Page 64 of All Superheroes Need PR
“You haven’t dated long enough, and you’re pushy. You need to give her more time.”
I don’t like that she’s right. I open my mouth to tell her off when the phone in my pocket starts to ring. I think about ignoring it, but a greater instinct has me reaching for it immediately. “You done?” I ask Emily.
“Just about ...” Emily says, giving me back my right hand as she polishes off my left. I reach into my pocket and pull out my phone. I see Nessa’s name flash on the screen—the name I want to call her.Wife.
Margerie sees the name pop up with Vanessa’s face, and her cheeks get bright red. Her shoulders bunch under her ears, and I’m about tolaugh at her ire when I answer the phone and hold it up. “Nessa, where are you? You threw me to the wolves down here in design.”
“You’re late,” Margerie shouts, trying to be heard by the quiet breathing coming from the other end of the line. “And I need to have a talk with you, missy!”
But Vanessa doesn’t answer. There’s no breathless laughter; there’s no quick apology. There’s only quiet breathing. Something isn’t right.
I jerk away from Emily, who almost drops her electric sander on the floor. “Roland? Everything okay?” Margerie asks while Emily turns her machine off and Shandra and the two minions working with her at one of the long wooden drafting tables in the rear of the room stop fussing with my gloves and turn my way.
I’m still wearing the old uniform, though there’s something wrong with the color. I think it’s all wrong. I feel like an ass and look like a grape. I drag the zipper down from the side of my collar to my shoulder, then underneath my armpit to my hip. Pulling my torso out of the uniform, I leave the top half bunched around my hips so I can fucking breathe ... even though, right now, I can’t.
“Vanessa?”
And then she releases a terrible sound. A sob. She may be tougher than old leather to have been through what she’s been through and come out on the other side of it sweeter than sin, but she’s still so fucking tender. Her tears tear straight through me. I’m standing, but when she sobs again, I stagger. I only miss that first step though, because in the next beat, I’m at the door.
“Where are you?” I somehow manage to say.
I can hear others talking to me, Margerie’s worried warble, but I don’t have time for that. I take the stairs. Too big to fly down the center column of the stairwell, I take each set of steps in a single leap. I try to keep my steps even and cool, not wanting to cause a panic without first knowing what the fuck is going on, but Ihatethat I’m forcing restraint when all I feel is untethered. I want to burn something to the ground.
I leave the small domed COE building through the first door I find and make my way out of the campus. On the street, the wind picks up. The sky is bright. I can’t fucking speak, and she isn’t fucking speaking. A headache sprouts behind my temples, and I feel achy from my crown all the way down to my teeth. My gums sear with an incredible pain that momentarily makes it hard to think.
“Nessa.” I say her name three more times before she finally releases a shuddering gasp.
“Rollo?”
“Baby, I’m here. Where the fuck are you?” Outwardly I remain tense, hard—fucking furious—calm. She releases another cry, and I step into the alleyway between the COE campus and the next block of buildings. I punch the wall, and my fist chips away at the concrete. “Nessa, please ...”
“They brought me to my old house, and they left me here ... I can’t be here.”
The fire in my bones explodes through my shoulders. I have to marshal myself so I don’t melt my new cell phone. “Address.”
She rattles it off before whimpering. I take off into the sky. “Nessa, are you in the house?”
She makes a murmuring sound that I fucking hate.
“Get outside. Find a neighbor to take you in ...”
“No ...” I can barely hear her over the sound of the wind. “I don’t want anybody else. Just you.”
I can’t speak, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my phone’s cutting out. I just ... can’t. Because the headache that started when I first heard her sob is back, and my whole body feels strange, and none of that matters. I’ve never felt ... like this before. Like I want to kill. Like I want to weep.
“Coming for you, baby,” I say into the phone, no idea if she can hear me. “Get outside. I’m coming.”
It takes me forty more fucking minutes to get to her. I must have flown over 150 miles. That’s fast, even for me, but not fast enough forher. Because when I touch down, staggering with the force of my impact on the earth, she stands up from where she’s been seated on the edge of a dusty road in the middle of fucking nowhere, hugging her knees. Her hair whips around her face, the sun turning the outer strands to gold. She pushes them back while I struggle to proceed.
She’s crying, and ... is that ...
No.
There’s blood.
She runs toward me, and I rush to meet her. It’s dusty out here. The road is covered in a thin sheen of dirt. It’s hotter than it was in Sundale proper, and it’s a hell of a lot filthier than the place where I grew up.
The community I lived in might have been near here, but the grass was green in front of each house, the lots were manicured, and there were stores and little shops lining one primary strip. This place ... out here ... it looks like it’s been abandoned for years ... generations. And she’d been sitting on the edge of a road without a sidewalk, looking just as abandoned.
