You Think Making Love is Easy?

One night, lying in my bed, Danae was quizzing me on what I'd eaten that day. I'd had a bagel with light cream cheese for breakfast, which apparently disappointed her.

"Look, you know you'd feel better if you stuck to the plan, right?" she asked.

I sighed. "Sure, I know."

"You'd have lots more energy, and maybe you'd get rid of this," she said poking me hard in the belly with a finger.

That hurt. Tears stung my eyes, and I was glad it was dark. No, I didn't have Danae's washboard abs, but I wasn't exactly the Pillsbury Doughboy either. Before I met her, I'd been working out a few times a week and not eating too badly. I was curvy. I thought she liked my body. I turned my back to her and pretended I was falling asleep.

"I'm sorry, Gwenny," she whispered after a short while. "I know I go too far sometimes. It's just that I want you to be healthy and happy because...I love you."

I gasped. Turning over, I searched for her face in the dark.

"You do?"

Danae scooted closer and whispered, "Yes."

We kissed, and the tears that had been filling my eyes spilled over.

"Do you believe in love at first sight?" I blubbered.

"Uh-huh," she murmured, kissing me again.

"I love you too," I said and smiled against her lips.

Sex between Danae and me had gotten better as the days went by. I was less inhibited but couldn't help feeling something was missing. Work and exercise classes and Danae herself kept me so busy, I didn't have much time to dwell on it though. There always seemed to be a whirl of activity surrounding her. I felt really lucky and really in love. The love buoyed me up, made me feel as if I was floating on air.

My "food plan" wasn't exactly going so well though. Though my kitchen was filled with "good food," on the nights Danae wasn't around, I found myself running to Burger King for a Whopper and fries. I felt horrible afterward, but that didn't stop me the next time. I also had a secret stash of chocolate tucked way back in one of my desk drawers and a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies hidden in a shoebox in my closet. I'd never felt compelled to hoard food before. Yeah, I was turning into a closet fatty.

After work one day, I stopped at a bookstore. I love to read and thought a book would be the perfect thing to share with Danae. What kind of book though? It had to be something special. Finally, I settled onThe Other Side of Welcome, a new novel by Edward Rankin, an author whose short stories I loved. Standing in line at the checkout, I found a pretty bookmark and a little card to go with it.

Having a nice gift for Danae excited me. Inside the front cover of the book, I wroteDanae, I hope you enjoy Rankin's work as much as I do. I love you. Gwen. She was coming over that night after her last class, so I wrapped it in pretty paper and left it on my coffee table to await her arrival.

Danae and I spent the whole evening together. We went shopping at the mall and then out to dinner. The food was really good and a nice "sanctioned" break from my plan. When we'd finished, the waiter brought around a dessert tray.

"Can I tempt you ladies with a piece of Death-by-Chocolate or Peanut Butter Dream pie?" he asked.

"No thanks," Danae responded without looking up or even asking me.

The waiter must've seen me eyeballing the pie, because he tried again.

"How about one dessert and two forks?" he suggested.

"Yeah, we could share," I said, winking at Danae.

"You don'treally need any dessert, baby.Do you?" It wasn't really a question.

I shook my head and looked away, and Danae asked for the check.

At home, she seemed excited about the gift. She looked inside at the inscription, thanked me with a sweet kiss, and laid the book back on the coffee table. We sat close together, holding hands.

"So, you're still sticking to your plan, right?" Danae asked.

"Yeah, pretty much," I replied.

"What does that mean?"

"It means for the most part, yes, I am sticking to the plan," I said.

"Hmm." She looked at me with one eyebrow raised. "Not sure I like the sound of that."

"I don't want to talk about it right now," I murmured, nuzzling her neck.

"Gwen? Oh..." Danae gasped as my teeth nipped at her skin.

She never did finish what she was about to say because my hands were under her top by then, my thumbs raking over her nipples, as I kissed and licked her neck. Running my tongue up the side of her neck, I sucked her earlobe and briefly flicked the tip of my tongue into her ear. Our mouths found each other and clung together, our teeth grazing and tongues dancing. Danae lifted her arms, and I pulled her top off over her head. Then she did the same for me.

My pants came off next at Danae's hurried insistence. Our breasts rubbed together, our nipples erect, glancing off the other's. Our legs entwined, and I slid my hands down the back of her pants to squeeze her beautiful ass. Writhing together, we rolled off the couch and onto the floor, still kissing and touching. Danae scooted her body across the carpet, away from the coffee table, and, still attached to her, I followed.

Lying on top of me, she kissed her way down my chest to my breasts. Her hands pushed them together, jamming both nipples into her mouth at once. Unable to get good suction with both, she let one breast go and closed her mouth around the opposite nipple and sucked hard. My back arched, and I held her head in my hands, urging her on. Her teeth scraped across my areola and closed around the turgid nub, eliciting a guttural moan from me.

Danae's pants were still on, but open in front, so I slipped my hands inside along her hipbones and pushed them down. She kicked them off and spread her legs, pushing her mound hard against mine. Wrapping my own legs around her waist, I thrust my hips up, so that our pussies were rubbing together, our juices mingling as we slid back and forth. Both of us were moaning and panting by then.

"I need something inside," I gasped. "Please. Something inside me."

Slipping a hand in between us, Danae ran her fingers along my drenched slit. Her long fingers glided up and down between my lips before two of them plunged inside me. Feeling along the top of my channel, she found my sweet spot and pressed her fingers into it, rubbing in tight circles. Moaning her name, I came hard and fast, my pussy clenched around her fingers.

She gave me no rest though. Almost immediately, she turned her body and positioned her crotch over my face, her face at mine. Pulling me open with her fingers, she sunk her face into my slippery cunt and sucked on my clit. She'd suck and then release. Suck and release.

I've heard that nobody eats pussy better than another woman, but in my case that wasn't really true. Danae's pussy was more open and meaty than mine, with the glistening inner lips hanging outside. Holding her ass in my hands, I pulled her down to my mouth and pushed my tongue into the crease between the inner and outer lips on one side. I licked down one side and up the other, then sucked the dangling flesh into my mouth.

Just as my tongue pushed into Danae's slick channel, my desire evaporated completely, with a suddenness that left me cold. I thought I felt her falter too, but she carried on, licking and slurping away at my unresponsive flesh. With a half-hearted effort, I licked along her slit again. The smell of her, which had always fueled my arousal before, was having the opposite effect now. I dropped my head to the floor and looked up at her pussy. The rippled curtains of flesh were repulsive. I hated the way they stretched in my mouth as I sucked on them. I really didn't want to do it anymore. Not at all.

Sensing my discomfort, Danae raised her head and sat down next to me on the carpet.

"You're not into this at all, are you?" she asked, wiping my wetness from her face with the palms of her hands.

I sat up too.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I don't know what happened."

"It's fine," she said, not looking at me.

She stood and walked into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard the shower turn on a moment later. I sat there on the floor for a while, feeling numb and defeated. Finally, I pulled on my panties and the sweater I'd been wearing and turned on the TV. A few minutes later, Danae went into my bedroom and got into bed. With some irritation, I realized I'd been hoping she'd go home.

I fell asleep on the couch and woke up disoriented some time after midnight. After a quick shower, I crawled into bed beside Danae. We didn't speak, but I could tell she was awake.

Early the next morning, I was awakened by something falling on the quilt over me. I opened my eyes to see Danae upending the kitchen trashcan over my bed.

"What the fuck is this?" she screamed, as the Ben & Jerry's container from a few nights before rolled off of me, the last drips of melted ice cream dribbling onto my quilt.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed back, sitting up and pushing away the garbage-strewn quilt. Burger King wrappers and an empty Fritos bag fluttered to the floor.

"You lied to me, bitch!" Danae yelled as she threw the garbage can on the floor and stomped back to the kitchen.

I followed and found her ripping open drawers and cupboard doors, rummaging through the contents. She opened the fridge and found a container of French onion dip hidden in the butter compartment and hurled it at me. As it hit the wall, the lid came off, and the contents spattered along the wall and floor.

"Stop it," I screamed.

"Fuck you, you goddamn liar!" Danae tossed over her shoulder, as she headed toward the living room.

She jerked open my desk drawers one by one, causing paper clips and errant pens and mail to scatter across the room. She found the bag of chocolates and hurled that at me as well. I caught it and flung it back, hitting her in the stomach. This only fueled her rage, and she stomped on the bag a couple of times with her bare feet before pushing me out of the way and running back to the bedroom.

When I got there, she was pulling all the boxes off the top shelf of my closet. She ripped a box open, and the package of cookies fell out. She seemed to lose steam then and sunk down to the floor, dropping the box beside her.

"What the hell is the matter with you, Gwen?" she asked in a weary voice.

"What the hell is the matter with you, crazy bitch?" I yelled. "You fucking dumped garbage on my bed. You trashed my apartment. You have no right!"

My hands were trembling, so I crossed my arms across my chest, tucking them into my armpits.

"I was only trying to help you," Danae continued. "Instead of letting me make a fool out of myself, why didn't you just say you didn't want my help?"

I said nothing. I simply looked at my toes and dug my fingers into my t-shirt. I just wanted her gone.

Danae shook her head and leaned her forehead on her knees.

"I can't do this anymore," she said.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Octavia is sitting next to me at a bar just over the line in her district. I'm nursing a beer; she has one of those little cocktails with an umbrella in it. We are invisible to the mortal world, of course, although I have been making sure that nobody is interested in sitting at our end of the bar.

"Seriously?" I ask. "Two women, their heads between each other's thighs, one's butt up in the air, the other's exposed by her bent legs. Even I could hit those targets."

"That big, huh?"

"No, not at all," I sputter. "I'm not that bad a shot."

She laughs.

"Julius, if you hadn't been so good at auras, you'd have flunked out of the academy. You were a horrible shot. You hit the instructor one time."

"Antonius." I nod, and feel a smile coming over my own face.

I haven't really gotten that much better since then. Sometimes, I didn't even manage to hit buttocks. I shot one guy in the butt and his "true love" in the right boob. The darts dissolve upon impact, of course, and people are more than happy to consider the momentary discomfort as just another one of life's pains in the ass. But this woman apparently thought that she was being groped so she turned around and decked the guy standing behind her, who, of course, turned out to be Mr. Right.

"So we're not talking big girls here?"

I smile again and take another sip of beer. "Danae -- the lesbian? -- has an amazing body. And Gwen must have been working out in the last few weeks too, because she looked incredible. Not big at all. Perfect, in fact."

"What is it with men?" Octavia asks. "Why are you all the ass-half-empty types? What's wrong with a nice curvy butt, anyway?"

"Octavia! You made a joke."

I become conscious that I am staring at her as if she has just constructed a scale model of the Taj Mahal out of Popsicle sticks.

"Sorry," I mumble.

"You should be," Octavia says with a toss of her hair. "I make plenty of jokes. I know you all think of me as some sort of airhead future heiress, but there's a brain in here, pal."

"But you are, aren't you?"

"An airhead?" She turns on me quickly.

"No, no. A future heiress."

"There's nothing wrong with wanting the best." She's become defensive. "I've put in five hard years as a cupid."

"I know, I know." I try soothing her. "So have you heard whether you got it yet?"

"Not yet. Oh, Julius, it would be so nice. They're such a great couple. Apart from the money, there's just such love between them, and I know that their little girl is going to be the most-loved baby in the world. Whether she has my soul or somebody else's. Touch me, Julius."

"Excuse me?"

Octavia is a nice kid, but we have been taught to avoid touching, whether it's mortals or immortals.

"Touch me and let me show you." She extends her hand toward me, the fingers splayed apart, and I instinctively meet it with my own. I nearly pull back, so odd is the effect of seeing her memories through her eyes. We watch a Bill and Elise Collins walking through the park, the woman quite pregnant, the two of them obviously in love. It is an idyllic scene, and it takes effort to pull my hand back.

"Wow!" I exclaim. "I didn't know we could do that. How long have you known that?"

"Since the academy. Sybilla and I used to . . ."

She starts blushing.

"Don't tell anyone, okay, Julius?"

"So how much time do you spend watching those two?"

Her blush deepens.

"Got it," I say. "Don't tell them that, either. So when do you find out?"

She shrugs. "If Elise delivers before my time's up, it won't be me. Can't have a baby without a soul, you know. They'll just assign somebody else."

I know that as well as Octavia does. Our rebirth into the mortal world depends on both hard work and luck. Like me, Octavia's previous life ended when she had died before being baptized. Until recently, Catholic theology had confined those children to "Limbo." Recently, though, the Church had had an epiphany and decided maybe that wasn't such a nice thing to do after all.

Yeah, like they knew squat. The truth is that those kids become the world's elves and cupids and fairies and leprechauns. If we keep our noses clean and do our work, we're entitled to be reborn into a new body. If we fuck up, we get recycled for another five-year stint. Rumor has it, in fact, that the head honchos are about to make it seven years. Medicine is doing so much better at keeping babies alive that the supply of immortals is dwindling. We cupids are being assigned larger and larger districts, and they've pretty much done away with leprechauns altogether.

"Good luck, honey."

"You too, Julius. I heard you made your quota last month."

I smile into my beer. Of course I made my fucking quota. They wouldn't let me back into the warehouse until I had emptied my quiver. And the warehouse was the only place I could get two darts filled with the "anti" that I needed to dissolve the ill-starred relationship between Gwen and Danae. It was a bitch, really, with the holidays. The college students were off until January fourteenth, and we were absolutely forbidden to go near high schools. If someone wants to marry their high school sweetheart, that's their business, and I wish them the best of luck. But a teenage body filled with both hormones and a dart filled with love serum is a powder keg. College students are bad enough, the randy little rabbits.

So I hung out in bars, at parties, and at churches. When I found two auras that were above minimally congruent -- young, old, gay, lesbian, whatever -- I took the shot. I was determined to get back to Gwen and Danae and undo the damage that I had done. I had studied their auras at the party where I had inadvertently put them together. Their relationship was destined for incredible highs and soul-searing lows before it finally flamed out; the "anti" would just hurry the process along.

In truth, I have never seen the stuff work so quickly. Love serum works fast because it has to. In most cases, there is a single moment that will determine whether or not a couple will ever get together. Our job is to arrive there before that moment and make it work. But "anti" is usually quite slow; relationships take time to end. In this case, I took it as a sign that Gwen was never intended to be a lesbian. Or perhaps it worked so quickly because no other cupid had ever been so stupid as to put together two such mismatched auras.

"Uh-oh, check it out. The fox at one o'clock and the guy at the end of the bar."

Octavia's excitement pulls me from my reverie. I turn around and find the guy first and then look back over my shoulder for the woman. I turn back in horror. Octavia has already pulled two darts from her quiver.

"Octavia, no. Please."

My voice is a hushed gasp, barely able to make itself heard. I am extremely conscious of the inappropriateness of my request. We are in Octavia's district, and she is entitled to match whomever she likes. In all honesty, their auras are congruent, although just barely.

Octavia stops. We are close enough that she recognizes the urgency of my request. She raises an eyebrow, inviting me to continue.

"It's her," I blurt out.

"Her?" She invites me to continue.

"Gwen."

"Your lesbian?" She looks back. "She is a cutie. Nice eyes."

"They're opalescent."

"Listen to you, Julius! Opalescent? Somebody's been spending too much time with his dictionary. But seriously, you don't think her aura matches up with his?"

She nods at the guy.

"It does," I admit. "A little. But . . . will you touch me, Octavia?"

As she extends her arm toward mine, I pray that I have the same success showing her the pictures in my mind as she had in showing me hers. I have no idea how it works, so I simply try to revisit the scene at the New Year's Eve party, when Gwen and Luke were physically close and their auras appeared to be making love.

I hear a gasp, and open one eye to peek over at Octavia. Her eyes are closed, her mouth parted, her breathing reduced to shallow puffs of air. Her other hand is clenched around the rail that marks the edge of the bar. I hear small squeaks coming from deep in her throat.

The memory has long since ended. Finally, she cracks open her own eyes, narrow slits that accuse me as she slowly detaches her hand from mine, one finger at a time.

"You fucking bastard," she says, her voice hissing from between her lips.

"Are you all right, Octavia?"

"How am I supposed to finish out the last month when I've seen that? When I know that Julius Cupidus goes around making love like that while the rest of us are groping blindly through the fog."

"What fog?" I ask, speaking very slowly. "You're not blind."

"I fucking might as well be! Now that I know what your little friend over there really looks like, I can't possibly match her with -- oh, my fucking God!"

I turn again, afraid to find out what sort of trouble Gwen might have managed to get herself into. Wasn't it bad enough that she was stuck with me as a Cupid? But nothing unusual is happening. Gwen is sitting down, ordering a drink of her own. The guy at the end of the table had given her a quick glance, but wasn't making any overt moves. Puzzled, I pivot on the bar stool to ask Octavia for an explanation. She is staring at Gwen, or more specifically at the aura above her head.