Accidentally Aphrodite - Dakota Cassidy Page 0,36
“How do you know what Igor is or isn’t like?”
“Because I do my homework, and you became my homework when you bit the apple. I needed to understand your state of mind, and how it came to be, in order to understand how to proceed. Being as you’re freshly broken up, it sometimes creates havoc with oversensitivity. No slight to you, it’s just how the heart and mind work.”
Her cheeks grew hot at the memory of all she’d confessed to that stupid apple. “He came into the bookstore where I work a lot.” Like every day for two solid weeks, watching her, flirting with her, asking for suggestions about books she liked.
“And?”
And she thought her daydreaming days had ended when she’d found Igor. He read Shelley and Keats to her while he peered at her over horn-rimmed glasses and she rested her feet in his lap, sipping Bordeaux.
They’d watched Wuthering Heights and Gone With the Wind together on Saturday nights, rebuffing loud nightclubs and crowded restaurants for crackers with Brie and strawberries dipped in chocolate while the strains of Chopin or Beethoven could be heard from her CD player.
They drank wine and talked classic literature while Rachmaninoff and Paganini dusted her cloud of love with the magical arrows of Cupid.
She rolled her shoulders. “And I dunno. He was smart and funny and well versed in all sorts of things I’m interested in, I guess.”
“So you had a lot in common?”
Had they? Looking back now, she wasn’t sure if he’d just pretended to have a lot in common with her because he wanted in her drawers. If Shawna was who he’d turned to, a woman she had absolutely nothing in common with aside from gender, how much did Igor really enjoy Wuthering Heights and listening to Paganini?
“I thought we did. Maybe in hindsight we didn’t.” This was uncomfortable and embarrassing, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t know the whole story anyway.
Khristos nodded, sipping his milkshake. “Nope. You didn’t. But he let you believe you did and you went along for the ride.”
Anger spiked along her spine at being exposed. “And you know this how?”
“Because Igor transforms himself every time some pretty woman catches his eye. You could have been into breeding scorpions and sword swallowing, and he’d have said he was, too. In the end, it all comes crashing down around his ears because he’s not really into sword swallowing. In fact, it bores him to tears. His reasons for beginning a relationship with you or anyone have little to do with anything other than the desire to have sex. At first, anyway. You saw the signs, you just chose to ignore them.”
“Scorpions have breeders?”
He rolled his eyes in that adorable way he did when she was pushing him over the edge of his patience. “Don’t avoid what’s unpleasant by deflecting. You know exactly what I mean. You didn’t feel Igor there,” he said, pointing to the area where her heart pounded erratically. “You felt him in your pretty head.”
Quinn snorted. “So you’re saying he pretended to like poetry readings and quiet nights by the fire because he wanted my smokin’-hot bod, and I let him because I wanted him to be someone he’s not? I think you can clearly see there’s nothing smokin’ about me unless you count my new melons, which I hope you’re going to talk to someone about deflating. Like, soon? Please? Bras cost the earth for a double-D.”
Khristos grabbed her fingers, forcing Quinn to look at him, leaving her uncomfortable with the depth of his gaze. “Don’t underestimate your feminine wiles, Quinn. You have plenty of those. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is, Igor doesn’t know what he wants specifically—what he does know is he just doesn’t want to be alone.”
She cocked her head and paused. What Khristos said washed over her in waves of truth. It explained why she spent so much time convincing herself Igor loved her, even though he’d declared as such. She’d never felt terribly secure when he assured her he felt the same way. Maybe because his words had never really rung true?
Ow.
That hurt—to be duped, to be used. “So he spent all that time with me, pretending to be something he wasn’t, just to avoid being alone. Perfect. I love the idea that I was a some kind of placeholder for Shawna.”
“You weren’t a placeholder for her, per se. Shawna could have been anyone, Quinn. She could have been your next door neighbor.”
“I bet