Page 29 of All Superheroes Need PR
Roland grins, just a little, just with one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, kid, you can have a picture, but why don’t you meet me here tomorrow, same time? Today I gotta take care of my girl.”
“Okay, okay, yeah. I can do that! Can Toni come too?” he says, gesturing to the little girl.
“Course. Tell all your friends to come. I’ll skate with you too.”
“Cool!” He sprints off, the little girl screaming for him to wait as his friends start to gather around and he starts to type a frantic note in the Wyvern’s cell phone while Roland turns back to me. I try to cover my mouth with my hand as Roland looks me over so probingly. He’s blinking slowly, and his lips are slightly parted, his jaw slack.
“Nessa,” I watch him mouth, though he doesn’t say the word loud enough for me to think I’m meant to respond to it. Then he clears histhroat and adds more audibly, “Lower your hand, baby. Don’t hide from me.”
“Sowwy, Rol-Rollo.” Wait ... did he just call me ...baby?Maybe I did hit my head harder than I thought.
His eyebrows knit together, and heat gusts out of him in a burst. “You get the names of the reporters?” he says as he looks at my face.
I shake my head. “It doesn’t ... feew ... thad bad. And tey didn’t push me or anyfen,” I garble. “I feww. Fell. I fell.”
He hisses, gaze tracking over my face, lingering over my mouth and chin, before moving down to my forearms and knees. “Shoulda been there,” I think he mutters under his breath, but he speaks too softly.
“Whad?”
He reaches for my sneakered feet and exhales abruptly. “Can you move?”
I nod, confident that I haven’t broken anything, at least.
“You in shock?”
I shrug. All I can think about is repeating my speech about coffee because I don’t think he was listening the first time I said it. “No?”
He nods more slowly, his nostrils flaring and smoke curling between us. It smells absolutely divine, and I find myself leaning in toward that magical scent. Not like burning skin or hair but like a bonfire on a big summer’s night. Weighty with the expectation of sunrise and full with the promise of home. I blink quickly and am so distracted it takes me a few seconds to understand his next question.
“Is it okay for me to touch you?”
It takes me too long to answer. My swollen tongue has lodged itself in my throat. I’m wrenched back into a bitter past, one full of skinned knees, bit tongues, twisted ankles, broken limbs, and worse. Nobody ever asked me that when I was growing up, not when I was living with those things that not even a dictionary could correctly identify as parents, and not after the system picked me up. This is so ... minor ... compared to all that. I don’t know how to respond, what to say, how to be.
“Tank yup, Rollo,” is all I can think to say, so I say it, stupidly.Stupid... No. I don’t feel stupid for this. Looking at him now, I don’t feel stupid for anything.
His gaze has glazed a little bit, and he looks a little uncertain. My knees scrunch into my chest, the skin pulling, pulling, unlike his brow, which is softening, softening ... He edges away. Not a lot, but a little. Enough for me to feel a relief I didn’t know I needed pull all the way through my soul.
“Sorry,” I say. “I mean yesh. You can tou-ouch me, Roll-lo.”
He gives me a final skeptical look, which fills me with another wave of relief—more like calm—and I clear up any indecision he might still have by reaching for him first. Shoot. My palms are all bloody and scraped up. I hesitate, turning my hand over so I can see the carnage. It really isn’t too bad, and I know I’ve definitely had worse.
Roland—Rollo now, according to my swollen tongue—reaches to close the distance between us, aiming to touch my arm with his hand, but I pull back again, more slowly this time, and manage to find my voice. “I dun want to ruin your clodes again.” I brandish my palm at him as a warning.
His expression turns from concern to incredulity to flat boredom. “You’ll buy me another set.”
I don’t bother reminding him that his paycheck triples mine and my entire company’s combined but instead feel an awkward smile coming on. I’m sure I look gruesome with blood seeping out from between my teeth, so I give him a closed-lip smile instead.
He rolls his eyes, and his warm hand slides around my outer forearm. I snort a little laugh as he pulls me into him, the force enough to send my buttery limbs sprawling in every direction. He doesn’t make a sound, though, doesn’t make fun of me. He just gathers me up against his chest, which is a freaking radiator against my side. It makes me smile.
“Something funny or you just losing your mind?” He’s sitting cross-legged, my feet between his legs, my butt perched up on one ofhis thighs, his left arm wrapped around my back. He’s as warm as a blisteringly hot summer day.
I smile and blurt, “Rollo, you ... you’re hot.”
“You coming on to me?”
Mortification hits me, but I have the strangest sense that he’s notupsetby what I’ve said. His face doesn’t hold one single hint of a smile, but he doesn’t seem angry. Well, he seems a little angry. He always seems a little angry. Right now, he seems angry at my hands.
“That’s no wh-I meant,” I say in a small voice, my tongue starting to really hurt.
