"What if I went and lost myself? Would you know where to find me? If I forgot who I am would you please remind me? 'Cause without you things go hazy." ~~ "Hazy" by Rosi Golan
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Demigods usually had prophetic dreams. Most were frighteningly real (literally) and ended waking you in the middle of the night with a haunting feeling in the pit of your gut. When I woke the next day, however, the first thing I realized was that I hadn't dreamed anything.
The second was that the hide-a-bed was empty next to me.
I sat up and craned my stiff neck over the back of the couch, looking into the open kitchen where I saw Annabeth. She was still in the clothes she fell asleep in the night before, her hair was behead-messy, and she was facing the countertop next to the two-burner stove. Though I could see exactly, she was making something, which really surprised me.
It turned out to be cereal, so my shock dwindled down.
Annabeth turned around a few seconds later, holding two large bowls in her hands. When she saw that I was awake, a smile stretched across her face and she walked around the couch to come sit next to me.
"Finally, the beast awakens," she joked, handing me a bowl of Fruit Loops. "Your hair is terrifying."
"Good morning to you too, sunshine," I teased back. In reality, I was more than happy to see her. For a minute we ate cereal, her cross-legged and me still half under the covers. My eyes cast over to the tiny hallway behind Annabeth. "…Is my mom still asleep?"
Annabeth swirled around rainbow speckles of what was left of her cereal. "No. She went to go outside on the beach. She wanted to wait until you woke up but I told her I'd take care of it." Her mouth curved up into an amused, slightly shrewd grin. "She seems to trust you an awful lot."
It was hard not to laugh. "More like, she trusts you to scissor-kick my head off if I try anything."
In the middle of drinking sugary Fruit Loop dregs, Annabeth snorted, spraying the milk back into the bowl. After turning a little pink and wiping the mess off her chin, she rolled her eyes at me. "…I always had a really weak scissor-kick."
I raised my eyebrows.
"And I wouldn't kick you if you tried anything."
There was a long pause as I tried deciphering that. Either she meant she'd inflict another sort of bodily harm or…
I cleared my throat and swung my legs off the bed, holding my hand out for her bowl. "I'll put these in the sink."
Annabeth gave her empty cereal bowl to me and got up as well. When I came back from the kitchen, she was grinning again. Things like that really didn't stick with her long, did they? Maybe she didn't mean anything from it after all.
"I'm going to go get dressed, okay?" Annabeth said, gathering her hair behind her in a half-hearted attempt to smooth it. "There's no need to waste a perfectly good vacation when the ocean's out there calling our name."
"It's normally too cold," I tried telling her, but she waved me off and went off to the bathroom without waiting to hear anything else I had to say.
Girls…
Sighing, I grabbed my swim trunks and a jacket from my suitcase leaning up against the wall and went off to my room to change.
Halfway through pulling on my shorts someone rapped on the door.
"Hurry up, Seaweed Brain!" Annabeth said impatiently.
I threw on the jacket while opening the door. "Gods, we have a whole week, no need to—"
Annabeth, who was standing right in front of the bathroom in a pair of shorts and a see-through white blouse over the top of a bikini, did not wait for me to finish my sentence. She grabbed onto my wrist and hauled me after her, practically bounding out the front door.
It was another beautiful day, with the sun beating the sand hot and the water so calm it barely made a sound on the shore. So unlike the normal Montauk summers…
Mom was already down there, sunbathing on a large orange beach towel.
Annabeth and I shot past.
"Morning, Mom!" I yelled.
"Good morning, sweetheart." She didn't open her eyes.
We kept running to the little stretch of wood poking out into the water about fifty feet away. As the dock got closer, we slowed. Annabeth slipped her cover-up over her head and discarded it on the sand, and I did the same to my jacket. Despite the weather, I still had doubts about the water temperature. And still—I sprinted ahead of Annabeth and got to the deck first.
My leg muscles bunched as I bent and released, launching myself with as much power as I could off of the wood. There was one exhilarating moment where I whooped with adrenaline; I flew so high Zeus would have killed me if it weren't for the water rising up at warp-speed to meet my face.
With a cannonball and a splash that soaked anything within a twenty-foot radius, my body dropped like a stone to the shallow bottom of the lake. The water tugged on me playfully, seeming to wind through me. I could sense it and move it and have it move me, like I was not a solid but a liquid. I had to admit, it was a really weird sensation, but I'd grown to love it.
Ten feet above my head the surface shimmered with the morning sun. The deck was a blurry, dark shape above me, and I could just barely make out Annabeth's head peering over the edge of it.
Multicolored fish swam around me, stopping curiously. They bobbed their mouths open and closed, wanting to talk, but I didn't hang around to chat. I willed the water to push me back up to the top until my head and shoulders popped out in air.
"Percy!" Annabeth laughed, dropping onto her stomach on the dock. "Are you okay? Is it too cold?"
I shook my hair out, splattering her, and pulled myself up so my arms were crossed on the deck. "It's perfect. Usually freezing, but perfect today." It was impossible keeping the sly smile off my face. "You should join me."
"Oh no. You're wearing that look. I don't know if I want to encourage whatever brought it on."
"Come on. I mean—how could you possibly resist this?" I flashed her my most ludicrous, pathetic begging look, complete with lower lip and batting eyelashes.
Annabeth shoved my shoulders jokingly, nearly sending me back underwater. "You're so arrogant."
I still won.
She stood, straightened her shorts, and did a loud cannonball in. Beneath the splashing and laughs, I felt her hands grab onto my shoulders and drag me under. Golden hair swirled around her face like drops of food coloring in water, mesmerizing. My chest tugged a little before I remembered that she was unable to breathe underwater.
Automatically, I drew in bubbles of oxygen towards us. The effect always reminded me of pouring soft drinks, the bubbles forming and hissing, letting the air space in the middle grown bigger. With a final "pop" it wobbled to completion and we slid, dripping, into it. Though it was just barely big enough to fit us, we made it work.
Annabeth immediately started laughing. Her curls streamed water down the darkened blue of her swim top and onto me. Since the bubble was somewhat small, she was propped up on a hand that was stretched over to the other side of my legs, and she was practically on top of me.
Pretty soon I'd begun laughing too.
It was abruptly cut off.
My eyebrows shot up as Annabeth leaned over and kissed me, wrapping her arms around my neck and letting our wet torsos press together. It instantly brought on the memory of last summer, a few days after my sixteenth birthday, that moment on the dining pavilion.
"I'm never going make it easy for you," Annabeth promised. She was a girl of her word, that's for certain.
I remember the melting sensation I felt when she wrapped her fingers in my hair and kissed me. And Clarisse and the other campers spying on us, dumping us in the lake, and then that kiss—the best underwater kiss ever.
It was hard deciding which was better—back then in the camp, or there under the saltwater in Montauk. My brain still felt like it was melting, no matter how many little kisses we'd shared between.
After what felt like hours—but not close to long enough—Annabeth pulled away, grinning, but kept her arms around me. "An Iris-Message is a completely insufficient birthday present, I think. Seventeen is nothing to scoff at."
"Just another year live without getting stabbed in the back." It sounded funny, but that was literally the only thing that can kill me. Not getting stabbed in the back was a fairly good thing.
"I'm serious." She said, looking down through her lower lashes. One of her fingers wrapped around a strand of my hair. "Since I couldn't get you a birthday present…"
My heart actually stopped.
Blood rushed up to my face and I could just stare at her, frozen.
She saw my face. "No! No, no, no," Annabeth stuttered and laughed, blushing as mad as I was and trying to scramble off of me. "No, no. Not that. No. I meant—"
Again, we began laughing so hard it was difficult to breathe. Maybe it was the nerves or the unintentional reference she made, but it was near impossible to stop.
"I meant—" Annabeth gasped out another guffaw, holding her hands over her mouth. "I meant—I just—Oh, just get me out of this thing I'm about to have a panic attack."
Still grinning, I brought us up to the surface and we dragged ourselves up onto the dock.
Annabeth flopped onto her back, an arm draped over her eyes. A grin was visible on her face and I couldn't help but notice the dips and curves of her bare abdomen.
When we were able to speak again, Annabeth sat up and punched me in the shoulder. "Gods, Percy, take everything I say dirtily, will you? I just meant that we should like bake a cake together or something."
I held up my hands defensively. "Hey, you brought it up."
"Your head is full of kelp." She tugged on a stray piece of my hair and smiled. That smile that made my brain drip out of my ears. That smile that was meant for me.
I was about to say something intelligent like, "Urrruughghhhhuuhuh," when a faint ziiiiip of a fishing line getting cast interrupted.
Right away my eyes darted to its source, as if on instinct.
The man holding the rod was familiar—Khaki shorts, Hawaiian-printed button shirt, black beard trimmed neatly, floppy fishing hat casting a shadow on sea-green eyes. The end of his fishing line wasn't even visible.
I couldn't stop the inevitable rush of pink to my cheeks. My dad was watching me and Annabeth? Did he hear—?
"Go on." Annabeth nudged me with her shoulder and put her feet in the water. "I'll wait here."
Nervously, I stood and shuffled down the dock and over to the spot on the shore where he was standing. When I got up next to my father, he looked down at me with wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.
"Don't worry, Percy," he said. "I wasn't eavesdropping."
"Uh…"
There was a pause between us that thankfully didn't last too long.
Poseidon peered down his line and gave it an experimental tug. "I'm glad you still come here. It's one of my favorite places. Excellent fishing."
"Um… Yeah." I shifted a little and glanced over at Annabeth, who was still sitting on the end of the dock, swinging her legs back and forth in the water.
"Ah." My dad smiled, his eyes lighting up again as he followed my line of sight and saw Annabeth, too. "You and Ms. Chase. I must say, this is a wonderful place to build relationships. It changes a person. Your mother and I know that firsthand. The sea seemed to always make us both calmer, happier people."
He rubbed his beard. "A lucky girl, Annabeth is, to have you, my son. I trust Athena hasn't given you two too much trouble?"
"Not really." Thank the gods for that.
Though Ares was the one whose specialty was scaring the crap out of me, Athena scared me in her own way. I knew blatantly that if he really wanted, Ares would appear and run some sort of painful god weapon through me and I'd be done. Athena would be the one to spend time plotting a more terrible sort of fate for falling in love with her daughter.
I could never speak that in words, though.
Poseidon let out a rolling laugh. "I'd expect her to pay you a visit this week. Having a relationship in camp is one thing, but this vacation may upset her."
Of course it would…
"I don't see what it has to do with her," I sighed.
"Careful, son." Poseidon gave his fishing pole another tug and began reeling the line in. "If she's going to be your future in-law you're going to want to pay a little more respect."
"My future—?" I started, blushing, but he waved me off.
"I wouldn't worry too much about it." The rod was tucked under his arm. "Say, is Sally around? I'd like to have a word with her."
Though I doubted Mom would like to be snuck up on in her bathing suit, I nodded and pointed off to where she was dozing under the sun.
"Thank you, Percy." After clapping his hand on my shoulder, Poseidon said, "and good luck with Annabeth. She's a lovely young lady, treat her well."
"I will," I mumbled at the sand and watched as my dad walked away towards Mom.
Back on the dock, I sat next to Annabeth and heaved a sigh, casting my gaze out over the sparkling blue ocean.
"What'd he have to say?" Annabeth asked, wrapping her fingers around the crook of one of my elbows.
My shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug. "He just…warned me that Athena might be coming to chew me out this week for inviting you."
"I'm sorry." She pressed her shoulder up against mine. "Who I like really shouldn't concern her. Is that all your dad had to say?"
I tried covering up the faint blush I could feel burning my cheeks. "Um…Nothing much, really."
"Don't lie." An amused smile turned the corners of Annabeth's mouth upwards. "Your blush gives you away. What'd he say?"
It wasn't fair that she could read me better than just about anyone else. I sighed, rolling my eyes at her. "He just said…that this place is, uh…a good place to build relationships." My eyes flicked away from her with embarrassment. "And he told me to treat you well."
Was it just me, or was she glowing? Her smile had changed to something that looked like either pride or adoration—maybe both.
On a surge of bravery, I added, "And he called Athena my future mother-in-law."
To that, Annabeth tilted her head back and laughed. "Maybe, Seaweed Brain. If you behave."
The day passed quickly, and soon we were trudging inside for dinner. Annabeth, Mom and I sat around the tiny kitchen table in our swimsuits, laughing until our sides hurt. It was those times I didn't mind my mom's eccentric personality. She called us kids and joked about mine and Annabeth's relationship, but I wasn't embarrassed.
Instead I felt kind of proud because she was so cool. Also because Annabeth really liked her, and it reminded me that her stepmom was less than awesome, so I decided to put up with mine for the time being.
After we'd polished off the sandwiches and ice tea, all three of us went back on the beach to comb for seashells. Annabeth kept her hand in mine the whole time, and I really couldn't think of a time when I was happier. Really.
The sun was moving closer to the horizon, sending colors of purple and orange shooting across the sky and water. There was a moment when we let Mom get ahead of us and we took a seat on a big rock to enjoy the sunset.
A calm breeze floated by, carrying with it the scent of salt and fish. At that moment I…I wished I could be someone better than who I was. I wished I could do something that Annabeth would notice, wished I could do something a little more impressive than what I could.
She seemed to be oblivious to me, eyes trained on the colors, not moving to swipe away her hair when it brushed into her face.
Far out in the water something stirred underneath the surface. A twenty-foot-tall plume of water shot into the sky, hitting the sun against it in a twist of colors blasting in every direction.
A massive whale—or at least, I thought it was a whale—leapt from the plume and landed on its stomach, sending more water flying.
Next to me, Annabeth gasped and automatically latched onto my arm, pointing out to where the whale breached. "Did you see that?"
I refrain from letting a grin creep onto my face. Behind Annabeth, standing a little ways away was my dad. He gave me a thumbs-up before (literally) dissolving with the sea breeze.
I turned my eyes back to Annabeth, who was giving me a strange, but affectionate look. When I caught her looking she bumped my shoulder with hers. "Hey, thanks for inviting me with you, Percy."
Instead of saying something clever, I pointed the accountability towards my mom. "It was Mom who invited you, not me."
"Well, I'm not going to give your mom a 'thank you' kiss, if that's what you mean."
When I glanced down at her again she'd put her hand on my cheek and pressed her lips against mine.
Even after she broke away, my mind wasn't working properly.
"Come on, Seaweed Brain." Annabeth stood, pulling me up with her. "It's getting late. We should be heading back."
Though I didn't want to quit then, I let her take me back to the cabin.
Hand-in-hand, we walked along the edge of the shore as the sun disappeared below the horizon.
oOo
Bwahahaha! I am done with chapter 3!
Please let me know what you think of it!
