Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters Page 5

  I remember, in a flash, the one time Icarus kissed me, five years ago. He only did it to check and see if he was really gay. His lips were soft, and after about a second, he pulled back, saying with a brisk laugh, “Nothing. You?”

  I laughed, too, back then, even though it hurt.

  I haven’t gotten close to kissing anyone since then.

  I know, all of a sudden, that Theseus is going to kiss me. I have no idea what I’m going to do about it, other than to say for certain that I will kiss him back.

  Before he can kiss me, he leans toward me and grabs my right hand. My scraped, bruised, and burning right hand.

  My stifled cry of pain kills the mood with amazing effectiveness.

  “Oh Hades, Ariadne, you did hurt your hand.” He holds it into the dim light, and the scrape is a dark stain on my palm.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.

  “It didn’t seem important,” I say softly.

  “Come on, let’s get you upstairs so you can get that cleaned up. You’re going to get an infection.”

  Nothing like medical talk to make me feel like an idiot.

  “Fine,” I say, standing up and facing the elevator that will take us back up into the lighted world above. I lean into the retinal scanner, then press the UP button.

  As soon as we step on the elevator car, he will see me. Torn, bloodied, and messy. He will be full of questions that I’m not allowed to answer.

  Without really deciding to do it, I turn toward him. I go up on tiptoe and press my lips to his. They are exactly as soft as I have been imagining. He tastes like he smells. Clean, minty. Fresh.

  It’s an instant, a moment, a flash, before the elevator dings and the doors slide open.

  I pull back quickly and step into the elevator, seeing myself in the mirrored interior.

  Messy ponytail. Torn pajamas. Rubber boots.

  He, on the other hand, looks very cute, and surprised as he follows me onto the elevator.

  I push the button for the lobby.

  I’m not surprised when he asks me, “Why do you have rainboots on?”

  I don’t answer. I can’t answer.

  “Do you go into the maze?” he asks.

  I look away, not wanting to see his face. “I can’t talk about this.”

  “Ariadne,” he says. “Look at me.”

  When I do, all I see is concern. Empathy. It stabs through my heart.

  His voice drops down a level. “What do they make you do?”

  The words rise up in me. My secrets. I could tell him. The things I’ve never told anyone, not even Icarus. The terror of the cows when the doors open and they can smell the Minotaur. The competitors. My brother’s pain.

  I look up at the cameras on the ceiling. “Stop asking me questions.”

  “I’m trying to help you,” he says, his voice quiet.

  “You can’t,” I say. The elevator stops and the doors glide open.

  I walk out of the elevator into the empty lobby, and he follows me.

  “You should be able to find your way back from here,” I say, pointing across the expanse of marble and gold to the walkway that leads to the hotel.

  “Ariadne,” he says, holding my wrist, right below the torn skin on my palm. It felt so intimate and private to have him touch me underground, but here, in the wide-open expanse of marble and gold that is the lobby, anyone could walk out of one of these elevators; cameras watch us from every corner. I feel exposed.

  Is my face showing everything that I am feeling and thinking? How much I want him to keep touching me? If I’m not careful, I will reveal everything to him.

  “When can I see you again?” he whispers. Then he lifts my hand and gently kisses my wrist, right at the place where my blue veins show through my skin. A shiver runs through me.

  Oh gods.

  I pull my hand out of his.

  “I don’t know,” I say, getting back onto the elevator. “I don’t know.”

  FIVE

  I wake up with a jolt. In my dreams, I have been running the maze. There is nothing novel in that—it’s basically my recurring dream. What’s weird is who I’m chasing. Every other night that I’ve had this dream, I’ve been chasing my brother, the Minotaur. Last night, I was chasing Theseus.

  Oh gods. Theseus.

  Did I dream everything that happened last night, seeing him in the hallway? Him touching me? Me kissing him?

  Oh gods. I kissed him. Did that really happen?

  I look down at my scraped palm, then at the spot on my wrist above it, where he kissed me. Yes. It happened. I can still feel the imprint of his lips on my wrist like a brand.

  What am I going to do?

  I want to see him again, but I can’t. Because apparently, I can’t trust myself to think clearly when I’m with him.

  How can I have gotten myself in this situation? I came so close to telling him everything, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know what he was doing down there last night, waiting for me to trip on him. I mostly believe that he didn’t hook up with Hippolyta, but, still, why was he down there? He never told me.

  I jump in the shower, carefully scrubbing my hands and my knee. Then I pull on jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. I have five hours until I have to put on the pressed chiton, hanging off the back of my closet door. Five hours until I have to put on my mask.

  Like every other morning, toast and orange juice are waiting for me on a tray when I get out of the bathroom. Dependably, it appears, ten minutes after I get out of bed. They time it so that I never see the person who delivers food.

  I take a small piece of my toast and throw it into the fireplace, with its gas log that burns constantly, day or night. An offering for the gods. I say the same prayer I always do—Please remove the curse from my brother—then I grab my ball of silver thread and my phone and leave my room. I take the elevator up to the 161st floor at the top of Daedalus’s tower. It was 158 floors, but last year we added a few more because some Persians built a 160-story tower.

  At the center of the top floor, there is a room without windows. The control room. It takes a retinal scan to get in. A Klaxon sounds and lights flash while the door is open, to warn anyone inside that they are no longer secure. As soon as the door closes, the sound stops.

  Screens cover almost every surface—LCD monitors for editing, the control panel for the maze, a bank of monitors for the security feeds. The only thing that isn’t electronic is Icarus’s big inspiration board. He’s got drawings he’s done for his ideas for projects—movies, TV, multimedia games. My favorite is a self-portrait wearing a full set of wings. The feathers are in every color of the rainbow, a striking contrast to his monochrome clothes.

  As I expected, Icarus is sitting in his favorite chair, peering at one of the screens through his thick-rimmed black glasses, headphones covering his ears.

  He is wearing his uniform—black jeans, white shirt, black moto jacket, black sneakers. I remember when he adopted it, five years ago—he told me that the greatest artists had a uniform, so they could put their energy into their art, not their clothes. I miss when he actually picked out his own clothes. There was this one pair of orange corduroys that I dearly loved. Not that he would admit to wearing them now.

  He doesn’t look up when I come in, he’s so absorbed in what he’s doing, so I have to tap his shoulder.

  He jumps out of his chair.

  “Hades, Ariadne, give a guy a warning, would you?”

  “Didn’t you notice the horns and flashing lights?”

  He looks harassed, running his fingers through his already aggressively tousled hair. “Look, Ariadne, I’ve got a hundred hours of video that have to be edited down to ten minutes of film. I’ve got fourteen stultifying competitors who I have to turn into stars, and my dad is off, somewhere, dealing with”—he glances at his phone, which dings—“centerpieces. Apparently. Why in the world your mother can’t deal with the centerpieces, I don’t know … Why the raw footage is stored in
a place that requires top secret clearances, so most of my staff isn’t allowed up here, that is another question … Why I agreed to run a show that has had its ratings drop for the last ten years … So basically, yeah, it would be fair to say that I’m too busy for horns and flashing lights.”

  He glances at his watch.

  “Wait, aren’t you supposed to be on set for the makeovers?” He looks at a printed-out schedule on a sheet of eleven-by-seventeen paper, which is marked up in highlighter and sitting on the desk next to him. He points at it. “Look, here you are, in orange, makeover episode.”

  I can see that everything involving me has been highlighted in orange. There’s a lot of orange on his printout.

  “Hours away, Icarus; it’s hours away.”

  “Don’t you have to get ready?” he asks.

  I cock my head to the side.

  “Right, right. You’re you, so no.” He narrows his eyes at me. “One of these days, sister, one of these days. I’m getting you into hair and makeup if it kills me.”

  “No, you aren’t,” I say, “because if you do, I will be the one to kill you. Best friend or no best friend.”

  He sighs. “You would have fun if you let yourself relax. You don’t have to take everything so seriously, Ariadne. Why can’t you be a girl for once?”

  “That is an incredibly sexist thing to say. Being female doesn’t make me like makeup. Do I give you crap about what you like? Do I ask you when you are going to start throwing the discus? Or marathoning? Or any other guy stuff?”

  “No, you don’t, but the question is, Ariadne, what do you like? How do you know? Because you never try anything. Maybe hair and makeup isn’t your thing, but what is your thing?”

  We’ve had this conversation so many times, and I’m definitely not interested in having it now. “I’m not talking about this, Icarus.”

  “For the muses’ sake, Ariadne, take a class or something…”

  “You’re one to talk—did you actually set up any meetings when you were on the mainland? Did you talk to anyone about your projects?”

  I point at his inspiration board.

  “That’s not the same, Ariadne,” he says, irritated. “I didn’t have a moment of free time while I was in Athens. Running this show is going to be my stepping stone to bigger and better things, but that means I actually have to step on the stone. If I can’t run this well, no one will give me anything else to do. You, on the other hand, have nothing but free time.”

  “This is not why I’m here, Icarus.”

  He gives me a knowing look. “I know why you’re here. You’re here to say thank you.”

  “Why would I be saying thank you?”

  “A certain boy, name starts with T, ends with s, waiting for you along a long hallway…”

  “Icarus, you conniving snake, what did you do?”

  He throws up his hands. “Hold it right there. I didn’t make Theseus go down to the maze level. I told him that if he went to the accommodations there would be some chance he would see you, thus leaving him there for you to find. You should be thanking me. Not complaining.”

  I sigh. “I don’t need your interference, Icarus.”

  “Yes, you do,” he says. “I’m trying to add some excitement to your boring life, and if you had a shred of loving-kindness in that raisin-dry heart of yours, you would say thank you. You kissed him, too, although that was barely enough to count, but when he kissed your wrist, it was hot.”

  I am blushing red hot right now. Icarus left him down there so I would trip on him?

  “How could you be so sure that he wanted to see me?” I ask. “Maybe he wanted Hippolyta?”

  “No, he isn’t interested in Hippolyta, he’s interested in you, and I can show you proof.”

  Icarus pushes a few buttons, unplugs his headphones, and on the big screen in front of him, I can see a crowd of sweaty bodies and flashing lights, the electronic dance music thumping underneath everything.

  The camera pans the whole room—my mother’s creation. Topless girls painted gold dance on platforms suspended from the ceiling, occasionally tossing gold dust down on the crowd so that the gold sticks to sweaty shoulders and bare backs, glitters in hair, and sits like dandruff on the shoulders of the men’s suit jackets. Waiters walk the room with gold-rimmed fluted glasses and canapés balanced on golden trays.

  The camera finds Theseus standing next to Vortigern, who is clearly going for a barbarian thing: bare chest, tight leather pants. Theseus looks great, of course—blue suit jacket, open-collared white shirt. Hair just messy enough.

  Vortigern hands Theseus a shot glass and Theseus downs it.

  Then the camera turns, and five of the female competitors make their way through the crowd. It looks like the people on the dance floor are moving to make way for the girls, but of course there is a big, bulky old guy holding a giant camera and trailed by two or three other guys with lights and microphones pushing through the crowd. We keep that hidden from the audience.

  The competitors haven’t been made over yet, so they are still wearing the clothes they brought from home. Their Athens-appropriate party wear is hopelessly behind the times here in Crete. The competitors are sparkled out in their polyester department-store finery—glitter and sequins and artificial bling.

  Except for the girl at the center. Hippolyta. The Amazon. She is dressed for battle. A backless golden Amazon breastplate. Held up by what, exactly? It’s unclear. Her leather fighting kilt barely covers her behind. Her thighs are solid, incredibly strong. She looks like a sculpture of a goddess.

  She’s gorgeous. Not that I’m jealous. Okay, I’m a tiny bit jealous.

  The camera turns back to Theseus and Vortigern, and Vortigern steps toward her. “Hey, Hippolyta, you want to dance?”

  She raises her eyebrow. “No.”

  “But last night…,” he says.

  “Last night was last night, and today is today, and I don’t want to dance with you.” She steps closer to Theseus. Very close. “You, on the other hand,” she says, looking him up and down. “You’re looking fine, Your Majesty, very fine indeed.”

  “Thank you,” Theseus says. “Hey, don’t worry about the Your Majesty stuff. Like I said on the way over, Theseus is good.”

  She takes another step closer, the camera following her in, and Theseus’s face is impossible to read.

  “How do I look, Theseus?” She almost whispers his name.

  “Nice, very nice,” he says, smiling, but there is none of the sparkle I see when he’s looking at me. I catch myself feeling happy about that, and then I’m irritated at myself.

  “Did you get the memo about the gold?” Theseus asks, waving at the décor, and to me it sounds like he’s teasing.

  If he is, Hippolyta doesn’t notice.

  “This?” she says, running her hands down her body, drawing attention to every bit of her. “I thought it might come in handy.”

  She leans in closer. “Come see me later, if you’d like to help me get out of it.”

  Theseus gives nothing away. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he says.

  The music changes and Hippolyta turns away. “Come on, girls,” she announces, raising her arms in the air. “This is my song.”

  “Bye, Hippolyta,” Vortigern says, his voice breaking a little.

  She leads the other girls away, but the cameras stay with Theseus and Vortigern.

  “What a woman,” Vortigern says.

  “More than I can handle,” Theseus says, shaking his head. “More than I can handle.”

  Icarus stops the film.

  “See, he wasn’t interested in the Amazon. He came down there because I told him that you would be there if he waited for you, and I’m not the only one who sees it. Watch.”

  Icarus cues up another clip.

  Vortigern and Theseus are still together, standing against the wall in another part of the room. Theseus is slightly disheveled, eyes a little bleary. He’s looking around, but it’s not clear who he is looking fo
r, and I’m not sure whose POV the camera is coming from.

  Then I hear a breathy voice, and everything is clear.

  Acalle.

  The camera pulls back to show her marching toward Theseus with her model’s stride.

  “Gods,” Vortigern says loudly. “It’s Acalle.”

  “I know that, you idiot,” Theseus whispers. Then he holds out his hand, “Princess Acalle, so nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says, shaking out her hair and ignoring his hand. “She isn’t here, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” he asks.

  “I’ve seen you the whole night, looking around. My sister Ariadne isn’t here. She’s not coming. She doesn’t come to these.”

  “I wasn’t looking for…,” he says.

  “Sure,” she says. “Look, you seem like a nice guy, but I’m not stupid, no matter what you may have heard. I can see you are interested in her. Don’t mess with her, okay? Don’t say anything you don’t mean.”

  I blush, not able to decide if I’m embarrassed that Acalle is talking to Theseus about me, or if I’m glad that she cares enough to say something.

  She turns to Vortigern. “You, on the other hand, can tell me anything you like, as long as I get to keep looking at you.” She runs a manicured hand down his bare chest and he groans. “You are really amazing,” she says. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “You’re. So. Beautiful,” he manages.

  “That’s more like it.” She grabs his hand. “Dance with me?”

  She leads him out to the dance floor. Thus is Hippolyta forgotten under the spell of Acalle.

  Icarus stops the tape. “Acalle can see it, so why can’t you?”

  I feel like growling at both of them. “I don’t need your help, Icarus. And I don’t have time for this. Gods, this is going to get me in so much trouble. What if he starts asking me questions?”

  Icarus stands and puts his hands on my shoulders. “You do need my help, because you are hopeless. You need to relax and enjoy yourself. You’ve met a guy, you like him, he likes you. Go with the flow for a while. You don’t have to tell him your life story, you know. Now, get out of here and let me get back to work. I’ve got a show to make.”