Page 55 of All Superheroes Need PR
“You look like you haven’t seen a comb in forty years.”
“I’m not forty.”
“You don’t know how old you are. For all we know, you could be 340. Gravity could work very differently on your planet—not to mention all the time you spent in interspace travel ...”
“Emily,” I bark, hoping to derail what was sure to be an hours-long physics explanation.
“Right. Well, if you can procure a pair of normal nonsweatpants in the next hour or so, and possibly a haircut, I’d try these.” She pulls out her notepad—the one forprescriptions, which feels decidedly appropriate—and starts scribbling. When she’s finished, she tears my newest scrip from the pad and hands it up to me. “That should get you started.”
I stare down at the list, but all I can think is that I’ve got no clue where to get a haircut, and when I had the COE send a car for me earlier, I had them bring me more sweatpants. I open my mouth, but Emily gets there first. “I’ll call Shandra. She’ll meet you in design in ten minutes to update your, uh ... look.”
Chapter SeventeenRoland
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 angerthere 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’dexpectedthem, 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.
Surprisedis 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 goddamnsun, 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?”
