is the exact opposite of me.”
“Wow.”
She put a hand on her hip in defensive indignation. “Wow, what?”
“Wow, those look nothing like monkey bars.”
“I agree,” the lady to the left remarked, batting her eyelashes at Khristos in that coy way females did when they wanted to catch a man’s attention.
Oh, because Mother Earth here knew the first thing about painting monkey bars accurately, in all her flowy robes and open-toed sandals in the height of a thirty-degree spell of cold weather?
But Quinn put on a smile anyway, only due to the fact that she shouldn’t care if the woman was trying to catch Khristos’s attention. He was free for the catching. She turned to address her.
Then the woman looked at her hard. “Has anyone ever told you maybe you went a little overboard with the colored contacts? They’re not realistic at all.”
Has anyone told you I could match you with an orangutan? “They looked different online,” Quinn muttered.
“Also, whatever you’re putting on your skin to make it glow like that? Can’t be good for it. I’m a dermatologist, in case you doubt.”
Quinn clenched her teeth. “Got a little carried away with the lotion. It’ll wash off.”
The woman glanced Khristos’s way again and gave him a dreamy smile. “Do they get any hotter than that? Is he your boyfriend?”
Khristos shook his head and gave her one of his perfect, toe-tingling smiles. “Nuh-uh. I’m gay.”
The woman’s shoulders slumped. “Of course.”
Quinn was determined to keep it cheerful while she waited on her matchmaking sign. “What are you painting?”
“This idiot’s demise.” She pointed to a man to her immediate left, just two seats down from them, who was neatly dressed in a plaid collared shirt with a knit sweater over top.
Khristos cocked his head to the right as he scanned the woman’s painting. “But what a brilliant use of color. Who knew demise was so neon green?”
“Those are his brains, which I plan to dance in when this ridiculous blind date is done with.” She turned to the man and grinned.
The man, dressed in the absolute antithesis of everything earthy and green, whipped his neon-blue, paint-covered finger in the air. “Not if I get there first.”
Quinn blanched, feeling an odd solidarity with this woman and her failed date. “So, I take it, it’s not going well?”
The woman, maybe forty-five or so, rolled her quite lovely hazel eyes almost to the back of her head. “Are you kidding me? I put out fifty bucks apiece to get into this class and all he’s done is complain.”
The man, sandy-blond with the beginning touches of gray at his temples, arched an eyebrow straight upward. “I thought that was what we were supposed to do in this touchy-feely, overpriced hotbed of neuroses—express our discontent?”
“On the canvas, not with your open mouth, and you can leave at any time.”
The man balked. “And not finish my masterpiece of discontent? Don’t talk crazy like that. It’ll make me question my very reason for getting up this morning. Not on your life.”
The woman shook her long head of hair, hair that almost touched her waist. “I was so hopeful. My girlfriend said we’d be a perfect match, and who knows you better than your best friend? But we’re nothing alike. I’d have more in common with a breast implant salesman,” she whispered from behind the hand she’d cupped over her mouth.
Something inside Quinn clicked at that moment. A connection to this woman’s deeper sadness, one she didn’t always show to the outside world.
“Still in the same room with you! Have ears!” the man yelled out.
Quinn put a hand on the woman’s forearm and nodded. “I totally get it. I was in a relationship like that, too. But you know what? It’s better to know now rather than get in any deeper. Trust me when I tell you, one drastically cut-short trip to Greece where I thought I was going to end up engaged at the Parthenon and my entire life in complete chaos later, and I only wish I’d realized on our first date how wrong he was for me. Phew, was he wronger than wrong. Could’ve saved almost six thousand dollars if I’d just paid attention.”
Khristos nudged her with a light elbow to her still-smarting ribs. “Quinn…” He muttered what sounded like a warning under his breath.
She flapped an absent hand at him. “Hush. Girl time. Bonding over stupid man choices. Go paint some more discontent.” She turned back toward the woman, giving her back to Khristos. “Anyway, I understand and I