Opening the door to my office as quietly as possible, I headed back to the living room, trying to decide whether to read a book or fold my wrinkled laundry. I’d barely sat down on the couch when I heard a ringing sound from my room. I’d left a bell in there just a few hours ago.
I guess I was being summoned.
Getting back up, I headed to my room and, at the doorway, peeked in.
The Defender was on his back with the covers I’d pulled over him around his waist. Both of his hands were resting on his flat stomach, the bell back on the nightstand where I’d left it for him.
Oh, someone looked like a ray of fucking sunshine lying there. He was glaring at the ceiling. I think it said everything about what he was, that his eyes and cheeks weren’t puffy and his mouth wasn’t swollen, when I could take a thirty-minute nap and look like I’d gotten stung by wasps.
“Hey,” I called out, hesitantly.
The reply I got was the usual—a grunt.
Everything about him screamed irritation, and he’d been up, what? A minute? I’d just walked by the room a second ago. Every time I’d checked up on him, he’d been totally passed out.
Or not, according to Mr. I’m Totally Aware At All Times.
Bullshit.
I waited there, ready to help him as he kept glaring, his breathing about as even as it got.
I tried again. “Good morning to you. Are you okay? Do you need something?”
“It’s dark outside,” he replied in a deep, sleepy voice before blowing out a breath that was still too short for how incredible his lung capacity had to be.
I mean, he’d been filmed flying into space without an oxygen tank to repair a damaged satellite. I thought it was The Centurion who had plunged into the ocean, going thousands of feet down to do something to one of the tectonic plates there years back. It was nothing a machine could even handle.
But he hadn’t had something wrong with him, with his back, when he’d done it. And if it still alarmed me that there was something wrong in the first place—my gut said he should have healed by now—I pushed the worry aside.
“Hungry?” I asked, preparing myself for more sarcasm since he already looked so crabby.
I almost rolled my eyes when he didn’t respond.
If he wanted to keep being difficult, he could keep being difficult. I was going to choose to be nice to him, even if I really wanted to ask what had crawled up his ass and died there instead. “Do you finally feel like watching something?” I tried again. I’d asked before, in case he was bored, and he’d just ignored me.
Nothing new.
For once though, he blinked.
Was that a yes? I think it might have been. All right then.
It didn’t take me more than a second to cross the hall, grab my tablet from the living room, and go back to my room.Hisroom now. I held it toward him, but this time I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t take it. His loss. I logged in and opened the browser page to one of my streaming subscription services. Then I chose the first show under the Most Watched category instead of what I really wanted to pick to be ornery—the latest Electro-Man movie. I hadn’t even watched it yet.
I genuinely wondered what he thought about all the Shinto Studios movies revolving around every superhero imaginable. Electro-Man had been around before The Primordial, and the similarities between the fictional character and the Trinity were close, but everyone had written it off as a coincidence. But now, I wondered….
What did superbeings watch anyway?Didthey watch TV?
“I can set it on your lap if you want, so you can pick something else,” I offered, trying to be hospitable.
Those dark purple eyes blinked at me.
All righty then. In that case, I set the tablet on the dresser across from the bed. “I’ll go get you some food,” I told him, before backing out of the room, waiting until I was in the hall to roll my eyes.
He’d graduated from being kind of a pain in the ass to full-on pain in the ass over the last week with that attitude. The guilt I’d felt for thinking that about him had slowly waned with each of our interactions. Now, I was at the point where there was no pretending he was something he wasn’t.
And that was patient, friendly, and easygoing.
It didn’t take me long to warm up the roast beef I’d made along with potatoes, throwing in some roasted carrots because everyone needed some lutein and fiber in their diet. Even big, bad superpeople who were currently out of commission, hanging out at the home of a stranger while they got better. Lucky fucking me.
