“Blackmailer? What blackmailer?” Alarm ratcheted his voice up a couple notches.
“The one who was in my office this morning right before the Easter Bunny.”
“The Easter Bunny? Matilda, what the hell are you on?”
“The couch,” I said. “Why?”
“What drugs,” he clarified. “You of all people know how dangerous mixing medications and alcohol can be.”
“You don’t believe me?” I challenged. “Fine. I’ll take a picture.”
“Matilda, don’t—”
“Shhhh!” I hissed into the phone. “He’s sleeping!”
The hall lurched from side to side, evading my feet just as I went to set them down. “’Scuse me,” I apologized as I hip-checked a table. A crash sounded behind me, but turning my head to look back felt like a counter-productive idea.
“What was that?” Liam asked.
“It might have been the ficus,” I giggled into the phone.
“I think it’s time you put yourself to bed. We can talk about the blackmailer in the morning.”
“Duh,” I said. “Of course I’m going to the bed. That’s where the Easter Bunny is. Hold on.”
I blinked at the screen’s blurry buttons, swaying like a reed in the wind as I aimed the phone at the bed and concentrated. The sound of a camera click announced my success. “Got it!”
Liam’s phone chimed through the receiver. “Nice picture,” he chuckled. “Where’s your other sock?”
“Where’s my—what?”
“Look at the picture you just sent me,” he advised.
“Hey,” I wondered aloud. “Who’s that?”
“You have the camera turned around,” Liam posited. “I’d know those legs anywhere.”
I glanced down to see my own legs and their familiar yoga shorts. Sure enough, there was one socked foot. “Goddammit! Stupid fucking socks. I needanother drink.”
“Matilda, please go to bed,” he pleaded.
“Nope. Not till I find my other sock. And have a drink. And figure out how to get Rolly’s key from him. But not necessarily in that order.”
A staccato burst of laughter rang out. “Jesus Ch—crackers!” Liam shouted. “All of you. Bed! Now!”
“Is that an offer?” I asked. The counter dug into my hip, keeping me propped at an angle that almost passed as vertical.
“You hate me, remember?” Liam replied. “Also, I like my women conscious enough to appreciate my efforts.”
“Oh yeah! I do hate you. And that reminds me! How come you have to kill people anyway?”
His beleaguered sigh could have been heard over the miles even without the aid of a telephone. “I am not discussing this with you.”
“What kind of person would leave children with you? I mean, really? A hit man for a baby sitter?”
“The kind of people that know me. I’m fucking awesome with kids.”
“You just said fuck again. Your awesomeness with kids is highly suspect.” The counter crawled away from me as my one socked foot slid across the tile. I grabbed the sink to steady myself.
“Well there go my plans of knocking you up,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat. “That shouldn’t make me hot,” I admitted. “You’re a terrible choice for me. You’re completely emotionally unavailable, you know that?”
“I wasn’t aware I was under any orders to be emotionally available for you.” His tone had cooled. Or maybe it was the air conditioner kicking on. “Go to bed, Matilda. You may not remember any of this in the morning, but I will.”
“Ha!” I announced triumphantly. “I found it!”
“Your sock?” Liam asked.
“No. The scotch. Close enough though. Sock. Scotch. See? Practically the same word.”
“Have it your way. Let’s go back to the part about Rolly,” Liam requested. “What did you say about his key?”
“I have to get his house key and give it to the Ferret or he’ll show the pictures to the police and they’ll put me in jail forever.”
“You’re going to give Rolly’s keys to a ferret?”
“Not a ferret. The Ferret,” I explained. “That’s the guy who’s blackmailing me only he looks like a ferret with a mustache.”
“What would he want with Rolly’s keys?” Liam asked.
“That’s what I said! But I guess Rolly’s all smart and rich which is super weird but I probably still won’t sleep with him.”
“Probably?”
“Yeah, well. Not on purpose I mean. Like today.”
A beat of silence. “What do you mean, like today?”
“Like today when I asked Adonis to take the paper bag off his head because I thought maybe I could make him feel better about being ugly but I accidentally humped his brains out on the bookshelves.”
“You did what?” Rage crackled through Liam’s voice.
“Not literally, of course,” I added. “His brains didn’t actually come out or anything.”
“You fucked some guy in your office today. Is that what you’re telling me?”
If Liam’s language police heard this, they made no move to protest.
“No. It wasn’t some guy. It was Adonis, and I’m pretty sure he has a magic cock on account of when I jumped on it I—”
The phone line went dead, humming in my ear. I dialed his number back.
“I think it’s better that I don’t talk to you right now,” Liam answered.
“But I need your help,” I protested.
“Why don’t you ask Adonis?” came Liam’s clipped reply. “Maybe his magic cock can help you.”
The line went dead a second time.
My third, fourth, and fifth attempts at a call back went unanswered. Thoughts scattered like marbles. There were too many of them for me to chase.
In one day, I had managed to sleep with a total stranger, kill my own fish, piss off Liam, and agree to sell Rolly out to a blackmailer.
An accusatory silence settled over my apartment, but I was too numb to feel any pain.
For that, I was grateful.
*****
“It has to get better, doesn’t it?”
“God, I hope so.” The water bottle was cool against my forehead as I slouched in my usual chair across from my first client of the day. I had been greeted this morning by a hangover the size of Alaska and a deeply depressed Easter Bunny. Mouth glued shut, eyes swollen, head colonized by spiteful little gnomes with pickaxes, it had taken everything I had just to pull Marvin away from the blender before he made himself into a rabbit smoothie.
“Are you okay, Doctor?”
I lifted the bottle from over my eyes to look at the speaker. A petite redheaded wife and mother of three whose marriage I had been trying to resuscitate for the better part of eighteen months now. No. I am very, very not okay. I wrestled a wave of nausea down to swallow a handful of ibuprofen. “Yes, Grace. Please, go ahead.”
She dabbed at her nose with the crumpled wad of tissue and let out a heavy exhale. “I’ve tried talking with Jim like you said. Telling him honestly how I feel. But it’s like he just tunes me out. Or he says he’s too tired to talk. Like last night, when we sat down to dinner—is he supposed to be up there?”
“Pardon?” I said, looking up from my notepad just in time to see Marvin perched atop my bookcase, looping the cord of my Venetian blinds around his neck. “No!” I shouted, launching out of my chair to grab him before he could dive off.
“Oh, you naughty thing,” I scolded, plopping Marvin down on the carpet. “Pet-sitting for a friend,” I said by way of explanation. “You were telling me about dinner last night?”
“Yes, right. We were sitting down to dinner and I asked Jim how the asparagus tasted. He said ‘good.’ And that’s all. I asked what he meant by ‘good.’ I spent thirty minutes after I got home from work marinating it—”
“Shit!” I flew across the room and snatched my letter opener from Marvin, who had opened his jaunty yellow vest and was poised to commit hara-k
iri over my stack of insurance billing paperwork. “No, no, no,” I said with brightness bordering on shrill. “No seppuku on the desk, silly rabbit.”
“Do you need me to reschedule?” Grace offered.
“No, please,” I said, sitting down with Marvin in my lap this time. “Tell me about the asparagus.”
“Well, I spent thirty minutes marinating it before—”
My door crashed open on its hinges, announcing Crixus’s arrival with the force of a gunshot. The paper-bagged Adonis followed in his wake, the sort of item you might pick up at a grocery store for sin.
“We have to go,” Crixus announced. “Now.”
“Where?” I asked. “Why?”
Crixus glanced at Grace, who was staring at him in open-mouthed wonder. “Best we didn’t discuss it at the moment.”
“I can’t leave now,” I said. “I’m right in the middle of a session.”
Grace grinned at Crixus and gave him a little wave. “I don’t mind if he joins us.”
“You want to get your husband’s attention?” Crixus asked.
“It’s much more complicated than that,” I commented. “We’ve been working through—”
“Here’s what you do,” Crixus said, striding across the room. His massive arm swept across my desk, sending pens, staples and paper flying.
“Hey!” I objected. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Grace purred. “Just so long as he keeps doing it.”
“See? She knows things.” Crixus winked at Grace while he leaned over my desk calendar, scratching random X’s throughout the month. He took the finished product and handed it over to her.
“What are the X’s for?” she asked.
“Easy,” Crixus said. “Every time there’s an X on the calendar, you knock your husband to the ground and suck his dick the second he comes in the door.”
Grace blushed red to her roots as she held the calendar to her chest. “Will that really work?”
“Yes,” Crixus and Adonis answered in unison.
“No,” I argued. “That might get his attention, but it won—”
“Okay, sounds good,” Crixus interrupted, pulling Grace to her feet. “Let me get that door for you.”
Grace obediently gathered her purse. “Maybe if this doesn’t work on my husband, you can stop by to give me a few pointers,” she said.
Crixus: turning respectable women into bitches in heat since sometime B.C.E.
“Happy to,” he replied.
“What the hell is this all about?” I asked, rising from my chair.
“No time to talk,” he said, grabbing me by the hand and pulling me into him.
“I have appointments today! I can’t keep cancelling everything. I’m not going to have a practice left!”
“Aphrodite and Persephone are on their way here to kill you,” Crixus reported.
“What?”
“Yeah.” Crixus jerked his head toward Adonis. “Mr. Wonderful here did a little drunk dialing of his own last night.”
“You did?” I asked, glancing at the brown paper bag. “What did you tell them?”
Adonis shrugged. “Just that I finally knew what it was to love someone and I was done with them forever.”
I winced. “Anything else?”
“That you fucked me senseless,” he added.
My already queasy stomach lurched toward my throat. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah, you probably should get out of here.” Marvin had temporarily ceased finding new and inventive ways to off himself and sat on my coffee table. “Aphrodite has a terrible temper.”
“And that’s to say nothing of Persephone,” Crixus said, nodding to Marvin. “Aphrodite’s pet is already here. She’s likely to bring hers as well.”
“What now?” I asked. “The gerbil from hell?”
“Close,” Adonis answered. “Cerberus, the three-headed hell hound.”
“Take me!” I said to Crixus. “Take me now!”
Adonis shoved his way between us. “I’m taking her!”
“Fuck you, bag boy,” Crixus retorted.
“She already did,” Adonis replied.
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said, snatching a fistful of each of their shirts. “You can both take me. But grab the rabbit and let’s get out of here!”
“What about your appointments?” Marvin asked.
“Shit!” I scurried over to the door and stuck my head out. “Julie, could you—”
“Cancel all your appointments?” she finished for me. Dimples dug into her cheeks as she shot me a knowing grin.
“Yes, please. Reschedule everyone as soon as you can.”
“Sure thing.” She picked up her phone and started punching numbers with a hot pink fingernail.
“Okay,” I said, slinging my purse over my shoulder and scooping Marvin up from the coffee table. “Let’s go.”
*****
Crixus’s hand stayed fastened over my mouth until the screams passed. An unanticipated side effect from two spontaneous orgasms bestowed at once. I couldn’t yet stand on my own legs. My body did its best to turn inside out.
“She’s…crushing me!” Marvin squealed. “Yes! Harder!”
Adonis pried the squirming rabbit from my hands while additional details filtered into my consciousness. The clinking ceramic of coffee cups and plates, the buzz of multiple conversations, the hissing of food on a flattop grill, the heavy scent of grease and bacon.
Looking through the plate glass window, I recognized the diner as belonging to Plattsburg’s downtown historic section, a place I had frequently passed but never visited.
“What are we doing here?” I asked against the rough skin of Crixus’s palm once the tremors had passed.
“I picked a place at random,” Crixus explained. “Everyone knows where you live and work by now.”
“Who’s everyone?” I asked.
“Look, we just need to keep you alive until I can get Zeus to intercede,” Crixus said. I made a mental note of his obvious resistance to my question.
Marvin snorted. “Good luck wi—”
Crixus clapped his hand over the rabbit’s fuzzy face. “No talking in public,” he whispered. “We don’t want to draw any attention.”
“Oh, right,” Marvin mumbled. “Like a guy with a bag over his head blends right in.”
“He has a point,” I said. All around the café, diners were beginning to neglect their plates of eggs to cast curious stares in our direction. A guy with a bag over his head was bad enough, but a guy with a bag over his head holding a vest-wearing rabbit?
Forget it.
And this was to say nothing of Crixus, who was no slouch when it came to garnering the interest of the restaurant’s female population.
“Here,” Crixus said, snatching a menu from the hostess stand by the door and handing it over to Adonis. “Look interested.”
“This is ridiculous,” he grumbled.
“Lots of women in this place,” Crixus pointed out. “You have some burning desire to know what it feels like to be turned into an immortal skid mark on the linoleum floor, by all means, take off the bag.”
“Just get us a booth,” Adonis said.
“Got it covered.” Crixus cleared his throat as a perky young server flounced by.
My eyes worked their way through an epic roll as I prepared to watch yet another floozy try to exfoliate Crixus’s body with her tits.
“Well, hi there.” She shouldered her tray and walked right past the demigod to Adonis, who held the menu at eye level. “What kind of surprise do you have hiding under that bag of yours, big boy?”
“A hideous birth defect,” Crixus answered. Irritation rolled off him in waves. I caught myself indulging in a moment of pleasure at his expense.
“Ooh,” the server purred. “Just like the Beast in a fairy tale. You need someone to tame you? I could be your Beauty.”
Adonis remained silent. I knew from experience that even the sound o
f his voice could produce full-body tingles. Apparently he did too.
“But could you be our waitress?” Crixus asked, impatience a thread pulling his words tight. “Because we’d like a table.”
“Oh, right.” Her cheeks flushed pink as she brushed a few stray hairs back from her forehead. “How many?”
“Just the three of us,” Crixus answered. “If we could get a quiet spot in the back, I would be very appreciative.”
“Anything for you,” she said to Adonis.
We followed her to a booth in the corner, where Adonis and Marvin took one side and Crixus blocked me in on the other.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked.
I glanced at Crixus, not knowing what the next phase of his plan—if indeed there was one—might call for.
“I think we’re okay for now,” he said.
“I’ll be back around soon,” she promised. Her eyes lingered on Adonis for a second too long, causing her to nearly run headfirst into the drink station.
“Stupid question,” I began. “If we’re trying to hide from Aphrodite and Persephone, why are we in public? Wouldn’t it be better to hunker down somewhere until we can figure a way out of this?”
Crixus’s thigh was warm against mine, the awareness of this stretch of skin consuming a good seventy percent of my conscious attention.
“Public is the safest place for you at the moment. There are limits to what any supernatural can do in the presence of humans. The more humans around, the more strictly that law is enforced,” Crixus explained. “But—”
“But? What but?” I asked.
“But they can still do anything that a human being can do,” Adonis said. “So technically, that doesn’t rule out shooting, stabbing, strangling, burning alive…”
I let my forehead come to rest on the cool laminate tabletop and spoke without looking up. “What are the chances we can just sit down with Aphrodite and Persephone and explain that this whole thing is just a big misunderstanding?”
“But it’s not.” Adonis put the menu aside and reached a hand across the table. “I meant what I said. I’m in love with you.”
“Please,” Crixus grunted. “You only met her yesterday. You barely even know her.”
Unhoppy: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #3 Page 6