Page 31 of All Superheroes Need PR
The COE campus is a sort of fortress. A single thirty-story tower sits in the middle of a ring of five lower buildings. Five massive glass balls, they look like the forgotten golf balls of giants, and through four of the glass domes you can see the dark green of tropical plants. In the fifth, the unique roof reflects the buildings and the blue of the sky, airplanes, clouds, and birds that pass overhead, while absorbing the glint of the sun. It was strange watching myself, Vanessa in my arms, asI touched down. I really did look ... like a hero. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. All I knew was that I liked the way Vanessa looked at me.
She’s trying not to look at me now while I make no effort to disguise the fact that I’m staring at her from where I’m standing against the wall. The room is a good size medical suite with a white tiled floor and bile-colored wallpaper.
She’s sitting up on the bed, drinking cranberry juice out of a little box, covered in Band-Aids, her hair looking ... My lip twitch doesn’t go unnoticed, not even by the woman who’s doing everything within her power tonotstare back at me.
“What?” she says, a tilt of her head that makes me want to weep. Every single thing she does affects me. My cock is ... being a fucking dick. My chest is itching. I scratch at it.
“You still mad at me?”
She pouts. When she realized toward the end of our flight that I had every intention of taking her to the doctor, she’d protested—albeit feebly. She was shaking so badly, I could barely understand her blathering, largely centered around coffee. I plan to get coffee with her after she’s been cleared, if she still wants that. How could I not?Sheaskedme. Yeah, she’d been in shock. Yeah, her adrenaline had been spiking like crazy. Yeah, she’d been hurt, too, but ... I’d still take it.
“Yes.”
“Dr. Larsen’s okay. She’s gonna let us out of here soon. Then we can get your coffee.”
“Yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“You want ... to get coffee? For the photo op, I mean?”
“Yeah, baby.” Her cheeks get bright red when I call her that, which makes me want to call her baby a thousand times over. I smirk and, when I glance at her hair again, smile outright.
“What?” she says in a higher pitch this time.
“You, uh ...” I lift my chin. “We’re gonna have to get you a swim cap for next time.”
It takes her a couple seconds to understand what I’m talking about. When she does, her blush spreads. She pats her hair down, but it doesn’t help. Buffeted about during our flight, her hair now sticks out in every direction.
“I ...” Her words die. They often do. I didn’t understand it at first, and then I had Mr. Singkham give me her file. Well, I stole the file because he’s old-school and likes hard copies too. Everything I read pissed me off, until I got to the bit about her finally getting adopted. The Theriot family was only meant to foster her. Not sure how they even got the gig considering they’d stopped fostering a few years earlier, shortly after they had their first biological child. But they did, and when she landed in their laps, they had six months with her before they filed the adoption paperwork. Her file got a lot thinner after that.
I get why she doesn’t like to be touched now, and I’m pissed at myself for having been so forward with her. I get why she doesn’t like to be yelled at and why she doesn’t respond well to anger. I’m gonna work on it. Just need her to have a little patience.Ijust need to have a little patience.
“Yeah?” I lift an eyebrow and wait.Patience.I mine for it with everything I’ve got.
She looks all over my face; like an explosion, I can feel her everywhere at once. And then she refocuses on my eyes, gaze flitting between them. I wonder what color they are now. My guess is white. My eyes had never changed to that color before we met.
She licks away the droplet of cranberry juice clinging to her bottom lip, and then she asks me the last thing I expect. “There’s going to be a next time?”
My bones lock up, and I struggle to breathe through the fire that pools in my abdomen. Is she ... flirting with me?
I went through a phase as an almost twenty-year-old in college when I leaned into the whole Forty-Eight thing and actually went to bars and out in public and let people try to talk to me. Women flirted with me so obviously, there wasn’t any mistaking their interest. It wasfucking boring. And though that phase was short and I haven’t revisited it since, I would have thought that the lessons I learned then would have lingered, but right now ... I’m not sure if she’s flirting with me intentionally or if I’m just being a prick.
I feel my face heat and look away from her, nodding absently at the ugly wallpaper. “Probably. Given your track record.” I’d meant them as a joke, but my words sound harsh.
She doesn’t respond.
Fucking hell.I look back at her and see a full-body shiver come over her again. “You cold?” My eyebrows knot.
She shakes her head, then nods, then shakes her head again and sucks down the rest of her cranberry juice, the tiny straw making gurgling sounds as she finishes the box. “I think it’s still the shock. I haven’t been that clumsy in a while.”
“Mr. Singkham’s boardroom begs to differ.”
Her jaw drops. “You are such a jerk!” She throws her cranberry juice box at me, and it falls far short.
I laugh. The gong is clanging again. The itching is worse. I inhale and exhale and try to forget the strange terror I felt when I saw her lying on the park pathway covered in blood, an angry mob surrounding her. It took me a couple seconds to realize the mob was made up of kids who were being pretty fucking rad and stepping up in her defense. A few of them showed me pictures and videos of the reporters who had harassed her. I’ve got them memorized. It won’t be hard to find them, and when I do, I’ll incinerate at least a couple of their organs.
They won’t die right away. It’ll be slow. Painful. So many doctors wondering how this could have happened. They’ll write medical reports and scientific papers about it, and most importantly of all, nothing like that’s ever gonna happen to her again because I’m not gonna let her out of my sight. Enough.Kidnap kidnap kidn—no. I’ve got a better idea than that.
