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.”
She gasped and tried leaning away. “That’s not a square. It’s a picture of my old swing set from when I was a kid.” God, she’d hated that thing. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the outdoors and all its magical sound and movement. She just didn’t enjoy it on a stupid swing in the height of winter.
But her mother had been convinced part of Quinn’s withdrawal into a book had to do with her lack of friends, and she was certain adding a play set to their backyard would bring everyone in the neighborhood over, just begging and scraping to be her daughter’s friend.
Instead, it only made Barry Womack, who lived two doors down, laugh and point at her when she’d taken a tumble from the slide and couldn’t get back up off her ass, what with so many layers of clothing on to keep her warm.
She kept people away from her mother and her bitterness because it humiliated her, and as she looked back on that time in her young life now, she realized she’d just kept right on isolating herself.
Khristos paused and pursed his luscious lips, so near her ear she wanted to scream at him to move away, with all his magical raising of her hormone levels. “Oh, yeah. I see it now. That’s the slide, right? Are slides so square?”
She rolled her eyes and swished a finger through the rectangle of color. “No, that’s the stupid monkey bars where my mother was convinced I should be getting some fresh air instead of staying buried under my covers reading Judy Blume.”
“Monkey bars are at the core of your discontent? You’re deep as the ocean, Quinn Morris.”
She made a face at him in mock exasperation. “Not the monkey bars, per se. Just a time in my life I was discontent because my mother is the exact opposite of me.”
“Wow.”
She put a hand on her hip in defensive indignation. “Wow, what?”
“Wow, those look nothing like monkey bars.”
“I agree,” the lady to the left remarked, batting her eyelashes at Khristos in that coy way females did when they wanted to catch a man’s attention.
Oh, because Mother Earth here knew the first thing about painting monkey bars accurately, in all her flowy robes and open-toed sandals in the height of a thirty-degree spell of cold weather?
But Quinn put on a smile anyway, only due to the fact that she shouldn’t care if the woman was trying to catch Khristos’s attention. He was free for the catching. She turned to address her.
Then the woman looked at her hard. “Has anyone ever told you maybe you went a little overboard with the colored contacts? They’re not realistic at all.”
Has anyone told you I could match you with an orangutan? “They looked different online,” Quinn muttered.
“Also, whatever you’re putting on your skin to make it glow like that? Can’t be good for it. I’m a dermatologist, in case you doubt.”
Quinn clenched her teeth. “Got a little carried away with the lotion. It’ll wash off.”