Goddess (Starcrossed)

wondered what it feels like to be loved like that. To be loved more .” He looked Helen in the eye, his gaze intent and hurting. “I know you love me, Helen. But don’t I deserve to be someone’s first choice for a change?”
    Tears burned in Helen’s eyes. The look on Orion’s face was exactly like the one she’d seen on Aeneas’ face when his mother chose the other Helen over him. All his life, in every life he’d lived, Orion had been the runner-up to someone else.
    “I can’t think of anyone in the world who deserves to be loved—loved more— more than you,” Helen said, her voice breaking. “I thought being with you would make me forget him. But that’s just a nice way of saying I was using you.” She bent her head. “I’m so sorry.”
    Orion put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close to him. “Hey, I’m the one who kissed you. I put myself in this situation. And I ought to know better.”
    “But I want to love you more,” she said slowly, afraid to continue. She steeled herself and pulled back to meet his eyes. “You could make me love you more, couldn’t you?”
    “Yes,” he whispered. “Until the next time you see Lucas. But you already know this. You didn’t just fall in love with him once. You fall in love with him every time you look at him.”
    “Then I’ll stay away from him. Forever.”
    He glanced away and bit his lower lip, debating it. “But I’d always know,” he whispered. “I’d always know that I forced you to love me, and that it isn’t real. I think I’d rather never be loved than know that.”
    Helen nodded, staring at her hands without seeing them. She wrapped her arms around his chest and let the tears come . . . for Orion, for herself, and for Lucas, but mainly because she was so sick of it all. She had power over the most magnificent forces on Earth, but she still didn’t feel like she had power over the most important thing of all—her own heart.
    Orion lay back on the sand and pulled her down on top of him. He banished the water soaking their skin and hair so they were immediately dry, and stared up at the stars while Helen cried a few frustrated tears. When she’d settled down, he piled their discarded clothes over them, still holding her on top of him to keep her off the cold sand. She was too tired to think straight anymore.
    “So are we friends?” he asked after a long silence.
    “Doesn’t seem enough, does it?” she said as sleep quickly set in and started to paralyze her. “We’re more than friends. We’re brothers. Blood brothers.”
    His chest shuddered with a little laugh under her cheek, and she felt him whisper “brothers” to himself as he drifted off to sleep.
    The last thing Helen thought before she drifted off after him was that she’d slept on a beach like this before with another boy. But this time there was no Helen-shaped dent for her to fit inside.
     
    “Uncle?” Helen called out.
    “I’m here, niece,” Hades replied kindly. Helen turned around and found him walking up the infinite beach in the Underworld—the one that never led to an ocean.
    She smiled tentatively at him as he joined her. “Thank you for coming. I have a lot of questions.” Her voice was quivering with uncertainty. “When I’m sitting across from myself, and other people are calling me names like ‘Guinevere,’ I’m having a memory, not a dream, right?”
    “Correct.”
    “How?”
    Hades’ dark helmet glimmered. “The dead have choices. They don’t have to stay in the Underworld forever if they don’t wish to. But in order to leave, they must wash their memories away in the River Lethe, before they can be reborn.”
    “And when I touched a few drops of that river water?” she asked, following up on a hunch.
    “Life experiences are never annihilated. The river remembers. Your soul called to those memories in the water, and they joined you in this life. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes,” he said, and then turned his cloaked head away. “Why don’t you clothe yourself?”
    “Oh. Right,” she said. Embarrassed, she crossed her arms over her lacy bra. “I don’t know how.”
    “Yes you do. Think, Helen.”
    “I want to be wearing warm, clean clothes,” she said distinctly. Helen pictured a sturdy outfit, complete with the lined galoshes that she usually wore in the Underworld, and it instantly appeared on her body. Helen raised her eyes to the place behind the shadows where she guessed Hades’ eyes would