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Percy was not a fan of their demigod retrieval missions.
Sure, maybe that was because the last time he and Annabeth went on one, he spent the next six days scouring the country and found her bruised and exhausted from holding up the sky, but he thought that was a pretty valid reason not to enjoy them.
And sure, maybe not every demigod was the di Angelos, powerful Big Three kids, attracting the biggest, baddest monsters from the darkest pits of Tartarus, but still. They were unpredictable. There were too many variables that Percy couldn’t account for, and Annabeth never seemed to factor in the ones that endangered her. No, Percy was responsible for those.
Chiron had all the most capable campers on their own missions, desperately recruiting everyone they could for the war that loomed at Percy’s back. With Thalia gone to the Hunt, it was just Percy and Annabeth this time around. They were old enough now, and beyond capable, Chiron had said, to complete this one on their own. No satyr protector, no elder demigod. Just the two of them and their wits.
And the field trip chaperone, whom they were pretty certain was going to try to eat them and the thirteen-year-old kid they had come to collect. So, a regular Wednesday.
Percy and Annabeth walked through the museum, feigning interest in different exhibits and watching the gaggle of middle-schoolers that they were trailing. Well, Percy was feigning. Annabeth was super into this stuff – history and art and whatever else. Percy kept having to drag her along when she got too caught up in a particular exhibit.
“Annabeth,” Percy said, hooking his arm through hers and pulling her along. “I will take you to every museum in New York City if you will just focus today.”
“I am focused,” Annabeth argued, huffing alongside him as they walked. “I’m just trying to blend in.”
Right. The last time they had “blended in” on one of these things, he had ended up on a dancefloor, trying not to step on Annabeth’s toes and pretending there wasn’t a very likely chance that his palms sweated through her dress where they rested on her waist.
As the field trip continued its trek through the museum, Annabeth never freed her arm from Percy’s. He wondered how they looked to other people – just regular teenagers. Sure, it might draw a little attention that they weren’t in school at one o’clock on a weekday, but Percy has noticed that most people tend to mind their own business when it comes to that kind of thing. Most people don’t want to get involved with things that don’t directly affect them.
Did they look like they were on a date? Not that it mattered or that he wanted it to be one. Or anything like that. He was just wondering. It was a pretty good cover if he really thought about it.
“Percy,” Annabeth whispered, digging her elbow into his ribs. Percy snapped out of his daze just in time to see one of the field trip chaperones slip into a closed exhibit, the plastic curtain that blocked it off fluttering as it fell closed again. “We should follow him.”
“What about the kid?”
“We’ll just be a minute. Come on.”
Percy followed close behind her, checking around him to make sure no one was looking as they slipped behind the curtain. Everyone was caught up in their own day. See? People don’t like to get involved.
–
Percy realized, as they walked past the scaffolding and heavy-duty equipment, that they had wandered into the Greek Mythology & History exhibit. Great. That didn’t feel foreboding at all. It was just a coincidence, he told himself.
He walked past a statue that said it was supposed to be his father. He stopped and stared up at the sculpted face – it didn’t really look like him at all. Though Gods can take whatever form they choose. Maybe his dad had looked like this at some point. The eyes stared back at him, vaguely familiar, but not quite right. He nodded at it like it could sense his acknowledgment and kept walking. He noticed Annabeth had paused a little ways ahead, staring up at a different statue. The plaque by its feet read ATHENA in a bold, elegant font.
“Doesn’t really look like her,” Percy commented as he caught up to Annabeth. “My dad’s is off, too.”
“They’ve all had different likenesses over the years,” Annabeth said. “This just isn’t how we’ve known them.”
“Right,” Percy said. “We should keep moving.”
Annabeth nodded, her gaze lingering another moment before she walked away. Percy wondered if he should tell Annabeth what Athena said to him last summer, about not approving of their relationship. It wasn’t a relationship. Not like that, anyway. And what was so wrong with a Poseidon kid and an Athena kid being friends? That’s all he and Annabeth were. Sure, he thought she was pretty, and he missed her when they weren’t at camp, and he thought about her a lot when they weren’t together, and –
They were friends. That’s all. No matter what the Goddess of Wisdom or Percy’s mother or anybody else seemed to think about it.
Percy’s train of thought is stopped cold by the sound of footsteps close by. He paused and turned his head slightly in the direction they had come from. The lights were off in the exhibit, the only light streaming in through the skylight overhead. It cast strange shadows that were hard to see into around the area. He felt for Riptide in his pocket, prepared to uncap it in an instant.
They waited a long moment, but the footsteps didn’t return.
“Come on,” Annabeth said, beckoning him deeper into a darker part of the exhibit. “He must have gone through there.”
They marched on, towards another curtain that looked to lead down a dark hallway, but just before they could escape, they heard the footsteps again.
Steadier this time, more insistent, and headed straight for them. Annabeth put her hat on, and Percy said, “Hey, Wise Girl. What am I supposed to do?”
Annabeth groaned in quiet frustration and snatched her hat back off, shoving it back into her pocket. She looked around, panic seeping into her expression with every footstep that came closer to them, echoing off the marble floors and the empty walls.
“Annabeth,” Percy whispered, holding Riptide in his hand. He tried to peer around the statues to see if he could catch a glimpse of whoever was coming for them, but no dice. Had the chaperone slash monster been behind them the whole time? He didn’t think they’d been made, but monsters can smell demigods for miles, especially ones as powerful as he and Annabeth were. The footsteps grew louder. He hissed her name again. “Annabeth!”
She must have known it wasn’t their monster. That’s the only way Percy can imagine she came up with what she did next.
She grabbed him by his right shoulder, snatched the pen slash sword out of his hand, and muttered, “Trust me.”
Then, she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down to kiss her.
His brain stumbled and short-circuited, leaving him standing completely motionless for a moment. She was kissing him. Why did she do that? His hands hung uselessly at his side and she started to pull away, the beginnings of an apology on her lips, but Percy’s brain went back online and he put his hands on her waist, the same place he rested them last winter on Olympus and back at Westover Hall.
Her lips were really soft, he noticed, and her skin was so warm he thought she must be blushing. Or maybe it was the heat of his own cheeks was feeling as his lips slid against hers a little. Despite the urgent nature of their situation he found himself thinking that he would have stood here all day, the beat of her heart so incessant and so fast that he could feel it against his fingertips when he reached up and pushed her hair behind her shoulder so he could rest his hand against the back of her neck and pull her closer.
It dawned on him, after an indeterminate amount of time that Annabeth’s mouth was on his, that this was only the second girl he had ever kissed. The first one had been the winter that he was in fifth grade, before he got kicked out of that school, at the winter dance. He had barely had enough time then to register what was happening, and she had told everyone in their grade that he was a bad kisser.
He wondered if he was doing a better job this time. Annabeth’s hand clutched at his jacket. He didn’t really know if that was a good or bad sign.
“Hey!” Somebody called, the footsteps right on them now. They jumped apart and found themselves faced with a museum security guard. “You kids can’t be in here.”
“Sorry, sir,” Annabeth said, her expression sheepish. Her eyes were wide, and her lips turned up into an embarrassed smile as she wrung her hands nervously. “We were just – we got lost and –”
“Yeah, yeah,” The guard said. He was a middle-aged guy, heavy in the middle and balding. He looked kind of like Gabe, if Percy squinted at him. He eyed them, unimpressed, his flashlight beaming at them like an interrogation lamp. It seemed a little excessive, but Percy couldn’t find his voice to say anything. “Get out of here, go. You’re lucky I don’t have you removed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Annabeth said, her smile breaking free. She grabbed Percy’s hand, pressing Riptide against his palm, and started dragging him back the way that they came. “We’re really sorry!”
“Yeah,” Percy croaked, letting Annabeth pull him along. He could feel his palm sweating in hers. His lips still tingled and his nose was full of the perfume she had taken to wearing lately – something flowery but sweet and dusky, too, like the smell of book pages hot off a printing press. He had never said as much to her, but he really liked it. It gave him that same feeling he had had on Circe’s island two summers ago, when he had seen her in her white silk gown and pink eyeshadow. “S-sorry.”
They slipped out of the curtain. Annabeth tugged him through the museum until they found the kids’ field trip again, and the chaperone had rejoined the group.
“What was –” Percy started.
“We’re not talking about it.”
“But –”
“Percy,” Annabeth said, her tone serious.
He let it go, but she never dropped his hand.
–
As it turns out, their chaperone wasn’t a monster at all. Just a very active parent of one of the kids. The retrieval went smoothly, and the kid was surprisingly calm about the whole being-kidnapped-by-two-kids-not-that-much-older-than-you thing.
“My dad told me something like this might happen when I was older,” The kid – Amara – said matter-of-factly when Percy helped her onto Blackjack’s back. “Can you tell him what happened to me?”
“You can Iris message him when we get to camp, alright?” Annabeth said kindly. “You’ll be safer there.”
The kid nodded. “Does this have anything to do with all the weird monsters I keep seeing?”
“You’ve been attacked?” Percy asked.
Amara nodded. “At my last school, this giant spider thing tried to eat me. I guess nobody except me could see it, because when I tried to tell them about it, they said I was lying and being disruptive. I got kicked out of school, and when I tried to explain it to my dad, he said I would understand when I was older.”
Annabeth cut her eyes at Percy – probably an Athena kid. Explained why she was so calm in the face of being a demigod, but Amara recounted how the only thing that she was really, really scared of was spiders. Percy smirked a little. Annabeth was getting a new little sister.
Percy was only kind of jealous whenever one of the other cabins got a new camper. He knew none of the ones they brought into camp would be moving into Cabin Three with him, but sometimes he thought it might be nice not to be the only person living there. He missed having Tyson around more than he would admit.
He wasn’t really thinking about that right then, anyway. He was still thinking about how soft Annabeth’s lips were.
“Are there spiders at camp?” Amara asked, completely unfazed by being on the back of a pegasus. “I don’t really like being outside because it seems like there are so many.”
“No,” Annabeth said. Somehow, Percy had never seen one. He always assumed it was a part of the magic that maintained the camp’s borders. Descendants of Arachne counted as monsters, the same as Laestrygonians and cyclops. “No spiders, I promise. I’m scared of them, too.”
Amara nodded, relieved, and slumped against Blackjack’s neck, dozing the rest of the way to camp.
–
At camp, they sent Amara off with Chiron and shared their suspicions that she might be a daughter of Athena.
“I should –” Annabeth said, already walking backwards towards the cabin path. “Get the cabin ready for a newcomer. Just in case she gets claimed.”
“Right,” Percy said, taking matching steps toward her. “We should talk about –”
“Okay, I’ll see you around,” Annabeth cut him off and turned around, all but bolting back to her cabin.
“The kiss,” Percy finished quietly, talking into thin air.
–
By the time lights out rolled around, Percy hadn’t seen Annabeth at all. Sure, she was probably busy training and preparing for the war – she always was, as though it was happening next week and not two years in the future. Percy figured he should ignore it as often as he can for as long as he can. Annabeth hated it when he said that.
He was just preparing to slip out of Cabin Three when he heard a soft knock on his door. He opened it to nobody.
“Annabeth,” Percy said, stepping back so she could step inside. He closed the door as she took her Yankees hat off, tucking it into the back pocket of her shorts. “Breaking the rules, are we?”
“Shut up, Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth said. She looked… nervous, which was incredibly unlike her. At the museum earlier, she had been putting on a show, convincing the guard that they were just two lovesick teenagers looking to be alone for a few minutes. Now, Percy could see the rigid line of her shoulders and the way she had been biting her lip to the point it was red and raw. He found that that didn’t make him want to kiss her any less. “I just – wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize?” Percy said, his eyebrows shooting up. “For… kissing me?”
Annabeth flinched as though it were a particularly painful memory and nodded. “Yes. I just didn’t know what else to do and there wasn’t any time and –”
“Annabeth,” Percy cut her off. “Did you not – was it – bad?”
“No!” Annabeth said, too quickly to be mistaken as casual. “I mean, no. It – it was fine. Good. I just shouldn’t have jumped you like that.”
“I didn’t mind,” Percy said before he could think better of it.
He would be lying if he said he had never thought of kissing Annabeth. He tried not to, obviously, because it was weird to think about kissing your friends, but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. She was just so – beautiful. Yeah. And her eyes were so brown and since he’d grown after that first summer, she had to look up at him to meet his eyes and he kind of liked that, and she was always – whatever, the point was, he had thought about kissing Annabeth plenty of times, okay?
He just wasn’t sure she had thought about kissing him.
“Did you not want to kiss me?” Percy asked, drifting towards her.
Annabeth’s eyes went wide. “I – that’s not really the point, now is it?”
“Maybe I should be the one apologizing, then,” Percy mused, “if it was that you didn’t want to do it. I could have just tried to talk my way around the guard and you could have slipped out.”
“That never would have worked,” Annabeth rolled her eyes. “And you have nothing to apologize for. I… Percy, just accept my apology so we can move on.”
“It’s noted, it’s accepted, but it’s not needed. I told you. I didn’t mind.”
“Okay. Great. I should get back to my cabin.”
“Can I ask you a question, though?”
“I’d really prefer if you didn’t.”
“Am I the only boy you’ve ever kissed?” Percy said, a teasing smile tugging at his lips.
“Why does that matter?” Annabeth asked, her eyebrows furrowed in that way that always makes Percy think she might headbutt him. “Why would you think that?”
“I’m just curious!”
Annabeth rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’re the only boy I’ve ever kissed. My first kiss was a strategic decision. Very fitting for me, right? Go ahead, laugh. I know you want to.”
Percy’s face softened as he looked at her. “I’m not making fun of you, Annabeth. I wouldn’t do that.”
“You make fun of me all the time,” Annabeth pointed out, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Okay, sure,” Percy said, waving a hand between them non-commitally. That was different. Sometimes he teased her, sure, but he would never be mean to her. “But not about this.”
Annabeth stared at him, waiting for his point.
He steeled his nerves and shrugged. “I was just going to say – you don’t have to have a strategic reason. You can kiss me whenever you want.” He said, scratching at the back of his neck. “Or you can have, you know, a do-over.”
“A do-over?” Annabeth asked, eyebrows raised. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll pretend that first one didn’t count, and you can have a normal first kiss. With me. If you want.”
“What if I want it to be with someone else?”
Percy winced. “Then that first one definitely counts.”
Annabeth smiled a little. “So either way, the first one is still with you.”
Percy pretended to think about it and then he grinned. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Annabeth rolled her eyes at him, her expression fond, and she took a step closer. It made it so she really had to tilt her head back to look at him. She reached up and pulled him in, slowly. His heart pounded in his chest and he really wished he had thought to brush his teeth again, but too late now, then –
At the very last second, she dodges his mouth, instead turning her head and whispering in his ear, “In your dreams, Seaweed Brain.”
She leaned off her tip-toes and smirked up at him. He gaped at her.
“So you don’t want to kiss me?” Percy asked, wincing internally at how desperate that made him sound.
Annabeth walked towards the door and turned back just before she opened it. “I never said that, did I?”
“But you do like me?” Percy grinned.
“I never said that, either,” Annabeth said, slipping out the door.
He jumped to catch it before she pulled it closed, but she had already stuck her cap back on and disappeared.
He stared out into the night after her, a smile stuck on his face, before closing the door and leaning against it, willing his heart to still.
(And to Annabeth’s credit, she was in his dreams that night.)
(And every night after that, too.)