If Helen thought this would be a simple task, she was kidding herself. Lying horribly, in fact. At present, she felt that this was nothing if not one of the hardest things she set out to do in her entire existence. Telling Paris about Patroclus, that she was going to try to make it work with Patroclus was like attempting to scale the walls of Troy all over again. And the gods know how well that worked the last time. If not for that damned ingenious horse ploy, the Greeks might have lost that war.
"For my entire life," Helen started. "Having a choice has been a rarity. You might not think so, with me having grown up as a sought after princess and then a queen, but it was so. Someone or another would always be making the decisions for me." It sounded almost bratty of her to be airing her past woes like this, but there was a point to it. "I was either being pulled away by someone or major life decisions was made in my stead."
As she said it, she realized how it must sound to Paris. She hastened to clarify, even though part of what she said rang true. "That is to say, Theseus tried to kidnap me for his own when I was but a little girl. My brothers had to come after him to save me. Then, with the contest for my hand in marriage, the man who won me like a material prize had not even fought for himself." She sighed and shook her head dejectedly. "You know that my marriage to Menelaus was not a significantly happy one. When I came to you that night and you proposed to whisk me away, I thought my heart could burst with joy." The former queen of Sparta looked at her Trojan lover with sad eyes. "In retrospect, there are times when I wonder if it was in part my heart bursting with the force of Aphrodite's spell."