Gods Behaving Badly: A Novel by Phillips Marie

Author:Phillips, Marie [Phillips, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

23

APOLLO WAS FUCKING Aphrodite in the bathroom. Again. She was leaning against the wall, one foot up on the toilet cistern, and judging by the look on her face she was thinking about paint samples. Again. This ought to have been a triumphant moment, his victory fuck, when he proved that he had overcome that insignificant little mortal, that he had erased her from this unimportant mortal planet and now he was erasing her from his deeply important body and mind. But he didn’t feel particularly triumphant.

How many times? thought Apollo. How many times had he fucked Aphrodite in this precise position in this precise bathroom? How many times would he? The term déjà vu was completely meaningless in his life. He had already done everything over and over and over again, and he would carry on doing the same things over and over and over again, for as long as—well, for as long as the earth revolved around the sun. None of it had any meaning anymore. Had it ever had any meaning? He trawled through the endless repetitions of his memory, searching for some youthful spark of enthusiasm, some sense of newness. Surely it had been there once. But the only example he could find was how he had felt about Alice.

“What are you looking like that for?” said Aphrodite. “You’re not going to come, are you?”

“Far from it,” said Apollo.

“Good,” said Aphrodite. “I’m not done yet. Right, I’m turning round.”

His whole life, Apollo thought as Aphrodite shifted position, was some kind of recurring dream. Or maybe a nightmare. But no; it wasn’t exciting enough to be a nightmare. Or interesting enough to be a dream. Maybe it was just a persistent hallucination.

How long ago had he killed Alice, anyway? Or had been an innocent party to the killing of Alice, he hastily reminded himself, feeling a twinge from the watchful eye of Styx. Was it last week, or a month ago? How much time had passed? What year was it? How long had they lived there? Did it even matter if it was all the same?

Well, whether it was a week or a decade, he missed her. He hated to admit it, but it was true. He still had her photo on his phone so he could look at her whenever he liked, but it wasn’t the same. Because it wasn’t just looking at her that he missed—though that was part of it. He gazed over at the bathtub, remembered her thrusting motions as she scrubbed the soap scum off it while he stood in the doorway, pretending to be waiting to use the loo. She would get sweaty under her armpits, sometimes even across her back. The ends of her hair would curl above her sticky pink neck. She was so different from all of the perfect beings who had surrounded him for centuries—who still surrounded him. Her flaws entranced him.

But it wasn’t only her flaws. He missed her virtues too. He missed her humility. He missed her kindness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.