Complete Nothing (True Love #2)(11)

“A long shot. I know.” I swallowed hard, feeling like a tool. What kind of moron couldn’t even get into his own state school?

“Peter, listen, I understand what you’re trying to do, but you can’t decide your future based on where Claudia’s going,” my mother said, adding a wing and then a thigh to the oil. “We love Claudia as much as you do, but it’s a high school relationship.”

The onion ring turned to rock on its way to my gut. “Mom, don’t.”

“I’m just saying! You don’t see her trying to make her plans around you.”

I stared at the floor. The swirly pattern on the tile blurred in front of me. Never had I felt the way I felt right then. It was like my mom had taken out a bat and swung right at my chest as hard as she could. My own mother.

“Oh, hon. I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, reaching for me.

I slipped away from her. “No. It’s fine,” I said, my jaw clenched. “You’re right. You don’t see her trying to plan around me.”

I snatched my backpack off the floor and barreled up the stairs. “Call me when dinner’s ready.”

I had just walked into my room when my phone beeped with a text. It was from Claudia.

I CAN STILL COME OVER AFTER BALLET TO HELP U W/GENERAL APP! LET ME KNOW!

My fingers tightened around the phone, and I slammed the door. I swear, it was like between her and my mom, they were trying to get rid of me. I threw my bag and my phone onto my desk, then dropped onto my unmade bed, trying to breathe through the pressure. Once my heart rate calmed down, I rolled over and looked at the framed picture of me and Claudia on my nightstand. We’d taken it at the shore over the summer on what had pretty much been the best day of my life. We’d driven down at the crack of dawn and spent the entire day making out on a beach towel, running into the waves, eating greasy food, and napping under her umbrella. We both looked so tan and chill and happy. Like two people who’d never even thought about taking anything seriously. Back then, college hardly ever came up. It was just this sort of nebulous thing far off in the future. Now it was the only thing everyone talked about. Every day. Nonstop. Next year, next year, next year.

I just wanted to be that guy at the beach. The guy with no worries.

I’d almost told her I loved her that day, on the boardwalk, as the sun went down, but I’d chickened out. No. Not chickened out. Decided to keep it to myself. To not let things get too serious. To keep having fun. And it had worked out. We did have fun. For the rest of the summer. Until school started again and then, suddenly, everything was serious.

I grabbed the frame, hugged it to my chest, and stared at the ceiling. Maybe I didn’t want to go to college. Did they ever think about that? Maybe I just wanted everything to stay the way it was.





CHAPTER FIVE


True


“Orion is here?”

My mother, the gorgeous and indomitable Aphrodite, stood at the open refrigerator with a bottle of Perrier poised an inch below her perfectly outlined, colored, and glossed lips. Her crisp white shirt was tucked into her form-fitting, black pencil skirt, her shimmering blond hair just grazing her chin. Her name tag from Perfumania, where she spritzed customers at the door, was still pinned to her left breast pocket, her name spelled out in gold script.

Unlike me and Hephaestus, my mother had refused to take on a more modern name when she had been relegated to human status. Just one of the many ways her stubborn nature had shown through since we’d been banished to Earth.

“Yep,” Hephaestus said, looking across the wide kitchen floor at me as if he thought I might suddenly collapse against it in tears.

“Not only is he here, he was in most of my classes,” I groused. If Zeus had sent Orion here to torture me, he’d done a thorough job.

“Why would Zeus send him here? What purpose does it serve?” She let the stainless-steel refrigerator door close with a bang.

“We were hoping you might have a theory,” I replied, leaning back against the counter, feeling defeated, since it was fairly clear she hadn’t a clue.

“And he doesn’t remember you? He has no idea who either of you are?” she asked, placing the bottle on the counter.

“Not a one,” I replied.

“But that is entirely un—”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence, because we were suddenly blasted by an explosion of otherworldly wind. The lights in the room flickered, the fridge released an avalanche of ice cubes onto the floor with a harsh growl, and the coffeepot exploded, ricocheting shards of glass across the room. My mother was still screaming when I opened my eyes and saw my father standing not two feet away.

“Ares?” I gasped. “What are you doing here?”

“You couldn’t have whirled into the backyard?” my mother complained, tugging a square of jagged glass from her hair.

“And risk the neighbors seeing?” he shot back. “Don’t test me, woman. I don’t have much time.”

“Don’t call me woman, man,” she replied, eyeing him up and down with disdain. But then her gaze softened. She gripped the refrigerator’s door handle, and an almost imperceptible blush appeared at the very crest of her cheeks.

My father looked different. Clean. As if he’d just bathed seconds before gracing us with his presence. Usually the God of War appeared sweaty and creased and stained from the field of battle, but as he stood in the center of our modern kitchen, his tan skin was so scrubbed it glowed. He wore the camouflage cargo pants often favored by today’s warriors, and a green T-shirt, the sleeves of which were pulled taught by his massive arm muscles. His brown hair was wet and combed forward over his forehead in a way that altered his features from their usual squared-off growl.