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“I fear I am spurning all my teachings and making a fool of myself,” Dax said.
“You are not. Many mortals become overwhelmed in the presence of gods. Aikos dropped to his knees on several occasions.”
“So he said.” Dax’s cheeks darkened again after muttering that, clearly knowing the reason for some of those knee scuffs. “I mean—”
“Aikos told you of his time with each of us?”
“Yes.” He cringed.
“And what did he tell you of his time with me?”
Dax hid his face by looking to the sky. “That… your coupling was heat and cold colliding high above where Atlas holds the world.”
“He spoke only of that?”
“Yes?” This yes was spoken with questioning, as if Dax wondered if I might tell him more. There was more to tell. There was the chaos of my mind and my mourning from all my mortal loves lost, and the moment when I’d pushed Aikos from my chariot to enact a rescue of Icarus that I had failed at the first time.
I could tell Dax that, but I did not want to worry him that I was some mad god to be feared. Perhaps I was, but I did not wish to be. So, instead, what I told him was, “I recounted my best-known stories to Aikos to see which he knew and to remind myself of some of my losses. He knew my stories well.”
“As do I,” Dax said with a touch of reflection. “I feel like I know so much about you, but those are stories, as you said, legends. Your valiant slaying of Python. Your time as a mortal to repent for that slaying. The curse of Casandra. The arrow loosed that claimed Achilles. The loss of, um…” He did not trail off because of forgetfulness but the realization that he named my greatest loss of all.
“Hyacinth,” I finished. There were other losses, other failures, but his I felt to this day.
“Yes,” Dax said. “It all feels so much grander and greater than me.”
“I began my life as a mortal, as you said, but I never took it for punishment. It made me… love you.” I used the grand you, meaning all mankind, but I assumed he didn’t know I had never and feared I would never say those words directly to a mortal or fellow god. “It made me love you in a way not all my brethren can understand.”
His worry softened, and though he had venerated me above other gods before, in that moment, finally, he saw I could be an equal. That was all I ever wanted, and why I sought potential love with mortals more than my own kind. With another god, I would always be reaching. If set above, I would always be reached after. I wanted to reach outward, meet my love in the middle, and embrace them like only equals could.
“Let us get to know each other as men, Dax, not as courtesan and god. Tomorrow, after I bring the dawn, I will seek you again.”
He looked disappointed. Given Aikos’s experiences here, Dax had likely assumed the evening would end with him stripped and ravaged by a god with the same searing touch that Aikos had told him about. But I could not risk ruining my chance at love again, not when success was so tenuous, regardless of the prophecy I’d seen. Prophecies could be thwarted, and this time, I would take great care with how things progressed.
If my heart thawed only to freeze once more, it would crack and shatter, never to feel warmth again.
“My lord Apollo, um… if we are to part for the evening, what do I… do?” Dax asked with a furtive look around our balcony and its steep drop-off toward the distant earth in one direction, and the maze of unfathomable Olympian architecture in the other. “What about my priest? I was not happy with him, but he was by no means a poor master. He will find me gone when he wakes and wonder.”
“Aphrodite will handle that,” I assured him. “And for as long as you wish to remain on Olympus, Dax, you shall, in your own quarters.”
I’d showed him to them, prepared in advance by Aikos, who’d crafted the rooms especially for his friend. When we parted, I kissed his hand like when we met, but nothing more.
Yet.
In the mortal courtyard, today Dax was wearing white with a violet sash. He looked just as striking as the night before, more so, for while talking to fellow mortals, he was at ease. He lounged upon one of the pillowed benches with an eruption of his captivating laugh and a shake of his auburn hair like a cascade of deep, dark crimson.
There were muses among the mortals. I wondered if Dax realized. Included was Calliope, their chief and muse of epic poetry. ’Twas her who’d made Dax laugh, and I heard her ask him to recite something, a favored poem of his, for it seemed she and her brethren were as taken with Dax as everyone else.
Beauteous courtesan who I so desired to know, to understand the heart of before I discovered what lay beneath the layers of his tunic, recited from Theocritus the “Death of Adonis.”
When he neared its conclusion, his voice drew me out of hiding.
“‘As on a carven statue
Men gaze, I gazed on him;
I seemed on fire with mad desire
To kiss that offered limb:
