Dancing With Cupid by Jennifer Stevenson

Author:Jennifer Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Musa Publishing
Published: 2012-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in my life—six thousand years’ worth—but apparently I’d gotten soft, living in the land of mac’n’cheese and daytime TV.

One minute I was drowning my sorrows in microbrew and giving my motorcycle an oil change, the next I was in a crowded, smelly room full of half-dressed women and shrieking parrots.

Then I noticed I was naked. Cool!

I was burning up. I remembered I was at T-minus-blowtorch and counting. I needed to get laid, stat.

They were singing something I recognized, an old, old Vidyapati Maithili love poem that I hadn’t thought of in ages:

Today my house is again home,

today my body is my body.

The god of destiny smiled on me.

No more doubt.

Let the nightingales sing, then,

let there be myriad rising moons,

let Kama’s five arrows become five thousand

and the south wind softly, softly blow:

for now my body has meaning

in the presence of my beloved

It’s beautiful if you sing it slow the way they were singing it. I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. The air was so thick with incense, the parrots squawking, the women of all sizes and colors with all their sweaty skin showing, all I could think was that I must be dreaming.

Then a parrot flew across the room and nearly bapped into my head. Okay, probably not a dream.

Had Indra called me? I remembered once getting invited to an orgy with him and forty nymphs—

Wait a minute. That music—the poem was Vidyapati, but the tune was…the tune was by…Eric Burdon and the Animals?

Either this was a dream, or I was hallucinating an orgy from the past. Either way, it seemed like a great idea. I hadn’t had sex in weeks.

“Welcome, Kamadeva, lord of love!” intoned a woman’s voice.

I turned around.

A big girl with big dark hair stood behind me. She made a flourish with a long scarf and the singing stopped.

I smiled. A long-forgotten sense of duty arose, and a familiar train of thought: How many of them are there this time? and Here we go, and Damn, I love my job.

My month-old boner throbbed.

“Okeedoke,” I said. “Who’s first?”

“You horndog.” The chick with the scarf frowned at me. “There’s someone here you need to talk to.”

She swept the scarf around and moved aside, and holy shit, there sat Rathi, her knees and ankles together, and a green parrot with a red beak sitting on her upraised hand, just like in my favorite portrait of her.

Clearly I was asleep and dreaming.

I smiled. “Hi, honey.”

She seemed steamed up. “You.”

I looked around me. Room full of half-naked, ready women, incense, candles—it all seemed perfectly in order. “Nice party,” I ventured.

A phone rang, and an answering machine clicked on. “Laura Cranston is not available right now. Please leave a message.”

I did another double take.

Okay, this wasn’t a dream. Or an orgy arranged in heaven.

And apparently I hadn’t been dragged back to India, or back in time, either.

I looked around me. The women looked back. I looked at the girl with the scarf. She seemed familiar. Big hair,

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