when the sun came up

vii.

Emma was silent. It had been a long week and she'd had a few drinks, that was all. That was the only reason why Ethan's face had flashed briefly in her mind at Grayson's words. That, and she hadn't had sex in a really long time and there were certainly no dating prospects on the horizon and he was the only male apart from Grayson she saw on a regular basis and in extremely close quarters, at that. So yeah, that kind of made sense and god she was feeling exhausted, it'd been a killer week and she'd had a few drinks, had she mentioned that she'd had a few drinks?

"Emma?"

"Huh?" she said automatically.

"You okay there?"

Gray and Olivia were both peering at her, looking amused and only a tad concerned.

"Yeah, of course," Emma said quickly, with a bright smile. "Just gonna grab another round. What can I get you guys?"

4. He reads. A lot.

More than anyone else Emma has ever met before, and she'd dated a rather pretentious English Major early in sophomore year who prided himself a little too much on how varied his reading "portfolio" was. (What a dickhead, Emma thought in amusement. Thank God she came to her senses so quickly and dumped him.)

But Ethan's so-called reading portfolio, if he ever cared to collate such a thing, was almost bizarrely diverse. After all, he did leave his things messily sprawled all over their communal living space, so Emma usually caught a glimpse of whatever his current reading material was. So far, she hadn't managed to detect any rhyme or reason whatsoever in regards to his tastes.

Was it possible he was interested in everything?"

He seemed to have a liking for scary books, particularly those rooted in gore, murders or paranormal activity. He favoured the long-winded essays of a handful of fairly pompous-sounding French and American literary journalists, none of whom Emma had ever heard of before. And he also had a passing interest in molecular biology and organic chemistry, if those times she came home to find him randomly absorbed in one of her course textbooks were anything to go by.

And when it came to other genres, Ethan wasn't one to discriminate. Detective mysteries, modern fantasy novels, classics, thrillers of the dystopian and science fiction variety, nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry (he was particularly fond of Gertrude Stein), reimagined fables and fairy tales and on one memorable occasion, even freaking Chaucer; Ethan apparently read them all. She'd spotted a couple texts from these genres floating around the loft at different times.

Emma didn't know how someone with the attention span of a gnat when it came to girls could force himself to get through The Canterbury Tales. In the original Middle English, no less. It was one of the truly more baffling things in life.

Then one afternoon a greek mythological thesis had happened to catch Emma's eye one evening. She'd been procrastinating studying for an exam the next day, looking for her diary, and there it was, buried under an untidy pile of books on the dining table: The Hero: Futility and Grandeur of Existence Within Human Limitations in Archaic Greek Myth.

An hour later, Ethan came home to find Emma deeply engrossed in his work.

"Hey, princess."

"Oh, Ethan. Hey." Startled, Emma dropped the thesis, then subtly shifted away from it. She was suddenly feeling a little awkward. "You're home early."

"Yeah, it was pretty slow at the bar today." He gave her a strange look. "Were you just reading my thesis?"

"Maybe," Emma said, keeping her voice purposely light. She made a noncommittal gesture. "It's good."

Ethan's lips quirked. "Oh, you think so?" He left his jacket on the coat rack by the front door and moved to lounge on the couch beside her, stretching his legs out with a sigh.

"So. Are you... interested?"

Enma turned to look at him quickly. "What?"

There was something sly about the curve of his mouth, something that made her stomach clench up very slightly just looking at him. "In mythology, I mean."

Emma relaxed. "Oh, yeah – of course. I'm not really familiar with a lot of the Greek gods and heroes you mentioned there, but it's still fascinating."

Ethan smiled then, one of his rare real smiles, no hint of a smirk. It made him look subtly different; younger almost, his face suffused with sudden warmth.

"Well, what do you want to know?"

That's how it starts. It becomes a tradition of sorts, after a while. Sometimes when they're just hanging out in the evenings, one of them cooking and the other shooting the breeze, or when they're both hideously hungover on Sunday mornings and can't be bothered moving an inch, they'll talk Greek mythology. She makes him tell her about Prometheus, the trickster who suffered eternal punishment from Zeus for introducing fire to mankind; Cassandra, gifted the power of prophecy by Apollo but, upon her refusal of his advances, also the curse of never being believed; Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus and helped him to defeat the Minotaur, only to be abandoned by him on the shores of Naxos.

She'd never dream of telling him, of course, but it quickly becomes one of Emma's favourite pastimes. Ethan has such an innate talent for storytelling, particularly when he's passionate about his subject, and his voice is, quite simply, beautiful. Always resonating perfectly, his quiet laugh like a dark secret.

She gets shivers sometimes, just listening to him.