Page 36 of The Cinderella Prince

“I won’t let you down,” Tristan said.

Today was going to be a good day.

CHAPTER 11

To Worship and Honor

Tristan

An afternoon picnicat Central Park that turned into hours of cloud-gazing, kissing, and hand-holding had only been the first of our many dates. To show Cedric what it was to be an invisible old nobody, I took him to a brewery one evening, enjoying the view of the Hudson River flowing by and tasting the various craft beers Mad Hare offered. We watched the stars and walked the streets. We went to underground movie screenings and watched old horror films neither of us expected to like nearly as much as we did. We ate junk food in a parking lot one evening and made love all night long in my bedroom, with Cedric holding his underwear against my lips to stop me from making a sound. We held hands out in the open until they got slick with sweat, and we kept holding them anyway.

Mama Viv needed me to help Millie with the menu for Lady Vivien’s 1950s TV Dinner Extravaganza. Cedric worked his ass off that night, helping behind the bar asmuch as he was helping in the kitchen, yet he kissed me nearly every time he passed through. There was a kindness and softness in the way he looked at me that hadn’t been there before the night at the Henriette Hotel.

The TV Dinner Extravaganza had an outrageously delightful lineup of queens depicting the 1950s life, from perfect little housewives to the ruthless survivors of a nuclear apocalypse, their gas masks and bodies seamlessly smoothed with paint that it appeared as if the masks were a part of their heads. It was wild fun, just like every event Mama Viv had ever put together.

Life was good.

Cedric was beautiful, and the moments we stole were priceless. It was almost easy to forget that things were never certain in life, least of all when his time was running out. A decision had to be made, and people had to be told. There would be diplomatic consequences, and there would be paparazzi coverages. I couldn’t even imagine the perfect storm that Cedric’s announcement was going to create.

But he picked me. Every night, he picked me over everyone else, and he promised he always would.

Somewhere deep within the rotten blackness of the core of my soul, I was beginning to believe him. I was starting to see a bit of light, a bit of life, a bit of recovery where only devastation had existed for over a decade.

Cedric’s hand wrapped around mine and pulled my thoughts from wandering. “The Greek and Roman art galleries are a real gem,” he said, leading me into a vast area of sculptures, vases, coins, tools, and pieces of walls with frescos or mosaics still on them.

I smiled at him, letting him guide us through thevarious galleries. The mission was to find as many homages to Antinous as we could, he explained.

“Um, silly question, but who’s Antinous?” I asked, frowning.

“Not silly,” Cedric said gently.

“I feel like I should know this,” I pointed out.

He laughed lightly. “Never be ashamed of the things you don’t know. Only be ashamed of never being wrong.” And when I laughed, he led me to Leon Levy and Shelby White Court and galleries, where statues and busts spent their eternity in care and with plenty of visitors to keep them company.

The gallery was rather empty on Wednesday afternoon. Light slanted at an angle from the glass dome, its intensity low enough that the orange lamps were lit throughout the gallery.

One, in particular, was interesting to Cedric, who ignored the perfectly polished, well-kept statues of gods and emperors, of general and philosophers, in order to show me a chipped and chiseled bust of a young man, the marble yellowed and his nose missing, he still had the features of timeless beauty. “This is Antinous. Isn’t he beautiful?”

Cedric’s eyes were wide with wonder, and the most ridiculous sliver of jealousy passed through me. I envied a piece of marble. The sensation passed immediately, and I tightened my hand around Cedric’s. “Do we know anything about him?”

“We don’t know much until he appeared in Emperor Hadrian’s life,” Cedric said. I was giddy with curiosity. This mattered to him, and he mattered to me. “Antinous was born on November 27, and the year was 110. We share abirthday, although I’m of a more recent vintage. He only lived until he was close to twenty, but his image survives to this day. He was raised in Bithynia, today’s Turkey, and he met Hadrian when he was twelve.”

I sucked a breath through my teeth.

Cedric chuckled. “It’s not like that. Hadrian sent Antinous to Rome to be educated and become his page. He invested in the young man and protected him. So when Antinous was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, the friendship turned into something more. He was Hadrian’s favorite, which was recorded in 128. I suppose, in modern terms, we’d call him Hadrian’s favorite person.” Cedric glanced at me with a touch of humor on his lips. “Hadrian was obsessed with the young man so much that he took Antinous on his tour of the Roman Empire. They traveled together until, in October of 130, the couple attended a festival in Egypt when Antinous perished. We don’t know for sure, but from what’s recorded, it’s likely that it was a freak accident that took him. We do know, however, that the contemporaries wrote of Hadrian’s reaction. To cite one, ‘he wept like a woman.’ The local priesthood in Egypt was the first to identify Antinous with Osiris. Others followed, and the young man was deified. Although we don’t know much of Antinous’ life, we know what he looked like. And we know it because Hadrian did everything to immortalize Antinous. He built a city on the Middle Nile, calling it Antinoöpolis. He commissioned Antinous’ likeness to be made into statues and busts. Religions throughout the Empire created cults of Antinous. To some, he was a divine hero. To others, he was the conqueror of death. His name was inscribed on coffins,and his story reached every corner of the Roman domain. Antinoöpolis was a bastion of Greek culture in the region of the Middle Nile, and there were at least twenty-eight temples built to honor the young man. Today, we can find his face on the statues of Dionysus, Hermes, Osiris, the Celtic sun god Belenos, and the divine hero Aristaeus, and many more.”

Chills ran down my arms and spine. My vision blurred as I gazed at this chipped bust that only depicted three-quarters of a face, the rest missing. I hadn’t known about him, although he had existed for two thousand years.

Cedric turned to me, a twinkle in his eyes from where the tears caught the last of the daylight piercing the dome. “Can you imagine such a love?” he asked, his voice fiery and passionate. “Thirty cities issued coins with Antinous’ face, and at least nine cities held games in his honor, including both athletic and artistic components.” He smiled. “Hadrian loved him so much and lost him so young. And there’s no doubt about that. It’s estimated there were over two thousand sculptures created in the years following Antinous’ death. Only a little over a hundred survive to this day. Of forty-odd statues found in Italy, half were kept in Hadrian’s home.”

I shook my head. I could hardly imagine anyone being loved so much.

Cedric shrugged. “I think it’s incredible. Two thousand years and we still know who he was because someone loved him enough to make him into a god. We think of the Roman Empire either as this beacon of culture in a barbaric world as barbarians themselves, but people are people. They love, they lose, they hurt, then feel joy and sorrow and painlike everyone that came before them and everyone that followed.”

I simply watched him as he spoke, his gaze moving from my face to the dome above us, then taking the entire room before returning to my eyes. “It’s easy to be remembered when you’re an emperor’s favorite,” I said.

“You know, I don’t think being an emperor makes someone able to love harder than everyone else,” Cedric said simply. “Imagine, then, how many people loved just as hard, but we know nothing about it.” He nodded. “But yes, not everyone can go around building temples and issuing coins.”

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