Chapter 12 Vanguard
VANGUARD
I can’t remember the last time I had a woman in my penthouse. It was either one of the hosts from a morning show for a segment on famous penthouses, or it was the time I came home from an event early and interrupted the cleaning lady, Sylvia, scaring her half to death. Either way, it’s been awhile.
And now, Mia is here, after I picked her up this morning for a continuation of the interview.
She wanted someplace with no watchers, no handlers, and I knew this was pretty much the only place we could have total privacy.
Danny is, of course, on the roof above keeping watch, but thankfully, he’ll stay there and let us be.
“So?” I ask, suddenly caring about her opinion on my not so humble abode.
I watch Mia move through my living room, her fingers trailing along the back of the leather sofa, her eyes cataloging everything.
“It’s very…” She pauses, searching for the word. “Clean.”
“You say that like it’s an insult.”
“It’s not.”
“Well, I do have a cleaning lady.”
She turns to face me, that sharp little smile playing at her lips. “It doesn’t look lived in. It looks like a showroom. Or a hotel.”
She’s not wrong. I’ve been here two years, and the place still feels like it belongs to someone else, like I’m just passing through, waiting for someone to tell me where I actually live. Someplace I can really call home. I’m not sure if that place will ever exist for me.
“I’m not home much,” I say. “Busy saving the world and all that.”
“Mmm.” She doesn’t sound convinced. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s a truth.” She moves toward the windows, the afternoon light catching the faint strands of gold in her dark hair.
She’s wearing jeans today that make her ass look fucking fantastic, along with a soft sweater that keeps slipping off one shoulder, revealing a lacy bra strap that’s been driving me insane.
“You can have more than one, you know. Most people do.”
I don’t have a response to that, so I head for the kitchen instead. “You hungry? You bring your lactose intolerance pills? I make a mean grilled cheese.”
“A mean grilled cheese,” she comments, sounding amused. She follows me, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. “America’s superhero, domestic god.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, darlin’.” I pull out bread, butter, cheese, mayo, and the jar of pickled jalapenos I keep in the back of the fridge. “This is my specialty. Secret family recipe.”
“Your family had a secret grilled cheese recipe?”
“Well, I did. A secret everything recipe.” I start buttering the bread, the familiar motions settling something in my chest. “When you’re poor, you learn to make food stretch. My mom wasn’t much of a cook even when she was sober, which wasn’t often, so I figured things out.”
Mia is quiet for a moment. When I glance up, she’s watching me with an expression I can’t read.
“You cooked for Emma then.”
“Yeah.” Hearing her name still feels like a punch, but it’s softer now.
Dulled. “Grilled cheese was her favorite. She liked it with tomato soup, but we couldn’t always afford both, so sometimes, it was just the sandwich.
We always had jalapenos in the garden, though, and cheese was cheap. And for dessert…”
I trail off, the memory catching me off guard. Emma at the kitchen table, five years old, swinging her feet because they didn’t reach the floor yet, her face lighting up when I brought over the plate.
“Cinnamon toast,” I finish, back in the present. “Bread and butter, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Quick and cheap and easy. She thought it was the best thing in the world.”
“That’s sweet.”
“It was sweet. It was also survival.” I lay the jalapenos on the cheese, more than I’d normally use because I want to see if she can handle the heat.
“Mom would be passed out on the couch or in her bedroom. Dad would be God knows where—the barn, probably, or just driving around, avoiding coming home. And Emma would be hungry, so I’d make us something. ”
I press the sandwich together and slide it into the hot pan. The butter sizzles, and the smell of melting cheese fills the kitchen.
“How old were you?” Mia asks quietly.
“When I started cooking? Eight, maybe nine. By ten, I had a whole repertoire. Grilled cheese, scrambled eggs, boxed mac and cheese if we were feeling fancy. Plenty of homemade hot sauce to go with that one.” I flip the sandwich, checking that the bottom is golden brown.
“Emma used to say I should open a restaurant. Nate’s Diner.
She had the whole thing planned out—the menu, the decorations, where it would be located. ”
“And where was that?” she asks, swallowing a LactoEase pill with a can of mineral water I open for her.
“Main Street in Livingston, right next to the hardware store.” I smile despite myself.
Nostalgia can feel like a drug sometimes.
“She said it needed to be somewhere people could walk to, because not everyone had cars. She was always thinking about stuff like that. About other people. About the planet.”
The sandwich is done. I slide it onto a plate, cut it diagonally—the only correct way—and push it across the counter toward her.
“Eat up,” I say. “Then tell me I’m not a culinary genius.”
She picks up half the sandwich and takes a bite. Her eyes widen immediately, and I watch her chew, waiting for the jalapeno to hit.
There it is.
“Oh my God,” she says, fanning her mouth. “That’s—”
“Too hot?”
“No.” She takes another bite, bigger this time. “That’s incredible. What the hell?”
I try not to let my grin get cocky. “Told you. Secret family recipe.”
“There’s no way this is just grilled cheese.” She’s already halfway through the first half, and something warm spreads through my chest at the sight. “What’s your secret?”
“Butter on the outside, mayo on the inside. And the jalapenos have to be pickled, not fresh. Fresh ones are too sharp. These have more depth and just a touch of sweetness.”
“Mayo on the inside,” she repeats. “That’s disgusting and brilliant.”
“Story of my life.”
She finishes the first half and reaches for the second, and I realize I’m just standing here, watching her eat like a fucking creep.
I make myself another sandwich, more to have something to do with my hands than because I’m hungry.
The domesticity of this—the two of us in my kitchen, sunlight streaming through the windows, the smell of butter and cheese—feels dangerous, like something I could get used to.
Can’t have that.
“So,” Mia says, licking a smear of cheese off her thumb in a way that makes my dick twitch, “shall we continue the interview? Or are you just going to feed me until I forget why I’m here?”
“That was the plan, actually. Death by grilled cheese. Very slow, very delicious.”
“Morbid. I like it.” She pulls out her tablet and sets it on the counter, tapping the screen to bring up her notes. “Where were we? I believe you were about to tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets.”
“Oh, was I?”
“You were. You just didn’t know it yet.”
I flip my sandwich, buying time. “What do you want to know?”
“What do you do when you’re not saving the world? When there’s no crisis, no press appearance, no Dr Julia Van Veen breathing down your neck.”
“This.” I gesture vaguely at the penthouse. “I come here. I exist. Sometimes, I watch TV.”
“What do you watch?”
“Whatever’s on. Old movies, mostly. The kind they don’t make anymore.”
“Like what? Iron Man?”
“Like Casablanca. The Maltese Falcon. Anything with Bogart.”
“Oh, ancient films. Got it.”
I slide my sandwich onto a plate but don’t eat it.
“Emma got me into them. She had this theory that old movies were better because people had to actually talk to each other. No explosions, no CGI, no AI, just dialogue and chemistry. You could tell all the story you needed to tell with just two people in a room.”
“She sounds smart.”
“She was the smartest person I ever knew,” I tell her. “Smarter than me, that’s for damn sure. She could’ve done anything, been anything.”
“But she chose activism.”
“She chose to give a shit.” I meet Mia’s eyes across the counter. “That’s what got her killed. Caring too much about people who couldn’t care less about her.”
The silence that follows is heavy, charged with things I don’t know how to say. Once again, I feel I’ve said too much. Mia sets down her tablet, her expression softening in a way that makes my heart feel water-logged.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “For what happened to her. For all of it.”
“Yeah.” I look away, out the windows at the city sprawling below, at life going on. “Me too.”
She’s about to say something else—I can see the words forming on her lips—when my watch buzzes.
No. Not now.
I glance at the screen. Emergency alert. Art heist in progress. MoMA. Armed suspects, civilian hostages.
Fuck.
“I have to go,” I say, already moving toward my bedroom.
“What? Now?”
“Armed robbery at the MoMA. Hostages.” I reach the closet in my bedroom, grabbing my suit.
Contrary to popular belief, in emergencies like this, I pull it on over my existing clothes to save time.
The nanotech in the fabric makes it slide over my shirt and jeans like a second skin, familiar and suffocating all at once.
“I’ll notify Danny on the roof. He’ll take you home in a minute. ”
“Nate—”
I stop. She’s never called me that before. Just Vanguard, like everyone else.
“Be careful,” she says quietly.
Something twists against my ribs. It makes me want to cross the room, cup her face in my hands, and kiss her until neither of us can breathe.
But that’s all too much, too soon for what we are to each other.
Because she is just a journalist doing her job.
So, I just nod, open the glass doors, step onto the balcony, and launch myself into the sky.
The Museum of Modern Art is chaos when I arrive a minute later.