Tox glanced around at the eclectic setting as they moved back down the hall. “Maybe the only one,” he muttered.
“You don’t like my house?”
“Quite the opposite. My place is a little less homey. It looks more like a mechanic’s spare…whoa.” Tox stopped at the entrance to her living room and looked at the massive mural on the right-hand wall. The image was explosive graffiti art. Images of cityscapes, human hands, vendor carts, dogs, and Broadway marquees swirled around the perimeter of the work. At the center, an empty, oddly-shaped pale blue void. Tox didn’t know if he liked it, he just knew he couldn’t stop staring at it.
“I painted that before I moved in. Just my impressions of a new city,” Calliope squeezed his hand. “I had this big blank wall and the previous owner left a bunch of paint, so…” She shrugged.
“You saw a blank wall and you had some paint, so you just painted a mural?”
“Yep. Well, I worked at an art gallery in Berlin for a few months a million years ago. They repped this wildly creative graffiti artist. I guess her work kind of inspired me.”
Tox cleared his throat. “Yeah, uh, you’re really talented.”
“Thanks.”
Tox turned back to the front door and stopped at three stunning framed black and white photos of a watering hole in what appeared to be the Serengeti. Each photo was at a different time of day—dawn, noon, and dusk—and captured a variety of animals, Cape buffalo, topi, and gazelles drinking against a backdrop of umbrella thorn trees.
“Pretty cool, huh? I worked for a wildlife photographer for a year when I was nineteen. National Geographic sent him to Tanzania for six months. I spent my twentieth birthday on Kilimanjaro. Those were Adrian’s gifts to me.”
Tox suddenly found the photographs uninspired and, frankly, a little clichéd. Adrian.
“You ready?”
Calliope followed him out the door.
“You’ve had some interesting jobs.”
“Yeah.”
“Where would you like to go?” He asked from the top of the stoop.
“Let’s see where the sidewalk takes us.” She glanced up at the dark sky and gave a contented sigh.
A fat drop hit Tox the moment they moved out onto the landing. “You sure you don’t want an umbrella or something?”
“I’m sure. I loved playing in the rain when I was growing up.”
Tox had a brief flash of a dark-haired child in rain boots stomping puddles with a mischievous grin.
“Where was that?”
“All over really. My biological father is Swiss, but he was never in the picture. My mom’s pretty open about it. He was a married banker. She was twenty. She didn’t want to destroy his marriage, so…” She shrugged. “I’ve only seen him a few times in my life.
“My mom is a fairly well-known poet, Elara Christos-Acosta. When I was really little we never stayed in the same place. She said we must follow her muse, which could lead us anywhere from an impoverished village to a mountain top.”
“That must have been hard.”
“I think it would have been if my mom hadn’t married my stepfather when I was five. He’s my real dad. Sometimes she would pull me onto her lap and say her muse had landed right here on my shoulder. She actually named me for the Muse of Poetry.” Calliope’s pale eyes misted.
“She must really love you.”
Calliope flashed him a surprised look. The sincere comment delivered almost absently had her face warming. It also had her puzzled. What parent didn’t love their child?
“She does. Anyway, on one of our adventures, she met my dad. My mom was bartering with a fishmonger at a seaside market when all of a sudden the man handed her the fish wrapped in brown paper and said, ‘presente, presente’ and waved off her money. She turned around and caught my dad signaling to the fishmonger. With the fish under her arm and me on her hip, she marched right up to him and said, ‘A fish is not a romantic gift, but it’s exactly what I wanted.’ She cooked all of us dinner that night, and they were married two weeks later.”
“Quite an impulsive family you come from.”
“My mother, yes. My stepfather, no. He’s actually pretty rulesy, but he claims he took one look at her—she had taken off her shawl to show her cleavage when she bartered—and decided he wanted to be the only man to see…” She made a face, looking like a teenager who had caught her parents kissing. “They are crazy in love. Even after all these years.”