Interim Goddess of Love #1 of 3 (COMPLETE)

Chapter 13

Good thing I was drafted to be the goddess of love, because I would suck as the goddess of law enforcement.

Johnny Alba was a student employee, an SK just like me. This semester his assignment was to work off his required hours in the internal mail delivery service at the Ford River Student Center. What that meant, really, was manning the window, asking students to fill up a form, and making sure that when the messengers came around they were given correctly-labeled deliveries.

...He imagined himself as an elf in Santa's workshop.

He had a girlfriend who was still a senior in his high school in Cavite. He missed her, but maybe not as much now that he was visiting her every weekend. He told me about how she was going to be the valedictorian for sure, and that she was considering a career as a meteorologist.

He told me this and more, but even after an extensive interrogation, he would not tell me who asked him to deliver the gifts to Kathy.

Was I just doing it wrong? For a second I wondered if Johnny Alba, mail delivery assistant, was one of them, because I couldn't seem to pierce that part of his brain. But he opened up about his girlfriend almost immediately, and I was seeing his other memories of love just fine, so that couldn't have been it. I ended up staying there for forty-five minutes before giving up.

And when I left the office, who else was by the door but Diego Simon, all casual, leaning on the concrete wall. Seeing him without his boy band disoriented me every time. I gasped just a tiny bit.

"I saw what you were trying to do," he said.

"I wasn't trying to do anything."

"Lying to me. That's promising." He took me by the shoulder and steered me away from a crowd of students that just walked into the mail room, and all I could think of right then was Sol is going to be sooo jealous. "I'm sure that whatever hoops our boy Joaquin is making you jump through, it doesn't include a shortcut through the mail guy."

Were we friends now? Diego never really talked to me, despite the Quin connection. Even when we were in the same room together he would just stay in his corner, glowering. Quin said he just wasn't the type who did small talk very well, and I understood that. If I had been born at the beginning of time I would find most of the people here insignificant and shallow too.

"Is it because what I want to know isn't about his love life?" I asked him.

Diego laughed. "What? No. That's bullshit. You can do anything to anybody."

"Then why can't I get him to tell me what I want to know?"

"I don't think you understand yet what you are now allowed to do, New Girl. You have the power to create and destroy lives and change human history. If you can't do something as inane as get a name out of a freshman, then it's because one of us—someone in your generation or older—isn't allowing you to."

"It's Quin, isn't it?" I groaned. "He has this thing about making me take this slow. It's so annoying." I wasn't sure if I should have admitted that to anyone else, but this was Diego, and he probably knew that anyway.

"His favorite hobby has always been to hold everyone back. You need this name why?"

"It's a goddess project. I'm practicing."

"Wait here."

I didn't exactly wait right there at the spot where he said it. There was a bench near it, and by the time I had walked up to it, he was back beside me.

"I have your name," Diego said.

"What? How? You can override Quin's mojo on the guy?"

He didn't like that I referred to it as "mojo." "For supernatural things? It's useless to try taking on Quin—we stalemate. But that's why I like using human methods like my fists. Or threatening to use my fists. Some people just have weak wills and give it up easily."

"You are..." Crude? Cruel? Brutal? I knew this about Diego already. My brain did not feel enriched by this. But he did give me something I wanted.

The name of Kathy's admirer, the person paying Johnny Alba to send her gifts anonymously, was Jake Lalisan. The Jake Lalisan who was also the "boyfriend" of Vida Castillo, reigning queen of Ford River.

And the guy that Kathy just admitted to me was the one she really liked.