Unlovable

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  “Okay,” he admitted. “That’s not my real name.”

  “I thought not. So?”

  “It’s Liam. Liam Whatshisface.”

  I blinked at him. “Your name is Liam what’s his face?”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “What? Like Matilda Schmidt is a fucking poem?”

  “No, not at all. It’s just that Whatshisface is a little…unusual.”

  “My mother couldn’t remember the guy’s name and the cocktail of drugs she was on hadn’t worn off when she filled out the birth certificate.”

  “Of course!” I said, sitting bolt upright in my seat. “This explains everything.”

  “Oh yeah?” His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed against the dark stubble covering his throat as he swallowed.

  “You were teased as a child! With a name like Liam Whatshisface, I could hardly see how you wouldn’t be. But it was worse than that. You were small for your age, which is why you’ve pursued weightlifting as an adult,” I said, noting the width of his arm in my peripheral vision. “Also, your family lived at or below the poverty line. Which is why you wear such expensive suits and yet drive a cheap car. You can’t bear for anyone to know that you came from an underprivileged—”

  “Stop!” The gun had reappeared, its cold metal kiss pressed against my temple as he steered with one hand. “You try to analyze me again, and I’ll use your brain to condition my leather seats. You’re worth more to me alive than dead, but I get paid either way. ”

  Fear sank in my gut like a lead weight. “I wasn’t trying to upset you. I just—”

  “You’ve been warned.” He tucked the gun back into his coat and retrieved something else.

  There was quick movement in my peripheral vision, and I felt the sting of a needle.

  Tremendous pressure spiked through my skull and light burst behind my eyes. Blessed darkness wrapped the pain in velvet.

  I slept.

  *****

  “Psst!”

  The sound filtered through a throbbing haze. My eyelids were sealed with cement and grit behind my glasses. Metallic rattling when I tried to move my hands. Pain biting into my wrist. Fingers numb and tingling.

  “Psst!”

  Handcuffs. My hands were cuffed behind my back. A windshield materialized in my blurry gaze, rain-spotted like the long black hood stretching beyond. This wasn’t my car. Where was I?

  “Psst! Dr. Schmidt! Are you awake?”

  Did I know that voice? My head lolled toward my shoulder, and I spotted a gas pump out of the driver’s side window. Gas. We had stopped for gas. But who were we?

  “Dr. Schmidt, can you hear me? It’s Cupid.”

  Cupid. I had to work my tongue free of the roof of my mouth. “Oh my God,” I groaned. “I had the weirdest dream. There was this demigod, and a hit man, and some creepy little baby with wings.”

  “If it was a dream,” the muffled voice asked, “then who are you talking to?”

  A series of pops rippled up my neck as I turned my head to see my laptop bag in the back seat. Something was in there. And it was moving.

  “Shit. So it wasn’t a dream. A demigod showed up at my office. Right before he dumped Cupid on my floor, and a Vegas hit man handcuffed me and crammed me into his car. I looked at the empty driver’s seat. “Where is he?”

  “He’s outside, smoking,” Cupid answered, following my train of thought. “Can you believe anyone still buys Marlboro Reds?”

  I watched the puff of smoke drift across the windshield, then looked back to my laptop bag. “How can you tell?”

  “I can smell them. Cheap bastard.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I asked.

  “When he shot the fish tank, I panicked and dove into your laptop bag. He zipped it closed when we were leaving.”

  Sigmund swam through my memory, his image fixing itself in my coffee mug. He was okay.

  “It’s dark,” I observed. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere near Des Moines if we’ve been driving as long as I think we have.”

  Panic stormed my senses. “We can’t be. I’ve only been asleep for a few minutes!”

  “Keep in mind, I didn’t see anything,” Cupid began. “But I heard Whatshisface talking to someone on the phone about giving you a little something to help you sleep. I think it started with a K. Keta-something?”

  “Ketamine?” I had run across Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer better known as Vitamin K or Cat Valium on the street, in grad school during a summer counseling internship at a drug-treatment center. I remembered one of the patients under Vitamin K’s dark spell telling me that it made heroine look like baby aspirin. Anger and fear grappled for control of my stomach. He could have killed me.

  “Yeah, that sounds right. But like I said, I didn’t see anything,” the voice from my laptop bag insisted. “Which, while we’re on the topic, I’d really like to. Can you unzip me?”

  My fingers tingled with the prickling of a thousand needles. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m handcuffed. Can’t you just materialize out of the bag, or unzip it with your powers or something? You’re magical.”

  “Do you honestly think I would still be in here if that were an option?” the voice said.

  “I suppose not. What happened to Crixus?”

  “You mean after he screwed your assistant’s brains out?”

  A flame of irritation licked at my heart. “What I mean is, wouldn’t he try to find you? Isn’t he assigned to your…case?”

  “Oh, he’ll find us. The question is how many women he’ll have to boff on the way. Like father, like son.” The bitter note in his voice was audible even through the layers of fabric and zippers.

  “And his father is?”

  “Zeus. Didn’t take any mythology classes while you were racking up those letters?”

  “Of course I did. I’d just never heard of a Crixus before.” I leaned forward in my seat to relieve the pressure on my wrists and introduced a whole new series of aches in the process. Pain radiated through my shoulders and down my arms. My lower back seized up when I tried to stretch my torso over my legs.

  “Not everyone makes it into the history books.”

  “But you did,” I said. “You’re Aphrodite’s son, though the myths were never very clear on who your father was.”

  “Neither was she,” Cupid replied.

  I scoured my memory for anything else about his story I could remember. What name had he said in my office? Psyche? Psyche. Psyche! “Wait a minute,” I said. “I remember Psyche. Psyche was a mortal princess, but Aphrodite was so jealous of her beauty that she ordered you to make her fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. But you were wounded by your own arrow and fell in love with her instead. Aphrodite was so furious that she forbade the union.”

  The bag was silent for several beats. “Yeah? So?”

  “So of course you would feel resentment toward happy couples, and I would think, no small measure of pain that your mother would deny you your own happiness while pursuing her own so selfishly.”

  “Could you be any more stereotypical?” Cupid snorted. “The shrink blaming the mother?”

  “Stereotypes exist because human beings follow patterns. Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.” The pain in my back receded enough for me to notice the pain in my feet. I had been wearing heels for the better part of seventeen hours. I kicked them off and wiggled my toes within their silky black stockings.

  “Just because your mother was a psycho doesn’t mean all mothers are.” The defensive note in Cupid’s voice abraded my already thinning patience.

  I forced a breath into my lungs and counted myself lucky Cupid couldn’t see my face. Was he referring to my earlier admission that my mother was schizophrenic? Or did he know more? “You’re reacting with hostility because I’ve hit a nerve,” I said, slipping into an indifferent tone the way a surgeon slipped into gloves.

  “Yeah? And you’re ugly,” came the muttered reply.
r />   “We really should explore this—”

  The driver’s side door jerked open and my captor resumed his place behind the wheel. Any tirade I had planned to launch at Liam disintegrated as the scent of night air and smoke riding in on his leather gave way to the aroma of char-grilled meat and deep fried potatoes. Saliva flooded my mouth at the mere sight of the fast food bags in his lap. My stomach remembered that it hadn’t eaten since the bowl of shredded wheat and almond milk yesterday before work. Even my extra indulgence, a sliced banana, had evaporated, leaving me ravenous.

  “Good morning,” Liam said. “Hungry?”

  “I’m—” I paused to swallow the pool gathering in my mouth “—a vegan.”

  “And I’m Catholic,” he said, pulling a carton of French fries from one of the bags. “What’s your point?”

  Steam curled upward from the fries, climbing the cold air like a belly dancer’s veil. “But fast food is so—” I paused to swallow “—processed.”

  He pulled a still-warm fry from the box and used it to trace the seam of my lips. “Come on, Matilda,” he urged. “One little French fry isn’t going to hurt you.”

  Hunger won out and the fry slid between my parted lips. My eyelids fell closed as the crisp, golden potato yielded up its hot, creamy center. My tongue traced my lower lip to gather up the grains of salt the fry had left there. When I opened my eyes again, Liam was staring at my mouth. “More.”

  His lips moved. His eyes did not. “You’ll have to wait.”

  Desperation warred with the disorientation from the drugs he had given me. I was about ready to see how flexible my five times weekly yoga classes had made me. If I could just slide my butt and legs through my cuffed wrists, I could probably strangle Liam with the chain and dive face-first into the paper bags on his lap before he had time to shoot me. “Wait for what?”

  A smile hooked one side of his mouth. “Until I get you to our hotel room.”

  *****

  Hitchcock would have loved this place.

  I sat in the car waiting as Liam traded words with the rumpled clerk behind the motel desk. Leaning into the cold window, I gazed up at the starless pre-dawn sky above the shoebox shaped motel right off the interstate. Flickering blue light from a TV screen leaked from the office curtains to spill on a sidewalk that had likely seen its share of vomit.

  The blinking neon sign conjured only the most desperate of winter moths to its buzzing, electric-hued hell.

  And yet, I felt no fear. Sometime during my drugged stupor, I had passed beyond the borders of panic into an easy, disembodied delirium.

  “Are we stopping for the night?” Cupid’s muffled voice asked from my laptop bag.

  “It looks that way,” I said, too tired to comment or care where we were stopping.

  “Do I smell fries?” The note of undisguised desire in his voice echoed in my gut.

  I looked longingly at the bags sitting in the driver’s seat. Liam had rolled them closed to keep in the heat. I might be able to unroll them with my mouth and steal another fry, but getting them closed again would be a whole other matter. “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Don’t hold out on me,” he whined. “I’m starving!”

  “And you’re likely to stay that way, unless you know how to eat through leather.” Had I been less focused on a momentary fantasy of wrestling a beef patty in a mud pit of special sauce, I might have noted my lingering resentment following Cupid’s earlier comment about my mother.

  “You’re going to let me out of here, right?” Now it was desperation, not desire, coloring Cupid’s voice.

  “I’m having trouble finding the motivation to perform such a course of action.” I yawned and rolled my stiff neck.

  “You’re a doctor.” Panic cranked his already squeaky voice up a couple notches. “What about the Hippocratic oath?”

  “You’re out of luck.” I caught a reflection in the side mirror and squeaked. Was that my ghostly pale face hovering behind the black-rimmed glasses? I leaned away from the window, not wanting to see any more. “It doesn’t really exist. And anyway, it’s not like I shoved you into my laptop bag after conducting an evaluation of your symptoms. You did that yourself.”

  “I panicked,” he insisted. “I’ve never been shot at before.”

  “That makes two of us.” Okay, so there had been that one time when my mother thought she was Annie Oakley. I decided not to count it, but the memory drew softness to my heart. “Look, it’s nothing personal. But what the hell do you think Liam would do if he saw you? I can’t even explain you to myself. Much less a gun-toting mob lackey, who, by the way, is laboring under the delusion that I owe some guy named Stefano the Fathead over a million dollars. You want me to let you out of the bag? Help me escape, or find a way to convince Liam he has the wrong woman. Be useful.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” Cupid asked.

  “Don’t you have any powers? Can’t you put some kind of spell on him or something?”

  “It doesn’t really work like that.” His voice held a trace of regret that have me pause. “Please, Dr. Schmidt,” he continued. “I’m sorry for the things I said. I just need a couple of minutes to breathe. And he’s got to go to the bathroom sometime, right? That’s all I’m asking.”

  “We’ll see. Shh! Here he comes.”

  The very night seemed to yield its shadows up for Liam’s use. They parted for him, shrouded him, concealed his movements.

  My car door creaked open, breathing a cool sigh upon skin held too long in an enclosed space. I inhaled the scent of damp earth, asphalt, and overheated engine.

  “You’re in luck,” Liam reported. “They had a king room available.”

  “I’ll save my backflips of joy for later,” I mumbled.

  “Promise?” His warm body leaned across mine to gather up the food bags in his seat before he grabbed the chain linking my wrists. “Turn to the side and put your feet on the ground first,” he instructed. “Then you can lean forward and get out.”

  I swung my stocking feet to the asphalt and pushed myself to standing. I winced as pebbles dug into my bare heels.

  “Where are your shoes?” he asked.

  “They hurt,” I informed him.

  “Put them back on.”

  “I can’t. They have straps and buckles. And I seem to be handcuffed.”

  He stared at my shoes, probably calculating how likely he was to get them on my feet before I tried to kick him in the face.

  “Shit,” he grumbled, scooping the arm holding the bags under my behind and lifting me off my feet. He carried me around to the car’s trunk and propped his foot up on the bumper, balancing me on his muscular thigh as he keyed it open. He grabbed a duffel bag in his free hand and lifted me off his leg as he started toward the sidewalk.

  I tried not to notice the foreign feeling of being pressed into his solid chest. No wonder being princess-carried was such a big deal in the romance novels. “My laptop bag!” I insisted, remembering Cupid.

  He had our food in one hand, a duffel bag in the other, and me balanced on his forearms. “Really?” he asked.

  “Well, I guess you could make two trips,” I commented.

  “The fuck I will,” he said, staggering toward the driver’s side door.

  I was back in the car for a split second as he leaned in, looping Cupid the stowaway over the same arm bearing the duffel bag. Liam kicked the car door closed, and we bounced down the walk to our room. “I need you to unlock it,” he grunted.

  “Where are the keys?” I looked at the straining muscles at the base of his neck and considered the likelihood that my ass would be making a hasty introduction to the crumbling sidewalk.

  “In my left pocket.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Really? That is the least original—”

  “Open the fucking door!” he ordered.

  I leaned backward, sliding my hand into the fold of fabric. “I don’t feel anything,” I said.

  “I do.” His chest still
ed. He was holding his breath.

  “Am I close?” My fingers crawled against the warm, hard flesh of his thigh.

  “Move your hand any more to the left, and we won’t need a room key,” Liam said. “I’ll kick down the fucking door.”

  Relief washed over me when I felt brass beneath my fingertips. “Got it!”

  “Too bad.” Liam turned, and I fumbled the key at the lock behind me. At last, it slid home and clicked open.

  I had never dreamed of being carried over a threshold. Neither had I imagined that when it happened, I would be handcuffed and held the arms of a man who probably killed people for a living. This was to say nothing of the immortal winged baby snuggled up to my laptop in the bag hanging from the man’s shoulder.

  Inside the room, Liam tossed me onto the bed along with all of the bags not containing food.

  “Jesus,” he panted. “Your laptop made of lead or something?”

  Following Liam’s gaze, I saw that my skirt had ridden up my thighs. I shimmied it back down and crossed my legs. “As a matter of fact, it’s not. And for the record, I could have unlocked the door more quickly if I didn’t have both hands cuffed behind my back.”

  “You have a point,” he said, reaching into his coat.

  The bed sank as he knelt behind me. A couple metallic clicks, and the cuffs fell away. I brought my arms out in front of me and indulged in a round of cat and cow stretches.

  Liam’s large hand closed over my right wrist. “Let me see,” he said. His rough thumb traced the pink, irritated circle of flesh the handcuffs had left. I watched with wonder as he raised it to his lips. Like scalding water on a sunburn, his mouth brushed across the oversensitive flesh.

  My unschooled gasp startled us both.

  Snick, snick. The handcuff clicked over my wrist at the same moment its mate closed around the headboard’s wooden post.

  I blinked into Liam’s dark eyes. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Can’t have you escaping while I take a shower.” He slid the brown paper bags into reach of my free hand. “The food’s all yours.”

  The bathroom door hadn’t even closed when I fell upon the grease-stained paper bags with a predator’s rapture.

  “Let me out!” Cupid hissed.