Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Um, I think they got up early and went shopping—”

  “Hm.” Anything to avoid being dragged into my mother’s ceremonial Skype to Chicago.

  “They’re just jealous,” Mummy said dismissively.

  Of what? I wondered, not for the first time. “And those Delhi Romeos?” I hated to guess what shenanigans my boy cousins might be up to.

  “Healthy. Chasing unsuitable girls. Sunil wants to change his field of study again.”

  “Put him on,” I said grimly.

  “Sunil!” she shrieked. I heard my cousin grumbling from another room.

  I got him straightened out, and then Papaji came in and said hello. By the time I shut the computer and ate my microwaved macaroni and cheese, it was nine thirty, and I hadn’t opened my briefcase.

  I was paging through piles of the Sandsreicht case paperwork when my cell rang. Auntie’s ring.

  I swallowed the last of the macaroni and cheese. “Hi.”

  “Hi yourself. Did your mother call?”

  “Just rang off.”

  “Did she tell you your stars are dangerous right now?”

  “She called you?” I said incredulously. “Next you’ll remind me to do the dishes.” I tossed the plastic pasta tray and ran my fork under hot water, feeling guilty.

  “Just remember to have fun,” Auntie said.

  “Do you know, that is exactly the opposite of her advice? And exactly what I would expect from you?”

  Auntie chuckled. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “There isn’t anything you wouldn’t do.” This was true. My hippie-dippy wild-child auntie had been shocking me since we met. “How my mother ever reconciled it with her conscience to put me in your clutches at the tender age of nine, I’ll never know.”

  “She expected you to straighten me out,” Auntie said.

  I smiled. “I know I tried.” Auntie had been married to my mother’s brother, a very affluent American physician, before he died. Auntie was everything a good Hindu girl should never ever be, but she had given me one great social skill and one tremendous gift: She had taught me how to drink, and she had made me a feminist.

  Auntie whined dramatically, “If you won’t take my advice, at least follow my example.”

  “Tomorrow,” I promised, thinking of my career-limiting coffee break with a runaway Indian charmer. “I have thirty depositions to get through tonight.”

  She tsked at me. “Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  I hung up and flipped open a deposition, licking my lips.

  Chapter Two

  I made it to the Lair about the time Baz fired up the Margaritaville machine. We took the pitcher up to the hot tub on the roof. The sun blazed down and the El trains full of commuters roared by and we lolled in the bubbles, sucking down ice-cold, sweet-and-sour ambrosia.

  “Where’s Veek?” I said. “He should be home by now.”

  “His boss is sick again.”

  My chest tightened for Veek. That skanky old voodoo priest was his only real friend. Baz made fun of me for fussing over Veek, so I just shrugged. “Work for assholes. That way you don’t care when they’re sick.”

  Baz gave me one of his looks. “Tell me about the new job.”

  “She’s gonna be fun. She’s wound so tight, she squeaks when she walks.” I smiled, remembering how she’d scolded me. Softened right up when I hung my head, though. Hard-hearted lawyer, my butt.

  “Don’t take too long. It’s been what, two weeks?” Baz never stops nagging. “You wait too long, you’re toast.”

  If I don’t get laid once a month, I go up in a sheet of flame. Theoretically. Hasn’t happened yet, though I’ve had a couple of close calls.

  “She likes my arms, too.” I looked down with satisfaction at my biceps. “I better hit the bells before dinner.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m off to a take-out at eight thirty.”

  “No dinner?” I said, dismayed. Veek cooked, but if his voodoo boss was sick, who knew when he’d be home.

  I don’t cook. I spent thirty-eight years, ten months, four days, and three and a quarter hours as a fry cook in a Toronto greasy spoon. Never again.

  “Cheaters has pizza,” Baz said callously, eyeing me over his mug.

  “Don’t you have anything cold in the fridge?”

  “Make your own sandwich,” Baz said. “Are you going to tell her you’re a defrocked lust god?”

  “Not a woman at the office,” I said. “I don’t rush those fucks. I craft them. Takes a few extra days, but it’s worth it. C’mon.” The no-dinner thing was bugging me. “Tell me you have a lasagna in your freezer.”

  I sucked down margarita and felt steam rising from the back of my head.

  Baz looked at me over his margarita. “What’s it been? Ten, eleven days now since you got laid?”

  My back prickled. “About that.”

  He gave me that annoying look again. “So go to Cheaters and have the pizza. Bring your new girl along. Kill two birds.”

  I smiled, imagining RathiRaani, my queen of desire, eating pizza. “You don’t think the brand-new partner will accept dinner from the mail-room guy! No, no, no. Coffee. After work. What if she were seen with me?”

  Baz lowered his mug. “So, not content with risking your own job, you’re risking hers? She just got there, you moron. If you find scoring so easy, why are you doing this to her?”

  I set my mug down on the shelf and stretched, letting the water jet hit me low on the back. “She’ll be forgiven. First week and all. Besides, I’ve hit-and-run so many girls in that firm, they’ll love her for falling on day two. Sisterhood is powerful.”

  “I can’t see why you haven’t been lynched.”

  I pointed at my dimples. “These. No, seriously. And I’m short. Just a cute lil puppy dog. It doesn’t hurt that I’m phenomenal in bed. But mostly,” I had to admit, “it’s cuz I’m short. Big hulking guy with a jaw and a six-figure salary? He’d be a threat. Kama’s just cu-u-u-u-ute.”

  Baz seemed unconvinced.

  I insisted, “Believe me, they don’t know about each other.”

  “Bullshit. Women talk. Sooner or later.”

  “Not about me. What are they gonna tell each other? ‘He turned me inside out and made me come out my ears until the pillows were wet?’ How about, ‘He turned me into a cow, and he serviced me in the form of a giant bull?’ Girls don’t share that stuff. They can’t know I’ve done ’em all.”

  “You know, I don’t need special effects to get to a woman.”

  I leaned forward, letting bubbles tickle my chin. “You mean you’re afraid to try. I was a love god for six thousand years. You were what, a war god?”

  Baz is only about twenty-seven hundred. The way he grandpops around the place, bossing us and shaking his head, you’d think he was a million.

  “I was just a king,” he said. “I got over it.”

  “Hey, I’m relaxed.” I stretched again to prove it.

  “Then why do you tell the women you screw you’re a sex god?”

  I sat up, splashing. “You fucking hypocrite, that was your idea.”

  “I only said, if you want your old job back, somebody has to know there is such a thing as a love god,” Baz said. “It’s called building your customer base. Why do you think the Home Office funds hate radio?”

  “I don’t want my job back. I want my old girl back.”

  “Yeah. The sight of you carrying a torch for the girl who dumped you in fifteen fifty breaks my fuckin’ heart.”

  Veek came out onto the roof in the nude and slid wearily into the hot tub like a black porpoise.

  That solved the dinner problem. But he looked kind of tired to cook.

  Baz handed him the margarita pitcher.

  “You okay?” I said.

  Veek drank from the pitcher, handed it back, and slapped himself over the eye. “Merde.”

  “Drink slower,” I said. “You look like shit. You want some weed?”


  “Go fetch him some fucking aromatherapy sticks and a vibrator, cabana boy,” Baz said to me. Then he took in Veek’s drawn face. “Bad day?”

  Wordlessly, Veek shut his eyes and shook his head. He laid his shaved black head down with a clonk on the wood and let his tattooed arms float at his sides. The way he wears his ink makes me want to try it. I don’t dare. Call me a clotheshorse, but I like to change up my ornamentation. And ink upsets some women.

  We passed the pitcher around. Baz sneaked looks at Veek. I watched him openly, not too proud to give a damn. He seemed to be chilling.

  I tried letting my arms float, too. The Veek pose made the bubbles tickle my palms. Twenty thousand feet above us, a jumbo jet climbed to cruising level and set off eastward across Lake Michigan.

  I thought of my new law partner, her snapping eyes, the silver ring flashing on her finger as she laid down the law to the slacker mail-room guy. Bossy female.

  I smiled. The bossy ones love to be dominated in bed.

  For some reason, the thought of playing boss-in-bed games with this one gave me a shiver.

  Maybe this really was the one.

  Or not. There was no reason why she would have reincarnated Indian again.

  Still, she gave me a hell of a zing. Miss Desire Queen.

  I breezed into work feeling every inch a partner. I’d gone over the depositions and made my notes, and I was confident we could force a settlement in the case, which would make my gruff senior partner happy. My mother now knew I’d landed the job and how much money it would bring, and that made her happy. I’d straightened Sunil out—there was no reason on earth besides laziness why he should switch his field of study from accounting to pre-Gupta art history—and that would make his mother happy, although Sunil not so much. You can’t please everybody.

  Though, goodness knew, I tried.

  I felt successful and full of battle spirit. Whatever they threw at me today, I could handle.

  On my desk I found a pile of legal pads, sharpened pencils, yellow stickies, pens, and a brand-new digital recorder-transcriber, still in its blister pack. That made me smile, too.

  If I could handle Sunil, I could handle the mail-room boy. He’d find I was one person he couldn’t charm.

  I only wished I hadn’t arranged to meet him so soon. My first week was bound to be busy, even after hours. And I didn’t like having something to hide from my coworkers. Well, not actually hide. All I would be giving him was a talking-to. But they might not understand.

  And so of course it came up immediately, in my morning meeting with Irene Bentwater, my senior partner.

  “Meet me for cocktails tonight, and we’ll talk about the team you want for this case,” Irene said.

  I gaped. “You’re putting me in charge of the case?” Then I remembered. “At what time tonight? I’ve made an appointment for coffee after work.”

  She gave me a shrewd look, not unlike my degenerate auntie Lakshmi’s, as if she hoped against hope that I had a rendezvous to smoke pot behind the gym.

  I confessed, “I’m—I’m meeting the mail-room boy, Kama, to look at his college transcripts.”

  “M-hm,” Irene said without judging me.

  “It’s just coffee!” My cheeks grew hot. “You should have heard him lying to his mother on the phone. They paid good money to send him over here, and he’s squandering their investment. I intend to light a fire under him.”

  She patted my hand. “He’s very good at what he does.”

  “Well, it’s not good enough,” I said, feeling militant. “I’ve straightened my cousins out from seven and a half thousand miles away. I can fix this boy.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine. A little extracurricular education never hurt anybody.”

  I simmered down. “Thank you for understanding,” I said. “What time shall we meet this evening, and where?”

  “Don’s Fishmarket across the street has good martinis. Do you drink?”

  “Not my first week on the job,” I said, smiling, and felt comfortable again.

  This conversation did make me wonder what I might be doing to my position in the office, meeting with young Kama. I didn’t feel guilty about it. I just knew it might seem…irregular.

  I found Janine, my assistant, putting away the office supplies Kama had left on my desk. She handed me a yellow sticky and coughed.

  It read, Coffee shop by the train station, State of Illinois Center, 5:30.

  A nice public spot. Too noisy for a tryst.

  Janine coughed again. I caught her looking at me, not insolently, but a little too long.

  “You should have that cough checked up,” I said. She turned her gaze to the sticky in my hand. I added, “He needs to be reminded of his duty to his parents back in Bangalore.”

  Her forehead relaxed. “Oh. Indian stuff.”

  I looked at her steadily until she flushed. “Precisely. Indian stuff.”

  Great. Now my assistant knew.

  By five thirty, my brain hurt. I had been in meetings all day, first with my new colleagues, and there seemed to be dozens of them, from the partners down to the assistants of the assistants, then with clients. Mercifully, I didn’t have to present anything. I only listened. Still, the strain of committing names and faces to memory all day left me with a headache and no particular desire for coffee with Bangalore Slacker Boy.

  However, I waded through two blocks of rushing office workers to the gaudy pink-and-blue government center and found the coffee shop by the train station.

  Kama was undeniably easy on the eyes, all dimples and sweet brown eyes and thick, straight black hair worn rather long. His after-work clothes came as a shock—apparently he had decided to impress me with his best ghetto-wear. He had changed into puffy five-hundred-dollar Nike high-tops, a black satin jacket with gold dollar signs all over it, jeans slung so low that he had to dig coffee money out of a pocket by his knees, and a white tank top stretched tight over pectoral muscles of which he seemed boyishly proud. He beamed.

  His dimples did charm me, just a tiny bit.

  He wanted to sit in a secluded corner of the coffee shop itself, but I made him come out to a table in the rotunda with me, surrounded by bustling commuters and families pushing strollers. I dumped my briefcase at my feet and sat, not unwilling to take in some whipped-cream-topped caffeine before a cocktail hour meeting with the boss. My headache began to ease.

  “Let me see the transcripts,” I said. He handed them over silently. “These aren’t originals.”

  “You order them online now,” he said, and then flushed, as if he hadn’t meant to say that.

  Why not? I wondered. I read them over. He’d started with the usual core academic undergraduate program, but veered off into double volleyball and English for Dummies in his second sophomore semester. “You speak like an American,” I said sharply. “What was the clever idea here?”

  “I spent five years in Brooklyn with a cousin when I was a little kid,” he said, hunching a shoulder and looking away. “My folks have never even looked at my grades. They don’t care.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy. “My parents shipped me to Los Angeles when I was nine. Mine care.” I touched his chin to make him look me in the eye. “Yours care, too. I’m sure they want a better life for you than running a photocopier.”

  He gave me a long look, and my finger got hot on his chin. I let go. His big, dark, pretty-boy eyes seemed to get shiny for a moment, and then he blinked rapidly.

  “What can I do, Ms. Singh?” His voice rose to a whine.

  I felt a hidden hand squeeze my heart. Poor kid, so far from home, no one to fuss over him as my family had fussed over me, and this Brooklyn cousin, apparently, not the guiding light my auntie had been. All right, Auntie Lakshmi’s light had been red. But she cared.

  He swallowed, holding my gaze. “They don’t want me back.”

  Yes. If they love me so much and need my advice so much, why don’t they let me come home? I could manage things so much more easily if I
were on the spot.

  “Let’s take a look and see, shall we?” My voice was hot and hoarse in my throat. Looking over the transcript, I found an interesting thread. “What’s this? You went from English for Dummies to composition…one, two, three quarters of it. And then the debate society and the poetry club and the science fiction club—”

  I glanced up and caught a smug quirk in the corners of his mouth.

  “Was your advisor pleased with your quick progress in English?” I said drily. “It must have been almost as quick as your progress with American this morning.”

  “She was thrilled,” he said. “Aw, look. I needed somebody on my side. Best way to get that was to succeed at something.”

  How did he do that? Everything he told me seemed to seize me and give me a little shake. He was like a wicked version of me.

  Here was Rathi, striving and striving to succeed, serving as everybody’s disciplinarian, wise guide, and moral critic, wrestling with the legal system to protect women from cruel, greedy men and hostile laws.

  Whereas Kama sloped through life—fooling his professors, dressing like a thug, building his body instead of his mind, charming everyone at work so that even my hard-eyed senior partner was soft on him.

  At the end of the day, which of us was happier with life?

  Well, obviously, I was.

  He watched me drum my fingers on his transcripts. “Can I see your ring?”

  I held my hand out. “It’s been on my hand since I was a child. I doubt if it would come off now.”

  He bent over my hand and examined the ring without touching. I heard him suck in a breath. When he raised his head he seemed oddly feverish. His puppy eyes had gone wide and mad.

  Before I could move, he leaned forward, right in my face, and searched my eyes.

  Suddenly he didn’t look twenty-two. He seemed far older, deeper, and wiser—or wise-assed—or something. I was getting flustered.

  Then he came even closer. I could smell the muskiness of his skin and the coffee on his breath.

  He blew on my lips.

  I felt terribly odd. In the center of the rotunda, with hundreds of commuters rushing around us, eating their fast-food dinners and shuffling about our table, there was silence.