WHO Luna Olmos [narrative] WHEN Saturday morning WHERE The Penthouse WHAT An aftermath WARNINGS suggestions of sexual assault and domestic violence
Last night Luna had been given a single instruction before Peitho and Hermes went out. Organize everything we need for the symposium, was what the goddess had said, dark hair flowing free over one shoulder while Hermes' kissed her neck, the two of the disappearing into the elevator.
"No problem," Luna told the empty apartment after they'd gone. "Just organize everything for a type of party I've never been to."
She spent the rest of the evening googling ancient symposiums as well as taking notes on everything Peitho had mentioned in her post. What was this modern type event that she wanted, exactly, and what did Luna need to arrange? Once she had a list and ideas she knew she could return to Peitho and run through it, but it seemed prudent to at least have thoughts to discuss. Peitho always looked so proud of Luna when she seemed to know exactly what she was doing, and Luna was always so happy when she pleased the both of them.
Luna fell asleep on top of her bed covers, the not-so-melodious sounds of 3Teeth and Rob Zombie still blaring through her headphones.
When she woke, her body was stiff and she'd pulled a weird muscle in her neck. With a groan Luna sat, dragging herself onto the side of the bed and slowly extracting her headphones from her hair. The music had stopped sometime during the night. The last thing Luna had written down on the paper last night had been sister beware: once the sirens have been called for, they'll come for you always. Luna didn't think it was a party note so much as a line for a story, but she remembered no context for it in the morning light.
Stretching as she did, Luna pulled herself up from the bed and yawned her way out into the apartment. Her bare feet slapping against the cool floor and the sunlight glancing off the surrounding buildings in her peripheral vision. Her entire plan today consisted of sitting by the window in her favourite chair and ordering Greek food in. After all her planning last night, Luna had a craving for moussaka.
But from the kitchen, Luna heard the sound of a woman crying.
Her body tensed and her head swiveled towards the bedroom of Peitho, sending a tiny stab of pain through her neck muscles. She'd never heard Peitho cry before and Luna dropped her phone carelessly onto the kitchen bench and moved towards the sound.
Slowly, she went, fully aware that her goddess might not want her there. But if she was needed, Luna would be whatever Peitho needed. A woman so great as Peitho should never have to weep.
The crying came from the en-suite, but when Luna rounded the corner she paused.
The girl crying in the middle of the bathroom floor, a sheet wrapped around her, was not the goddess Luna had expected. Just... a woman, a stranger.
Luna must have made a sound, because the woman looked up at her in surprise. She seemed Luna's own age, maybe a little younger. (Although these days that meant so little. Gods could look whatever age they liked.)
"Are you okay?" Luna asked, instead of what are you doing here? which was on edge of her tongue.
The girl sniffed. "I... don't know." She dropped her face into her hands and started crying again. "I mean... I don't know why I came here. Last night it seemed like-" She shook her head. "But now I don't know why I-"
Luna knelt down next to the girl. "Shh, it's okay," she told her, not touching her even though it sort of seemed like she should rub her back. "Are you hurt?"
The girl shook her head but looked utterly miserable. "No, I just- I don't do things like this!"
Luna didn't know what to say. She couldn't say yes, Peitho has that power, to make you want her so much you'd tear your own skin off just to touch her. She couldn't say, what you felt wasn't real, it was an intoxication.
What she eventually said was, "let's get you dressed and into a cab."
Luna helped the girl back into her clothes from last night, all the while listening to her speak as though Luna were her confessor. She was married! She loved her husband! She didn't know what had made her come here last night! She wasn't even drinking! She'd never even been interested in a threesome before! How could she face everyone now!
Luna just nodded and tried to form words that were comforting but non-committal.
She didn't think of them as bad people, her gods. But they weren't good people either. Peitho and Hermes weren't people at all, weren't bound believers of a system of equality. Peitho and Hermes, who did whatever they wanted to humans and saw nothing wrong with that. They were gods, and Luna had come to understand that this meant they saw anything that they did as their right.
But how was Luna, one of those mere mortals, supposed to navigate the world like that? If she'd been a woman in Ancient Greece she felt like there would be no issue. She would accept, without question or judgement, that Gods did as Gods pleased.
Would things be simpler if she didn't love them in the way she did?
Growing up, Luna had to fight for the attention of her parents. She was sure that they loved her (because they were her parents, and parents had to love you) but she never felt that love. They bought her anything she asked for, they sent her to music lessons and gymnastic lessons and various after school activities that she showed even the slightest interest in, but Luna had trouble remembering softness from them. They never hurt her, and Luna - who had had friends with violent mothers or fathers - had always been grateful for that.
They were interested in her academically, were interested if she was keeping up with her chores and her various set activities, but they never seemed to be interested in her. Sitting at the dinner table with them while they discussed their day, Luna felt as though she might as well not be there. While her mother expressed frustration with someone at work, and her father lamented some friend's divorce, no one asked Luna how her day had been, or what she'd done on the weekend, or how she was feeling.
At seventeen they bought Luna a brand new car, and her father briefly squeezed her shoulder before moving away. Luna couldn't remember the last time someone had hugged her.
(No, she could remember exactly the time: it had been when she was sixteen, and it was a visiting aunt in greeting and when she'd left. Luna barely knew her mother's sister, but when she wrapped her arms around Luna, Luna was fairly sure she loved her anyway.)
At eighteen and just graduated, Luna met Bruno and fell in love so deeply she thought she'd never feel anything like it again. Her parents hated Bruno, who was twelve years older than their daughter and who had been in and out of jail since his youth for various crimes. But what did they know about love? Luna had never seen any evidence from them of what Bruno could now give her, which was complete and utter adoration. Bruno treated her like she was precious and important and beloved, and so she ran off to Los Angeles with him to become a part of his life. They got married almost right away, and Luna spent happy hours in the chair at his tattoo shop, letting him ink her body like she was an unwritten book and he was her author. (And if they were tattoos she didn't want, she only argued a little. And if he made her get back in the chair when her skin was still swollen from yesterday's needle and she didn't want it, she endured that with what she considered grace.)
She felt adored. He never laid an evil hand on her, even if he sometimes threatened it. Sometimes, late at night, he would whisper about how he was so lucky to have her, just like she was lucky to have him. He would whisper that he was the only one that really got her, that understood who she was and what she needed.
The first time she caught Bruno cheating he cried and grabbed onto her and promised it would never happen again, and she consoled him and dried his tears.
The second time it all happened the same.
The third time was when Luna was starting to wise up to him, to what he was actually like, to what she let him get away with. She still forgave him, but told him this was the last time: if he loved her then he needed to prove it, needed to stop treating her like he did. Bruno begged and cried and promised.
Three months later he kicked her out of the apartment and told her they were done.
"It's taken me a long time to accept it," Bruno told her while she packed her things into the car, "but I can't tolerate the way you treat me anymore."
Luna never called her parents to tell them it had all fallen apart. She couldn't bear to.
Instead she found herself a job as a waitress and lived out of her car. Then she started supplementing that with prostitution, making just enough to get herself a shitty apartment that she could barely keep up on the rent for.
And until Peitho came along and swept Luna off her feet, that was how she thought her life would continue. Aimless and pointless, working two demeaning jobs to make money that she didn't have the time to enjoy, even if she'd had enough of it.
Peitho had brought her home to be their pet because Gods did as Gods pleased, and Luna was grateful to be chosen. She was grateful for the soft bed and the amazing views and that she wasn't fucking some rough man in an alley, wondering if she was going to get sick or murdered or generally just feel awful afterwards.
Unlike the girl from the bathroom, Luna knew exactly why she was here. Luna had chosen this.
Luna gave the girl a handful of cash and put her into a cab downstairs. When Luna leaned in through the door she said, "try and just forget about this," she told her. "We've all made dumb mistakes before. Don't let it change the rest of your life."
It felt disingenuous to say to the girl, that this was a dumb mistake on her part and not the work of gods toying with humans because they could, but what else could Luna say? Not the truth, not what had actually happened.
So she watched the cab go with a deep sigh and then slowly made her way back up to the apartment. She took a long shower in her own en-suite, leaning slightly against the wall.