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The night before her wedding, Sally Jackson’s feet turn to ice so quickly she’s honestly surprised not to see frostbite.
Breaths heaving, she shuts the door to Percy’s little bedroom before sprinting for the bathroom. She quickly locks the door and flips the fan on before turning on the shower and the faucet.
Only then does she let herself sob.
“Fuck,” Sally moans to the inside of her elbow as the salty tears finally fall. “Fuck.”
It feels like the final nail in the coffin of a terrible life: Poor orphan gets knocked up, drops out of school, works tirelessly for minimum wage and resigns herself to loveless marriage. She’s the worst of clichés.
Though, in Sally’s defense, she held out as long as she could on the loveless marriage part.
Gabe Fucking Ugliano.
Big gut, bigger ego. No hair on his head, too much on his back. He manages an electronics store in Queens and plays poker like it’s his job. Drinks even more than he eats, and smokes like a fucking fiend.
Truly, a knight in shining armor.
Gabe Ugliano smells like a bowling alley from the seventies. It’s one of his redeeming qualities.
(His only redeeming quality.)
Sally digs the heels of her hands into her eyes before lifting the collar of her shirt to her mouth, biting down on the hem as she grinds her teeth. When she closes her eyes, she sees again the cyclops in the trench coat, his beady eye staring hungrily at Percy though the chain-link fence. The only thing that separated her baby from the monster stalking him on the playground for so many weeks.
Gabe Ugliano is the lesser of two evils.
He won’t hurt Percy. He can protect Percy.
But who, Sally allows the tiny, frightened voice in the back of her head ask, will protect me?
A wave of self-loathing follows the thought. Sally’s a big girl. She chose this life. She knew what she was getting into.
But did she?
Sally remembers long-forgotten promises of a golden palace underneath the sea, sultry whispers in the night that she was a goddess, a gem, a pearl. A queen among women.
She looks down at her dirty old t-shirt, up at the water stains on the ceiling of her decrepit bathroom, and buries her face in her cracked and calloused hands as she cries.
A queen indeed.
Percy doesn’t understand. That’s been the hardest part of it all. Her son is a sweet boy with a good heart, and he can’t fathom why Sally would ever saddle herself to someone so foul.
“Do you,” Percy had asked quietly just that night, as she tucked him into bed, “Do you really love him, Mom? Does Gabe make you happy?”
Her son is a sweet boy with a good heart, who loves her just as fiercely as she loves him.
So, she lies.
“Yes, baby. I do.”
And Percy believes her, because as far as he knows, she’s never lied to him before.
Sally shudders with another wave of self-loathing, still huddled in a ball on the bathroom floor, when there’s a knock on the door.
Sally covers her mouth and takes three deep breaths through her nose before responding. “Just a second, honey.” She winces at the horrible croak in her voice. Shit. Shit. Percy can’t see her like this. She scrambles to stand, splashing water from the still running faucet on her face and pulling a brush through her hair before she turns off all the water.
There’s another knock. “Sorry, Perce, I’m sor--,” Sally opens the bathroom door.
But it’s not Percy waiting to use the toilet, worried about her muffled sobs.
It’s his father.
***
Poseidon looks older than the last time Sally saw him, almost a decade ago. There are smile lines around his eyes, a slight, attractive graying of the hair at his temples. But his face is the same, all tan skin and smooth planes, with eyes like sea glass and a sharp, regal nose.
Percy looks just like him.
Sally meets Poseidon’s eyes and lets out an honest to God yelp before slamming the bathroom door shut.
It catches on his foot, and Poseidon sticks out a quick hand, gently easing the door open.
“Sally,” he says softly, his voice a low and comforting rumble. His green eyes are bright and wide and horribly sad, and Sally turns away to sit on the toilet before she can find the pity she so dreads within their depths.
She sticks her head in her hands. This is all just a bad dream. It has to be.
She feels more than sees Poseidon kneel before her, grasping her hands and pulling them toward his chest. He smells the same, like brine and salt and sunshine, and Sally closes her eyes against the wave of emotion, of happier, kinder memories that suddenly assault her.
“Sally,” Poseidon says again, before he raises her hands still grasped in his to his lips, kissing her cracked knuckles tenderly. “Don’t do this, my love. Let me take Perseus to camp. Please, Sally.”
Then she’s crying again, sobbing really, and she finds herself in Poseidon’s lap, the two of them leaned against the grimy wall of her tiny bathroom in her crud apartment on the Upper East Side, both of them clinging to each other like it’s been days and not years since their last meeting.
Perhaps to a god, that’s how it feels.
“You deserve so much better than that disgrace of a man, Sally,” Poseidon whispers fiercely into her hair, hugging her close. “You deserve so much better than this. Perseus will be safe at camp, I promise you. The monsters can’t reach him there.”
“But neither can I,” Sally cries, burying her head in Poseidon’s awful Tommy Bahama shirt as the arms around her tighten. For a moment, she’s crying so hard she can’t catch her breath. “I’m not ready yet. I can’t--you said sixteen years. I get sixteen years. I can’t...”
Poseidon had warned her, once they knew the baby was on its way. He’d told her of the monsters that would hunt them both, the gods who would be irate at their child’s existence. He’d told her of the prophecy.
Sixteen years. She gets sixteen years with her baby, before a single choice ends Percy’s days.
Sally Jackson doesn’t plan to waste a second of it.
“Oh, my love,” Poseidon says sadly. Sally thinks about all the children this god has watched die through the millennia and shudders. To him, Percy is already another tragedy.
No child can outlive a god, after all. Not even theirs.
“Don’t take him away, Poseidon,” Sally begs, gripping his bright shirt between her fingers. “Don’t, you can’t, you can’t take him away, please don’t--,”
“I won’t,” Poseidon shushes her, “I won’t, Sally.” He sighs and pets back her hair.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and the god scoffs.
“Don’t thank me. You wouldn’t be in this mess if not for me.”
Sally bites her lip. “Don’t say that. Percy’s not a mess. He’s worth it. He’s worth everything.”
The furious thundering of her heart settles at her words. Percy is worth it. Her sweet boy with the best heart she’s ever known is worth this. Sally would kill for him. She would die for him without a second thought.
Right now, though, she must live for him.
Poseidon seems to sense the change in her, notices her body finally relaxing against him, her breath evening out. He slides his arms under her shoulders and knees and stands.
“I can walk,” Sally says quietly, resting her head against his neck, and they go quietly down the hall, past Percy’s still shut bedroom door and into her little room.
“I know.”
He moves back the covers and settles her in the bed, before pulling up the quilt to her chin and sitting on the edge beside her, leaning over slightly to turn on lamp on her nightstand.
“I will not patronize you any longer,” Poseidon says, reaching up his hand to brush the hair off her forehead. “Your decision is made; I can see that. Just know that I admire your courage. I admire the ferocity with which you love our son.”
Poseidon leans forward and presses a kiss to her head. “And remember that I am with you. I will be watching. No man, no person in this world or the next can ever be your equal, Sally Jackson, and should this Gabriel Ugliano see fit to harm a hair on your beautiful head, his reckoning will come. I swear on the River Styx, it will come.”
Thunder rumbles in the distance.
Poseidon runs his fingers along the side of her cheek and makes to stand.
“Could you--,” Sally asks, voice barely more than a breath as she reaches her hand up to grip his wrist. And sure, she feels a bit pathetic and needy and silly asking her Greek god baby-daddy to stay the night before her wedding, but she’s missed him. She’s missed him so much.
With a soft smile, Poseidon climbs onto the bed and wraps his arms around her from behind.
Sally falls asleep like that, feeling safe and warm and loved. And the next morning, when she wakes to the sun on her face through the window, Poseidon is gone, but Percy is beside her, his little hand latched around her wrist as he snuggles into her shoulder.
“Oh,” Percy says, when he wakes to Sally playing idly with his hair. “Did I fall asleep here last night?”
Sally shrugs with a smile. “You must have. Any bad dreams?”
Percy grins. “No. Really good dreams, actually. We were at the cabin in Montauk and rode horses on the beach. The horses could talk. It was nice.”
“It sounds nice,” Sally agrees, wrapping her arm around Percy’s shoulders as she looks up at the simple white dress hanging on her closet door. For the first time, the familiar dread doesn’t rise up in her throat when she looks, as it has in the month since she bought the thing.
And after she’s showered and changed into the white dress she once loathed, veiled fitted in the in the simple bun at the back of her head, Sally goes to her dresser and finds a long string a pearls, with a note underneath.
You are a queen, my love. Let no man forget it.
With a deep breath, Sally clasps the pearls around her neck and smiles.