For a long moment, Ray did nothing more than study his younger brother. “It’s still there,” he noted quietly.
No one in years—not even Chiron, not even Athena—had brought up Malcolm’s fatal flaw. At least not to his face. Because it was irrelevant. Because when his recent nightmares reminded him he had conquered it all too well, when colleagues like Pravir got so annoyed he was sitting on decisions for too long, when total strangers like Galene and Rhode could glean oh so quickly that he was neurotically thoughtful, who in Hades could say today that he barreled into dangers without regard for consequences?
“Do you think this is a ‘chilling’ matter?” said Ray.
“See, the thing is,” Bae said, “accuracy takes nuance. Chiara was getting there before you interrupted her.”
Ray didn’t apologize, but he did offer them another shot, promising not to interrupt this time. “But again,” he said, “I have only two days here. I’m here because Chiron personally called me. You don’t have to like me. That’s not my job. I’m trying to drill this into you in the two days I’m here because Chiron said you needed help.”
Did he remember you were always an asshole? Malcolm thought.
“I’m making time on two weekdays,” Ray said.
We didn’t ask you to be here.
“For free,” Ray added.
Malcolm kept his mouth shut.
Ray repeated the question.
Malcolm and Bae looked at Chiara. “Do you wanna go?” Malcolm asked.
“Uh, no, your turn,” she said, her pitch a little too high, eyes darting away from him.
Malcolm cleared his throat and took a moment. “It’s a thoughtful question and one certainly worth considering. What we—” Ease tensions, he reminded himself. “I’m sure we can all agree that New Athens should save and lengthen as many lives as we can with the limited budget we have. That’s our ultimate goal. What we have to understand is that, no matter what—whether we choose to engage in those thought experiments or not—these choices are being made regardless. They’re unavoidable.”
Malcolm could already see Ray biting back an objection. He doubled down. “Every choice you make,” Malcolm said, “what you as the public do, what you don’t do; what we as department leads and city councilors do, what we don’t do—is a tradeoff, and every choice affects other living things. It’s from those choices that we can infer some rough estimate of how much you value other things.
“Like, how much are you willing to pay in taxes? There’s a range, right? You won’t pay nothing, but you want your own money to spare so you can, I don’t know, buy a video game console, right? Or an air fryer. Or a high-powered blender. Let’s say a blender. They’re more useful. It’s not just you, of course. It’s tens of thousands of other people here making those choices, too.”
Ray was shaking his head in disbelief.
Malcolm kept talking. “But if, say, ten thousand people—instead of buying a blender, assuming they all live alone—put that amount in a fund or a city program for one person’s life-saving treatment, that implies that they value that person’s life at a cost of ten thousand blenders.”
Ray’s eyes shut in what looked like pain.
Malcolm rolled with it. Ray thought he was so fatally flawed to this day? Well, then he’d show it.
“You are all making those choices,” he said. “Everyone is. When you’re smoking; when you’re drinking; when you’re hitting the speed limit; when you’re taking your friends on a cross-country road trip because it’s cheaper to go by car instead of flying on a plane, which is more expensive but safer. Every. Decision. Counts.
“And it is those decisions that tell us some estimate of how much some actor—like the overall public—is willing to spend to save a potential life. Or these decisions tell us how much the public is unwilling to avoid some little inconveniences to the point that they sacrifice a potential life.”
Ray so clearly wanted to blow a fuse. But so did Malcolm.
“And it sounds cold-blooded,” he said, “because, of course, it is. But Chiara, Bae, and I don’t have the luxury of grandstanding on morality like that, because this is our job. We can’t afford to opt out of those calculations, because we want to make sure we’re saving as many lives as we can. Because to us, what’s truly cold-blooded and even selfish is not bothering to confront a disturbing-sounding reality just because it’s uncomfortable.”
Malcolm ended there, taking a deep breath.
“Are you done?” said Ray in complete nonchalance, like he gave no care to a thing Malcolm had just said.
Malcolm suppressed his glare. He wasn’t going to give Ray that satisfaction. “Yeah.”
“Do you feel better saying that?” Ray said with a nod.
“I feel better hearing it,” said Bae.
Chiara shrugged and nodded.
“Malcolm?” Ray said.
“Sure,” he lied.
Ray actually smiled for a moment. “You three just feed off each other, don’t you?”
Malcolm didn’t argue. It wasn’t Ray’s or anyone’s concern how much they could still squabble behind everyone’s backs.
“That’s adorable,” said Ray. He looked at them as if they were fledgling birds. “I can see why Chiron singled you three out. But you know, it would work if you could actually help each other. Unless you’re not interested in doing that.”
“The way we do things around here is to keep being transparent,” Bae said defensively. “If they don’t understand something, we’ll explain it. We don’t treat people like they’re dumb. Nobody likes a politician who treats you like you’re a five-year-old.”
Ray looked all the more smug. “That is... quite childishly naive. I think you forget that this little world you’re building,” he said, “is set in real life. People say they want transparency. They may even say they want nuance and complexity, though I doubt it. But you have to account for and not grossly underestimate just how stupid those people are.”
Bae narrowed his eyes. “That’s not cool. And that’s not fair to the people here.”
“Fair? Oh, I thought we were talking about the truth,” said Ray.
“That’s what Malcolm was doing,” Chiara muttered. “Not that we would’ve actually worded it quite like that.”
Ray sighed as the trio fell silent.
In the back of his mind, Malcolm already found the echoes—pre-echoes?—of Ray’s taunt. I may not play fair, Rhode had said to him once, but I play honestly. Even Pravir had confronted him in similar ways. So, why was it that handling Rhode and Pravir never turned Malcolm all hot-headed with rage the way he did for his own brother? Why wouldn’t he just scoop up all this fury from within and say begone with it? Why was it so easy to quiet his ego and listen to—even compliment—Rhode and Pravir and not his own brother? Yet if he had so easily forgotten Rhode’s advice or Pravir’s, had he ever really listened in the first place?
“When you play Capture the Flag,” said Ray, “what can happen if you grossly overestimate your opponent?”
You mean all those times you weren’t here so you could knock out all the steps in your ten-year plan to get your Fulbright? Malcolm griped—and tried and tried and tried to just let it go.
It was Chiara who pulled him out of his boiling frustrations.
“You can assume the wrong strategy,” she said slowly.
Right. Simple, Malcolm thought. No different to when he, Annabeth, and Percy had very rightly decided that game just some weeks ago not to butt in sooner, oh so conveniently letting Ares and Hermes drive each other out.
“You want to teach your constituents,” said Ray. “Guess what. Learning is hard, and in the real world, people don’t even want to learn. Do you get that? They are not like you.”
Even as he understood it, Malcolm objected, hearing his sentiments shared by Chiara: “That’s why we teach them statistics and media literacy. We got Chiron to require them for camp training.”
“That’s good,” said Ray. “And I’m sure you’re friends with enough of them, so they can trust you. That’s good. But thousands of other people are going to move in. Face the truth. Less than three in ten people actually trust experts in your profession.” He looked squarely at Malcolm as he said it. “And four to five in every ten do not. It doesn’t help if more people realize the prominent role your fellow alumni had in shaping capitalist policies that propped up authoritarian regimes and atrocities like Operation Condor.”
“It’s not even—” Malcolm burst out, cutting himself off at once.
But Ray was already shaking his head, scoffing at Malcolm in disappointment.
This time, Malcolm’s itching crabbiness turned inward.
“You have it easy now. This is a summer camp,” Ray said with a little dance. “Wait ‘til godly or corporate—or hell, godly corporate—interests start buying your journalists and really start misrepresenting everything you stand for. You’ll be eaten alive. That’s just embarrassing.”
Despite the lashings, Malcolm was half tempted to offer him a job anyway. Maybe to get their public broadcasting up and running, since all that was going so slowly. But it was a terrible idea to let Ray get involved. Giving a job to a highly qualified brother who didn’t even feel remotely like family? What would the public understand?
With another sigh, Ray calmed. “You need to work on answering with soundbites.”
Malcolm fought his reflexes to scoff and roll his eyes. Bae couldn’t help it.
“See, we can talk about the truth,” Ray said. “You can tell me to my face you’d value my life at five to ten million dollars—That is how you people usually calculate it, isn’t it?—and I quite hate that, but I get it. But it’s too much for most of the public to understand. I’m sure you’re hiding other controversial things they don’t even know they should ask, and that those decisions are for their benefit. I believe that. But when—not if—when these decisions leak, you need to know how to avoid saying things that make you sound insensitive.”
Malcolm couldn’t believe Ray had the nerve to even look at Chiara as he said that.
“You have to think of every sentence. You’ll be clipped out of context,” Ray said. “I could show you a collection of all of those moments from your past town halls. I figure I didn’t need to. I assumed I could speed-run this whole thing with you three—this is definitely not how I do things with other clients—because I figured you would get it like that.” He snapped his fingers.
The second worst part about enduring Ray’s company was how he acted like he cared when Malcolm just knew Ray was getting high off the satisfaction of being proven right. But the worst thing of all was how much easier it would’ve been to stay mad at Ray for underestimating him—except Ray never gave him the opportunity.
“You said so yourself,” Ray said. “You can’t trust the public. So, if you slip up, they’re going to keep hitting you with it and never stop. You wanna take that chance? Don’t take my advice. Take yours. Every little decision counts, right?” He looked at Malcolm.
“Another important point,” Ray went on, “you also can’t make people feel guilty. People are simpletons. They can’t handle it. You need them to actually like you. Like, without them having to try. Because they won’t.”
Malcolm also remembered Rhode telling him the same thing. Nana had always said a hard head made a soft ass. He had to wonder: was he even cut out for this line of work? Did someone—did even Rhode—have to make him feel like shit for him to take them seriously? Surely, he would have gotten it, right?
“People have to have positive feelings towards you,” said Ray. “Not neutral. Positive. And in all of the town halls I watched—and I did see all of them—none of you are putting in enough of an effort. You’re not leveraging even the simplest media engagement. Planting stories, engineering narratives is one thing. But where are the photo shoots? The appearances at community events? I can count them on my fingers. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s counterproductive. Play the game. Do your job. What do you think—honestly, what do you think is going to happen when you all fall out of their favor? Do you even track your approval ratings?”
“Look, I get it,” Chiara said, “but to some extent, if we had to work towards the highest approval ratings instead of achieving the most public good—with sufficient approval, of course—we wouldn’t be doing our actual jobs well.”
“You think they voted for you for not trusting them?” Ray said incredulously.
“I mean...” Bae muttered.
“Yeah, sure, these people actually voted for experts,” said Ray. ”But they get to decide when you’re the experts and when you’re their out-of-touch enemies. You want to keep doing your jobs, right?”
When Ray dialed back his glare, Malcolm mirrored him. Malcolm knew Athena wouldn’t be pleased with him right now. Athena would’ve sided with Ray.
Holding his figurative nose, Malcolm asked, “Okay, how would you suggest we answer that question?”
Ray’s smile was the most disgustingly smug bite of humble pie.
Notes:
🏛️🚧🏛️
There’s foreshadowing in this chapter, but the emoji hint isn’t the most fun, despite my fun crafting the plot, so let me also represent the econ/stats trio by their adorable school mascot emoji: 🦁🐦🔥 + 🐘 + 🦫. I couldn’t figure out how to say it in the fic, but I made Chiara an alumna of Tufts—20 minutes away from Bae. As I've mentioned before, I made Malcolm go to Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Also, I’m not exactly sorry, but I did base Ray’s and Bae’s and even Malcolm’s attitudes on a handful of people I’ve met lol — and two of them were my professors lol.
I'm behind on my biblio (sorry to myself), but I'll update that real soon.
HMU on tumblr, where you'll find some notes/commentary on the three scenes in this chapter.
I hope I managed to carry out what I tried to do in this chapter, but I also welcome feedback on what may be improved on to make these scenes realistic while entertaining.
Chapter 15: In which Malcolm tests a dangerous theory
Notes:
May I just say... I love mess!
Also, thank you (yes, YOU!) for making the adventure that is this fic and the stress that is my life less lonely and more fun for me.
*figurative hugs to willing parties who might need comfort in these trying times*
No specific warnings will be given in this novel (...not even for the insipidity that is statistics).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Over three days—and through considerable bouts he was wasting his time even entertaining such uselessness—Malcolm was forced to question the inclinations of his very mind. But the more he questioned himself, the more he realized he no longer had much faith, really, that the public, that journalists, that his own colleagues, could understand him. Ray’s fault, of course.
Malcolm was ruminating over those quandaries even now, sitting across from Rhode at a random City Hall conference room he’d insisted on. The glass walls surrounding the entire room were perhaps overkill, but seriously, he’d needed to get them out of his office.
Rhode hadn’t questioned him why, which had been great, because it already wasn’t fair that her voluminous mane of Greek curls had her looking extra pretty. And that blue floral number of hers was really bringing out her eyes. She had on five or so stacks of at least a dozen rings that kept reflecting light into his face. And for some reason—one Malcolm hadn’t quite known how to ask for—Rhode had been wearing a more playful smile today. Whatever the cause, it was clear her shoulders had relaxed by a considerable number of newtons—and even more so once he’d confirmed that Harpocrates had also blessed the conference room.
And, yes, Malcolm had noticed all that about her; he was perceptive after all. Yet, even if Rhode were to have said something outlandishly inappropriate to make fun of him, he was too far away right now to pay enough attention.
Here she was, gathering her hair to one side, baring the inked shark on her shoulder, writing notes on sheets of paper he had offered, telling him new gossip she made him promise to keep secret, snacking on the dates and revani she’d brought and the apples and pears he’d sliced. And here he was, stewing with thoughts of his smarmy brother.
“How would I suggest you answer that question?”
Malcolm could still hear the echoes of Ray’s greedy eagerness. His ridiculously dramatic pause.
“Do you realize the assumptions you’re making there?” Ray had said with his typical scoff. “How would I suggest you answer that? How does this sound? ‘Valuing lives in dollar amounts is something some academics and companies do, but we thought better of it and abandoned the whole approach, because we recognize people as sentient, soulful beings with their own intrinsic worth.’”
Two days ago, Malcolm had needed to shut his eyes so as not to roll them out of his skull. Now, he was mindful enough to rein in a scoff that surely would’ve just confused Rhode.
But Ray had given enough valuable pointers to, in his words “cover up slime with sparkles—if you really insist on keeping the slime.” Namely:
One: Get a real PR team. Except don’t call it PR, Ray had said. And also: Pre-prepare speaking points while making key decisions and maybe actually consider the repercussions of having controversies splashed on the front page of local publications.
With what budget, Malcolm had thought, were they going to get specialized PR teams?
And was he seriously lacking the level of “compunction” that Galene believed he had?
The second thing Ray had prescribed was methods to counter falsities and unideal narratives, complete with practice cases for Malcolm, Chiara, and Bae on topics like climate change denialism or Olympian war conspiracies. Don’t refute statements, Ray had said. Instead, find common goals and present policy decisions as opportunities worth achieving.
Except how different was that, really, from what City Council had been doing already? Malcolm wondered. Now he wished he’d asked Ray to clarify more. Did Ray want him to pick better fights? New Athens didn’t even have a climate change denialism problem. It was all so confusing.
Third, Ray had advised, it was imperative that City Council reformat the town halls: “If you can’t shorten it or do it less, say that there are too many journalists and residents who haven’t had their turn to ask questions because some people are dominating the time. That’ll limit follow-ups. And then months after that, while you expand some unrelated youth engagement efforts—what a perfect excuse—dedicate one question in each town hall to youth attendees. That’s bound to limit any real grilling.”
Malcolm felt more grossed out by those recommendations than any of his past blatant coverups.
So how was it, he asked himself, that he was now practicing Ray’s advice on Rhode?
When Rhode mentioned she’d be busy Friday, catching a ballet on Olympus with some twenty cousins and Annabeth, Drew, and Valentina, Malcolm kept his trap shut. He didn’t tell Rhode that Drew knew about the two of them. Or that Drew had come on to him. Or that Drew had offered—no, declared without his asking—that she’d pull strings and keep the outhouse thing hush-hush.
On one hand, Rhode could’ve hated having sexual details passed around like candy as much as Drew did, who treated this sort of thing as a personal vendetta. On the other hand, maybe what Rhode would loathe more was Drew using charmspeak on her behalf. (Malcolm, for one, appreciated it. Fair was fair.)
Maybe Rhode would have worried if Drew was sucking up to her. Or angling for political favors from him. Malcolm could almost picture Rhode saying, You did tell her to cut it out, didn’t you?
What was clear, however, was none of that was going to trouble her if he left her clueless.
That Ray’s tips clearly worked just irritated Malcolm even more.
But there was something about Rhode (or was it still about Ray?) that made him want to test—or outright challenge—his brother’s advice. And so, Malcolm tried.
When Rhode defended Poseidon’s history of threatening minor gods over the pettiest things... Well, Malcolm decided in the end not to argue, lest he and Rhode begin another needless squabble.
Fair point, Ray.
When Rhode gushed about how her cousin Hippothoe had gotten Atlantian companies to stop asking about job candidates’ criminal histories, Malcolm let himself chime in. Counterintuitive as it sounded, he told her, those companies might actually call back fewer people from marginalized groups. Why? Well, with less information, they could statistically discriminate against groups without even realizing it. So maybe, he added, there were better ways to support the formerly incarcerated.
Rhode hadn’t seemed to mind his input. She even noted it down. Would Ray have expected that, hmm?
Then again, Ray might have agreed anyway.
Malcolm decided he would let it go, especially when he had Rhode here with him, dishing more of her tea.
“He’s not nearly like Alastor—not nearly within his range—but it’ll be tricky to find any table for Agon,” Rhode was saying. “Agon is... Well, he’s a popular actor. People think he’s attractive—not me—so some are just obsessed with him, but he’s the type that keeps perpetuating this theory that Olympus somehow instigated the Second Titan War to deliberately impoverish its people.”
“How shitty of him,” said Malcolm, fully taking in the sight of Rhode once more:
The poofy hair he’d seen her with once already. The dress he now realized was an exact match with another he’d seen, just in a different floral pattern. The peek of the tattoo he’d laid his lips on, inches from a long shell pendant necklace he’d spotted in her closet. It had been next to those pearls she’d worn that morning.
“It’s not just that, even,” Rhode said. “Earlier this year, there was this party Uncle Zeus threw on Olympus. There was this awfully cringe moment—oh, Fates, I could hardly watch it. Hebe had just rejected Agon, and he had the nerve to complain to other men, ‘Ohhh, it’s so hard to date anyone these days. People are so sensitive now!’”
“Yikes.”
“Ugh, I know. And he just keeps at it. ‘Enough with Zeus’s agenda! Artemis has corrupted him! The gender wage gap isn’t real! Olympian women aren’t paid 72% men are paid for the same work! Artemis is lying, and you sheep are falling for it like the Americans are!’”
It was Malcolm’s turn to cringe.
“And then, more recently,” said Rhode, “he’s very: ‘Demeter’s soy ploy—’”
Ray’s voice reverberated in Malcolm’s head: ‘People are stupid. They are not like you.’
Malcolm blocked the noise, shrugged off his fear, and looked Rhode squarely in the eye, blurting, “Wait, you know that’s not true, right? That figure for Olympus? Even the slightly less bad one for the US. You know that’s not true, right?”
“Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m saying,” Rhode said. “He’s so insistent that Artemis is lying, that Demeter’s lying—”
“No, it’s Artemis,” Malcolm said, “or also her—with the false stats. They’re not true.”
In a single, belabored breath, his chest went still—then his heart jolted hard. His nerves flashed warnings, his brain already spiraling into overdrive. This was when Athena’s bracelet would have gripped his wrist, urging him to run away.
And for a half-second, he thought about shutting up. About backtracking. He could’ve taken Ray’s advice. It would’ve been perfect now. Rhode hadn’t processed it yet—must not have, because she wasn’t yelling at him.
Unless...
Looking right at her, Malcolm needed no other reminder to barrel on: “The whole 72-lepta-to-the-drachma stat for equal work in Olympus, or the 77 or 78 number in America...”
He saw it almost in slow motion. Rhode’s mouth had fallen agape.
But at this point, he had to know. And if he were wrong...
So be it. He deserved to know.
Malcolm kept his voice steady. “It’s legitimately not what Artemis says—”
“Excuse me?” Rhode’s jaw dropped further, eyes ablaze as she sputtered at once, “And I fucked you? I really—seriously, I really— expected better—”
And so would have Ray.
But, so had Malcolm, honestly.
“Wow!” said Rhode. “What— I mean, really—”
Yeah. That’s right. Yell first, ask questions later.
“You’re saying—” Malcolm said, nearly flinching over Rhode’s new unintelligible sounds of protest. “You’re quoting some statistic claiming that women in Olympus are paid 72 lepta for every drachma men earn for doing the same work. It’s horribly misleading to say it like that. It distorts the truth.”
But as Malcolm had talked, the anxious fear kept crawling into his veins, spinning sticky, spindly webs that caught on his breath, whispering that he’d been wrong. Not about his research but about what he believed about her.
If his assumptions were wrong, maybe it would’ve been his own fault for such misjudgment.
Malcolm recalled Pravir telling him off just yesterday for how he’d tried talking to Robert. He remembered, for the nth time, Ray scolding him like a child.
But something about Rhode made him refuse to hold back. Perhaps it had partially to do with their parents’ rivalry. Maybe a tiny part of him wanted to lash out at her for besting him so many times.
This should’ve had nothing to do with that. None of that was worth running off the edge of a cliff. He still could’ve backed down.
‘You’ll be clipped out of context,’ came Ray’s voice.
Malcolm threw him out of his mind and held tight to his faith.
“No,” he said, straight to Rhode’s ireful face, “it’s legitimately untrue. And it f— It pisses me off so much, when that supposed statistic, or the American one, is thrown around.”
Ask me why, he thought, leaning towards her.
Rhode scoffed. “Of course, a man would want to think that.” Her gaze searched his face before she sighed, irises turning bluer as her brows eased, even as her shoulders tensed. “And I do understand the appeal.” With just a blink, her eyes flashed a lighter green. “Well, forgive me for believing you were a different type of man,” she said through clenched teeth.
It had taken all of Malcolm not to interrupt her three different times. For her part, Rhode looked too shocked to move.
‘I know you,’ she’d promised, just two days ago.
It felt like a lie.
Malcolm breathed through the jumpy muddle in the pit of his gut. “I’m not saying this as a man,” he said, certainly trying not to take this as an attack as a man. “I’m saying this from the perspective of an economist—with facts. Detailed facts.”
“Oh,” Rhode said, putting on a voice,”and you have an alternative set of facts, I presume, that show that there is no gap? As if women like Lilly Ledbetter didn’t get discriminated against by their employers.”
“I never—”
“As if there had been no need for your Congress to pass those fair pay acts recently, or for Zeus to insist on the same.”
“That really—”
“As if it’s all just some big misunderstanding,” Rhode said, quicker, louder, madder, “that really doesn’t deserve all this attention.”
It was at this point Malcolm realized that Rhode wasn’t still sitting here across from him, still within his five-feet radius, so he could entertain her with his spiel. She was here because she felt she had to—for her entire sex.
Malcolm thought about this once more. What the fuck was he doing?
But, once more, Rhode’s betrayal left him on edge.
You’re pulling those assumptions out of your ass, he died to say.
And, yeah, he could see clear as day that Rhode was disappointed in him. Livid, even. But that was the thing. Why in Hades would he have shut up? This was Rhode.
“Oh, did I say that?” he said with a touch of coldness and a colossal dump of innocence.
Malcolm saw Rhode’s breath rise in her chest—oh, no he didn’t. He wasn’t looking there. He was meeting Rhode straight in the eye as she hissed, “Look, whatever’s happened, I am not going to stay here and debate trivialities when you’re running with this idea that Artemis is a liar.”
“Did I say that?” he said.
For a moment, Malcolm saw it. Rhode wanted to believe him—or herself. She was still sitting here, when the door was that way, opening and closing her mouth, finally saying, “Okay. You agreed with someone who said that.”
“I said Artemis isn’t telling the truth,” he corrected. “I didn’t say she was lying.”
Rhode stared at him, slack-jawed like he was the weirdest weirdo to have ever disgraced her presence. “I don’t have time for this,” she muttered.
“I know a pay gap exists,” said Malcolm, rushing more the farther back she rolled her chair. “I know that. But we can’t just explain it all—as so many people seem to do—with a single number, least of all the 72-lepta one for Olympus, or the 77 or 78 one for America. I think it’s 77.5.”
Just as she looked like she was working it out, Rhode grew farther—literally, too. She was standing now, towering over him, and shooting him a dirty look. “Don’t assume I don’t understand that it’s a multifaceted problem warranting more than a single statistic.”
“Why would I?” Malcolm got a head start before she could argue more. “Look, we both agree—I assume we’d agree—that in an ideal world, men and women should earn the same amount of money for doing the same work, right?”
It really wasn’t Ray’s pointer that had gotten him to start there. But he did note the glints of confusion amid Rhode’s anger.
“That’s what I’m saying,” she said, shifting on her feet. “That’s what researchers have found, and I still can’t believe I have to explain this to you!”
“Yeah, okay, then explain it to me,” he pressed casually, leaning on the table. “Where do those numbers come from? Whether the 72 number for Olympus or the 77.5 one for the US. Whichever.”
Malcolm didn’t know for how long his leg had been bouncing but forced it still, planting his feet flat on the ground. He reached beyond Rhode’s many gel pens, grabbing his own pencil instead, and spun it in his hands as he forced breaths in the two second silence that had split the table between them like an ever-growing chasm.
Rhode may have looked disgusted, frankly, but she hadn’t left. She stood stiffly behind her chair, knuckles whitening on its back, making no move to pick up the blazer she’d laid on the neighboring chair.
That was all Malcolm needed right now.
He knew it wasn’t fair to push her on this. Rhode wasn’t exactly Olympian, nor was she American. But Rhode being Rhode...
“It’s—” she started.
Faster than Malcolm could blink, her fury quickly dissipated from her face, leaving only annoyance. Just as he had predicted.
“It’s an average comparison,” Rhode began impatiently, “calculated very thoroughly by the respective Olympian and American statistics departments, of the earnings of men and women, which tells us how differently they get compensated for similar work.”
Malcolm had so very nearly butt in—like, twice. He’d twirled his pencil faster and faster to stop himself. But he waited, only to notice that Rhode was, too. Her eyes drifted to his fiddling, until he finally set the pencil down and started drawing abstract shapes on his knees instead, out of sight.
“It’s a comparison,” he said, “of the median year-round earnings of men and women who work full-time. So, first of all,” Malcolm went on, over Rhode’s attempts to interrupt him, “it’s not hourly, contrary to how many people talk about it. That makes the 72 and 77.5 numbers more of a salary gap—among people who work full time—not a wage gap—”
“Why does it matter if we call it a salary or a wage?” said Rhode. “We can be as finicky as we like, but scores of women still don’t earn nearly the same amount for the same work, just as the figure demonstrates.”
“The reason it matters,” said Malcolm, in disbelief that Rhode still didn’t frickin’ realize this—and wow, he’d really underestimated her in a whole other way—“is because there’s another important variable: time. If we, for example, look at data from the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that even among just full-time workers, whose earnings make up the ‘wage gap’ stats, men work more hours than women do. It’s not even just the number of hours that increases the pay gap; overtime hours are obviously worth more.”
Rhode again looked like she was going to interrupt, but Malcolm absolutely refused to stop.
“So, in fields like law and finance and medicine, for example, where it’s standard to work overtime, men will naturally get paid a lot more. But if—”
“There is an obvious reason—”
“—women in law or finance or medicine worked as many hours as men do, the so-called ‘wage gap’ would—”
“‘So-called’?”
“—look smaller. Because it is smaller. Raising—”
“Like I was trying to say—”
“—women’s wages by 22 or 28 cents per dollar—like all those misquoted stats people use would imply we should do—wouldn’t lead to equal pay for equal work.”
With a huff, Rhode sat down again, “All right, sure,” she said, rolling herself back to the conference table until she bumped into his foot.
Malcolm drew back his legs as chagrin filled Rhode’s eyes for a brief moment.
She reset herself with a blink, sitting with perfect posture, folding her hands as if—Malcolm imagined anyway—leading a work meeting. “But did you consider why women work less?” she said.
The hairs on his arms raised as a glimmer of a blade flashed into his eyes.
Except there was no knife. It was Rhode’s dozen rings. He made out a rose on her right ring finger and a snake on her left index.
“Hi, my eyes are up here,” she just as well stated.
“I wasn’t— ”
They’d already been through this. How many fucking times was she going to use the same ridiculous moves to tilt the ground her way...
Was likely as many times as he let her.
Malcolm rolled his eyes.
Rhode, meanwhile, cleared her throat. “As I was saying.”
Gods, you’re infuriating.
“Who is it, I wonder,” she said with derision, “who’s almost always the designated primary caregiver to children, hm?”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said, “but it’s not just—”
“Who”—Rhode ignored him, raising her chin—“gets stuck at home and stuck, out doing groceries and what have you, stopping them from working those hours? Should that be explained away?”
“When have I denied—”
“Who is it,” she said, leaning closer, “who gets discriminated against simply because they may get pregnant?”
Her voice cut sharper, and it finally hit Malcolm’s ears—every “who is it” staring straight at him. And what did he know about any of that?
That accusation sounded too much like Ray.
Except it wasn’t like Malcolm hadn’t known— Of course she’d been through that. Dammit, he did know.
“Yes,” Malcolm said, shifting forward, eager to get it in Rhode’s head that he already got this. “And those are separate, albeit related, issues—”
“Separate?”
“Albeit related, and they obviously deserve addressing, but look—”
Rhode scoffed.
Malcolm’s chair squeaked as he rolled himself closer. “Look, we’re no longer talking about equal pay for equal work.”
“Well, when these issues are highly related—” Rhode said.
“We’re talking about the extent of women’s labor force participation,” he said, folding his own hands on the table “and sources of non-wage—non-pay—employment discrimination.”
“And that inequity and discrimination comes in many more forms than you may realize,” Rhode bit back, suddenly crisper and clearer. “Like, more women are part-time workers—”
“Exactly.”
“They’re less likely to be offered promotions—”
“Yeah.”
“—and the earnings increases that come with them—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—even being punished severely for any scrap of time they take off work, like when they have children.”
“Right,” said Malcolm, a touch gentler.
And?
He let her sit with it, as she was no doubt doing to him.
Malcolm answered the question himself, catching the swirling, seagreen storm in Rhode’s eyes that probably would’ve struck him speechless if all the points drilled into his brain didn’t simply tumble out of him on autopilot:
“And that’s not exactly about equal pay for equal work, is it? But there’s a second blaring problem with the 72-lepta-per-drachma or 77.5-cents-to-the-dollar figures. Again, all they show is the median woman who works full-time versus the median man who works full time.”
“And the averages must be so much worse,” Rhode fired back. She began collecting her pens, lining them up with deliberate precision. “Not to mention,” she said, “it clearly doesn’t consider how many more men must be employed versus women.”
Now she was straightening every scrap of her written notes—and Malcolm wanted to help, but he didn’t want her to go.
“Yeah.” He held back from launching into a handful of stats on averages. “But more than that. This isn’t, like, an average difference in the medians across jobs, or, hell, even industries.”
Rhode’s eyes narrowed as she very slowly tilted her head, her hand freezing over the pen closest to Malcolm. “So, you mean to say...” she said, “that it genuinely doesn’t compare the same—well, not even the same sector? That they’re honestly comparing every—or rather, they’re not. They’re comparing medians from a hodgepodge of jobs from every industry.... That’s their comparison?”
“Oh, there’s plenty else those stats don’t control for.”
Though Rhode had pulled back her hand, her last pen lay on the conference table, just inches from his elbow.
She flitted her eyes left and right, blinking once. “That sounds very stupid. That’s not how Atlantis measures it. At least I don’t believe so. That sounds too ridiculous a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake,” Malcolm said. “The comparison’s useful to know. It just depends on how it’s understood and quoted. And it’s pretty much always like that, so I’m not sure.”
“We do not report it like that in Atlantis,” said Rhode, voice dripping with disdain. “We had a massive task force overhaul our measurement systems over the past few decades, for essentially everything we track. We now have very comprehensive automated reports on things like that, dashboards that run monthly... I’ve seen them once or twice. It’s per sector and by experience level, role... I’ve seen them. That’s what’s averaged.”
Malcolm cocked his brows. “That’s... comprehensive for a dashboard.”
“We’re improving our transparency,” Rhode said.
“Who reviews all that?”
“There’s a team— And I just told you I’ve seen them.”
“Okay, surely you do not have the time to comb through that. If I don’t do those things here, and no one in our statistics department does either—” He was veering off course. Malcolm nudged himself back before he really began mocking Atlantis’s data strategies. “Okay. Anyway.”
“They help as a reference tool,” Rhode insisted.
Malcolm forgot where they’d been. It was hard enough to fix his gaze on the bridge of Rhode’s nose—and now, with her restless irises, shifting green into blue, Malcolm couldn’t quite hold the lock.
He reached for his reserve of tamped-down annoyance instead.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “you really don’t need to tell me gender discrimination happens. I know that. But if we’re talking pay gaps in particular, it’s like 5 to 7% or 8 to 9%—let’s say 5 to 9%—when comparing medians. It’s not 22. In the US. Neither is it 28 in Olympus. It’s more like 3 to 10% there.”
“Other sexism makes up the difference,” Rhode said sneakily, a flash of teal in her eyes.
Malcolm shrugged. “Probably. Yeah. Partly.”
Rhode inhaled. “Sometimes,” she said, “it sounds like people want to explain away these issues as anything but sexism, and they find each and every anecdote to suggest gender discrimination doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, it’s awful when they do that,” Malcolm said.
Okay, he couldn’t help his sarcasm. But if he were supposed to be ‘people’...
“What’s actually better,” he added, squashing his anger and steering toward the wiser route, “is if we carefully look at the data to drill down to the root causes and systemic issues of highly complex problems.”
“I’m only saying,” she said casually, crossing her arms, “that there is a genuine problem when people—perhaps inadvertently—place the burden of proof of sexism higher than the burden of proof that it doesn’t exist.”
Oh, how diplomatic of you.
“I’m not that kind of economist,” Malcolm retorted.
“And surely every single researcher you’ve quoted agrees with you. Surely,” Rhode said, nodding.
Malcolm let out a quiet breath. “I wouldn’t claim that,” he said with a newfound calm. “But that doesn’t invalidate everything they found. And maybe it’d surprise you to meet those researchers and discover that they’re not heartless.”
“You are aware, yes,” Rhode said, “that women sometimes don’t want to enter fields that discriminate against them or are hostile towards them?”
“Yeah—”
”And that doesn’t factor into that single, simple statistic people love to tear apart to defend their misogyny—”
That wasn’t about him, Malcolm told himself, but her comment got another rise out of him anyway.
“Then use another one,” he grumbled.
“—nor,” said Rhode, “does the fact that industries and occupations can be devalued as more women enter the field. How lovely is that?”
“Which I bet partly explains why the lowest-earning college majors and lowest-earning jobs in both the United States and Olympus are dominated by women, sure,” Malcolm said. But he couldn’t help himself, adding, “Although pay is sometimes low because of oversupply of labor in some fields, whatever the gender.”
“There are all sorts of reasons—” Rhode said. “All sorts of issues— Did you know that women also face harsher penalties for ethical violations?”
Hades, she was still at it.
“I know,” Malcolm snapped. “Gods, I know. We could go on and on and list all the different types of discrimination. Would you like to?”
Rhode looked like he’d slapped her. “Why do you sound sarcastic when you say that?”
“I’m not— It’s insulting you think I would deny that,” Malcolm shot back. “I know that pay discrimination can happen. I know that women can be systemically punished. It’s my job to know. Why wouldn’t I know? I’m not being sarcastic. I’m annoyed.”
He took another deep breath, deciding he liked Rhode more before, when she’d trusted him—when this kind of look wouldn’t suddenly flash across her face.
“Oh, you!” she said.
It was the same look she’d shared with him previously when sharing her most outrageous morsels of gossip.
“You’re annoyed.” Rhode’s eyes were as bright as her jewels.
Her reactions, he reminded himself, were not his problem.
“Maybe I have no right to be,” Malcolm said.
He didn’t quite know why he said that, because why wouldn’t he be?
“But how am I supposed to be expected by New Athenians to close the earnings gap,” he said, “if some people are undoubtedly going to pin it on the city that women here will— Now they don’t. Now, they earn considerably more than men because they’re more educated and skilled for the jobs in demand than the men here. But how much do you wanna bet that people will suddenly get pissed off at City Council when some report in the future—maybe three years from now—will state that women here suddenly earn less than men do? All because some of them’ll become mothers.”
Rhode interlaced her fingers, clenching her hands as she shot back, “Then provide affordable childcare. There are solutions!”
“Yeah, and force men to take paternity leave, right?” Malcolm said.
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“What? No, that’s already law here. But it doesn’t solve everything. Are we supposed to take it for granted that no man will use his parental leave as a working sabbatical? Are we going to assume that no guy will ‘take time off’ to hone his skills and get ahead while the mother of his child is busy recovering and child rearing?”
“You could just encourage better support for mothers!” said Rhode. “In time, people’s attitudes can change. They already have.”
“In time, hopefully,” Malcolm said. “Parenthood aside, it’s also frankly silly, I think, to assume that women on average still won’t work less and earn less, since, guess what, they aren’t as driven by money as men are.”
Rhode scoffed. “Those are stereotypes. They’re bold claims, and, as I said, times are changing.”
“Or,” said Malcolm, “were those stereotypes demonstrated to be true on average in recent empirical studies from multiple research bodies, from Chicago to the New York Fed?”
Rhode’s eyes narrowed. “But who’s to say that that’s even true everywhere and in the future?”
“Sure, let’s just hope that, shall we?”
There it was again. That look on her face. “Why are you such a defeatist about this?” she said.
More than that look on her face, what did it mean that Rhode was leaning back in her seat, farther away from him? But her shoulders didn’t look as rigid as before. Did they?
Rhode sat straight up once more. “Of all issues, how many others do you single out to rant about and make excuses for like this?”
Yeah, that was totally untrue and downright unfair. So Malcolm freely ignored her accusation.
Part of him figured he wouldn’t see Rhode anymore after today. He’d hurtled down this path after everything they’d shared—and now what?
And yet, he refused to back down.
What, like he was supposed to wrap her up in cushions and lie?
“Look,” he said, “I’m sure it’s different with you, being at the tippy top of Atlantis’s hierarchy. But life for everybody else is starkly different.”
“Oh, honestly.” Rhode glared.
“See, what do we do,” Malcolm rolled on, “when the women here decide with their skill set to work at or even start non-profits or have low-paying jobs that ‘make a difference’ and have some positive impact instead of making a career in finance or banking or other male-dominated industries that aren’t as altruistic but are higher-paying?”
“Oh, there are loads of things! You can raise the minimum wage, for one—” Rhode said with a breeze.
“Already trying that,” Malcolm said just as easily. “Research shows it doesn’t help at mid- or high-income levels. The gap’s worst at high incomes.”
“Yes, we did something.” Rhode actually took a moment to think, her fury leaving her face by the second.
It did a lot to calm him.
“For high-income,” she said, eyes whizzing like she was scrolling through her memories, “you can cap executive earnings, especially in finance. How they earn obscenely more than peers in other sectors is ridiculous, and it’s hugely because of a focus on finance that some countries are more unequal than others.”
“Okay, that’d probably help,” said Malcolm, ready to get Chiara and Rayel exploring what on that they could do in New Athens.
“Yes, but don’t do it like the EU,” said Rhode. “They did a bonus cap. So, of course,” she grimaced, “all those financial companies just offset it by increasing salaries.”
Malcolm paused for a half-second, searing her tip into his brain.
“Beyond that,” he began, “if we’re really trying to close the entire gap— It’s just not gonna happen be—”
“This again.” She gestured to his face, hands falling to slap the table.
“—cause every single one of these little godsforsaken factors widens the pay gap.”
At least she was looking at him like the other days they’d shared—exasperated, sure, but he was used to that. So long as he didn’t get that other look.
Perhaps there was still something to salvage.
“I mean, come on,” Malcolm said. “Women volunteer more than men do. It’s true year after year, across all demographic groups: Age. Education. Income. Race. Ethnicity. Region. Parental status. Every demographic group. Should we tell women not to volunteer as much because they should be earning money instead? Why even attempt to volunteer, right? They’d at least earn something if they were working part time and taking more shifts and working overtime or even doing gig work those hours. They’re not helping to solve the pay gap.”
“And men can’t be encouraged to volunteer more?” said Rhode. “Honestly, don’t be so defeatist. You’re annoyed? That’s annoying.”
As Rhode scoffed once more, Malcolm took yet a deep breath, staring her down. “You can’t possibly,” he said, “in all the years you’ve lived, think that it’s all that simple. It’s not to be annoying, and I take offense to being called defeatist. It’s that it’s just not that simple.”
“Unlike you,” said Rhode, “I have seen how much worse it was back then. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen the progress. Things have changed—and quickly. From being shut out of the schools and the workforce to becoming the majority of students in higher education and outperforming men in many fields... The world has demonstrably changed, far more dramatically than your mind can comprehend.”
“The huge progress is just regression to the mean—or, I mean, what mean we should’ve already been seeing,” Malcolm argued. “The progress has basically stopped. Since 2004, so little has budged.”
Rhode stared, unimpressed. “And how surprising is that when your legislators have hardly scratched the surface of common sense solutions?”
“Okay, fair,” he muttered. “But I’m not naively under any assumptions that our fixes will eliminate the problem in New Athens.”
“Oh, well, we’ll see in three years then,” said Rhode. “Maybe you’ll end up like Luxembourg. Or Italy. Or Belgium. Or Atlantis.”
Malcolm’s gaze dropped to the wooden detailings of the table between them, mulling over her compliment. “I didn’t just mean medians,” he said. “Or just full-time workers. Or just anyone employed. That’s hardly scratching the surface. That’s not gonna take three years. Or ten. Or twenty. Or fifty.”
Rhode huffed. “You mortal beings these days. All the information you have at your fingertips and you still cannot fathom how grateful you should be that things aren’t worse. Because it really wasn’t that long ago, even by mortal standards, that it was so much worse, and you get so angry and at least sound so defeatist that all these problems aren’t solved in a mere few years when you’ve had it better than anyone.”
Malcolm couldn’t believe those words had come from her mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said feigning calm, “that it’s fair or right to say that people can’t be frustrated by their circumstances just because it’s an improvement from before. And I, well, personally, wouldn’t suggest to any constituent of mine to just look to worse times as if she should be grateful or whatever to people or systems or whatever circumstances are harming her that she doesn’t have it worse.”
Rhode glared at him once more. “I never suggested you say that. But you mortals are just so unhopeful sometimes, and that turns you nihilistic, which—guess what—doesn’t help.”
“But it’s—” Truly, Malcolm couldn’t understand her. “I mean, it’s like whack-a-mole, isn’t it? Like, for some reason, researchers are now finding that in countries with higher scores on the gender equality index, women make up a smaller percentage of STEM graduates. I mean, what? And nearly all of those countries with equal-ish medians—Italy, like you mentioned—are countries where far fewer women are actually employed. It’s just not that simple.”
Rhode’s brows furrowed before she blew out a breath. “I never said it was. How can I live and do my work all these years if I couldn’t allow for some patience? I would lose my mind and quit with that kind of attitude.”
That was completely irrelevant to Malcolm. How wouldn’t anyone lose their mind? But how could anyone quit?
The only sound between them was the pencil he found himself tapping on the table. Malcolm cut it out.
“There are so many ideas to try,” he said. “I get that. But just because ideally they should work doesn’t mean they would in real life, and women—”
“Oh, Fates, I never knew!” said Rhode.
“And women choosing their careers out of their own free will—assuming they weren’t driven away or pressured not to end up in Wall Street or whatever—doesn’t make them victims. Let’s not pretend women don’t have agency.”
“Yes, and when they do,” she said, “by asking for promotions and raises, they’re still punished. There are reasons why women ask less than men. That can’t be boiled down to a ‘choice.’”
Malcolm thought of three ways to respond to Rhode, choosing the one Ray would’ve hated most: “Yeah, that’s not true, probably.”
Malcolm saw Rhode’s stink-eye. Saw her tame it. Saw her draw a breath. Saw her lips form the words: “In what way do you mean that?”
Ha!
He reined in the faintest flicker of a smile. But dammit, he was right. More than Ray would ever know.
“There’s a forthcoming econ paper making the rounds,” he said. “They found that women do ask as much as men. Their employers just don’t give it to them. Women’s attempts are 25% as successful.”
Rhode was quiet.
“Or, well, at least that’s true in Australia,” he clarified.
“Hmm.”
Malcolm took advantage of the quiet to jot down her suggestions in his notebook. When he caught her glancing at it, he couldn’t give enough of a shit.
Rhode sighed deeply. “So, essentially...” She stared into space, her focus an inch off his ear. “We’re focusing far too much on the wrong issues.”
She caught his eyes, unflinching.
Malcolm’s lips parted. “Well, I—”
Whatever he’d expected... None of the versions in his head came close to Rhode’s bluntness.
As her words seeped in, relief crashed over Malcolm, wave after wave.
He wasn’t wrong. Rhode was still here. This wreck he’d made of them wasn’t permanent. Because he was right. And if he was right, then Rhode really did know—
“Malcolm?” Rhode’s head cocked as she ducked faintly to meet his far-off gaze. “You were saying?”
Oh, how very her.
Malcolm took another moment to savor the call of his name.
“I mean, you pointed out some of the solutions,” he said.
“Yes, but...” Rhode sighed. “The whole ‘wage gap’ thing. All the effort to increase pay transparency and reduce differences in wages... ”
Malcolm put his twirling pencil down again (when had he started that?), gripping his armrests. “It’s not like men are never paid more than women for the same work, but...”
He could hear his grandma tell him off for not finishing his sentences.
“It’s almost a distraction,” said Rhode. Almost stern in contemplation, she stared long and hard at him.
Malcolm tried holding her gaze, refusing to say anything. At his third attempt, he found that spark in Rhode’s eyes that had so often embarrassed him—that glint she wore when he succumbed to her, or when he offered her more.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it takes decades of training for my staff not to sugarcoat things to me. I end up firing the condescending ones. I keep the brave ones.”
It was flattering in a way that she’d... keep him?
After what? Wanting to “fire” him? With what cause, exactly?
“Thank you,” said Rhode. She took a long moment to give him a once-over. “You don’t have to watch your tone with me.”
It felt like he’d passed a test of his own—except Malcolm wasn’t sure he bought it.
But with the way Rhode was still eyeing him, expecting—or daring—him to... To do what, he didn’t know.
Another challenge. Another game. He wondered how careful Galene was with her words. How many hoops had she leaped through to earn Rhode’s trust—and what did it take to keep it?
Crossing her legs, Rhode faced him full-on, wearing her business face. “Once we adjust for all these other factors, it’s—what—5 to 9%, you said?”
The motion broke his train of thought. Malcolm sat up straight, stuffing the mysteries into the overflowing drawers this woman had crammed full since he’d met her. “Here, yeah. There’s more variation with Olympus—”
“It’s tricker to estimate,” she guessed, tossing a mass of curls over her head.
He nodded.
“So, it’s controlling for? Education, occupation, time at work?” Rhode’s green pen hovered over an empty spot on her page, her rings glimmering again as she flexed her hand.
“And parental leave. The biggest kicker being time at work.”
Rhode thought some more and returned to scribble her own notes Malcolm couldn’t read. He tried not to watch her, staring at his empty laptop screen, processing nothing but the face he saw Rhode make.
“I genuinely feel like I’ve been lied to,” she said.
Malcolm allowed himself a peek, and found Rhode looking right at him.
“Yeah, well, when even the President, or a god as respected and reputable as Artemis, misquotes statistics in the name of equality...” he said, hearing his grandmother’s warning once again. “Who knows if it was mistaken speechwriters, lazy fact checking, something else...?”
“I doubt Artemis would’ve chosen to lie,” said Rhode.
Malcolm drummed his fingers on his armrest. I didn’t say that.
Rhode’s eyes still hadn’t left his face. “But fair enough,” she said.
Saying nothing in the long, dragging stillness between them, Malcolm tried parsing through those overstuffed drawers of partial unknowns and half-baked questions, finding only a comfort seeping into his bones.
His suspicions had held true.
Take that, Ray.
One mystery solved, Malcolm rummaged through a drawer to work out the next: What did that shade of dark blue mean? Did green mean angry? Yet also happy? There were flecks of green now. There was a pattern. He was getting closer, he could feel it. Maybe if he could dare to ask—
“I appreciate the detail,” said Rhode, cutting through the dead air. She paused for a moment. “That is actually why I fucked you. I mean, not the first time, but... at least three others.”
Malcolm wondered whether he should’ve let it all go as easily as Rhode made it. Was that the convenient thing to do—or the right thing to do?
“Is that supposed to be funny?” he said.
Rhode shrugged. “I didn’t know you better the first time. And I’m sorry, I’ve known Artemis longer. Not as intimately as you, though. It’s a blunder on my part.”
Malcolm bit the inside of his mouth, catching his lips before they betrayed him.
He was supposed to be mad—or actually not. It was hard to tell, and he had neither the space, nor time right now to think it over, but it seemed safe—wise—to cede a sliver of ground and spare them both their dignity.
Malcolm shifted in his chair. “I think that’s on her part, too.”
Rhode’s hand leaped to her chest. “I didn’t mean it in that way!” she said, barely feigning dumbness. “If I don’t want to see her brother, I can’t exactly have lunches with her and ask her to cite her sources, can I?”
Rolling his eyes, Malcolm shook his head, fully unable to contain a smile. “You always gotta have the last laugh, don’t you?”
Rhode’s lips pressed into a thin line, making him laugh for real. But it was useless. Her eyes sparked with her own silent laughter.
“You know, actually...” She scooped a forkful of revani, sinking into her chair as she chewed. “It’s actually good.”
“What is?” Malcolm doubted it was the sickly sweet cake she was munching on.
“All the context,” said Rhode. “The details. What it’s truly like.”
“In what way?”
“It’s not actually as bad as I thought.”
“Besides the depressing realization that obvious fixes won’t do much anything and that it’s so, so, so much harder to get women to earn as much as men, you mean?” Malcolm said.
Rhode made a face. “I meant that employers aren’t so blatantly sexist. It’s not as intentional or even careless. So, when I’m putting gender equality measures in our trade deal, I can go after the smaller issues, which people are probably more likely to support. Especially when it doesn’t put them on different sides. That’s always trickier for me. So, if we disguise it somewhat, it’ll be easier to convince certain communities to join our trade partnership. We don’t always announce when some small initiative is inherently part of a larger one.”
Well, well... Here, finally, was the proof Malcolm had sought!
It seemed so obvious now—so obvious, he shouldn’t have needed to hear it straight from Rhode herself. There really was no need to celebrate it, but, lord, it had taken weeks until she’d cracked. To him.
So maybe it was her admission that had Malcolm blowing this into a bigger deal than warranted. He was already suspecting so, considering he had to bite his lip not to put on a stupid smile. But dammit, he’d known it.
Malcolm put his brain back together. “So, probably the most effective thing a country could do”—he pinched his hand hard to fight off another grin—“um, to eliminate the pay gap—after allowing women to work, of course—is to institute paid mandatory paternity leave, like you hinted at. It has to be mandatory—”
“So women aren’t punished alone,” Rhode butt in.
“Because it would spread firms’ risk much more evenly.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a horrible way to frame it. That women have all this... risk. ”
Malcolm bobbed his head slightly. “It lessens firms’ disincentive to pick women. It’s still true, even if it’s ugly. But don’t expect it to do that much all the time—”
“You just said it helps.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t exactly work for academia, for example. Like, with academic hetero couples. Because men tend to just take their research work with them and advance their careers, while their wives are busy giving birth, recovering, nursing, and dealing with their babies. And no policy can stop the men from doing that.”
Rhode huffed, spearing a pear slice so hard, it snapped in two.
“No policy—” Malcolm said, watching Rhode pierce the pear and chew. “No easy policy can get my fathers’ male colleagues to know nearly as much about their kids—basic things even—as their female colleagues do.” He shook his head, eyes glazing over. “It’s so stupid. It’s that stupid. And, like, they’re not even ashamed. Literally, they brag about how much they do—work and whatever—away from their kids.”
“Sounds like Agon.” Rhode swiveled in her seat and reached for their seating chart notes, sliding her jar of dates closer to him. “Whom should we assign him to? I’m trying not to involve Athena in these issues. She should have a day off for Annabeth’s wedding.”
Is this another of your attempts at an olive branch?
One of potentially a handful already, Malcolm realized.
“Can you also check if Harmonia has enough on her plate to deal with him?” Rhode added. “Well, him and his family? They don’t have to be directly near her—just in her vicinity. They can kind of self-manage.”
Harmonia, fortunately, still had capacity to spare.
Rhode helped herself to a date, leaving the jar between them. “Put down Ekklisis with him, and their four children: Klydon, Metagnosis, Proskhesis, and Phanarchos. Or I can type them, if you want.”
Or perhaps this was Rhode being Rhode, without any hidden agendas.
Something told Malcolm no.
It wasn’t the first time she had offered to spell names for him. As Malcolm had learned throughout their seating-chart saga, the more minor the god, the more intricate the name. The self-righteous part of him figured he’d spell all five names right if Rhode just sounded them out one more time.
Either way, he’d also learned a thing or two from Rhode about making nice.
Done with Ekklisis and halfway into his attempt at Klydon, Malcolm handed off his laptop and ate a date.
Rhode didn’t even face him, but he was almost certain her next breath had her shoulders shed another newton of tension.
As Malcolm found, Rhode hadn’t corrected his spelling. Ha. And Ekklisis was probably the most difficult of the bunch. He deserved points for that guess.
Wait. Malcolm swiveled towards Rhode. “Hold on, the same Ekklisis who’s helping New Athens with our youth assistance programs... is with Agon?”
This had to be worse than Philophrosyne being married to Koalemos.
Rhode picked at the crumbs on her plate of revani. “The same Ekklisis, who abruptly scaled down her therapy business in Atlantis, leaving patients scrambling—all because Agon couldn’t put up with her success.” Her eyes flicked towards Malcolm. “Do watch out.”
“Fuck me.” Malcolm inhaled, fingers at his temples, as his mind whizzed with potential outcomes and preemptive solutions. Ultimately, he noted only a couple and murmured a thank you.
Rhode merely took another little bite of her cake, still hogging his laptop. Malcolm found her gaze once again on his notes.
“Well, that’s another reason, right?” he said, catching her eyes again. “If we look at the distribution of wives’ share of household income—like, how many wives earn what share—there’s a really sharp drop after 50%.”
Rhode’s eyes left him. “Meaning you find fewer who earn more? We already established that. How is that surprising?”
Any finding is valuable, Malcolm wanted to argue.
“Okay,” he said, “but the study also found that it’s also partly because couples are more likely to divorce when a woman outearns her husband, even if she does so by a little. Not in Ekklisis’s case, I guess.”
“Well, that certainly didn’t happen in my marriage,” Rhode muttered.
Malcolm watched her for a moment, casually chewing on more revani. It was like she hadn’t given a thought to what she’d said.
“Well, good for you,” he said.
His curiosity waited for deets that never came. He was also left wondering how the hell her comment made any sense when mortals had worshiped not her but Helios. And to an offensively significant degree.
“For what it’s worth, three of their children side with her,” said Rhode, unknowing or uncaring about his befuddled state. “They want her to leave. There’s just one holdout among them. Ironically, the ones who want her to leave are like him, and the one who wants them to stay together, Proskhesis, is like her.
“I keep hearing the stories. It’s worst on Klydon. He can’t take the mess. Metagnosis has almost gotten Ekklisis to walk out, but Proskhesis keeps pulling her back. And Phanarchos, who also wants out, is more pragmatic. He’s the one who probably got Agon to let—ugh—Ekklisis get involved with New Athens. But that’s also because she’d already pulled out of some contracts with Atlantis. Although I hear—get this—Agon can now do his own laundry! Wow! Klydon mentioned it to some magazine, and the media had a field day.”
Rhode had another bite of her revani and set it just closer to Malcolm than herself.
Orange sweetness wafted into his nose as he eyed the glistening cake, its generous chunks of pistachio—and the spoon Rhode had set at his three o’clock.
“How funny,” he said, “being a ‘provider’ doesn’t include providing basic needs at home.”
Rhode rolled her eyes like he’d never seen before. “Don’t be disingenuous, Malcolm. Internal housework has always been women’s duties. Hello?”
Malcolm snorted.
He considered taking a bite of Rhode’s revani, cowered, and opted for another date as Rhode began muttering about switching Calligeneia and Eosphoros’s seats with Aristaeus and Melina’s, since Eirene wouldn’t be able to take more drama.
“You know, to be fair,” said Rhode, “Ekklisis has always hated that Agon struggled to keep up with her. She keeps hinting again and again that she deserves someone who can provide for her. You’d think even that would get her to leave, but no, apparently.”
“Honestly, maybe—” Malcolm inspected Rhode’s sweet-as-hell revani, and again went in for a date. “What if there is no getting to pay parity—ever? Not just medians and averages. The rest of it. Equal labor force participation, et cetera.”
Rhode paused whatever she was doing and glowered at his screen. “We don’t need all these women dependent on their husbands.”
“That’s also why divorce rights exist,” said Malcolm, mid-bite. “Speaking of, um, I’m confused. You said Calligeneia hates Eosphoros for cheating. Are we actually putting them at the same table? Didn’t you mention a while back they’re already divorced?”
“Separated,” said Rhode. “No one is meant to acknowledge it, because what they hate more than each other is anyone prying into their business, so the invite will still have to go to the both of them. We should note that.”
‘We’ apparently meant her. She still had his laptop.
Malcolm had no idea what to do now. Frankly, he felt useless. Rhode had reclaimed all their notes, leaving him without anything to work with. He even regretted having the dates. He wasn’t even hungry, and now his teeth felt sticky. Just great.
Rhode’s fingers were still flying across his keyboard. “Divorce rights are never enough,” she said. “What bargaining power do women have in a household if they don’t earn much income? I know the pay gap is smaller amongst childless women—” She turned to Malcolm. “That’s true, right?”
“It’s also partly why lesbians earn more,” he added. “Although bi women earn less than both. Same patterns with gay and bi men.”
Not Chiara though, he thought proudly. And, come to think of it, neither him.
Rhode looked off in thought for a moment but occupied herself with his computer once more. “Well, it seems almost irresponsible and self-disrespecting and naive,” she said, finally giving him back the laptop in favor of another pear slice she stabbed with a fork, “for a woman not to earn her own income if she has the ability to do so. How would any man be more important than her own freedom and security?”
“Divorce rights,” Malcolm said again, as Rhode grumbled through her chewing.
“I can’t imagine—” she said through a bite. “I wouldn’t ever want to put myself in a position where I depend on a husband for income—especially in this day and age when we don’t even have those old restrictions. My mother would have disowned me.”
Malcolm really tried not to judge her, but damn.
“And more power to you,” he said. “You were also born Princess, so...”
A contemplative look swept across Rhode’s face.
Dear gods. And he’d thought he was blind sometimes.
Malcolm bypassed the plate of revani, reaching for the pear fork, as the Fates would have it, the same time Rhode did. At least the Fates had been kind enough not to get him to bump into her.
Malcolm slid the plate over. “Go ahead.”
She just pushed it back. “I just had one.”
Malcolm acquiesced.
They shared the last three pear slices without a word. When only one remained, Malcolm halved it, taking a piece, leaving the last. Rhode didn’t complain, but she ate it slowly enough to make him squirm.
Between her steady crunching and the overactive whirs of his laptop fan, Malcolm searched for something to say.
He helped himself to his water, thinking of a dozen ways to redirect their conversation—yet something about her warned him not to.
“In many cases...” Malcolm placed his water bottle smack dab in front of Rhode’s right hand, his heart pattering like he’d surrendered a queen. He shrugged it off, doing double duty to ignore her watchful gaze. “Legitimately, the rational thing a family would do is to maximize income first and then split it. That’s usually the husband’s. Obviously not in Ekklisis’s case—theoretically anyway—but you know.”
Rhode swallowed her last bite. “Split it.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that.”
She took two swigs of his water as if it were nothing.
The thrums in Malcolm’s chest hushed.
“I’m just saying that’s the idea,” he said, steeling his twitching lips as Rhode wiped pink stains off the rim with a tissue.
No, Malcolm hadn’t given up a queen. He’d promoted his pawn into one.
Rhode set down his bottle on her half of the desk and reclined into her seat. “The ‘rational’ idea,” she said, “doesn’t factor in access to funds. In other cultures, women are the bookkeepers of the family. That balances things. But when you have no account? Or when your partner can deny access to a joint account? Any situation like that is ripe for abuse. That’s not rational to me.”
Unless you account for likelihood of abuse and its horrific outcomes, which is what you’re assuming already with who knows what probabilities...
Malcolm silenced that voice in his head and grabbed an apple slice, letting Rhode talk.
“In America, married women weren’t guaranteed the right to open bank accounts or credit cards without their husbands’ permission—not until the ‘70s.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You realize that’s only forty years ago. And in Greece, it was just thirty—barely before you were born—after those reforms they did to align with the EU. That’s new.”
Malcolm set the fork to Rhode’s nine o’clock. “I guess the biggest moral here: Live alone if you can. Don’t have kids. And don’t marry a dude. Unless it’s to someone like Helios apparently.”
Rhode’s gaze, suddenly more vividly green, burned into his—then drifted somewhere before the papers in front of her.
Malcolm winced. “I meant— You said he wasn’t like that.”
He vowed to himself never to mention the guy again. Perhaps a gross overcorrection. Still.
“It’s silly.” Rhode was looking off into the distance now as Malcolm clung onto her every syllable, even if she was just going to tell him off. “Too many people outside Atlantis already think my mother and I are enforcing some insane, radical agenda with the choices we’ve made all these years. Though they do like that we’ve been encouraging a four-day workweek.”
Malcolm let his questions go. “Cool. Who do you think’s gonna work the extra day?”
Horror struck Rhode’s face as she whipped around in her chair, the casters groaning as her spine shot straight. “So, should we not?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have any research to recite off the cuff about potential gender disparities from four-day workweeks?” she said.
Well, now he just felt he had disappointed her again. Only this time, he was glad to.
“Let’s see.” Malcolm pulled his laptop closer, angling it so they both could see.
A quick search confirmed there hadn’t been any trials yet.
“There’s related research that could give us a theory,” he offered.
Sick of craning her neck to read his screen, Rhode wheeled herself over to his side of the conference table, nudging an empty chair aside before sidling into the spot on his left.
As their arm rests clashed together, Malcolm drew his eyes past the four feet of table space that once distanced them and beyond the glass, where he spotted Pravir, Rayel, and other colleagues heading toward the exit. It must’ve been past five now. Maybe 5:30, 6? Ten paces behind the group, Chiara and Hubert were chatting with Ainsleigh and Bae.
Malcolm shifted his weight to the right of his seat.
There was so much space in the room. Not a single one of the dozen chairs he could see was occupied. Yet Rhode had chosen to sit next to him.
Was it better people saw them arguing or as close as they were now?
He tried not to peek outside, but he’d caught Hubert’s eyes and had to look past him before the guy thought he needed something.
This was work, if anyone asked.
It was work, and yet he couldn’t process anything more than fuzzy black shapes on white light.
“Can you scroll down?” came Rhode’s voice.
In a flash, she whipped her head towards him, the faintest hint of alarm in her eyes. “Oh, no, sorry. You can take your time.”
Malcolm breathed out a laugh. “I can read, you know.”
Rhode glared. “I didn’t imply—”
“Chill. It’s cool. Here.” He slid his laptop four inches left. “You control it. I’ve read this one.”
Rhode huffed, accepting his offer anyway.
In an office—and a camp—full of dyslexics, seeing Rhode zoom from page to page to page was whiplash.
“I can see you watching me,” she said with a faint smirk. “It’s distracting.”
“This is slow to you?” Malcolm blurted.
Shit.
Rhode’s face fell, her eyes brimming with apologies, excuses, questions.
“Can you show me more research on compressed schedules?” she said, nudging the laptop towards him. “You know, I can’t remember. I don’t think we designed our proposed four-day workweek to be mandatory. I’ll have to ask.”
She rose to fetch her phone, thumbs tapping away as she slipped back into her chair at his side.
Malcolm had found five studies for her and, for good measure—
Was Rhode leaning on his arm rest right now?
He wasn’t going to check. He was preparing another set of tabs on linear pay structures.
He didn’t feel the need to explain it.
Rhode was scrutinizing his every keystroke—sometimes watching his screen, sometimes glancing at his hands.
It was distracting.
“For stuff on flex time, compensation issues, and lots of other things, you can look at Claudia Goldin’s work,” Malcolm said, now catching Rhode’s focus drifting for a generous moment to his arms.
Wow. The forearm thing again? Seriously?
“She’s a labor economist and economic historian,” he went on, making a mental note to keep rolling up his dress shirts in Rhode’s presence. “Studied at the school where my father teaches.”
“Oh?”
Rhode watched his fingers open a new tab, and Malcolm couldn’t even remember what he’d thought to look up.
Was she perhaps imagining—?
Ahem.
“Yeah, so Claudia Goldin’s the one who led early research on women’s labor force participation in the US,” he said, trying to think about anything but how awkward it was that they were both staring at an empty page while he couldn’t even type a thing. “That was way back in the ‘70s”—oh, damn, hardly a blip for you—“um, when labor surveys used to collect data only on men. And basically every year now she has to talk to the media about some of the same things over and over.”
As he faced her, Rhode met his gaze at last, and somehow she was closer now. Much too close for a man who’d picked a glass-walled conference room purely to avoid office gossip of this kind of thing.
“Marianne Bertrand is another one,” he rambled on. My pop’s colleague actually.”
Rhode didn’t look away.
“I’ve met her a bunch of times.” Malcolm hardly thought of what he was saying. He just had to do something. Anything. “Great taste in cheese. Fancy cheese. With fancy wines.”
The spark of amusement on Rhode’s face took him back to Percy’s home in Manhattan, when she’d taken him apart with nothing more than a look.
This was ridiculous. He’d seen her naked. A bunch of times partly. Once fully.
Yeeaah, that had to be the problem.
“She’s also done interesting work. On board diversity quotas. If they help or not,” Malcolm remembered.
The barest tilt of Rhode’s head had her long coils tickling his bare arm. “What did she find?” she said, breathing a sweet citrus into his nose.
“Not horrific but also not great stuff.” He couldn’t recall the details right this second.
Rhode’s lipstick had worn off a smidge—faded almost as much as when she’d kissed it onto his skin. But she didn’t draw away. She was studying his face, oh so shamelessly taking in every micro-movement.
Malcolm didn’t get it. Was he supposed to make a move? Surely not. There were fucking glass walls surrounding them.
And even if he could imagine a flicker of a motion from outside, he didn’t turn. It was after 6, right? It was probably just the flashy detailing of Rhode’s bag reflecting into his glasses.
“Oh, and they co-authored something, Goldin and Bertrand,” said Malcolm in an excuse to restore his breath. “About MBAs. Post-MBA earnings.”
“Also not horrific but not great stuff?” said Rhode, a smile twitching upon her lips.
Oh, her voice. Malcolm decided right then and there: He had a thing for Rhode speaking to him like that. Not quite subdued, yet not quite palpable—and only for him to hear.
But that wasn’t important.
“Um. I’d say more horrific,” Malcolm recalled. He tried and failed to match Rhode’s volume, yet his pitch dimmed and spiked with every other word.
Rhode’s strong brows pinched just that bit.
“They found men and women earn pretty much the same starting out, right after their MBAs.” Louder than he would’ve liked, at least his voice was even now. “And then ten years later, men earn—” 60 log points more. “Um.”
That was e⁶⁰ minus 1. As easy as that. But evidently, Malcolm had delegated too much work these days because how had he forgotten what e⁶⁰ was?
Gods knew how many times he blinked, trying to conjure up the table he’d studied to translate log points into percentages, seeing only a startling glimpse of sunlit waters.
Okay, so he knew log points under 30 didn’t need any work. Thirty log points was basically 30%.
Now, what were 40, 50, and 60? Forty log points meant 50%, right? And 50 was...?
Malcolm’s mind didn’t care about his questions. The only answer was blue—a pacific blue so incongruent for a temperamental Atlantian, who was now drawing a breath.
“Hold on.” Malcolm blinked once—heavy and deliberate, as if to reset his brain. What was the approximation formula again? “They earn something like...”
Log point plus 0.5 times the log point squared, right?
“Like?” In Rhode’s steady gaze, green emerged in the deep blue.
“Gimme a sec.” Pressing his eyes shut, he ran through the shortcut.
Malcolm could feel Rhode’s exhale on his skin, but he forced the numbers into focus. “Point-six plus half of point-six squared...” he muttered. “This should be easy.” (Fuck, why had he admitted that?) “Yeah, point-seven-eight! It’s a bit—”
Eyes open, he found Rhode’s focus trained on his mouth.
“A bit of an underestimate,” Malcolm said, carrying his voice just far enough to reach Rhode’s ears. “So, some 80% higher. After starting out with the same earnings, ten years out, men with MBAs earn about 80% more than women with MBAs.”
Meeting Rhode’s gaze was like handling a hot potato. He really couldn’t do it, but he stayed put, juggling his focus from eye to eye. Malcolm pushed himself to sizzle and burn, surely reaching third-degree now as his eyes jumped across Rhode’s face.
Suddenly, he was back on the Upper East Side, equally distracted by her direct attention as he was intrigued by her methylmercury teachings and health policy musings.
Was that what Rhode wanted? Someone who’d give that back to her?
The puzzle pieces were slotting together. She’d entrapped him time and time again, getting him wriggling in her nifty clutches. Maybe what she really wanted wasn’t the faint struggles of an opponent to best but for someone who’d reciprocate.
“Remember that cliff at 50-50?” Malcolm said.
With a slow, quiet breath, he steadied his gaze—and his heart rate.
And Malcolm knew now.
“You mean in household earning shares?” Rhode said, glancing at his lips once more.
Did she know his ears could catch the hitch of her breath? Did she remember there was glass surrounding them?
“Yeah, Marianne Bertrand studied that. With one of her former students at UChicago, Jessica Pan.”
Rhode finally met his eyes. “Bertrand, Pan... and Goldin,” she said.
“I can give you more if you like.”
Malcolm could swear on the Styx he hadn’t intended it to come off like that.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t mean it like that.
He was sure of it now—as certain as Rhode’s gaze—that for as much, or as little, as she wanted, whatever it was, be it casual company or informal policy advisor, he was right for the role. All Rhode had ever really asked for was his courage to be honest with her.
“You know,” Malcolm said, “they also found that if a woman, based on her demographics, is expected to earn more than her husband, she’s actually less likely to work.”
Clarity seeped through the fog. And if Malcolm were being honest, he really wanted to try that revani. There was a bite left on Rhode’s plate he could see in the corner of his eye. She hadn’t finished it yet. Maybe it wasn’t too sweet. Or... perhaps the citrusy syrup tasted better on her lips.
“The more graphs and tables you show me,” said Rhode, barely above a whisper. “The more studies you recite...”
Malcolm could almost taste the orange sugar syrup on her tongue.
“The more you speak...” she said, “the more my libido tanks.”
Malcolm could have laughed.
That’s not what your eyes are saying.
In not a second of all these weeks had he remotely imagined he could turn her own accusation right back at her.
“I would say you’re mean if I didn’t feel the same,” he said instead.
I know you, she’d said? Well, he knew her right back, didn’t he?
It was Rhode who looked away first.
The air felt even tauter now—thicker and heavier with their lies laid bare.
Malcolm stared into the wooden table, his periphery catching more colleagues heading out. He nearly cleared his throat. “I actually have some work to do right after this on taxes and campaign financing. Because those are sexy topics.”
He couldn’t believe he’d even hinted at it, but Rhode had started it. Who but she would bring up libido in a meet-up with him like this?
Rhode rolled closer to the table, making new notes, giving him more breathing room. But with each tilt and turn of her head, whiffs of jasmine wafted into his nose, and a dozen memories played in his head of the night in her room that they’d seared into fate.
Malcolm tugged his attention away thrice before finally speaking. “What’s it like in Atlantis?”
“What’s what like?” Rhode asked, still glued to their seating chart business.
“Campaign financing. We’re trying to tighten the rules.”
“Oh. Well, we have maximum donations, naturally,” said Rhode, only fleetingly glancing away from the papers to switch from a red to a green pen. “Per year, it’s 650 drachmas per individual for each political party per year. That’s equivalent to something like—” She looked off into space.
$1,530. $1,527.
Rhode blinked once. Twice. Thrice. “Um. $1,500 dollars?”
Close enough.
Her eye line panned his way. “Please tell me you won’t consider political spending by corporations, associations, and labor unions to be a form of free speech.”
“What do you mean?” said Malcolm, “What if Percy, through Ásylo, helps finance my next campaign so I do a better job tackling water pollution? That’s totally not corruption. It’s a good thing!”
He snickered at Rhode’s huff and eyeroll.
“Next question,” he said, rolling up to his own notebook—and what he hoped was a subtle several inches right. “How do you detect instances of employees donating on behalf of organizations? ‘Cause that’s what we don’t know how best to do.”
“Well, we made everything public,” said Rhode, pausing to list more names. “Everything. Like I said before, many of these things are being automated. We used to have so little information. Now we have so much—and so much so that it takes a while for our statisticians and journalists and any other analysts to comb through all those reams of data.”
Even now, her gaze drifted past the glass—anywhere but at him.
“Our watchdog groups are incredibly busy,” she said, “especially now that Evgenios is helping us track politician donations. Ultimately, I’d say it makes no difference to try to bribe officials, because we’re still a monarchy—and one that isn’t there for show.”
Malcolm jotted a reminder about Evgenios, muttering, “You unelected autocrats.”
Rhode only stared.
“It’s funny ’cause it’s true,” Malcolm dared.
She still didn’t let up, but he wasn’t squirming in his seat. It probably helped that he was a full foot away from her.
“I didn’t say you were doing a terrible job by any means,” Malcolm said with a smile. “I’m just pointing out a fact.”
Rhode took a breath. “The parties only have so much power, and scandalous politicians have to answer to us—and we’re not”—she smiled back—“friendly to certain criminals.”
“Mmm.”
Rhode ignored him, playing mindlessly with her rings as she eyed her papers. “That said, we’ve also been trying to reward honesty, because even if naming and shaming helps, it sort of normalizes bad behavior.”
Malcolm looked for loopholes. “Has anyone ever tried to bribe you in other ways without you realizing until later?” He could imagine maybe with outfits. Jewelry was probably way too obvious. Maybe someone else had once given her a tapestry or some other artwork. Hadn’t Drew been working on a dress for her? Who had bought those ballet tickets?
“Well,” said Rhode, “years and years ago, some C-suite executive once hooked up with me only to later ask me for subsidies.” She shook her head.
Malcolm’s brows shot up.
“Fool,” she said. “He should’ve been thrown into Hades for that nonsense. We let him off with a warning, but”—and now she looked at Malcolm, pride gleaming on her face—“not after I learned enough to have his company pay more in taxes.”
“Regulatory capture through sex? Interesting.”
“But I gave him no public benefits, so there were absolutely no losses to society. Just a bit of my pride. So, not regulatory capture, thank you very much.”
“So, he paid— ” Malcolm steeled his trembling lips before he burst into hysterics. “He paid the state—to have sex with you.”
“Shut up.” But Rhode was smiling.
“Would he have gone to jail if you didn’t enjoy yourself?”
“It was certainly worth an extra eight million drachmas for my country—”
“Eight million drachmas!”
“Per year,” said Rhode, chin lifting a fraction. “Practically in perpetuity. At least so far. That’s what it averages out to. I keep a spreadsheet, of course.”
Are you trolling?
Oh, is that your rate?
“What a good deal,” said Malcolm.
Rhode laughed. “The additional tax revenue from that company alone was actually more than the cost of our newest state-owned hydropower plant—a very large-scale facility, mind you.”
“Shiiit.”
“Mm-hmm.” Rhode turned back to the screen and her notes. “It’s okay. I won’t make you pay. You can keep your money.”
“And you didn’t extort him, did you?” Malcolm said.
Rhode snapped back to him, a mild glare in her eyes. “Are you looking for trouble, you—? You malapert.”
Malcolm grinned. “You what?”
“You malapert.”
“That’s not a word.”
“Yes, it is! Would you like to bet?” Rhode’s eyes narrowed as she inched toward him.
Oh, what are we playing for here?
Malcolm held it in.
“Well,” he said, “this malapert can recognize that you’re really dancing at the edge of extortion here.”
“His company was exploiting loopholes!” she said with a huff, throwing her hair over her shoulder as she turned back to her lists. “I helped find out—”
”You had insider information...” Malcolm translated.
“—and very kindly told him he should look at the quality and experience of his finance department, lest the Atlantian Revenue Agency find some evidence of wrongdoing.”
“Gave an implied threat to selectively enforce the law...”
“I was also going to say,” Rhode said, somehow able to write simultaneously, “that it got us to look at other companies, and, suddenly, they paid more, too. He more or less became an informant, until I got tired of our thing. It got annoying when he started acting like he was Atlantis’s savior, even if it became more costly to find any new loopholes.”
“So, if I notice any company in New Athens taking advantage of our tax system,” Malcolm said, “it would help if the city pimps me out to the C-suites?”
Memories flashed of Drew cornering him. Of Leo joshing around with him—and winking a bajillion times. Even those hypotheticals of Pollux last year.
He scrubbed away those thoughts as Rhode snickered, shadows flickering across her face as another batch of New Athenian staffers passed by outside. She paid them no mind, switching through her pens that ate up another half-page.
“Poseidon pays you,” she said. “Somewhat.”
“Does he realize the conflict of interest here?”
Without lifting her pen, Rhode’s eyes flicked up at him for a brief moment. “You don’t seem to care. Although it really isn’t in Babás’s interest, whatever we’ve been doing. That would be the real conflict.”
Malcolm cracked a smile, still in disbelief this was his life. “Oh, man.”
”Don’t worry though. He won’t pull any funds from the city.”
“Thank you?”
“It’s not me.” A smile spread across Rhode’s face as her pen glided over her page, more quickly, more cursively. “I assure you, he wouldn’t. I mean, if I hated you, he’d surely want to do something about it.”
What exactly would Poseidon do to me?
Our insurance policy is keeping Percy holed up here.
“Could we get a better interest rate, though?” Malcolm near-whispered, leaning in until he was mere inches from Rhode’s ear.
It was dangerous, he knew. But it was intoxicating—the mere proof that they weren’t just a fact in his office, nor the forest, nor her room. Whatever this was was true here, too.
“Don’t push it, Malcolm,” said Rhode in a singsong voice.
Without backing up even a millimeter, she faced him again. “I thought quite a lot of it already was free money and not even some interest-free or low-interest loan? Or,” she said, thinking, “it was something like it becomes interest-free, was it—once the city satisfies certain objectives? And didn’t you pick those objectives?”
Malcolm smiled, remembering when Chiron had barged into this very room, all smiles, to tell him and Chiara and whomever else had been present of Poseidon’s offer.
“It is like that,” he said. “Which I love. I just thought it was funny.”
“Mmm.”
Rhode might not have literally LOLed, but he took great pride that his joke landed and resulted in a smile.
As Rhode busied herself with her note-taking, Malcolm decided it would have been tactless to ask her how exactly Poseidon could pull some fifty million dollars to hand to New Athens. Well, it had already been fifty mill’ for the government alone. How much had he donated or invested into the city’s industries? Annabeth and Leo’s joint ventures had gotten—what was it?—three million?
How many years of compound interest did it take him to save all that? How much did Poseidon set aside to put into rare, grand projects like New Athens? How couldn’t he be tempted to spend his money immediately on other smaller projects? What had he divested from to join Malcolm in prioritizing New Athens?
And wherever all that money was from, why? Why fifty-something million? Had it been to one-up Athena this time around?
The more Malcolm thought about it, the more he doubted it. Poseidon couldn’t possibly have known how much Athena had put in before offering his own funds. How would he know he was New Athens’s biggest donor multiple times over?
It was totally possible, Malcolm thought, that Poseidon was simply... nice. Why couldn’t it be true?
Malcolm needed no more than to look to his left to catch Poseidon’s black hair and shifty moods. Or Amphitrite’s softer face and measured restraint. He wondered about cause and effect, because or despite... and took a shot in the dark.
“Did you have something to do with that?” he said.
Rhode’s brows shot up. “Uh, I did not know of you whatsoever when he proposed those contracts, and I have nothing to do with Poseidon’s business with New Athens, even now. Don’t flatter yourself.” She didn’t even look his way, apparently more bothered by something she crossed out some five times.
“That’s not what I meant. I know it’s just him,” Malcolm said. “Marine jurisdiction. Atlantis doesn’t interfere in foreign states, et cetera. Amphitrite told me.”
Malcolm remembered that calm, effortless smile on Amphitrite’s face as she watched Rhode with those young Atlantians. He wondered how easy that expression might have appeared on Athena’s face once he actually got the city off the ground—or when a hundred thousand people will have settled in New Athens. Or was it when he’d pass the chief policymaker torch to someone else?
What did it take for you? he wanted to ask Rhode.
No, that wasn’t what they were talking about. What were they—?
“I meant back then,” he said. “Was it your idea, those types of loans?” It felt like a secret to ask it.
Malcolm waited a beat, then two, suddenly meeting a steady shade of aquamarine saying: Say more.
He chose his words deliberately. “Your island had those sorts of loans—gifts, really—to other poleis. Like when Argos was broke and weakened from attacks, and couldn’t afford to repair their own walls and strengthen their cavalry. And they waited forever for someone to help.”
Was that a glint in Rhode’s eyes? A twitch on her lips?
Malcolm shifted his seat to face her dead on. “And the island of Rhodes, way out east, went, ‘Here you go, 100 talents, free of interest. That’s what— At the time, a drachma was a day of skilled work...”
Rhode nodded, a smize in her sidelong gaze.
“And a talent was 6,000 drachmas?”
“Roughly.”
“So, a wage for a skilled worker now...” Malcolm thought. “Say, at $20-something per hour... a hundred talents has gotta be, what, $100 million in today’s terms? Damn.”
Rhode shrugged faintly. “War is expensive. Rhódos was rich. There were poleis mortgaging their entire territory to fund warfare. I bet you know that. Without war... well, a hundred talents was spare change for our treasury.”
Malcolm chuckled, awed by her boast. “Yeah, ‘cause you didn’t go out looking for trouble.”
He found himself leaning toward Rhode, as if closing their distance could coax out her answers faster.
“We valued relationships more,” she said. “The island wasn’t very arable, so we needed trade.”
“Other poleis—or states, whatever—that lacked farmland did trade and conquests. That was the point of the conquests. I know you know that.” He nearly whispered the sentence.
Malcolm edged his chair closer just a bit, only for Rhode to roll back—and swivel his direction, her knee grazing his shin on the way.
“They did land conquests,” she said. “Rhódos, as you know, is an island.”
“No different from, say, Crete—”
“Which did not try conquering its neighbors.”
“Because they didn’t want to, or because they couldn’t?”
Malcolm hunted for that mask to crack, aching for her to let it fall, just for him.
“Perhaps they were busy,” said Rhode.
“Trying to conquer themselves, you mean? All those civil wars...”
“Cretans proved to be highly capable,” she said. “You know, Rhodians actually hired Cretan mercenaries. I thought it was quite neat.”
“‘Mercenaries.’” Malcolm jerked his chin up. “Do you still bribe pirates to ally with you?”
Rhode drew a breath, her voice low. “Is this how you talk to other gods?”
There’s a lot I don’t do with other gods.
“Those Cretan fleets,” Malcolm pressed, “what were they for again?”
“Defense,” she said easily.
“Against?”
“Pirates.” Rhode’s eyes held steady, but her lips twitched at their corners.
Malcolm didn’t need to hear her say whose. That smile was enough of a secret—a whisper above the muffled hallway chatter and right into his ear, saying, Their own.
“Okay, that’s Crete.” Malcolm shifted, his leg catching hers—and he didn’t bother pulling away. “Athens—”
“Is not an island and had a brilliant military suited for land,” said Rhode.
“And an excellent navy,” Malcolm added, “that actually did go on maritime conquests—unlike Rhódos, whose also excellent navy essentially never left home except to protect. That’s a choice.”
Rhode’s face lit up. “That is an interesting comment from a son of Athena.”
“Hey, New Athens isn’t gonna go out conquesting. I hear it pays off not to instigate any wars.” Malcolm waited a beat, enjoying Rhode’s smile, before he said, “I mean, aside from...”
Rhode’s eyes flashed. “Byzantion was violating free trade laws.”
Malcolm put on a face of wide-eyed innocence. “Oh, which laws?”
“Freedom of navigation.”
“Which wasn’t a thing then—”
Rhode clenched her arm rests. “It was ‘a thing’. We had a norm—”
“A norm.”
“Yes, the norm of open seas,” she said, closing their distance with every word. “It was an uncodified law.”
“So, just a principle.”
“A binding one.”
“Which Rhódos, as a maritime trade hegemon, enforced purely altruistically, of course,” Malcolm prodded. “You know, like declaring a war on terror against pirates just to conveniently share in some of that pirate booty? Genius.”
He breathed the word, letting it hang between them as blue-green flickers swept across Rhode’s face—surprise, insult, pride, annoyance?
“That wasn’t standard procedure,” she said, clipped. “Athens, being the other naval police, had fallen after ‘looking for trouble,’ as you say.”
Malcolm’s grin broke free. “Needing your help, too.”
“Rhodians and Athenians helped each other,” she said offhandedly, steering them back. “Rhódos set an example to advance trade and improve living standards across the region. No other polis or state had the might—or the mind—to stamp out piracy, nor the power to stand up to a rogue city wringing them dry with tariffs—”
“Sounds like hyperbole.”
“—at a trade chokepoint. But Rhódos could. So she did.” Reclining into her chair, Rhode crossed her legs between his, bumping into his inner thigh.
Malcolm ignored it. Barely.
“Byzantion had de facto rights over the Bosporus,” he goaded, accuracy be damned. “Rhódos is hundreds of miles away.”
“You said it yourself: de facto, not de jure,” said Rhode, her voice steely as the leg she refused to budge from his. “Why don’t you imagine modern-day Turkey arbitrarily imposing tolls on the Bosporus, tariffing civilian access to and from the Black Sea, and see where that’d land them, hm?”
The satisfaction in her tone hit Malcolm as unmistakable as the press of her leg a centimeter up his thigh.
Doing fuck all to apologize or even acknowledge this... accident—this move?—Rhode dipped into that register, her words just for him. “My people didn’t have to wait over two thousand years for Montreux—or UNCLOS, for that matter—to see it in writing that those ‘principles’ were worth enforcing.”
She was pinning him down again, the fire in her gaze exactly matching those moments—their moments—when she'd slide onto his lap, her thighs bracketing his. With just that inch of contact, he could feel the ghost of her weight and hear her in that voice, rattling off a torrent of secrets—pirates, treaties, whatever she chose to share with him. If not for these glass walls—
“So, was it your idea?” Malcolm asked, shifting in his seat, every instinct telling him to move even as he stayed pressed to that inch of her leg. “Generous loans as political goodwill?”
“I know you’re well-versed enough in the old politics to know gods did not typically handle the day-to-day operations of the poleis they patronized,” said Rhode.
It didn’t sound like she’d finished her sentence.
“But something tells me you were more involved,” Malcolm murmured. “Something also being Galene’s textbook and what she learned from you, using multiple examples of Rhodian policies, especially on trade and finance—all those ways Rhódos, like Atlantis, was more cosmopolitan and progressive.”
Rhode barely restrained a grin. “It’s the power of friendship, what can I say?”
“Oh, you’re gonna be coy now?”
Rhode drew her eyes away, taking a moment or two to herself. “We always had this idea,” she reminisced, “to be open and generous.”
You and Helios?
She turned to Malcolm again, uncrossing her legs as her hands fell to her lap—and he suddenly found he could breathe easier.
“You’re using among the worst examples if you don’t want me to be coy. It wasn’t us they honored for that,” she said.
You mean it wasn’t him.
Rhode’s eyes began to glimmer, yet she was smiling. “Nor was it some diplomat, nor some general, nor the Rhodian government.”
Malcolm knew the story well by now, especially after all those late-night deep dives under his covers, but it felt special to be here right where he was in this very moment, hearing the tale personally from the goddess herself.
“Argos recognized, as they should have,” Rhode said fiercely, “the generosity of the entire people of Rhódos. Because that’s how Rhodians were: open and generous. You must know how rare that was, to have a whole people recognized like that.”
Didn’t Athens give plenty of collective honors? Malcolm thought. And wasn’t all that honoring pretty much a fancy way to gain and retain loyalty and aid?
But he knew what Rhode meant.
“To have all the people,” she said, “collectively recognized for their virtue, with ceremonial gold crowns and stele inscriptions, in temples and in festivals, the way monarchs and heroes and gods were worshiped...”
But not gods like you?
If Rhode could see his silent griping, she didn’t acknowledge it.
“Imagine,” she said, “later, when you take a step back from New Athens, you see it run—not on its own, right?—but by people who learned to see the vision you see.”
Her voice seemed to seep into Malcolm’s skin, sending shivers up his arms as he tried to picture the idea.
“People living by it. So many of them,” she said. “And far away, your peers in need think, ‘Wow, look at them. They’re not just standing on their own two feet; look at how much they’ve done for us. The people. Let’s honor them through memory and sacrifice.’”
Not coy, huh?
Malcolm’s voice came quieter. “That... sounds like a lot. I can’t quite imagine that.”
Rhode held him in place with a look. “I don’t think you’ll have to. Perhaps no one will be quite as”—she thought for a moment—“finicky as your people.”
Malcolm’s breath caught on something.
My people?
He swallowed, nodding once. Rhode’s words sat heavy on his shoulders, even as they lifted him taller.
While she returned to the table to sort through her notes again, Malcolm was left to wonder how in Zeus’s name anyone could appreciate, or even choose... finickiness (was that even a real word?) over things like openness and generosity.
Rhode may have agreed with him, but she also would’ve sided more with Ray, wouldn’t she?
Malcolm didn’t know if it had been intentional, but she swiveled farther left, turning more of her back to him.
Fine either way.
As Malcolm reached for some papers, Rhode grabbed them back.
“Make yourself useful and send Galene those studies. Her work email is online,” she said.
He did as Rhode asked and took that as permission to bug her more about implementing campaign expenditure caps and using per-vote public subsidies to fund political parties.
Whether Rhode had had enough or wanted more time with him, she trailed off mid-explanation and declared, “I need coffee.”
Malcolm shut his notebook. “Yeah, we can take a break.”
“You’ve been on a break this whole time!” Rhode said, spinning his way. “You wrote down six names in two hours!”
“Whoa, whoa! Let’s be fair here,” Malcolm said. “It was five-and-a-half.”
Rhode laughed a full-belly laugh.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Malcolm held the door open for a whole minute as Rhode rummaged through her purse, applied her lipstick, put on her blazer, and fixed her hair. Squinting into the daylight, he hi-ed and bye-ed a handful of stragglers heading out.
“So, yes, she’s really been expanding her vocabulary,” Rhode said, voice crisper, back straighter as she joined him outside. “She just struggles with pronouncing new words. Then again, some engineering terms aren’t easy for me, but she’s perfectly fluent.”
Malcolm hadn’t even asked. “Has Alicia also been talking your ear off about car parts?”
They passed Alvin and two other Romans with microwaved dishes on their way to a nearby conference room. Rhode carried on, either not noticing or completely ignoring their glances, even as Malcolm wished the guys a nice dinner.
“Let’s just say I now know more about cars in German than in English or even Greek,” she said. “But those tutoring sessions help me practice, too, actually. The genders, the word order, the tenses...”
Ultimately, pretty much everyone had other stuff to do and chatter about than look at her or Malcolm.
Past the two groups, they turned a corner to the hallway snack station, finding Giuseppe the Coffee Machine occupied by Brett. He still hadn’t moved into the adjoining Security Services building, but with the quiet he needed, neither Malcolm nor Clarisse minded.
“Back to those automated reports,” Malcolm said. He angled toward Rhode, the turn carrying him a half-step away. “Must be nice to have those resources. I’m drooling. How big’s the department?”
“I would say six thousand?” Her eyes stayed fixed on Brett’s back. “It reaches half a million, maybe more, during our census years.”
She only looked at Malcolm as Brett left—no look, no nod today.
Malcolm picked the fanciest of the cups available. “Mug for you,” he offered.
“Oh, may I take that one?” Rhode swapped the cup in his hand for another. “Better for crema.”
Malcolm gave her a subtle nod.
“May I make you one?” Rhode asked, needlessly hushed. “If you don’t pick a drink, I’ll pick one for you.”
Malcolm knew this moment would follow him into next month. “Coffee at this time?” he said.
“There’s decaf.”
He considered it for a half-second. “Nah, let me try your version.”
Already well acquainted with Giuseppe, Rhode got him cooperating with merely a single nudge.
“Do you know how Olympus does their statistics?” she said—but before Malcolm could even ask what she meant, she whispered, “It’s so fragmented, isn't it?”
Coffee fumes wafted in the three paces between them as Rhode handed him his cup.
“Pretty piecemeal,” he said. “Less than America though.”
“They call it checks and balances,” she said, ripping a packet of cane sugar as Giuseppe brr-ed to life with her coffee. “We call it turf wars.”
“Well, your way should be more efficient,” Malcolm said.
If he’d stressed the should too much, Rhode didn’t notice. She was too busy stirring in her sugar and glancing again at Brett on his laptop in a secluded hallway nook.
“Rhode?” Malcolm said softly.
She sipped her coffee, eyes finding his over the cup’s rim.
“I’m sorry again for...” He faintly nudged his head towards Brett.
Rhode licked the crema off her lips. “You’re not his parent. But is he as bad as you with the overwork?” she said, just the slightest bit pointed.
“Yeah,” Malcolm grimaced. “Every week, he gets a huge overtime bonus.”
That Malcolm signed off on. Because there was literally nobody else.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I don’t.”
“Shame. Neither do I.”
They snickered, heading back to the conference room, where Malcolm stacked their empty plates, offering to finish the apples if she had her last bite of revani.
Rhode collected her dates and pens, only to follow him to his office and deposit them on his desk, saying, “I could be free Friday night.”
Malcolm took her seat, leaving her his to slump into and swivel around in as she beamed at him in thanks.
Sharing her coffee in their own cups, they traded more questions than ever, shielded by four pure walls to talk shit and waste time.
The coffee was utterly bitter. Yet fruity, Malcolm realized. He’d never noticed those notes before—never could from Rhode’s lips.
In the ten minutes it took for Malcolm to translate half her notes into logical statements, she’d finished her own mug. He still had plenty left. He’d probably—no, he had to—save some for tomorrow. All the better: Rhode wouldn’t be around, but her coffee would.
After she left, he almost reached for his water, but he let the coffee—her coffee—linger on his tongue, all the way until dinner.
In the recesses of his mind, Malcolm knew he already wasn’t going to sleep much tonight. But with too many problems to solve, too much of Rhode’s advice to consider, too many moments to replay, there was much too much needing his finicky touch.
Notes:
🗽☀️
It's Percy Jackson Day! I'm celebrating by posting!
Apologies for the wait. A lot has been going on in the back end. This update took a lot of effort. It’s 44 pages long, and I have another 75-ish pages of notes(!!) for this chapter alone. I’m usually not this crazy lol.
Because some of you have liked these sorts of things, pick and choose whatever behind-the-scenes content interests you:
Tumblr: Chapter 15 | Writing gender gaps | Setting scenes — or not | Feminist economics in my fanfic | The Bureau of Labor Statistics! (to be posted) | Agon, Ekklisis, and their kids (to be posted) | TMI for an AN lol
Hope you’re all well. Thanks again for your encouragement and support all these years. I recently reread every comment from readers, and honestly thanks again for sharing them. 💜
Once I wrap up my biblio, I’ll be off to chapter 16!
Chapter 16: Appendix 1: Bibliography
Notes:
The bibliography is here for academic responsibility and my own accountability. The list is pretty condensed. I wanted to make the listed references super accessible if anyone wanted to further explore these topics. 🤓 😎
I'm citing whatever warrants a citation, along with some things that are barely mentioned but that I just thought were cool. For each of these points, I'm also minimizing the number of sources and trying to only list sources that are accessible (no paywall + little to no jargon or bad academic writing).
I also added a few summaries below to provide context (if something's suuuper vaguely mentioned in the story).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Selected sources, organized by chapter, in order of reference
Epigraph
-
"Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes: Poetry Foundation
Chapter 1: In which Malcolm encounters an aggravating sea princess
- Ingroup-outgroup bias: Wikipedia
- Riptides and rip currents: "What is a rip current?" - NOAA
- Hicksian demand functions: Wikipedia / Policonomics
- Compensating variation: Wikipedia
- Prisoners’ dilemma: Khan Academy
- Cabrini-Green, public housing demolition, and the rise of block gangs: "Why 2016 Has Been Chicago's Bloodiest Year in Almost Two Decades" - Newsweek / "New Chicago Gang Book Highlights Rise in Factions, Social Media Use" - WTTW (Chicago PBS)
- Larry Hoover: Wikipedia
- Arresting gang leaders can lead to spikes in violent crime: Criminal Group Embeddedness and the Adverse Effects of Arresting a Gang’s Leader: A Comparative Case Study – Criminology
- Founder and former leader of Chicago’s biggest gang, the Gangster Disciples; his capture by the FBI (and the capture of other gang leaders) is believed to have contributed to a “Wild West” mentality in gang life, leading to increased shootings and homicides in Chicago.
- Binomial distribution: Khan Academy
- Geometric distribution: Khan Academy
- Tracking and fighting block gangs: "Gang factions lead to spike in city violence" - Chicago Tribune
Chapter 2: In which Malcolm wins and loses
- Haliai: Sea Nymphs of Greek Mythology - Theoi
- Aphedron: Wiktionary
- Romans and Rhodians: Ancient Rome: From the Early Republic to the Assassination of Julius Caesar
- Attraction and cortisol: "How Hot People Affect Your Brain" - The Atlantic
- Strawberries and fumigants: "Almost All American Strawberries Are Grown With Toxic Chemicals" - The Atlantic
- "If we have ten Rhodians, we have ten ships": Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age
- Gaugamela: Wikipedia / "Alexander the Great: Battle of Gaugamela 331 BC" – BazBattles (YouTube)
- Parthian shot: Wikipedia
- Girls and women in gangs: "'I did earn my name'" - WBEZ / One Woman Shares How She Was Drawn Into A Gang At An Early Age – NPR
- Tuckman’s stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing…): Wikipedia
- Payoff matrix: XPLAIND
Chapter 3: In which Malcolm uses his social skills
- Sound engineering of cars: "The ‘Slam’ of Your Car Door is Fake" - MEL Magazine
- Attraction and cortisol: "How Hot People Affect Your Brain" - The Atlantic
- Methylmercury: "Mercury Contamination of Aquatic Environments" - US Geological Survey
- Methylation process: Cracking the Mercury Methylation Code - Science
- Dams: "Canada’s Big Dams Produce Clean Energy, and High Levels of Mercury" - New York Times
- Neurotoxicity and health consequences of methylmercury: "Mechanisms of methylmercury-induced neurotoxicity: evidence from experimental studies" - National Institutes of Health / "Methylmercury Exposure and Health Effects" - National Institutes of Health
- Bioaccumulation and biomagnification: Catalina Island Marine Institute
- Fish to avoid eating: "Mercury Levels in Commercial Fish and Shellfish (1990-2012)" - US Food and Drug Administration
- Sex differences in facial expressions: "A large-scale analysis of sex differences in facial expressions" - PLOS One / "Explanation for the Gender Differences in Expressing Emotions" - UPenn
- Polykleitos: Doryphoros - Wikipedia
- US food guide (MyPlate) and Big Dairy's lobbying: "Healthy Eating Plate vs. USDA’s MyPlate" - Harvard School of Public Health / "Experts Say Lobbying Skewed the U.S. Dietary Guidelines" - TIME
- Canada’s food guide (basis for New Athens's food guide): Government of Canada
- Regulatory capture: Investopedia
- Mexican drug cartels in the avocado industry: "Why Avocados Attract Interest Of Mexican Drug Cartels" - WBUR
- ADHD and hypersexuality: Healthline
- Jon Burge: "When Chicago Tortured" - The Atlantic / "A Digital Archive Documents Two Decades of Torture by Chicago Police" - The Atlantic
- United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT): Wikipedia
- Geneva Conventions: Wikipedia
- Chicago reparations (for victims of Jon Burge's and the Midnight Crew's police torture): "In Chicago, reparations aren’t just an idea. They’re the law" - The Guardian / "The Nation’s First Reparations Package to Survivors of Police Torture Included a Public Memorial. Survivors Are Still Waiting." - ProPublica
- Edward Gallagher in Afghanistan: Wikipedia / New York Times
- Among other offenses, Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL, shot indiscriminately at civilian crowds and stabbed to death an unarmed, already seriously injured, and sedated 17-year-old ISIS prisoner, Khaled Jamal Abdullah, with a hunting knife. Gallagher also photographed himself with Abdullah's dead body and the knife, and sent the photo to friends. He retired from the Navy in 2019 with full honors, pension, and medical benefits.
- US voted against setting up the International Criminal Court (ICC): Wikipedia
- Lipstick in Ancient Greece (used to only be worn by prostitutes): Wikipedia
- Manhattanhenge: Wikipedia
- A full-sun Manhattanhenge indeed occurred a day before July 12th, 2016.
- PTSD and fireworks: "The Overlooked Effects of Fireworks" - Penn Medicine News
- Manufactured spending: "Illegal or Just a Great Spending Hack?" - Student Debt Relief
- Elephant unemployment crisis: "Unemployed, Myanmar’s Elephants Grow Antsy, and Heavier" - New York Times
- Banana disease: Panama disease - Wikipedia
- Japanese chalk craze: "Why Mathematicians Are Hoarding This Special Type of Japanese Chalk" - Gizmodo
- Decomposition of dead things: "Recycling the dead" - Science News for Students
- "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou: Poetry Foundation
- Credit rationing: Wikipedia
- In Chicago, an example of credit rationing is redlining: "How Redlining Segregated Chicago, and America" - Chicago Magazine
- Chicago homicide and shooting statistics: crime.chicagotribune.com / heyjackass.com
- There were 358 homicides in Chicago from January 1st, 2016 to July 12th, 2016.
- There were 2,149 shootings in Chicago from January 1st, 2016 to July 12th, 2016.
- The above statistics and the 2014 and 2015 statistics, all mentioned at the end of chapter 3 and which make up the two graphs in chapter 3, are from the Chicago Tribune. (However, the data presented in chapter 3 would not have been what had appeared in the Tribune's website at midnight July 13th, 2016. The Tribune does not update the page to the minute or hour or day. So, there would have been fewer homicides and shootings known about when Malcolm viewed the data.)
- The City Beautiful Movement (and Daniel Burnham and John Root): Encyclopedia of Chicago
- Frank Lloyd Wright and Chicago: Wikipedia
- "The most beautiful great city left in the world" (supposedly, a Frank Lloyd Wright quote about Chicago): BrainyQuote
- Chicago homicide statistics began to be collected in 1968: Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1981 - ICPSR (p. 11 [p. 1])
- Chicago segregation: "Chicago Isn’t Just Segregated, It Basically Invented Modern Segregation" - Chicago Magazine
- Riots in the 1960s decimated neighborhoods in Chicago's West Side: 1968 Chicago riots - Wikipedia
- (Daniel) Burnham and (John) Root: Wikipedia
- Louis Sullivan: Wikipedia
- (Bonus: Sadie TM Alexander: Wikipedia / The Sadie Collective)
- Sadie TM Alexander was the first Black American in the US to receive a PhD in economics. She was also the second Black woman in the US to earn a PhD. However, because of discrimination she could not find work in economics. So, she decided to head into law. She became the first woman and the first Black American to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was not allowed to eat in their dining hall, and the dean of the law school refused to speak to her. Nevertheless, she persisted and became the first Black woman to practice law in Pennsylvania. Sadie TM Alexander was also the first Black woman appointed as Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia. As well, she was the first woman to serve as secretary of the National Bar Association.
Chapter 4: In which Malcolm helps kill some industries
- "No Church in the Wild" by Jay Z and Kanye West: Genius
- Nietzschean philosophy: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Plato's Euthyphrōn: Wikipedia
- Carbon-capturing concrete: Eco-Friendly Alternatives To Traditional Concrete - Specify Concrete
- 15-minute city: Wikipedia
- Biomethane: International Energy Agency
- Blue and green hydrogen: "The Colors of Hydrogen" - Utility Analytics Institute / "The clean hydrogen future has already begun" - International Energy Agency
- Marginal abatement cost curves: ClimateWorks Australia / PLAN Washington
- Jane Addams, settlement houses, and the settlement movement: Wikipedia
- Gini coefficient: Wikipedia
- Open innovation challenges (and the public — AKA "the crowd" — outperforming experts): "Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner" - Harvard Business Review
- "Who Gon Stop Me by Jay Z and Kanye West: Genius
- "Murder to Excellence" by Jay Z and Kanye West: Genius
- Chicago nicknames (Second City, City in a Garden, City by the Lake, My Kind of Town, City that Works): Wikipedia
- Edward H. Bennett (and his city planning and park planning in Chicago): Wikipedia
- Daniel Burnham's vow ("The Lakefront by right belongs to the people. Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people."): Burnham Plan of Chicago - Wikipedia
- "Why I Love You" (Ft. Mr. Hudson) by Jay Z and Kanye West: Genius
- "Illest Motherfucker Alive" by Jay Z and Kanye West: Genius
- Vaping risks: "The Risks of Another Epidemic: Teenage Vaping" - New York Times
- The statistics mentioned in chapter 4 are based on the 2020 statistics mentioned in the article above.
- Substance abuse considered a disability in Canada: "New guidelines help accommodate workers with addiction issues" - Toronto Star
- Carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat: World Health Organization
- Mississippi school immunization: "In Mississippi, strong vaccine laws keeping measles at bay" - The Commercial Appeal
- Religious, philosophical, and conscientious exemptions for school vaccinations: "What Are the Vaccine Exemption Laws in Your State?" - PBS
- In 2015, only two states—Mississippi and West Virginia—did not have non-medical exemptions; 48 states had such exemptions (as mentioned in chapter 4).
- Universal healthcare
- Deaths linked to lack of healthcare coverage: "More than 26 000 Americans die each year because of lack of health insurance" - National Institutes of Health / "New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage" - The Harvard Gazette
- Jon Gruber (MIT economist), architect of Romneycare and Obamacare: Wikipedia
- Three-legged stool required for universal healthcare and political issues pertaining to healthcare programs (e.g., lack of public support for a single-payer system in the US): Healthcare Economics - MIT OpenCourseWare
- “Stupidity of the American voter” (Jon Gruber quote, referring to the Congressional Budget Office’s use of tax incidence as an accounting tactic, which helped the government gain public support for the Affordable Care Act): "Obamacare consultant under fire for ‘stupidity of the American voter’ comment" - The Washington Post
- John Rawls's veil of ignorance concept (termed “original position”): UTexas
- Deontology: UTexas
- Utilitarianism: UTexas
- Environmental impacts of vaping: "How Vaping Could Be Damaging The Environment" - NPR
- Teenagers rebelling against marketers of junk food: "New study finds simple way to inoculate teens against junk food marketing" - Chicago Booth
- Uncodified constitutions: Wikipedia
- Living tree doctrine in Canada (and the debate over living constitutions in the US): Living Constitution - Wikipedia
- Peace, order, and good governance vs. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: The Canadian Encyclopedia
- The American Dream in Canada: "Has the American Dream Moved to Canada?" - Brookings
- Friedrich and Finer on administrative ethics (internal vs. external control; moral push vs. moral pull): The Administrative Ethics Between Professionalism and Individual Conscience - Business and Management Review (p. 2)
- Ludi Apollinares (and praetextae): Wikipedia
- Issues with solar (toxic waste): “The Dark Side of Solar Power” - Harvard Business Review
- Biomethane AKA renewable natural gas (RNG)
- Pros: "Could Renewable Natural Gas Be the Next Big Thing in Green Energy?" - Yale School of the Environment / "California's natural gas fight shows the false promise of 'renewable natural gas'" - Vox
- RNG is good for shipping, aviation, and heavy industry and is most beneficial in less temperate states (like in the Northeast) that have higher seasonal peaks in their electricity systems.
- Cons (more so for California vs. Long Island): "California's natural gas fight shows the false promise of 'renewable natural gas'" - Vox
- Biomethane in Europe: “Mapping the state of play of biomethane in Europe” - European Biogas
- Biorefinery co-products: “Biomass energy” - National Geographic / “Coproducts” - Science Direct
- In the process of creating energy from organic matter (biomass), biorefineries also create other things (co-products) to generate revenues. For example, the gasification process produces syngas (to be turned into fuel) but also slag (which can be turned into building materials).
- Renewable natural gas is a “drop-in” fuel, meaning it can replace conventional (petroleum) fuels and be used for vehicles without requiring significant modification (Argonne National Library).
- Pros: "Could Renewable Natural Gas Be the Next Big Thing in Green Energy?" - Yale School of the Environment / "California's natural gas fight shows the false promise of 'renewable natural gas'" - Vox
- Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions: Compare Your Footprint
- Long Island’s trash issues: ”Advocates Clash Over What To Do With Long Island's Trash” - WSHU (2021) / “The Future of Trash, or What to Do With It All” - New York Times (2008) / ”Long Island's infamous garbage barge of 1987 still influences laws” - Newsday (1987)
- Long Island’s potential for clean fuels: "Op-Ed: Long Island faces garbage crisis: Albany needs to act” - Clean Fuels NY Coalition
- Plastic and fast fashion
- Some men might avoid recycling because it’d make them look gay (and unmasculine) to men and women: “How we care for the environment may have social consequences” - EurekAlert!
- Environmental impact of fast fashion (waste and microplastics): "The environment and economy are paying the price for fast fashion — but there’s hope" - Vox
- Clothes found to be worn an average of seven times before disposal (by British women): "The environment and economy are paying the price for fast fashion — but there’s hope" - Vox
- Emissions intensity reductions vs. absolute reductions: “Taking Aim: Hitting the mark on oil and gas methane targets” - Environmental Defense Fund (p. 18) / “Climate experts are worried about the toughest carbon emissions for companies to capture” - CNBC
- Oil companies boast about achieving reductions in emissions intensity (meaning fewer emissions per tonne) all while increasing their absolute emissions—much like the Aphrodite Cabin’s claims about waste & microplastic reductions.
- Plastic and fast fashion
- There is more plastic deep in ocean than on the surface: “More than 14m tonnes of plastic believed to be at the bottom of the ocean” - The Guardian
- Plastic in animals in the Mariana Trench: “Even at 36,000 Feet Deep, Ocean Creatures Have Plastic in Their Guts” - Live Science
- Humans ingest microplastics: “A plateful of plastic: Visualising the amount of microplastic we eat” - Reuters
- Microplastics found in human placentas: "Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta" - Environment International
- Difficulties in recycling polyester: "How green are your leggings? Recycled polyester is not a silver bullet (yet)" - The Guardian
- Plastic bags vs. reusable bags (and challenges when conducting life-cycle assessments): "Plastic bags are still bad for the environment, despite misleading reports" - PopSci / "Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag" - Quartz
- Applied vs. pure R&D: “Why America Doesn’t Really Make Solar Panels Anymore” - The Atlantic
- Boxed water issues: “Boxed water isn’t the environmental solution they want you to think it is” - Fast Company
- Nasoni: Wikipedia
- Rent control
- Opposed by virtually all economists: Chicago Booth Initiative on Global Markets Forum
- Creates scarcity; increases rental prices; lowers housing quality: “What does economic evidence tell us about the effects of rent control?” - Brookings
- Shuts out youths and newcomers: “Pitfalls of rent restraints: why Stockholm's model has failed many” - The Guardian
- Led to misallocation of housing in New York City: "Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work" - Freakonomics
- Can lead to gentrification, ethnic and social segregation, and more street crime: “Pitfalls of rent restraints: why Stockholm's model has failed many” - The Guardian / “Rent Control Breeds Crime - MIT Research Study” - Think Realty
- Milton Friedman quote (“Rent control is a law that supposedly…”): Freakonomics
- Assar Lindbeck quote (“Next to bombing…”): Wikiquote
- Police reform policies (modeled on Chicago’s 2021 reforms): Important, but Less Publicized, Changes in Police Reform Bill - Ottosen DiNolfo Hasenbalg & Castaldo, Ltd.
- Corruption in megaprojects: Wikipedia / Corruption in public projects and megaprojects - International Journal of Project Management
- "Not only must Justice be done; it must be seen to be done”: R v Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy - Wikipedia
- Steel and concrete/cement contribute to a combined 16% of global CO₂ emissions:
- Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% (7-9%) of global CO₂ emissions: Steel's Contribution to a Low Carbon Future and Climate Resilient Societies - World Steel Association (p. 4)
- Concrete production accounts for around 8% of global CO₂ emissions: Making Concrete Change - Innovation in Low-carbon Cement and Concrete - Chatham House (p. 6 [p. v]) / "Climate change: The massive CO2 emitter you may not know about" - BBC
- Student income inequality in US universities: "Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours" - New York Times / Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
- Greeks diluted wine; Macedonians did not: “Wine in the Ancient Mediterranean” - World History
- Alexander the Great’s heterochromia and general appearance: National Geographic
- Parmenion and his role in Gaugamela: Wikipedia
- Rhodes/Rhódos:
- General history (naval and mercantile power; schools; relations with Alexandria; etc.): Wikipedia
- Establishment of formal maritime codes: The Intriguing History of Maritime Law - Schechter, McElwee, Shaffer & Harris, L.L.P.
- Coinage: Wikipedia
- Acropolis: GPS My City
- Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) (model for Atlantis’s trade agreement): Wikipedia
- Ocean acidification: Wikipedia
- Elektryone: Wikipedia
- Heliadai: Wikipedia
- Aphrodite of Rhodes: Theoi
- Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Helios and Rhodes: Tate
- "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou: Poetry Foundation
Chapter 5: In which Malcolm doesn't actually hate a party
- Taylor-Kanye phone call drama (occurred on July 17th, 2016): "Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift: A timeline of the drama, which now includes Kim Kardashian West" - LA Times
- Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS): International Energy Agency
- Harpocrates: Wikipedia
- Academic tracking and the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM)
- Effects of tracking: "Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools" - The Atlantic
- Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM): "Integrating Classrooms and Reducing Academic Tracking" - The Century Foundation / UConn Renzulli Center
- Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy: IMSA
- Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Ivy Plus: “Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours” - New York Times
- Data actually confirm Princeton's reputation of being a university filled with rich kids—more so than others in the Ivy Plus (Ivy League + Duke, MIT, Stanford, and Chicago). In terms of the discrepancy of the share of students from the top 1% to the share of students from the bottom 60%, Princeton ranks 21st (17.0% vs. 13.6%) of over 2,000 colleges—above any other of the Ivy Plus, except Dartmouth. Columbia and Chicago rank 72nd (13.4% vs. 21.1%) and 114th (10.0% vs. 24.5%), respectively.
- Statistical and graphical integrity
- Misleading graphs: Wikipedia
- Edward Tufte’s principles: "Improve Your Visualization Skills Using Tufte’s Principles of Graphical Design" - Medium
- Liquid bandages: Wikipedia
- Lidocaine: Poison Control
- Conjoint analysis: Qualtrics
- Compensating variation: Wikipedia
- Aristotle and Plato’s criticisms of democracy: Ochlocracy - Wikipedia / Plato’s five regimes - Wikipedia / Aristotle's classification of constitutions - Wikipedia
- Participatory budgeting: Wikipedia
- Prairie School (elements of the style and examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs): Wikipedia
- Form follows function (coined by Louis Sullivan, who credited the idea to ancient Roman Marcus Vitruvius Pollio): Wikipedia
- Starchitects like Zaha Hadid: "Zaha Hadid is ‘resentful and wronged’ says Stephen Bayley" - Dezeen
- Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT: Wikipedia
- Daniel Burnham vs. Frank Lloyd Wright: City Beautiful movement - Britannica
- Frank Gehry’s architectural approach: “Why Frank Gehry Is Not a ‘Starchitect’” - Vanity Fair / Interview: Frank Gehry - Financial Times
- Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture: “How Louis Sullivan's organic architecture inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School” - Curbed Chicago
- An element of the Prairie School (also called the Chicago Group) style of architecture, organic architecture was promoted by Wright, who was himself influenced by his once-employer, Louis Sullivan. Sullivan had used organic ornamentation in his Chicago School buildings like the Wainwright Building and the Guaranty Building.
- “Married to the ground” (Frank Lloyd Wright description of organic architecture): "The Finale at 89 For a Fiery Genius: Death Ends Wright's Flamboyant Career" - LIFE Magazine
- Wainwright Building: ArchDaily
- Guaranty AKA Prudential Building: Hodgson Russ
- Thatcher, Reagan, and New Public Management: Wikipedia / eGovPoliNet: The Policy Community
- Hollow state: Wikipedia
- Chicago Boys: "The Complicated Legacy of the 'Chicago Boys' in Chile" - ProMarket / “In Chicago Boys, the story of Chilean economists who studied in America and then remade their country” - Slate
- Pareto improvement: Investopedia
- Propositional calculus: "Introduction to Propositional Logic - Discrete Mathematics" - TrevTutor (YouTube)
- Transposition (from "if A, then B", we can infer "if not B, then not A"): "Transposition" - Carneades.org (YouTube)
- Eukaryotic kingdoms (protists, plants, fungi, animals — throwback to grade 8 bio lol): Wikipedia
- Squeeze theorem, and proof: Khan Academy / Wikipedia
- Carbon sequestration into the sea floor, and ocean acidification
- Ocean vs. atmosphere as a carbon sink: Carbon Sequestration and the Ocean: How will our waters react? - NAMEPA
- Blue carbon ecosystems: What is Blue Carbon? - NOAA
- Oceans store a third of human-generated CO₂: Understanding the Science of Ocean and Coastal Acidification - EPA
- Carbonic acid and effects: Understanding the Science of Ocean and Coastal Acidification - EPA
- Ocean acidity increased by about 25% from preindustrial times to the early 21st century: Understanding the Science of Ocean and Coastal Acidification - EPA
- New York’s specialties: Cuisine of New York City - Wikipedia
- Illinois’s specialties: Culture of Chicago - Wikipedia
- Pizzas: Chicago has three signature pizzas (not just deep dish).
- Pizza puffs are indigenous to Chicago.
- Giardiniera is a popular condiment in Chicago, used as a topping on the city’s real signature dish: Italian beef (a sandwich).
- Chicago is the hometown of mass-produced gyros.
- Microbrews are common in Chicago, which (as of 2018) has the most breweries of any metropolitan area in the US.
- Malört is a liqueur made and found in Chicago and seldom seen elsewhere in the US. It is absolutely disgusting (Wikipedia).
- Game theory, infinitely repeated games: Wikipedia
- Art and money laundering: National Law Review
- Effects of declining oxygen in marine organisms (including damage to vision): Marine wildlife is starting to suffocate - Knowable Magazine
- Plastics found in placentas: "Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta" - Environment International
- Toxic fumes from oil spills affect sea lions: Oil Spills at the Water Surface - NOAA
- Fishing gear pollution: “Dumped fishing gear is biggest plastic polluter in ocean, finds report” - The Guardian
- Mercury poisoning, chelation therapy, and selenium:
- Health effects of mercury poisoning: "Methylmercury Exposure and Health Effects" - National Institutes of Health
- There is no cure for mercury poisoning: Understanding Mercury Poisoning - Healthline
- Chelation therapy offers one treatment, but is risky, even when performed successfully: Wikipedia
- Selenium acts as a strong chelator (i.e., it can effectively bind itself to toxic metals in chelation therapy): Wikipedia
- Selenium is a rare mineral, but it can be produced: Wikipedia
- Selenium is also a pollutant and can poison aquatic life: Wikipedia
- Rhódos/Rhodes
- Topography, flora, and fauna: The flora and fauna of Rhodes - Via Gallica
- Dama dama deer: European fallow deer - Wikipedia
- The city of Rhodes was in the form of a theater: Hippodamus of Miletus - Wikipedia
- Hippodamus (and Piraeus): Wikipedia
- Rhodian sea law: The Intriguing History of Maritime Law - Schechter, McElwee, Shaffer & Harris, L.L.P.
- Quadriga (Helios is credited as its inventor): Helios - Theoi
- Streetlight effect (looking under the streetlight): Wikipedia
Chapter 6: In which Malcolm gets a little raunchy
- “Hic Rhodus, hic salta” / “Aftoú gár kaí Rhódos kaí pídima” (idiom from Aesop's fable called “The Leap at Rhodes”): Wiktionary / Library of Congress
- Water spider: Britannica
- Amount of information processed each second: Understanding Unconscious Bias - NPR / Short-Term Memory - Simply Psychology
Chapter 7: In which Malcolm faces death
- History of the island of Rhodes: Wikipedia
- Ocean acidification: Wikipedia
- Establishment of formal maritime codes: The Intriguing History of Maritime Law - Schechter, McElwee, Shaffer & Harris, L.L.P.
- Collapse of fisheries: "We projected a fisheries collapse by 2048 — now there is reason for hope" – The Hill
- Moral hazard and bank bailouts: [trying to find something that isn't a textbook or a jargonistic paper lol]
- Endometriosis: Johns Hopkins
Chapter 8: In which Malcolm comes to his senses
- “What works?” vs. “How does the world work?” Why “what works?” is the wrong question: Evaluating ideas not programs - Chris Blattman (a UChicago professor)
- Assumption dumption (a design thinking exercise): Universal Design Guide
- Pareto improvement: Investopedia
- Biomethane AKA renewable natural gas (RNG)
- Biorefinery co-products: “Biomass energy” - National Geographic / “Coproducts” - Science Direct
- Issues with RNG: The Four Fatal Flaws of Renewable Natural Gas - Sightline Institute
- Suffolk County: Where Camp Half-Blood (and New Athens) would most presumably be located.
- Donations to the government are considered unconditional gifts: Gifts to the US Government - Bureau of the Fiscal Service
- Which is to say: “Imagine if billionaires were allowed to make earmarked contributions to, say, the US Treasury to influence other areas of public policy [....] As an aside, I love this page on the Treasury website: ‘Wanna make a gift to the US government? Go right ahead! We’ll use it however we damn well please.’” (Justin Sandefur on Twitter)
- Transportation bonds: Investopedia
- Origami engineering: Origami: Art, Engineering… or Both? - PBS Terra / Engineering with Origami - Veritasium / The satisfying math of folding origami - Evan Zodl - TED-Ed
- Media bias: Types of Media Bias and How to Spot It - AllSides
- Chicago Bulls 2015-2016 season: Wikipedia
- Michael Jordan’s records and career achievements: Wikipedia
- LSAT: Law School Admission Test - Wikipedia
- Highest LSAT score = 180.
- Accommodations for people with ADHD and/or dyslexia typically include 50% extended time: LSAT Accommodations - Verdugo Psychological Associates
- Healthcare
- US healthcare system: The Healthcare System of the United States - Healthcare Triage
- Canada healthcare system (coverage gaps include drugs, dental, and optometry): Canada's Healthcare System Explained - Healthcare Triage
- Canada has about 100 public drug plans and 100,000 private plans: A Prescription for Canada: Achieving Pharmacare for All - Final Report of the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare - Government of Canada
- How many Canadians have drug coverage:
- Around 60% of Canadians are enrolled in private drug plans: A Prescription for Canada: Achieving Pharmacare for All - Final Report of the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare - Government of Canada
- Around 30% of Canadians (seniors, low-income) are covered by public plans (100% - share without coverage - share by private = 100% - 11% - 60%: 29%): see other two citations
- 11% have no private or public drug coverage: Universal prescription drug coverage in Canada - National Library of Medicine
- California population > Canada’s population: WolframAlpha
- Canada has a uniquely confusing system of getting drugs to market (“no wonder pharma companies hated them”): I won’t name the person but a pharma industry expert shared this “joke” with me that’s told in drug companies, going, “If you have a new staffer in the market access division, send them to Canada. If they can survive the complexities, they can thrive anywhere in the world.” (The US has this issue, too, but apparently not as bad?)
- Canada is ~4th worst in the OECD in drug affordability: Annual Report - Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (on p. 2 of every report)
- Countries without a centralized drug purchasing plan to negotiate with healthcare providers (e.g., US and Canada) have less bargaining power and end up paying more for healthcare:
- Which is why Medicare and Medicaid get discounts compared to other US plans: The Economics of Healthcare: Crash Course Economics #29 - Crash Course
- And why Canada created the Pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance so that provinces and territories could negotiate together: Pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance - Wikipedia
- In contrast, countries with centralized pharmaceutical procurement have lower drug prices and other benefits: Centralised Pharmaceutical Procurement: Learnings from Six European Countries - Applied Health Economics and Health Policy
- Other countries also simplify things by having a single, national formulary (e.g., the UK and New Zealand vs. US and Canada): Should Developed Countries, Including Canada, Provide Universal Access to Essential Medications through a National, Publicly Funded and Administered Insurance Plan? - National Library of Medicine
- Flow state: Wikipedia
Chapter 9: In which Malcolm picks up a habit
- Pincer maneuver: Wikipedia
- Greek fire was likely made of naphtha: Wikipedia
- Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination during the Obama administration: Wikipedia
- War crimes (the Nike kids probably violated 2.a.ii, 2.a.iii, and 2.b.vii): United Nations
- 7 Wonders Rhódos gameboard: Analyzing the Wonders in 7 Wonders - The Thoughtful Gamer
- [Too lazy to list the minor god-related stuff for the seating charts lol]
- “Make no little plans” (famous quote by Daniel Burnham): Daniel Burnham: Highway Planning - Encyclopedia of Chicago
Chapter 10: In which Malcolm inspects cabins
- Vegan beer and fish glue: The Real Reason Some Beer Isn't Vegan - Mashed / Isinglass - Wikipedia
- Jeffrey's college application dilemma: Applying to College, and Trying to Appear ‘Less Asian’ - New York Times
Chapter 11: In which Malcolm gets psychoanalyzed
- Infrastructure banks (used to help governments carry out infrastructure projects before subsequent administrations can abandon those plans): National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank - Wikipedia
- Multilevel, underground streets (inspired by Wacker Drive in Downtown Chicago and Harvey W. Corbett’s NYC concept art): Wacker Drive - Wikipedia / The Multi-Level, No-Visible-Cars NYC That Might Have Been - Core77
- Soundfront trail inspiration: Chicago Lakefront Trail - Wikipedia
- KGB lipstick pistol (aka the "kiss of death"): International Spy Museum
- Lead in ancient lipstick: True Colors: Unmasking Hidden Lead in Cosmetics from Low- and Middle-Income Countries - National Institutes of Health
- Lead in modern-day lipstick (and regulations to limit contamination): Food and Drug Administration
Chapter 12: In which Malcolm meddles in godly drama
- Demeter Cabin architectural inspiration (UChicago): Explained on my tumblr
- Lincoln quote "Do I not destroy my enemies..." (attributed, but not sourced to an original work; may have been adapted from a quote by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund): Abraham Lincoln - Wikiquote
- Cognitive limit to the number of people one can have (close) social relationships with: Dunbar's number - Wikipedia / People Aren't Meant to Talk This Much – The Atlantic
- [Again too lazy to list the minor god-related stuff for the seating charts lol]
- China banned erotic banana-eating livestreams (May 2016): BBC
- Symbolic logic (the "alien math"): "Introduction to Propositional Logic - Discrete Mathematics" - TrevTutor (YouTube)
- Key figures in the history of symbolic logic:
- Universal basic income (why Malcolm hates it)
- When cash transfers are given universally (to everyone) rather than in a targeted manner (only to the poor), the amount needed to make a difference for the poor takes away from funding for other worthwhile programs. This is typically the argument for UBI and why libertarians love the idea; with UBI, the government would no longer have to spend so much because people would be able to meet their own needs rather than rely on the government to do so. But Malcolm worries that cutting social protection programs would make the worst off even more worse off.
- He also argues that when so many programs are cut to make room for UBI, there are so many other things that would be underinvested in. He hints at what economists call public goods (e.g., environmental protection) and merit goods (e.g., education), which are the responsibility of the government because the public by themselves would never invest enough in them.
- On the math, using 2023 data: Something as little as $30,000 for every American costs $10.2 trillion. In comparison, total government expenditures across ALL levels of government was less than that—about $10 trillion (Government spending in the United States - Wikipedia). That is how enormous a decently sized UBI would be and how much it would take away.
- This is why Malcolm argues UBI is inequitable, useless, and unaffordable.
- Book authors referenced in Malcolm's attempt to rage read:
- Rand refers to Ayn Rand
- Rumsfeld refers to Donald Rumsfeld
- Cruz refers to Ted Cruz
- Walt Whitman and his sexy poems: Sex and sexuality - The Walt Whitman Archive
Chapter 13: In which Malcolm is sick and tired
- Coming soon. (Oops.)
Chapter 14: In which Malcolm gets dragged into the hot seat
- Coming soon. (Oops.)
Chapter 15: In which Malcolm tests a dangerous theory
Will be fully expanded and filled out by end of August (hopefully). Currently cleaning my 75-ish pages of notes lol.
- Value of a statistical life: Wikipedia
- Counterintuitiveness of Ban-the-Box policies: 'Ban The Box' Laws,' Do They Help Job Applicants With Criminal Histories? - NPR
- Myths and evidence about soy: Straight Talk About Soy - Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Gender pay gap in the United States
- Lily Ledbetter and US fair/equal pay acts: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 - Wikipedia / Equal Pay Act of 1963 - Wikipedia
- A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter - American Economic Review: A summary by Claudia Goldin, explaining…
- “77 cents on the dollar”: The oft-cited pay gap measures the median year-round earnings of men and women who work full-time in 2010 (p. 1095).
- The gap increases as age increases (p. 1095-1096).
- Men work more hours than women do (p. ) (see also: American Time Use Survey - 2024 Results - BLS)
- Overtime premium in law and finance (which Goldin calls “greedy jobs”) (see also: __).
- The pay gap across averages is worse than across medians: ____ BLS
- The pay gap is widest at high incomes: _____ Goldin?
- Women can be severely punished for even small amounts of time they take off work: A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter
- Meanwhile, men use parental leave to advance their careers, especially in academia: ___
- Industries and occupations can be devalued as more women enter the field: ___
- The lowest-earning college majors and lowest-earning jobs are dominated by women: ___
- Women also face harsher penalties for ethical violations: ___
- Women are less driven by money than men are: Preference for the Workplace, Investment in Human Capital, and Gender - Federal Reserve Bank of New York / Chicago, ...
- … etc.
- FIX ORDER:
- Evidence from multiple studies that women negotiate less than men and are punished for negotiating: Why Women Don't Negotiate Their Job Offers - Harvard Business Review
- Newer evidence that women negotiate on promotions and raises as much as men but are less successful: Women Ask for Raises as Often as Men, but Are Less Likely to Get Them - Harvard Business Review / Do Women Ask - Industrial Relations *
- MBA - 60 log points
- The gap has barely budged since 2004: Highlights of women’s earnings in 2023 - BLS (see Chart 1)
- “Separate, albeit related” labor force participation issues:
- Women spend more time on caregiving, housework, etc.: American Time Use Survey - 2024 Results - BLS
- Pregnancy discrimination:
- More women are part-time workers:
- Women are less likely to be get promotions and raises—even if they ask as much as men: australian study
- More men are employed than women (labor force participation rates): Gender Gap - Econlib ← Goldin
- Women sometimes don’t want to enter fields that discriminate against them or are hostile towards them: ___
- Economics and other quantitative disciplines tend to place the burden of proof of sexism higher than the burden of proof that it doesn’t exist (rejecting a null hypothesisassuming no discrimination vs. rejecting null hypothesis assuming there is inherently discrimination) + other measurement issues Rhode mentions: We’ve Been Underestimating Discrimination - Chicago Booth Review
- Solutions to the gender pay gap and general inequality:
- Raising the minimum doesn’t help much at high-income levels:
- Affordable childcare:
- Mandatory paternity leave:
- Raising the minimum wage could theoretically decrease the pay gap (because women are disproportionately represented at low-paying jobs): The Impact of Raising the Minimum Wage on Women - IRLE Berkeley /
- etc.
- Campaign financing and general funding of political parties:
-
- Maximum size of private donations:
- USA: Contribution limits - FEC (As of 2025, individuals can donate from ~$3,500 per election to a candidate to $132,900 per year to national party committees. Organizations like “Super” political action committees AKA Super PACs have no donation limits.)
- Canada: Limits on contributions - Elections Canada (As of 2025, individuals can donate CAD$1,750 per year.)
- EU: Financing of political structures in EU Member States - European Parliament (p. 20). (As of 2021, for countries with limits, the average maximum donation allowed is an average of €53,000, ranging from €500 in Belgium to €300,000 in Slovakia. Some EU states don’t have limits.)
- In the US, political spending by corporations, associations, and labor unions are considered a form of free speech: Citizens United - Wikipedia
- In Canada, companies, unions, and other organizations cannot donate to political parties: Political Financing, Spending, and Advertising Safeguards - Elections Canada
- In the EU, it depends (e.g., France, Latvia, and Luxembourg have strict prohibitions, like Canada; meanwhile, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden allow third parties to donate, like the US) (p. 17-18): Financing of political structures in EU Member States - European Parliament
- Threat of employees donating on behalf of organizations: [obvs not a thing in the us bc it’s legal for companies to donate]
- Difficulties in tracking dark money involved in political donations: A Changing Campaign Finance Landscape - Brennan Center for Justice
- Using Blockchain to track political donations (Evgenios’s role in this fic): The New Advent of Campaign Finance - Cornell Law School / Analyzing the Role of Blockchain Technology in Strengthening Democracies / What is blockchain? - IBM
- Naming and shaming helps fight corruption: How to Fight Corruption—and Why We Should - Chicago Booth Review
- Fighting corruption by celebrating honesty: A new tactic against corruption: Putting honest politicians in the limelight - The Fund for Global Human Rights
- Need for campaign expenditure caps: Most Americans want to limit campaign spending - Pew Research
- USA: Presidential spending limits - FEC (For the 2024 general election, each presidential candidate could spend ~$124 million, which is about ~$364,705 per million people. This is before all other spending by congressional districts.)
- Canada: Understanding spending limits - Elections Canada (For the 2021 general election, each party could theoretically spend ~$30 million, which is about $789,473 per million people. This already accounts for spending by all electoral districts.)
- Comparing election spending per capita: Cost of Election - OpenSecrets / Breakdown of Expenses by Expense Type and Registered Political Party – 2021 General Election - Elections Canada
- US 2024 election spending by all political parties: $14.8 billion, or $43.53 per person. (... Not including another $9.5 billion for the 2022 congressional races, which would put the total at $24.3 billion, or $71.46 per person).
- Canada’s 2021 election spending by all political parties: CAD$84,750,144.40, or CAD$2.22 per person ($1.61 = 44 times less).
- Using per-vote public subsidies to fund political parties (like in Canada up until 2015 and Germany): Federal political financing in Canada - Wikipedia / Financing of political structures in EU Member States - European Parliament (p. 25).
- Maximum size of private donations:
- Corruption and legal abuse:
- Regulatory capture: Investopedia
- Extortion laws: Justia
- Selective enforcement: Wikipedia
- History of Rhodes/Rhódos and Ancient Greece more broadly (during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods):
- Interest-free loan to Argos: Argos and Rhodes - Attalus
- 1 drachma = 1 day of skilled work: Ancient_drachma - Wikipedia
- 1 talent = 6,000 drachmas: Attic talent - Wikipedia
- (Other currency conversions: Value of 1 ancient Greek drachma and 1 Athenian Talent - Attestation Update)
- Rhodes was rich; a trade hegemon - _____:
- Some poleis mortgaged their territories to fund warfare: ______
- Poleis/states lacking arable land did trade and/or conquests—particularly land conquests: ________
- Rhodes was focused on trade and diplomacy, not conquests: _______
- Crete was fractured into poleis that wanted to take over each other: ______
- Crete was too busy with internal conflicts to try to conquer its neighbors: ______
- Rhodes had a treaty with Cretan mercenaries/pirate city-states (like Hierapytna) to combat piracy from Crete itself: Cretans: Athenians and Rhodians on suppressing supposed bandit peoples - Philip A. Harland / Pirates of the Mediterranean: Piracy as a Political and Economic Strategy in the Hellenistic World - ResearchGate
- Athens had an excellent navy and initiated maritime conquests: Wars of the Delian League - Wikipedia / First Peloponnesian War - Wikipedia
- Rhodes also had an excellent navy but used their fleets to combat piracy, not for conquests: The Rhodian fleet and the Karian coast - OpenEdition
- The sole(?) time Rhodes started a war was on Byzantion (AKA Byzantium) over tolls/tariffs for traveling through the Bosphorus Strait, a chokepoint to the Black Sea: The Histories of Polybius - Bill Thayer / UChicago (47-52, p. 395-427) / Rhodes - Attalus (for brief reference on how there were basically no other wars started by Rhodes)
- Rhodes was a bit more open/inclusive and also more cosmopolitan than some other Greek poleis/states: Ethnic diversity on Rhodes island: Inscriptional evidence - Philip A. Harland / Foreigners at Hellenistic Rhodes - Migrants and Membership
- The entire people of Rhodes were honored by Argos (with gold crowns, stele inscriptions, in temples and games/festivals): Attalus
- Honours given to the entire people of a polis were like how monarchs, heroes, and gods were worshipped (inscriptions, sacrifices, acknowledgements in temples and festivals): _________ / Argos and Rhodes - Attalus / ____
- Free trade and maritime laws:
- Ancient Greece practiced free trade (involving freedom of navigation / the norm of open seas): Trade in Ancient Greece - World History / How Anti-Trade Nativism Wrecked the Ancient Greeks - Barry Strauss
- Montreux Convention (signed 1936; guarantees the right to free navigation in the Bosporus: Türkiye only collects service fees, not customs): Wikipedia
- UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) (came into force in 1994; established freedom of navigation more broadly, including for straits—but this does not apply to the Bosporus, since the Montreux Convention already existed): Wikipedia
- Modern trade chokepoint issues including the Bosphorus (part of the Turkish Straits): Chokepoints and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade - Chatham House (e.g., p. 37).
- De facto (what happens in reality or practice but is not officially sanctioned) vs. de jure (what is enforceable under the law or even uncodified norms): De jure - Wikipedia
- Data issues
- fragmentation
- checks and balances
- turf wars
...
Notes:
If anyone's looking for more sources, let me know. I also may have forgotten to add some.
Chapter 18: Appendix 2: Playlist
Notes:
Here’s a playlist I carefully curated to follow the feel and the plot of Strategist.
I spent a lot of time making sure it would sound nice to hear the playlist in the order it's in—like the way "Memories On 47th St." (ch. 3) just perfectly rolls into "No Church in the Wild" (ch. 4) ... *chef's kiss*.
All tracks are available on Apple Music (aside from leaked songs). Not sure about Spotify.
I’ll be updating this playlist as I publish, so as not to "spoil" the story.
If there’s a way to share an Apple Music playlist without doxxing myself, please let me know!
Chapter Text
Playlist for Chapters 1-14:
Chapters 1: In which Malcolm meets an aggravating sea princess
- Confident - Demi Lovato
- The Lion the Beast the Beat - Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
Chapter 2: In which Malcolm wins and loses
- Run For Your Life - The Seige
- Run This Town (feat. Rihanna) - Jay-Z
- Ocean (feat. Khalid) – Martin Garrix
Chapter 3: In which Malcolm uses his social skills
- Happy Birthday (feat. John Legend) - Kygo
- Curious - Hayley Kiyoko
- If I Can’t Have You (Gryffin Remix) - Shawn Mendes & Gryffin
- Here - Alessia Cara
- Memories On 47th St. - Vic Mensa
Chapter 4: In which Malcolm helps kill some industries
- No Church in the Wild (feat. Frank Ocean & The-Dream) - Jay-Z
- On the Corner (feat. Lil Durk & Kd Young Cocky) - G Herbo
- Who Gon Stop Me - Jay-Z & someone
- Murder to Excellence - Jay-Z
- Empire State of Mind (feat. Alicia Keys) - Jay-Z
- Good Morning / Harlem - Langston Hughes
- Mississippi Goddam - Andra Day
- New Americana - Halsey
Chapter 5: In which Malcolm doesn't actually hate a party
- El Ritmo Psicodélico - Eleni Foureira
- Ti Koitas (feat. Mike) - Eleni Foureira
- Aeraki (To Thiliko) - Eleni Foureira
- jealousy, jealousy - Olivia Rodrigo
- Mata Hari (Greek Version) - Josephine
- Into You - Ariana Grande
Chapter 6: In which Malcolm gets a little raunchy
- Vasilissa - Eleni Foureira
- Body Say - Demi Lovato
- private thoughts - Lena
- Sto Theo Me Paei - Eleni Foureira
- Close To You - Gracie Abrams
- Gimme What I Want - Miley Cyrus
- Teeth - 5 Seconds of Summer
Chapter 7: In which Malcolm faces death
- React - The Pussycat Dolls
- Don't Play - Halsey
Chapter 8: In which Malcolm comes to his senses
- Feels Like Summer - Childish Gambino
- Your Type - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Gimme Love - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Making the Most of the Night - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Only Angel - Harry Styles
- Alive - Spencer Sutherland
Chapter 9: In which Malcolm picks up a habit
- Something in the Air - Steelfeather
- Death of Me - Julien Kelland
- Halo - Little Dume
- Older Than I Am - Lennon Stella
- Kindly Calm Me Down - Meghan Trainor
- Too Many Friends - Spencer Sutherland
- Summer Love - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Lucid - Rina Sawayama
Chapter 10: In which Malcolm inspects cabins
- Friends - Meghan Trainor
- Bends - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Woman - Andreya Triana
- Poli_Ploki - Eleni Foureira
Chapter 11: In which Malcolm gets psychoanalyzed
- Can We Again - Carly Rae Jepsen
- Genius - LSD
- Fotiá (Hellberg Remix) - Evangelia
- Perder Control - Evangelia & Eleni Foureira
Chapter 12: In which Malcolm meddles in godly drama
- Wild Child (feat. Jake Torrey) - Lupe Fiasco
- Don’t Give Up - Grammatik, Ryan Shaw & Probcause
- Oxytocin - Billie Eilish
- El Dorado - Shaylen
- When I'm Alone - Carly Rae Jepsen
Chapter 13: In which Malcolm is sick and tired
- Crazy Ass B*tch - Rozzi
- Puppeteer - MAX
- Bad Influence - Spencer Sutherland
Chapter 14: In which Malcolm gets dragged into the hot seat
- Satoshi Nakamoto (feat. Adrian Lau & Probcause) - Gramatik
- AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM - Beyoncé
- Cruel Intentions - Delacey & G-Eazy
- Wrong (feat. Lil Uzi Vert) - MAX
- Aristourgima - Eleni Foureira & Arcade
...
Pages Navigation
Account Deleted on Chapter 1 Tue 21 May 2019 04:55AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Tue 21 May 2019 09:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
Account Deleted on Chapter 1 Wed 22 May 2019 03:18AM UTC
Comment Actions
offlowercrowns (Guest) on Chapter 1 Thu 23 May 2019 03:02PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Thu 23 May 2019 07:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
offlowercrowns (Guest) on Chapter 1 Fri 24 May 2019 05:59AM UTC
Comment Actions
storychaser on Chapter 1 Sat 25 May 2019 02:45PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sat 25 May 2019 10:01PM UTC
Comment Actions
happy_mango on Chapter 1 Mon 03 Jun 2019 08:56PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Mon 03 Jun 2019 10:32PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 30 Jun 2019 08:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
sick gang (Guest) on Chapter 1 Wed 05 Jun 2019 02:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jun 2019 08:28PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 30 Jun 2019 08:30PM UTC
Comment Actions
Mira (Guest) on Chapter 1 Fri 06 Dec 2019 05:48AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 08 Dec 2019 03:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
Mira (Guest) on Chapter 1 Wed 11 Dec 2019 12:37AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 15 Dec 2019 10:40AM UTC
Comment Actions
Scarlett (Guest) on Chapter 1 Wed 26 Jun 2019 04:55AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jun 2019 01:55PM UTC
Comment Actions
Scarlett (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jun 2019 06:53PM UTC
Comment Actions
SummerNightStar717 on Chapter 1 Sun 21 Jul 2019 01:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 08 Dec 2019 04:05AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azaneti on Chapter 1 Mon 29 Jul 2019 07:00PM UTC
Comment Actions
StarReacher on Chapter 1 Tue 10 Sep 2019 04:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Sun 08 Dec 2019 03:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
dinosaurfangirl on Chapter 1 Sun 27 Oct 2019 04:36PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ketopi on Chapter 1 Mon 06 Sep 2021 08:28PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Mon 06 Sep 2021 10:38PM UTC
Comment Actions
hamsterboo on Chapter 1 Thu 10 Mar 2022 03:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 1 Thu 10 Mar 2022 04:12PM UTC
Comment Actions
hamsterboo on Chapter 1 Thu 10 Mar 2022 04:20PM UTC
Comment Actions
happy_mango on Chapter 2 Sun 15 Dec 2019 02:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Sun 15 Dec 2019 05:26PM UTC
Comment Actions
Scarlett (Guest) on Chapter 2 Mon 16 Dec 2019 04:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
Mira (Guest) on Chapter 2 Thu 19 Dec 2019 04:35AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Sat 18 Apr 2020 05:47PM UTC
Comment Actions
Foozler165 on Chapter 2 Sun 12 Jan 2020 02:27AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Sat 18 Apr 2020 05:52PM UTC
Comment Actions
Onlychoice on Chapter 2 Sat 01 Feb 2020 06:02PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Sat 18 Apr 2020 06:02PM UTC
Comment Actions
Onlychoice on Chapter 2 Mon 20 Apr 2020 02:49AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Mon 20 Apr 2020 05:07AM UTC
Comment Actions
Onlychoice on Chapter 2 Fri 24 Apr 2020 05:28AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Tue 15 Dec 2020 09:01AM UTC
Comment Actions
Bucky05 on Chapter 2 Tue 18 Feb 2020 07:34PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Sat 18 Apr 2020 06:09PM UTC
Comment Actions
Foozler165 on Chapter 2 Sat 18 Apr 2020 08:03PM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Mon 20 Apr 2020 05:08AM UTC
Comment Actions
Bucky05 on Chapter 2 Sun 19 Apr 2020 03:02AM UTC
Comment Actions
iannageorge on Chapter 2 Mon 20 Apr 2020 05:11AM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation