Not all love stories follow straight lines.
Forget the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker. Not long ago, I found myself in the center of a magnificent love triangle. Not as a participant, but as a meddler. This is a New Jersey story, which means we trade the old rhymes for a slightly more colorful cast.
Mark—The Fixer—cares for broken things: stubborn printers, messy lives, and the family apple orchard he refuses to lose. He never thought too hard about the way his best friend Elijah—The Drag Entertainer—a magnetic drag queen and walking flirt, made his chest feel too tight. Perhaps Mark’s mind was preoccupied by the flirtations of Viktoriya—The Maker—a visionary Ukrainian designer and baker whose attention felt like sunlight Mark didn’t know he’d been missing.
Then during a routine IT service call for a Rutgers philosophy professor, Mark found himself holding my prison—an antique bronze lamp. True to his nature he sensed an injustice and compassionately freed me without a second thought.
Call me Eros. Not a genie nor god—but both were based on me. I am just a powerful, ancient, cosmic entity. I can’t grant wishes, but I do like to meddle, and Mark’s inconvenient love life became my favorite hobby.
Over six weeks flirtations turn to confessions and awkward moments into point-of-no-return choices. Glittered drag numbers become declarations. Bread-baking folds into intimacy. But when a developer closes in on the orchard, the pressure forces an impossible choice. The four of us must discover exactly how far we’ll go to protect what we’re building—or risk losing it all.
In the end we all learned: Not all love stories follow straight lines.
