Romantic Interludes
Page 2
“It’s very possible, actually.”
“Then what am I thinking now?” she asked.
“Blue, twenty-one.”
Psyche stopped breathing. “But it’s . . . that’s not possible.” Her voice was faint, lacking conviction.
“You know by now that this is no ordinary place, and I am not ordinary, either.”
She didn’t want to hear any more. She squeezed her eyes shut, as if to block out the world.
His hand touched hers and she jerked in surprise. “Please, don’t be afraid.”
“How can I not?” she demanded. “I don’t know what’s going on, why I’m here. If it’s money you want—”
“No, I have no need for money.”
“Then why?” she cried. “I don’t understand. Is this, like, a stalker thing?” Her voice cracked on the last two words.
“No. As I said before, I never intended for us to meet.”
She thought she heard a soft, wistful note in his voice and was surprised by the sympathy she felt for him. “Why were you . . . watching me, then?”
“I’m not sure.” He sounded puzzled, and she believed him. “You fascinated me as no other mortal has ever done.”
“M-mortal?”
He didn’t reply.
“You said, ‘mortal.’ ”
His steps faded as he walked away, possibly to the window. Her heart thudded and her breath came short. Was he crazy?
“I’m not crazy,” Eros murmured. “But I think you know that already.”
“I’ve seen some things I can’t explain,” Psyche said carefully. “I don’t know what to think anymore. Would you . . . Would you please explain it to me? I hate being confused and fearful of what’s going to happen, and maybe if you told me . . .” She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t contain the spill of words that flowed from her like floodwaters over a dam. “I’m just really scared right now.”
It was a long moment before he answered, so long she thought he wasn’t going to reply. “What I have told you is the truth,” he said finally. “I am Eros, and you are on Mount Olympus.”
“But that’s only a myth!” Psyche protested.
“Apparently not.” Eros sounded amused.
“Go on. Tell me the rest of it, why I’m here.”
“Your friend was fated to fall in love with a man she met at the mall. But when I fired my arrow at her, I missed and hit you instead.”
Psyche blinked. “Does that happen often?”
“No. It’s the first time I’ve ever missed,” he said, frustration sharpening the puzzled note in his voice.
“What does that have to do with why I’m here?”
“Because you were hit by the arrow, you would fall in love with the next man you saw, no matter who he was.”
So, that explains the blindfold, she thought.
“I couldn’t let that happen to you. I’m trying to find a way to undo the enchantment.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Not yet. I’ve sent a message to my mother. If anyone will know, she will.”
Psyche tried to remember. “Who is your mother?”
“Aphrodite. My father is Ares.”
It was Psyche’s turn to be amused. “Love and War?”
“On occasion, they can be somewhat similar,” Eros said, and Psyche laughed softly. It startled her, because it was the first time she’d laughed since being kidnapped.
“Are you really a god?” she asked.
“I suppose it depends on how you define the word.” The bed dipped as he sat on its edge. “I’m an immortal being with certain abilities. But I neither need nor desire worship, and I don’t answer prayers. In many ways, I am simply a servant of the Fates, assuring that destiny plays out as it should.”
“What is my destiny?”
“I don’t know. I only know when a person is supposed to fall in love with another.”
“Tara was supposed to fall in love with someone at the mall?”
“Yes.”
“Did she?”
“I completed my mission despite the setback.”
Psyche winced, feeling almost wounded by hearing herself referred to as a “setback.”
“I’m glad she’ll be happy,” she said finally.
There was another long pause before he replied, his voice low. “Love does not guarantee happiness.”
“Will Tara be happy?”
“I don’t know,” he said, frustration returning to his voice. “I only know what I need to know to fulfill my purpose.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He sighed. “Don’t be.” He stood and Psyche felt a pang of disappointment. She was sure it was simply because she was bored and wanted someone to talk to, that she needed answers to help understand her situation. In any case, she hoped he wouldn’t leave.
“Will I always have to wear this blindfold?” she asked, quickly changing the subject.
“Until I can remove the enchantment, yes. But I should hear from my mother soon.”
“Have you ever removed the enchantment before?”
“No. There was never a need.”
“But it can be undone?”
“I hope so.” His footsteps faded as he walked away, and then the door clicked shut behind him. Alone again in her luxurious prison, Psyche removed the blindfold and winced when the light hit her eyes.
The pile of books he’d brought her lay on the foot of her bed. Psyche sorted through them quickly. They all were titles she’d had on her wish list, but hadn’t yet purchased. Despite her wealth, Psyche kept herself to a strict budget and only bought a couple of books per month. Otherwise, she’d spend all of her time reading and never do anything else. But now there was nothing else she could do. With a sigh, she picked up the first book and began to read.
A soft wind carrying the scent of perfume heralded his mother’s arrival. Aphrodite appeared near the doorway and smiled at her son. Like all those in the pantheon, she was tall and attractive, but Aphrodite was the most beautiful of all the gods. Her dark hair was long and thick, and her sky-blue eyes were wide-spaced. Unlike her reputation, she was neither vain nor jealous. One of her duties was to create beauty, and that would be extremely difficult if she envied it.
She kissed Eros on the cheek. “It has been too long, my son.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mother—at least a decade, possibly more. Their kind easily lost track of time. It had been longer since he’d seen his father, but Ares wasn’t particularly paternal.
“Please, sit, Mother. Will you have some wine?” Eros poured a goblet of nectar for his mother and she took a sip with a delighted sigh. Zeus was notoriously stingy with nectar and ambrosia, and Aphrodite had always complained she wasn’t given enough.
“I need your help,” Eros said. He launched into his story, and his mother listened intently. Her smile stretched wider and wider.
“I fail to see what is so delightful,” he said, slightly wounded that she was not taking the situation seriously.
“Oh, Eros,” she said. “After nearly ten thousand years of making humans fall in love, you fail to see the signs of it in yourself?”
Eros blinked. “What do you mean?”
Aphrodite laughed, the sound softly melodic, like chimes dancing in the breeze. She shook her head. “Men! Fools, the lot of you. You’re in love with the girl, Eros.”
Arguing with a goddess was never a good idea, even if that goddess was your mother. Eros picked his words carefully. “But how is that possible? Why now, after ten millennia?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps you pricked yourself with one of your own arrows.”
“Very amusing,” he said drily. “It makes no sense.”
“Love rarely does.” She rose and went to the scrying bowl beneath the window and swept her hand over it. An image of Psyche appeared in the water. She was sitting on the wide ledge of her window, looking out at the waterfall, the expression on her face achingly sad. Eros longed to sweep her into his arm
s and swear that everything would be all right. The desire surprised him. Despite being a god of emotion, he’d experienced very little of it himself.
He pushed away the thoughts, for there were more important issues at hand. “How do I reverse the enchantment?”
His mother kept her focus on the image in the bowl. “You can’t.”
His heart sank. “Are you certain?”
She shrugged. “You can always ask my father if you don’t believe me.”
He was unlikely to do that. The king of the gods was loud and gruff, and Eros had vague memories of being afraid of him as a child. Despite his large brood of children, Zeus wasn’t particularly family-oriented.
“Rather pretty, isn’t she?”
“There has to be something,” Eros insisted.
“Certainly. Let her see you.”
Eros shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“If she ever loved me, I would want it to be . . . real. Not because she was forced into it by a spell.”
Aphrodite smiled at her son. “And why wouldn’t it be real? Do you believe the millions of couples you’ve brought together with your arrows did not really love one another?”
“That’s different. They’re mortal.”
“So is your butterfly,” Aphrodite said. “And you are wasting precious time.”
“It wasn’t her fate.”
His mother tilted her head quizzically. “How do you know?”
He didn’t, but he hadn’t been sent to hit her with an arrow that day. Of that much, he was certain. Of course, humans fell in love without his assistance. He was only sent when Fate needed an extra nudge in the right direction.
He and his mother watched as Psyche left her perch on the window and strolled to the bathroom. She gripped the hem of her dress and pulled it over her head. Eros blushed and touched the surface of the water, sending her image vanishing into the ripples.
His mother patted his shoulder. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “Now, I’m off to meet your lady-love.”
“Don’t scare her,” he said, but Aphrodite had already vanished.
Psyche dipped a toe into the tub. It was already filled with water, yet she saw no spigot for adding more or changing the temperature. To her surprise, the water was lusciously hot and she sank into it with a sigh of bliss. The tub was so deep, she was submerged to her neck. On the rim sat a variety of glass bottles. She picked one up and sniffed the contents. An oil of some kind that smelled like sandalwood. She poured a few drops into the water and was about to replace the stopper when her eye caught a flash of white, and she turned to see a woman watching her with interest.
Psyche let out a shriek of alarm and sent the bottle flying from her slick hand. The woman reached out, faster than a blink, and caught it. She set it down on the edge of the tub.
“Who are you?” Psyche asked. “Are you one of the servants?”
The woman giggled. “No, I am Eros’s mother.”
“Oh!” Psyche sat up and bowed her head respectfully. She remembered from the bedtime stories that her father used to tell her that Aphrodite was proud and jealous. She didn’t want Eros’s mother to think she needed a good smiting to put her in her place.
Aphrodite chuckled, and Psyche wondered if she had the same mind-reading abilities as her son. It seemed likely. She blushed and kept her eyes on the water.
Aphrodite took a seat on the edge of the tub. “So, my dear, tell me about yourself.”
“You don’t know?” Psyche asked. “I—uh—I mean, you’re a goddess, right? Omnipotent and all that?”
Aphrodite laughed again and the sound was light and sweet as the singing of birds on a spring morning. “Not quite. I only see if I’m watching. My son hasn’t been very forthcoming with his . . . interests.”
Psyche wondered what in the world she meant by that. “What do you want to know?”
Aphrodite waved a hand. “Oh, the usual. What you do, your hobbies, your dreams and aspirations.”
Psyche gnawed on a fingernail. “There’s not much to tell, really. I do charity work.”
Aphrodite tilted her head curiously. “You don’t have a job? I thought all mortals had a job.”
“I think of my charity work as my job. I . . . I don’t really need money.” Psyche flushed a little, as she always did when discussing her wealth. She supposed she might be more comfortable talking about it if she’d done something to earn it, but she had inherited it from her grandfather.
Aphrodite smiled and patted Psyche’s shoulder. “I think that’s lovely.”
“Thank you.” Thinking of her work made Psyche wonder about her friends and family. They must be frantic. Her dad was probably shouting dire threats in his heavily-accented English to everyone from the local police to the president about what would happen if his daughter was not found.
“You’ll see them again, soon. I promise,” Aphrodite said, correctly interpreting Psyche’s change in mood.
“Can you take a message to them?” Psyche asked. “Let them know I’m all right?”
Aphrodite gave Psyche a small smile. “Do you think they would believe it?”
Likely not. In these situations, the families were often bombarded with fake messages.
“Don’t worry, little butterfly. You’ll see that things will work out soon enough. It will just take a bit of time to get the message through to my blockhead son.”
“What message?”
But Aphrodite only smiled and vanished from sight.
Psyche lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, when she heard Eros’s voice again. “Put on your blindfold, Psyche.”
“I don’t want to.” She rolled onto her stomach and closed her eyes. “I want to go home.”
She heard a soft sound like a sigh or wind through a gauze curtain. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. If you were sorry, you’d let me go.”
“I can’t. I told you—”
Psyche thumped her fist on her pillow. “Just leave me alone!”
A few moments of silence passed before Eros spoke again. “I thought you might like to go outside for a while to stretch your legs.”
Psyche’s anger vanished in an instant. “Oh yes, please!” She scrambled from the bed and looked around, but she didn’t see him.
“The blindfold,” he reminded her.
Some of her excitement drained. “Do I have to wear it outside?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Psyche sighed, but picked up the blindfold from the bedside table. After she tied it in place, she felt a gentle touch on her cheek, fingers brushing her skin as softly as butterfly’s wings. “I know you do not believe me, but I am sorry about this. More than you can know.”
She nodded. “Okay. But that doesn’t change anything.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Eros said. “Here, take my arm.” He placed her hand on his bicep and led her from the room.
“I don’t have any shoes,” Psyche said.
“You won’t need them.” His hands rested on her shoulders, guiding her around corners. She only realized they were outside when the breeze began playing with her hair. The temperature was the same, perfectly comfortable, and the air was sweetly scented with flowers. She could hear the rumble of the waterfall in the background and a bubbling fountain nearby.
“May I take the blindfold off?” Psyche asked. “Please. I promise I won’t look at you.”
There was a moment of hesitation. “All right.”
She untied the knot at the back of her head and gasped in delight at what she saw. She stood in a garden, but its beauty was so astonishing that surely it could exist only in the imagination. Stone walls surrounded it and bright wisteria tumbled from them. The meandering stone paths were lined with overflowing beds of flowers, some in colors nature had not created. In the center was a tall fountain featuring three marble women holding seashells from which the water spilled.
“Who are they?”
“Are they real?”
“They’re my aunts.”
Psyche’s father’s bedtime stories hadn’t included much genealogical information.
“They’re the daughters of my grandfather, Zeus, and Eurynome,” Eros said.
“I thought he was married to Hera.”
“That never stopped him.”
“Oh.” Psyche reached out to touch a lotus flower floating in the pool of the fountain. “Is that, um, acceptable?”
“The gods are susceptible to the same moral failings as mortals.”
“The stories my father told me portrayed your mother as vain and jealous. She isn’t, though. She’s very nice. Are there other stories that were wrong?”
“Some. The stories you have heard are much like tabloid newspapers—information collected from dubious sources, full of insinuation and conjecture and exaggerated to capture the audience’s attention. But, on occasion, eerily accurate.”
Psyche tilted her head. Eros’s voice was still coming from behind her, but she saw only her own reflection in the water. “I never heard any stories about you.”
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. It was exactly what Psyche had told Aphrodite when asked to describe herself. “I have done little of note.”
“You make people fall in love. You don’t think that’s noteworthy?”
Psyche could hear amusement in his tone. “The chroniclers apparently did not. I’ve had no great adventures, no children to join the Pantheon.”
“Your arrows have changed fate. Antony and Cleopatra. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Napoleon and Josephine. The course of human history would be different without love.” Psyche didn’t like to hear Eros downplay his importance.
“I merely ensure that events transpire as they’re supposed to,” Eros said. “I am simply the tool the Fates use. If you wish to praise someone, praise the Weavers. They wrote the drama; we merely act in it.”
Psyche was confused, but then a half-forgotten memory resurfaced in her mind. She’d run into her parents’ room, crying, afraid of the lightning and thunder that seemed to be right outside of her window. Her father had carried her back to her bed and told her the tale of the Fates while he tucked her in. She remembered how soothing his deep rumbling voice was, so gentle and reassuring. “There are three Weavers who weave the threads of your destiny into a tapestry. Clotho spins the thread of your life. Lachesis measures it. And when your allotted time has gone, it is Atropos who severs it. Even the gods themselves are bound by the Weavers’ threads.” He’d smiled at her then and kissed her forehead. “Do you not see, Psyche? Nothing can harm you while the Weavers still spin, and there is still a long thread before you.”