Psy saw through Eros without trying, and Eros never had a chance to use his flirtation techniques on her because she had an energy field surrounding her that reacted with him in a manner that destroyed any pretence. Any smoothness that Eros thought he had became clumsy around her. He bumbled, incapable of saying anything but the bald truth, and the truth always came out cheesy, but he leant into the cheesiness, because it made her laugh. He liked her laugh. It pierced his skin and lit him up from within. Eros knew that Psy enjoyed his company, but part of him felt as if it was anthropological. She was ambitious, driven, and strong enough to withstand Venus’s petty tests of endurance. There was no way she would genuinely see Eros as a viable option. Eros was a connecter, the Mr Right Now you went through before you met Mr Right. He was the guy for fun anecdotes; soft memories with no hard feelings. Girls were never upset that whatever they had with him didn’t last because they never believed he was capable of anything more than transient romance. His friendship with Psy, however, made him feel like he had been running on 30 per cent. That he had untapped reserves. That there was more.
That night, sat on a blanket, up on the roof of their building, before they kissed, with his tongue loosened by wine and the stars blurring through tears of laughter, Eros had told Psy that she was the best person he’d ever met. He’d told her that he was glad they never hooked up because the thought of her never speaking to him again scared the shit out of him.
Psy had held very, very still and looked at him curiously for a few seconds, eyes narrowed and so sharp and scintillating they provided fierce rivalry to the stars that were surely watching them agape. As if in a kind of bodily self-protection response to the intense awkwardness he was unused to, Eros had suddenly felt like he had stepped outside of his body and was watching the scene like a spectral spectator. His body somehow knew that, if his soul remained fully inside of his body, he would have combusted from the sheer mortification; and so, it expelled it. An incorporeal version of Eros watched the scene from above as some idiot whose shirt was unbuttoned too low waited for the only girl he had ever truly cared about to try to figure out the best way to let him down easy.
The gentle night breeze had provided the only movement that night for a few moments as Psy stared at him, before the sharpness in her eyes melted into something softer.
‘Is that the only reason you’re glad we never hooked up?’ she had asked, lowering a plastic cup full of warm rosé from her lips, black and pink, molasses and berry. The atmosphere between them tightened and drew Eros’s soul back into his body, just so it could be close to her.
Eros had responded, ‘That’s the only reason.’
Psy had simply nodded, put her plastic cup down and said, ‘I’m never gonna get tired of you, E. So there. Now you have no reason not to kiss me.’
Eros had skipped to work the next morning and found that the dirty pigeons were cooing a Stevie Wonder song. The inner-city air smelt like an orchard instead of a construction site Portaloo with base notes of deli meat. Life was, by all accounts, good. The night before, he and Psy had kissed. It had been languid but fervent, tipsy but not drunken; it made him feel tethered, but it also gave him wings. He soared with the knowledge that Psy wanted him back. Usually, when his attention was drawn to someone, he found that he already had theirs, that the ‘yes’ had already been released before the question was posed.
With Psy, however, it was different. She was different.
The kiss was still looping through his mind as he entered Venus’s office, having been summoned for a meeting. Psy wasn’t in yet, he knew that; she’d sent a text earlier informing him that Venus had sent her on an intricate errand across the city that would take half a day. He couldn’t wait to see her, to cement the new iteration of their relationship and, maybe, if she wanted to, sneak into an accessories closet and talk about it, and – if she wanted – make out about it.
‘What’s up, sis?’ Eros plopped into the seat opposite her desk happily, and Venus rolled her sharply lined eyes.
‘Sis? What are we, in a cable kid’s network sitcom? I really think that you formed some kind of brain problem the day that I accidently dropped you down the stairs as a kid, which has made you, like, idiotically chirpy all the time.’ Venus’s voice was flat, cool and unemotive.
Eros smiled. ‘Why, thank you for telling me that my being a non-monstrous human being is a result of possible sibling abuse. What did you want to see me about?’
‘I need you to take down that throwback picture you posted of us on Instagram from when we were teenagers – the one with my original nose.’ Venus’s naturally thick curls were flattened into a seamless curtain that slinked around her angular, flawless face like a waterfall, and she flicked it off her shoulder.