“Throw up,” she ordered.
“I beg your pardon?” He slanted her a sideways glance of incredulity. “They were only jelly beans, for chrissake.”
To his utter amazement, she tried to stick her fingers in his mouth. “Vomit, you jerk. Vomit.”
He would have laughed if he weren’t gagging. Her nimble fingers were practically tickling his tonsils. He bit down hard enough for her to pull out.
“Ouch!” she yelped. “Oh, God, you have to vomit.” Now she was slapping him on the back, hard.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her till she started to settle down. “Have you lost your freakin’ mind? Are you crazy?”
“I’m not crazy, but I will be if you don’t vomit.” She took several deep breaths. When she was no longer trembling, she eyed him speculatively. “I don’t suppose you’d let me ease a rubber tube down your throat and pump your stomach.”
“Only if you’re straddling my lap, naked as a French Quarter hooker, doin’ the hula. Even then, I’d have to think about it.”
“Oh, this is no time for your crude jokes. Get serious. You’ve been tormenting me for years, but you have no idea what you’ve done now.”
“Why don’t you tell me?” A sudden thought occurred to him. He seemed to remember seeing tiny jelly beans in some of the rat cages. Could they have arsenic, or something, in them? His stomach churned ominously. “Those jelly beans… they weren’t poisoned, were they?”
“Of course not, but…”
“But?” he prodded.
“But they had a love potion in them,” she divulged with a sigh of resignation. “Can you see now why you have to vomit?”
“A love potion?” he hooted. “Oh, darlin’, if you wanted to get laid, why didn’t you say so?”
She closed her eyes for several seconds, as if counting to ten. When she opened them, her blue eyes still glittered with anger, but her words came out calmly, as if he were a half-witted child. “Listen, and listen good, because I’m only going to explain it once. I have invented a real love potion. JBX—the Jelly Bean Fix—is a little side venture of mine and Terrebonne Pharmaceuticals. I’ve run experiments on my lab rats for over a year, and believe me, the potion works.”
“A love potion? Ha, ha, ha. You been sniffin’ some voodoo-hoodoo incense or somethin’? I got news for you, honey. There ain’t no such thing as a love potion.”
“How about Viagra? If someone had told you a few years ago that there was a little blue pill that could perform such… well, magic, you probably would have pooh-poohed that, too,” she said, lifting her chin with affront.
“Pooh-pooh? What’s a pooh-pooh? I do not pooh-pooh.” Then he thought about her other words. “You’ve been giving your rats Viagra? Isn’t that kind of weird? And illegal? Maybe I should call the animal-rights people.”
“No, I have not been… oh, this is an impossible conversation. Listen. You swallowed a love potion, you big baboon. Get that through your thick head. We have to do something about it, now!”
He looked over to the cages where some of the rats were humping away, while others were nuzzling each other like little lovebirds… or love rats. Still others were nibbling on miniature versions of the jelly beans he’d just eaten.
He didn’t believe for one minute that there was any such thing as a real love potion… no matter what she said about Viagra. But there wasn’t a chance in hell that he wasn’t going to pounce on this opportunity. “So, when do I go into lust mode? Will I be makin’ love to you on the floor, like those rats? And no one will be able to blame me ’cause I’ll be out of control from your potion, right? And you’ll lose all your inhibitions and jump my bones like a hobo on a hot dog, right?”
“The potion isn’t about lust… well, not totally. It’s a love potion. Please, Luc, try to vomit, or go to the hospital and have your stomach pumped, if you won’t let me do it.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“If you only knew.” She sighed and rubbed the fingertips of one hand over her creased forehead.