Dancing With Cupid Read online

  “You wanted to rebuild your cult,” Veek reminded me.

  “I wanted to find Rathi. Maybe make people remember I used to have a body—according to scripture,” I added sourly. “This was all Baz’s smartass idea. ‘Tell them who you are.’” I threw my hands in the air. “So I told a few women who I am.”

  Veek said, “It seems to have worked.”

  I clicked around the site some more. “Wow. She’s pretty thorough. Meetings. Testify! Members only. Register. About us. Survey.”

  “She wants to meet you again.”

  “They all do.” Behind me, he made a noise, and I looked around. “What? None of us wants to be bothered with repeat customers. Baz, Archie, Lido—you don’t, yourself.”

  “I do when my priest sends me back. When the lady pays, she gets repeat service.”

  If it’d been Baz scolding me, I’d have made the obvious comeback. Veek must have seen my retort in my eyes.

  He said softly, “These are not your, how you say, your johns. Not customers, mon frère. Your—no, not serviteurs, either, but they worship you. They need you.”

  “And they had me. Once is plenty—”

  He interrupted me. “Worshippers serve their god, but a god must also serve. You cannot coast along on one visit per worshipper. By announcing that you are who you are, you have made a commitment to them. Now you must keep it.”

  I hunched a shoulder. “Yeah. Right.” Veek can be annoying. He’s so civilized when he rips me a fresh one.

  “You have their prayers, their praise. They keep your name alive. They announce to the world your miracles. You owe them more than to throw each one un plan cul and ‘fare thee well, Mademoiselle.’ That is how a sex demon behaves—not a god.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You will notice she has pointed out the important part.”

  “What?” I snapped.

  “There is no record of what his wife thought about Kamadeva’s fate.”

  “Huh.”

  I stared into my own pretty face and tried to remember Lotus Bride, which was almost certainly not her name when we met.

  When I looked up, Veek had that patient expression he and Baz use on me.

  These guys have about forty percent as much fun as I do, and this is why. “You worry too much,” I said.

  He just nodded.

  But I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by just how much I had to worry about.

  Chapter Five

  Next day at work, I thought I saw what Veek was getting at. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to see chubby girls with big hair. They all smiled at me—everybody smiles at me—and for the first time it made me uneasy.

  Have I slept with this woman?

  Who the hell knew?

  It wasn’t until Rathi came in to work that I began to realize more of the implications.

  The Rathi I left in India hadn’t cared who I had sex with. It was the job. We were both extremely active—it surprised me how much I was remembering, now that I was letting myself think about the past. About us.

  She wore a lot of red in those days. Her hair was a huge black fluffy cloud…her navel was a beaker of nectar…and she’d been as flexible as I was. I could still feel how she would put the sole of her foot on my thigh and wrap her arms around my neck. I heaved a big sigh.

  RathiRaani, my newfound Rathi, breezed past my open copy room door in a dark gray suit and her hair back in a bun so tight, it gave me a headache. Hairs rose all over my body in response. I didn’t realize I was smiling until Ellen, Irene’s assistant, came up to my half door with a requisition in her hand.

  “Oh ho! Kama’s got a crush on somebody.” She poked my elbow.

  I made a what? scowl.

  Ellen smiled at me. “Be gentle with her. She’s new.”

  Terrific. Now the whole office would hear I was after her.

  “It’s not nice to gossip about your coworkers,” I said.

  Ellen dropped her jaw at me and gave me a huge, mocking, incredulous, bug-eyed stare.

  I didn’t want anyone to know I was after Rathi. It was too risky. I’d screwed up before. I didn’t need help.

  “She’s not from America,” I pleaded. “Things are different over there. It would freak her out if she—”

  “If she knew you’ve boinked every assistant in the firm?” Ellen said.

  Now my jaw dropped. “I thought you didn’t—”

  “You thought I didn’t know? Or you thought I didn’t care?” Ellen seemed calm, but she folded her arms, and I didn’t like the glint in her eye.

  “Didn’t care, I guess,” I said weakly.

  “I don’t. You were fun. It’s over. You’ve been discreet.”

  “Well, I’ve been discreet,” I said with reproach.

  She lowered her voice. “Kama, you cannot shake that cute little butt all over the office and date every new girl in her first week without people noticing.”

  “And talking, apparently,” I grumbled. Although I noticed she had referred to my boinking the assistants. No mention of the associates or partners. I supposed the lawyers were more closed-mouthed. “What’s the point of me being discreet if you ladies aren’t?”

  Ellen just shook her head at me.

  “So we’re cool?” I raised my eyebrows and gave her the dimples. “You won’t tell Rathi…anything?”

  Ellen smiled, but her head was still shaking. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

  “Absolutely.” But I wasn’t listening. I was tuned in to the sound of Rathi’s heartbeat.

  She patted my arm. “Good luck, stud.” Apparently sensing that my attention had wandered, she rolled her eyes and walked away.

  I could feel Rathi’s heart beating anywhere in the building. I knew when she stepped onto the elevator at lunchtime. The clean-skin perfume of her fingers still rang in my head from yesterday.

  She had meetings scheduled way into the evening, I’d learned from Ellen.

  This was where I started scoring points.

  At one thirty I popped down to the coffee shop in the lobby and bought chai exactly the way Rathi had ordered it at the rotunda.

  I was turning with it in my hand when I found her behind me in line.

  Her eyes caught mine.

  I forgot to be smooth. “For you,” I blurted, and handed her the cup.

  And suddenly I saw a woman I really did recognize, standing right behind Rathi. Big girl. Pile of unruly black hair. Earnest brown eyes. Massive cleavage. She looked stunned to see me, and her mouth opened as if she was about to speak.

  I fled.

  I stared after Kama. I was still holding the cup he’d given me. I sniffed it. Chai the way I like it. I smiled.

  “Do you know that guy?” said a voice behind me. I turned, bemused, to see a familiar face behind me in the queue. My memory for faces is good. This was the author of the web site about my so-charming mail-room boy.

  Charm boy hadn’t seemed happy to see her.

  “No, who is he?” I said, feeling I owed Kama something for the chai. My female parts were warming up now, too. How shameful!

  Yet I smiled.

  She was gazing after him with saucer-sized eyes. “I thought I knew him.” Had I any doubts, her yearning tone laid them to rest.

  “Don’t I know you?” I said. “Are—aren’t you the founder of the American Kamadeva cult?”

  She turned to me with surprise. “You’ve heard of me?”

  I gave a one-shoulder shrug and played the immigrant card. “I was born in India.”

  Her mouth made an O. “You’ve heard of me in India? Wow!”

  “I’m Ra—Ms. Singh from Bentwater Coralaine.” I gestured upward with my cup. “Law firm. You must be Lotus Bride.”

  “Call me Lolly.” We shook hands. “My name’s Laura really.”

  I checked the big clock over the security desk. “Do you have five minutes? I was fascinated by your web site.”

  We talked for more than twenty minutes. She was an earnest girl
, not yet thirty, educated, and a sound thinker about women’s rights. Her obsession with Kama—or his mythical counterpart—seemed wildly at odds with her feminism.

  I tried to reason with her. “But don’t you see, sex is the least part of it. If you can put sex into perspective, you are no longer subject to the threat of unplanned pregnancy, the burdens of childbearing and childrearing—”

  “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” she interrupted.

  I paused, speechless.

  “Nothing personal,” she said wisely. “I’m sure you’ll get around to it.”

  I felt myself blushing. “My career is very important to me.”

  “Sure.” She squinted at my gray suit. “But I think maybe you need some horizontal liberating, know what I mean?”

  I laughed and admitted that sex had a place in a woman’s life. Theoretically. As long as she didn’t enslave herself to some man over it.

  “Well, right.” Before my eyes, Lolly became Lotus Bride. The big, cheap costume gems in her earlobes and on her fingers flashed in the late afternoon sunlight as it fell through the lobby windows. The priestess of the love god leaned forward earnestly. “You hafta know what you want and just take it. Including good sex.” She nodded. “That’s something I learned from Kamadeva.”

  I felt my ears pricking up and blushed more warmly. “What precisely did you learn?”

  “He made me see I could have great sex whenever I wanted it. I had been feeling fat and ugly and he came along and he—he just showed me. Afterward, he told me who he was. How he had to keep having sex with all these women because he’s looking for his long-lost wife. He says the only way he’ll know her is with a kiss.”

  “So he has to have sex with everyone?” I said drily.

  “Well, you can’t just kiss somebody and walk away,” Lolly said in a reasonable tone. “Besides, he has a mission to rescue American women from their puritanical body-prisons and release their kundalini.”

  It occurred to me that Indian girls with absolutely no Puritans in their background whatsoever might also find themselves imprisoned in their bodies. Chastity was still a number one virtue for us.

  Lolly certainly seemed sexually liberated.

  Maybe we could advise one another.

  Thinking of Kama and his boyish muscles and his young-old eyes and the warmth of his lips on my finger, I went hot all over.

  A crowd of people exited the elevators across the lobby. I remembered I had a long afternoon ahead of me. “I’d like to talk to you again,” I said.

  She smiled at me, a happy, unaffected young woman. Something like envy touched me. “Sure. Here’s my card,” she said.

  I handed her mine. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  Back in the office, I was tempted to quiz Kama about his relationship with his “high priestess.” The look of horror on his face when he saw her! I chuckled. The boy fancied himself a player, but when he was confronted by a past one-night stand and some new woman he was trying to impress at the same time, his nerve couldn’t handle it. Frankly it made me like him better than if he had tried to talk his way out of the situation.

  Not that I would admit that to him.

  Irene Bentwater had invited me to go with her to judge’s chambers that afternoon to witness the settlement of one of the firm’s biggest ongoing cases. This was a huge privilege. I made sure she knew I was grateful. The partners and associates who had worked on the case for the past four years would be there. If they were inviting me, too, it was to show my face to the judge and opposing counsel, to make me known around town, to associate me with their triumph…and to show off their success to me.

  “This is an honor for me,” I told her. “My only concern is that some documents are coming later this afternoon for the eight p.m. client meeting in the Sandsreicht case, and I have not read them.”

  Irene made a face. “I see. Well, if they come in, you’ll have to leave. Put your phone on stun, so Kama can text you when they arrive.”

  “Give Kama my cell number?”

  “He’s our in-house messenger service. Don’t worry,” she said, smiling wryly. “He won’t misuse your number.”

  My doubts must have showed in my face.

  She just patted my hand and sent me on my way.

  Accordingly, I gave my cell number to Kama, who gave me his in return. “If you get a text while you’re in chambers, you’ll want to know who’s sending it to you, right?” he said.

  I conceded that this would be advisable and took the number. Then I hustled after Irene. The longer I stood near Kama, the warmer I felt.

  The team met in Judge Green’s chambers to haggle over the settlement of a sexual harassment suit. The client-plaintiff didn’t have to be present, as is often the case with harassment suits, it being felt that she had suffered more than enough contact with the defendant already. I had looked forward to watching the defendant and his employer squirm and whimper and poor mouth their way through the meeting, which they did.

  But I squirmed even more.

  The comfortable, leather-upholstered chairs in the judge’s private conference room were too soft, too sweat-inducing. The air-conditioning seemed to have quit. Judge Green was approximately a hundred and thirty years old and dried to a skeleton, so maybe that was why she kept her chambers at tropical temperatures.

  At first I was glad I’d worn a skirt, since pantyhose are cooler than slacks. But as the leather seat under me got hotter and hotter, I began to wonder if my period had come three weeks early.

  Counsel for the plaintiff, Davis Corolaine, my next-most-senior partner, ran through the charges and the evidence. He was just getting to the juicy parts—the range of compensation for which our client would settle—when he shot me a dirty look and I realized I had been shifting in my chair every ten seconds or so.

  I took a long deep breath through my nose and sat still.

  Ten seconds later, I folded my left leg under me, trying to get air between my left thigh and the leather.

  Fifteen seconds later, I shifted to my right leg.

  Davis glared at me again.

  I sat still and tried to focus on the settlement terms.

  Instead my mind wandered. I fancied that the invisible water tank from last night’s dream had grown huge, the size of an invading spaceship, blotting out the sky, and as I watched it, I felt rather than saw the first split in the tank, felt the first drops falling on my skin, like blessed monsoon rains breaking the drought.

  What woke me was Judge Green’s sharp interrogative tone. I felt a sharp, terrible pain in the neighborhood of my underpants and smelled something burning.

  I leaped to my feet.

  Everyone looked at me. I stared wildly at them, appalled at how far my attention had strayed. My bottom felt scorching hot. I snatched my phone out of my briefcase and looked at it.

  “I beg your pardon. Excuse me,” I blurted and ran from the room.

  Judge Green’s clerk was at his desk. He gave me the restroom key attached to a two-foot-long plastic stick and directed me down the hall. The smell of something burning got worse, along with the pain under my skirt.

  I thought I smelled smoke.

  I raced to the restroom, slammed into the handicap stall, and thrust my skirt, underpants, and pantyhose down around my ankles in one swift, undignified, struggling movement.

  To my amazement, the underpants were charred and smoking…right at the point where I felt hottest.

  The plastic of my pantyhose was actually fused, sticking to the charred undies.

  And my crotch was still heating up.

  By now tears ran down my face, tears of horror, embarrassment, and pain. There was no one in the restroom with me. I shuffled out of the handicap stall to the sink, wet a paper towel, and applied it to my burning female parts.

  The wet paper towel hissed on contact.

  Grimly I shuffled to the restroom door and threw the bolt. Then, whimpering like a hurt puppy, I waddled back to the sink, filled th
e sink with cold water, hoisted myself up onto the counter, and lowered my scorching rear end into the water.

  Steam billowed up between my legs and also behind me, fogging the mirror, curling my carefully straightened hair into tiny woolly kinks, beading my face with moisture that made the tears spread over my cheeks and drip, diluted with steam, off my chin onto my suit jacket and my hot, bare thighs.

  I cried there for ten minutes, occasionally running more cold water straight over my burning flesh. At the end of ten minutes my female parts were still hot and moist, but they weren’t sizzling any more.

  I stared down stupidly at the burnt panties and pantyhose around my ankles.

  Then I became aware of a subdued buzzing sound.

  My skirt was still on the floor in the handicap stall. I hauled myself out of the sink and shuffled across the now-sopping-wet tile to pull my cell phone out of my skirt pocket.

  Text from Kamadeva. Sandsreicht documents arrived. What shall I do with them?

  Up until this moment I had been unable to think, too busy hurting, panicking, and marveling at the impossible thing that had just happened. Now I remembered that I had just run out on an important meeting in the middle of what was destined to be a very long evening of business.

  I was half-naked. I’d ruined my clothes. I was two miles away from my apartment.

  The rooms outside this one were full of opposing counsel and both my senior partners and a singularly humorless judge.

  I had cried my makeup off.

  My hair looked like a giant black Brillo pad.

  I punched Reply into my phone and then, thinking better of leaving a record, pressed Call instead of Text.

  Kamadeva answered. “Yes?”

  I had no difficulty making my voice grim and no-nonsense.

  “Listen carefully. I want you to go down the block to Marshall Field’s. Go to the fourth floor. Buy me a pair of Evan Picone plain black wool pleated-front gabardine slacks, no belt loops, women’s size eight. Get a clerk to help you. Bring them to Judge Green’s chambers. I’m in the restroom down the hall. Do you understand?”

  “Hold on.” Agonizing silence followed. Then he said, “Was that pleated or non-pleated?”