Dpov

It didn't occur to me that I might be on something dangerously close to a date with Lorelei, until we'd already been seated and I noticed several people sending us not so very covert glances.

How the hell had that happened?

It wasn't like I wasn't used to getting looked at. Being so tall and spending a good amount of my time in the gym for sports or lifting heavy things in the shop, you got used to catching people off guard, but I wasn't sure if it was that, or the daughter of Aphrodite sitting across from me this time.

She was looking out the window, resting her chin on her hand, the sunlight from what was turning into a gorgeous day reflecting in her eyes.

Somehow, it looked as if she was both distracted, and waiting for me to take one of those staged 'candid' photos you always saw online.

I wanted to be annoyed by this, part of me wondering if this was intentional, then realized that this train of thought was entirely one sided and how stupid it was to be working myself up over someone simply looking out a window.

That was the weird thing about Lorelei, how almost entirely unreadable she was, and how easy it was to project almost anything on her because of it. Something I was sure that happened to her a lot.

I looked at her for a moment, wondering how many personalities had been assigned to her. Maybe someone's mean girl or maybe someone's dream girl, easy to hate because of how unfair it was that she looked the way she did, when so many people didn't. But just as easy to insert into whatever ideal you could think to put her in. It had me wondering how many of the people who looked at her, actually saw her as an actual person.

Neither of us had spoken since we'd slid into the booth, and, realizing that at this point, I'd just been staring at her, I tried to think of anything we might talk about.

It occurred to me that despite how much she seemed to be popping up lately into my life, I really didn't know all that much about her.

Someone needed to say something however, and I had a feeling if I didn't, the silence between us was going to start developing its own personality.

"So." I said feeling extremely awkward. "What do you… do?"

She took a moment before she turned, and focused her attention back at me, and I wondered how someone could from looking so genuinely upset just five minutes ago, to so… impassive.

It was like it hadn't even happened.

When I was annoyed, I had a tendency to stew. I couldn't just shut of my emotions out of nowhere like that, and once again, I found myself a little uneasy as I realized it looked like she had.

"What do I do?" she asked a hint of amusement, the corner of her mouth ticking up a little at the question.

"Yeah," I said shrugging, trying valiantly not to feel stupid and mostly succeeding. "Like, you know. In your free time? Hobbies. That sort of thing."

"You mean besides applying my eyeliner?" she asked raising an eyebrow, clearly guessing my train of thought that, despite my best efforts, went straight for the obvious.

"Yes, besides that."

Before she could answer, a cute girl with several glitter pens lining the pocket in her apron approached the table.

"Hey Dex." She said brightly, her smile faltering a little when she spotted Lorelei, before her eyes snapped back to me. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, and her light eyes were very determinedly focused on me.

"Hi Jenny." I said, aware and unnerved by Lorelei's expression going blank again as she considered the girl, and wondering if that's why Jenny looked a little nervous as well. "You guys got any of the nuclear sauce?" I asked, knowing my order would depend on her answer.

"Well, if you ask my manager we're out." She said scratching the back of her head awkwardly with one of her pens, before a guilty smile broke across her features. "But I might have set aside a bottle earlier this week when I noticed we were running low."

"Excellent." I said. "I'll have my usual then." I glanced at Lorelei who was glancing at the menu Jenny had just set in front of her. "You know what you want?"

"You can go ahead and put his order in." she said still looking over the options. "I'm still deciding."

"Alright." She said glancing at Lorelei hesitantly, giving me one final smile, then walking towards the server's station to enter the order.

Lorelei's eyes watched her from over the menu as she walked away, something calculated in them, and for one insane moment, I thought I saw something like jealousy, but the notion was quashed when she said.

"That girl is into you."

She'd said it like a fact, one she wasn't particularly interested in one way or another, except that it was relevant to her current surroundings.

"Who? Jenny?" I asked in surprise looking over my shoulder to see Jenny talking to one of the other servers, both glanced in our direction looking worried.

"She thinks I'm your girlfriend." Lorelei continued going back to her menu, as if what she was saying was no more engaging than a passing comment on the weather. "In case that messes up any sort of angle your working."

"What? No." I said shaking my head, though why I was so adamant about it I wasn't sure. Jenny was nice, and she was in my English class so I knew she was smart...

That didn't seem like something Lorelei needed to know though.

"I'm not working any sort of angle. Besides, how do you know?"

This earned an 'are you serious?' expression from Lorelei, but that was all she did before she went back to the specials section.

"Guess the answer to that's pretty obvious." I said quietly and she shrugged without looking at me, but I felt myself frown.

"I guess stuff like this happens to you all the time, doesn't it?"

"Stuff like what?"

"Just like, meeting someone and suddenly knowing way too much about their love life."

She seemed to consider this for a moment before putting her menu down and closing it.

"It depends." She said eventually, and I was a little surprised to realize just how interested I was in the answer.

I hadn't given much thought to the Aphrodite cabin and the powers of it's campers, at least no more than anyone else as far as I could tell. So it was novel to have one of them in front of me, seemingly open to answering questions I hadn't realized I had.

"I mean, maybe it's that way for some of my more powerful siblings, but it wasn't exactly like Jenny was trying to hide it." She gave me a meaningful expression as she continued with. "The girl's been trying to get you to ask her out for weeks."

I didn't know why, but I felt myself flush a little at this. Maybe just because at how obvious Lorelei was implying this had been, but also maybe because it still caught me by surprise whenever a girl, especially a good looking one like Jenny, might have considered me attractive.

Then again, Lorelei had told me she thought I was as well, and that had genuinely freaked me out. Maybe I was just hopeless.

Not knowing how to react to this, I seized on something she'd said in an attempt to move the conversation in a different direction.

"More powerful?" I asked raising an eyebrow in disbelief.

If looks were anything to go by, which I was pretty sure it was safe to assume that they were in her particular situation, she should have been running her cabin.

"Yeah." She said and I was surprised to hear, some bitterness in her tone.

"That doesn't include you?" I asked curiously and she grinned, but there was something sinister about it.

"I wouldn't expect you to understand it Dex. But I'm kinda on my mother's shit list at the moment."

"You?" I asked in surprise.

That was hard to believe. She was like the perfect daughter of Aphrodite, wasn't she?

"Don't act like you know the first thing about me and my siblings." She said shaking her head and I realized that despite actively trying to work it into the conversation, I still hadn't learned anything about her. Nothing concrete. Except that her mother might have been mad at her.

She seemed to be pretty good at turning the conversation away from whatever it was she clearly didn't want to discuss, so I decided to follow the only real lead I had on her.

"Well," I said frowning. "What did you do? To upset her I mean."

This time I saw it, the emotion that flashed behind her forced calm. It was pain and it was profound.

"Does it matter?" she asked looking away from me her voice uncharacteristically quiet.

"I guess not." I said with a shrug, but feeling my eyes narrowing at her all the same, unable to help wondering despite my words. "But you can't really expect us to be friends and for me to not to know anything about you."

"So your go to is my issues with my mother?"

"I asked about your hobbies." I pointed out. "You were the one who brought her into this."

She looked at me for a moment, appearing as if she wanted to argue, then was apparently stunned to realized I was right.

"Why can't you just stare at me and pretend I'm always right like everyone else?" she asked looking genuinely annoyed and I was surprised when it shocked a laugh out of me.

"Are you serious?" I asked and she crossed her arms over her chest.

"No." she admitted, but her tone was stubborn and she added. "Well, not entirely."

We didn't speak for a moment as Jenny set a massive burrito in front of me, a long with a soda and a bottle of hot sauce that had a mushroom cloud imposed onto the logo, and Lorelei took the chance to order a stack of pancakes and a milk shake.

"Well I'm sure we can find someone in here to suck up to you." I said after taking a bite of my food, glancing around the diner. "If you really need the validation."

"No one said anything about validation." She said irritably. "Have you considered that maybe I just don't like talking about myself? Most guys are fine with that. In fact, I'm pretty sure they prefer it."

"Sounds like you need to hang around different guys then." I said with distaste.

"Maybe." She said pensively, leaning forward on the table and resting her chin on her hand.

She hadn't slipped back into her freakishly composed persona, but she'd still managed to say nothing about herself and I wasn't sure if it was just plain curiosity, or some sort of Aphrodite charm she was working that made me so determined to figure out more about her, rather than annoyed at an interrogation process that seemed more painful than pulling teeth.

If she wasn't who she was, would I have cared this much?

Her pancakes arrived faster than I expected, and she asked how the graphics card was working for me. I wasn't sure if this was subtle reminder of the gift or a question asked out of genuine interest, but when I flooded the response with tech jargon, she seemed to follow it, or at least she pretended to.

"I'm glad it's working for you." she said taking a sip of her milkshake. "Also you can stop testing me. I know you're throwing in Xbox specs."

So she really had been paying attention…

"How do you know so much about frame rates?" I asked her suspiciously. "What does Jake talk about it or something?"

I knew Jake was big into video games from hearing him talking about it at camp. He and his brothers were always talking about what ever shooter was popular at the moment.

"Are you familiar with the concept of Occam's Razor?" she asked with a sigh, sounding a little exasperated at this point.

"Yeah." I said wondering where she was going with this. "The simplest solution is usually correct, right?"

"What's the simplest answer to your question? If you had to answer it yourself."

"What? That you play video games?" I asked with a laugh, then, when she didn't, I felt a surge of shock go through me.

She didn't respond, only looked at me and I wondered if, finally, I might have found something in common with her.

"What do you play?" I asked, but before she could respond, my phone rang.

I looked down only to be shocked to see that my break was almost over.

"What's up?" I asked when I saw it was Michael calling. "You guys need me back?"

"Nah." He said sounding amused. "Chet just stopped by. Said he had a couple of contractors coming by to deal with those broken shelves in the store room so we were closing early. I figured I'd let you know so you didn't feel you had to rush back from your date."

"It's not a date." I said annoyed.

"Whatever dude." He said in a tone that told me he clearly didn't believe me. "I'll see you at school."

"Bye." I muttered annoyed, but hanging up the phone without bothering to argue.

"Gotta go?" Lorelei asked, raising an eyebrow inquisitively as I put my phone back in my pocket.

"No, actually." I said a little surprised as the Michael's message sunk in. "They had to close early."

"Oh." She said sounding a little surprised.

A slightly awkward silence fell between us as we each realized neither of us wanted to approach the elephant in the room.

Now that I didn't have to go back to work, we were going to continue to hang out after this?

"You know." I said eventually as she took another sip of her milkshake. "There's a really cool arcade a few blocks from here. Has a bunch of retro videogames if you wanted to check it out? I usually stop there for an hour or two if I've got some free time after work. If that's something you'd be into."

I didn't know why, but I felt a little nervous, feeling as if I was saying about four times as many words as I normally would. Maybe it was because I was nervous she would make fun of the idea, ask me why I would think that was something she'd want to do, like Heather had when she'd visited me the first time after we'd started dating. But I tried to convince myself that it didn't matter what she thought, even if she did. Then again, maybe I was anxious about what would happen if she said yes.

The question had surprised her, that much was obvious but I couldn't tell what she was thinking as she contemplated the idea.

"Sure." She said with a shrug.

"Really?" I asked in disbelief.

"Why not?"

Just then, Jenny came by with the check, but when I reached for the bill, Lorelei had already grabbed it.

"You don't have to-" I started confused, but she'd already tucked a card into the folder and handed it back to Jenny.

"I know I don't have to." She said cutting me off. "But you helped me save my project so I want to."

I frowned for a moment, wanting to argue, but not finding a particularly good reason so I went with the truth.

"I'm not used to a girl paying for me."

"That's not my problem." She said apparently unconcerned and glancing at her phone.

I hesitated, wondering if I really wanted to argue against free food, especially when I had done her a favor before deciding to let it go. I could always even it out at some other point.

Jenny returned, looking a little dejected and wishing us a good rest of our day.

Before she could walk off, however, Lorelei smiled at her and complimented her makeup and I watched as Jenny's expression went from resentment, to distrust, then, incredulity. It ended with a beaming smile and a thank you, leaving me to think, like most people I knew that had interacted with her, Jenny now probably thought Lorelei was pretty cool, despite having clearly been feeling weird about her just five minutes ago.

It was fascinating to watch.

"How do you do that?" I asked her suspiciously as Jenny walked away, looking as if her week had been made by the compliment.

"Do what?"

"Make people like you?" I asked.

I didn't know a lot about people, but Jenny had not seemed thrilled about Lorelei from the second we sat down. Now, with a single compliment, she looked as if talking to Lorelei had her on cloud nine.

"Because the world is shallow Dex." She said with a shrug, putting her phone down and looking at me with a somewhat weary expression. "When you look like this, people want to like you."

I expected a smirk at this, or a playful laugh to make it clear she was, at least partially, joking. But she didn't. She just looked tired. Tired and a little unhappy.

"You're a bit conceited, you know that?" I asked her and she shrugged, again as she countered with.

"That doesn't make me wrong."

"Well, no." I admitted. "But don't you think that's a bit unfair?" I asked her frowning. "Using your powers to take advantage of mortals like that?"

"Oh don't be so patronizing, Dex." She said sounding a little annoyed this time. "It isn't as if Demigods don't fall for it too."

I was surprised at the emotion that went through me at this. Shock, but then also, a little pity as well. I wanted to be angry, remembering how Lorelei had tricked me into thinking she was helpless during the capture the flag game, and how comfortable she seemed with using her powers to get her way, but I just couldn't manage it. Not when admitting it seemed to make her somewhat unhappy.

Besides, was it really all that different from using my abilities to make money fixing other people's weapons, or build traps during capture the flag?

Apart of me felt like it might be, but I couldn't quite figure out how.

Deciding to table the issue for now, I glanced at her voicing another question that came to mind.

"So, if everyone's always fawning over you for how you look, how do you know if someone really likes you for you?" I asked her curiously and I saw something flash behind her eyes before she looked out the window again.

"You don't." she said quietly. "But then again, no one really does."

"You don't have some sort of built in love meter that tells you how much someone adores you?"

This caused her to laugh.

"Love meter?" she asked skeptically as she turned back to me, but she was smiling.

"You know?" I asked feeling a little stupid as I tried to explain her own powers to her. "Like, that's your whole thing right? Love and beauty and all that hallmark crap."

"It's not exactly hallmark." She said frowning. "And it's a lot easier seeing in other people, influencing in other people." she added apparently trying to clarify. "But in the end, everyone only sees what they want to see. Even us."

It was only now that I remembered that like me, her ex had cheated on her and while she'd clearly been angry about this when we'd met, something about the way she'd said it made me wonder if maybe Caleb had hurt her more than she wanted to admit.

Gods, was I actually feeling sorry for Lorelei? How the hell had that happened?

"Well." I said a little awkwardly. "At least you can be assured that you've got your pick of volunteers."

I was sure there were plenty of guys willing to form a line to see if she wanted any of them.

"True," she said mildly with a shrug, but again, she didn't seem happy about it.

We stepped out of the booth, earning one final bright smile from Jenny as she said waved us out.

We hadn't taken two steps out the door when something big and heavy darted out of the alley next to the diner, and lunged for Lorelei.

Acting on instinct, I caught the creature and crushed it with the lid of the dumpster it had sprung from.

There was a horrible hissing noise as acid sprayed from sharp mandibles, and it's black, armor like exoskeleton started to wither and turn to dust, it's many legs twitching as it disintegrated.

"Gross," Lorelei said with a vague interest, taking a step back from the acid.

She looked remarkably calm for having just been charged by what looked a like an ant that had been fed a cocktail of growth hormones and steroids, then let loose in a nuclear power plant.

"What was that thing?"

"One of the Myrmekes." I said frowning, realizing as I said it out loud, how strange the situation was. "It's weird, they usually don't attack unless they can swarm."

I glanced at Lorelei who was still eyeing the creature with a mixture of interest and distaste, but felt my eyes narrowed with I spotted something glinting, hidden under the collar of her dress.

"It must have been attracted by that." I said gesturing towards the chain and walking towards her. "Those stupid bugs love shiny things."

Without really thinking, I lifted the chain to inspect what I now realized was a locket. It was beautifully made, the heart shaped pendant centered around a clear pink crystal, covered by an ornate, filigree cage of gold.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but as I looked at the craftsmanship, something about it felt powerful, almost familiar. And an insane thought popped into my head as I looked up to ask.

"Did my Dad make this?"

It was then I realized that Lorelei had gone rigid. She looked extremely uncomfortable, nothing like her usual confident self and I realized that maybe, I shouldn't just be walking up to a girl and picking up her jewelry, or crowding her space, especially after she'd just been jumped at by a monster.

"Sorry." I said stepping back hastily as I realized what I'd been doing and dropped the locket, surprised at how cold the metal had been. "I didn't mean to-"

"It's fine." She assured me and while the words sounded sincere, something about her still seemed off as she tucked the locket under her collar again. She didn't seem to want to meet my gaze. "You like metal stuff, I get it."

She shot me half a smile, but her heart didn't seem to be in it and I was surprised at how much it bothered me to see her this unsettled. While there were some advantages to being my height and size on the lacrosse field and in the arena, I often forgot how intimidating it could be to other people.

But it had never seemed to bother her before.

'Then again, you did just kill a mutant ant with a dumpster lid.' A small voice said in the back of my mind, it's tone sounding as if it were trying to be fair.

I had a really hard time believing that Lorelei of all people would be afraid of me. This was the girl who killed monsters in heels after all.

"Did you still want to go to the arcade?" I asked half expecting her to have a change of heart after, but was pleasantly surprised when she nodded.

"Yeah, let's go."

"Cool." I said grinning and was surprised at just how relieved I was to hear her say this. "First round of tokens is on me."