Chapter 5
chapter
five
Juniper
The panel hall is packed, the kind of packed where folding chairs get pulled in from somewhere to handle the overflow. Leo and I end up wedged into a row near the back, close enough to the wall that his shoulder presses against mine the second we sit down.
He doesn’t move it away. Neither do I.
Somewhere around the second question from the moderator, Leo’s arm migrates from the back of his own chair to the back of mine. Then sometime after that, it’s not behind my chair anymore, it’s around me, easy and unhurried, like he’s been doing it for years instead of approximately two hours.
I should probably have something clever to say about that.
I don’t. I just lean into it.
Because the truth is, none of it feels forced or false.
I try to remind myself that he is pretending to be my boyfriend.
But for right now I’m choosing to simply enjoy it.
Because Leo is exactly the kind of man I’ve always wanted.
I was beginning to think that the charming, funny, nerdy, wicked smart man was a myth.
Leo takes that and says ‘hold my beer. I’m not only all of that, I’m absurdly handsome too.’
I chuckle to myself which earns my shoulder a little squeeze from Leo’s hand.
The panel itself is good. Better than good, actually. Three people who clearly love this material discussing the kind of behind-the-scenes detail that makes a franchise feel less like a product and more like something somebody bled for. I’m absorbing a good seventy percent of it.
The other thirty percent of my attention is occupied by the warm, solid weight of Leo’s arm. And the way he laughs, low and real, at exactly the right moments.
I spot Eric twice during the panel.
Once near the side aisle, arms crossed, watching us instead of the stage.
Once again closer to the end, when the lights come up after they played some clips from the behind the scenes documentary that’s scheduled to release next year.
Eric’s expression is doing something complicated and unflattering that I choose not to spend any more time interpreting.
My sister was right, I’ll give her that. Eric is definitely the type of man to not want to engage in competition with another man.
I decide, somewhere in there, that I’m not going to let him have any more of my attention today than he’s already gotten. It’s a small decision and it feels disproportionately good to make it.
“You good?” Leo asks quietly, leaning down during the Q&A, his mouth close enough to my ear that I feel the question more than hear it.
“I’m great,” I say. I turn my head to face him and he’s leaned so close our noses nearly brush. I swallow thickly and focus on how ridiculously long his eyelashes are. “Why?”
“You went somewhere for a second.”
“Just doing some mental house cleaning.” I try not to look at his mouth. I fail. “Deciding what gets my attention today. Turns out the list is shorter than I expected.”
Something in his face shifts at that. “I’m very glad to hear that.”
We go from that panel to two more. By the time the last panel lets out, my feet have officially entered open rebellion against the choices I’ve made today.
The prospect of real food—not con food, not a protein bar, actual sitting-down food—has become the single most appealing idea I’ve encountered all day.
“Dinner,” Leo says, like he’s reading my mind. “Real dinner. Out of costume.”
“You’re trying to get me out of costume.”
“I am trying to get you into a chair that isn’t load-bearing convention furniture,” he says. “I also would like to ensure you eat something besides a protein bar and a bag of nuts. The costume thing is incidental.”
I smirk at him. “Sure it is.”
“There’s a place near the hotel. Decent pizza. I scouted it on the drive in, which I recognize makes me sound like I had a whole plan, and I want to clarify that the plan was just find food, not meet a beautiful woman and seduce her with mozzarella.”
I laugh, surprised out of me again, which seems to be becoming a theme. “Mozzarella seduction. Not something I’ve ever considered, but it definitely sounds promising.”
We part ways in the hotel lobby, after a brief, slightly absurd negotiation over whether forty-five minutes is enough time to get human again.
Which is debatable. The dress isn’t the easiest to get out of alone, though I do have some tricks to make it manageable.
But there’s also the whole air myself out because we live in Texas and even with air conditioning, you sweat.
Especially when your costume involves crushed velvet and silk.
By the time I make it down to the lobby, I’ve already had three arguments and subsequent negotiations with myself. Ultimately, I decided on a nerdy t-shirt with my jeans, my hair up in a ponytail because it’s more me, but I left on my good bra.
I’m seven minutes late and mildly out of breath from the elevator sprint. I’m already mentally formulating my speech on why I’m late.
Leo’s already there.
And every single thought I have evaporates on contact.
He’s in a plain gray t-shirt and dark jeans, hair slightly damp like he just got out of the shower. The glasses are the same, that aww-shucks grin is the same, but I’m registering that I had not completely comprehended what was costume and what was actual Leo.
The absence of the costume does something genuinely unfair to my ability to function as a person.
The chest plate, it turns out, was not doing nearly as much work as I assumed.
The shoulders are real. The forearms, visible now in a way they weren’t under three layers of molded plastic, are real.
His left arm sports a brightly colored Marvel-inspired tattoo sleeve that I definitely want to investigate closer.
He looks like exactly what he is—a toned, solidly built, devastatingly unbothered man waiting in a hotel lobby, and I am, for one full humiliating second, struck completely speechless.
“You’re staring,” he says, when I get close enough.
“I’m allowed. You stared at my dress for an entire panel.”
“Your dress was historically significant.”
“My dress was a costume.”
“A historically significant costume.” He offers his arm, half-joking, half not, and I take it. “C’mon. I made a reservation under a fake name because I thought it would be funny.”
“What name?”
“Steve Rogers.”
“You did not.”
“I absolutely did. I am nothing if not fully committed to my character.”
The pizza place is small, warm, the kind of low-lit, red-vinyl-booth establishment that exists in every town in America and somehow always smells exactly the same.
We get a corner booth. Leo orders something with too many toppings and defends it passionately when I question his choices, and somewhere between the breadsticks and the first slice, the conversation drifts somewhere realer than costumes and panels.
“So,” he says. “Tell me something true. Not con small talk. Real.”
“That’s a big ask for someone who’s known me for six hours.”
“Since you ambush-kissed me, I think we’re past small talk.”
“Okay.” I turn my glass in a slow circle on the table, deciding where to start.
“It’s me and my sister, mostly. Clover. Has been since I was seventeen and she was twenty.
” I glance up at him. “Our parents died. Car accident. I was finishing up high school, she was in the middle of college and instead of either of us getting to have the year we probably should’ve had to fall apart, we just—didn’t.
We held it together. For each other, mostly. Sometimes very badly.”
Leo doesn’t rush to fill the silence after that, which I notice and truly appreciate. He just waits, attentive, like he’s actually taking it in instead of formulating his next sentence.
“Clover handled it by getting busier,” I continue.
“Work, plans, constant motion. She added a major, then somehow managed to combine a master’s degree in there somewhere.
I handled it by disappearing into other worlds for a while.
Books, then shows, then—” I gesture at myself, at the general concept of who I’ve become, “—this. The costumes. The cons. It started as an escape hatch and turned into something I actually love, which I think happens more than people admit. You don’t always get to pick what saves you.
Sometimes it’s just whatever’s closest.”
“That’s not nothing,” he says quietly. “That’s a very real thing. And you and your sister did an amazing job with each other.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s also why Clover worries about me more than I’d like,” I admit.
“She thinks I disappear into fictional worlds because real ones feel too unpredictable. She’s probably not wrong.
But I also think she copes by jumping from one thing to the next, never letting herself completely settle.
” I laugh. “We’ve never once said that to each other’s faces, so.
” I shrug. “We’re a work in progress. Both of us. ”
“For what it’s worth,” Leo says, “disappearing into a world you built with your own hands for five months straight doesn’t sound like running from something to me. It sounds like choosing something. Those aren’t the same.”
I look at him for a second too long, something warm settling low in my chest that has nothing to do with the pizza.
“Nerdy, creative, chivalrous, and insightful. Leo, you might actually be a super hero.”
“You forgot hot,” he says.
“What?”
“Earlier, you referred to me as the hot stranger. I just wanted to make sure hot stayed on your list.”
“Noted. Now it’s your turn,” I say. “Real thing. Go.”
He exhales, leans back against the booth. “Ranch family. Big one. My dad’s side has been working the same land outside a town called Saddle Creek for three generations. Cattle, mostly. I grew up the way you’d expect—up before sunrise, callused hands by age nine, the whole thing.”
“You don’t strike me as a rancher.”
“I’m not, anymore, not really. I help out when I’m needed, but I went a different direction professionally.
Tech. Software, mostly. I started building things on an old laptop in the barn office when I was supposed to be doing chores, and it sort of snowballed from there.
” He says it simply, no false modesty, no inflation either, just a fact about his life laid flat on the table between us.
“My dad never made me feel like I was betraying the family by not wanting to inherit the cattle business. Which, looking back, is not a small thing. A lot of dads would’ve made that harder than he did. ”
“Sounds like a good dad.”
“He’s the best person I know,” Leo says, and there’s no hesitation in it at all, no qualifier.
“It was just the two of us growing up, mostly. My mom wasn’t really built for parenting.
She tried, for a while, or said she did.
It didn’t take.” He says this lightly, the way you’d mention old weather, a storm that passed through a long time ago and left without much wreckage worth describing.
“She’s still around. We’re cordial. She calls on my birthday and other major holidays.
But she doesn’t still live in our small town. ”
“You don’t seem angry,” I say.
“My dad raised me to believe holding onto anger adds to your burden in a way that prevents you from carrying anything else.” He lifts one muscular shoulder in a shrug. “Made sense. So I let go of the anger. KiKi is just KiKi. My dad though, he was all the parent I needed.”
“So. Ranch kid. Tech nerd. Card-carrying member of the Hill Country of Texas Nerd Squad. What else am I missing?”
“That’s pretty much it. But I should mention that the HCoTNS is a real organization. Very prestigious. Hard to get into.”
I laugh, and it loosens something in my chest that’s been sitting heavy since the part about his mother. “Are you taking applicants?”
“You interested?”
“Obviously. Though I’m not exactly in the Hill Country.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Fair enough. For what it’s worth,” I say, echoing him, “raising a kid mostly solo and still managing to make him this—” I gesture at all of him, the easy shoulders, the unhurried calm, the way he’s been steady and warm through every single version of today, “—isn’t a small thing either.
That’s not luck. Somebody did real work there. ”
Something flickers across his face. More surprise maybe. A little embarrassment.
“Yeah,” he says, quiet. “He did.”
We sit with that for a second, the restaurant noise washing pleasantly around us. I realize in that moment that this is the best date I’ve ever had. And it’s not even a real date.