“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 ifwe 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.
