Page 3 of Locking Down Qetesh

"Does it mean anything?"

"No. The whole point is that people talk, it would be reductive of me to insist that men took keys and women took locks. Not only does that make it more difficult for anyone who doesn't identify as either, but it doesn't take into account orientation or anything else. So people just pick whichever they like the look of and get talking."

"And that actually works?"

"Sometimes, people just need something to break the ice. That's what I'm here for." At least that I can be confident about. My own love life was a bit more complicated, but at least I could hold onto my reputation as a love goddess if everyone thought that I was good at helping other people find romance.

And maybe Jacob was going to be the next person I found love for. He seemed sceptical in the way that many people were before they met the love of their life, I'd seen it countless times. Maybe my event would be the one that changed it for him.

Chapter 2

QETESH

The doorbell went and I grabbed my phone so I could click through to the app. My best friend waved at the camera from the other side, her hand grasping the neck of a bottle.

I hit the button which would unlock the door and then the microphone. "I'm in the greenhouse."

Ella didn't even respond before heading through the door and making her way into my house.

"You really should just give me a key, Tesha," she said as she entered the room and set down a bottle of non-alcoholic prosecco.

"You had a key," I reminded her. "It's not my fault that you lost it."

"Your plants stole it," she murmured.

"If that was true, then it would have turned up by now."

"Maybe."

"There's no maybe about it." I loved her dearly, but she did have a tendency to misplace things. Especially keys. She'd somehow managed to lose the one she had at the Lock and Key party where she met her fiancée too. I'd had to spend hours working out which key went with which lock so that I could remove the lock without a match from circulation.

"Maybe you just need a passcode to get in the house instead."

"Keys are better," I responded.

"Ah, right. You're super old. I forgot."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm not super old."

"You don't look super old, but you definitely are. I'm going to get some glasses."

I nodded and pulled off my gardening gloves, knowing that there wasn't going to be more time for tending to my plants. In Ella's words, that was what she spent all day doing, she didn't want more of it when she visited me.

The evening sun shone through the glass panes of the greenhouse connected to my house, and I let out a contented sigh. This was my haven away from the world. Here, it was just me and my plants with the occasional visit from my best friend. But as a dryad herself, she understood my connection to this place in a way very few other people ever had.

She returned a couple of moments later with a couple of champagne flutes and we made our way over to the comfortable chairs I'd had installed here for moments just like this. Ella sloshed some of the sparkling wine into glasses and handed one of them to me.

"I'm going to drink so much real prosecco on Friday," Ella mumbled.

I laughed. "You're the one who decided not to drink in the lead up to the wedding."

"Because I don't want my liver to go on strike the moment I say I do."

"That's not how it works," I reminded her. "You can do as much damage by binge drinking it..."

"I know, I know. Just let me have this, Tesha. Not all of us can have banging bodies after thousands of years."

"You don't know that," I countered. "You could become immortal tomorrow..."

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