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Do you dream? the boy asks.
This boy whose eyes are the Aegean’s, clear blue to the very bottom. This boy whose curls are his sister’s, coils of gold catching golden sun. This boy whose temerity is oceans and seas, relentless and defiant, a force they will all reckon with soon.
This boy who is Sally’s, a wonder, fearless and righteous and good, more precious than he knows.
This boy who is his.
He is surprised by the way it overwhelms him, this fact. The way it catches the breath in his throat, an unyielding hook on an unwilling prey, dragging the very core of him to the surface.
He has had sons before. Wanted, kept, some even adored. None, somehow, like this. None whose eyes—his own eyes—pierce through his marrow. None who could undo him, could bring him to his knees, with just three words and an open face.
Of course we dream, he answers, an echo from the other end of a blink of an eye. Of course my heart beats, Sally. Of course my blood flows. Of course, of course, of course.
None has had Sally’s wonder. None has had Sally’s heart.
Do you ever dream about mom? his boy asks, and he is disarmed.
What is a dream to a god?
He commands tides, rends the earth, unleashes storms that can remake continents and seas. He has been consumed, re-formed, made undeniable. Begged and worshiped, he is legend. He is myth itself. A god with more power at his fingertips than a mortal could dare to dream of, so limited are their dreams.
But what is a dream to a god?
Blue-white early morning sun filtered through fraying curtains, a broken dawn that might be enough against a vaster eternity.
Sally is already on the beach when he rises, tracing a path where the water kisses the sand, a curl of her hair blowing in the salt breeze. It’s nothing for the gentle Atlantic to bite at her ankles, dappling the hem of her skirt with the only constellation that’s his to give.
It’s everything when she turns to him and smiles.
“Dance with me,” she demands, unspooling her arms from her chest, and he has a hard time believing that light belongs to Apollo, when it radiates like this from her.
The summer tides have been placid, lulled quiet by the quiet in his own mind. Now, they laugh seafoam against her legs, even as he feigns an ire he doesn’t feel. “You dare command a god?” he asks, stepping closer to her reaching arms. Already, despite the inches still between them, she knows, they both know, she has him in her grasp.
“You’re not so special.” Her hand is cold against his chest now, against the thrum of a heart steady for millennia. Of course it beats.
“Impertinent woman,” he chides, pressing his hands to her back, his mouth to her jaw. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Her lips tilt into a smirk when he’s unable to keep the amusement from his voice.
“I know you’re not the god of dance,” she teases against his ear. “Should we ask Apollo for some lessons? Or Terpsichore?”
No. Neither. None. Nothing to interrupt this peace she creates, this dream he would never wake from. “We’ll dance, if you insist it.”
It’s against his mouth that she whispers, she promises, “I insist it.”
“Of course.” It’s easier than anything to lift her off her feet, to spin her around until their laughter rises above the crash of his seas. “Whatever you want, Sally, is yours.” Hers to command, though he never tells her, this mortal woman with a sardonic mouth and a sharp tongue.
They spend the first summer dancing, and the second passes in joy. In between, there are autumn storms, for Sally loves nothing more than the sound of rain while she reads. In boxes brushed with melting snow, there are pizzas with “extra olives, please, Don,” which might just be sacrilege if kissing her weren’t so sweet. There is Sally, growing in the way that spring grows, blushing with new life, heavy with that same burden. In the third summer, there is Percy, burnished eyelashes brushing round cheeks, fluttering open to reveal eyes that are his own. There is Percy, and with him, new meaning to pride, to love, to worry.
About me, his boy means but does not say.
Poseidon knows something about things that go unsaid, an inheritance he hadn’t known was his to bequeath.
The last night, he doesn’t say goodbye. Sally sits in the hospital bed, their newborn son asleep in her arms. “It’s better this way,” she tells him. “Safer,” and he can only agree. He presses a kiss to her mouth, a kiss to Percy’s brow, and gives them the fragile invisibility of distance from him.
“For Percy,” she tells him again, years later, another man’s ring on her finger, his pearl around her neck. And again, he can only agree.
How does he tell his boy that sometimes he dreams of sending the man in Sally’s apartment—her husband, worth less than the scum on the scum on her shoe, and yet more capable of protecting his son than his own father, a god—to the depths of Tartarus, that sometimes he revels in the dream of tearing the man limb from limb, but mostly he dreams of the warmth on the other side of a window pane, of throwing a baseball, and of hair going gray?
He did not dream of Sally before or during, but after, now, he dreams of a life he cannot give, a woman he cannot have, a boy he can’t not want. This dream, with this woman and with this boy, is dancing by the sea, olives on pizza, books on a creaking coffee table, all three of them sheltered from gentle rain. It is the soft rhythm of days into nights into years filled with mundane, everyday, impossible things.
His boy’s cheek is warm against his hand, and he’s dreamt of this, too.
His boy’s cheek is warm against his hand, when once, he held all of him in just his palm.
Time changes mortals and sons, but immortal fathers stay the same. The ocean roils, the water remains, and he’ll be theirs for far longer than they can be his.
Yes, the Sea God means but does not say.
Yes, of your mother, and of you.