He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead.
“You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to — what was it you called it? Oh, right — cohabitate with me.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly —”
That had nothing to do with him — it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however.
“We can take things as slowly as you want, but you know it’s too late now to change your mind, Pierce,” he said, in a warning tone.
“Of course,” I said. I could see I had approached this all wrong. Where, when you actually needed one, was one of those annoying women’s magazines with advice on how to handle your man? Although that advice probably didn’t apply to death deities. “Because the Furies are after me. And I promised you that I wouldn’t try to escape. That isn’t what I was —”
“No,” he said, with an abrupt shake of his head. “The Furies have no part in this. It doesn’t matter anymore whether or not you try to escape.” He was pacing the length of the room. A muscle had begun to twitch wildly in the side of his jaw. “I thought you knew. I thought you understood. Haven’t you read Homer?”
Not again. Mr. Smith was obsessed with this Homer person, too.
“No, John,” I said, with forced patience. “I’m afraid we don’t have time to study the ancient Greek poets in school anymore because we have so much stuff to learn that happened since you died, such as the Civil War and the Holocaust and making files in Excel —”
“Well, considering what they had to say about the Fates,” John interrupted, impatiently, “Homer might possibly have been of more use to you.”
“The Fates?” The Fates were something I dimly remembered having been mentioned in the section we’d studied on Greek mythology. They were busybodies who presided over everyone’s destiny. “What did Homer have to say about them?”
John dragged a hand through his hair. For some reason, he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “The Fates decreed that anyone who ate or drank in the realm of the dead had to remain there for all eternity.”
I stared at him. “Right,” I said. “Only if they ate pomegranate seeds, like Persephone. The fruit of the dead.”
He stopped pacing suddenly and lifted his gaze to mine. His eyes seemed to burn through to my soul.
“Pomegranate seeds are what Persephone happened to eat while she was in the Underworld,” he said. “That’s why they call them the fruit of the dead. But the rule is any food or drink.”
A strange feeling of numbness had begun to spread across my body. My mouth became too dry for me to speak.
“However you feel about me, Pierce,” he went on, relentlessly, “you’re stuck here with me for the rest of eternity.”
I didn’t hate him.
After the way the sight of him being carried away by that wave in my dream had gutted me, I knew I’d never be able to hate him.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself. That’s the phrase that had been tattooed on my guidance counselor Jade’s wrist. I tried always to remember it, not just because she was dead now, and that was partly my fault, but because sometimes when I got angry, bad things happened. People got hurt.
In the past, it had always been John who’d inflicted that pain.
This time when I got angry, it was John who got hurt.
Which was probably why, by the time he left, I was the one sobbing on the very same couch where he’d claimed to have spent the night. I wasn’t crying because I hated him. I was crying because I hated myself.
“You knew,” I’d accused him, when I’d finally found my voice after he’d made his revelation. “And you didn’t tell me. The whole time I was sitting there eating all those waffles, you didn’t tell me. You … you tricked me!”
“I didn’t trick you,” he’d insisted. “I thought you knew!”
I was quickly discovering that the expensive private school education for which my father had insisted on paying was worthless. All of the information I’d been taught at the Westport Academy for Girls back in Connecticut was either erroneous or useless to me in my current life as the consort of a death deity.
“You eat,” I’d said to him accusatorily. “I saw you eat. And you leave here all the time. I’ve seen you in Connecticut, in Isla Huesos …”
“Did I say you can never leave?” he’d demanded.
“No. But —”
“But every time you do, you’ll see your friends and family moving on with their lives, while you’ll never age, and always have to come back here … to me.” His tone became embittered. “I can see how thrilled you are by that prospect.”
Tears had sprung into my eyes — not at the idea of spending eternity with him, but of watching my mother grow old and die before my eyes. I felt weepy every time I thought of it.
Seeing the tears, he’d softened, adding imploringly, “Pierce, you were hungry. You had to eat. If I had said something about it, what would you have done … gone without food?”