Crazy Cupid Love

by Amanda Heger

  Jake’s hand closed over hers before she could find out. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed each of her knuckles. “I still think you’re pretty fucking perfect. And if you’ll give me a chance, Eliza, I want to prove to you that capital-L Love is real.”

  She was too tangled up in her memories and emotions to say anything for a long while. Terror and happiness and longing swelled up inside of her. Her fingers tingled and blood rushed by her ears. “Let’s just see how tonight goes, okay?” she finally asked.

  Jake pressed another soft kiss to her temple. “You got it.”

  Chapter 17

  “Cupids may be liable for common law alienation of affection where a spouse may show that (1) a marriage entailed genuine love between two spouses, (2) the spousal love was destroyed, and (3) the Cupid’s malicious enchantment caused or contributed to cause the loss of affection.”

  —Alexander v. Federline (Cal. 2005.)

  Eliza crept through the front door of Herman & Herman like a cartoon cat burglar. All she needed was a striped shirt and a sack with a dollar sign on it. Instead, she had swollen lips, a flush in her cheeks, and out-of-control sex hair. All of which she felt mighty smug about, but none of which she wanted to explain to her parents.

  Apparently, she didn’t need to explain anything because—despite her parents standing in her dad’s office, well within earshot of the front door—they were too busy bickering to notice her.

  “I told you it was a horrible idea,” her mother said. “A million times, I said—”

  “Can you please stop with the know-it-all act for thirty seconds?”

  Eliza peered around the door. Her mother’s nostrils had flared wide enough for anyone to see her rage from fifty paces. Uh-oh, Dad. Abort ship.

  “Maybe if you treated me as your equal in this business, I wouldn’t have to remind you when I’m right.” Her mom nearly spat the words.

  Eliza sighed. She wanted to sit behind the receptionist’s desk, put on her headphones, and relive last night again and again, but it seemed she needed to play peacemaker. Otherwise, her father wasn’t just going to break the no-stress rule; he’d tie it in a knot and toss it into the ocean.

  “Hi, guys,” she said.

  “Eliza!” her dad called out. He gave his wife a furious glance before stepping toward the front door. “You’re early.”

  She hung her jacket on the back of her chair. “I have some news I wanted to share.”

  Her mother’s jaw went slack. “Good news or bad news?”

  If she hadn’t been glowing with the aftereffects of a three-orgasm night, Eliza might have gotten angry. Instead, she pulled out her license and slapped it on the desk. “I passed my exam. Fully licensed Cupid at your service.”

  Her dad whooped and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. “I knew you could do it!”

  “Dad.” Eliza laughed as he spun her. “Put me down. No heavy lifting, remember?”

  “I didn’t know you’d scheduled the exam, Eliza,” her mom said. “Congratulations.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone in case… Well, you know.”

  Her mother nodded. “Mmm.”

  “We would have been proud of you even if you’d failed, kiddo,” her dad said.

  “I know, I know.” She slipped into the desk and powered up the computer. All this attention was making her squirm. “So what’s going on today?”

  “You have a voicemail,” her mother said. “Came in yesterday afternoon.” Judging by her tone, she expected Eliza to listen to it immediately.

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m going to take your father to his appointment today,” her mother said. “We have a few things to discuss. Then I’m going to pick your brother up from the airport. Why don’t you stay here in case someone comes in?”

  Eliza looked at her dad, who gave her one of his patented can-you-believe-this-woman eye rolls. “Okay. See you guys later.”

  Her father gave her a quick kiss on top of the head, grumbled something about needing to change his shoes, and headed to the door. Her mother started to follow but turned back around and stopped in front of Eliza.

  “Honey?” she asked.

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  Her mom let out a long sigh.

  Here we go, Eliza thought. A game of twenty-one questions all designed to nag me about being a responsible Cupid.

  “I’m really proud of you,” her mom said. “You worked hard for this.”

  Her mother was proud of her? Proud enough to speak the words aloud? Eliza’s mom-shaped baggage grew a smidge lighter, and she blinked back a few happy tears. “Thanks.”

  Her mother looked just as shocked by her own confession. But in the span of a breath, she was back to being all business, all the time. “Make sure you return the call before the end of the business day. The money-back—”

  “Money-back guarantee. I know, Mom. I’ve got it. I promise.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, she didn’t have it.

  At least, she didn’t understand half of the garbled voicemail. Eliza replayed it twice, and it made less sense each time. Between the static and the sound of a mariachi band in the background, Eliza knew only three things for certain: (1) the caller was kindly Mitch Johansen, whom she’d last seen on his anniversary, (2) he was very unhappy, and (3) he expected her at his house before close of business today, or he’d be “making a detailed report to the Department of Affection, Seduction, and Shellfish.”

  Fuuuuuuuuuck. On the list of things she wanted to do today, dealing with an unhappy customer was at the bottom, slightly below dealing with her parents and just above gouging her eyes out with a hot fire poker. But she could not have a complaint filed against her today, not on her first day as a fully licensed Cupid.

  Eliza stared at the phone and then the front door. She’d promised her mom she’d stay at the shop while they were gone. But a threat of a complaint with the Department and taking a hit on their money-back guarantee seemed like as good a reason as any to break that promise.

  Twenty minutes later, she sat outside the Johansens’ house. The last time she’d been there, it had looked warm and inviting, even from the porch. A person could tell it was inhabited by sweet grandparents who kept a bowl of candy in their living room, just in case the grandkids stopped by. Now, if Eliza didn’t know better, she would have guessed an old, crotchety man lived inside. The kind who yelled at kids to get off his lawn and turned his lights off on Halloween.

  Maybe it was the way the plants on the front porch had drooped and browned since she’d last been here, but probably it was just her nerves.

  You have this under control, she thought as she raised her fist to knock on the front door. You passed the test. You’re as qualified as any other Cupid out there. Sort of. Mostly.

  The door swung open before she could knock. “Finally,” Mitch said.

  “Hi!” Eliza did her best impression of someone who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “I apologize. I was out yesterday, but I came as soon as I got your message.”

  The elderly man pulled her inside the house with an unexpected level of strength. The next thing Eliza knew, her butt hit the floral couch. It took two breaths to gather her wits, but when she did, she found herself sitting beside a sniffling, puffy-eyed Lily Johansen.

  “Lily, are you okay?” Eliza reached out to her, but the woman pulled away.

  “We want our money back,” Mr. Johansen said. “And I want you to make this right, or I’m filing a complaint.”

  Eliza grasped for a single thread of calm in this mess. Why was Lily Johansen crying? Why was her husband glaring at Lily like she were Medusa incarnate? What in the worlds was happening? “Mitch, please. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m happy to help—”

  “Of course you don’t know what’s going on,” he spat out. “I told my wife
we should have insisted on someone more experienced. Where’s that man who was with you anyway?”

  She cleared her throat. “I got my license yesterday, so I don’t need to be supervised any longer.”

  “Ha! Don’t need to be supervised.” He paced, leaving footprints in the freshly vacuumed carpet. “We’ve been using your parents’ firm for a long time, but after this—”

  “Mitch,” his wife said. “Please, sit down. You’re making it worse.”

  Eliza turned to Lily again. Maybe it was wrong to turn her back on someone as angry as Mitch Johansen—Eliza had no desire to star in the next season of The Winged One Confesses—but she obviously wasn’t getting anywhere with him. “Lily, what’s going on?”

  She blew her nose, then looked up at Eliza with tear-soaked cheeks. “It didn’t work.”

  “The enchantment?” Eliza asked. “But when I left here, you were—well, happy.” And why were they just calling now, the day after the moon cycle ended? She bit back that question, not wanting to invite Mr. Johansen to get even angrier with her.

  “It worked for a little while. Then it…” Lily shook her head. “Petered out.”

  “For God’s sake, Lilian. Really?” Mitch asked.

  Before Eliza could make heads or tails of his outburst, the front door slammed shut behind him. She took a deep breath and replayed the woman’s words: the enchantment had stopped working. That was completely normal, and she’d gone over what to expect with them that day. “Lily—”

  The elderly woman wiped her nose and sat up a little straighter. “Please, call me Mrs. Johansen.”

  “Mrs. Johansen, you said you’ve used Cupids before, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So you’re aware that the casts only last a moon cycle. And yours ended last night.” She didn’t need a calendar to calculate that one, considering what she’d been doing last night when Jake’s had worn off.

  “No.” Lily shredded a tissue between her fingers. “It worked for a little while. A day, maybe. After that, I think we both were faking it for a few more days. He spent most of his time down in the cruise ship casino, and I stayed on the sundeck. Then”—she lowered her voice, even though the two of them were alone in the house—“Mitch’s bojangle stopped working. Soon we couldn’t even sit in the same room for more than ten minutes without a fight.”

  Eliza’s thoughts spun at a hundred miles an hour, trying to keep up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Johansen, when you say bojangle—”

  Lily gave a solemn shake of her head. “Nothing. It’s like he’s dead down there. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I—”

  “It’s not your fault.” No matter who or what was at fault—likely Eliza, if her not-so-ancient history was any indication—she couldn’t allow Lily to think she’d brought this on herself.

  “We’ve had problems in the past, in the bedroom and out. You don’t get through this many years of marriage without a few rough patches.” Lily stared into the distance and hugged herself. “But nothing like this. All we do is argue, day and night.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Eliza said. Sorry didn’t begin to cut it. Sure, she was sorry, but she was also confused, unsettled, and a little bit afraid. She’d had a lot of mishaps in the last few decades, but nothing quite like this. Still, Eliza did her best to shake it off.

  She wasn’t a kid anymore, and she couldn’t run away. She had to fix this. These were people’s lives. People who’d been loyal to her family for years. People who’d trusted her to help them. People who seemed to have found actual capital-L Love.

  Until Eliza came along.

  “Is there a reason you didn’t call immediately?” she asked. “I would have been more than happy to help you weeks ago. Again, I’m so sorry you’ve been suffering through this.”

  “The cruise. We just got home yesterday.” Lily began to tear up again. “We spent the first day trying to have fun, but by the third day, we were pretending not to know each other. By the fifth, Mitch spent all his time at the casino and left me alone in the room. I just don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either,” Eliza admitted.

  Gods, how had she managed to bungle this so badly? Being stranded in the middle of the ocean with someone she hated sounded like a vacation from the Underworld. The only thing worse would be getting stuck with someone she hated on one of those cruises where everyone on the ship—

  “And then we got food poisoning.” Lily let out a little wail. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had something to do with that too.”

  “I didn’t. I swear. Can you think of anything the two of you might have done differently this time?” Eliza asked. “Maybe you’re anemic, or one of you is on a new medication?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “Have either of you had a blood transfusion or any kind of organ transplant?”

  “No. I don’t know what was different this time.”

  Bile burned Eliza’s throat. She knew exactly what was different this time: the Johansens had worked with a five-foot, five-inch disaster in Keds.

  “Please just fix it, or Mitch is going to make your family pay for our divorce,” Lily said.

  Her words left Eliza’s nerves frayed and sparking. She couldn’t handle being responsible for yet another ruined relationship. Plus, her mother would lose her mind if she had to give the Johansens their money back and pay for their divorce lawyers.

  Eliza stood and wiped her sweaty palms on her pants “I promise you I will fix this. But I’d really like to do some research first, just to make sure I’m doing everything right.”

  Lily responded by blowing her nose on her sleeve.

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” Eliza said. “In the meantime, here’s my cell phone number. Please call me if anything changes.”

  The woman took the card but didn’t meet Eliza’s gaze. “Okay.”

  “Will you be okay for a day or two?”

  “If Mitch is back by then.”

  Eliza refused to think about the possibility that Mitch Johansen would go out for the proverbial cigarettes and never come home. “He will be.”

  Lily looked up at her with the smallest flicker of hope in her eyes. “You promise?”

  Eliza swallowed back the lump of fear in her throat and gathered her resolve. If she’d managed to get her license after decades of disasters, she could do this. It was probably a common side effect with an easy fix. She’d ask Jake or do some internet research, and the whole thing would be fixed by this time tomorrow. “I promise.”

  And then she said a prayer that she wouldn’t have to break Lily’s heart a second time.

  Chapter 18

  “The novice Cupid should be alert to any subtle signs of unusual behavior changes resulting from the heightened emotional state associated with enchantments.”

  —The Total Beginner’s Guide to Enchantments

  Eliza sank into Jake’s couch—the scene of the first of last night’s glorious crimes—and let the brown leather swallow her. Every Cupid textbook and treatise Jake owned littered the floor around her, having been consumed and then cast aside in her frantic search for answers. The clock on his wall read eight thirty, but her body insisted it was already two in the morning. Her mind might have been running at the speed of light, but her eyes were heavy with exhaustion.

  “It must have something to do with me. I know it.” She rehashed the details of the Johansen disaster for the third time since she’d shown up at Jake’s apartment, completely unannounced. “I don’t know what to do. He was so angry. Maybe if I can separate them for a few days—give everything time to reset and enchant them again? But what if that makes it worse? What if every time I enchant someone, I make it worse?”

  Jake slid a cool glass of wine into her hand. “Eliza, breathe. We’ve been at this for hours. There’s nothing in any of these books that suggests you did this. Maybe they were
on the verge of splitting up anyway.”

  “I just don’t understand. Before, they were so…perfect together.” An imaginary weight landed square on her chest. Apparently, her old friend Failure had come back to pay her a visit, and he’d brought his BFFs, Shame and Disappointment, for the ride.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  She did. The concern in his eyes made Failure, Shame, and Disappointment disappear in a single heartbeat. “You really don’t think I’m the problem?” she whispered.

  His lips grazed her temple. “I really don’t think you’re the problem.”

  With Jake’s warmth, the scent of lingering shaving cream, and his late-afternoon scruff tickling her skin, she almost believed him.

  “If I can’t figure this out, I’m going to lose my license. I’ll have to go back to temping.” She took a giant swig of wine. Moscato—sweet and fruity, and not to Jake’s taste. He’d bought it for her.

  “I know you’re upset, but I really think you’re getting ahead of yourself. You enchanted me, and I’m no worse for the wear.”

  “What if I’m a relationship killer?”

  “You aren’t a relationship killer, Eliza. I don’t understand what’s going on with the Johansens, but I do know that isn’t it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am. And we’re going to figure it out. Together.”

  “Thank you.” She pulled him down beside her and nuzzled into his side. Gods, why did that feel so good? Why did he feel so good? “Maybe I just need to relax a little. Let the answer come to me.”

  “That is a brilliant idea. You ever get stuck on a problem, and then later, when you stop thinking about it, maybe in the shower”—he traced her collarbone with one featherlight finger—“it comes to you?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Her brain fogged over with a surge of hormones—the touching-more, needing-more, wanting-more kind—and she only half knew what she was saying.