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Chapter Nine

Vanessa

“Vanessa! Vanessa!”

“Vanessa, over here!”

“Is it true you’re already on the outs with the Wyvern?”

Yes, I think bitterly, though I don’t bother answering the two journalists following me.

I keep jogging—not because I feel pressured by social media comments but because these past three weeks when I’ve set out to walk from my town house to the COE headquarters, I’ve been approached by journalists. Mobbed. I’ve found that keeping up a good pace can help deter them.

And in the past three weeks, I’ve barely talked to the Wyvern. He’s been dutifully reporting to all the meetings, letting designers poke and prod at him to fit him for his uniform. The COE wants photos taken at the end of the month with him and the other local Champions. He’s unenthusiastically agreed to all of it.

He still hasn’t moved in with me.

And while I’m not upset he hasn’t, it’s just left me feeling off-kilter. Like I did something wrong. I know my performance at the press conference was pitiful. Maybe he’s having buyer’s remorse.

No man’ll ever love you like I do, Vanessa. Tell ’em, sweetheart.

Without us, you’ll be alone forever!

The last things the people who gave birth to me said before they were taken away by the cops. They were wrong. I realized that after meeting the Theriots. I’ve known that every day since.

But ... that little part of my brain still stuck in a past life worries about my inability to talk to men. What if ... I never find a partner? I’ll still have my family. I’ll still have my work. But it might be nice, maybe, to one day be able to come home to someone. Ideally someone reliable, who’ll be in my corner no matter what.

Who’ll say things like, I see any of you hounding her on the streets, I’ll melt the cameras to your hands and light your underwear on fire, without flying off immediately afterward. Maybe a human man who also won’t mind me being fake girlfriend to a superhero with a surly attitude and only two pairs of sweatpants.

Yeah, right.

The reporter with the floppy blond hair struggles to keep pace with me as I near Memory Park. “Is it true?” he huffs as we pass the glittery bronze statue of Taranis at the park entrance.

It’s Taranis as a little boy. This is where he fell. Sundale’s own hometown hero, he was the first member of the Forty-Eight I ever saw in person. It had been in a parade. I’d been thirteen and he’d been somewhere around there, presumably. Smiling around at the crowd, he’d had lightning bolts dancing on the ends of his fingertips and occasionally would make the lights lining the parade flare and die and dance in different colors. He’s back on top of the headlines now, even if he was displaced by the Wyvern for a few minutes.

“Is it true that you can’t please him sexually and that’s why he’s cheating on you with the Olympian?” I stumble, almost fall, but catch myself and pull ahead a little bit faster. I’m not used to jogging quite this fast, but that’s a really stupid question, and I want to get away from it. Not the first part—because that could definitely be true, as inexperienced as I am, but the second part is one of the greater reaches I’ve heard in a while, and I have no desire to piss off the Olympian’s PR team.

I pass the kiddie pool to my right and lose the reporters in a crowd of strollers. Their questions keep up with me, though.

I did accept the Lois Lane contract. Even if it was insanity that compelled me to, I should actually do the job I signed up for. If he doesn’t want to see me anymore, that’s fine, but we do need to be seen in public. It’s a fake relationship, but if we can’t even get our picture taken over coffee, all those little fake pieces are going to crumble.

I huff, annoyed. I can be a better Lois Lane than that. I just need him to buck up, get over whatever it is that he doesn’t like about me, and match my Lois to a halfway passable Clark.

Clark. Ha. Who am I kidding? He’s more of a Kylo than a Clark.

Maybe I’ll make Margerie yell at him, I think with a smile as I jog through the skate park feeling light, already going over what I’ll say to him—what I’ll try to say to him—next time I see him.

You’re such a chicken shit, Vanessa ...

No.

You ever suggest anything like that again ever, I’ll tear out your spines ...

“Vanessa! Over here! Is it true the Wyvern isn’t really ...” The reporter jumps out at me from behind the half-pipe, and clumsy doesn’t even begin to describe my response.

My feet leave the ground as I fall, arms cartwheeling, and I can feel my mouth open in a silent yet dramatic wail. My phone, which is strapped to my left wrist in its handy jogging holster, hits the ground first, the loud cracking sound making me wince before my torso hits the ground on top of it. My chin hits the pavement last, knocking my thoughts loose. A bright pain flashes through my mouth and a much milder one through my chest.

“Ow ...” Aware that I should get up, move, and that they’re probably, most definitely still filming, doesn’t help propel me to my feet at all. On the contrary. I’m grounded. My left arm is stuck, and my legs are tangled, and the sun brushes my face and is soothing in a way that has me tearing up.

I blink in the sight of pavement and people shouting. “Hey!” “The fuck?” “Those guys with the cameras knocked that lady over!” Kids’ voices. Low and warbly and prepubescent and adolescent and almost grown and all the things in between.

Fingers nudge my right shoulder against the ground, and I wince, disliking that I’m being touched by strangers until I hear a little voice squeak, “Hey, miss, you okay?”

“Dude, give her some space!”

I roll onto my back to find a little girl and a little boy looking up at me. No, looking down at me. I’m down, they’re up. Whatev ... “Ooph.”

“You don’t look so good,” the little girl says, her head cocked, her long black braided pigtails swaying with the movement.

The slightly older boy gasps. “Oh, cool! It’s her! That’s the Wyvern’s girlfriend!”

A chorus of gasps go around, and I nearly laugh. I let the kids in front of me offer me their hands and pull me up into a seated position. I wait a few seconds for the adrenaline to settle to make sure I haven’t injured myself worse than suspected. Feeling shaken but otherwise okay, I nod. “Yuh, I dam.” Wait. What did I just say?

“Ohh! Where’s he now?” The little girl’s round brown face beams with excitement.

“He’s not going to light us on fire, is he?” The boy, who could be her older brother with how similar their skin tones and face shapes are, is already looking up at the sky, and I laugh.

“Doh, doh, dot at all. Dank you for help ... me.” Something’s off. My mouth feels like hell and I can taste blood.

“Yeah, don’t worry, lady. We ran those guys off!” I glance up at the new voice that’s spoken to see a boy, maybe thirteen, with an awesome naturally red Afro pointing down the path where the reporters are being blocked by a small armada of kids wielding bicycles, scooters, and skateboards. The reporters try to intimidate the kids into letting them through, shouting louder and brandishing their badges—that is, until someone throws a gigantic compostable cup down onto them from the top of the half-pipe.

The kids all burst out laughing as blue goes everywhere, soaking the reporters’ shirts and cameras, and I can’t help but bark out a laugh with them that makes all the bones in my chest ache. I cover my sore mouth with my hand and wince again. My chin hurts, too, I realize, and my head is spinning a little. I should probably get a lift out of here but know that I can’t as soon as I remember the shattered phone on my wrist.

“Hey, do you haff a phone?” I slur like a clever drunk, just able to be understood.

Three kids offer me theirs. I take the first, and since I don’t know any numbers but my parents’ and I’m definitely not calling them to pick me up out here in a pile of children feeling like a child myself, I call the generic number for the COE. After giving them my employee code with increasingly slurred speech—not because I have a concussion but because I most definitely bit my tongue—I’m eventually patched through to Tor, head of the Wyvern team’s operations, who promises to send me security and a car.

Feeling a little embarrassed they’re sending security, I don’t have another choice but to wait. As I do, most of the kids resume skating. Some still loiter around, though, including the boy and the girl who sit on the ground peppering me with questions about the Wyvern until help arrives.

And not from the direction it’s supposed to.

But from the sky.

A superbeing touches down in the center of the jogging path wearing navy sweatpants and a navy hoodie—that I gave him. I don’t know why, but my lower lip quivers a little bit when he looks at me, his gaze scanning my body from the top of my ponytail to the toes of my sneakers. His eyebrows are pulled together, his countenance intense.

I cover my mouth with my hand, the bright pain on the left side of my tongue making me feel silly because I sound like a cartoon character as I say, “Whab a-ou doing-ere?”

Roland arrives in front of me in a blur of movement, and as he drops to one knee between the two kids, surrounding me with the sheer mass of him, smoke curls from his nostrils. Smoke. “I don-think I’ll ebber get ova that,” I whisper.

He jerks back. “What?”

“De smoke,” I answer sheepishly.

He jerks back even more. “You dying?”

I burst out laughing so hard it sends pain splintering across my chest. “Ow. Don’t make me laugh.” The kids on his either side are laughing too.

“What happened?”

“Just some stupid reporters,” the little girl says. “But don’t worry, Mr. Wyvern. We scared them off!”

He looks at the kids on either side of him and then at the mob of children slowly forming around him before glaring back into my eyes. “Wanna hear you’re okay. Use your words, Nessa.”

Nessa. I don’t know when he decided I needed a nickname, but I like it. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe he doesn’t want to ditch me as his fake girlfriend.

“Do you wanna getta coffee wibbme?”

“What? Now?”

I nod.

“Did you hit your head? How badly are you hurt? Did you see her hit her head?” He asks the kids, voice sounding a little strained.

I reach forward and grab his sleeve and smile and say, “No, no. I’m fine. Weally. I mean ... as giwlfwend an-boofren. Fake. Fo-work. We should ...”

“Jesus Christ. You’re trying to plan a work appearance for the two of us right now? Am I getting that right?” He’s right. I am. “Have you lost your damn mind?” I think he may be right about that too.

“It’s adrenaline!” the little boy shouts. “My daddy works as an EMT, and he says that people talk a lot after they’re in accidents. She’s been talking a lot so far.”

“That right?”

“Uh huh.” Both the little girl and boy nod in unison.

“Nessa, Nessa,” Roland says, shaking his head, and I hear the sound again, the same one I heard before, back in the COE building. A rumbling. And I’m oddly comforted by it.

“Y-y-yeah?” I stutter.

“Shush.”

I laugh choppily and feel my bottom jaw chatter against my upper teeth. I cover my mouth with my hands as soon as I register the blood taste. “Ow.” I wince.

Roland stands up and hands the little boy a phone. “I want you to write down your name and the name of every kid here who helped my girl today, okay? When you’re finished, come back to me. Don’t forget to write your own.”

“Okay. Do you, um ... is it okay if we get a picture after?” The little boy is about to burst excited goo out of his eyeballs.

Roland grins, just a little, just with one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, kid, you can have a picture, but why don’t you meet me here tomorrow, same time? Today I gotta take care of my girl.”

“Okay, okay, yeah. I can do that! Can Toni come too?” he says, gesturing to the little girl.

“Course. Tell all your friends to come. I’ll skate with you too.”

“Cool!” He sprints off, the little girl screaming for him to wait as his friends start to gather around and he starts to type a frantic note in the Wyvern’s cell phone while Roland turns back to me. I try to cover my mouth with my hand as Roland looks me over so probingly. He’s blinking slowly, and his lips are slightly parted, his jaw slack.

“Nessa,” I watch him mouth, though he doesn’t say the word loud enough for me to think I’m meant to respond to it. Then he clears his throat and adds more audibly, “Lower your hand, baby. Don’t hide from me.”

“Sowwy, Rol-Rollo.” Wait ... did he just call me ... baby? Maybe I did hit my head harder than I thought.

His eyebrows knit together, and heat gusts out of him in a burst. “You get the names of the reporters?” he says as he looks at my face.

I shake my head. “It doesn’t ... feew ... thad bad. And tey didn’t push me or anyfen,” I garble. “I feww. Fell. I fell.”

He hisses, gaze tracking over my face, lingering over my mouth and chin, before moving down to my forearms and knees. “Shoulda been there,” I think he mutters under his breath, but he speaks too softly.

“Whad?”

He reaches for my sneakered feet and exhales abruptly. “Can you move?”

I nod, confident that I haven’t broken anything, at least.

“You in shock?”

I shrug. All I can think about is repeating my speech about coffee because I don’t think he was listening the first time I said it. “No?”

He nods more slowly, his nostrils flaring and smoke curling between us. It smells absolutely divine, and I find myself leaning in toward that magical scent. Not like burning skin or hair but like a bonfire on a big summer’s night. Weighty with the expectation of sunrise and full with the promise of home. I blink quickly and am so distracted it takes me a few seconds to understand his next question.

“Is it okay for me to touch you?”

It takes me too long to answer. My swollen tongue has lodged itself in my throat. I’m wrenched back into a bitter past, one full of skinned knees, bit tongues, twisted ankles, broken limbs, and worse. Nobody ever asked me that when I was growing up, not when I was living with those things that not even a dictionary could correctly identify as parents, and not after the system picked me up. This is so ... minor ... compared to all that. I don’t know how to respond, what to say, how to be.

“Tank yup, Rollo,” is all I can think to say, so I say it, stupidly. Stupid ... No. I don’t feel stupid for this. Looking at him now, I don’t feel stupid for anything.

His gaze has glazed a little bit, and he looks a little uncertain. My knees scrunch into my chest, the skin pulling, pulling, unlike his brow, which is softening, softening ... He edges away. Not a lot, but a little. Enough for me to feel a relief I didn’t know I needed pull all the way through my soul.

“Sorry,” I say. “I mean yesh. You can tou-ouch me, Roll-lo.”

He gives me a final skeptical look, which fills me with another wave of relief—more like calm—and I clear up any indecision he might still have by reaching for him first. Shoot. My palms are all bloody and scraped up. I hesitate, turning my hand over so I can see the carnage. It really isn’t too bad, and I know I’ve definitely had worse.

Roland—Rollo now, according to my swollen tongue—reaches to close the distance between us, aiming to touch my arm with his hand, but I pull back again, more slowly this time, and manage to find my voice. “I dun want to ruin your clodes again.” I brandish my palm at him as a warning.

His expression turns from concern to incredulity to flat boredom. “You’ll buy me another set.”

I don’t bother reminding him that his paycheck triples mine and my entire company’s combined but instead feel an awkward smile coming on. I’m sure I look gruesome with blood seeping out from between my teeth, so I give him a closed-lip smile instead.

He rolls his eyes, and his warm hand slides around my outer forearm. I snort a little laugh as he pulls me into him, the force enough to send my buttery limbs sprawling in every direction. He doesn’t make a sound, though, doesn’t make fun of me. He just gathers me up against his chest, which is a freaking radiator against my side. It makes me smile.

“Something funny or you just losing your mind?” He’s sitting cross-legged, my feet between his legs, my butt perched up on one of his thighs, his left arm wrapped around my back. He’s as warm as a blisteringly hot summer day.

I smile and blurt, “Rollo, you ... you’re hot.”

“You coming on to me?”

Mortification hits me, but I have the strangest sense that he’s not upset by what I’ve said. His face doesn’t hold one single hint of a smile, but he doesn’t seem angry. Well, he seems a little angry. He always seems a little angry. Right now, he seems angry at my hands.

“That’s no wh-I meant,” I say in a small voice, my tongue starting to really hurt.

“I know.” He huffs through his nostrils and gives his head a short shake, focusing entirely too hard on the scratches on my hands. “Not too deep. Your knees look salvageable too. But your ankle’s a little swollen. This hurt?” He presses on a spot on my left leg right above my sneaker, and I recoil from his touch.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry,” he hisses. He glances at my face and looks away quickly, then glances back. His eyes are still glowing but differently than they had been. Just a ring of white around the pupil. “You sound funny. Open your mouth.”

I comply without hesitation, responding easily to the authority in his tone. He seems surprised by my easy acquiescence but quickly refocuses on my lips and teeth and tongue. He shakes his head and glances past me. The kids are in a riot, all shouting the spelling of their names at the same time.

“Tell him my phone number too! If he needs a buddy, I’m his guy!” I hear a boy shout.

“I bi m’tongue,” I offer on a laugh.

He exhales smoke through his nostrils again, and I grin. His gaze flashes bright pink-white. “I can fucking see that.”

I shrug. “Ith okay. Coffee?”

Rollo rolls his eyes and moves to stand without releasing me. The little boy and his sister return not a second later. “I got all the names!”

“Hey, I helped,” she adds.

“Good work, you two. Now remember what I said, okay? Meet me here tomorrow. I’ll bring presents for all of you, and we can skate and take as many pictures as you want, okay?”

The kids start cheering, and that little cheeky grin Roland wears slowly morphs into a full-on smile. I blink three times to make sure I’m not seeing things. By the hammer of Thor, his smile is spectacular.

He looks at me, that smile tragically disintegrating into concern, and, on a smoke-laced breath, huffs, “I’m gonna fly now. You got any objections to that?”

“COE shecurity ith coming ...”

“They aren’t. I’m your security. Now tell me, you afraid of heights?”

“Yeth.”

He hesitates. “I won’t let you fall.”

“Oh—okay.”

His eyes widen slightly, as if surprised by my answer. “You trust me?”

Not as far as I can throw him, which is not at all. “I thon’t think you’ll let me fwall.”

He looks away from me quickly and I can’t interpret the expression that crosses his face, but I can feel his hands tighten around my body. “Fine,” he says. Then, with no prompting at all, “Good.”

“Where we ... going?” My eyes widen. I’m not sure how I feel about flying again. But I still know that I’d be hard-pressed to walk on out of here and, if what he said about COE security is true, I don’t really have a backup option, unless I want one of these kids to try to jerry-rig a skateboard gurney and haul me out. That would make for an interesting photo op.

“To get coffee,” he deadpans.

I can’t tell if he’s joking. He must not be. Coffee was, after all, my last suggestion. “Tank you, Rol—” I can’t get the word off my tongue and try again. “Thank you, Roll-oh.”

He nods once after a short hesitation. And then he rises to his full height with me still in his grip, and keeps on rising. I squeak and grab hold of his shoulders as the ground gets smaller and smaller and the screaming kids turn to little grains of sand below. My stomach flutters, full to bursting.

“I got you,” he whispers in my ear, and it’s too easy to believe him as we fly off into the early morning light amid a chorus of children screeching in delight, chanting the name that I gave him. “ The Wyvern, the Wyvern, the Wyvern! ”