Cupid stood in the darkest shadows of the candle-lit room, not that the couple enjoying an Italian dinner in front of him, Shelly and Mark, would be able to see him anyway. He was Cupid, almost always invisible to human eyes, an angel of heaven and the prince of love. Throughout each year, decade, millennium, he kept busy matchmaking and inspiring romance between humans all the world over. One day, he would be patching up a crumbling Graceland marriage, the next he would be conjuring change into the hand of a homeless girl so she could buy her first crush some ice cream.
Now, in front of Shelly and Mark, he knew that he was doing good in the world. Mark would propose to Shelly, and they would both be delighted when she said yes and threw her arms around him over the solid dining room table, breaking a wine glass with abandon in the process. It was a perfect manifestation of the American dream. But something was missing from his love creation. He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but as he furrowed his white-blond eyebrows on the scene, he realized that he was downright bored.
His head nodded as he thought this over, but he was jarred out of his musings by a sharp snapping noise. His green eyes swiveled up to inspect the romantic scene in front of him. Everything was just as it had been, slow conversation between the smiling dark-haired couple, giggles protruding here and there.
Then he started as his eye caught sight of someone standing across the room. But it couldn't be... it was. It was Sadie. That damned girl he had fallen in love with, in horrible lust with. The girl from the other side, from below, from...
"Hell, Cupid, you've become so damned predictable," she shouted across the room. Shelly and Mark did not hear her. "I hope you can think of something fun and new to do for Valentine's Day. It's your big day, after all."
She turned her attention away from him and squinted her eyes at the couple. It made her look cat-like and almost sinister. She was plotting something, Cupid could tell. Her dark red bob haircut almost seemed to sizzle with electricity around her ears. The flower and snake tattoos on her shoulders and bosom stood out electrically on her smooth skin, as if she had gotten them a week ago. Cupid knew the tattoos were much older than a that, and that she was much older than she looked. He knew that no earthly woman had such a graceful, muscular body, a body fleshy in all of those voluptuous places, at age 826. He looked down at his own body. Slouching beneath a jeans ten years out of fashion and a pilled sweater, holes cut out for his wings, he was disgusted with himself.
"I've been really slacking these past 50 years," he muttered to himself. "I've been depressed. But it's all her fault." At this, he looked up again to search for Sadie's figure. But what he saw instead shocked him. Mark had Shelly pinned against the edge of the dining room table, belly down, her dress pulled up, binding her arms above her head and covering her face. Mark's cock sat awkwardly at the entrance of her asshole.
Mark was whispering in Shelly's ear. Cupid made out the question: " Do you want my cock? Do you want it hard in the ass?" Mark whispered it with intensity. Shelly's covered head nodded enthusiastically. He leaned across the table for a bottle of lube that had somehow materialized within the last five minutes and massaged some over his now unrestrained boner. He took a dab and, using his finger, worked it into Shelly's asshole without hesitation. Cupid could see Shelly's puckered hole squeezing and twitching in response to his thick, callused finger. The small-time romance writer had never been fucked in the ass before, not with so much as the pencil she took story notes with. And while Cupid knew that she fantasized about it, he knew that Mark had never considered anal before in his life - he was always content with a socially acceptable, fast frontal fuck.
Yet, here they were, in the middle of dinner, doing the anal deed... well, almost. Mark had finally pressed his lubed cock head in her ass, the bulb of it bulging her open, after a few moments of inexperienced slipping. But she was so tight that she cried out in pain and he had to pull out almost immediately. He leaned his face over to Shelly's head again, speaking in soothing whispers, and Cupid snapped out of the room.
Still cursing Sadie's work, he rematerialized as gently as he could in the Brooklyn bedroom of one member of a teenaged trio he had been working his magic on. He had expected them to be talking out their issues as he had influenced to do an hour ago. When he left, the hip heartthrob young man whose room it was listened and nodded as a svelte and studious 19-year-old woman explained to a third youth, a square-faced, neighborly looking kid, that she couldn't hook up with him any more because Heartthrob-in-Frye-boots was her true soul mate.
Instead, the room was a mess of teenage fornication. Clothes were strewn among naked LPs, empty condom wrappers, and a forgotten tray of store-bought sushi. Lady Gaga thumped from the subwoofer, and the reek of spilled coffee vied for attention over Nag Champa incense and smell of cunt and sweat.
Still clad in his Frye boots, Heartthrob gave it to Squareface in the ass with a condomed penis while Squareface jerked his tongue into Studious's ungroomed slot. Studious didn't look so interested in studying right now, her glasses askew and her fingers pulling rather recklessly on Squareface's protruding nipples and her own swollen hairy labia.
Cupid was incensed, and could feel his face reddening. He let out an uncontrolled roar of anger, and the three teens momentarily stopped their revelry and looked around, seeing nothing unusual. Cupid clamped his mouth shut, clenched his fists, and set off in a sudden snap to find Sadie.
He had to fly above clouds for more than two hours, peering down at earth every 20 miles, hoping - and afraid - he would find Sadie, before he caught sight of her through a heavy bank of fog stolidly placed over Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He darted down to earth, procrastinating as he drifted through the cooling fog instead of appearing directly next to her. She was sitting on the edge of a crumbling sandy wall protecting a dugout horseshoe pit. Drug needles had long since replaced horseshoes as the only game going in that dugout, and the place was not often stumbled upon by tourists. Except for Cupid and Sadie, it was empty.
"What the hell are doing?" he shouted as best he could. His didn't like that his voice sounded thin and weak in his ears. She'd know he was nervous seeing her again. "You're screwing everything up!"
"Screwing things up? Ha!" she scoffed. She took a long swig out of a copper flask. "You're the one who's barely getting your job done, and someone needs to help along love in this world." More quietly, she added, "And you look like shit. You don't even bother to carry your bow and arrow anymore, and your hair is disgustingly greasy."
Now Cupid was getting fired up again, remembering why they had broken up in the first place. "You're such a hypercritical, hypocritical hussy-cunt," he said, proud that he didn't stumble over this tongue-twister. Still, he ran his hand through his neglected, grown-out hair. Combined with his three-day beard and rumpled shirt, it made him look like a bleached-out California beach bum.
"You know what? I'm not going to stop creating lustful passion until you start to do your job a little better. I'm sick of your depression shit. Everyone's talking about it. They think it's because of our breakup, and it's embarrassing me. You'd better put on a good Valentine's Day show or my love solutions are going to get raunchier than a virgin nun's pussy."
"What the hell? Hussy-cunt!" Cupid repeated stupidly again. "I- I'm not changing anything I do. You're disgusting and unethical. The whole two centuries we were fucking, I was disgusted, but I felt responsible for you because I thought you were in love with me. You made me tie you up with straps and fuck your between your restrained legs, you made me bend over so you could fuck me with your conjured cock, you made me hold my penis inside you for hours without moving while you slept. And conjuring her...."
"I didn't make you do anything," she rolled her eyes. And she was right. Half of their perverted sex acts had been his idea. He had never felt so uninhibited as he was with her.
She took another swig from the flask, her dainty uplifted chin revealing a lonely, unplucked chin hair, her nipples almost falling out of her black leather vest. "Fugyou, get out of here," she waved her hand at him, then tried to stare him down.
But he had heard the slur in her voice. To sound like that, she must have had at more than one flask of whisky already. So, she was depressed about their breakup too. He pushed up off the ground, containing his smirk until he burst up through the fog and into the sun once again, out of her sight.
-------------------------------------
For the next few days, he carried out his duties as best he could. He didn't want to think about everyone in the ethereal world talking about his depression, and besides, it was almost Valentine's Day, and he was usually thrown a party in heaven complete with an angel food cake topped with whipped cream and cherries. He was certain to get laid after the party by some pretty angel or goddess, and he'd be able to forget about everything.
He influenced wildflower bouquets and handmade chocolates, sweet nothings whispered from pimps to whores, canoes that overturned at edges of tiny grassy islands, long glances over Dance Dance Revolution competitions. He even let humans catch a glimpse of him in his freshly laundered traditional linen toga, carrying the golden bow and arrows that had been sitting in his dusty garage for half a century.
It was the week before Valentine's Day that he felt he should make a short appearance at a sci-fi convention in Las Vegas. There were plenty of, well, sci-fi dorks that needed some love their lives. Of course, most of them weren't romantically inept just because they liked to read about robots, time travel and dystopia, but some of them were painfully shy.
He arrived at the conference on its second day, Friday, February 12. He appeared with a snap into the men's bathroom - he saw no reason to pay admission - and strolled into the main lobby dressed in a Zeus costume, trident and loincloth golder than gold, whiter than white. A young boy came up to him and unhurriedly examined Cupid's outfit and shining, muscular physique, pale and wonderfully Greek, though not exactly Zeus-like.
"Actually," commented his observer, "this is a sci-fi con, not a fantasy con." The boy shook his head and walked away.
Cupid pursed his lips and made his way across the lobby to a room where a presentation, "Predictions of Science Fiction: Do They Dictate the Future?" would be held in 15 minutes. He passed a door to his left, and stopped suddenly - something interesting was happening in there, he could sense it. And it involved someone he knew. He used his angelic abilities to see though the door, and what he saw unfolding at first unsettled him, then tantalized him and finally, when he realized the identities of those involved, shocked him into a flood of emotion and confusion. For it was her, she was the one behind the closed door, giving head on her knees to a lowly hotel bellhop.
For all the raging emotion inside him, Cupid couldn't move a muscle. He watched helplessly as his love of so long ago, object of his lust and affection long before Sadie was in the picture, was degraded in the face over and over by this despicable, acne-faced hotel servant who'd probably never even made a woman come before. His red-bulbed staff jerked in and out, in and out of her mouth, yet she still looked beautiful, dignified, a slight smile around her closed eyes - hazel, he did not forget their color - and her hands grasping the backs of Bellhop's still-clothed knees.
