Odysseus perched up on the mast of their ship as it cruised across the waves. The men had become hale and hearty soon after Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and Odysseus hoped with all his heart that her descendants would remember and appreciate her bravery and selflessness. Adresteia fluttered up to the mast and transformed into her human form to sit next to him, using her powers to hide them from the sailors below. Odysseus flipped his coin to her, “For your thoughts?”
She looked at the strange coin – it looked like solid gold, but felt a bit too light. It had an oddly notched hole in the middle, surrounded by an engraving of a snake eating itself. “Is this the coin Thalassas gave you all those years ago?”
“The one and same,” Odysseus said, “Also the same coin I rather foolishly gave to Paris, pretending it was a good luck charm.”
“Why was that foolish?”
“Because it really was a good luck charm.”
“Be careful with it Odysseus,” Adresteia said, “There are very few things that are truly lucky in this world, but none of them are inherently good or bad. That which trends unnaturally in your favor may one day betray you.”
“Well, I’ve always treated luck as a matter of last resort. Any day of the week I would rather rely on my wits, my aim, or even my strength. I avoid gambling with my money or my life.”
“Then why carry it at all?” Adresteia asked, handing it back to him.
“I guess I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t.”
They sat for a while feeling the salty breeze. Though the circumstances were certainly grim, both of them had drawn comfort from the familiarity of working together again. Though they’d seen each other many times over the last ten years, it had been years since they’d been tasked with a mission that took them away together. Despite that, though, over the preceding months they’d fallen back in synch.
“I remember another night like this,” Adresteia reminisced, “I remember how much I wanted to kiss you that night.”
“I remember how much I wanted you to kiss me,” Odysseus smiled, “I also remember the night we spent together when we finally made port in Ithaca.”
“I would hope so,” Adresteia playfully punched his leg.
“And I remember you leaving without a word.”
“You mean you remember waking up without me.”
“No, I mean I remember you leaving.”
“You were awake?”
“I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about things...”
“Like what?”
“Well, I remember wondering if taking a goddess from behind like we did on our second go around was blasphemy or not.”
“What did you decide?”
“Well it was after I went down on you, and I figured that eating out a goddess’s pussy was the most pious thing I would probably ever do.”
Adresteia laughed, loudly enough to clap her hand across her mouth. “I’m sure it was a real sacrifice for you,” she teased.
“Well, at first… It was putting a hell of a crick in my neck, but then when we switched it up a bit I did really get into it.”
“Yeah, because I started sucking on your cock, jackass,” Adresteia smiled.
“You know, given our relative inexperience at that time,” Odysseus said, “I think we did pretty damn well.”
“We really did, didn’t we?”
“So why did you leave?”
Adresteia froze; in the decade since that night, Odysseus had never asked her that.
“You loved Penelope,” she said simply.
“True,” Odysseus said, “And I still do. But I always worried that you left without saying anything because you were ashamed of what we did.”
“What? No!” Adresteia hadn’t expected that at all, “I wanted to stay, but…” She trailed off, not planning to finish the sentence, but Odysseus quietly waited for her to do so. His nonverbal persistence eventually pushed her into letting it out.
“I wanted to stay, but I was afraid of what would happen next. Of what I would want next. Would we just pretend it was all normal? Would we have had breakfast with your family? Would I have spent the day strolling about Ithaca would you? Would we have sat and watched the sunset before enjoying another night of passion?”
“Well, my father headed down to the wharf early that morning, so you would have only met my mother,” Odysseus said, “Which would have been awkward because she knew I still loved Penelope and intended to marry her, and she wouldn’t have approved of me bringing unfamiliar women into my bed. But she wouldn’t have held it against you, and she would have offered you juice and flat bread for breakfast. I think we had some smoked meats, too. You would have met my younger sister, Ctimene, and our friend Eumaeus. They would have made obnoxious kissy noises and asked embarrassing questions. Then I would have taken you on a hike up past our fields into the mountains above the city, and tried futilely to impress you with feats of tragically mortal physical prowess. And then there would have been the sunset, and more sex. So much sex…”
“You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it?”
“Well, in the midst of worrying about the theological implications of carnal relations with a deity, I had some time to plan our weekend in painstaking detail.”
“The whole weekend? Really?” Adresteia said.
“I’m always the man with the plan,” Odysseus said, “If someone says, ‘Hey, Odysseus, what should we do today?’ they expect a thorough and detailed answer.”
“I thought about the future too,” Adresteia said, “I thought about staying with you and making love to you until you forgot about Penelope. I thought about settling down for a few decades to have demigod children, or just snatching you away to travel the world together.”
“As I recall, Penelope suggested something along those lines.”
“I remember,” Adresteia said, “that was a good night.”
“It was,” Odysseus said, “I’m still sorry about what happened at my coronation. Under any other circumstances, I would have been ecstatic to receive such an invitation, but…”
“No, no,” Adresteia said, “Penny and I misread the situation. We thought it would be a fun way to celebrate. Neither of us realized how hard your father’s passing was on you. That was on us.”
“Most men fantasize about such things – and there I was, the opportunity literally falling into my lap, and I… was not up to the task,” Odysseus said, "I have regretted it ever since."
“Well, I wish you’d said something,” Adresteia said, “It’s not as if I’m any less fond of you and Penny than I ever was. I would have been willing to try again.”
“Oh,” Odysseus clutched his heart, “You tell me this now? Let me go tell the navigator to turn us around...”
Adresteia laughed, “The three of us will celebrate when we return you home, alive and intact. Penny will owe me.”
“I have to be intact, huh?”
“Well, I guess we can make things work, whatever happens. And if you don’t come back, maybe I’ll just move in with Penny and we’ll carry on without you.”
“I think I would rest easier if you did,” Odysseus said, “I love her so much Addy. I feared it might grow thin as the years went by, but it hasn’t. There’ve been ups and downs, but we always come out stronger. You have no idea how glad I am that you didn’t try to drive some sort of wedge between me and Penelope. But … I’ll admit, I still don't really understand why you didn’t? They say all is fair in love and war…”
“I’ve always respected your relationship with Penelope, Odysseus”
“But you didn’t know Penelope yet,” Odysseus said, “Not personally. Not when you left my bed.”
“But I knew she was a good woman, because I knew any woman you could love that much had to be. And I knew she was mortal, and that while I will have centuries to take lovers and create families, you two only have decades. I couldn’t take that away from you two. It would have been wrong.”
“Thank you,” Odysseus said, genuinely, “I don’t know that I could ever do anything that selfless. And truth be told… if you had tried to steal me from her… you might have succeeded, and I… everything that is good and worthwhile in my life… I would have missed all of that.”
Adresteia blushed, “I… Well… Hey, it’s not like I wanted to watch my first boy-toy age into a doddering, dripping raisin.”
“Dripping? A drippy raisin?”
“Mortals drip when they get old.”
“We drip?” Odysseus asked.
“Old humans drip fluids out of about every orifice but their ears. And those fill up with hair and wax.”
Odysseus laughed, “So this is the state of the human condition, viewed from the outside.”
Adresteia smiled again. They sat listening to the breeze and the waves for a while, “You know," Adresteia finally said, "Your wife did say we could keep each other’s spirits up…”
“Are we under that much stress already, or are you just that horny?”
“The night of your coronation was the last time I even came close to having sex, Odysseus.”
“What? Why?” he asked.
“Honestly, just too busy. Athena’s had me running about here and there, spying on people. I would hate to think how many hours out of the past five years I’ve just spent perching on tree branches and fence rails watching people.”
“But I’m sure you make a very attractive bird,” Odysseus laughed, “There must have been some suitors vying for your attention.”
“Oh, there were, but… well, that’s gross. Artemis and Zeus do their thing, but humans are as far out of my species as I’m willing to foray.”
“Five years… no sex for five years?”
“The curse of being a work-oriented woman,” Adresteia joked, “Do you want to now?”
“I’ve got a deck full of sleeping men down there that I think would notice if we curled up under a blanket together.”
“I meant up here,” Adresteia winked.
“What? You can’t be serious…” Odysseus laughed, “You want to have sex at the top of a thirty foot mast?”
“Truth be told, I started thinking about it a few minutes ago, and now I just want to know if we can pull it off.”
“You’re serious?”
Adresteia held out her hands and a pair of silk ropes appeared in a sparkle of light, “Trust me?”
Odysseus looked down – the shroud of darkness Adresteia had created below them made it impossible to see the hard deck of the ship, but it was enough to know it was there.
“I suppose wine would be the opposite of helpful, right now, right?”
Adresteia simply smiled and began tying one of the ropes around his ankle.
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