She sighed, shifting in an attempt to get comfortable. “You were very clear that you wanted no wife. No children. And the children were a surprise to us both, but I think we will do very well now that we’ve adjusted to it all. But why add marriage to the mix?”
“I remember seeing your parents at a ball,” Ares said into the quiet of the room, with only the ocean outside as accompaniment. “It was perhaps ten years ago now. It was a ghastly sort of state affair, bristling with diplomats and career socialites.”
As he always did, now, Ares moved his hand over her belly. Finding one baby’s head, and the other’s pair of feet. Saying hello to his sons. Pia had grown used to the patterns he drew there. The way she sometimes drifted off to sleep and woke to find Ares crooning nonsense to her belly.
She hardly dared admit how that made her feel. Riddled with hope. Laced through with sweetness. So full of impossible, unwieldy emotion, she felt it was one more part of her set to burst. At any moment.
“I never knew my parents to subject themselves to anything grim or ghastly,” Pia said, trying to rally when everything felt too emotional these days. She was in her eighth month, and twins were usually early. Her time with them as part of her was almost over. And so, too, was her time with Ares nearing its natural conclusion. She could feel it with every breath. “They much preferred to be the life of the liveliest parties they could find.”
“I imagine it was a business affair for your father,” Ares said. “There were stultifying speeches, as there always are. Much self-congratulation. Then the dancing began. There were the usual awkward couplings of diplomats, their wives, and so on. These things are typically excruciating. But then your parents took the floor.”
Pia thought she knew where this was going. She smiled, settling more fully on her side. “My parents loved to dance.”
“That was instantly apparent. I don’t know anything about their marriage, or not anything that wasn’t twisted to sell papers, but I did see them dance. I saw the way they looked at each other.”
“Not only as if there was no one else in the room,” Pia said softly, remembering. “But as if no one else existed at all.”
“My own parents did not dance unless it was strictly necessary for reasons of highest protocol,” Ares told her, propping himself up on one elbow and regarding her, an odd sort of gleam in his green eyes that made them seem burnished with gold. “And when they did, they did their best never to gaze at each other at all. I watched them dance at the same ball ten years ago and I imagine it was perfectly clear to everyone in the room how little esteem they held for each other.”
“Did they not...?” Pia didn’t quite know how to phrase the question.
Ares let out a laugh, but it was tinged with bitterness. “My father liked to indulge his temper. When it was aimed at me, he liked to throw things against walls. I am only grateful that he contained that rage to me alone and never aimed it at my mother.” He shook his head. “They say he is a decent enough ruler, but he was a cold, unfeeling husband and is a terrible father.”
“You don’t have to talk about this,” Pia said quietly, when she thought he wouldn’t go on.
Ares’s eyes glittered. “My mother provided him with the requisite heir, thus securing the bloodline and the kingdom, which was all he cared about. Once that was accomplished, he felt perfectly justified in pursuing his extracurricular interests. Without caring overmuch if that might hurt her feelings. In fact, I think I can say with perfect honesty that I have never known my father to care about anyone’s feelings. Ever.”
Pia tried to pull up pictures of the king of Atilia and his late queen in her head. And more, tried to think of them as people instead of pictures anyone could look at.
“Your father cheated on your mother?” she asked.
“Constantly.” Ares smiled, but it was little more than the sharp edge of his teeth. “And enthusiastically. Quantity over quality, if my sources are correct.”
Pia let out a breath, and directed her attention to the place where their hands were still linked.
“I think my parents cheated on each other as well,” she told him, though she’d never admitted that out loud before. No matter what the papers said. “I know they loved each other, madly and wildly. Everyone knows that. But part of that kind of love is all about hurting each other. I think the glory was in the coming back together, so they always seemed to look for new ways to break apart.”
Ares lifted her hand and brought it to his mouth. He pressed his lips against her knuckles and Pia’s heart instantly careened around inside of her chest. Fizzy and mad, as if they weren’t already naked. As if they hadn’t already spent hours making each other moan.