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 forhim. 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.”
