Chapter 4
chapter
four
Leo
She’s so pretty I’m having a hard time not staring at her. Everything about her. The costume itself is hard to ignore. That dress fits her so well. And I will not be the jerk who stares at her cleavage, but damn, it looks good.
Juniper.
Even her name is pretty.
I meant what I told her, that kiss was the best I’ve had in years.
In fact, everything I’ve said to her today has been the complete truth.
Not that I’m accustomed to lying to people, I’m not.
At all. But I also know that truth has a tendency to get stretched at events like this when many of us are pretending to be someone else. If only for a little while.
Her hand fits in mine like that’s where it belongs.
I’m aware that’s an absurd thing to think about a woman I’ve known for twenty minutes, but I think it anyway.
We walk out of the food area, Juniper’s fingers laced through mine and a half-eaten pretzel in my other hand.
Evidently I’m still capable of multitasking even when my brain has mostly stopped working in complete sentences.
The exhibition hall swallows us back up immediately.
Noise, color, the low roar of several thousand people having the best weekend of their year all at once.
Somewhere ahead, a guy in full Iron Man armor is doing the repulsor pose for a line of kids that stretches halfway down the aisle.
There’s a woman dressed as Princess Mononoke who is laughing so hard at something her friend said that she has to lean on a vendor table to stay upright.
“Okay, hang on.” Juniper stops walking, tugging me gently to a stop with her. “People keep looking at you and I want to know if it’s because you’re unfairly attractive or because the costume is actually that good.”
I cock a brow at her. “Bold of you to assume it’s not both.”
“It’s definitely not both. Not that you aren’t attractive and that the costume is good.
Both are true, but stop and stare worthy?
I’m not so certain. I need a control group.
” She tilts her head, studying me with the same focused, assessing look she gave my shield twenty minutes ago. “Turn around. Slowly. For science.”
I turn around. Slowly. For science.
“Yeah, okay, it’s the costume,” she says, when I’ve completed the rotation. “Mostly the costume.”
“Mostly. I think maybe you were just checking me out.”
She shrugs. “You’ll never know.”
“How do you know they’re not staring at you for being unfairly attractive in a gorgeous costume?” I ask.
She tsks her tongue as if the mere thought is completely ludicrous.
A woman in a Black Widow costume stops us before I can argue the point further, asking if she can grab a photo—“the detail on that shield is unreal”—and Juniper steps graciously out of frame.
I pose with the shield raised the way I’ve practiced approximately forty times in my bathroom mirror at home, which I will not be telling anyone, ever, including Juniper.
“You’re good at that,” Juniper says, once the woman’s thanked us and moved on.
“At what?”
“Posing. Some people freeze up. You just—” she does a small, surprisingly accurate impression of the stance I just held, “—commit.”
“Four months of practice.”
“Practicing the pose specifically?”
“Dammit, I litereally just mentally swore I would not admit that to you.”
She giggles. “Please tell me you did it in your bathroom mirror wearing your tighty-whities.”
I laugh, despite myself. “First of all, I do not wear tighty-whities. Secondly, I mostly had to practice being comfortable enough in the costume that posing didn’t make me feel like a complete moron.
” I glance down at her, at the way the silk of her skirt is catching the overhead lights even just standing still. “You don’t have that problem.”
“I’ve had years of practice not caring what I look like to strangers.
And some family members, to be honest.” She says it lightly, like it’s nothing, but there’s a current underneath.
“It helps that today I get to be three thousand years old and devastatingly beautiful instead of, you know. Myself.”
“You’re devastatingly beautiful as yourself,” I say, before I can stop myself.
She glances up at me, something flickering across her face. Surprise, maybe, or pleasure? Whatever it is causes the back of my neck go warm in a way that has nothing to do with the convention center’s questionable air conditioning.
“I can’t tell if you’re just really smooth and these are lines or if you’re truthful,” she says, but she’s smiling when she says it, and her hand tightens slightly around mine as we start walking again.
We get stopped twice more before we make it halfway down the hall.
Once by a group of teenagers who want to know where I got the shield (“I made it,” I tell them, and watch their faces do the math on that and come up impressed), and once by an older guy in a faded, decades-old Star Trek uniform who tells Juniper her costume is the best Arwen he’s ever seen, and means it so sincerely that she goes a little pink and has to look at her shoes.
“How long did yours actually take?” I ask her, once we’re moving again. “The real number. Not the number you tell people who ask politely and don’t actually want the real number.”
“You want the real number?”
“I want the real number.”
She exhales, like she’s bracing herself.
“Five months. Give or take. There was a month in there where I was hand-embroidering the underlayer at two in the morning because I’d convinced myself machine stitching would look wrong under convention lighting.
” She glances up at the track lighting up above us.
“Which, as it turns out, would not have mattered. But I didn’t know that at the time, so.
” She shrugs, like this is a perfectly reasonable amount of effort to put into something. “Five months.”
“That tracks. The detail on it is—” I look at her properly, the full effect of it, the way the layers move when she breathes. “It’s not costume-quality. It’s costume-design-quality. There’s a difference.”
“You can tell the difference?”
“I printed my shield from my 3D printer. Then spent a couple of weeks painting it, then another three weeks getting the weathering right because I decided a shield that’s blocked a hundred imaginary bullets should look like it’s blocked a hundred imaginary bullets. I can tell the difference.”
She laughs, delighted, like I’ve said something better than I think I have. “You are a nerd,” she says as if it’s a big discovery.
“I think it’s safe to say that about everyone in here.” I lean closer to her. “Unless you know something I don’t.”
“Well, not everyone is okay being called a nerd,” she says.
“True. But I’m not one of them. I’m a card-carrying member of the Hill Country of Texas Nerd Squad.”
Her lips fold in, then she burst out laughing. “Did you just make that up?”
“Affirmative.” I toss my pretzel and give her a smile. “I’m pretty sure you know now that I have no game so everything I’ve said has been completely honesty.”
“I’m beginning to put that together,” she says. “Okay, so, yours. You made the shield, but what about the rest?”
“I made it.”
She stops walking again, properly this time, turning to actually look at the chest plate like she’s reassessing it from scratch. “All of it?”
“Most of it. The plates are 3D printed. I designed the molds myself, printed them, sanded and primed and painted everything by hand.” I tug on the tight blue against my skin.
“The base layer’s spandex, molded to fit, which is part of why it reads as—” I gesture vaguely at my own torso, slightly self-conscious about finishing the sentence.
“As built like an actual superhero,” she finishes, unhelpfully.
“That wasn’t where I was going with that.”
“It’s where I’m going with it.” Her eyes do a quick, almost involuntary sweep, and then she seems to catch herself doing it and looks immediately, fiercely interested in a nearby banner advertising a panel about practical effects in low-budget filmmaking.
“Anyway. 3D printer. Very impressive. Very creative. I respect it.”
“High praise.”
“The highest.” She glances back at me, the pink in her cheeks not entirely gone. “I didn’t peg you as a 3D-printer-and-CAD-software type, if I’m honest.”
“What did you peg me as?”
“I don’t know. Foam and hot glue, like the rest of us mortals.”
“I started with foam and hot glue,” I tell her. “Upgraded once I got tired of things falling apart by hour six of a con day.”
“Disgustingly practical.”
“I contain multitudes.”
We’re nearly to the panel hall. I see the sign for it up ahead, a hand-lettered placard propped on an easel, a line already forming along the wall. That’s when I see him. Eric, she called him.
I recognize him immediately, even without the Klingon prosthetics fully visible from this angle, mostly because Juniper’s whole body changes the second she spots him. Her hand goes tight in mine, not panicked exactly, but braced, the way you brace before a wave you’ve already seen coming.
He’s closer than I expected. Closer than either of us has time to avoid.
“Juniper!” He says her name like he’s pleasantly surprised, though something underneath it doesn’t match the tone.
There’s something coiled and a little too sharp at the edges.
He’s holding a convention program rolled up in one fist, the bat’leth still slung across his back, the forehead ridges looking…
not at all how I bet he thinks they look.
Wow, that’s really unfortunate. And very penile. I swallow a grin.
“Eric.” Juniper’s voice goes carefully even. “Hey.”
His eyes drop to our joined hands. Linger there a beat too long.
“Wow.” He says it slowly, like he’s working out a math problem he doesn’t love the answer to. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”
“It’s—” Juniper starts.
“Must have slipped your mind,” Eric says, before she can finish, and the smile on his face is beginning to look a little too smiley. The humor definitely doesn’t meet his eyes.
I do not like him. At all.
“Funny, considering how many times we talked about today. You’d think that would’ve come up.”
I feel something in my chest go very still and very deliberate, the way it does right before I say something I mean to land.
“I’m Leo,” I say, and extend my free hand, easy, unhurried, the picture of a man with absolutely nothing to prove. “Juniper mentioned you two met last spring. Small world.”
Eric looks at my hand for a second too long before he shakes it, his grip a little harder than it needs to be, like he’s testing something. I let him. I don’t test back. There’s no version of this where I need to.
“Yeah,” he says. “Small world.”
“Great costume, by the way,” I add, because I can be magnanimous.
Even if I am being somewhat dishonest. Truthfully the costume itself isn’t terrible.
Though his uniform is the wrong damn color.
Captain red on a Klingon. I nearly shake my head.
Instead I tilt my chin up. “The ridges are a nice touch.”
Eric’s jaw works. “Thanks. I made them.”
The silence that follows has a texture to it, thick and a little dangerous, and I watch Juniper’s free hand curl slightly at her side — not scared, I don’t think. Just bracing.
“We should probably get in line,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward the panel hall behind Eric. “Panel’s about to start.”
“Right.” Eric’s gaze flicks between the two of us one more time, doing some final tally I can’t see the math on. “Have fun, I guess.”
“You too,” Juniper says, and there’s real effort in keeping it pleasant, in not letting the relief show too plainly on her face.
He walks off without another word, the bat’leth swaying dangerously close to a nearby pop-up tent as he goes, and Juniper doesn’t relax until he’s a solid twenty feet away, swallowed back into the crowd.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” She exhales, long and slow, like she’s been holding that breath since the food court. “He’s annoyed. Did you catch that he’s annoyed?”
“I caught it.”
“Good. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.” She glances up at me, something rueful tugging at her mouth. “Thank you. For the handshake thing. That was very alpha-male-protector of you.”
“I was being polite.”
“You were absolutely posturing.”
I laugh. “A little,” I admit. “He had it coming.”
She laughs—a real one, loose with relief—and tugs my hand toward the line forming outside the panel hall, and I let her pull me along, watching the tension drain slowly out of her shoulders with every step that puts more distance between us and a guy in bad Klingon prosthetics.
When we’re in line, I pull her back to my front and lean down to her ear. “Later we must discuss that atrocity on top of his head.”
She barks out a laugh. Then spins in my arms. She bites down on her lip. “Come closer,” she says quietly.
I lean down, unsure if she’s going to tell me a secret or kiss me again. I’m fine with either option.
“He made it himself. Did you hear that part?”
“I did.”
“Do you think he used his own foreskin?”
And that’s when I realize I’m pretty sure I’m falling in love with this woman.