Accidentally Aphrodite (17 page)

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 wasn’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.

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

K
hristos 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.

The one that made his chest tight and his fingers itch to run through her hair.

“Did you make sure they didn’t call 911?” he asked Nina.

“I got it all covered. I told them she’s off her meds, and that’s why she fainted. They’re so diggin’ each other, it’s a wonder they even managed to see the fucking phone.”

Quinn’s head bounced upward. “I heard what you said to them, Nina. You said I had irritable bowel syndrome.”

“Oh, shut your piehole, Goddess-Lite. I had to think fast.”

Quinn began to squirm against him, her once limp hands struggling to brace herself into a sitting position. “Put me down, Khristos! I’m okay now. Whatever it was passed.”

Whatever it was
. What the fuck was it?

No match had ever gone down like that. There was no pain involved in it—no suffering. He knew firsthand how the emotions felt. His mother had taught him well to know all the signs, see and feel all the highs and even the lows.

But none of them damn well hurt. Not the way they’d appeared to hurt
her
. Last night, she’d been smacked into the hard pavement and she hadn’t made a peep.

She might declare she was a chicken, but not when it came to pain—which meant, whatever happened back at that studio had to have been pretty bad.

“Did you hear me, Khristos with a K? Put me down!”

“I’m not putting you down until we’re back at your place. So suck it,” he said.

She twisted his nipple through his jacket. “Khristos! Put me down!”

He stopped in the middle of the busy sidewalk, Nina reaching over him to tighten Quinn’s scarf and make sure her hat was covering her ears. “Okay, but if you face plant again and get any more scraped up than you already are, I’m not responsible for what your mother’s going to do to me. You don’t want her to chew my face off, do you?”

“Jesus, kiddo. What the hell? You scared the shit out of us.”

Quinn hit her feet and wobbled a little, reaching for the brick wall of a store. Then she straightened and batted her eyelashes at Nina. “I scared you? You of the big muscles and cold, black heart? Know what that means, don’t you?”

“It means if you do it again, I take you out and I don’t have to worry about it anymore?”

Quinn grinned, but it was weak, and he sensed it. She tugged on a strand of Nina’s long hair. “It means I’ve grown on you. Maybe it’s only like mold or whatever bacteria, but I’ve grown on you. You really are a marshmallow just like Ingrid said.”

Nina growled under her breath and tipped her sunglasses down her nose so Quinn could see her eyes. “Walk, or I’m going to eat your skinny little bird legs right off your body and pick my teeth with their bones.”

Quinn reached upward with a notable shaky hand and patted Nina’s lean cheek. “Clearly someone didn’t paint away their discontent.”

Nina moved in closer and flashed her fangs. “
Move
or I’m hiking your featherweight ass over my shoulder like the sack of potatoes you are.”

But Quinn only chuckled. “If only my scale said featherweight. I might be short, but my hips don’t lie.”

Nina pointed in the direction of home. “
Now
.”

“On it, Boss.”

As Quinn turned to make her way down along the sidewalk, Khristos cupped her elbow, unable to let her too far from his grasp.

Yet, her excitement was uncontained. “So, OMG, right? Who knew those two should end up together?”

“Sometimes, the most unlikely people, people who appear so ill-suited it makes you cringe, are true soul mates. I tried to tell you.”

“Was that the part where you were clenching your teeth and you had that tic in your jaw?”

He laughed as he navigated them through the crowd. “Somewhere around there. You were so busy sharing your bad experiences and bonding, I worried you’d talk yourself out of their match. You have to be careful not to let your experiences cloud your judgment, Quinn. It’s important. Those two are going to do great things together for children in Doctors Without Borders.”