“My best friend. You would have seen her that night we met at the bar.” I look at him. “She was the girl every guy couldn’t take their eyes off of.”
Cupid nods. “Yeah, I remember her,” he confirms. “But that’s not who I remember catching the eye of every guy.”
“Anyway…” I continue, letting that statement wash over me. “We’d had a fight. He told me not to go. I went anyway. And when I came home, he was just…gone. I called, it went to voicemail. I texted, he never responded. I even emailed a couple of times. Nothing.” I bring the tea mug up to my chest and press it against my sternum, seeking warmth.
“He ghosted me,” I say. “After three years together. Poof, gone.”
“What a dick move,” Cupid says, and I agree.
Then: “So he’s the reason you’re…like this?” And at this, I genuinely laugh because what a way to ask that question.
When I finally get my breath back, I say, “Yes, unfortunately. Bryan is the reason I’m like this.”
By this point, we’ve moved from the edge of the bed to the center, propped up against the headboard. My left side and his right side touch at points—shoulders, elbows, thighs, our socked feet—as we look ahead at nothing in particular.
“I wish I could go back in time and kick his ass,” Cupid says.
I snort at this. “Oh yeah, what would you have done? Snappedyour fingers and sang a song at him?”
“Wha—” he starts. “Oh, ha ha, very funny,” he says, bumping my shoulder with his. “AnotherCupid looks like he’s in a musicaljoke. Welcome back, Love.”
“Can I ask—?” I bite my lip, considering my next words. “Whydoyou dress like this?”
“Would it be enough to tell you I just think it makes me look cool?”
“No, I don’t think it would be.”
He sighs, leaning his head back against the headboard, and folds his hands in his lap. “I had a bad breakup once, too, you know. Really bad. This was a long,longtime ago, and it took me many years—centuries—to get over it.”
“What happened?” I ask, humiliatingly curious at this new information.
“It’s going to sound crazy,” he says, letting his head fall in my direction.
“Try me.”
“There was this girl, Psyche. The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen—” another nudge to my shoulder, “—until I saw you.” My cheeks heat. “And it made my mother jealous,” he says.
“Ew, yourmom?”
“Yep, Aphrodite has quite the temper. So she recruited me to do her dirty work. She wanted me to shoot Psyche with an arrow and make her fall in love with this horrible monster thing. But I messed it up.” Cupid’s shoulders slump. “All of it. Long story short, I fell in love with Psyche. Disobeyed my mother’s orders and tried to keep it a secret from everyone.”
“Even Psyche?”
“Especially Psyche,” he says. “I wanted to keep her safe. But I ended up keeping her in a box, I think.” Cupid smiles sadly at me. “I wouldn’t even let her seeme.”
“What happened?”I whisper.
“Her sisters got in her head. Convinced her I was some invisible monster she needed to kill. And when she tried to and discovered it was me, I just got so mad that she would betray me like that. So I…” he flutters his fingers above his lap, “flew away.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Wow,” I say. “I thought my relationship was fucked up.”
Cupid chuckles. “Yeah, those days were especially fucked up. Mortals don’t have anything on gods when it comes to fucked up shit.”
I suck in a breath. “Do you regret it?”
