There was something teasing about the way he said the lovely Thetis. I looked at him. He was smiling and looking up at me sideways, invitingly. The shadow of the leaves moved over his perfect body. With no thought or intention beyond answering the challenge of the moment I leaned over and kissed him. It’s always such an interesting experience, lips, so full of sensation, pressed against other lips, which move independently, closed but with the possibility of opening, dry, but with the immanence of moisture. And it’s strange, when you examine it, to put a mouth, used for speech and eating, so close to another mouth, to invite such intimacy.

When Poimandros and I had been married at Festival eight years before, we had been in the City, in one of the practice rooms in the hall on the street of Dionysos. Even then, on a solid planet, not knowing he was a god, and in a context where we both knew what was expected of us, it had been wonderful, powerful, numinous. Now as I kissed him in the grove on Olympos, not knowing whether he wanted it, or even whether this was really what I wanted, that familiar-strange sensation of lips touching seemed almost overwhelming. I moved my head away. He was smiling, and again the smile was both strange and familiar. I had seen it before, not only on his face but on statues. He was looking at me, not through me, as statues did. I looked down. His penis was half awake. It gave a little bounce as I looked. I put my hand on it, and felt it swell delightfully in my grasp.

“We’re guest-friends, Marsilia,” he said. “I shouldn’t take advantage.”

“But I want to,” I said. I did. I felt the gathering tightening twitch of my own sexual desire.

“But it would be un-Platonic,” he said, laughing.

I took my hand off his penis, now fully awake and pointing towards me. “All right,” I agreed, feeling a little ashamed of myself. “You’re right. It would be. So, Phila.”

“Phila, yes,” he said, sounding a little disconcerted. I had no idea why. He was right, and I had acknowledged as much.

“I had an idea,” I said.

“Good. I don’t know much about her.”