“You know, I thought your mother would be a pretentious bitch, but she was actually very nice,” Chloe said.
I smiled as I sat in the seat behind us. “That’s surprising,” I said. “Although it makes me happy.”
Chloe was staring at me when she sat down beside me. I gave her chin a quick flick, making her grin widen, and asked, “What?”
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not lying to me,” she said. “For introducing me to them as they are to you, not giving me false names or some lie. Although, now I am wondering how many other gods I’ve met that are parading around as normal people.”
I chuckled softly. “I’ll introduce you to all of them,” I said. “Except Apollo.”
“What’s wrong with Apollo?”
“He’s an asshat who doesn’t deserve your presence,” I replied.
“Wait, didn’t you two get in some fight about a girl?” she asked, apparently pulling some memory of a myth she’d read in the past.
I sighed. “Long story short, he insulted me, and I got revenge by striking him with a love arrow and striking the nymph he fell in love with with a blunt arrow. She ended up hating him so much that she turned herself into a tree.” I almost laughed as I remembered.
“That’s a little mean,” Chloe said.
“It was very entertaining at the time,” I said.
“I’m sure he didn’t think so,” she said. “How would you feel if someone took away the love of your life?”
Someone did. Someone stole you from me, and my mother erased you from history to shield me from the pain of it—was what I wanted to say.
“He’s had plenty of lovers before and after,” I said instead. “Believe me. Right now, he’s touring as a musician. He has all the groupies he wants.”
Chloe stiffened slightly. “I once dated a musician,” she said in a small voice.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ah…” she looked down at her hands, her hair falling over her eyes. “I had to delete all social media and move apartments.”
Her gaze lifted to mine as my heart plummeted. I thought she might say more, but she leaned back in the seat and slid sideways, her body molding perfectly into mine, and I draped my arm across the back of her chair.
“Soon,” she said.
I kissed the top of her head and squeezed her shoulder, but I didn’t reply. I was eager to know who had hurt her so badly that she’d tried to erase herself—if she would even tell me his name. I wanted to know who had made her so scared of love, so afraid to be with someone she might fall in love with, that she had thought it safer to settle for someone she barely liked.
I wanted to know who had thought they could bruise her soul as they had and whose name I would be writing on an arrow not designed for love or spite but for an eternal prison within their mind—driven into madness by solitude in complete darkness.
I hugged her a little tighter at the thought.
Her adrenaline was fading without the boost of the crowd and the fighting players in her face as we sat there. But I savored that closeness as the game went on.
“I think I want to go back downstairs,” she said a few minutes later.
“Why?”
“Because the longer I’m this close to you without the noise of the crowd and the distraction of the players in front of me, the less willpower I’m capable of maintaining, especially with how sexy you look in this backward baseball cap.” She glanced back over my shoulder. “And—“
“You think I’m sexy?” I interjected.
She stifled a coy smile and pushed her hair over to one side, revealing the shoulder that her oversized jersey kept falling off. Greed lifted her dark eyes, so much that I nearly pulled her into my lap, shoved the rest of the people out of the box, and then spanked her over my knees for testing me like this.
