Which then sent her mother off on another tangent about the unreliability of men and somehow kept her so occupied, she didn’t seem to notice Quinn’s breasts.
Breasts she’d taken great pains to wrap an Ace bandage around to flatten them out. She’d also borrowed one of Khristos’s sweaters, at least three sizes too big for her, in order to camouflage them.
Her lightly tinted sunglasses had mostly kept her eyes hidden, heavier than usual makeup had covered her bruised face, and she hadn’t even had to explain away her glittery skin due to her mother’s laser focus on angry rants about that anus-head Igor.
“I can’t even believe you told her you were gay.”
Khristos chuckled. “Are you kidding me? I’d have told her I was the Zodiac Killer if it meant she’d sheathe those claws.”
“Bravo then, because it did make her pause,” Quinn commented as the wind began to pick up. Khristos had been very clever, smart, funny, but her mother would have none of it until he’d dropped that bomb right in the middle of her second helping of eggs.
“Listen, if she thinks all men are out to get you for one thing, and one thing only, I don’t want her uncomfortable. We have to do this, Quinn. In light of the fact that our situation is urgent, knowing you’re out with me and thinking I’m some kind of rebound after Igor would only upset her. She’s your mother. I don’t want that.”
So the playboy was decent, too. These little insights into his personality were so enlightening, coming from a man who was, according to Nina, known worldwide for his talent at wooing women with a prowess so strong, it’d make your libido spin.
She shrugged, fighting off the warmth his sensitivity to her situation created, and sighed as they came to the crosswalk. “She’s not upset about me or my feelings. She just loves to carry on about how awful the opposite sex is. Give her a platform, and she’s on the highest tier, waving her hands in the air. I don’t think she’s ever gotten over my father leaving her.” Like ever.
Khristos shook his head, the ends of his dark hair just peeking out beneath his knit cap. “She loves you, Quinn. Not a doubt in my mind. It’s her way of protecting you even if comes off a little Femi-Nazi. I’m not sure what her reasons are, but she has them.”
“A little? Did you hear her, Khristos? Like, really hear her? She doesn’t just take an inch; she takes the hundred-yard run. She’s a zealot with a cause. All she needs is a tinfoil hat and a pitchfork.
Nina scoffed, pushing her glasses up her zinc-slathered nose. “I’m here to tell ya, I don’t give a shit what her reasons are. She’s a shark. It’s a beautiful thing to witness, friends. So damn beautiful, if I wasn’t the baddest ass we got, I would have opted to go to the bird sanctuary with her instead of playing bodyguard to Lite-Brite here. Marty and Wanda always get the good shit.”
“I don’t even know why she’s here. She drove in all the way from Jersey, still thinking I wasn’t even back from Greece yet. Something’s up. I just don’t know what.” Her mother didn’t love the city. She didn’t love it when Quinn had decided to move here after college, and she continued not to love it almost fourteen years later.
She’d considered Quinn’s move to Manhattan flighty and irresponsible, full of whimsical dreams that would never come true.
And okay, she’d mostly been right. Most of her dreams hadn’t come true. But she was happier away from the oppressive blanket of negativity her mother smothered everything with. It gave them distance, and time for her to store up her energy for their next visit.
“Well, she’s here, and I’m gay for the moment, and I’m good with it.”
Nina knocked shoulders with Khristos and cackled. “You’re a chicken-shit.”
“I prefer to call myself testicle-saver, thank you very much.”
“You got a cape?” Quinn teased, basking in the warmth of his lighter banter.
“If it means your mother’s teeth won’t be in my ass, I’ll even wear tights.”
Quinn laughed until she remembered something Nina had mentioned. Something she’d avoided or purposely tuned out the night before in order to keep her sleep nightmare-free. “Question?”
“Go,” Nina prompted as they stopped in front of an art store where classes were being held and, allegedly, where someone, somewhere, needed Quinn’s power.
“The bad-guy thing. Tell me about it. I can take it.”
Nina’s face changed, going from taking intense pleasure in the wrath of Storm Helen and the path of its debris to serious. “Look, kiddo. I’m not gonna lie, this whole paranormal thing is fraught with danger. Not always, but sometimes. Do I think someone might wanna kick your scaredy-cat, teeny-tiny ass? I dunno. Can’t say for sure until we dig deeper into this thing. But I do want you to pay attention. All the GD time. I’ll always be right here. So will Khristos, no matter what. But sometimes, shit happens that we don’t know about. And that’s just the truth.”
Visions of supervillains danced in her head, supervillains like the one Katie, Ingrid’s old boss had experienced, and it made her shiver. “So there could be someone out there, someone who actually wants to be Aphrodite?” Who?
Khristos’s lips thinned. “I don’t know that for sure, but it’s like Nina said, better safe than sorry.”
“So they’d have to get the apple from me in order to steal my powers, right?”
Khristos’s face became grave. “No. You took the power from the apple, Quinn. The power’s in you now. The dynamics of the apple have changed.”
She scrunched her eyes shut and clung to her scarf. She was pretty sure she knew what that meant, but because she was taking this stab at hitting things head-on these past few days, she was going to ask anyway. “So that in turn means what?”
Nina gripped her shoulders and looked her dead in the eye, almost making her tremble at the somber glaze of her stare. “That means in order to get the power from you, they have to kill you.”
Wow. Those crazy Greeks. Totally cutthroat, huh?
* * * *
“Look!” Nina yelled her success from across the room, holding up her hands covered in paint. “I made a still-life blob!”
Quinn fought a cringe. They’d been in this terminally long, therapeutic finger-painting art class, trying to get in touch with their inner turmoil for over an hour, and nothing. No vibe. No warm fuzzy. Nothing.
Where the hell was this match?
The instructor, dressed to play the part of the Guru of Peace and Light, who wore a white cotton caftan and matching pants in all his yoga-like Zen, nodded as he strolled through the aisles of easels where fingers flew in a flurry of color.
His hands were steepled beneath his chin, his lined face serene. “Do you feel it, my friends of the earth and sky? Feeeeel the power of your strokes. Become one with the paint, soar to the clouds. Let it guide your hands along the journey that is your quest for deep inner peace.”
“Is that like Vision Quest?” Quinn asked out loud.
Khristos snorted, using a knuckle to roll another color onto his canvas. “I don’t think Madonna has anything to do with this.”
She looked at her canvas and then to Khristos, who’d quite successfully painted what looked like a sunset. If you tilted your chin up and moved your head to the left, anyway.
“I think whatever intuition you had this morning was a mistake because not only am I not feeeeling the connection to the paint, but my journey is neither deep nor peaceful. I don’t know about you, but any two people in the world who find this class even remotely therapeutic deserve each other. They don’t need us for the matching.”
Khristos smiled, sliding his stool closer to hers and leaning in so close, he made her dizzy. “Aw, c’mon, Quinn. Haven’t you found the core of your discontent? I think it’s right there in that odd combination of squares in bright Big Bird yellow and spicy-brown mustard.”
She gasped and tried leaning away. “That’s not a square. It’s a picture of my old swing set from when I was a kid.” God, she’d hated that thing. It was
n’t that she didn’t enjoy the outdoors and all its magical sound and movement. She just didn’t enjoy it on a stupid swing in the height of winter.
But her mother had been convinced part of Quinn’s withdrawal into a book had to do with her lack of friends, and she was certain adding a play set to their backyard would bring everyone in the neighborhood over, just begging and scraping to be her daughter’s friend.
Instead, it only made Barry Womack, who lived two doors down, laugh and point at her when she’d taken a tumble from the slide and couldn’t get back up off her ass, what with so many layers of clothing on to keep her warm.
She kept people away from her mother and her bitterness because it humiliated her, and as she looked back on that time in her young life now, she realized she’d just kept right on isolating herself.
Khristos paused and pursed his luscious lips, so near her ear she wanted to scream at him to move away, with all his magical raising of her hormone levels. “Oh, yeah. I see it now. That’s the slide, right? Are slides so square?”
She rolled her eyes and swished a finger through the rectangle of color. “No, that’s the stupid monkey bars where my mother was convinced I should be getting some fresh air instead of staying buried under my covers reading Judy Blume.”
“Monkey bars are at the core of your discontent? You’re deep as the ocean, Quinn Morris.”
She made a face at him in mock exasperation. “Not the monkey bars, per se. Just a time in my life I was discontent because my mother is the exact opposite of me.”
“Wow.”
She put a hand on her hip in defensive indignation. “Wow, what?”
“Wow, those look nothing like monkey bars.”
“I agree,” the lady to the left remarked, batting her eyelashes at Khristos in that coy way females did when they wanted to catch a man’s attention.
Oh, because Mother Earth here knew the first thing about painting monkey bars accurately, in all her flowy robes and open-toed sandals in the height of a thirty-degree spell of cold weather?
But Quinn put on a smile anyway, only due to the fact that she shouldn’t care if the woman was trying to catch Khristos’s attention. He was free for the catching. She turned to address her.
Then the woman looked at her hard. “Has anyone ever told you maybe you went a little overboard with the colored contacts? They’re not realistic at all.”
Has anyone told you I could match you with an orangutan? “They looked different online,” Quinn muttered.
“Also, whatever you’re putting on your skin to make it glow like that? Can’t be good for it. I’m a dermatologist, in case you doubt.”
Quinn clenched her teeth. “Got a little carried away with the lotion. It’ll wash off.”
The woman glanced Khristos’s way again and gave him a dreamy smile. “Do they get any hotter than that? Is he your boyfriend?”
Khristos shook his head and gave her one of his perfect, toe-tingling smiles. “Nuh-uh. I’m gay.”
The woman’s shoulders slumped. “Of course.”
Quinn was determined to keep it cheerful while she waited on her matchmaking sign. “What are you painting?”
“This idiot’s demise.” She pointed to a man to her immediate left, just two seats down from them, who was neatly dressed in a plaid collared shirt with a knit sweater over top.
Khristos cocked his head to the right as he scanned the woman’s painting. “But what a brilliant use of color. Who knew demise was so neon green?”
“Those are his brains, which I plan to dance in when this ridiculous blind date is done with.” She turned to the man and grinned.
The man, dressed in the absolute antithesis of everything earthy and green, whipped his neon-blue, paint-covered finger in the air. “Not if I get there first.”
Quinn blanched, feeling an odd solidarity with this woman and her failed date. “So, I take it, it’s not going well?”
The woman, maybe forty-five or so, rolled her quite lovely hazel eyes almost to the back of her head. “Are you kidding me? I put out fifty bucks apiece to get into this class and all he’s done is complain.”
The man, sandy-blond with the beginning touches of gray at his temples, arched an eyebrow straight upward. “I thought that was what we were supposed to do in this touchy-feely, overpriced hotbed of neuroses—express our discontent?”
“On the canvas, not with your open mouth, and you can leave at any time.”
The man balked. “And not finish my masterpiece of discontent? Don’t talk crazy like that. It’ll make me question my very reason for getting up this morning. Not on your life.”
The woman shook her long head of hair, hair that almost touched her waist. “I was so hopeful. My girlfriend said we’d be a perfect match, and who knows you better than your best friend? But we’re nothing alike. I’d have more in common with a breast implant salesman,” she whispered from behind the hand she’d cupped over her mouth.
Something inside Quinn clicked at that moment. A connection to this woman’s deeper sadness, one she didn’t always show to the outside world.
“Still in the same room with you! Have ears!” the man yelled out.
Quinn put a hand on the woman’s forearm and nodded. “I totally get it. I was in a relationship like that, too. But you know what? It’s better to know now rather than get in any deeper. Trust me when I tell you, one drastically cut-short trip to Greece where I thought I was going to end up engaged at the Parthenon and my entire life in complete chaos later, and I only wish I’d realized on our first date how wrong he was for me. Phew, was he wronger than wrong. Could’ve saved almost six thousand dollars if I’d just paid attention.”
Khristos nudged her with a light elbow to her still-smarting ribs. “Quinn…” He muttered what sounded like a warning under his breath.
She flapped an absent hand at him. “Hush. Girl time. Bonding over stupid man choices. Go paint some more discontent.” She turned back toward the woman, giving her back to Khristos. “Anyway, I understand and I sympathize. I’ve personally given up on finding the one and decided to focus on me.” Quinn squeezed her arm again and smiled her reassurance.
“Quinn!” Khristos hissed.
The man snorted. “How did you manage to find another granola-loving, tree-hugging woman in a sea of all the women in New York City, right here in this class?”
The woman pushed her stool out and stood up, her rounded body rigid. “You know what? If you’re not careful, I’m going to drown you in that sea, you uptight, pompous, overblown bag of Abercrombie & Fitch!”
Quinn raised a fist in the air, cheering on this brave woman in solidarity. “You tell him, sister! Don’t settle for second best!”
The man almost knocked his easel over when he pushed his stool out, too, and stomped over to them. He glared down at her, and if she were honest with herself, he was quite handsome. He’d aged well.
“Second best? Why don’t you stick your nose in someone else’s trail mix and mind your own business, lady?”
Khristos was on his feet in mere seconds, setting her behind him in an act of protective measure. “Okay now, buddy. Let’s all just cool off. Quinn didn’t mean to interfere.”
Quinn poked him in his broad back. God, touching him was like touching a wall of sumptuous granite. “I did too!”
“Quinn,” Khristos warned, his voice rising.
She pushed him out of her way and stood on tiptoe, her finger under his nose. “Don’t you ‘Quinn’ me, buddy. She’s doing the right thing by nipping this disaster in the bud. I mean—”
And that precise moment was when it hit her—so hard, she almost fell into Khristos and took out her easel of discontent. But it wasn’t like the night before, that incredible, warm certainty.
It was jolting and fast and almost painful in its intensity as it grabbed her intestines and tugged with such ferocity, she lost her breath.
“Quinn!” Khristos grabbed at her as she began to fall forward, her knees buckling.
<
br /> She looked up at him in helpless question, everything else in the room blurring but his face. “Cupid?” she asked, almost unable to get the word out from her lips at the pain tearing her apart.
Nina was there, too, in a flash of movement and hoodie, bracing her from behind, her hands surprisingly gentle as she cupped Quinn’s elbows and supported her. “Kiddo?”
But everything else had faded away, everything but the pain and the certainty of this match. “Cupid!” she whispered on a groan as another stab of searing-hot pain ripped through her.
The man and the woman had moved just behind Khristos. She caught a brief glimpse over his shoulder of their faces, full of concern
They stood together, her shoulder touching the top of his chest as they each scrambled for their phones. But her hands shook, and his phone was out of charge, according to his yelp of dismay.
So he took the phone from her and held it steady as she peered over the top of it and ran her finger over the screen, their heads now touching. While her fingers flew over the phone, he looked down at her and inhaled, his once hard-as-chips-of-ice eyes gentle and almost surprised.
When the last gut-punch of agony grabbed her and tossed her insides like a salad, she clenched her teeth together and gave the order on an urgent whisper, “Now!”
Like an old friend, trusty and steadfast, the arrow arced over the couple’s heads and tagged each of them in the heart, melting into multicolored sparkles.
Love bloomed—perfect and everlasting, making them both look into each other’s eyes in wonder.
And even through the haze of shooting, fiery jabs of pain—it was beautiful and deep and real. So real, Quinn could almost taste the sweet tang of it on her tongue.
Well, then.
Namaste.
Namaste.
Chapter 10
Khristos carried her out of the art class with Nina hot on his heels, his heart pounding in his chest. He held her close to him, as though trying to absorb her pain. If he just kept her as close as possible, he’d somehow take the distortion of her beautiful face from agony to that impish smile she lavished on people with such generosity.
Accidentally Aphrodite (Accidentally Paranormal Novel Book 10) Page 13