Chapter 22

When Grant reemerges a short time later, he’s wearing light gray sweatpants that look sexier than they have any right to be, and a faded, holey t-shirt that reads ‘I Drive a Hearse for the Carpool Lane’. I’m guessing he’s bulked up lately because it stretches against his broad, muscular chest and shoulders in a way that makes him fidget and pull at the seams. His hair is still wet, but less than before. Dark brown curls are starting to jump up, jutting out at odd angles that defy gravity as much as he does.

“I brought you some dry clothes.” Grant inches towards me like he’s a lion tamer about to feed a new lion. “I don’t think they’re really your style… sorry.”

I take the clothes out of his hands and hold them up. He brought a pair of Christmas pajama pants and a t-shirt that has a picture of robot aliens on it. They look oddly familiar.

“Is this from Bertha Jenkins’s graphic novel series about those aliens that crash land onto Earth and hide in plain sight as sex toys?”

“The Nightstand Why Choose series, yeah. I, um, was hoping you weren’t familiar with that series.”

I cock an eyebrow. “Everyone is familiar with Bertha Jenkins… apparently,” I add, looking at the t-shirt.

Grant runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah. I got those for free…” He trails off. “You know, after I paid money for it.” He exhales slowly. “I really don’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“So don’t.” I gesture for him to turn around while I change into the clothes he brought.

“I won’t! Starting now, I’m an open book.”

I peel off my wet clothes and pull the oversized t-shirt on. “An open erotica book,” I say, glancing down at the graphic.

“They’re romance—scifi romance. Not that the genre really matters. They’re phenomenally written. And the science! Amazing! Zagreus Hart was apparently so impressed with the science in them about space and time travel that he put the whole collection in our break room. That’s where I read them. Word around the water cooler is that they’re serving as the basis for some new project…”

He continues to talk about the science while I fold up my wet clothes and roll down the waist of the pajama pants so they don’t trail too far past my feet.

“You can turn around,” I say, interrupting Grant as he talks about how the dildo one of the alien-robots traveled back in time to their very first orgy after saving the world from ocean monsters… or something. I got a bit lost. I don’t usually read anything that isn’t titled ‘Evidence’, but I might have to make an exception for these titillating transformer aliens.

“True, my trope of choice is when a character returns to save the day, but I teared up so much when the butt plug came back to—” He trails off abruptly when he looks at me.

His normally gooey-warm eyes, narrow to a dangerous squint. The hardened edge makes me shiver, my nipples hardening in response.

Seriously, something about him just does it for me.

“You look too good,” he says in a low rumble that goes right through me.

I glance down at my outfit. It confirms what I already suspected: I would never be caught dead wearing this outside.

“Did some of the building debris hit your head on our way out?”

Grant shakes his head and crosses the length of the floor towards me. His hands whisper up to the side of my face, tilting my head so that I look directly up into him.

“You’re always stunning, but now? Here in my basement in my clothes? You’re… you’re…”

“Your kryptonite?” I joke, extremely proud to be showing off my superhero research.

Grant doesn’t respond to the joke. He shakes his head slightly and holds my face even tighter in his hands.

“Kryptonite makes Superman weak. You, no you make me feel like I’m not myself. Like I can do anything, be anything. You make me surge with lust and power. You make me want to take you and show you exactly how much you’re mine. You make me crazy. You—” He stops and really shakes his head this time. Then, he takes a step back. He tries for a weak smile, but that fierce look in his eyes still pierces me. “So I guess you’re maybe red kryptonite then, although depending on which source material you’re drawing from—”

“Kryptonite is green,” I say, smiling, happy that I finally out-nerded him.

The warmth floods back into his eyes and he throws back his head to laugh.

“It’s whatever colour you want it to be.”

Okay, weird way of saying I’m right.

“Anyway, we can talk Marvel all day, or we can go back to discussing the little stuff. You know, who you are, why you lied, if you’re evil…”

“Are we still throwing the word evil around?”

I cock an eyebrow. Fair enough. “Allegedly evil,” I amend.

Grant sighs. “I don’t want you to think I’m evil—allegedly or not. What can I do to make you trust me?”

“Let’s start with something radical, like telling the truth.”

Grant nods seriously, even though I’m making fun of him a bit. He walks around to flop down onto the couch. I join him. As the smell of his freshly showered self washes over me, it takes everything I have not to cuddle into his side. Even though I’ve never gotten to the comfortably cohabiting stage with a partner before (or, you know, the month mark), it’s easy to imagine us spending nights unwinding together just like that. I imagine I’d breathe in his scent, fit perfectly into his side, and relax in a way that I never have.

I scooch away from him slightly, my back ramrod straight.

Nothing good comes from imagining a future with someone I barely know. Or, more accurately, who barely knows me. No one wants to cuddle someone who’s reviewing deposition questions for the millionth time.

“I really don’t want to lie to you anymore. I need you to trust me as much as I need air. It’s just that… that truth might be a bit scary,” he starts.

“Scarier than working for a supervillain?”

Grant shrugs. “Depends on who you ask.”

“Well, hard truth is kind of what I do for a living, so shoot.”

“To start with the truth, we have to go back a ways.” Grant runs a hand through his wavy hair. “I’ve never been a ‘dream big’ guy. I’ve always been a happy with what I got person. And I am happy, like really. I love my life, my family, my hobbies. I’ve just never wanted more. At least until I saw you. The moment I saw you, I knew want. I saw you and I knew that I wanted, no needed you in my life. Needed you to be mine.”

Is it weird that I wish I had a pad of paper to take notes on? Probably. My fingers twitch with the need to take note of inconsistencies that I find. I settle for interrupting him.

“So, going back ‘a ways’ is several hours ago? Technically.”

Grant throws me the most awkward, hopeless smile I’ve ever seen. “I guess my first lie is letting you think that tonight, well the tonight from a few days ago, is the first time I’ve seen you.”

My stomach knots. As someone who detests getting surprised, I do not like this turn of events. If he saw me before tonight, then that means that he wasn’t at the building by chance. In all probability, he was at the building because he was following me. Not good for the whole ‘evil’ thing.

“Elaborate.”

“The first time I saw you was a couple weeks ago when you came to the employee ferry to meet with that scary biker lady who’s been scoping out the terminal. I saw you and it was like the very foundation that I’d built my whole life upon shook.”

“So, what? You took one look at me and decided to go full stalker?”

“No, no,” he says quickly, waving his hands slightly. “Kind of. It wasn’t until a little while later.”

“A little while later.” It’s a prompt, a question, and a declaration of disbelief all rolled into one.

Grant winces. “This next part is a bit weird.”

“We aren’t in weird territory yet?”

“Is it too late to go back to lying?” Grant asks with a nervous chuckle. “On second thought, who needs trust? How about I just show you how I can fly again instead?” He gives me his suave superhero look with a raised eyebrow. “Let me give you a ride, baby,” he says in what I recognize as his Garnet Defender voice.

I shoot him a scathing look, even though I’m holding back a smile. What a dork.

“Worth a shot,” he mutters. Then he clears his throat. “One day at work, you were in my head. I was going about my cleaning—my hands were busy with one thing, but my mind was consumed with that radiant ray of sunshine on the pier. Even with those ridiculously oversized sunglasses, I could tell you were something special.

“I guess I was thinking so much about you that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was. Without even realizing it, I found myself in the off-limits area of back wing—the place that they say is getting renovated, but everyone knows is where they do some secret testing.”

“And what? You were just able to waltz in there? As the janitor? You have that kind of access?”

“That’s the thing!” Grant exclaims, looking more pumped on this than he should. “I shouldn’t have access to that wing. I never have in the past. I’ve tried my keycard in there before, just to see what would happen. Nothing. That day, though, I just sort of walked in while I was in the middle of a daydream about you.”

He still looks amazed at the luck of it all. Simply serendipity abound. They say you don’t know you’re in a trap until you’re in one. I guess occasionally, you don’t even realize afterwards. You just walk around with a lump of poisoned cheese in your mouth, blessing your lucky stars.”

“What was in there?”

Grant’s face breaks open into a grin. “It was the coolest thing to ever happen to me. The whole room was silver with puffy clear bumps all over the walls. There were probably some gadgets and stuff around. I’m not sure. All I could focus on was the very center of the room. Floor to ceiling, there was a laser cage. Actual purple lasers that hummed and everything. And right in the middle of them was this sphere that just glowed. No, I shouldn’t say glowed. It burned so bright I couldn’t even look directly at it.”

He’s still smiling, even though this sounds like a personal nightmare. Random, glowing objects that are caged in lasers are rarely beneficial for the environment. Granted, I didn’t think they existed outside of cartoons, but I’ll stand by my evaluation. Matte-coloured objects are much more eco-friendly.

“What did you do?”

Personally, I would have left immediately, taken exhaustive notes and filed some paperwork. Grant, I’m learning, is a very different person than I.

“I poked it with my broom.”

Of course he did.

“And?”

Grant closes his eyes and considers my question for a second.

“You ever blown a circuit in your house?” he asks. I nod. “Sort of like that. Full ‘Danger, danger Will Robinson!’”

I don’t bother asking who Will Robinson is. Most likely a coworker. I’ll check the employee roster later.

“After it felt like everything inside my head and body exploded, I blacked out for a bit. When I opened my eyes, I was floating. Just in the middle of the air. I was sort of glowing, like the sphere. For a second it was really scary because I couldn’t figure out how to get down and the energy from the orb felt like it was short-circuiting my brain.”

He’s smiling as he tells me this. Smiling. There is no way I’d be smiling. Between the pain and the paperwork, I don’t think I’d care for the experience at all.

“Anyway, eventually I feel this tug in my chest, so I tug a bit right back at the feeling. Next thing I know, the orb and the lasers and every single piece of furniture in the room goes crashing to one side, along with my body. It took a second, but then I realized that I did that. I gave the feeling another tug and everything zoomed up to the ceiling. So, I just ran out of the room as fast as I could so I wouldn’t have to be the one to clean it up.”

He laughs.

I don’t.

I mull over his story. It’s far-fetched. Beyond far-fetched. It’s so far-fetched, I doubt there’s any cell reception where it is, and that’s taking Hart Link’s new satellite communications systems into account.

Then again, the man can fly.

While I normally wear my skepticism like a security blanket—I’m one of those annoying people who sit through movies going ‘that could never happen’ (I actually had a date leave because I wouldn’t stop saying it)—perhaps I need to extend my radius of believability.

For now, I put glowing sphere in a laser cage under the ‘maybe’ column.

“That all sounds…interesting,” I say, not committing to admitting that I believe him. “But what all does that have to do with me? How is poking things with your broom at all related to me?”

Grant holds back a smile. Poorly. By the time he’s snickering, I hear it. Still, I don’t break. I just keep staring him down while he fights the battle of his life to maintain a straight face.

“Sorry, tickle in my throat,” he says once he regains his composure. I raise an eyebrow at him. “Son of a… I just keep lying to you. When you said ‘poking things with your broom’, I thought—”

“I know what you thought,” I interrupt. “But how does that relate to me?”

“Right. Well, you know how I’m not really flying so much as I am changing the direction of gravitational pull?”

I nod, still not loving that he was holding me up hundreds of feet in the air through the strength of his will alone.

“My own gravitational pull got changed then, too.” He runs his hand through his hair and tentatively meets my eyes. His own are so earnest and scared, like his next breath depends on how I take this. “Hailey, it changed to you. You became my new center. Everything about you, no matter how close or far you are, pulls me to you.”

“I don’t know if you’re being literal or figurative right now…” Honestly, either one is intense in its own way.

“Figurative. I’m not literally being dragged towards you. Well, I am, but just in my own mind. I don’t know what it is. I certainly can’t explain it, but I know that you’re my destiny. We’re meant to be together, you and I. Accident of science or plan of fate, it really doesn’t matter. You’re the one for me. So you see, I was following you that night, this night, every night because I can’t leave you alone. How can I when the very essence of you runs through my veins?”

After saying all that, he doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. What can you say after someone declares that a glowing object convinced them that you’re their true love?

Dr. Debbie did not cover this. Unless this falls under the category of someone giving you a compliment? That doesn’t feel right though. I don’t feel like the appropriate response to this is telling him that I like his shoes.

“Is being a super villain henchman for sure off the table?” I ask hopefully.

Upon reflection, I think I could deal with him being evil.