It’s nothing more than the same thing I said to her, but it feels important. Tender. Caring. She licks her way down my abs and presses my thighs wide. Calypso goes still. “Here, too?”
“Yeah,” I manage. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“You truly are full of surprises.” She exhales against my clit and then flicks her tongue against my piercing there. “A true delight.”
I soon learn that Calypso is a little fucking tease. She plays with my body, plucking my strings to have my need surging…only to move to another part of me to luxuriate her attention on. My orgasm is thwarted again and again, the pleasure compounding each time. I don’t have words to describe what she’s doing.
It feels a lot like being loved, but even I’m not foolish enough to mistake sex for emotion. I think.
She finally kneels between my thighs, her pale skin flushed and her hair shoved back from her face. “You’ve done beautifully, love.”
“Calypso, please.” The thought that she might leave me hanging on this precarious edge has panic fluttering in my throat. “Don’t stop.”
Her lips curve sweetly. “I won’t.” She eases two fingers into me and presses her other hand down on my lower stomach, angled so she can get at my clit with her thumb. Calypso watches me as she guides my body higher and higher until hers is the only face I see. I come so hard, I think I black out.
I’m distantly aware of her murmuring in a low, melodious voice as she smooths her hands over my body before settling in next to me, tucking herself under my arm like she was always meant to be there. It feels like she was always meant to be there, but that’s got to be the post-orgasmic bliss talking.
There is no reality where a woman like Calypso actually looks at me like I might be someone she could love, but sex chemicals do funny things to brains. I’ve never heard of them making a person hallucinate, but here we are.
That doesn’t stop me from pulling her closer. “You’re a miracle.”
“Hardly.” She huffs out a laugh against my throat. “How can you possibly keep that innocent thread, while doing what you do for Athena?”
The reminder sobers me, but only a little. I stare at the ceiling and let the comforting weight of this woman draped half on top of me convince my heart it doesn’t need to race. It only mostly works. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” She idly sketches her fingertips down my arm. “You’re nice, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Good people in Olympus are rarer than diamonds.”
I tense up, caught between wanting to get away from this conversation and not wanting her to stop touching me like I’m someone valuable. She knows what I’m capable of, so to call me innocent by any definition of the word seems like some bullshit. But Calypso is dead serious.
Somehow, that almost makes it worse. “We covered this,” I grind out. “I’ve killed people, as in multiple. I am not a good person. If you look up bad person in the dictionary, pretty sure murderers are listed there.”
“Bad person isn’t a term in the dictionary.” She shifts closer yet, throwing one of her legs over mine. “Don’t run. I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
Calypso is quiet for a long moment, and the steady drift of her fingertips lulls the tension from my body. I don’t have the energy to keep it up right now, even if I’m smart enough to tell she’s just circling to approach the subject from a different angle. The thing is…I don’t know why she cares so much. No one else gives a fuck if I think I’m good or bad. They only care about what I’m able to do for them. I don’t expect quite the same thing from her, but old habits die hard.
Finally, she says, “I grew up with nothing. I think those at the top forget that it’s not like that for everyone, but even though my parents did their best and tried their hardest, they were barely getting by. Maybe it’s selfish or materialistic, but I saw my mom work herself to the bone, saw how it wore her down month after month, year after year.”
She trails off, and I can’t help offering my understanding. “My parents were dockworkers—or are dockworkers, I guess. They worked hard to hide, well, how hard everything was, but I started to notice as a teenager.”
“Yeah.” She sighs. “I had big dreams, you know? I busted my ass, got really good grades, and got accepted into the university on a full scholarship.” She doesn’t have to explain which university; there are several colleges in the upper city, but only one university. Colleges and universities always seemed like the same thing to me, but one accepts everyone and the other only seems to be populated by the elite, with a scattering of those not blessed by being born into the right family. Calypso sighs. “It took less than a quarter for them to put me in my place.”