Page 92 of All Superheroes Need Photo Ops
I feel her body tense up against mine. So responsive. I crave her. “How much what?” she asks.
“For the picture?”
“This one?” She laughs. “You really are full of yourself ...”
She pulls back and takes a look at the image that’s got me so entranced. She’s right. It is a picture of me, of my face, but it’s so different from all the rest. The title of her exhibit isAliens Among Us. As predicted, it’s a gallery of images of superbeings, but in positions and poses that aren’t conventionally shot.
My least favorites are the images she was granted permission to use from the battle at the ports. A single shot of a dart in focus, with a woman hanging from the ceiling behind it, blurred, is the one I hate most. That dart is headed straight for the camera and she still has the scar on her face to prove it.
But my favorite of the images is this one here, and not because it’s of me—many of them are. This is a picture she took of me at her dad’s barbecue. Her parents came into town and hosted a barbecue with members of their family from New Jersey, mostly Malian Americans, but also blended and ranging in age from two to eighty. There must have been about forty of them—cousins, cousins, cousins, and cousins who I’m pretty sure weren’t even technically related.
In the photo, I’m standing at the grill, wearing an apron. I don’t have a shirt on underneath, so you can see my blue skin shimmering in the light, patterns drawn across it in glittering white swoops and swirls. They match the patterns on my weapon. But it’s not my alienness that matters at all in this photo. It’s the light, the way it hits my chin and chest, illuminating the stains on my apron, the charcoal smears on my arms.
I’m laughing like an idiot in this picture. I just look so ... silly. So stupid. So much like a peon. I can’t even remember what I was laughing at anymore—maybe something one of her drunk-ass uncles said, I can’t be sure. But I do know that I’ve never seen me like that, and I like it more than a proud male like me probably should.
“This isn’t even my favorite,” she says. “Why do you like it?”
“It’s not that I like the way I look in it,” I say against her lips. Staring into her eyes, I can see the light from my own reflected onto her cheeks. And it’s bright white. A color that I now know means total andutter infatuation. It’s sickening. “I like the way you see me. Nobody’s ever seen me like that. Not even me.”
She grins. “That might be the nicest compliment I’ve received all evening.”
“Well, I takethatas a compliment, considering how many compliments you’ve likely received tonight. After all, you aretheMonika Neumann.”
A gloss covers her eyes and she bites her lower lip. She reaches in between her breasts, confusing me for a moment until she withdraws a piece of jewelry, simple and so perfect a platinum that it shines nearly white. She holds it out between us and swallows hard. “I was hoping you might consider becoming Mr. Darius Neumann, if you’ll have me.”
It hits me like a brick, and I forget to breathe. When she gives me a slight laugh and nudges me with her knee, I realize she’s expecting a response. “Are you ...” But I can’t speak.
She withdraws something else from between her tits. A folded square that looks badly beat. It’s the same marriage license I threatened her with all those months ago.
“Holy fuck, are you asking me to marry you?”
“Yes,” she laughs and then chokes up. “Am I allowed to say it now? Now that it’s all finished?”
She’s been asking and I’ve been telling her to wait, unsure of what the words would do to me. But I nod now.
“I love you,” she tells me.
“You’re fucking insane,” I growl. “But you’re the only one crazy enough for me, baby. I love you too.”
“So does that mean you’ll marry me?”
I dip Monika low to the ground and kiss her deeply enough that the peons around us start to whistle. I give them all a collective zap that will undoubtedly earn me a punishment I deserve, and I couldn’t be more ready for it. A lifetime of it.
Against her parted lips, I whisper, “I do.”