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Afterwards, as they're lying sweat-soaked and breathing hard in a tangle of silk and limbs and half-discarded clothes, she turned to him and said, “Imagine if you didn’t leave.”
Odysseus laughed, the sound low and rumbling like distant thunder. “Do not tempt me, dearest wife.”
Penelope kissed his bare shoulder, lingered too long against his salty skin. “I have tempted you successfully already,” she said, smiling. “This isn’t a temptation. It’s an order.”
“Is there a difference?” But he was already closing his eyes.
She watched his face in the dim light. She watched it change as she had many times before, laying beside him and watching him dream, or watching him think. With him, there was hardly any difference. His father had once said he dreamed the same way other people ran or drank or threw a punch: with singular, sober purpose. He never stops thinking, he told her. Even when he’s asleep. Penelope had yet to find evidence to the contrary.
She watched as Odysseus’ pleasure-slackened smirk thinned into a thoughtful frown, then as his eyebrows pinched together as his mind raced through corridors and corridors of possibility. She could almost see the moment he hit dead ends, retraced his steps, followed breadcrumbs back to the beginning, before running down another hallway of what-if s.
Imagine, she’d requested, and now here he was, doing as she bid. Imagining all the ways it could go wrong. Would go wrong. Imagining counter-attacks and fortifications and back-alley scheming that might save them from both godly and man-made retribution.
Imagine if you didn’t leave .
Here was where his imagination would lead him: dead and doomed, in some form or another. Not heeding Menelaus’ call and breaking his vow would call the gods’ fury on them all, and Ithaca would break beneath their divine heel.
But leaving, going to war for this petty cause—that might kill him, too.
He reached this singular conclusion, and he opened his eyes with the same bleak disappointment that had haunted his face since the summons came for him.
“No,” he said simply, quietly.
There was a world of devastation in that single word.
Penelope sighed as she rested her head against his shoulder, following his eyes to where their legs were tangled in the dark. He shifted his ankle to brush against hers, and she, in turn, reached down to find his hand and bring it against her chest. She spread his fingers wide so his knuckles rested against her heartbeat.
“It is a choice of dying there, or dying here,” she said. “And your selfish wife would much rather you die where she can see you.”
“It is not that simple, and you know it,” he said. “If I go, I will die alone for a cause I do not believe in. If I stay, you will die with me for something I could have prevented if I could muster up the courage to do the former. I will not ask that of you.”
“Ask me anyway.”
“I already know your answer, wife.” He sounded tired, and older than the years he’d lived.
“Ask me anyway, husband,” she repeated, kissing the tips of his calloused fingers.
He turned his face towards her, and she could feel his smile against her hair before he asked, “Will you die with me, Penelope?”
“Of course,” she replied without hesitation.
Outside their bedroom window, the moon was tracing its unstoppable course across the sky. Penelope would do anything to stop it. To still the moon in its tracks, pluck it from the heavens and swallow it whole, just so dawn would never come to take her husband from her.
Her wise, beautiful, thunder-hearted husband. Her Odysseus. The gods gave him to her, didn’t they, when they were married, when their souls were knit together? So what right did the gods have now to reclaim him? What right did they have to take him away from her?
“Let the gods come for us,” she said. “I will meet them all, head held high with the very pride they made me with. Let swift-footed Artemis and the plague-giver Apollo train their deadly arrows on me. Let the dread Ares try to shatter me beneath his chariot wheels. I would welcome the challenge, if you were only beside me.”
Odysseus made a sound, low in his throat, his agony warring with the last dredges of his hope. “If it were only the two of us, my love, my Penelope,” he said, pulling her tight against his side, “I wouldn’t deny us of the fate you imagine. I would face the whole of Olympus for you if you asked me to.”
“But,” Penelope said, watching the shadows lengthen over their walls, knowing every second took them nearer to the end, “it isn’t just the two of us.”
Odysseus’ chest heaved with a heavy sigh. “No, it is not.”
Their people. Their island. All of them would be damned for Penelope’s selfishness, too.
“Please,” Odysseus whispered, “don’t let him forget about me.”
She didn’t need to ask who he spoke of; between a mother and father, could there be any other person than their child, their greatest joy, their tender Telemachus?
Penelope laughed quietly. “Do you really think you have to ask? He will know your name better than he knows his own, if I can help it.”
She twisted in their bed, so she might look upon him. If the gods denied her a death with him, she was going to be greedy in another way. She kept her eyes on him, barely blinking, and drank him in until she was intoxicated by it all. In the morning, she will not remember falling asleep, but she would remember this: Odysseus staring back. Odysseus holding her, but making no move to kiss her. Odysseus memorizing, Odysseus dreaming while awake.
“Come home to me,” she said softly, reaching out to brush his hair from his eyes, like she had a thousand times before and—Fates willing—she would do so a thousand times again. “Promise me that.”
“I cannot. I will not break your heart twice by being both dead and a liar.”
“Then make me another promise: don’t let yourself forget about me.”
No, Penelope would not remember falling asleep. But she would remember her husband’s smile, wrinkling the corners of his eyes, as beautiful as the day they were wed.
“I will know your name,” he repeated, brushing his knuckles across her wet cheeks, “better than I know my own.”
And he did kiss her then, right between her eyebrows.
“Be gone before I wake,” she whispered as he drew away. “Don’t give me another chance to be selfish.”
Another kiss, soft and gentle against her lips. “As you wish, my love.”
There was another thing his father said about him: Odysseus always kept his promises.
Penelope woke when the sun was halfway across the sky, the space on the bed beside her already cold. She stood and padded quietly over to the looking glass to inspect the damage accrued from last night.
Odysseus’ love was a desperate, thrashing thing—leaving lips kiss-bruised, leaving indentations on her thighs in the shape of his fingers, leaving the evidence of teeth on her shoulder. Always leaving things behind, he was, for her to find in the mirror the next day.
She never imagined she would one day be one of those things.
Penelope touched a faint purple bruise on her collarbone, left by a hungry mouth. It would fade, in time. Penelope could weep at the thought.
But then she heard the sound of footsteps. Distant shouting. An inquisitive “Mama?” echoing down the hallway.
The palace was wide awake. There were people to look after, dinners to arrange, petty grievances to be mediated and settled, decisions to be made. Odysseus had no need for a wife where he was going, but his kingdom still needed a queen.
His son still needed a mother.
She looked at herself in the mirror, all alone in a bedroom made for two.
And then Penelope of Ithaca squared her shoulders, and was ready.