about my job, and I told him I worked in Web design. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I’d majored in it and in French. Both areas had turned out to be completely irrelevant to my job, though Lara swore having a Web site would drive up our business. We mostly relied on word of mouth now.
When he told me he was a veterinarian, I said, “No, you aren’t.”
Those smoldering eyes widened in surprise. “Why do you say that?”
“Because…because you can’t be. I just can’t see it.” Nor could I imagine telling Lara tomorrow: So I was in a bar last night and met this sexy veterinarian… No, those concepts somehow didn’t go together. Veterinarians looked like Wil Delaney.
“It’s God’s truth,” Kiyo swore, stirring his margarita. “I even take my work home with me. I have five cats and two dogs.”
“Oh, dear Lord.”
“Hey, I like animals. It goes back to the honesty thing. Animals don’t lie about how they feel. They want to eat, fight, and reproduce. If they like you, they show it. If they don’t, they don’t. They don’t play games. Well, except maybe the cats. They’re tricky sometimes.”
“Yeah? What’d you name all those cats?”
“Death, Famine, Pestilence, War, and Mr. Whiskers.”
“You named your cats after the riders of the apocal—wait. Mr. Whiskers?”
“Well, there are only four horsemen.”
We talked for a while after that about whatever else came to mind. Some was serious, some humorous. He told me he was in town from Phoenix, which kind of disappointed me. Not local. We also talked about the people around us, our jobs, life, the universe, etc., etc. All the while I kept wondering how this had happened. Hadn’t I just been noting how I lived outside of society? Yet, here I was, talking to a guy I’d just met like I’d known him for years. I barely recognized the words coming out of my own mouth. I didn’t even recognize my body language: leaning into him as we talked, legs touching. He wore no cologne but smelled like he looked: darkness and sex and heat. And promises. Promises that said, Oh, baby, I can give you everything you’ve ever wanted if you’ll just give me the chance….
At one point, I leaned toward the bar to slide an empty bottle across it. As I did, I suddenly felt Kiyo’s fingers brush my lower back where my shirt had ridden up. I flinched as electricity crackled through me at that slight, casual touch.
“Here’s more honesty,” he said in a low voice. “I like this tattoo. A lot. Violets again?”
I nodded and sat back in my chair, but he didn’t remove his hand. That tattoo was a chain of violets and leaves that spread across my lower back. A larger cluster of the flowers sat on my tailbone, and then smaller tendrils extended outward on both sides, almost to my hips.
“Violets have sort have become my patron flower,” I explained, “because of my eyes.”
He leaned forward, and I almost stopped breathing at how close his mouth was to mine. “Wow. You’re right. I’ve never seen eyes that color.”
“I’ve got three more.”
“Eyes?”
“Tattoos.”
This got his interest. “Where?”
“They’re covered by the shirt.” I hesitated. “You know anything about Greek mythology?”
He nodded. A cultured man. Cue swooning.
I touched my upper right arm. My sleeve covered the skin. “This one’s a snake wrapped all the way around my arm. It’s for Hecate, the goddess of magic and the crescent moon.” What I didn’t add was that Hecate guarded the crossroads between worlds. It was she who governed transitions to the Otherworld and beyond. This tattoo was my link to her, to facilitate my own journeys and call on her for help when needed.
I moved to my upper left arm. “This one’s a butterfly whose wings wrap around and touch behind my arm. It’s half black and half white.”
“Psyche?” he asked.
“Good guess.” He really was cultured. The goddess Psyche was synonymous with the soul, which the butterfly represented in myth. “Persephone.”
He nodded. “Half black, half white. She lives half her life in this world and half in the Underworld.”
Not unlike my own life. Persephone guided transitions to the world of death. I didn’t travel there myself, but I invoked her to send others across.
“She governs the dark moon. And back here”—I tapped the spot behind me where my neck connected to my back—“is a moon with an abstract woman’s face in it. Selene, the full moon.”
Kiyo’s dark eyes held intense interest. “Why not one of the more common moon goddesses, then? Like Diana?”
I hesitated with my answer. In many ways, Diana would have served the same purpose. She, like Selene, was bound to the human world and could keep me grounded here when I needed it. “The others are…solitary goddesses. Even Persephone, who’s technically married. Diana’s a virgin—she’s alone too. But Selene…well, she doesn’t get a lot of press anymore, but she was a more social goddess. A sexual goddess. She opens herself up to other people. And experiences. So I went with her. I just didn’t think it’d be healthy to be marked with three goddesses who were all alone.”
“What about you? Are you alone, Eugenie?” His voice was velvet against me, and I could have drowned in those eyes. They were like chocolate. Chocolate is an aphrodisiac.
“Aren’t we all alone?” I asked with a rueful smile.
“Yes. I think in the end, we all are, no matter what the songs and happy stories say. I guess it’s just a matter of who we choose to be alone with.”
“That’s why I come here, you know. To be alone with other people. There’s isolation in a crowd. You’re hidden. Safe.”
He looked around at the buzzing, moving sea of people in the bar. They were like a wall surrounding us. There but not there. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here too?”
He glanced back down at me, his expression a little less sexual and a bit more pensive. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I guess maybe I’m here because of you.”
I didn’t have any quick retorts for that, so I started playing with the bottle again. The bartender asked if I wanted another, and I shook my head.
Kiyo touched my shoulder. “You want to dance?”
I was pretty sure I hadn’t danced since high school, but some force compelled me to agree. We stepped out into a crowd of very bad dancers. Most were just sort of floundering around to a fast song with a heavy beat that I’d never heard before. Kiyo and I weren’t much better. But when a slower song came on, he wrapped me to him, pressing us together as close as two people could be. Well, almost as close.
I couldn’t ever remember anything like this happening with
