By the time we’re having breakfast on our kitchen counter, the lingering traces of burning cotton have already been taken care of by a range hood that was about ten times more expensive than what a regular household (that is, one where shirt-burning is not an endearing tradition) would require.

The breakfast is, as ever when it’s Tay’s turn, a culinary marvel the likes of which can temporarily distract me from—

“So, do you need any last-minute preparations—” she starts to ask right as bacon deliciously crumbles between my incisors.

“Ixnay!” I manage to mumble despite her perfidious timing.

She would’ve made such a great supervillain…

Lisa Wilbourn prioritizing aesthetics over ethics—

“You can’t be this afraid of the mere word and expect me to believe you’re ready for this,” she says with a dismissive eye-roll before she reaches for her tea mug to take a sip that I let her taste just to properly answer her as she deserves.

“I’ve been since that night in our hotel when you decided that you were the one who was going to propose, Tay,” I say, timing this just right so that she will make a spit-take.

Except I become overly mushy right around the middle of what I intended to say, and I instead end up staring into her eyes, smiling softly and shyly, feeling something bubble up from the bottom of my chest, and…

And she gently sets down her mug, stands up, and walks around the counter to pinch my chin with two fingers before she leans down, and, with short, careful movements of her tongue, she licks the bacon crumbs from around my mouth.

“I love you,” she breathes out, her breath as minty as her preferred breakfast drink, the air washing over my face warm enough that I can luxuriate in it.

“Forever,” I beg her.

“That’s what tomorrow is for,” she answers with a tone so steady and reassuring that I can believe her.

I close my eyes and lean forward, nestling my face over her breasts and against the sharply professional white blouse I picked for her before she went to Washington on this latest, incredibly poorly timed mission of hers that Tagg will have to answer to me for.

Tagg and his goddamn pool.

“What about you?” I finally say. “Any last-minute thing you want to do?”

Her hands clutch the back of my head just tight enough to force me against her, and she leans down.

“‘Want’ is not the right word,” she says.

My arms wrap around her waist.

“But you’ll still do it,” I say.

She nods.

And I prepare to give my fiancée a piece of my mind regarding her sense of timing and priorities and how it’s a very good thing that everything that needed to be taken care of I already did while she was gallivanting and playing superhero-slash-politician.

Just… I’ll maybe finish breakfast first.

And cuddle a bit more.

***

Panacea

“Hello, Amelia,” the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass tells me through the black phone he holds with pointless poise.

“Hello, Father,” I tell him, the word stuck in my throat for a moment that lingers long after into the silence that follows.

“How have you been?” he says.

“Good enough. Busy,” I say, striving to find a way to prolong the answer without breaking any of the many NDAs I’m under.

“That’s good.” His smile warms a bit, and he reaches with his hand, resting the tips of his fingers on the glass, the flesh paling under the pressure.

I… just look at them. For a moment.

It’s still hard to believe, but it gets easier every time I see him. The man who gave me up and—

No. No, that’s not fair.

He’s the man who gave up everything for me.

So I put my own hand on my side of the glass, matching as well as I’m able the bigger, broader, slightly darker hand of the man who took me in when my biological mother died and then gave me away when he could not stay anymore.

One link more in the number of people who passed me around, I guess.

“I… I am grateful. That you find the time to come visit,” he says.

“You are my father,” I answer.

“I am a hardened career criminal who you have almost no memory of,” he says with a vague smile that could mean any number of things.

My eyes drift down to his neck, where a scar no longer is, then to his chest, where scars never had the chance to form before I saved him.

“You aren’t getting in fights. Not anymore,” I say.

“I… I’m sorry I worried you,” he answers.

I look into his eyes, looking for something familiar that I can see in mine in the mirror and almost finding it, like every single time since I first met him.

I think I only saw it when he almost died, during his first month here, after the transfer from the maximum security prison where he spent the first year after the Birdcage was finally dismantled.

When he looked up at me, pale, too weak to speak, too weak to do anything other than raise a trembling hand to reach for mine, not because he wanted me to heal him, but because…

Because he’s a person I barely remember at all. One more link in the chain of people who passed me around. That’s what he is and what he’s likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

But, to him, I am his daughter. His baby girl. The one he gave everything up for. The one he spent years in Hell for.

The one he wanted to reach for a last time before he died.

And, because of that, I’ll keep visiting.

And I’ll keep calling him father.

***

“How was it?” Emily asks me, still leaning on her bike when I join her in the parking lot.

I take her in, looking precisely as she did seven years ago when she was tied to a chair, and I was forced to wear a hazmat suit for the worst session of therapy I’ve ever endured, still wearing the tight lycra leggings and leather riding jacket that became her look as she decided to adopt the persona of a niece that, nowadays, should look older than she does.

And I hug her.

Her arms are tight and firm around me, reminding me of Vicky’s hugs in ways I still have trouble letting go of, but I dive in and bury my face in the crook of her neck, letting the scent of worn leather and tanned skin overwhelm me and soothe me.

“You don’t have to put yourself through this each and every time,” she tells me, the edge of protectiveness shining through as clearly as it did when she forbade me from going to Behemoth’s last stand.

“It’s only once per week,” I weakly mumble.

“That’s… That’s not something you… Amy…” she tries, having trouble with the words like she has often enough that I suspect I’ll never get to hear about her own daddy issues, apparent as they are, according to Lisa.

… I suspect that Lisa may have a certain tendency to group too many things as ‘daddy issues,’ though.

“Hey, I’m fine. It’s just… today was a bit rough given that… you know,” I say, pulling away and offering a tired smile to my ride out of here.

“I don’t?” she says, purposefully obtuse in ways that don’t suit her, so I give her a flat look, and she ends up grumbling something that sounds a bit like, “Can’t believe you got me to attend…”

“If you want me to get another date—”

She shoots me a glare that trumps mine in both intensity and purpose, and, for a moment, I’m really tempted to fall between her arms, slump in them, and look up at the tall, blonde, fit woman in much the same way as women often look at shirtless, muscled guys in Vicky’s choice of bedtime reading.

Poor, poor Dean.

“So. It is a date,” she finally says.

I find it in myself to raise a mocking, sardonic, answering eyebrow before I pull out of her hug and dance around her to sit on the backseat of her newest bike, one that looks like the love child of a Harley Davidson and a tank, and wrap my arms around her waist.

“Who knows?” I say with a teasing lilt that she very much deserves after playing hard to get for years after our mutual attraction was brought to light by a certain Thinker.

Her muscles tense under my touch, and I lean forward to rest my face against warm leather.

Then, after a few seconds of charged silence, she rudely breaks the moment by shoving a riding helmet at me, and she drives us out of the parking lot of the prison where my biological father serves a sentence that I have enough political clout to overturn.

***

Pamela

“This. This one. What do you think?” I ask a weary man sitting on a stool by the side of a ceiling-high mirror who tries to give me a tired smile.

“You look gorgeous in it,” he says as I look down critically at the emerald green dress that a broad, white satin belt cinches at my waist, making it clear that either the Pilates classes do work or that I should stop abusing my daughter knowing the world’s greatest biotinker.

The weary, no-longer balding man with twenty-twenty vision doesn’t do Pilates, after all.

“Give me something more concrete?” I tell him with a bit of a pout. “You keep saying I look gorgeous, and… it’s flattering, don’t get me wrong, but I’m looking for an opinion.”

He sighs and straightens up, his gaze sharpening and making me suck on my lower lip like a teenager rather than a divorcee.

“Do you really want me to give you my opinion?” he asks.

I nervously nod rather than go with my first instinct and tell him that I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t just to start a fight and see if he cares enough to fight back.

Damn it, Charles. All these years, and you’re still parading around in my head.

“Well then,” he says as he stands up, needlessly reminding me of how much taller he is than me as he looks down and pushes me back until I step into the dressing room, where he backs me into a corner with no escape from his green eyes or from the cowed me looking back from the mirror inside as he closes the thick curtain.

“Danny…?” I ask with a thin, tremulous voice that doesn’t do anything at all to settle my nerves.

“My opinion that you apparently care so much about is that you already bought a dress a month ago. A wonderful dress that makes you look as beautiful as you are, which is a lot. My opinion, Pam, is that you’re running out of things to occupy yourself with until tomorrow comes, and any last-minute change you make is likely to be for the worse.”

I bite the sucked-in lip and tilt my head down, looking at him through thick, carefully brushed eyelashes.

“Does this mean you don’t like this dress?” I ask with a tone of voice that may be slightly too cowed, with a hint of puerile insecurity, as my hips sway side-to-side widely enough to send the calf-length, pleated skirt flaring around my legs as I wiggle in place.

His eye twitches, he grunts, and, suddenly, his hand slams against the wooden partition, right by the side of my head, making my heart race right before he leans down and takes my lips, his hand groping me over my hip, pulling me against his hard body, and making me feel that teenage rush all over again.

Which, quite fittingly, ends up with the two of us sheepishly buying an unnecessary green dress right after we’re politely asked to leave the store and never come back.

All in all, it is a good distraction.

***

Danny

“Can’t believe you got me to do that…” I mumble as I watch through the rearview mirror for any incoming traffic before I maneuver us out of the parking spot I found close enough to a shopping center that I would’ve never stepped into before a blonde and a redhead with an eye for the finer things decided to destroy my family’s generations-long devotion to understated tastes and sober spending habits.

“Excuse me, I did what?” she says, turning in her seat to look at me in a way that has the safety belt pull tightly between her breasts.

… I am not jealous of a safety belt. That is not a thing that happens.

“You know perfectly well what you did, Pam,” I say, trying to focus so I won’t ding the paint job of the moron who parked this close to me while I was gone. The moron with a fuchsia van.

I may be doing him a favor.

“Ask my boyfriend for his opinion on a shopping trip?” she asks, about as clueless as Lisa when she uses this same tone. That is, not at all.

“Boyfriend?” I ask her with a side-eye as I regret not getting a car with assisted steering like Taylor insisted I did ‘in my old age.’

Disrespectful upstarts. The lot of them.

“I…” she dithers before looking down at her green-clad lap with a silly smile that I struggle not to match. “I just don’t want to get in the habit of saying it before we announce it.”

I, finally free of the confines set upon me by the driver of a fuchsia van that reminds me a bit too much of my daughter-in-law-to-be and her former costume, struggle not to let go of the steering wheel and hold her hand over her lap.

Then, I struggle a bit more and finally lose.

I slow down before we reach the next intersection, allowing myself to just feel the smooth fingers of a woman who stopped doing manual work years ago as they lace around mine, her smile brightening in the corner of my eye as she stares at our joined hands.

“It will be perfect,” I tell her, letting the light go from amber to red.

“Will it? I’ll be there,” she says, her smile losing some shine.

“It will be perfect because you will be there,” I tell her, momentarily angry at her self-deprecation and looking straight into eyes that I’ve grown used to seeing first thing in the morning.

“Danny, I—”

“You crossed the country for her, left your entire life for her, made amends, rebuilt yourself from the ground up. You, Pamela Hebert, are a wonderful, caring mother.”

“… Still not Hebert,” she mumbles, even as her fingers tighten around mine.

I tug on her, and she falls toward me with a gasp, her lips once more on mine as I dive into a kiss that will spark the fire she has. That will turn her into something other than a hurt woman allowing herself to dwell in the past because of sheer anxiety.

She answers me.

Her fingers thread through my hair, her tongue tangles around mine, and she lunges forward fast enough that the seatbelt engages and stops her from pushing me against the door of our car like she has done on more than one occasion when I have, apparently, infuriated her enough that she just had to shut me up.

Her breathing is heavy against me, and I stare into her eyes, remembering all the things we didn’t manage to get up to in our recently vacated dressing room, and I lean forward, pushing back against her, letting go of the steering wheel to reach up to her breast, pushing it up against the band of black nylon crossing over it that slackens when Pam stops pushing hard against the restraint, and… And I have a beautiful woman looking at me with eyes that are not full of need, but of demand.

Which obviously is the perfect moment for a fuchsia van to honk at me for delaying on going through the green light.

***

“This is getting frustrating,” she mutters, resting her chin on the back of her hand and her elbow on the car window as she watches the houses pass by.

“We are both adults. We live together. We sleep together. There’s no reason for us to behave like teens desperate to find a secluded corner to make out in,” I tell her, trying to focus on the street ahead and not on the milky thigh revealed by a raised skirt.

She, of course, looks at me like I’m a moron.

“Never let it be said that romance is dead,” she mutters.

“You weren’t complaining about my sense of romance when you got that ring—”

“Stop making me blush! I’m a redhead with a pale complexion; this bullying is the last thing I need!”

“You weren’t complaining about my bullying when—”

There’s a hand slapped over my mouth, which I feel I should point out is not a perfectly safe thing to do to your driver.

“Danny, you’re getting me precisely at that point where I’m mad enough at you, embarrassed enough at what you’re saying, and pent up enough at the frequent interruptions that I can very well show you why it would be a good idea to get to a secluded corner like a pair of teenagers.”

I arch an eyebrow, turn into the first deserted alley I can find, and look at her until the blush crawls up to her hairline and her hand leaves my lips.

Then, because I was married for a few years and then more or less raised the most stubborn teenage girl on the planet, I say something other than a barked order for her to drop her panties:

“It will be all right,” I say.

She pouts. Which only makes the whole thing harder.

“I am all but throwing myself at you—” she starts.

“You did throw yourself at me. That’s what the safety belt is for.”

“—and you’re here, just trying to get me to talk rather than… take me?”

“Pam… look at me,” I finally say after too much hesitation on what, precisely, I want to tell her.

She does. Green eyes, glittering despite the lack of light coming into this narrow alley, glossy lips barely parted, hands demurely folded over her lap, incongruous with the raised skirt still showing me too much leg for it not to be a distraction.

Just… a distraction that is not enough for me not to unlock my own safety belt, turn toward her, carefully pull her free of hers, and pull her over the gearshift and on top of my lap, my hands on her stomach, over her newest green dress as I just breathe in the soothing scent of chamomile that started following her around shortly after she first moved in with me.

It’s a scent I already knew. Already missed. Already loved.

And there’s that familiar pang. The guilt at finding someone else after losing a wife that consumed my very being. At having a woman in the bed that was ours for so long, and then only mine as I watched over her daughter in a neglectful way that would’ve made her hate me. Scorn me. Leave me.

But she had already left when all that happened.

“Are you… are you also a bit nervous?” she ends up asking after her breathing deepens and her back relaxes into my chest.

“Not really. It’s just… some things can’t be changed,” I say.

Her hands rest on top of mine, and she cranes her neck down to look at them.

At ringless hands.

For now.

“You can’t tell me to forgive myself when you won’t do the same thing, Danny,” she whispers.

I don’t answer. Not with words.

I, instead, lean down and around, my lips finding the side of her bare neck to nibble on as my hands on her belly become possessive, and I pull her harder against me.

“I didn’t leave my whole life behind—” I start.

“You didn’t have to,” she cuts me off, maybe a bit fiercer than usual.

“That’s not the point, Pam. You’ve done things I haven’t to… atone. I just…”

“You just almost got yourself killed, supported your daughter in everything she decided to do, and have been there for her ever since you realized she needed you.”

“You’ve got quite a flattering way of putting things,” I tell her, my fingers squeezing her belly.

“Of course. I am a woman in love, after all,” she says, turning to look at me over her shoulder, her glossy lips catching a stray ray of light that brings their texture in full relief and makes me hold my breath for a single moment.

“Thank you,” I tell her.

“That’s not what you’re supposed to answer,” she says with a slight frown that wrinkles her forehead.

I twist my neck around in a way that would’ve been far more uncomfortable before Taylor convinced me to visit Panacea for a tweaking session that ended up with me no longer having a bald spot and getting teased to Hell and back in the office for it.

So I can rest my forehead on hers.

“I love you,” I tell her with all the intensity I can muster, but not half what she deserves.

Her smile brightens my world and makes something still frozen in my chest melt a bit more. Thaw with each passing day that I wake up to green eyes rather than blue ones haunting me from an empty pillow.

I’m sorry, Annette.

And thank you, Pam.

Then, of course, because we’re both, apparently, filled with too much energy due to a certain biotinker giving us some extra fitness, hands roam, clothes fly, and we end up getting fined for something that we could have done at our house if we had just managed to wait for ten goddamn minutes.

***

Taylor

I browse my phone without showing any external signs of my turmoil as I wait in a room decorated with carefully soothing tones. The scents my swarm picks up are indistinct, only the cleaning agents standing out.

In the room, that is.

Outside of it?

It’s… far less pleasant.

I catch traces of blood, most of all, but other bodily fluids also stand out, some of them coming from people lying catatonic in their beds. Some of them, from people restrained to their beds.

Most just sit around or huddle in the common room. Maybe take a walk in the inner yard.

But those aren’t the ones that catch my attention.

“Miss Hebert?” a nurse calls out when she walks into the waiting room, some of the other visitors briefly looking up before going back to their phones, magazines, or clasped hands, and I nod before standing up to follow the older woman through the door she walked in.

“Is there anything I need to know?” I ask.

“Not really. Well, the usual stuff: ask for help if you feel you need to, don’t agitate her, leave if you feel you have to. Just… I don’t think she will be hostile. She asked for this, after all,” she says, distracted yet not unkind.

I nod once again, thinking about all the other things I could ask or sardonically tell her, but holding back my tongue as I just follow behind the muffled steps of her slippers on a linoleum floor.

And then we reach another room, one that my swarm tells me is full of round tables with padded chairs and people talking in hushed tones or even whispers under the watchful gaze of a male custodian broad enough of shoulders that I briefly wonder whether he’s gotten the enhancement package Amy and Piggot finally got approved for civilian use.

The Olympics are going to need some extra categories. If we keep holding them, that is.

“Here she is,” the nurse tells me with a tired smile, and I yet again nod before ignoring her directions and heading straight for the young woman waiting for my visit.

“Hello, Emma,” I say before I sit down.

“Hi, Taylor,” she says with a shaky smile that makes me feel sick for too many reasons to number.

***

We got permission to move to the courtyard after a few minutes of vague nothings.

I prefer it. It’s easier to get lost in the sensation of the sun on my skin and the mild fragrance of almond trees in bloom that some white butterflies dance around without my intervention.

“I didn’t expect to hear from you,” I finally say.

She chuckles nervously, rubbing the back of her neck in an entirely un-Emma way that makes me clench my teeth.

“I… I heard about… you know…” she drifts off.

I shut my eyes, allowing the surrounding space that my swarm tells me about to guide my footsteps as I dwell in soothing darkness painted by the flashes of the colors that my insects see on blooming flowers and that humans will never get to see.

Thank you, Arachne. You’re a sweetheart.

No matter what Heartbreaker had to say about you.

“My wedding. You heard about my wedding,” I finally say.

Emma nods.

“And you… what? Decided to take a stab at ruining it?” I ask, unable to hold back even after all these years that should’ve made the woman walking by my side a non-issue. Somebody that I used to know. A faded memory from a high school that I dramatically dropped out of because I was… tired of living in Hell.

God, I was such a teenager…

“I… I wanted to give you closure,” she says.

My eyes fly open, and I stop and turn, fully facing the shy, skittish, scared woman.

No, the scared girl.

She fidgets under me, shorter than I am by a full head, intimidated in a way my younger self would have found hilarious.

“Closure?” I ask.

“For… For what you two did to me,” she says.

My heart beats… harder. Not faster, but harder.

“You don’t get to dictate anything, Emma. Nothing at all,” I say as I allow the insects farther from us to rise in volume as they buzz with the anger I filter through them.

She shakes her head, and, once upon a time, I would’ve been jealous of red locks shining in almost metallic hues with the gesture, but today’s Emma has her hair cropped short in a utilitarian way that I try too hard not to think about.

“No. It’s not… I apologize. I… I wrote letters. A lot of them. Through the years. I apologized to a lot of people for a lot of things, but I… I never sent the ones for you because I… I don’t even know, Taylor. I was angry, and scared, and guilty, and… And for years, I couldn’t even think about you without becoming the hysterical girl tearing her hair out in the middle of a hallway.”

She stops talking, looking up at me with that same anxiety she did when I approached the table she was waiting for me at. The look I didn’t allow myself to process.

I close my eyes yet again, delving into comforting darkness.

“I know why you did it,” I say, brief flashes of long talks with both my fiancée and my mandated therapist going through my mind. “I know you were… ill. I don’t even know what you can offer me that I already haven’t gotten elsewhere.”

I don’t focus my swarm on her. Not now.

So she catches me by surprise when she tugs on my sleeve.

“I… can offer something that comes from me?” she says, the voice so careful that I can’t help but open my eyes to meet hers.

“And why would I want that?” I whisper.

“Because you were always a hero,” she answers.

And, for the first time since I’ve met her in this place with too many human odors, Emma is sure of what she says.

***

“How are you?” my fiancée says from the phone as I walk out of a building that, no matter how I look at it, is still more warm and welcoming than Winslow ever was.

“Raw,” I answer.

“Come home,” she immediately says.

I close my eyes, allowing Arachne to guide my steps on the sidewalk as white butterflies flutter amid falling petals.

One of them hovers above a girl with red hair cropped short enough to bristle, the butterfly dancing along a repeated circle that goes unnoticed by everyone in the yard.

The girl’s crying.

She wasn’t when I left.

“I don’t even know how to feel about her. It’s… I’m not angry. Not anymore. But I still…”

“You don’t have to solve that, Tay. Not today. Not ever,” she tells me.

“And what about you?” I ask.

There’s a brief silence on the other end of the line.

“You utter moron—” she says.

“Whatever Power has told you, it’s untrue and unfounded,” I reflexively tell her.

“You—years. Years of going to therapy, and you still have to take the world on your shoulders at the drop of a hat.”

“I am a superhero; it’s what we do. And you, of all people, don’t get to complain to me about this.”

“I already checked on her! You didn’t have to do this!”

“Wha—then why is this the first I hear about it?!”

“Because—because of very good reasons that your inferior Thinker rating doesn’t allow you to intuitively grasp!”

“Are those reasons that you are a busybody utterly convinced that you know best?” I say, my closed eyelids twitching as I near the parking lot.

“Only at a surface level,” she grumbles.

“Oh? And under the surface?”

“… That I love you and don’t want to see you sad,” she says.

My eye-twitching mild annoyance melts into something that makes me smile as warmly as I did this morning when I came into our apartment and right before I saw the stupid shirt waiting for me on the kitchen counter.

“I love you,” I say.

“I love you too,” she answers.

And, in the middle of a backyard filled with blooming almond trees, right before my steps take it away from my range, a white butterfly alights on the back of a crying girl’s hand.

With no interference from me.

Just because Arachne is a sweetheart.

***

Dinah

I’ve got my own apartment. In that apartment, there’s a room.

It’s the kind of room that people who don’t know about my power would shy away from, give me a nervous smile over, and then get away from me as quickly as they could.

It’s, in fact, the kind of room that people who know about my power still give me nervous looks over.

“I still can’t get used to it,” a stupid boy says.

“And that’s why you are a Tinker while I’m a Thinker,” I tell him, quickly falling into a years-old routine.

“I still don’t understand your need to state the obvious?” he says with what, according to Lisa, is not sincere bafflement.

Goddamn cheaters who cheat…

“It’s because somebody may need me to write things down so he doesn’t get to use his obliviousness and Tinker fugues as excuses,” I tell him, arms crossed imperiously as I glare at the brown-haired boy wearing a shirt in a red tone that perfectly matches that of his armor in a way that, again according to Lisa, is an ironic jab at my unmasked status.

“Oh, you definitely like to write things down,” he mutters.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I say.

And then Chris, former Kid Win, current third-best Tinker in Brockton Bay, and somebody who only wears a costume when there’s absolutely nothing better for him to do inside of a very well-furnished lab, dares raise an insolent eyebrow at me before gesturing all around us at my special room.

The one with wall-long whiteboards, dangling colored strings, and too many Post-it notes for me to bother keeping track of without the use of Janus.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, resorting to Lisa’s one-size-fits-all answer.

The eyebrow raises a notch higher.

I try not to grind my teeth.

“I offered to build you a holographic system. Voice-activated. You could devote this room to even more of your comics collection, but noooo, you just have to have things your way—”

“It’s my apartment. I’m paying for it. I don’t see the issue with having things my way.”

“My way is better.”

“You’re about to get your foot stomped on.”

“Oh, is that a prediction? Chances of me getting silenced because of telling you an objective truth?”

“Are you really—are you really bringing up the Lucky Luke thing again?”

“I just—you like comics about Westerns! I got you the Blueberry hardcovers, which are demonstrably better drawn, and—”

“You are bringing up the Lucky Luke thing again.”

“You could’ve been anything other than sardonic, you ungrateful—”

“You don’t get it at all! You still don’t get it at all! I was—it’s not about it being a Western; there are layers—”

“It’s a book for kids—”

“Say that again. Say that again and see what happens.”

“It’s. A book. For kids,” he says. Again.

Standing right in front of me.

Pointlessly reminding me of how much taller he is than I am.

Which is why I have to jump up to wrap my arms around his neck hard enough to asphyxiate the infuriating man before I hook my heels behind his back and shove my tongue into his mouth, something that he takes about half a second to enthusiastically react to, his hands holding me up by my ass, pulling me tighter against him even as he stumbles around and ends up tripping and taking down a red string full of post-its and a green one with pictures that tangle around us when we roll around on the carpeted floor that I may or not have made extra soft and cushiony after a drunken night asking which rooms in my apartment were more likely to be christened by Chris taking me on all fours—goddamn it.

“Stop,” I say, panting in ways I don’t care to analyze at the moment.

“What? Stop telling you to read an actual book?” he says before I jab my finger under his ribs and get a pleasant thrill at his yelped reply.

That, of course, devolves into a tickling contest that ends up with me on my back and him looking down at me, flushed, the ceiling lamp turning his loose hair into a halo, his breath smelling of those stupid minty things he always eats before meeting me, no matter our ever-shifting official dating status at the moment.

Because, according to Lisa, I need to live life and not follow a script, so I’m not allowed to ask about the chances I’ll end up marrying this infuriating doofus and finally seal the deal.

Stupid busybody older sister…

“I need to get ready for the bachelorette party,” I tell him as I wrap my legs around his hips.

“Isn’t that in three hours?” he says, his hands sliding between the carpet and my back and holding my shoulders possessively.

“I… I am the maid of honor. Three hours is cutting it short,” I say, wiggling my hips up and rubbing against the front of his jeans, where something that already christened this room and all the other ones in my apartment waits for me to lower his zipper.

“I can be quick,” he says.

“That’s not a good thing to tell me right now,” I tell him before he dives down and takes my earlobe between his teeth, making me gasp out as my eyelids flutter and the ceiling lamp that was hiding behind him suddenly blinds me.

“Can’t you… ask?” he says, his hot breath in my wet ear almost managing to make me whimper in need. “Ask Janus if we’ll be on time?”

I lick my lips, even if they’re already wet because of him, and dive deep into my power for a single second, shards of the many futures unfolding around me, teasing me with all the things Chris and I could get up to in just a few minutes of heated, passionate, stupidly fulfilling, raw sex.

Then I find a number, and my eyes shoot wide open.

“Out!” I yell as I push his chest with both hands.

“Wha—why?!” he asks, more bewildered than the first time we ended up on the floor of this very room.

“Out!” I repeat, the goddamn number still echoing in my head.

“You’ve got your legs wrapped around me!” he unreasonably complains.

“Out!” I say a third time, regretfully—swiftly unwrapping said legs.

“Okay! Okay, I’m going! But what the Hell, Dinah?” he says, standing up before reflexively taking me and pulling me up against him, his scent filling my nostrils, his heartbeat on his chest drumming against my ear, his hands on my back drifting down…

“Stop, please…” I whimper, not doing anything at all to move away from him.

And looking mournfully up when he does step away with a worried look.

“Hey. What’s up?” he asks with that stupidly caring look that managed to hook me in when I first saw it, and that makes this all that much harder.

So I bite my lip, look away from warm, concerned eyes, down into a carpet chosen just so we would be more comfortable when he ended up doing to me all the things Janus just showed me we could be doing in the next few minutes…

And I answer.

“Forty-three percent,” I mutter.

“What?” he predictably, cluelessly asks.

“Forty-three percent chances you get me pregnant if you don’t leave my apartment in the next five minutes.”

His eyes widen in a way that would usually make me giggle before he forces himself to blink at me.

Then he looks down at what could pass for a wristwatch if nobody looked that closely and back into my eyes.

“I could set an alarm—” he starts.

“Out!” I say.

And, as soon as I manage to push him out the door, I slump down the wood-covered pane of bulletproof alloy that Lisa insisted I fitted my home entrance with.

Then I, sitting on the floor, my forehead resting on my knees, cover my burning cheeks with both hands and try very hard not to let out a low, hissing noise as I struggle to keep at bay the images of the many, many ways that Chris could’ve gotten me pregnant in.

As usual when it comes to an infuriating, clueless Tinker, I fail.

… I should ask Hannah for tips.

 

 

==========================

So, the thing about an extensive cast of characters?

There’s a lot of people to say goodbye to.

The next chapter will continue this little tour and maybe bring about some bitterness to go with the sweetness. And then, the one I just finished writing?

I’m drained, exhausted, and somewhat happy.

… Not like that, you perverts.

Anyway, that’s the penultimate chapter I just finished writing, so next week, I’ll have to face the last one of what has been more than two years of my life and my career as a writer. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to write the postmortem then or if I’ll do it in a somewhat less emotionally charged future. In any case? Look forward to it and to me doing my best for the sake of these characters that started out not being mine.

As always, I’d like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, and Xalgeon. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on Amazon. Thank you for reading!