Aphrodite yanked her glasses off and set her book on a nearby table littered with pictures of them, happy, laughing, playing badminton with Zeus and his brood. “What exactly did I say to you?”
“You told me if a woman ever got her hands on the apple—which the stats favored; I mean, how many men do you know who’d be kooky enough to confess their love woes to an apple in the Parthenon?—you said I’d fall helplessly in love with her. Yes, you did. Which to me meant, better hang on to that damn apple, Khristos, or possibly end up in love with a serial killer. It was your controlling way of demanding I get busy and make you some grandchildren.”
Aphrodite appeared to pause in thought before she said, “Was your grandmother on that damn tour bus to the Parthenon again?”
“Bingo, Mom! She fed Quinn that crazy story about talking to the apple about her breakup with the man she wanted to marry to purge her soul of strife or whatever the story was. Quinn, being the mythology addict she is, and still pretty sore from the end of the relationship she thought would lead to marriage, believed her.”
“Does she still smell like a goat?”
“Who?” he all but shouted.
“Grams, of course.”
“Rumor has it, yes.”
Aphrodite grinned. “So she’s still selling that story to the tourists? Gods, she’s good. She cracks me up.”
“Is that the point? No. The point is, Quinn is now Aphrodite, and I’m in love with her because you couldn’t keep your nose out of my life! If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times—let me find the love of my immortal life. But no, you just couldn’t let it be.”
“I’m still missing something here…”
He ran a hand over his jaw with an exasperated sigh. “How convenient you’ve forgotten that argument. I almost did, too. But then I remembered, it was like World War III. We didn’t speak to each other for almost a decade. And I remember that threat—clearly. So make it go away. Now!”
Aphrodite laughed, a bubbling chuckle of casual abandon. “Oh, honey, no, no. no. I would never actually put a love spell on the apple. I said I should put a spell on the apple so you’d stop chasing women. Your memory’s slipping, son. Try some ginko biloba. I hear it helps. I was just keeping you on your toes to teach you about consequences, give you responsibilities to tend. You know how I feel about my past, how remorseful I am for some of the horrible things I did in my misguided, orgy-filled youth.”
Khristos cringed and held up a hand. “Stop right at orgy, please.”
His mother shook her head as the room tinkled with more of her laughter. “I’ve told you at least a thousand times about all the trouble I’ve made, and not without good reason. I told you because I didn’t want that for you, and the way things were shaping up, with you off chasing every toga from here to eternity, I had to do something, didn’t I?”
He damn well didn’t chase togas.
Wait—what?
There was no spell? He’d spent the better part of his adult life pretending to be something he wasn’t to avoid getting caught in a web that didn’t even exist?
Which meant—he really was falling in love with Quinn?
Oh, fuck.
“Do you mean to tell me that I’m not falling in love with her because of a love spell, but because…”
“Just because, honey.” Aphrodite smiled at him, a smile beaming with love. “There’s no spell, no shenanigans, nothing. That’s your heart, telling you you’ve found the one. I’m so happy for you, Khristos! Oh, we’ll have grandchildren in no time!” She whirled around, clapping her hands. “Mom!” she yelled. “Did you hear?”
His grandmother—or GG, as they called her—sauntered into the living room, a pink umbrella-ed cocktail in hand, her crazy Mohawk sagging from the humidity. “Yep,” she said on a sigh. “I heard.”
His mother threw her arms around his grandmother’s neck. “Isn’t this the most amazing news, Mother? Grandbabies!”
His grandmother pushed her false teeth from her mouth with her tongue before slapping Khristos on the back. “Hold onto your flimsy panties there, girlie. I got a confession to make.”
His eyes narrowed in his grandmother’s direction. He adored her, loved her as much as he loved his mother, but Grandma’s first name wasn’t Agape for nothing. Like her name, she was the scariest bitch.
Fear skittered up his spine. “GG, what have you done?”
She took a long sip of her drink through the straw, sucking on it noisily until she’d had her last drop. “You want it straight up, or do you want me to weave one of my stories like I do on the bus?”