Accidentally Aphrodite (16 page)

“
Who—are—these—people
?” Helen screeched, her face turning a blotchy red, the color creeping down over her neck.

Khristos popped upward at her mother’s howl, losing his balance and promptly falling off the couch, knocking the end table lamp to the floor. He sat straight up and wiped the corner of his mouth free of drool.

Marty and Wanda flew out from behind Arch, dressed as though they’d never slept, and rushed toward Helen, surrounding her with clouds of perfume and immaculate fashion sense.

Marty held her hand out with a warm smile. “You’re Quinn’s mother? I’m Marty Flaherty. It’s so lovely to meet you! We were just getting ready for some breakfast. Won’t you join us? Arch? Would you set another place at the table?”

Wanda wrapped her arm around Helen and purposely directed her toward the table. “And I’m Wanda Schwartz. We’ve heard so many wonderful things about you from Quinn!” she cooed.

Quinn’s heart pounded in her chest as she offered her own hand to Khristos and yanked him upward, attempting to avoid his eyes. This was so, so bad. How was she not only going to explain all these people in her apartment, but her gigantic cans, purple eyes and glow-in-the-dark skin?

And Carl? Oh, Jesus and some duct tape. How would she ever explain Carl, who was still fast asleep on her floor, a blanket tucked under his chin?

Khristos bounced his head from side to side, massaging his neck. “How do you feel today? Did you get a good night’s rest?”

She ached from head to toe. Sometime during the course of the evening, Nina had explained her own ability to self-heal as she’d dropped an ice pack in Quinn’s lap. She wouldn’t complain if that had been one of the super powers bestowed upon her. It had to be more useful than enormous lady lumps.

He looked down at her and winced, trailing a finger across her bruised cheek before she took a step backward to avoid his touch. “I can’t apologize enough, Quinn. If I could take your place, I would,” he rumbled, deep and low.

God, did he have to be chivalrous and hot? She brushed it off. “I’ll heal. Nothing some aspirin and antibiotic cream won’t mend.”

“So Mom’s here. She seems nice.”

Quinn’s fists clenched at her side. Not just because her mother had arrived in all her angry disapproval, but because even in the midst of chaos and morning breath, Khristos was delicious, and he sent a ripple of hot awareness along her spine just to remind her.

“Let me just give you a head’s up about Helen Morris. If you think your mother’s difficult? Think a hundred times as difficult minus the orgies and ability to see an invisible arrow. She doesn’t need to turn you into a cow to make you pray for death.”

“Aw. She doesn’t look so bad. She’s the size of a minute, Quinn,” he said on an affable smile, flashing his toothpaste-commercial white teeth.

“Ah, but her opinion’s the size of the population of China.”

He winked, all charming and easygoing. “There isn’t a woman on the face of the planet I can’t win over. Don’t worry.”

Quinn leaned into him, despite her better judgment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was hot. Indeed, he was probably a real lady killer. But he was in for a big whack to his self-esteem with her mother.

“Listen, if you want your ego to remain healthy, run. Run far, run fast, because if anyone can trash your record, it’s Helen.”

She knew well how hard her mother could be on a person’s self-esteem, how critical, how utterly infuriating—all part of the reason she’d spent so much of her childhood and teen years buried in books.

He rested a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, shooting her another one-hundred watt smile. “Trust me. I got this.”

* * * *

Khristos yanked the door shut to her apartment and leaned against it with a shudder as Nina skipped up the steps in front of them to survey the street.

Quinn gave him the I-told-you-so look. “I warned.”

“And I was an idiot not to heed. Jesus, she’s brutal—a warrior disguised in pink mom jeans and a turtleneck with sheep on it. She looks so innocent. Who’da thunk a woman the size of a teacup poodle could fit so much venom in that small a space?”

She pulled her gloves on and laughed. “I tried to tell you. I know you have your Casanova on level ten, but my mother’s immune to all men. It doesn’t matter how good-looking, how smart, how
anything
, she wants nothing to do with them.”

Khristos held out his arm, offering it to her once they’d made their way up the stairs when Nina gave them the thumbs-up. “You’re not kidding. I pulled out all the stops, too. Every last one. Centuries worth of tried-and-true methods all hacked to pieces by a gladiator.”

Quinn giggled as she had to decide whether taking his arm was healthy for her state of mind. “I gotta give it to you. That was a smooth move, chatting her up about the rare Mauritius kestrel. How do you know so much about birds? How did you know she even
liked
birds?”

Khristos wiggled an eyebrow. “I saw a text from her to someone named Maude about their Bird Enthusiasts Club meeting next week. And then I googled so fast, I almost broke a finger.”

She patted his arm as they strolled down the sidewalk with Nina trailing behind them. “Ah, Maude. The only friend my mother has. You still get an A for effort. That bit about how the sheep on her turtleneck accented her eyes just might’ve worked if you hadn’t tried to take it to the next level.”

Khristos grimaced. “Yeahhh. I should have known to stop at sheep and not get carried away with the whole pink-galoshes thing.”

“But you were right—they did match her lipstick.”

Nina pushed her way between them and cackled. “Your mom is like a fucking ray of GD sunshine. Christ, she beat player here’s ass down like she was the hammer and he was a nail. That crap about his cheekbones being the sharpest thing he owns was the shit.”

Now Quinn winced. Her mother had gone for Khristos’s jugular from the moment he’d sat down next to her. Every word out of his mouth, she’d made a point of shooting down like she was the supersonic death ray and he was the army of supervillains.

She’d whipped him with her words while she’d poked and prodded Marty and Wanda about their relationship to Quinn—and all during the course of just one meal that had lasted no more than thirty minutes.

She’d held her breath the entire time as Marty explained they were having a book club sleepover to console Quinn after her breakup with Igor.

Which then sent her mother off on another tangent about the unreliability of men and somehow kept her so occupied, she didn’t seem to notice Quinn’s breasts.

Breasts she’d taken great pains to wrap an Ace bandage around to flatten them out. She’d also borrowed one of Khristos’s sweaters, at least three sizes too big for her, in order to camouflage them.

Her lightly tinted sunglasses had mostly kept her eyes hidden, heavier than usual makeup had covered her bruised face, and she hadn’t even had to explain away her glittery skin due to her mother’s laser focus on angry rants about that anus-head Igor.

“I can’t even believe you told her you were gay.”

Khristos chuckled. “Are you kidding me? I’d have told her I was the Zodiac Killer if it meant she’d sheathe those claws.”

“Bravo then, because it did make her pause,” Quinn commented as the wind began to pick up. Khristos had been very clever, smart, funny, but her mother would have none of it until he’d dropped that bomb right in the middle of her second helping of eggs.

“Listen, if she thinks all men are out to get you for one thing, and one thing only, I don’t want her uncomfortable. We have to do this, Quinn. In light of the fact that our situation is urgent, knowing you’re out with me and thinking I’m some kind of rebound after Igor would only upset her. She’s your mother. I don’t want that.”

So the playboy was decent, too. These little insights into his personality were so enlightening, coming from a man who was, according to Nina, known worldwide for his talent at wooing women with a prowess so strong, it’d make your libido spin.

She shrugged, fighting off the warmth his sensitivity to her situation created, and sighed as they came to the crosswalk. “She’s not upset about me or my feelings. She just loves to carry on about how awful the opposite sex is. Give her a platform, and she’s on the highest tier, waving her hands in the air. I don’t think she’s ever gotten over my father leaving her.” Like
ever
.

Khristos shook his head, the ends of his dark hair just peeking out beneath his knit cap. “She loves you, Quinn. Not a doubt in my mind. It’s her way of protecting you even if comes off a little Femi-Nazi. I’m not sure what her reasons are, but she has them.”

“A little? Did you hear her, Khristos? Like, really hear her? She doesn’t just take an inch; she takes the hundred-yard run. She’s a zealot with a cause. All she needs is a tinfoil hat and a pitchfork.

Nina scoffed, pushing her glasses up her zinc-slathered nose. “I’m here to tell ya, I don’t give a shit what her reasons are. She’s a shark. It’s a beautiful thing to witness, friends. So damn beautiful, if I wasn’t the baddest ass we got, I would have opted to go to the bird sanctuary with her instead of playing bodyguard to Lite-Brite here. Marty and Wanda always get the good shit.”

“I don’t even know why she’s here. She drove in all the way from Jersey, still thinking I wasn’t even back from Greece yet. Something’s up. I just don’t know what.” Her mother didn’t love the city. She didn’t love it when Quinn had decided to move here after college, and she continued not to love it almost fourteen years later.

She’d considered Quinn’s move to Manhattan flighty and irresponsible, full of whimsical dreams that would never come true.

And okay, she’d mostly been right. Most of her dreams hadn’t come true. But she was happier away from the oppressive blanket of negativity her mother smothered everything with. It gave them distance, and time for her to store up her energy for their next visit.

“Well, she’s here, and I’m gay for the moment, and I’m good with it.”

Nina knocked shoulders with Khristos and cackled. “You’re a chicken-shit.”

“I prefer to call myself testicle-saver, thank you very much.”

“You got a cape?” Quinn teased, basking in the warmth of his lighter banter.

“If it means your mother’s teeth won’t be in my ass, I’ll even wear tights.”

Quinn laughed until she remembered something Nina had mentioned. Something she’d avoided or purposely tuned out the night before in order to keep her sleep nightmare-free. “Question?”

“Go,” Nina prompted as they stopped in front of an art store where classes were being held and, allegedly, where someone, somewhere, needed Quinn’s power.

“The bad-guy thing. Tell me about it. I can take it.”

Nina’s face changed, going from taking intense pleasure in the wrath of Storm Helen and the path of its debris to serious. “Look, kiddo. I’m not gonna lie, this whole paranormal thing is fraught with danger. Not always, but sometimes. Do I think someone might wanna kick your scaredy-cat, teeny-tiny ass? I dunno. Can’t say for sure until we dig deeper into this thing. But I do want you to pay attention. All the GD time. I’ll always be right here. So will Khristos, no matter what. But sometimes, shit happens that we don’t know about. And that’s just the truth.”

Visions of supervillains danced in her head, supervillains like the one Katie, Ingrid’s old boss had experienced, and it made her shiver. “So there could be someone out there, someone who actually wants to be Aphrodite?” Who?

Khristos’s lips thinned. “I don’t know that for sure, but it’s like Nina said, better safe than sorry.”

“So they’d have to get the apple from me in order to steal my powers, right?”

Khristos’s face became grave. “No. You took the power from the apple, Quinn. The power’s in
you
now. The dynamics of the apple have changed.”

She scrunched her eyes shut and clung to her scarf. She was pretty sure she knew what that meant, but because she was taking this stab at hitting things head-on these past few days, she was going to ask anyway. “So that in turn means what?”

Nina gripped her shoulders and looked her dead in the eye, almost making her tremble at the somber glaze of her stare. “That means in order to get the power from you, they have to kill you.”

Wow. Those crazy Greeks. Totally cutthroat, huh?

* * * *

“Look!” Nina yelled her success from across the room, holding up her hands covered in paint. “I made a still-life blob!”

Quinn fought a cringe. They’d been in this terminally long, therapeutic finger-painting art class, trying to get in touch with their inner turmoil for over an hour, and nothing. No vibe. No warm fuzzy. Nothing.

Where the hell was this match?

The instructor, dressed to play the part of the Guru of Peace and Light, who wore a white cotton caftan and matching pants in all his yoga-like Zen, nodded as he strolled through the aisles of easels where fingers flew in a flurry of color.

His hands were steepled beneath his chin, his lined face serene. “Do you
feel
it, my friends of the earth and sky? Feeeeel the power of your strokes. Become one with the paint, soar to the clouds. Let it guide your hands along the journey that is your quest for deep inner peace.”

“Is that like
Vision Quest
?” Quinn asked out loud.

Khristos snorted, using a knuckle to roll another color onto his canvas. “I don’t think Madonna has anything to do with this.”

She looked at her canvas and then to Khristos, who’d quite successfully painted what looked like a sunset. If you tilted your chin up and moved your head to the left, anyway.

“I think whatever intuition you had this morning was a mistake because not only am I not feeeeling the connection to the paint, but my journey is neither deep nor peaceful. I don’t know about you, but any two people in the world who find this class even remotely therapeutic deserve each other. They don’t need us for the matching.”

Khristos smiled, sliding his stool closer to hers and leaning in so close, he made her dizzy. “Aw, c’mon, Quinn. Haven’t you found the core of your discontent? I think it’s right there in that odd combination of squares in bright Big Bird yellow and spicy-brown mustard.”