Page 69 of All Superheroes Need PR
I scoff—well, I would have if I weren’t still laughing. Meanwhile, Luca’s coming closer and closer to me. Reaching me, he picks me up and spins me around, making me laugh even harder. “This girl? You think this girl’s too young to date? She’s an old lady and gettin’ older every day! It’s about damn time she found an old man.”
“I’mher old man. Now put that young girl down before herboyfriendlights your pants on fire.”
Luca drops me, and I wince but still chuckle out, “He’d probably just melt your shoes to the ground.”
“Shit, you can do that?” Luca says over his shoulder. He reaches into his pocket and steps back toward the driveway. He fishes out his phone. “Go on. Do it then, boyfriend.”
“What?” I’m still chuckling, even as I bite through the pain. “Why?”
“So I can film it! I’ll tell the world the Wyvern melted my shoes to the ground because I beat him in a game of ball.”
“You little shit,” Roland says from a crouched position on the ground, retying his shoelaces and shocking the hell out of me, making me smile so wide I can’t control the muscles in my face. I can believe he’d cuss out my brothers, sure, but not that he’d do it in a joking way given how recently they were actually trying to well, you know ... kill each other. “You know as well as I do, I beat you guys forty to two.”
“Only because you cheat!” Emmanuel shouts.
“Is this still going on?” Elena comes out carrying a large tray covered in glasses of her famous lemonade that’s actually lemongrass, sage, and agave and doesn’t taste that bad if you ignore the earthy flavor—i.e., it tastes like grass. On the tray, she’s got two ice packs for me. “What are you doing still standing up, corazóncita? Sit.” She kicks the side of the rocking chair next to the front door intentionally and conspicuously.
“Mamá, I don’t need it now. It can wait. Your wraps are doing enough.”
She sets her tray down on the table between the two rocking chairs on her porch. She hands me the ice packs, trying to fight me to get them into the waistband of my sweats. “Mamá, quit it!” I shout on a laugh.
“What is this?” She curses in Spanish. “You already messed it up?”
“Sh ... Luca picked me up.” I see the flap of a bandage peeling away from my skin. Elena starts to pull it free while I fight with my shirt and her to push it back into place. “It’s fine. See? Look.”
“Did I hurt you, Vanny? Shit. I’m sorry, hermanita.” Luca’s voice makes me cringe. I give Elena my best glare.
“What?” she mouths back at me.
“It’s fine. Elena just redid my bandages,” I start, but when I turn, I crash into Roland, spinning directly into his grip. He grabs the edges of my T-shirt. Elena moves away as Roland lifts my shirt up and then higher. He reaches for one edge of a bandage, peels it back, has a look. He does the same to the other side. His nostrils flare both times, but his expression otherwise doesn’t change.
He meets my gaze and lowers slowly into a crouch. With his height and my lack thereof, he ends up eye level with my hips. He kisses the one on the left, over the bandage, and then the one on the right, over the bandage through my T-shirt, while Luca makes gagging sounds. I don’t care about that now, though. Not as Rollo tugs the bottom of my tee into place and looks up at me with eyes that flare orange as they flick to my lip. Not pink. Not white. Orange.
“Are you ready to leave soon?” His voice is hollow. I can’t read the emotion behind it. His calm is frightening.
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Drink your tea or ... whatever that is,” he says. Behind him my brothers chuckle and Elena scoffs. “Let me get cleaned up, and I’ll meet you back here in five. You got all your stuff?” I nod, but he knows that. When he brought me here, I didn’t have any stuff, and neither did he.
He takes my hand in his and rubs his thumb across the backs of my knuckles before quickly brushing a kiss across them. Caught in his shadow now as he stands, I watch him openly assess my face. I know he’s looking at the bruises and the bandage Elena placed on my cheek and the much smaller one on my lip. The bleeding might have stopped, but the bruising is still there.
“They’re better today. I’m better,” I whisper. My lips quirk. “I’m actually feeling pretty good, not that I believe you’ll believe that.”
A muscle in his cheek ticks. He twists his neck only very slightly, but I still hear the crack. His hand reaches for me, passing over the backof my head and tangling in my curls. He leans in and breathes against my cheek, “You might be fine, but I’m not. We’re gonna go home and get in our bed, and you’re gonna fuck me, and I’m gonna be gentle, but first we’re gonna have a talk about exactly what happened.”
I squeak but don’t want to give anything away in front of my family, so I let Roland go after kissing me on the forehead. My brothers stand around and watch me with eye rolls and frustrated stares. They haven’t tried to ask me about what happened. Besides, Elena’s the biggest gossip here. Elena will tell them what’s okay to share.
“You sure you’re gonna be okay, kiddo?” my dad says, taking a seat in the other rocking chair after I drop down into the first.
“Yeah. When I took this contract, I just didn’t realize that ...”
“That?” my dad prompts while my brothers pick up playing and arguing; I don’t know which they enjoy more.
“That it’d be dangerous. I mean, I know I read all those waiver forms back to front and back again, but I just didn’t really realize that this is real. There arerealvillains.”
My dad is frowning at me, rocking in his chair. He takes a sip of his lemonade, makes a face, and says the last thing I expect. “You want this contract? You want to do this work?”
I nod. “Yeah.” Without question.
