“With this my arrow Strong and true, I bind you to her And she to you. This bond I forge No mortal may break. This vow of love, I, As a Cupid now make.”
He felt the release in his arm before he ever let go. Strong and true, just as it needed to be, he watched with a smile upon his face as it took flight toward poor, unsuspecting Tyler Morris. Gideon had to cringe a little, when halfway to its mark, it ran through the shoulder of a boy of about ten who had run into its path, but sighed with relief when the arrow continued on its way.
Then the horrible and unimaginable happened right before his eyes. The wind moaned, a long sigh of frustration, and his arrow moved off target. Gideon shielded his eyes against the sudden glare of the sun reemerging from behind the clouds, as he tried to track the new course his arrow was taking.
Up, down, sideways—he couldn’t keep track of the darn thing. And then he lost sight of it completely, and he panicked. Gideon turned, to his left, to his right, behind him. He still couldn’t see the damn arrow.
Gideon, son of one of the Circle of the Three. Gideon, the boy who had turned into a man, who was still a winger but well on his way to becoming a full-fledged Cupid. Gideon, of the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of archery training.
His first assignment, the assignment of a lifetime, and he’d blown it. Because suddenly, Gideon knew without a doubt where the arrow had gone. For a moment he just stood there: shock, anger, grief, embarrassment all warring within him.
Then he gave in to what had to be the worst of really bad days and reached behind him. Gideon grasped the neck of his arrow, and pulled. And then he simply sat down, right there in the middle of the promenade, as he contemplated what the ramifications had to be for a Cupid who shot himself in the ass.
January 12,
2004 Eros’s Private Chambers
Eros sat alone in his drawing room, a roaring fire in the marble-lined fireplace and a glass of thirty-year-old sherry in his hand. The book he had been reading sat forgotten on the table by his chair as he ran a weary hand through his head of silver hair.
His cat, Agape, yawned and stretched on the jewel-toned footstool to his right. The cat’s eyes glowed a pale yellow in the light from the fire as he turned his head to stare at his owner. The thoughts tumbled from Agape’s mind like pebbles over a calm body of water, making their way without words into Eros’s consciousness.
“Yes, my dear feline, the boy has definitely made a mess of things.”
The god of love took another sip of his sherry and sighed, both in contentment at the warm, pleasurable feeling of the liquor and at the problem that now lay heavy upon his mind. He felt the cat’s thoughts take a turn in another direction and had to laugh.
“Agape, you rascal, you alone would find the humor in a Cupid shooting himself in the posterior.” Another sigh, one of weariness at yet another crisis he would be required to handle. “The fact is,” he interrupted his pet, “such a situation has never occurred before. I have to admit that I’m at a loss on how to handle it.”
Again his trusted advisor had thoughts on the matter.
“Hmm, well yes, I suppose you’re right. But you do realize, dear sir, that although a Cupid’s arrow has no effect on a Cupid without my say-so, Gideon isn’t yet a Cupid. He’s still in training, hasn’t yet passed his Final Exams. That worries me. I have a distinct feeling that our Gideon is going to suffer some consequences that I’ve never considered.”
Eros had to smile at his friend’s meow of protest. “I didn’t say it would be insurmountable. I just said that I have never considered the effects if such a situation ever did occur.
“I suppose, Agape, that you and I will just have to watch the events unfold together. Hopefully, given the sensitive and highly important nature of this particular match, our boy will be able to pull it off. We’ll work on the individual plights and pains as they arise.”
He stretched his legs before the fire and finished his nightly sherry. “Actually, Gideon and his bad aim just might provide us with a bit of amusement. Granted, I will not, of course, be able to be anything but stern with Dimitria and Jonathan, since it was at their urging that I assigned Gideon to Valentine Lewis.”
Eros rose and removed his robe, moving to pull back the quilts from his bed. “But if this works out favorably in the end, I’ll be the first to congratulate them on their foresight.”
The cat’s brain continued to churn and roil, but Eros shut it out with little difficulty. Cats, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, could by some be considered the bane of creation.
Three
January 14, 2004
Gideon’s House, Chicago
He hadn’t gone to work for two days. It was a cowardly act, and he knew it, but he didn’t go just the same. Instead, Gideon was still lying in bed, the covers twisted around his naked body, staring moodily at the ceiling of the house he called his own.
Eros had to know by now what had happened. Just as he undoubtedly knew the reason he hadn’t shown up for work yesterday or today.
Gideon sighed and rolled over, bunching the pillow into a more comfortable position. It was pathetic really, to still be lying in bed at two in the afternoon. But what else was there for him to do? He’d screwed up and he was too scared to face the consequences of his actions. Call him what you wanted, but he valued his life.
Sleep. Just a few more hours of sleep, and he’d get up and shower, dress, and drink a pot of coffee. Then he’d think about, and worry about, what to do next. He’d think up a plan and how best to finagle his way out of what was quickly turning into a major train wreck of a disaster.
A few more hours of peaceful, dreamless sleep was all that he needed. A sleep free from the pictures of Valentine’s face, of her blue eyes and black hair, of her long legs and perky breasts. For some reason, he couldn’t get Val out of his mind, and it was driving him crazy, especially the perky breasts part.
When he finally slept, he dreamt of her.
Gideon was back at Navy Pier, except this time the sun was warm on his face and the air was tinted with the smells of summer. Cotton candy, corn dogs, and the scent of too many sweaty children in one place drifted on the air.
He stopped before the carousel, smiling at the brilliant colors of the ponies and lions, the carriages and mythical creatures that passed before him, around and around again. A scream tore through the air, but it was the scream of excitement, of exuberance, instead of one of terror.
Gideon chose a seat on a bench facing the carousel, so that he could continue to watch the circling of the ride, the never-ending line of children and their parents, and hear the calliope music that filtered through the noise.
He looked down and realized that in his hand he held a cone of cotton candy, pink and fluffy and looking like the epitome of summer. There was nothing like summer at the Pier, he thought to himself. The only thing missing was the woman he loved, and somehow he knew that she would be along shortly.
Gideon glanced to his left as he sensed a slight movement, a small variation in the space surrounding him. A brilliant smile lit his face as he saw her, the woman who made his life complete. He watched in awe, in amazement, as this beautiful woman who loved him back took his hand and sat beside him.
They didn’t speak. It was enough for Gideon to sit in the warm sunshine and hold her hand. It seemed to heat his own hand, infuse it with a warm glow, and in a perfect moment of clarity he watched as he pulled her hand to his lips and placed a kiss in her palm. The miracle of finding her was a daily surprise, a surprise that he thanked the powers-that-be for each and every morning.
A little boy passed before them, pulling his father along in a trot as he almost hopped his way to the carousel.
“C’mon, Dad, c’mon! I wanna ride it one more time, Dad, okay? Just one more time, and this time I wanna ride the unicorn. Can I ride the unicorn, Dad?”
The father’s laughter added to Gideon’s joy as he watched the man run a hand through the boy’s hair. Such love, such affect
ion. A part of him, a part deep inside his heart, his soul, filled with longing. To have a child like that someday, he thought, and turned to his love with an unasked question on his lips. But she knew, somehow, what he wanted to say, what he wished to ask. And she smiled a gorgeous smile that lit up her eyes and made them even bluer. She reached to push a lock of her long black hair away from her face, and she answered his silent question.
“One day, Gideon, one day.”
And his heart filled almost to bursting as he realized that Valentine Lewis, the woman he’d waited a lifetime to find, would one day bear his child. Eros had to be smiling on him today.
But suddenly Val was gone, and so were the carousel and the sweet smells of summer. He was no longer on the Pier, but inside the chamber that contained the Circle of the Three. Dimitria was speaking, and she was very—what was the word—peeved. His own father sat, still as a statue, as he kept his eyes downcast upon the marble desk before him. And Eros—Eros had a look of dignified horror upon his face, a look that Gideon had never seen before.
He didn’t understand why he was here, what he had done to make them so upset. And why were all of the other Cupids here, even the other Cupids-in-training like him? There were hundreds of them, thousands, in the gallery, up on the balcony. Why was he here? He had no idea what was going on. Until he went to sit down in the offered chair, and realized that he had an arrow protruding from his body.
An arrow—sticking out of his butt.
Gideon awoke, shaking and cursing, the cries of “winger” still reverberating in his head as he tried to remember what he had just dreamt, what it could mean. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the details, couldn’t seem to recall exactly where he had been or what he had been doing.
All he knew was that Val had been there, and that she had loved him. And that he had loved her, more than he’d ever loved anything in his life.
And that there had been, once again, an arrow stuck in a place where an arrow should never have to be.
He gave up on the idea of taking a shower and drinking some coffee. Instead, he buried his head under his pillow, pulled the blanket up and around him like a cocoon, and thought about screaming until he passed out.
January 14, 2004
Lehman-Altman Accounting Firm
It was turning out to be one of those days. The kind that start off badly, steadily progress to worse, and ultimately end up at “please, someone shoot me now.”
Val had overslept. She had no idea how it had happened, either. She’d gone to bed at eleven, like she almost always did. She’d set her alarm for six-thirty to make it to work promptly at eight. And yet somehow she’d woken up, torn from a dream about a man with golden hair and chocolate brown eyes, to the tune of a squawking alarm clock that flashed eight thirty-five in bright red numerals.
She flew through the morning ritual of a shower and blow-dry, even skipping that holy routine of slathering moisturizer on her skin to keep it from drying out in the winter weather. Hair pulled back in a quick ponytail, a swipe of mascara and lip gloss, and she was ready to go.
But then there was the car. Her trusty, reliable old monstrosity that, although it looked like something from a Stephen King novel, still got her to and from where she needed to go each day. Except, of course, for today. Old reliable decided that seventeen degrees, with a wind-chill below zero, was just too damn cold to get moving. So Val sat, talking and pleading and finally crying, in freezing temperatures while she bargained with her car to start. Before she knew it, twenty minutes had passed, her fingers were numb even through the leather of her gloves, and the snot from her crying jag had frozen.
Needless to say, neither she nor the driver of the cab she finally called was in a particularly good mood when they pulled up outside the offices of Lehman-Altman.
It proved to get even better. The account she’d been working on for days, for hundreds of man-hours, was sitting on her desk when she finally sat down at almost ten o’clock. Along with it was a note—and not one of those “thanks for the great job” types either. Oh, no. This note was full of snipes, full of lines marked with the dreaded yellow highlighter. Seems Mr. Allen had changed his mind a couple of hundred times about exactly how he wanted this particular account handled, and it was now up to her to realign not only her thinking, but the entire job that she’d spent better than a week tweaking to perfection.
Val worked hard for over four hours, flipping through her notes, pulling up pertinent information on her computer, typing and retyping documents that were already in their fifth or sixth draft. Finally though, at almost two-thirty, she called it quits and decided to take her lunch break. She’d skipped breakfast in her bid to get to work no later than she had to, and the resulting growls of her stomach had her twitching.
The cafeteria in the office complex was blessedly calm and quiet. The lunch rush hit at noon and she’d avoided it skillfully. Only a handful of people sat at the multitude of tables, and after Val went through the line, picking up a salad and a cola, she chose a solitary spot in the corner of the room.
“Peace. Just fifteen minutes of blessed, wonderful peace.”
It was a prayer of sorts, that she would enjoy her lunch alone and with nothing but her thoughts to amuse her. She dug into the salad, liberally topped with high-calorie blue cheese dressing, and proceeded to inhale with delight. Val had always enjoyed food—the textures, the taste, the resulting good feeling that it left her with. Tasha was always concerned with fat grams and carbs, and Val didn’t understand it. Her sister was actually in great shape, although Tasha didn’t think so. She was always talking about the five pounds she wanted to lose, and she had the tenacity and willpower to stick to her guns when it came to food.
But Val, on the other hand, loved food. It was a good thing that she had a very high metabolism, a system that seemed to burn off fat as fast as she consumed it. She was five foot nine, an Amazon in the world of modern-day women, but she weighed only a hundred and thirty pounds. A lean, mean, eating machine. Her momma always said that she was a long, cool drink of water. The thought made her smile. And remember that she hadn’t talked to her parents for almost two weeks, a situation that she would rectify this evening.
After a nice long bath and a glass of wine. Or maybe two.
Val saw him then, sitting alone at a table across the room, a newspaper in front of him. Her heart did a little tap dance inside her chest, and the bite of salad she’d just taken got stuck on its way down.
Good Lord, but the man was handsome.
Short hair the color of chestnuts seemed to shine in the light, and even from fifty feet away she could see the intense emerald green of his eyes. His fingers were idly tapping to a tune on the top of the table, and Val noticed that they were long and solid-looking.
She sighed. She’d always had a thing for nice hands. And gorgeous eyes. And a nice, tight butt.
“Easy, Tonto,” she whispered to herself. She took another sip of cola and then the thought hit her, right in the belly which was doing a few little twists and turns from the view.
What if this was the one? The one that Cupid had sent her? Crap, what should she do?
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she finished her salad. Criminy, but the man looked good. Even as he was, casual and at rest, just reading the paper and finishing his coffee, he looked good. Part of Val hoped that he was the one Cupid had sent. Good-looking, in an easy yet polished sort of way. He obviously had a good job, or he wouldn’t be dressed in the suit that he was, or even work in this building. And his hands. Val sighed again as she thought of those long, slender fingers—and the things that such fingers could do to a woman.
Unfortunately, her fantasy was shattered within the next few minutes, as she watched Mr. Heartthrob pick his teeth with a piece of paper he tore off from the one in front of him. As her stomach did a little dip in rebuttal, said cutey then proceeded to let out a caffeine-induced burp as he pushed away from the table. And to top it all off, to the cha
grin of both her libido and her tidy, orderly brain, he didn’t even bother to take his lunch dishes to the trash before he sauntered out the door. Sauntered, she noticed, while scratching a part of his anatomy that really, really shouldn’t be scratched in public.
Val just laid her head on the table in defeat.
“If this is the best you can do, then I’m in serious trouble.”
She stayed at work until almost seven, finishing up the Stevenson portfolio. Val was tempted to draw a stick-man with a dagger through his heart on the note she left for Mr. Allen, but in the end decided to just write “done” on it and leave it at that.
It wasn’t until she was halfway to the parking garage that she remembered she’d had to take a cab to work.
“Why, oh why, does my life so totally suck?” She almost sobbed it, but her pride and dignity kept her from really belting out another crying spell. Instead, she tromped back into the office and asked security to call her a cab.
When she finally got home, she didn’t even bother with her evening routine of checking her answering machine and taking something out for dinner. Val opened the refrigerator and with one hand grabbed her bottle of Pinot Grigio that she’d been saving for a special occasion. Turning around, she opened a cabinet and snagged a wineglass, dropping her coat and gloves on the floor on the way to the bathroom.
She set the bottle of wine and the glass on the sink, then drew a bath with water as hot as she could stand it. Pouring in a generous amount of her favorite mango bath gel, she poured a glass of wine and downed it in one long swallow.
Glass refilled and in hand, she walked back into the living room to her CD player. She needed music—something fast and pumping to get her out of her funk. Val flipped through her CDs, finally settling on one by Madonna. Good old Madonna, the stand-by music she could always count on.
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