Battlefield Love

by Skyler Andra

  Rane’s kiss had been like a storm, something that caught me up and didn’t care where it flung us. While Byron’s kiss was different, like the roar of a fire, one that was contained in the hearth for the moment but could still leap out and destroy everything in its path. He tasted like peppermint, and when his tongue came out to trail along my lower lip, I whimpered a little.

  “Goodnight,” he whispered, his voice strained, as if it cost him to leave me behind.

  Giving me a final kiss on the forehead, which left my skin burning for long afterwards, he departed the room.

  Bastard.

  Alone on the bed, I scrunched my hands, my eyes wide and my heart beating fast. My sudden rage was intense and so surprising that I gasped. That was wrong. That was completely wrong. I had never been angry at anyone giving me a no before. I would rather have someone say no than give me a reluctant yes. That was just part and parcel with being a halfway decent human being.

  After a stunned moment where I tried to find out if I had turning into a monster, I realized that the anger felt outside of me somehow. It was less as if it were coming from a place inside me than it was washing over me.

  In that moment I realized I really needed to learn more about Eros. Find out what made him tick. Was this anger coming from him? From me? Because I was upset that Byron had turned me down? Or because I didn’t want to be alone? I was scared and on the run. Homeless. Money less. Jobless. I needed Byron’s comfort, even though I knew it wasn’t fair to ask it of him. He’d already done enough, bringing me back to his home, giving me shelter, until I figured out my next move.

  Going over everything in my head was pointless. I’d just torture myself unnecessarily. Tucking myself between the cool sheets, I snuggled into the pillow. I must have been exhausted because I fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  When I woke the next morning, the smell of frying bacon dragged me from the bed so fast. Sleep be damned when my stomach demanded food! My shower and working out my next step could wait until after breakfast.

  A large T-shirt hung over the doorknob. I slipped it on before venturing out into the kitchen. The carpet scratched beneath my feet.

  In the kitchen, Byron flipped the bacon in the pan and mixed up the scrambled eggs. Dressed in a T-shirt and soft flannel pants, he still looked painfully good as he concentrated on the food in the pan. An urge rose in me to go to him, stand behind him, and wrap my arms around him. Inhale his musky scent mixed with the remnants of his spicy cologne. But after last night’s rejection, I stomped on that idea pretty quick.

  “Is that breakfast?” I asked, leaning on the counter near him, my stomach grumbling.

  “Yep.” He gave me a sideways glance with hooded, sleepy eyes.

  “For both of us?” I prodded.

  He shot me a look with a little smirk. “No. I’m making twice as much food as I normally would just so I could eat in front of you and then throw away the rest like the villain in a children’s movie.”

  I made a face at him as he switched off the stove burner and spooned the fry pan’s contents onto two plates. He grabbed the rye bread from the toaster, placing a slice on each plate. God, a man who made me breakfast was sexy as sin. At the table, he’d already set out butter and jam complete with a label printed in French. Apparently being a professor was paying off for Byron.

  I heaped a thick spread over my toast, along with jam.

  “This is good,” I said. “This is way better than that time I somehow messed up making us cold cereal.”

  “That wasn’t your finest moment, no.” Byron laughed, easing the lines of concern pressed into his forehead. “But we’re not talking about your cooking failures today.”

  “We’re not?” I asked, my stomach bunching, wanting to stay light and fun, not delve into the dark story just yet. “Because there’s certainly been some doozies since we last talked.”

  He gave me a look, the one that screamed explain and now, and I imagined him dishing that exact look to students who failed to submit their assignments on time.

  He put down his fork neatly on his plate. “After not seeing each other for four years,” he started. “You email me out of the blue, and tell me you’re in trouble.”

  Maybe there was some part of me that thought it might be good to tell Byron that he was right. I could have made up something about a fight with a friend or trouble at work, and that I had blown it all out of proportion. It wasn’t like I had never done that when we knew each other. However, it wasn’t as if my issues were going to blow over just because I said they were, and I had never, ever had a good track record of lying to Byron.

  “I was willing to let it slide last night,” he said, taking my hand, the heat from it jumping into me and accelerating my heartbeat. “Because you looked pretty upset. Hell, if things look better today and you realized that you were overacting, I might still be okay with this being a short, strange vacation for you. But something tells me it’s not, is it?”

  I pushed aside my plate, no longer hungry. If he wanted the story, he was about to get it, but was he really ready? I didn’t want to lie to him. “It’s not.”

  Byron leaned back in his chair with all the patience in the world. “All right. Get talking.”

  There was nowhere left to hide, and I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, so a few nights ago,” I started, scratching at the tabletop. “I was just doing my job, and after this really strange call, a bright light appeared in the sky.”

  I briefly mentioned the important detail of what my job was, but didn’t go into great depth. I wasn’t about to have Byron judge me for how low I’d descended for survival. Everything else all spilled out: the men in my apartment, Mads rescuing me, the cops after me, the men in suits at the diner crawling all over Rane’s car, the radio announcements and my supposed crimes, my suspicion of Rane and running away and ending up in Boise. The only thing I left out was the stuff that had happened between me and Rane. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but at the moment, it was still so new and raw that it felt like picking at a wound to mention Rane more than I absolutely had to.

  When I was done, I took a sip of water soothing my dry and sore throat. It wasn’t one of those situations where I told someone my problems and realized that they were much smaller and silly than I’d originally made them out to be. If anything, I had realized that not only were they real, they were unbelievable. Instead, I think I felt better because I wasn’t doing it invisibly anymore. For better or worse, I was confessing to someone who had once been very important to me. Even if he was looking at me as if I were crazy.

  “Well?” I finally asked impatiently, preparing for him to tell me I’d gone mad and for him to kick me out of his home.

  Byron tilted his head, his eyes drilling into mine. “How long have you been doing phone sex?”

  Oh, god. Out of the entire story, this is what he wanted to know! Not jump into a solution for how to get out of this mess.

  “About eighteen months,” I said, suddenly a little lost for words, buried under my shame. “That’s the thing you most wanted to ask about?”

  Byron’s hands bent outwards. “Yes, because the rest of it sounds insane. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that. It sounds like you’ve had a nightmare, the kind where you wake up believing it’s true.”

  I leaned forward, the table digging into my chest. “Look, I know how it sounds, but this is all real. I swear to you. People in my apartment, people who are avatars of gods, and I was being taken to some kind of meeting in Seattle…” I winced. “Okay, wow, that really does sound like delusions of grandeur, doesn’t it?”

  Byron pat my hands. “It does.” His gentle tone spoke of his disbelief and sympathy. “Look, Locke, have you been under a lot of stress lately? Money troubles, issues with neighbors or something? Because that can make for some pretty wild incidents? These things can play havoc with the mind.”

  Here he was getting all academic on me, making me doubt everything that had happened, when I know they were al
l real.

  “No, nothing like that.” My voice sounded more exasperated than I preferred. “You might be surprised how well phone sex pays if you don’t mind guys calling you a dirty slut.”

  “I mind,” Byron muttered.

  “Well, no one’s asking you to work a phone sex line. What I’m saying is that unbelievable as this feels, it’s all real, and it’s happening to me.”

  “But you can’t prove it, can you? Can you just look at me and see weird strings leading me to my one true love?”

  For some reason, that made my face burn hotter than Byron’s gas stove. The idea of investigating his red cords, the way I had examined Jeff’s and the old man in the library, left me feeling empty and slightly breathless. I hated the idea but at the same time was eaten up by curiosity, wanting to know if his cord might lead to me. That last idea felt dirty, like I was invading his privacy, and part of me didn’t want to know. What if that was history? I didn’t think I could take that.

  “I…I don’t want to do that.” I shook my hands. “And no, I can’t prove it. Except….”

  “Except?” Byron was giving me a skeptical look, and that was as familiar as it was irritating. He had always been like that, too sure he was right, sure that every answer could be found in a book or some study, if he found the right one.

  I had always longed to put Byron in his place when he got this particular sort of stubborn attitude, and maybe this whole sorry incident would be worth it if I could. But I didn’t want to look. I took a deep breath.

  “Do you keep condoms in the house?” I asked.

  His cheekbones rounded from his smirk. “What?” He covered his face with his hands as he laughed. “No? Why would you ask me that?”

  The collar on the shirt I wore felt tight, even though it was miles too big, and I yanked at it. “Pretty sure you do. Check your nightstand.”

  “I haven’t bought condoms in years. Stop being ridiculous, Locke.”

  So he wasn’t having sex? Or his girlfriend took the pill? Damn. So many questions raised from such a small comment. Questions best not asked right now.

  “No. Seriously.” I raised my chin defiantly, jerking my head, gesturing for him to check. “Check your nightstand.”

  He stood, impatience storming across his face. I knew that look. The sooner he proved me wrong, the sooner we could get me checked into a mental health institute or whatever polite term they were calling the looney bin today.

  I wondered if this would work. It had worked exactly once, I had refused to let it work a second time, and that wasn’t a lot of evidence for a test where it seemed as if my sanity were on the line. In the next room, I heard Byron’s footsteps, then a drawer open. Then there was nothing else for several long moments. I hung onto my breath in case this didn’t work and I looked even more of a fool.

  When Byron returned to the kitchen, he was carrying a strip of condoms and had a strange look on his face as if he were caught somewhere between surprised and impressed.

  “So?” I asked, leaning back in my chair, feeling all cocky, and unable to keep the smirk off of my face.

  From Byron’s face, I read that he had to rewrite everything he knew about the situation, about magical powers, about me. He stashed the condoms in the utensils drawer and came to sit down with me at the living room table again.

  “All right,” he said. “Point proven. So you’re being chased by two organizations you don’t know anything about.”

  “Thank you.” Relief teemed through me. I was about to go mad if he didn’t believe me. “And I came to you because…”

  “Because I’m the only person you know who has a doctorate in comparative mythology and folklore. Yes, I know.”

  Actually, that had been a distant second or third reason at best. I had come looking for him because I knew him and trusted him, missed him, still felt something for him. But those reasons probably weren’t something we could talk about right that moment.

  Byron cleaned up the plates as if the action helped him think. But I was raised better than that, and sat him back down, doing it for him.

  “I’ve got the dishes,” I insisted, stacked them and cookware into the sink before running the hot water. “You tell me what you know about all of this mythology business.”

  Chapter 17

  Byron cleared his throat before starting. “Well, Greek and Roman mythology aren’t my strong suit, and honestly, despite a fair number of similarities, there are some very deep differences as well. I’m actually not the best person to be asking about this kind of thing.”

  Great. The professor of mythology and folklore didn’t know much about the most famous of all the gods.

  “I’m really not asking for a lecture or a specialist,” I told him, scrubbing the dishes and rinsing them. “I just want another human opinion. You know, someone who’s apart from all of this.”

  “Okay.” There was an edge of amusement in his voice. “I think I can provide that. First, you have Hermes, who’s the Greek god of a lot of things. From what you’re talking about, it seems you found someone who’s embodying the aspects of Hermes as a god of thieves and tricks.”

  That pretty much summed up Mads.

  I nodded as I put the plate in the drying tray. “Well, getting a hold of a nice car and a classy downtown apartment is a damned good trick for a guy with no perceptible income or a wallet from what I observed.”

  “Right.” Byron chuckled. “And the way you talked about him, Mads, right? He sounds like someone who at least understands that mode of behavior and belief. And may enjoy the idea of penis-shaped lawn ornaments.”

  I jerked my head back. “What?”

  Byron jumped up to retrieve a book from his shelf, which he flicked through, and lay on the bench next to me. I glanced between him and the images of statues with giant erect cocks sprawled across the page.

  “The Greeks and Romans both associated the figure of Hermes with the phallus,” Byron explained. “And thanks to the fact that social and sexual customs were very different than they are now, it was considered lucky to have a shrine to Hermes in your front yard. That shrine, more often than not, took the shape of a large phallus.”

  I laughed so hard my stomach cramped, and I almost dropped the slippery, sudsy plate in my hand. Next time I saw Mads I was going to remind him of the revelation that was also the god of cock!

  “A dick. You mean they put a large dick in the yard to make Hermes happy.” I paused. “How large is large?”

  Byron sketched a shape in the air about the length of his arm.

  The picture of a suburban street with dick statues of that size running down the length of it made me pause. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” None of this news even phased Byron. “So you’ve got Hermes, who’s the god of thieves, messengers, tricksters—anyone who needs to move fast and needs at least some luck to do what they do. Then apparently in Rane, you have Ares, the god of war.”

  Byron paused, stroking his chin, the motion hypnotizing me, my gaze glued to his finger and the cut of his hard jawline.

  “Ares is a different case,” Byron said, shaking me out of my daze. “Especially in a world where war was a personal thing. In the modern era, there are many people who manage to be entirely insulated from war. That wasn’t the way it was before, back when these gods were worshiped. War happened most years, and you probably had a soldier in the family. Military service was mandatory for the Romans and in certain select places for the Greeks. Ares was only ever the god of war.”

  “Because war was so big,” I murmured, rinsing the final dish and letting it dry.

  For a moment, that made my heart ache for Rane. I remembered how carefree Mads had been even when we’d been running from the men in black together. Rane in comparison, seemed to carry something far heavier on his shoulders.

  I leaned against the counter, facing Byron.

  “You could probably pray and sacrifice to Hermes for a wide variety of things. Ares only appeared for one specific but wid
e-reaching situation.” Byron shook his head. “Unlike his feminine counterpart, Athena, who represented not only warfare, but strategy, wisdom, courage, arts and crafts.”

  The way Byron said it made me suspect he thought Ares a simple god, built for only one purpose: fighting. Sure, he had a dangerous and insatiable lust for battle. But there was more to the elemental that I’d met. He was dutiful, an accomplished victor, and ended many a conflict to save thousands of lives.

  Byron flicked through a few more pages of his thick book. “And then we have you. Cupid.”

  “Er, not me at all,” I corrected him. “I can’t do what Rane did and reach to some kind of god elemental thing.”

  “Are you sure they kept saying Cupid?”

  “Yes, like the little baby with the wings and the arrows.”

  “Okay, first no.” Byron pointed to an image of a sculpture of a winged man resembling an angel, embracing a woman. “That’s not Cupid at all. But I’m wondering why they used the Roman name for the god when they’re using Hermes and Ares, which are Greek.”

  “I don’t know.” To this point it still confused me. Maybe it was just the representation of the god. Same role just different names in separate cultures.

  “And second,” Byron added. “At some point the Victorians got a hold of Cupid. They were the ones who decided he was all adorably fluffy and cute. Before that, even back to the Renaissance, when he was a very good-looking young man with wings, he was kind of scary.”

  This news supported what Rane had said about the other gods fearing Eros. But I played dumb, wanting Byron’s take on it. “Isn’t he the god of love, though?”

  Byron laughed and there was something a little dark in his voice. “Yes, and that was terrifying to both the civilized Greeks and the order-above-all-things Romans. Both of those societies were pretty much built on everyone following the rules. Love’s one of those things that throws a wrench into things.”

  Ahhh. Interesting. But I kept up my ruse, milking him for more. “I don’t know if I understand.”