Chapter 14

"what if i want to kiss you tomorrow?"
- what if i, meghan trainor

Annabeth thinks she might be a little bit in love.

Only a little. She is, after all, seventeen years old, and a spy, and not Lois Watermann with the brown hair and prosthetic nose like Percy thinks she is. But, sitting in his bedroom with the smell of boy surrounding her like a safety blanket and just Percy on his back cackling like a little kid at a story she's telling, it's not hard to pretend.

"No way," he giggles.

Annabeth nods earnestly. "Seriously. I was such an annoying child."

"It's adorable."

"You say that now, but if you knew me when I was seven you'd think otherwise."

Percy shakes his head. "I bet Little Lois was great."

She didn't exist. "She was a pain in the butt. I'm glad I've changed."

Percy rolls his eyes fondly.

Annabeth readjusts herself, crossing her legs. "What was Little Percy like?"

"He was a heartbreaker."

"Of course."

"Don't roll your eyes at me. I was a right ladykiller at five. Got all the girls."

"And by 'girls' you mean the moms?"

Percy digs his toes into her thigh. "Rude."

"That's not a denial."

He sighs. "Unfortunately not. Still, though. S'not a bad thing I had all the moms at my feet. You wouldn't believe the stuff they'd bring for me. I think they knew that Mom was having a bit of a financial crisis so they'd always bring me stuff like cake and candy and there'd always be, like, a coupon tucked away in the tinfoil for Mom. We lived off those coupons, man. Mom would collect them like lottery tickets and use them to buy me clothes and get haircuts."

Annabeth has learnt by this point that Percy doesn't want sympathy. He's just telling a story that he's properly separated himself from, like the Percy and Sally he keeps mentioning are fictional characters. Which Annabeth understands, probably almost as well as he does. She's had her fair share of reports she's had to file out, some of them really, really gruesome. One time she had to testify as a witness for her best friend who had been shot in the chin and through the head right in front of her eyes, and that had probably been the hardest thing she's ever had to do.

Besides. It's not like she, Piper and Thalia don't also hoard coupons like precious jewels. Most of their grocery shopping has been paid for with twenty 5% OFF ANY FOOD WHEN THE TOTAL IS MORE THAN FIFTEEN DOLLARS that they cut out of newspapers and the backs of McDonald's bags.

"That's so cool," Annabeth tells him. "I wish moms did that to me. Instead I just bossed their children around and screeched at them when they didn't use the building blocks properly."

"That must have made you super popular."

"Oh, totally."

Percy laughs. Annabeth tries not to stare.

Instead, she goes up on her knees and starts looking at Percy's photo wall. It's already increased from the last time she saw it. There's more Jason and Grover, lots and lots of Sally which Percy refuses to be embarrassed about, a few with a boy a couple inches shorter than Percy with coal black hair and eyes in a skull T-shirt and lots with faceless people Annabeth doesn't recognise but assumes are relatives.

She smiles when she sees herself on there. Percy insisted they take a selfie after their first date. Percy has got his eyes crossed and Annabeth is laughing at him, and then there's another one near the bottom of the wall where he's pressing a kiss to her cheek. She remembers that one. It had not been planned in the slightest. He had just turned his head and kissed her cheek, so the look of surprise on Annabeth's face is genuine.

It's a cute picture. Annabeth considers asking him if he can print her out a copy.

"Have you got any Little Percy on here?" she asks.

"A few." Percy shifts next to her, and Annabeth is very hyperaware that he's pressed up next to her in his bedroom. On his bed. Alone.

Oh my god Annabeth shut up.

He points. "Here."

Annabeth looks. It's a six-year-old Percy sitting in the bathtub, bubbles on top of his head, beaming at Sally with the front two teeth missing.

Annabeth wants to faint.

"You had chubby cheeks," she says. "Oh my God, that's so cute."

"Shut up."

"No, look at you! Look how adorable you were!"

Percy grumbles darkly. "You're just like Mom. I should have never showed you."

"Chubby cheeks are my favourite."

"I didn't grow out of them until, like, two years ago."

"That's adorable."

"Shh, Lois. I'm a man now. You can't say that anymore."

"Percy, you have dimples."

"Shhhhh."

Annabeth laughs at Percy's sulky face. "Aw, don't worry, babe. Being cute isn't a bad thing."

Percy leans closer to her and bats his eyelashes flirtatiously. "Am I cute enough to win a second date?"

Annabeth laughs. "We literally went on a date last week."

Defensively, Percy holds up his hands. "I'm sorry! I just– thought that, you know. We could speed up the process a little."

"Is this so you can kiss me?"

Percy falls back onto his bed and hides his face in his pillow. "Maybe," he mumbles. When Annabeth smacks the back of his leg to reprimand him he rolls over and looks at her pleadingly. He's doing that thing with his eyes, where he makes them big and pouty, a little like a baby seal. The brat knows that the baby seal eyes are her weakness. That by itself probably deserves another smack. "You can't blame me! You're really pretty and you like me back, and this, like, never happens. I want to be able to have at least kissed you once before you figure me out and run away."

Annabeth flushes scarlet. "I'm– wait, 'figure me out and run away'?"

Percy gives her a look. "Duh. There's a reason someone as attractive as myself has gone seventeen years without being kissed before."

"You haven't kissed anyone yet?"

"Which is only more reason why I should kiss you."

Annabeth stares at him. "How?"

"How should I kiss you?"

"How on earth have you not been kissed yet?"

Percy laughs dryly. "I'm not as desirable as you think I am, Lois."

"What are you saying? Of course you are!"

Percy shrugs. "It's no big deal."

"No big deal? Percy, why would you think that?"

Something isn't right. The words settle in Annabeth's stomach the wrong way, like acid licking at the pits of her gut.

She studies the way Percy fidgets under her stare, the way he so nonchalantly spread out over his bed three minutes ago but now is beginning to curl in on himself. She thinks of the way he started to crumple at the football game when Brandon mocked him, the way he started shaking.

"Who told you that, Percy?" she asks coldly, and he flinches.

She's hit the nail on the head.

"No one," he mumbles.

"Percy."

"Just leave it, Lois. It doesn't matter."

"Was it Gabe?"

He stiffens.

"Oh my God."

"It's not a big deal."

Annabeth laughs humourlessly. "Not a big deal? Percy–"

"Lois, please."

To Annabeth's shock she notices that tears are beginning to well up in Percy's eyes. He looks away from her and tries to blink them back, bringing up his hand to aggressively knuckle them away, but before he can in a moment of sheer desperation Annabeth pushes his hands down away from his eyes and cups his face in her hands. He stares at her, his green eyes wide and betrayed and glittering, and something lurches in Annabeth's heart as she looks down at him, at the way his shoulders begin to shake as he tries to suppress his sobs, and realises that she never, ever wants to see him hurt again.

His pulse jumps beneath her fingertips. She strokes her finger across his cheekbone, traces the telltale scars left from his fourteen-year-old acne along his jaw.

She rests her forehead against his and closes her eyes. "It's okay," she whispers. "It's okay."

"No it's not," Percy mumbles. "I'm an angsty teenage boy, I'm not meant to show emotion."

Annabeth opens her eyes. She's never been this close to him before. She can count his eyelashes and see the blue lines in his eyes. He's got the lightest dusting of freckles across his nose, and a scar above his eyebrow. It's all perfect.

"Don't try and cover it up, Percy," she says. "You're allowed to be sad."

Percy huffs out a laugh that dissolves into a sob. He closes his eyes and Annabeth lets go of his face and throws her arms around his neck, and even though he is bigger and stronger and broader than her he curls up into a little boy in her lap and cries into her shoulder.

She had always kind of known it was coming, ever since he told her about Gabe.

She waits patiently as she strokes his hair. Her shoulder is becoming damp and under her T-shirt her bra strap starts to itch but she doesn't move, doesn't want to move, because Percy is crying and she knows he needs to get this out.

They sit there for what must feel like hours. Percy feels like a little boy in her arms, and looking around his room, at the wall of photos, as his plain blue bedspread, the blobby parts of his wall where the whitewash didn't set, the Nirvana posters on his cupboard, he still kind of is, in a way.

Annabeth tightens her arms around his shoulders.

"Whatever Gabe told you," she says firmly into his hair, "was complete and utter crap. You're beautiful. You're not perfect, but that's okay, because it's enough for me, and it's enough for your mom and for Jason and for Grover and for everyone. You're incredible at swimming. You have to be one of the nicest, most gentlemanly, considerate, chivalrous boys I've ever had the pleasure of going on a date with. You're a damn good cook, too. I adore you. You're wonderful and witty and yes, I'll admit, sometimes your jokes aren't all that awful, and you're handsome and you've got a colourful personality and for some reason you like blue cookies and you want to save the whales and your favourite colour is blue and you wear the same damn shoes over and over again and that's what makes you you, and all Gabe was is a pig who deserves to fall off the end of the Earth and burn in Hell. Okay?"

Percy is quiet for a while. And then slowly, he nods against her shoulder.

"Good."

"Do you mean it?" he whispers.

"Of course."

He hums and sits up, scrubbing at his eyes. He looks a little embarrassed. His eyes are still red and when he speaks his voice cracks but neither mention it. "Um," he says. "Sorry about that."

"It's okay."

"I made your shirt all wet."

"I can wash it."

"I'd personally keep it as a memoir," Percy says. "So I can remember the time Lois Watermann called me funny."

Annabeth laughs disbelievingly. "Oh my God."

"I knew it."

"I said only sometimes."

"Still." He lounges back on the bed and suggestively wiggles his eyebrows. "So."

"So."

"Have you changed your mind about our date?"

"Crikey, Perce."

"You kind of have to agree, just saying. I cried on you."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"Yes it does! That's, like, the biggest masculinity sacrifice I could have offered."

"Oh, boo hoo."

"Just go on another date with me."

"Magic word."

Percy sighs. "Just go on another date with me. Please."

Annabeth breaks character and laughs. "Of course I'll go on a date with you, you goon. But you're organising it."

"I organised the last date."

"Do you want to be able to kiss me?"

Percy salutes. "Sorry, ma'am! Yes, ma'am!"

The dampness of her shoulder and the rings around Percy's eyes are the only reminders of what happened when Sally calls them for dinner. It's bangers and mash ("and cake for dessert," Sally assures them. "Don't look so heartbroken, Percy") and as Annabeth nibbles at the end of her sausage and Percy progressively moves closer and closer to her throughout the meal until their sides are pressed against each other, and then when they sit down to watch a movie and Annabeth tentatively lays her head on Percy's shoulder, she knows that they'll be okay.

When Annabeth arrives home, if it isn't been for her reflexes she would have tripped right over the barricade of flour packets that have been stacked like a blockade against the doorframe and fallen flat on her face.

She stares at them.

"Guys?" she calls nervously.

Piper materialises around the kitchen door – or, at least, what Annabeth assumes is Piper. The figure is covered head-to-toe in flour. The only giveaway that it is Piper is the hair and the fact that she's wearing her gross asparagus green socks. "Annabeth!" she squeaks excitedly. "Oh, come and join us!"

Annabeth stares at her in astonishment. "I would ask what all this flour is doing on the floor but it looks like you emptied sixteen more bags over your head."

Piper gives her a look. "We're baking."

Cautiously, Annabeth toes one of the flour bags. "And you need thirty-three bags of flour to do that? Who are you baking for, a country?"

"I've got a fundraiser at school tomorrow," Piper explains. "And I need to bring in cakes, so we decided to do a giant jumbo version so I'd have lots and lots for school but also so we'd be able to feed ourselves for the next four weeks or so. We multiplied the recipe by sixty-seven, I think."

"Sixty-seven?"

"I want to make a lot!"

"It's a warzone in here," Thalia calls. "Annabeth, get changed and then get your butt here. I can't bake two hundred cakes and then a bonus seven hundred cookies by myself."

Annabeth blinks. "I'm sorry, seven hundred cookies?"

"We need to ice them, too," Piper tells her cheerfully. "Are you any good at piping?"

Annabeth shakes her head in disbelief. "You're nuts."

"It's for a good cause. Go on, get changed. We need help."

Annabeth throws her school bag on the sofa and cautiously picks her way across the floor, making sure not to step on any of the flour bags. Now that she's further in the house, she can also see that there are sugar bags stacked up against the wall by Thalia's bedroom and cartons of eggs scattered all over the floor, which she's pretty sure is some sort of hazard. She strips herself down to her underwear and then gets changed into her oldest, rattiest sweatpants and a T-shirt she thinks belongs to Piper, and then heads into the kitchen.

Warzone is a complete and utter understatement. There's flour all over the counters, the walls and somehow the ceiling. There's sugar all over the floor and tins of unopened baking soda filling the bin ("it's an excellent storage option," Thalia explains). There's a cracked egg on the floor and water is everywhere. There are two trays of biscuits in the oven and at least another four propped up on the windowsills to cool. Thalia has dough in her hair and all down her shirt, and Piper looks a little like a snowman.

"I'll say it again," Annabeth says. "You guys are nuts."

"My thoughts exactly," Thalia agrees through gritted teeth. She shoves the plate of cookies in Annabeth's face. "Ice these, please."

"How should I do it?"

"I don't care. Give them smiley faces, make them look like pigs, hell, draw genitalia all over them, I don't give two figs. There are five boxes of icing sugar under the sink and if you search thoroughly enough you'll find some edible glitter or balls or flakes and some food colouring. Piping bags are on the radiator. Go crazy."

Thalia looks a little wild. Annabeth wonders how long Piper has forced her to bake for.

"Why are the piping bags on the radiator?"

"They accidentally caught fire," Piper explains a little sheepishly, whisking a bowl of cake batter. "They got caught in the oven and went up in flames, so I had to throw them in a bucket of water, which somehow ended up in the freezer, so they're in a giant ice cube on the radiator. They should be done by now, I think."

Annabeth blinks. Suddenly she feels sorry for Sally Jackson, if this is what she has to go through every time she bakes.

"Anyway," Thalia says distractedly. "Why were you home so late?"

"It's six."

"And school ends at three."

"I went around to Percy's. And I texted you both, so you can't yell at me."

"I haven't looked at my phone for hours," Thalia says. "Ever since Piper got home we've been baking."

"How was Percy's?" Piper asks.

"It was nice. Sally made us some cake. And did you know that she managed to do it without getting fondant on the light fittings?"

Thalia snorts. "Oh, shut up."

"Did anything sexy go down?" Piper enquires politely.

"No, what the hell?"

"Don't give me that look. It's a genuine question. I'm pleased that your relationship is progressing so nicely, but you haven't even told us about a kiss yet. How slowly does he move?"

"It was my decision, actually."

Thalia gasps. "Annabeth Chase, going slow?"

"I thought it would be healthy for us. I said we'd go on more dates before we decide anything, so we can see if this whole 'dating' thing is really us, you know?"

"That's smart," Piper says. She stops mixing and leans against the counter. "I wish I had a boyfriend."

"I don't," Thalia says.

Piper ignores her. "Just someone nice, you know? It would be so lovely." She gestures around her sadly. "We'd get this done so much quicker if we had a forth person. Preferably someone male."

"No, it would be weird," Thalia says. "And don't stop mixing, we're on a tight schedule here. We've got at least six hundred and fifty more cookies to go, and we haven't even started putting the cakes in the oven yet. And Annabeth, get a move on. You haven't even started icing yet."

Annabeth pours the entire box of icing sugar into her bowl. Go to the hog, after all. She empties a pitcher of water in after it and starts whisking it with a fork until it becomes thick and pasty.

She pauses after a while. "Did you know that Percy was abused?" she asks quietly.

Thalia freezes. She turns and stares at her. "What?"

Annabeth presses her lips together. "Yeah. He doesn't– talk about it a lot, you know? But today he just– he just broke down."

Piper puts down her whisk. "Oh, Annabeth."

"I felt so useless," Annabeth says in a small voice. "Like– what do I say? Was I meant to say anything?"

"Was it his stepdad?" Piper asks.

Annabeth nods.

"Step-parents are the most likely causes of parental abuse," she says. She's not boasting. It's just a fact. "Well, second-most. Behind parents whose spouses have died."

"Yeah."

Thalia chews her lip. "Do you want us to make some cookies for him?"

"I can spare a few," Piper says helpfully.

"Yeah. Um, yeah, that would be nice. But they have to be blue."

Thalia nods. "Okay."

When Percy's cookies come out of the oven, Annabeth ices pink hearts onto them.

A/N so that was a lot more angsty than I thought it would be whoops?

Anyway, I hope you liked that! It's a bit of a filler chapter, I'm really sorry. Next chapter we have some lovely percabeth development which is nice and also actual plot unlike this one. but this needed to happen, you know? Like. Percy has suffered abuse, both physical and verbal, and I think I needed to show the after-affects of it. He's not going to walk away fine, despite him being percy-i-don't-die-jackson and stuff, so yeah. I felt like I had to include that.

Anywho

Thank you all so so so much for your reviews! Literally they mean so so much to me, I love you guys so much. Thank you thank you thank you for leaving the time to leave me such nice comments, reading them is always like the highlight of my day. Also – 160 reviews? what? How did that happen?

Literally you guys are the best thank you so so much xxxx

Also, just to clear things up: percy's dad was not a spy. I actually thought about making it like that, but it just wouldn't work with the plot i have now. Some of you were a little confused because i said the olympus ring was started by three brothers. It's not percy's dad, unfortunately. Percy is just ordinary percy.

(and also pineapple does not belong on pizza the amount of you who said otherwise was utterly bizarre you have no taste buds)

Anyway! Thank you all so so much for reading, I love you all. Please tell me what you thought, and I'll see you guys next Saturday! Byeee xx