“None of that happened,” Cupid said with great certainty, climbing out of the car and using the reflection in the window to flatten his hair.
Cupid’s innocence struck a chord with Pan; the beast in him receded. As Cupid’s reflection kept careful watch, Pan scrubbed his hand through Cupid’s hair. “Let’s go inside.” He led Cupid through the garage and into the mudroom, spinning around at Cupid’s groan. “What’s wrong?”
“Smells good in here.” Cupid’s hand had moved to his belly, forming tight circles over his shirt.
“You hungry?”
“Starved.” Cupid followed Pan into the kitchen and sat at the counter. “Mia’s dinner tasted good, but I think it was mostly water.”
Pan chuckled. “I’m not surprised.”
“Plus, I lost most of it.”
“You yacked on your first date?”
“If that means getting sick, yes,” Cupid answered with a frown.
No wonder the dude looked like roadkill. “Man, that’s rough. I grilled lamb. Want some?”
“Yes.”
“You know,” Pan teased, while pulling containers of leftovers out of the refrigerator, “if you’d set your heart on me instead of the skinny yoga instructor, you wouldn’t be walking around with an empty stomach right now.”
When Cupid didn’t respond, Pan glanced across the room at his friend, whose hand had glided upward from his belly and threatened to rub a hole in his shirt right over his left nipple. Shit. Not that either of them needed the reminder, but Cupid hadn’t set his heart on anyone. Those strings were being jerked around from high above.
Working quickly, Pan pulled a plate from the cupboard and loaded it up with lamb and rice before shoving it into the microwave. “What the hell happened tonight, Q?”
The defeated expression returned to Cupid’s face.
Pan leaned forward, elbows propped on the counter. “We’ll figure this out. Tell me what you remember.”
Cupid’s eyes glazed over in a faraway stare. “Things were going so well at first. I drove there, no problem. I gave her the flowers and the wine. I kissed her—”
“Whoa. Details, man. What kind of kiss?”
The trance broken, Cupid hit Pan full-on with his lovestruck baby blues. “The kind worth waiting three thousand years for.”
Well, fuck. Pan had been thinking more along the lines of tongue or no tongue. “Okay, you kissed . . .”
“Yes,” he said, finding his place in the story once again, “and then Jonah interrupted us.”
“Hold up. Who the hell is Jonah?”
“He’s her son.”
“Mia has a son?”
“She has three, but the other two were asleep, so I didn’t get to meet them.”
“Oh-kay.” Not one but three kids Mia conveniently failed to mention, and from the way Cupid was skipping over the details, this wasn’t even what had ruined his date. “Then what?”
“Then we ate dinner and dessert and went into Mia’s room, and everything was going really well”—Pan pulled his top lip between his teeth and bit down hard. Wait for it—“until I told her I loved her.” Cupid’s entire expression was transfixed by what could only be described as grace.
Just then, the microwave beeped. Pan swallowed his I told you so and the accompanying curses and took advantage of having his back to Cupid while collecting the leftovers and silverware and a napkin. Neither of them needed another emotional display from Pan right now.
“I know, I know,” Cupid said. “That was a mistake, but I haven’t even gotten to the horrible part.”
“Eat,” Pan said with admirable cool.
Cupid sliced off a corner of the lamb and brought it to his mouth. “Praise Artemis, this is delicious.”
“Artemis. Right.” It had been a long damn time since Pan had invoked the goddess of the hunt. “So, the horrible part, you mean the barfing?”
“No.” Cupid stopped chewing and frowned at whatever he was remembering. “She wasn’t vibrating for me.”
Well, there was an interesting development. “You didn’t please her?”
Cupid rolled his eyes. “Of course I pleased her. More than once,” he added. “What do you think I am, an animal?”
Pan ignored the cutting reference to his old body. “Then what did you mean by ‘vibrating’?”
Cupid set down his utensils and fixed his stare on Pan. “Her heart. There was no return signal.”
“Wait, what? I thought you were hers and she was yours and all that happy hooey. Isn’t that the whole point of your satellite system?”
“That’s just it, Pan. I don’t know the point.”
Pan had to admit to feeling more than a little confused. Physical labors he understood. Hold the sky. Muck the stables. This esoteric mumbo jumbo about heartbeats and vibrations was above Pan’s pay grade.
“Is your heart still pulling you around like at the gym?”
“Not right now,” Cupid answered.
“Then, why do you keep rubbing your chest?”
“Because it feels like a python is coiled around my heart and choking the life out of me.”
“Oh.” Oh, fuck would have been more appropriate. Pan recognized that ache though it had been several years since love had so thoroughly fucked him over. “When did this new problem start?”
“The moment I realized Mia could never be mine.”
Pan had to hand it to the gods; they’d really done it this time. Of all the tortures Pan had witnessed through the centuries, unrequited love remained their most diabolical.
What really chilled Pan to the bone was that Cupid still walked the earth. Punishment dealt, why hadn’t Cupid ascended to the Mount to languish forevermore over his never-to-be love? That he was still here could not be good for any of them.
“Hang on.” Pan paced along the wood floor behind the kitchen counter. “Mia didn’t vibrate tonight, but sometimes it takes a while for love to grow, right?”
“Wrong. It might take a while for love to blossom, but if it’s Right Love, the echo beats are present from the beginning.” Cupid sighed heavily and set down the bone he’d been gnawing.
“From the beginning? Like, the very, very beginning?” Pan was catching on now, a giant boulder rolling downhill and gaining momentum. “So, at the gym, when you were talking to her before class . . .?”
Cupid’s hand balled into a tight fist and banged hard against his chest. “Yes, if I hadn’t been so thoroughly distracted, I might have noticed before class”—another bang—“after class”—and a third—“and after dinner, before we . . .” He crumpled to the counter with a moan, dropping his forehead into the cradle of his folded arms.
“That’s when you called me, after you realized you couldn’t have her?”
“Yes,” Cupid answered. “Is there dessert?”
Pan slid a tin of brownies along the counter. “So you fucked her, your heart broke, you barfed, and then you drove back here?”
Cupid lifted his head and leveled Pan with a glare. “You might want to work on your empathy.”
It wasn’t the first time Pan had been accused of skipping the niceties. Pretty words and validations only wasted valuable time. Pan had a job to do.
“There must be something you haven’t told me.”
“Yes,” Cupid answered, transferring three brownies to his plate and licking the crumbs off his fingers. “The part where I turned my car around four separate times and drove back to her street because even though that GPS inside me wanted to drag me here, my heart nearly ripped from my chest when I tried to drive away from Mia.” Cupid shoved a brownie into his mouth, chewed for several seconds without registering an ounce of pleasure, and swallowed. “The part where I sat in front of Mia’s house and begged my mother to release me from this torture.”
“You did make it back here in
one piece,” Pan observed. “Maybe Aphrodite answered your plea.”
“She didn’t.”
Pan snagged the metal tin with his pinkie, wrenched free a large brownie, and chewed thoughtfully. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s work this out.”
Cupid followed Pan to the great room and sank into the couch with a loud sigh. Pan plunked down in the recliner across from him and slammed his back against the seat to pop out the footrest. “All right. Aphrodite told you to follow your heart, which led you straight to Mia. You’re in love with her, but she’s not in love with you, and that’s not going to change.”
“Apparently not,” Cupid responded, narrowing his eyes at Pan.
“And now, this compulsion has driven you back to me but this time with a broken heart.”
“Right again,” Cupid said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “I thought you were good at this.”
“I am. Yours is a puzzling case. Let me think.” Pan’s hand brushed along his beard. “Hmm. You love Mia, but she doesn’t love you.”
“Seriously, Pan, if you say that one more time, I swear I’m going to—”
“Hang on; I think I’m onto something. It doesn’t seem to be your heart’s desire that matters.”
“Obviously.”
“So maybe you are meant to make things right for Mia.” Pan delivered his insight with a surge of enthusiasm Cupid did not share.
“I’m meant to help Mia find love—with someone else?”
Pan shrugged. “Got a better idea?”
“I have a million better ideas.”
Pan waited silently while Cupid swallowed the bitter pill of his true punishment.
“Well, I guess this is good news for Mia, at least. Mother has chosen her to be a Worthy.” Despite his devastation, Cupid managed a genuine smile for Mia. Poor fucker.
“Q?”
Cupid’s attention snapped back to Pan. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“What if I say no?”
This situation was likely to get a whole lot worse before it started getting better, though “better” might well be the last emotion Cupid would feel once he finished the job. Pan shrugged, his frown providing the whole, sorry answer.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Cupid said sadly.
“Hey,” Pan said, “at least we’re in this together.” Easy enough to say when it was Cupid’s heart getting ripped apart.
Cupid took a long, hard look at Pan, then sighed again. “Well, it’s not as if I don’t know how to do this. How many hundreds of thousands of times have I brought two intendeds together? All I have to do is find Mia’s Right Love and pierce his heart with one of my—” Cupid reached over his shoulder and stopped cold. “Right.”
“Easy, buddy,” Pan said, shoving the footrest against the chair and scooting forward in his seat. Cupid wasn’t looking so good. “You gonna hurl again?”
Cupid sucked in a deep breath. “I can do this,” he mumbled. “I am the God of Love. I can do this.”
Pan gave him an encouraging nod. “There ya go.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Good,” said Pan, relieved to see Cupid gaining back his confidence and some of the color in his cheeks.
“I’ll just tell the girl who believes our world was invented by poets to trust me, the self-proclaimed God of Love, to find her Right Love.” His voice died on a strangled whimper.
Oh. Not good, then.
Cupid turned and met Pan’s gaze with an anguished expression that sent a chill down his spine. Pan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anyone, man or god, look so utterly lost.
“Pan?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“How in the cosmos am I going to do this?”
23
Melons
Cupid woke to an urgent beating in his chest. The gods were not going to sit around and wait. The pulsating only subsided when Pan convinced him to catch Mia’s first class of the day.
“In the meantime,” Pan said, “you and I are going grocery shopping, so put these baggy shorts on over those ass huggers, or I’ll never get you through the market in one piece.”
“I’m really not looking for that kind of companionship right now.” Cupid’s response drew a dark chuckle from Pan.
“Pfft. As if anyone will care.”
“Seriously, Pan? We’re going food shopping. How sexy can that be?”
Pan clapped a hand on Cupid’s back and led him to the garage. “I can’t explain it, but women go nuts when they see a man in the grocery store. The more helpless you are, the crazier it makes them.”
“I really do have a lot to learn about Earth girls.”
Pan let out a snort as he folded his body into the driver’s seat. “For a guy who has no clue, I’d say you’re doing fine.”
“Not with the one who really matters.” Cupid gave his chest a firm rub that did nothing to ease his desolation.
“To be fair, it’s not that Mia didn’t want you, right?”
The memory of their heated, joined bodies assaulted Cupid, topped off by Mia’s half–embarrassed offer for another round. “She definitely wanted me.”
“Well, there ya go,” Pan said. “Your record is untarnished. I mean, you can’t help it if the gods are playing hot potato with your heart. At least you don’t have to worry you’ve lost your touch.”
“Ha! Anything but.”
Pan shook his head. “You’re making me want to bash your teeth in again.”
“Is it my fault this equipment they gave me is epic?”
“Dude, I do not want to hear about your pecker. That is seriously not cool.”
“Then I won’t tell you my recovery time is practically zero.”
“You’re lucky I’m driving right now, you little shit. I might still deck you when we get to the store.” Pan appeared to be deep in thought over the issue.
Cupid wasn’t trying to irritate him; it just happened. He folded his arms over his chest, shifted his body toward the door, and absently watched the scenery pass by. Their truck veered sharply to the left and careened into a parking space near the store entrance.
Pan stuffed the key into his pocket. “If we’re done discussing your dick now, perhaps we can go inside?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
Cupid scrambled out of the truck and followed him through a door that opened on its own into the brightly lit market. “Great Zeus!” Cupid exclaimed, stopping dead in his tracks as his gaze skittered across colorful pyramids of ripe fruits overflowing their display tables. “Where are the orchards that produce all these crops?”
Pan appeared by his side with a large metal cart on wheels. “Come on,” Pan said, nudging Cupid forward with his elbow. “I’ll explain as we go. Otherwise, you’re never going to make it to Mia’s class. You still like pomegranates?”
“Yes, I do.” Cupid turned just in time to catch the red globe flying toward his head. On the other end of the toss stood the playful Pan of Cupid’s childhood, a wide grin on his face. He never could stay angry with Cupid for long.
Much relieved, Cupid palmed the nearest object—a ropy, greenish-white ball that barely fit in his hand—and picked up the name from the nearby sign. “How about you? Are you a fan of the cantaloupe?” With a powerful thrust that surprised both of them, Cupid hurled the heavy fruit at his friend’s belly.
“Whoa there.” Pan chuckled, easily catching the melon. “You’re gonna get our asses thrown out of here.”
“Yes, they tend to frown upon food fights in the produce department.”
Cupid turned to find a woman dressed in a very short, white skirt swishing across her bottom as she pushed her cart along past him. Want was a reflex he couldn’t control, but there was nothing to it beyond the physical urge.
“What a shame,” Cupid replied. “So many colorf
ul globes just waiting to be flung.” He waited a tick for the woman to realize she was smitten, not that he planned to do anything about it.
Without so much as a glance in Cupid’s direction, the woman wheeled her basket straight toward Pan and gave him a bright smile. “Nice catch.”
“Huh?” Pan held his pose, melon raised in one hand and confusion etched into his forehead. He glanced at Cupid, who could only shrug his shoulders.
The girl giggled too high and too loud. “I said, ‘Nice catch.’ You have great hands.”
Pan’s nose twitched. He too had caught the scent. “Uh . . . thanks.”
“You look like you could use some help with the melons,” she said, throwing back her shoulders so her bosoms filled Pan’s view.
Pan’s gaze locked on the offerings for longer than Cupid felt was appropriate, but the woman seemed more hopeful than put off. When Pan finally snapped out of his bosom stupor, he cleared his throat and dropped the cantaloupe into his cart. “My friend and I are doing fine, but thank you.” Pan gestured to Cupid, but the girl’s attention could not be coaxed away.
Unused to being ignored since his fall to Earth, Cupid concluded she must be playing that hard-to-get game. Testing his theory, Cupid scurried to Pan’s side. “Actually, I was curious how you know which fruits are ripe.”
The woman smiled and sidled even nearer to Pan, whose eyes closed for a split second while he drew in a deep whiff of her. “It’s easy,” she answered, flapping her eyelids at Pan as if he’d posed the question. “You just need to know where to squeeze.”
Pan gave Cupid a what’s-a-guy-to-do smirk before closing his hand around the girl’s bare upper arm. His voice sounded gooey and weird. “That’s never really been a problem for me.”
“I can believe that.” A sigh fluttered out of her pretty mouth.
She’s not faking. It’s Pan she wants.
Exactly why she’d chosen Pan over Cupid was a question for another time. Right now, the only question was what Pan intended to do about it. Cupid didn’t need to check Pan’s shorts to know his friend had hoisted an erection to rival his own; their musk settled over the fruits and vegetables like a shearling blanket. The least Cupid could do was make himself scarce.
First Quiver Page 12