Page 56 of All Superheroes Need PR
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 basicallyaremagic. 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 overyou.”
“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. “Iwasn’tworried 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?”
