AVERY LAY ON her bed, staring up at the delicate clouds that floated across her ceiling without seeing them. It had been several days since she’d come home to find Calliope in the kitchen, wearing Atlas’s boxers, though she wouldn’t ever forget the image. It was burned into her mind with such searing clarity.
She and Atlas hadn’t spoken since that morning. She hadn’t even seen him in the apartment: they’d both made themselves scarce lately, as if they’d agreed to some mutual, temporary cease-fire.
Somehow Avery had managed to hold it together at school. But every night she’d collapsed into her champagne-colored lace pillows and let herself erupt in hot, bitter tears.
“Avery?”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he was knocking on her door, but still, it took a moment for Avery to process what was happening. She’d been longing for this conversation, yet she’d been dreading it too.
“Unlock,” she muttered, standing up as the room comp released the magnetic block-field from over her door.
Atlas stood there. He looked different; there were circles around his eyes and a pallor to his skin, but it was more than that. Something had fundamentally changed about him, as if he was no longer the boy Avery thought he was.
“Hey,” she said simply. Let him give the next syllable; that was all she had to offer right now.
“Hey,” Atlas echoed. His eyes searched hers, but she just returned his stare, cool and level. “Look, can I come in?” he asked.
Avery stepped aside and he walked past her, shutting the door. “Took you long enough,” she muttered.
“I had a lot to think about.”
But Avery wasn’t finished. “I assume so. You really screwed up this time, Atlas.”
“I’m sorry, I screwed up? Don’t you hear yourself? You came back that morning from Cord’s! Who are you to talk?”
“You know full well that Cord and I are just friends.” Avery felt oddly pleased to have made him shout.
“I don’t know anything anymore,” Atlas replied, with a bitterness that surprised her.
They were standing beneath an enormous crystal chandelier, utterly still. It was as if the act of finally having this conversation had anchored them to the ground, and neither of them could move until they resolved things one way or another.
Avery bit her lip, wishing she’d rehearsed some kind of speech. “Look, I’m sorry about how I reacted when I saw you flirting with Calliope. It was stupid and immature. I came back that morning wanting to tell you I was sorry—but then I found her, prancing around in your underwear!” She blinked back a fresh onslaught of tears. “Atlas, I know we fought, but you didn’t have to sleep with her that same night!”
“Nothing happened between me and Calliope,” Atlas insisted. “Not that you’ll believe me, since you seem determined to think exactly what you want.”
Avery sighed. “Even if you didn’t sleep with her, you shouldn’t have brought her home. Don’t you see? When something bad happened, you went straight to her. You ran away.” To someone easier. Someone you could actually be with, in public, she wanted to add.
“It wasn’t just me. We both ran away to someone else.”
“Like I said, nothing happened between me and Cord.” Avery wasn’t quite sure why she wanted to make the point, but it didn’t matter; Atlas was shaking his head.
“I believe you. But what about next time, Aves? Maybe something will happen then, for either of us. Don’t you see what a huge problem it is that when we fought, we both turned to someone else, someone more …”
“Easy. Uncomplicated. Which is exactly what you and I are not,” she finished for him.
Atlas looked up at her. “Is that why you love me?” he asked, very quietly.
At first she didn’t understand. “What?”
“Did you fall in love with me because it was complicated, and forbidden—because I was the only thing in the entire world that you were ever denied? The only thing you ever wanted that you were told ‘no,’ instead of ‘yes’?”
Avery felt the blood drain from her face. “That’s cruel, Atlas. You don’t mean that.”
At the hurt in her voice, something of the old Atlas came back to his features, and he let out a breath. “I had to ask,” he replied, sounding more defeated than upset. It scared Avery, because she knew it meant he was shutting himself away from her, forcing himself not to feel, not to care.
“You know I love you,” she insisted.
“And you know I love you. After all this, though …”
Avery heard the note of finality in his voice. And she realized, with a terrifying sense of clarity, that it was the beginning of the end.
“It isn’t working, is it?” she said quietly, because the words were so very painful, and Atlas shouldn’t have to be the one to say them.
“It can’t ever work. It’s impossible. Aves, it might be best for us to just … stop.”
Atlas spoke hollowly, almost formally, as though Avery were a client to whom he was proposing a new construction plan. But Avery knew his mind better, almost, than she knew her own—she could see what this was doing to him, the excruciating effort he was making to keep from breaking down in front of her.
I love you, and nothing else matters, she wanted to say, but she held the words back, because in the end they weren’t useful. Everything else mattered. She loved Atlas, and Atlas loved her, and yet it would never work between them.
She knew the events of last Saturday were her fault. She’d picked at their relationship, peeling off little pieces of it like a destructive child, until it all inevitably came to a head. But their problem was bigger than that one evening. Atlas was right, what had happened was just a symptom of the larger issue: the sheer impossibility of them being together.
There was nowhere they could go that was safe; nowhere that the truth of who they were, the forbiddenness of their love, wouldn’t come chasing them.
Maybe love wasn’t enough after all. Not when every last obstacle was arrayed against you, all the odds stacked to make you fail. When the entire world was keeping you apart.
“Okay,” Avery said, as the universe quietly rent itself in two. “Let’s just … I mean …”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. Let’s just go back to the way things were before? Go back to being brother and sister, after everything they had shared?
Atlas seemed to understand her, the way he always did. “I’m going to take the Dubai job. I’ll be halfway around the world soon. That should make it easier on you. I’m sorry,” he added.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there after he left, her eyes still closed. A single tear ran down her cheek.
It felt to Avery as if someone had died. And in some sense there had been a death, she thought: of her relationship with Atlas. It had been a living, breathing thing, full of sound and color, until the two of them just dealt it the final blow.
Atlas was leaving, and he wasn’t coming back.