Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (69 page)

Considering that my hot date for Friday night was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, the answer was definitely no. “Not really,” I said.

“Then let me take you out for some real food — if that’s all right.”

I looked at Brad then — really looked at him, at the eyes with their warm, shifting hazel tones; the oversized nose that he’d always hated but which I sort of liked; the wide, friendly mouth. He’d never been what you’d call conventionally handsome, but I’d always liked his looks. Of course he didn’t compare to Luke, but even Luke had told me to stop making comparisons. So I wouldn’t.

“Ahem.”

We both looked up to see Nina standing over us, her arms crossed and a patently false smile painted on her glossy lips. “Well, hi…Brad,” she said. “Long time no see.”

“Hi, Nina,” Brad said, looking a little puzzled by her apparent hostility. Then again, he didn’t know how many hours of Nina’s life I’d wasted in agonizing over our breakup. “Christa and I were just catching up.”

“Fab,” she said. “Hey, Christa, I hate to be a party-pooper, but it’s getting kind of late and I still have to drive you home — ”

This from the girl who told the rest of us we were getting old when we wanted to head home at one…on a weeknight. But I knew what she was doing, and even though I didn’t like it very much, I wasn’t about to start arguing with her in front of Brad. Besides, he and I had already set up a date for the following night, so if Nina thought she could prevent further contact, she was sadly mistaken. And she was right — it was close to eleven, and I still needed to get my handwritten notes into my computer if possible. Then I could email them to myself at work.

“No problem,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee, Brad. It was really great seeing you — and I’m looking forward to tomorrow night.”

“Pick you up at seven?”

“Sounds great.” I smiled, a little more broadly than I would have under normal circumstances, but the evil side of me was enjoying Nina’s obvious ire. I gathered up my purse and then followed her out of the theater complex.

To her credit, she waited until we were safely ensconced in her Z4 before exploding. “Okay, what the hell?!” she snapped.

Innocently, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Do not — I repeat, do not give me that shit! What the hell are you thinking? Brad ‘he stomped on my heart and left me for dead’ McAllister! Haven’t you learned anything?” With a vicious gesture she threw the car into reverse and punched the gas. The little BMW jumped backward as if it had been kneed in the nuts.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said, after my heart decided to dislodge itself from my throat.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” The car screeched to a stop at the parking attendant’s booth. I began to pull out my wallet, but Nina just shook her head impatiently and practically flung a ten-dollar bill at the attendant. “Can you say ‘rebound’?”

“That’s stupid. I wasn’t even dating Luke long enough to have earned an official rebound.”

“Like the length of time you were together matters,” Nina retorted.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” she said, turning left onto Sunset right in front of an oncoming SUV, “that you fell for that guy big-time. Don’t lie and say you didn’t — I know you too well.”

An uncomfortable silence followed that remark. I should have known Nina would figure out exactly how crazy I’d really been for Luke. We’d been friends too long. “Maybe I did,” I said in a small voice. “But I can’t let that stop me from moving on, can I?”

“Of course not,” she replied. “But you guys broke up barely a week ago. And if it were someone else, maybe I wouldn’t mind. I saw what happened after Brad dumped you, though, and it wasn’t pretty. Are you really saying you want to go through that all over again?”

“Circumstances are different now,” I said. “He’s moved back down here to L.A. And he as much as said he was sorry about how he handled things.”

“And that’s supposed to make it all better?”

Of course not, and I knew that as well as Nina. Still, a lot of guys wouldn’t have even admitted as much as Brad had in our short conversation. I had to give him points for that. “It’s a step,” I replied finally. “Maybe this is just the universe’s way of sorting things out.”

Nina lifted an eyebrow, and again made one of those heart attack–inducing left turns onto La Brea. “‘Whenever the good Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window,’” she said, in such treacly-sweet tones I knew she had to be quoting from something.

“What the hell is that from?”

“
The Sound of Music
.”

“Oh, rot, Maria,” I snapped, and then we both began to laugh.

By the time we reached my apartment, her mood had been restored somewhat, and she was able to wish me good night with only the slightest trace of accusation in her tone. By that I knew, while she didn’t really support my decision to see Brad again, she wouldn’t try to stop me. Implicit in that understanding was the promise to be there for me if Round Two turned out to be as disastrous as Round One.

For myself, I didn’t know exactly what to think. Had God finally stepped in? Was Brad His personal
deus ex machina
, the man who could save my heart and soul from the Devil?

I just wished I knew if I even wanted to be saved.

A
ll day Friday
little pricks of guilt tormented me. Maybe Nina was right. Maybe I’d just said yes to Brad because I didn’t want to deal with the emotional aftermath of my split from Luke. Maybe I was just trying to relive a part of my past instead of seeing what the future might have to offer. Then again, was there some predetermined amount of time that had to elapse before I could start seeing someone else? It wasn’t as if I’d gone out looking for a new relationship; this one had pretty much been dumped in my lap. And if Luke really wanted to talk, he knew where to find me. Too many times in my life I’d apologized for things that weren’t even my fault, and as much as I missed him — ached for him, if I really wanted to admit it to myself — I was damned if I was going to crawl back to him and beg for forgiveness when he was the one who had screwed up. If he was too proud to admit any wrongdoing, then so be it.

At least the article seemed to be coming together pretty well. I cleared out most of my copyediting duties in the morning and spent the afternoon organizing my notes into something resembling a coherent whole. Lee, the photographer, had already uploaded the images he shot onto the server we used for handling photos, and I actually had a lot of fun looking through them and deciding which ones to use. Then I had to write captions for the ones I selected. I didn’t have the rough draft ready for Roger to look at until almost five, but at least I felt I had done a decent day’s work and hoped he would approve of what I had written.

He’d already left by the time I dropped the story envelope on his desk; people tended to evaporate early on Friday afternoons, especially the staff members who had long commutes. Roger lived down in north Long Beach, so I couldn’t blame him for pulling the disappearing act, but I still felt vaguely disappointed. It would have been nice to have a chance to discuss this, my first article, with him, but I supposed it could wait until Monday morning.

By the time I got home, I had about an hour before Brad was scheduled to pick me up. Since the date was supposed to involve dinner but nothing overly special, I didn’t do much more than touch up my makeup, give my hair a quick once-over with the brush, and then change the flats I’d worn at the office for a slightly more stylish pair of kitten-heeled ankle boots. The last thing I wanted was to come off as desperate or trying too hard; casual but nice seemed to be the best angle to take here. I didn’t want to acknowledge how nervous I actually felt. That was just silly, wasn’t it? After all, I’d known Brad for years; it wasn’t like going on a first date with the Devil or something. But maybe in a way that made things more difficult. We’d have the weight of a shared history affecting everything we did and said. I could try to convince myself that we were just starting over fresh, but that’s never really the case — you can’t ever entirely discount the past.

My minor preparations for the date left with me with a good amount of time to kill before I could logically expect Brad, so I took my laptop over to the sofa and opened it up, thinking I could roam around on the Internet, check my mail, and do whatever else it took to fill up that last useless half-hour.

Nothing much interesting in my email, of course — my mother sent me a recipe for some zucchini casserole that sounded vaguely nauseating, but I just replied that it sounded great and then, because I was too guilty to trash it altogether, moved the email into my “misc. Mom stuff” folder and promptly forgot about it. I really didn’t get a huge volume of mail, since my spam filter was pretty aggressive, so there wasn’t much new. In fact, one of Luke’s emails was still visible in the inbox.

I know I shouldn’t have, but I clicked on it and then sat there, feeling a painful tightness in my chest as I read the simple message.
A roast sounds wonderful — thank you for cooking. Yours, Luke.

Yours, Luke.
But he really hadn’t ever been mine, had he? We’d just played at a relationship, after all. Luke had the whole moonlight and roses thing down pretty well, but the minute the situation got a little more complex, he’d pulled a disappearing act. I supposed I should have been grateful that I got out of the entanglement with only a few extra emotional scars.

Still, it hurt. It hurt a lot. I stared at the email for a long moment. Then I closed the window for my mail program and opened up the Firefox browser, forcing myself not to think about him, about what had gone wrong. Dwelling on it wasn’t going to change anything, and I knew I’d better get myself together before Brad showed up and started asking questions. That’s another problem with going on a “first date” with someone who already knows you well. There’s no mystery.

But after spending some time canoodling on sites that I knew were guaranteed to give me a laugh, including The Onion and GoFugYourself.com, I felt my spirits improve somewhat. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when someone’s doing an excellent job of mocking Lady Gaga’s latest sartorial disaster.

Precisely at seven, Brad knocked on the door. He always had been the punctual type. I didn’t have time to do much more besides close my laptop and set it down on the coffee table. Then I got up and let him in.

He looked good, wearing lived-in jeans, a dark shirt, and a brown leather jacket. Not quite as effortlessly chic as Luke, but still more than presentable.

“I like your apartment,” he commented, after a quick glance around. “It looks like you.”

“Thanks,” I said, and then we both stared at each other until he began to grin, and I found myself grinning back.

“Awkward much?” he asked, and I replied,

“You have no idea.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll get over it eventually. Let’s get something to eat — I’m starving.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I replied, then went to get my purse.

Brad’s ride turned out to be an older-model Pathfinder, which felt awfully lumpy and bumpy compared to any of Luke’s plush vehicles or even my own Mercedes. Then again, Brad had never been much of a car guy. With him it had always been what was practical, and I supposed the SUV was good for hauling things around.

“So what are you in the mood for?” he asked. “Mexican? Thai?”

“Oh, pretty much anything,” I said, even though I knew he’d always hated it when I responded that way. He wasn’t one of those guys who asked a question just for form’s sake when he had already made his mind up as to what he wanted to do. He asked because he genuinely wanted the input. So I added hastily, “Mexican would be good.” If nothing else, a margarita sounded like a great idea.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” he responded with a grin.

We headed south to Olympic and then east. I didn’t really recognize where we were going, and some of the neighborhoods we drove through were marginal at best. But Brad was a native, and I figured he knew where he was going, even if he’d spent most of the last seven years up in the Bay Area.

Sure enough, the restaurant we pulled up in front of looked perfectly respectable, and I thought I’d even heard of it, even though I’d never eaten there.

“El Cholo’s got the best tamales in L.A,” Brad said, just before handing the car over to the valet. It seemed that no matter where I went out to eat, it was impossible to park your own car. “And also the best margaritas.”

“I’m all over that,” I said.
The bigger, the better
, I added mentally.

It turned out Brad had reservations, and I lifted a skeptical eyebrow at him after we’d been seated. “So why bother to ask me what I wanted to eat if you already knew where we were going?” I asked.

His tone was apologetic. “Well, let’s just say I hoped you’d want to come here. I got reservations at three different places, just in case…which means I’d better call the other restaurants and cancel.”

I couldn’t help shaking my head as he pulled out his cell phone and made a couple of quick calls. Just as he had hung up on the last one, the waitress came along and took our drink orders. Pretty much all of the margaritas sounded great, but I decided to go with the blue agave margarita, just because having a blue drink sounded like a lot of fun. Brad ordered a traditional version on the rocks, and then we lapsed into yet another awkward silence before she returned and rescued us by leaving behind some chips and salsa.

After a bit of companionable munching, I asked, “So do you think the festival helped with your film?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Brad replied, looking relieved that I’d found an innocuous topic of conversation. “In fact, I spoke to a representative from HBO there who was really interested in picking it up for cable. So maybe it’ll get a little more life than just making the indie festival circuit and a few art houses that are willing to take more of a risk than usual.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I imagine a good part of working as an independent is learning how to network.”

“You have no idea.” He leaned forward a bit, clasping his hands on the tabletop. “You’ve got to be both a filmmaker and a marketer. Maddy’s great at it, and I’m learning — I mean, I saw some of the marketing work my father’s company did and even pitched in to help write press releases and that sort of thing every once in a while, but it’s a far cry from that to convincing people the film you’re backing is worthy of screen time. It’s rough out there.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. It didn’t sound like much fun to me, but I’d always been the type who preferred to work behind the scenes. Last night at the festival had been both terrifying and exhilarating — I’d had to force myself to approach people and ask questions. Roger had said the first article was the most difficult, and I sincerely hoped he was right. Otherwise, I’d have to swallow my pride and tell both him and Jacqui that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing after all. “Do you have any other projects you’re working on?”

He shook his head. “Not right now.”

The drinks arrived, and I couldn’t wait to pick up my margarita and take a long, cool pull at it. Nothing like the judicious application of some tequila to break the tension.

Because I could feel it. I didn’t know for sure whether it was the result of natural awkwardness at sitting face to face with the man who had dumped me so egregiously all those years before, or whether the chemistry I’d always thought had been so good had altered subtly. Maybe it was just that we still had a whole lot of emotional baggage to deal with and weren’t sure how.

Or maybe it was simply that I found myself wishing really, really hard it was Luke sitting across from me and not Brad.

Typical
, I thought.
How many years did it take before you stopped wishing that Brad would miraculously come back into your life? And now that he’s here, the only person you can think of is Luke? Get a grip, Christa!

“So what else are you up to?” I asked. I made a vow then and there that I would keep the conversation going if it killed me…and if I looked into Brad’s hazel eyes one more time and imagined Luke’s vivid blue instead I’d pinch myself. Hard.

“Oh, I’m teaching a couple of anthro classes over at the local community college,” he replied. “Might as well put that master’s degree to some use. It brings in some extra cash, and I like it. A lot of the other adjunct professors have problems with the current climate, which keeps their hours below a certain level so the college doesn’t have to pay them benefits, but I don’t really need a full-time income right now, so in my case it doesn’t matter so much.” He frowned. “Although I do agree that the policy is potentially damaging.”

“And how’s your family? Your mom?” I inquired hastily. Compelling as it might have been for the actual parties involved, I wasn’t in the mood to hear him launch into an in-depth analysis of why the tight-fistedness of the California higher-education system was hurting the rank and file.

“Oh, fine,” Brad said, apparently oblivious to the obvious red herring. “She went through a rough time, of course…we all did…but she’s managing much better now. I think it was a relief for her to finally get the company sold, even though she really didn’t want to let go of it at first.”

Brad’s father had been the sole owner of a company that sold high-end barbecues, outdoor fire pits, log sets, that sort of thing. I’d never really thought about how much money was actually in that business until I’d seen for myself how well his family had lived, but it had been very profitable. Probably it had been a wrench to sell the company, but it had thrived because of Mr. McAllister’s passion for his products and his hands-on approach. I doubted that Mrs. McAllister or even Brad could have kept the place operating at the same level it had while Mr. McAllister was alive, so selling it seemed to me the most logical thing to do. “Well, I can see how that would be hard,” I said. “I mean, it was your father’s baby, right? But I’m glad it all worked out in the end.”

“Yes, and the investments we made from the sale should keep all of us going for quite a while,” Brad replied. “I’m trying to be a little picky about the projects I take on, though, because it’s not the kind of wealth that’s inexhaustible, naturally.”

Unlike Luke’s
, I thought automatically, and I really did reach down under the table and pinch my left forearm between my right thumb and forefinger. Ouch. You’d think I’d learn. “And your sister?”

He sipped at his own margarita before replying. “Oh, she’s fine, too. She’s in her second year at San Diego State, although with the way they run that place it’ll probably be another four years before she graduates. She wants to go into sports physiology and medicine, of all things.”

Actually, that made a lot of sense to me, since Brad’s little sister Melissa had been the sort of gung-ho athlete I found it almost impossible to relate to. I mean, more power to her and all that, but I just couldn’t get my brain behind someone who obsessed over her backhand and who entered marathons as if they were just a walk in the park. Then again, she probably couldn’t relate to me and my shopping pathologies, either.

“That sounds impressive,” I managed to say, even though I found myself not much caring what Melissa’s future plans were. In the year that Brad and I had dated, I think she and I had probably exchanged a maximum of twenty words.