Chapter 9 #2
Maybe I am being a dick about this. I nod to the Channel 6 camera guy stowing his gear in the van. “Fine, we’ll talk. But you’re still not getting your interview.”
“Yeah, just us,” she agrees. Lacey’s eyes flick from me to the cart guy as he chooses then to hand us our sandwiches. I can see her holding back a question.
Some regular people do know me. I stop by the same corner stores and food trucks often.
I don’t fully know what their assumed reasons are for why I’m blue, but the older man who runs the breakfast sandwich truck has made a couple comments to me about tattoo removal.
The rest have been polite and just not brought it up with me.
I’m not keen to have Lacey’s coworker keep looking at me, so I motion for her to follow me. We duck into a nearby alley.
I tug the cold metal ladder of one building’s fire escapes down. She purses her lips a moment and then starts to climb the ladder.
“So, uh, how did you get to be in your line of work, professional damsel and all that?”
Yeah, that’s the way to not sound jealous.
Lacey snorts, seeing right through me. “Are you asking how I met Clayton?”
“Maybe I am, so what?” I reply, and she rolls her eyes. “So, he swept you off your feet, flew into the sunset?”
“Well . . . no, there was some flying off into the sunset,” she says, getting to the roof before me.
She offers a hand to me to hold while I step up onto the roof with her.
“He started helping me with my investigation of the ooze, shared the things he knew about all the new mutant appearances, the people who were researching the ooze that he had connections with through his company. Helped me find leads.”
Something in her expression shutters as she lets go of my hand and turns away.
“It was really helpful at first, but I’ve hit a block with it lately.
A lot of my leads have become dead ends.
Maestro was the only one who seemed to have some kind of infrastructure supporting him.
All the others . . . well, a lot of the super powered mutants we see don’t have much to say beyond grunting.
The mutations leave them kinda ’roided up. ”
“Dead ends, huh?”
She crosses the rooftop to where a boxy vent comes up to knee height on her and dusts a section free of snow with a gloved hand. I just sit in the snow next to her while she unwraps her toasted plain with butter monstrosity of a bagel choice.
For a minute or two, we sit in silence, focused on our sandwiches. This wasn’t what I had envisioned before when I said we should get something to eat together. Mine doesn’t even have the spicy mustard on it, but I’m not willing to go back down to get it.
“I’m sorry about that night Steel showed up. He isn’t usually like that,” she offers again, primly brushing a couple crumbs off the corner of her mouth with a finger. Her eyelashes flutter against her cheek as she stares at the ground.
“I mean, it’s on par with all my other interactions with him.”
She grimaces. “He’s just . . . overprotective.”
“You could have told him you had company over, that he needs to give you some space.”
Lacey gives me a look like I don’t even know the half of it. “I meant to have some more distance between us after the breakup, but most people still know me as his girlfriend, and so they usually come after me to get to him. I think he feels really bad that it’s been disrupting my life so much.”
I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on their conversation while I was hanging off the balcony before, but that was not the impression I’d gotten from him.
“But there are worse things than being inconvenienced, you know? I understand his fears. He’s so afraid to show any weakness even for a second because this whole city relies on him—”
At that point I can’t hold back a noise of disbelief. Fucking Steel Heel propaganda over here.
“They do not. Come on. More people rely on the city bus line than him, and it’s never on time.”
Lacey purses her lips at that, and I decide to back off. As perfectly legitimate as my grievances with this guy are, she probably just sees it as unnecessary dunking on him.
Raising my hands in mock surrender, I tell her, “Just saying, it seems like you spend a lot of time managing his emotions for him. You’re trying so hard not to hurt his feelings about this that you’ll let him run your life.”
“Because I want to be emotionally mature and not, like, an abusive asshole,” she says with such insistence that I wonder if I missed part of this conversation. Are we still talking about the same things? “It’s shitty to put ultimatums on people like that.”
“Asking him for a bit of space is an ultimatum?”
She blows out a breath, looking a little annoyed with me. “Look, I don’t know how to explain it better. I’m messing it up, probably, and that’s why it doesn’t make sense.”
It’s making a lot of sense to me right now. I raise an eyebrow, and just say, “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You had that tone. It makes it sound way worse than it is.” She shakes her head and says, “I don’t want to keep talking about this.”
“Yeah, ok.” I nod slowly, skeptically.
She’s quiet for a long time. I don’t know what else to say to her, so I just ramble in any direction. “I, um, heard it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, but my dad says, I mean, uh, Maestro—”
“Hang on, Maestro’s your dad?”
“Well, yeah. He raised me.” I wince. I can’t imagine she wouldn’t be supposed to know that for any reason, but it’s still probably more than I should have shared. On the other hand, I’m just glad to change the topic.
“I mean, I consider him my dad, he grew me in a test tube all by himself. Not the one you saw, a smaller one. I don’t know if we actually share DNA.
Vin says Dad made me out of a possum, a lizard, and a bat, but like, that’s just shit all older brothers say.
And like, people get their panties all twisted over what’s a ‘real legal family,’ but like why can’t a real family be like one really old dad and his two gene-spliced homunculi? ”
I grimace, realizing I am just rambling full speed through this instead of properly unpacking it. Actually, maybe my family is too difficult a subject, but I’m stuck with it, and she just keeps looking at me and nodding slowly, fascinated.
“Yeah, like, sure, my dad shouldn’t have been creating life unethically, but like, it technically isn’t illegal to do, and it’s been like over twenty years since. And while he doesn’t even do that anymore, any statute of limitations has gotta be up by now—”
Finally she interrupts me, frowning. “He stopped? But . . . all the mutant attacks—”
“Maestro isn’t a part of that. I mean, I would know. I have to wait outside his bathroom while he showers because we’re afraid he’s going to slip and fall again.”
It’s not a complaint, exactly. Sitting in the hallway for about twenty minutes isn’t difficult, but it’s the amount of times I’ve wondered if he would make a loud enough noise when he falls that I would hear it if he didn’t cry out.
“Again?” Lacey prompts, looking concerned. It sucks that she didn’t just say everyone’s dads just start falling over and it’s fine.
“Yeah, it was pretty scary the first time it happened. He hit his head, had this terrible purple bruise for weeks. I think Vin still feels responsible for it because he was home when it happened.”
My throat feels oddly tight around the words. I swallow.
“Dad’s getting older, he can’t do stuff like he used to.
He can’t fucking drive, that’s for sure, and yet he insists on driving.
God, I don’t know what I’m going to do with him when he gets worse.
I sure can’t put him in a senior home. I don’t want to, but sometimes I wonder what’s going to happen to him. ”
We lapse into silence then, as I start wondering what I’ll even do when he’s gone.
The family business? Fuck that. I can’t help but feel disillusioned from ambition after seeing what it’s done to Maestro.
He’s so absorbed in this vendetta over his research with Steel, that he’s wasting the time he has left with us on it.
“Actually, I don’t want to keep talking about this,” I say out loud, because if I don’t put that roadblock out there I’m just going to keep heading down this trail of thought.
Lacey nods quickly, her expression equally grim. “Um. Yeah. Ok. Uhh . . . are you planning on giving me my panties back?”
I nearly laugh from the whiplash. Fantastic. I would much rather be preoccupied with how horny I am for the unreachable girl than ponder my dad’s mortality. “Do you need them?”
“Yes, actually, you can’t just take one of my favorites like that.”
“You gonna walk out of here wearing two pairs?” I ask, even though I know full well the pair I stole from her are in a shoebox under my bed back at the hideout.
“Where’s this second pair coming from?”
Eyeing the brown stockings she’s wearing, the skirt that’s barely longer than her winter coat, my mouth goes dry. I manage to ask in a low hush, “Are you . . . not wearing underwear?”
She smiles and shrugs, tossing her hair in a way that makes me weak. “You’re too easy.”
“And you’re taking advantage of me,” I sigh, but the corner of my mouth tugs upward. Sometime since sitting down next to me on the vent, she scooted closer, until she’s practically up against me, leaning into my personal space like a cat twining itself between my ankles.
She’s so close, her head is just about leaning on my shoulder as she looks up at me. Her dark brown eyes are warm. Behind her, the sky is turning pink and purple, the glare of the harsh winter sunset catching in strands of her hair and making her glow.
Her features soften in surprise as I touch her face, brushing a snowflake off her cheek. “You know, I’m still thinking about the way you taste.”
She blushes, and turns away, a chilly wind slipping through as she puts an inch or two of space between us. “I know we said it’d be just the once . . .”
I wait for her to say it was a tease, that it shouldn’t count, but she doesn’t.
“If I’d had my time with you, I would have . . .” I trail off, a glint of sunlight across her lip gloss derailing me. The shape of her mouth shifts my brain out of whatever gear drives language.
“Yeah? You wanna finish that thought?”
“It’s a lot of thoughts.”
“I have time,” she offers, soft and breathy.
“It’s a checklist.” I swallow. The memory of that night heats my blood, tension creeping through my core.
“I wanna lick you till your thighs clamp around my head and I lose consciousness from lack of air. I want you to get on top and bounce you there and just rub your clit until you come, I want to be inside you when you do and feel it. And then I want you to sit on my face and smother me again.”
Lacey’s eyes grow a little wider with every new item on my list, and when I’m done, her cheeks are burning.
“There’s, uh . . .” She clears her throat, slightly flustered. “I don’t know that we could get to all of that in one night.”
“Well I would have come over earlier if I knew.” I sigh. It’s utterly impossible not to touch her face or lean in closer. I’m lost in her every detail. “I have dreamed about being smothered by your thighs for . . . probably longer than I should admit.”
“Don’t be such a romantic,” she scoffs, cheeks reddening and eyes rolling, but I spy the smile she fights against. She puts a hand on my chest, playing a moment with my sweatshirt’s strings; she looks up at me, such concern and care in her eyes.
I believe her when she offers gently, “If you ever do want to talk about the other stuff, though, you know how to find me.”
“Yeah, I’ll find you.” I’d take her up on that in a heartbeat, drop by on her balcony and just talk about anything for hours.
For a moment, neither of us speak. I wonder if she’s thinking about what it would mean to invite me up to her place a second time, this time on purpose.
I did promise her just the once, even if I didn’t get all the time I wanted to tease every possible delicious moan out of her.
As much as I want to beg for it, to promise we won’t even do over-the-pants stuff, I just want to goddamn hold her for a couple hours—I don’t want to push her and ask for another night.
Though, I can imagine at least one place that her billionaire ex-boyfriend won’t interrupt us.
“Fine, fine, I’ll show you where the ooze comes from, you don’t gotta torture me into it.” I sigh, throwing up my hands in defeat.
Lacey blinks in surprise but doesn’t ask what made me change my mind.
Nothing’s changed. We’re still on different sides. Not friends. Foes. Not fuckbuddies either. But I want more time with her, alone. Even if it’s just talking like this.
It’s not a date with Lacey for the record, but it is something. I’m sure the feeling will dissipate the minute I have to wade through ankle-deep sludge of the city’s underground storm-drain system.