Page 20
Chapter Seventeen
Roland
I’m an hour late to pick her up, and I feel like a doofus in black dress pants, a navy-blue button-down, and no beard. Well, for me what feels like no beard. It’s barely a shadow. The lineup Shandra gave me was good, though. I guess. But damn if I don’t know how I feel about the hair. It’s a big change. My hair was down to my neck, and now it’s short. Shorter on the sides than on the top, but it still doesn’t even brush the tops of my ears. She wasn’t willing to budge either. The little blond waif of a woman didn’t look equipped to cut my hair at all, but she handed me the aesthetic brief, handwritten in tiny, perfect writing I recognized. I had to smirk.
Superman’s haircut—the way a Turkish barber would do it.
It’s strange to me, remembering every so often that the woman who just about breaks down trying to speak in front of people she doesn’t know is a hypercompetent entrepreneur running what is becoming a massive media company. Now, sitting across a tiny table covered in a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth from her, I’m more nervous than I can remember feeling before in my life. In fact, I’m not even sure I knew what nervousness was.
My childhood ... the first memories I have, anyway ... was riddled with emotions tinged in the residue of nervousness, but there was anger there too. I couldn’t remember anything except that I had forgotten something very important and needed to remember it. And when time passed and I didn’t, apathy set in instead.
I spent all my teenage years and through my twenties feeling a certain level of disappointment with these humans. As if I wanted them to be other than how they turned out, but I already knew this species wasn’t capable of surprising me. They were new, different from what I’d known back wherever I came from—not that I could remember it in detail—but I remember the feeling that I’d expected them, and while I feared leaving behind whatever I’d left behind, I wasn’t afraid of this new place. But how to explain all that to her? The first person I encountered who surprised me.
Surprised is too light a word. The strong, vulnerable, gorgeous, funny, witty, shy Vanessa Theriot shocked the bones free of my flesh and the sanity from my soul.
And she won’t. Stop. Staring.
“Fu-freaking quit it, Nessa. You’re freaking me out.”
“Sorry.” She jolts. Her cheeks get really pink, and I feel mine heat in response. “It’s just ... you know ... you look ...”
“Yeah, I know. You told me I look good,” I say, leaning in toward her and dropping my tone. “But you’re making it really hard to sit at this table with you with a raging hard-on.”
She squeaks— squeaks —just like she did when she opened the front door to her town house looking like a dream with her hair piled on top of her head in a bun of some kind, a few dark- and light-brown curls styled to frame her face. She had makeup on and these chunky shoes that could have passed for either part of a school uniform or combat boots, and a black dress that hugged her from her collar to the hem of her obscenely short skirt. I had half a mind to make her change, and when I told her as much, she pouted, and then she tripped down the next step. I rushed forward, caught her against my chest, and held her there longer than a stranger would have considered normal. But I couldn’t let her go. She was blinking up at me like I was the goddamn sun, and she didn’t stop looking at me like that the entire drive and is still looking at me like that as we’re seated at the restaurant by a stammering waiter.
“Sorry,” she whispers a little more calmly before tearing her gaze away from me and back to the menu. And she just has to say it, doesn’t she? “We could get out of here, though, you know.”
I lean back in my seat, rake my hand over my face, and groan. “You’re not being very nice, Nessa.”
“And you’re shaking the whole table,” she says, laughing as she reaches to steady her wineglass. She brings it to her lips and watches me over the rim as she takes a swallow.
I’m not gonna survive this, am I?
“Hi there. My name’s Manuel, but you can call me Mani for short. I’ll be your, um ... waiter tonight ...” He must know that I’m glaring at him because his speech starts to devolve.
Vanessa takes pity on him, which I loathe, and smiles her shy little smile that makes me want to level cities for her and tear out Mani’s throat. “Mani? My brother’s name is Mani too. Emmanuel, so not quite the same.”
“Oh really? Where’s he from?”
“Our mom is Mexican.”
“Oh, cool. I’m German. It’s honestly really such an honor to wait on you tonight. Can I tell you the, um ... the specials?” My glare has started to heat, and I know he sees the fire in my eyes.
“Of course,” Vanessa chirps.
Marvin tells us the specials, which I don’t hear at all but to which Nessa responds politely. She asks him a few questions, which he stutters through, and I fight the urge to melt the pen in his hand and the rubber soles of his shoes to the floor. He refills our wine and water glasses and then hastens to the back of the restaurant, where I can see four other staffers staring at us. I plan to shoot them my most searing look when Nessa kicks me under the table.
“The f—eff was that for?”
She’s leaning toward me, her menu trapped between her breasts and the table, where I’d currently like to have my face. “Stop it,” she says, and I’d think she was reprimanding me if she weren’t also smiling. “You’re being mean.”
“Mean?”
“Yes, mean. You’re supposed to be a hero, remember?” She gives me a playful look, and I get the sense she’s teasing me. And I’m honored.
I sit back and match her teasing with a dry tone of my own. “I thought I was supposed to be a dragon?” I bring fire to my eyes, and her smile gets wider, and my heart damn near stops. She’s not afraid of me anymore. At least, not like she was.
“That too.”
“Why Wyvern, anyway?”
She huffs. “I thought we went over this.”
“Yeah, but I could have just been Dragon-Man or something.”
“Dragon-Man?”
I shrug, grin widening in response to hers. “I’m no branding expert.”
“Clearly.” She shakes her head. “Besides Dragon-Man being stupid, a wyvern is a mythical dragon, like from fantasy books, except a wyvern has a barbed tail and only two legs and is generally considered faster but lacks the magical powers that dragons sometimes have. So, in that way, it wasn’t totally accurate. You basically are magic. But Wyvern tested better, and frankly, anything was better than Pyro,” she says with one eyebrow raised, as if I’d been the one responsible for it.
I laugh and shake my head. “Pretty sure the leads in all those books you’re talking about are white.”
She just shrugs. “You could be the lead in that book if you’d just be nice. You could have little kids dressing up as you for Halloween. White kids and kids of any other color.”
“You know kids dress up as villains all the time.” I lean in toward her and reach for my wine. I don’t care what it tastes like. It could taste like piss, and I’d still have drunk it just to get that look in her eye.
She’s flustered. Breathless. Pupils all big. She blinks several times. “Yes.” She drinks from her glass, too, more quickly this time. “They do. They dress up as villains. Darth Vader, Lex Luthor, Kylo Ren—all villains who died.”
I don’t answer right away. Just stare between her eyes.
When she looks nervous enough, I finally sigh. “You got a one-track mind, Nessa.”
My gaze drops to her lips. I watch them as she whispers, “It seems you do too, Rollo.”
“I do.” I exhale deeply, and when I lean forward, she sucks in a breath. I say, “But I think I could try to be the hero for you.”
“Hey there, it’s me, um ... Mani again. Have you all decided what you’d like to order?”
Nessa jumps, her wineglass teetering dangerously, but I reach across the table and stabilize it. She glances at me with pupils damn near fully blown. “Oh, sorry. I think we, um ... we’ll ...”
“Give us a minute,” I tell him.
When he leaves, she looks up at me, her hands stilling as they unfold the menu once again—a futile effort, but it’s cute she tries. I’ve given up. “What?” she says. “Why are you glaring at him like that?”
“I don’t like watching people drool all over you.”
She blushes high in her cheeks and glances across the restaurant, a cozy space with a dozen or so tables like this one and only two booths in the very back—dark, away from the windows, and more private. They were going to take us to one of those first before I thought it too risky and made them move us directly up front. In the privacy of a booth, there’s not a doubt in my mind that my hands would have wandered. And while most of the patrons of the restaurant are older and not paying us much attention, the rest are staring avidly. If we were in a booth, somebody would see something, and I’d have to burn their eyes out.
“I’m pretty sure he was drooling over you .”
“Sure. Doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna light him on fire or melt his glasses to his face, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Her water glass is halfway to her mouth. “I wasn’t worried about that before. You ... you’re joking, right?”
“Sure.”
Her little smile comes back, and she shakes her head, actually looking at the menu briefly before laying it down. “Not much of a hero then, huh?”
“I said I’d try. It’s a process.”
She clears her throat. “I, um ... I’d like to try for you too.”
I cock my head, confused. She exhales, and my pulse thrums with a zing. Something is happening.
“You read my file.”
“Shit, Nessa—I mean ...”
“No. Just ... let me finish, because I need to, um ... say this.” So I wait. I wait like I’ve never waited before. It’s unbearable. She exhales, her curls leaping up before fluttering back down to touch her cheek. “You read my file. You know already that I grew up in a not-so-nice family and that I was fortunate enough to find a new, amazing one. That file ... you might have seen the pictures of the ... what I looked like when I was rescued after all those days alone. The people who kept me homeschooled me because there’s no regulation on homeschooling in most states, and they weren’t ... good.” She exhales deeply, which is nice for her because I’m not fucking breathing at all.
“But what that file doesn’t show is the other stuff they did. They ...” She shakes her head, and I’m so shocked by the lack of rage in her features because that’s all I feel right now. And then she looks up, directly into my soul. Her hand reaches in and takes hold of all my bones.
“If you want to know about me, you have to ask. You can’t ... surprise me. You can’t call me names. You can’t threaten me. You just can’t. I can try, and I will try to be honest and not retreat from ... this,” she says, gesturing between us, “but you can’t just try ... You have to be the hero in this, for me.”
I swallow razor blades. All I can do is nod. It takes me a while to be able to speak. I feel like I’m sweating even though my body doesn’t really do that. The sweat just evaporates. It takes every ounce of my power to remain seated and not go to her, wrap her in my arms, and squeeze her until I absorb her entirely.
“I swear it, Nessa,” I say. I choke. “I’ll be the hero for you.”
She nods down at the table and then takes another breath before meeting my gaze and nodding again. One corner of her mouth quirks, but it’s shaky. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Jesus.”
I card my fingers through my hair and drain my glass. She’s still blushing at me when I put it down. “I also, um ... I want you to know that ...” She reaches for her glass, but her hand is shaking. She curls it into a fist and brings it to her lap in a way that makes my stomach melt. “You mentioned that you wanted this to be a real dinner ... date. I’m okay if you want to drop the fake part of this thing that we’re ... doing here. I am ... um ... I’ll resign from the Lois Lane contract. I’ll just, um ... be your girlfriend, I guess ...”
I’ve tried as long as I can. I launch out of my seat so quickly, the chair topples back and lands on the floor with a hard slap. I round the table and hinge at the waist, and I grab her face, and I kiss her deeply, tongue down her throat, lips hard and beseeching.
I kiss her long enough to be satisfied, which means I’m there for a long fucking time. She’s not the one to break the kiss, though, and that makes me happy. I pull back on a growl. My chest is making that sound that even Emily can’t figure out, and it’s loud.
Her eyes are still closed, her abused lips red and parted. I stroke my rough thumb down her cheek, careful not to accidentally scratch her. “Marry me,” I growl.
“Rollo!” she squeaks. Her eyes fly open, and I stand up fully when she pushes me off with a smile. She shakes her head.
I begrudgingly move away from her only to see several people in the restaurant with their phones out now. I glare at them until they put them away and pretend to keep eating. The elderly couple seated a table away is grinning at us. The man has both of his thumbs and eyebrows up. I laugh at him and shake my head before picking up my chair and falling into it, unburdened.
“So is that a yes?”
“Rollo!” She smiles at me, and it’s a magical thing. She’s wrong. She got it all fucking wrong. I’m not the one who carries magic. “Can we at least get through dinner first?”
“How many dinners until I get to marry you?”
She balks. “That’s not how it works.”
“It’s the deal we made for ... other stuff.”
She blushes darker, and it’s the cutest fucking thing. And then, once again, my Nessa says the last thing I expect. “Twenty-two.”
I grin like a maniac. “Then get a white dress, because twenty-three days from now, you’re going to be mine for real. Forever.”
She just rolls her eyes and orders from the waiter when he eventually stumbles back over. It’s cute that she doesn’t believe me. I reach for my wineglass and let the topic lie for now, instead changing the subject to her life, her family. I want to know more about her, and she’s right. I don’t want to have to root it out; I want her to tell me.
And she tries for me, just as she promised she would.
We talk about her brothers, the dicks who fought me. I like ’em, even though I’ve only met them once, because she tells me all the ways they’ve had her back over the years—ways I even had the privilege of witnessing when her youngest brother beat me upside the head with a lacrosse stick.
We talk about her parents—her real, adopted ones—about the movies she likes and hates, and then spend the next two hours talking about books. She rants about the underrepresentation of women—Black women, in particular—in sci-fi blockbusters over the past fifty years for a solid half hour, citing movies I’ve never heard of, but I pretend. And in return she gets to hear about my weird-ass childhood, my time in the SDD discovering my powers, the foods I hate, and how much I hate haircuts.
“How was it? Rescuing those people? Doing hero shit?” Vanessa’s a little tipsy. Her tongue sticks out to wet her lower lip in a way I don’t even know if she knows is dangerous. Course she doesn’t. Nor does she know how desperately I’m hanging on.
“Not sure.”
“What do you mean, not sure?” She scoffs.
“I did it because you pissed me off, and because I pissed me off. Wanted to prove to you that I could do it and maybe prove it to myself too. But when I was up there, it was all mechanical. Brute determination and grit. Just one thing after the next after the next. I don’t think I even realized how exhausted I was until I saw some of those pictures Monika took.”
“She’s incredible, huh?”
“Crazy. The wildest part is that she was so discreet. I didn’t even realize she was there most of the time.”
Vanessa nods. “The best.”
“And you want to know what made it all feel worth it in the end?”
Vanessa blushes, like she knows what I’m gonna say before I say it. “What?”
“The way you looked at me when I knocked on your door. Like I was the most impressive thing you’d ever seen.”
“You kind of are.”
My chest heats. I exhale smoke and shake my head, a lock of my already-disheveled hair drooping across my forehead, Shandra’s whole aesthetic out the window. “ You are.”
“Me? I’m just a nervous wreck who can’t talk to people.”
“Who runs her own company. Who’s fucking badass.” I cock my head. “And what do I care if you can’t talk to people? You can talk to me. In fact, it’s better you can’t talk to people, because anytime anybody talks to you, I wanna kill ’em.”
“You’re insane.”
“Yeah.”
“And also really sweet.”
I laugh hard. “Shut up.”
“You are,” she insists, picking at her dessert. She hasn’t offered to share, and even though I don’t care about key lime pie, I still enjoy stealing bites from her plate and seeing the annoyed, almost involuntary way she flicks my fork away. “What you did for those kids was insane.”
I shrug. “They deserve it. They didn’t have to help you.”
Her blush is deep, and she’s nodding. “Still, I should have been the one to thank them.”
“No.”
“No? I was the one who fell ...”
“And you were all right. I wasn’t. When the COE called me and told me you were hurt, I lost my damn mind. I was expecting the worst. Wasn’t expecting you to be smiling and a bunch of kids to have your back. Made me feel better. And definitely saved those reporters’ lives.”
Nessa snorts and polishes off her pie. “Seeing you skateboard with those kids was hot.”
I laugh. “You drunk?”
She blushes and quickly blurts, “Tipsy! I promise I’m not gonna throw up.”
I laugh even harder and order the bill. Vanessa insists on paying because I’m “poor now” after giving all my money away to those kids. I let her. Don’t give a shit about money. She can have all mine so long as she buys me sweats every so often and maybe a couple new pairs of underwear.
Fat and happy, we take some pictures with the damn waiter, Moroney or whatever, and by the time we get home, I’m feeling more satisfied than I ever have in my life. Until I go to the bathroom and wash my hands and realize ...
“What the ...”
My nails grew half an inch and are sharp as goddamn razors.
“What the fuck?” I hiss.
“Rollo, you okay?” She calls me by the name she calls me when she’s really happy. I’m not gonna fuck this night up with talk of the impossible, because what’s going on with my hands is impossible. Forgetting what I told Emily, I grab the nail file from under Vanessa’s bathroom sink and grunt, “Yeah, just taking a shit.”
“Thanks for the info.” She laughs.
Frantic, I take the file to my hand and start sawing away, except ... the file breaks in half on the second pass. What the fuck is happening to me?
I need answers before I bring this to Vanessa. Solutions. Because what’s not gonna fucking happen? I’m the hero now. I’ve got the girl, and I’m not gonna scare her away by telling her that I can’t fucking touch her.
I angry text a picture to Emily, like this is her fault. And bless the damn woman, she texts me back right away. I open my messages and frown, hating her response enough to break my phone in half.
Either tell Vanessa or make up an excuse—either way, don’t touch her!
If I hadn’t just snapped my phone in two like Nessa’s nail file, Fuck you , is what I’d have texted Emily back.