Enjoy.
This was…strange. No quests, no monsters—with the exception of the chimera, but normally once a monster tried and failed, another followed it—and it was so…calm. I thought it might have been the calm before the storm, but I didn’t want to think about that. The New Year was here and lucky Annabeth began school one week after me.
I sat on my bed, leaning against the headboard, looking over my English homework: a two page comparison between Macbeth and Hamlet. Annabeth sat in front of me, between my legs, her back against my front as she typed absentmindedly on her laptop.
Without a warning, she started her playlist of songs from YouTube and I was bombarded with music that ranged from classical—that she listened to when drawing her architecture plans—to modern. Thankfully, the modern music didn’t include any of the disgusting rap some of my school friends listened to.
She moved the laptop off her lap and turned around, kneeling now.
I glanced over the paper I was trying my hardest to proofread. “What?”
But she didn’t answer me. Instead she put her knees on either side of my hips, resting her hands on my shoulders.
“Well, okay then,” I said, setting down the paper. “Uh, Annabeth—”
Her lips silenced mine.
Okay, I thought to myself. This is…okay. My breathing was quickening and my heart was thudding, but I managed to calm myself down. Just kiss her—you know how to do that…kind of.
The situation continued pleasantly enough until she backed away. Her grey eyes were full of something…new, scary, dangerous.
“Annabeth, maybe we should stop.”
“Yeah, maybe we should.”
She was breathless and breathtaking at the same time.
Instead of making her get off me, I did the stupidest thing possible in this situation and held onto her hips, pulling her even tighter against me.
“Jeez, Annabeth.” I kissed her slowly. “This is…awful. I mean—” I mentally slapped myself and started over. “This is a little…mature—don’t ya think?”
She just kept kissing me.
And I was so caught up in her kisses that I forgot about everything else, about where we were, who we were and just focused on her—her lips, her hands, her breathing. I was testing my limits. She was making me very, very nervous. But it was the kind of nervous that happened when I was in battle, when I was fighting—adrenaline, anxiety, eagerness…
“Perseus!”
I instantly pulled my lips from Annabeth’s, looking towards the door where my mom was standing, glaring furiously at what she saw.
“Oh,” Annabeth whispered, moving off me and standing. “Hi, Mrs. Blofis.”
Paul appeared in the doorway, smiling calmly, a hint of mischievousness in his eyes. “Hey there, Percy. How was your day?”
It all went downhill from there. Long story short, my phone was out of my possession and Annabeth and I didn’t see each other for a long, long time.
The next time I saw her, it was her birthday, April 9th, and even though my mom was reluctant to let me be alone with her again—and really, who could blame her?—Paul had calmed her down and I was off to her boarding school.
When she got over her initial surprise of realizing that I knew her birthday, she was happy to see me. I think.
--
The clang that her celestial bronze knife made against Riptide made me smile. We’d been fighting for maybe twenty minutes and she still wasn’t giving in. She was fighting with maybe a ten inch blade while Riptide was almost half my height.
I had been careful not to actually make contact with her skin, but she wasn’t trying that hard. It didn’t hurt when the knife came in contact with my skin, and she hadn’t yet attacked my vulnerable spot—not that I thought she would.
“Getting tired, Owlhead?”
She scowled. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”
I thrust forward and she blocked the jab easily, getting in a slice of her own. “Answer the question.”
“Not in the least.”
The easy training went on for a while, but it lacked passion—real fight-or-flight instinct involved in battle. We eventually gave up, collapsing in a sweaty mess before I voted on a swim. She had settled on a shower while I walked from the field to my cabin, grabbing my swim trunks and heading down to the lake.
It was Sunday afternoon and in two hours Annabeth and I would be heading back to the real world, back to the place where normal teenagers don’t practice sword fighting for survival, where Greek Gods and Goddesses were simply folklore and fairy tales to explain mundane things like the sunrise and give a final resting place that might make people more wary about life choices.
I wasn’t ready to leave yet.
“Percy, darling, could you move my umbrella for me? The sun really is beating down hard today.”
I looked up from the lake. There was a gorgeous woman lying on a pink chaise beach chair that seemed extremely out of place in the rugged setting. She had a bright pink umbrella stuck in the sand that was covering her from the sun and I had the urge to roll my eyes. Instead, I stood still. Aphrodite was dressed in a bathing suit of her favorite color—duh, pink—and looked very…prissy.
“Didn’t you just love that little twist with Rachel? Hm…well, she’s Apollo’s now.”
I scowled.
“Now, now, Percy, just relax. Annabeth and you…are happy, correct?”
I was a bunch happier before you intruded. I stayed quiet.
“I thought for sure you were going to fall for Rachel. She was so much easier to be around, you know, I’m sure. And when she kissed you before the war—oh, my, that certainly made me happy. I thought you were really going to fall for her.”
I didn’t want to say what I was thinking—so had I.
“But, seriously, Percy. You don’t think I would let you get off that easily? Annabeth is Athena’s daughter. Athena and Poseidon—my Zeus, they’re worse than teen girls after the same football player! Always, always arguing!” She squished up her nose as if she had smelled something funny. “They’re both so stuffy. But it makes for wonderful drama—especially where you, Percy dear, are concerned.”
Unfortunately, this was true. I wasn’t Athena’s favorite person in the world, and not only because I was in a relationship with her daughter. My dad had managed to piss her off too much, too often, and that meant that Annabeth and I were basically Romeo and Juliet, except with a happier ending…I hoped.
“So, I’ve concocted this wonderful novel for you and Annabeth.” She leaned forward, smirking. “The question is—is it a romance or a tragedy?”
“Why are you here, Aphrodite?”
“Just came to warn you. By the way, Annabeth’s on her way.” She cocked her head, as if listening to a voice inside her head for a moment. Then she scowled—though her face was still beautiful—and said, “And my darling husband is calling my name. I’ll be in touch, Percy.” With a wink of a perfectly made-up eye, she erupted in a puff of pink that smelled like perfume.
When I was done coughing, I heard, “Seaweed Brain, you done swimming yet?”
I had a feeling that the last 5 weeks of school were going to be the most vacation I could have. When summer came along, I had a feeling that some Gods were going to want to have a conversation with me. In no uncertain terms, some of these conversations were likely to end badly.
I liked writing this, cuz I thought it was kind of more of a real relationship. Percy and Annabeth are teenagers and can't always be perfect, never caught, etc, etc. It felt right to write... Lol.
chapter 5 will be up soon, i promise.
lots and lots of never ending love,
Alyssa
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