by Lexie Dunne
The door beside the elevator, the one that apparently led to stairs, flew open. I only had time to register a green blur before I found myself locked into a crushing hug. The arms around me were familiar, and the smell—
“You’re okay!” Abruptly, I was pushed backward and craned my neck to stare up into Guy Bookman’s handsome face. “You’re not hurt! I was worried—”
“You were in my apartment,” I said, as I realized why the smell had been so familiar. “You went through my apartment.”
Immediately, Guy looked abashed. “I called to talk to Angus, and Portia mentioned you hadn’t been at work. I was worried, so I thought I’d check—”
“You’re Blaze,” I said. “You. You’re Blaze. You’re not Jeremy. Jeremy is not Blaze. You are—what?”
“Um.” He went still and suddenly looked sheepish. “Yes, yes I am.”
“You didn’t know?” asked a voice behind him, and I saw Jeremy leaning against the doorjamb of the stairwell. He looked, as always, confident and a little bit dangerous even though I now knew he wasn’t Blaze. “Figures.”
“Hey.” Guy reared up to his full height, which was, as expected, exactly the same as Jeremy’s. Standing next to each other, they could have been twins in everything but coloring. Jeremy wore a white muscle tee and blue jeans. But he was much darker in complexion than Guy’s bronze hair and green eyes. “It wasn’t like I was giving her a lot of clues to go off of.”
I ignored him for a second because I had a feeling that if I tried to wrap just one more surprise into my expanding brain, it might very well explode. Jeremy was safe. Jeremy was a known quantity. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You’re—you’re not War Hammer, are you?”
When Vicki began to laugh, genuinely, like that was the funniest joke she’d heard in a long time, I suspected otherwise. Jeremy shook his head and sketched a little bow. “Class D. Just like you.”
“Oh. Uh, about that . . . never mind.” I turned on Guy, who took a step back as if he had just realized he was violating my personal space. Since the guy had rescued me countless times, I wasn’t inclined to care about that. But the rest of it . . . “You’re Blaze. You’re Blaze.”
But Guy frowned at me. “What are you doing here? Did Eddie bring you here?”
“Eddie?” I said, confused.
Vicki stepped between us. “As fun as this little reunion is, the walls around these parts have ears.” She pointed down the hall at several doors. “Let’s take this inside somewhere.”
“Right.” Guy actually sounded strangled as he backed up. He couldn’t seem to decide what to do with his hands. He rubbed his hips like he was hoping the Blaze uniform would have pockets. “Let’s, um, do that, then. My place—”
“Way too far,” Vicki said. “Mine’s fine. So, boys, Gail here will be just down the hall from me. Isn’t that lucky?”
Jeremy had a frown on his face, and I realized he was checking me out under the shapeless Davenport clothes. “How’d you net a room on the powered floors?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it here,” I said, which was about all I felt comfortable disclosing. For some reason, Vicki’s statement about the walls having ears stuck in my head. It couldn’t be literal, right? I was beginning to accept that there was a secret world of superheroes, and, oh, right, that my coworker who I had barely spoken to regularly donned a mask and saved my life, but the walls with actual ears? No thanks.
Silently, we climbed onto the elevator, and Vicki pressed the button for the seventh floor. I stood back from both Jeremy and Guy. Vicki seemed like the safer choice. If she noticed what I was doing, she didn’t remark on it. When we disembarked, she jerked her head to say that we should follow her. I wondered briefly if our rooms, since they were on the same floor, were at all alike.
Probably not. For one thing, I don’t own nearly as much S&M equipment as Vicki does.
“I collect it as a joke,” she said when I stared, dumbfounded, at the leather crops and whips artfully arranged on one of the stark white walls of her apartment. The black leather couches with the bright red pillows made me do a double take, but it was the white bust wearing a full leather mask on the coffee table that really made me goggle. “Designers send me the weirdest things, so I collect some of them. That’s Peaches Franklin.”
“You named your S&M mannequin head?” I asked.
“You’ll get used to it,” Jeremy said as he dropped onto the couch.
Guy waited until I’d seated myself on the couch opposite from Jeremy and Vicki before he sat down. Next to me. Tension coiled through every line of him, from the way he sat straight up without touching the back of the couch to the way his hands fisted on the black knees of his uniform.
“So . . .” Vicki shrugged. “Who wants to start?”
“I say Gail goes first.” Jeremy tilted his head slightly in challenge, and I narrowed my eyes right back at him. I remembered this plan of attack well. He was hiding something—that much should be obvious since we were literally in a secret superhero compound—and was planning to antagonize me until I forgot about it.
“We’re all dying to hear how you got hot,” he said. “I mean, not that you weren’t hot before. But now—took a few steps up the babe scale. How’d that happen? Did you burn off your sadness for me on the treadmill?”
I gave him a tired look. “Do you have to be a pig right now? Seriously?”
“Old habits die hard.” He leaned back and spread his arms on the back of the couch, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. Jeremy in repose.
“It’s not a habit, you’re doing it on purpose. Quit being an ass.”
“Ohh-kay,” Vicki said, holding her hands up in a time-out position. “Clearly there’s some history here.”
“Yeah, he’s my ex, who dumped me while I was in the hospital,” I said. I looked between them. “That didn’t come up on one of your dates? Usually a discussion of the exes is par for the course.”
“One of our . . . oh, huh. Does she not know?” Vicki asked Guy and Jeremy.
“Well, considering the ruse was to fool the entire world, and not just her, I’m going to guess no,” Jeremy said, and why he glared at Guy as he said that, I had no idea.
“What is everybody talking about?” I asked.
From beside me, Guy spoke quietly. “I’d rather hear what happened to you first, if that’s okay, Gail. We can explain everything else since it’s all tied together.”
I wanted to know more about the ruse, actually. “You have to promise me you’ll tell me what’s going on. Everything that’s going on. I’ve been in the dark for far too long.”
Guy nodded. “That’s fair. You go first?”
“Okay.” For the second time that day, I ran through the entire tale of my time with Dr. Mobius, from beginning to end, stopping only when Vicki or Jeremy asked a question. Guy remained deathly quiet. The tension never faded from his shoulders; nor did he look at me. He stared at a point on Vicki’s black coffee table, never looking up. The look on his face grew grimmer the longer the story went on.
“Wow, quite an adventure,” Jeremy said when I finished my rundown. “Trust you to stumble into a bank holdup on your first day awake, though.”
I cracked a small smile at that. It was either laugh or cry at this point. “Well, you know. Habit.”
Next to me, Guy was nearly vibrating like a plucked string. Though it seemed glaringly obvious to me, neither Vicki nor Jeremy seemed to notice. “I left,” he finally said, “so that you would be safe.”
Jeremy levered himself off the couch and crossed into the kitchenette area of Vicki’s apartment, obviously very at home. “Well,” he said over his shoulder, “that didn’t work now, did it?”
“Jeremy,” I said.
Jeremy shot an “Ain’t I a stinker?” smirk over his shoulder.
&nbs
p; “So what about you three?” I asked, mostly hoping to put Guy more at ease. His tension was making me tense.
“Witness Protection,” Jeremy said, grinning.
“That’s just what he calls it.” Vicki folded her yards of leg beneath her. “We were tired of staking out his apartment when the villains decided once and for all that he was Blaze. So we moved him here and inducted him into Davenport society.”
I remembered something Vicki had said in the hallway. “So how do you contribute?” I asked him, suspicious. What on earth could a Class D add to Davenport Industries, which was obviously lousy with superheroes?
“Superior gaming skills.” Jeremy returned with a bottle of Pellegrino. “I run the simulators.”
“The slower ones,” Guy said, earning a laugh from Vicki and a scowl from Jeremy. For a second, the corner of his lips pushed upward in something close to a smile, like he was pleased with himself for the burn. But he schooled his features back into the regular Guy face I remembered from the office. “Sorry, Jer.”
Jeremy grunted at him. “Slower ones, my ass.”
I knew so little about the man who sat next to me, which felt incredibly unfair, given the number of times he’d swooped in to save the day. So I turned an expectant look on him. “And you? I think you owe me your story now that you know what happened to me.”
“I’m not going to start at the beginning,” Guy said. “We’ll be here all night, and . . .” He cast a look at Jeremy.
My ex twisted the cap to the water bottle. “They don’t share origin stories,” he said. “Not with Class D freaks like me. Can’t have the plebes wandering around with all of their big secrets. Bunch of whiny babies.”
“Anyway,” Guy said, “when it was obvious to me that the villains weren’t going to leave you alone, I hatched a plan. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about it, but for it to work, you had to seem fully broken up with Jeremy and with Blaze.”
And he launched into a story, the most I had ever heard him talk. Jeremy and Vicki interjected a few details, but the story unfolded about how Guy had used his Bookman influence to convince Jeremy’s job to move him to Miami. How he’d enlisted Vicki to stage a meet cute at a bar down the street from Jeremy’s new pad so that that public would know that Jeremy Collins and Gail Godwin were no longer a thing. And once the two of them—Jeremy, it appeared, had been in the dark—were sure that everybody knew about the newest It Couple, they’d arranged a very public rescue of Vicki, cementing it for everybody that Jeremy Collins was truly and forever Blaze.
“Of course, the villains started going for him,” Vicki said, grinning. She ruffled Jeremy’s hair when his scowl deepened. “So it became a full-time job for both Guy and me to keep him safe. We had to tell him. Eventually, we decided just to move him here.”
“So, that’s it. That’s the story.” Guy wouldn’t look up from his hands.
“How did you know that the villains were going to leave me alone?” I asked.
“Eddie,” Guy said.
“Who?”
“Eddie Davenport. He came to visit me that day in the office—when he met you—because he wanted to get a look at you. At the, uh, the girl I was giving Chicago up for.”
I could think of absolutely nothing to say to that. My feelings were all still a jumbled knot in my stomach. I needed a sandwich and about twelve hours of sleep to begin processing any of it, so I just stared. “Eddie Davenport was there to meet me?”
“Yes.” Guy finally looked up and met my gaze. “And he pulled some strings, so supervillains would really believe that you and Blaze were through. Until . . . Mobius.”
“Meanwhile, others got to pay the price,” Jeremy said, and the bitterness in his voice made me look at him fully. So that was what he’d been trying to hide. His fingers fidgeted with the cap of the Pellegrino bottle.
“I’m sorry,” I said, since there wasn’t anything else I could really say. Sorry for what, though? None of this had exactly been my fault.
For a moment, I didn’t think Jeremy was going to say anything. But he sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s water under the bridge,” he said in a way that sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Can’t do anything about it now.”
“Kids,” Vicki said, and all three of us looked over at her. I’d kind of forgotten she was even there, which was a bit surprising, given that we were surrounded by her collection of kinky sex gear. “I hate to be the buzzkill, but I’ve got an early-morning photo shoot, and if I show up with bags under my eyes, Denise will simply murder me.”
“Denise?” I asked.
“My makeup artist. She’s a genius, but she likes an untouched canvas.” Firmly, Vicki ejected us from her suite, promising that she’d take me to Testing in the morning before she left, if she could. I began to see why they hadn’t let her have a mentee before. Right before she closed the door, she turned to the guys, “Will one of you take her to her new room? Suite 704.”
“I’ll do it,” Guy said before Jeremy could pipe up.
The latter raised his eyebrows. “Okay. I’m going to get a few hours in on Call of War.” He did a really geeky hang-ten sign with his right hand. The move felt old and familiar in a way that had tears gathering unexpectedly at the back of my throat. “Got a level-42 druid requesting a private meet-up.”
“I hope she’s female this time,” I said.
“Get catfished once, never live it down.” He peered at Guy for a moment, shrugged, and gave me a sunny grin. “See ya, babe.”
I gave him a smile because it was simpler than giving him the finger. He knew I’d always hated that pet name. “Good night.”
Once Jeremy had strolled off with his hands in his pockets, Guy turned to me. “He grows on you,” I said.
“Yeah, he has his moments.” Guy pushed his shoulders back, and I thought of all of the times we’d stood like this, waiting for the police to show so they could get me to safety. Only then his mask had been on rather than crumpled up in one of his hands. It made me want to ask a thousand questions. Why me? What is it about me that the villains came after me and not somebody else?
I wasn’t sure I was ready to know the answer to that one yet.
“C’mon,” Guy said, clearing his throat, “your room’s this way.”
“So, Vicki,” I said to break the quiet as we walked. “She’s interesting.”
A line appeared between his eyebrows as he gave the matter some thought. “Don’t always believe what you see with her. You’ll be hanging around with her a lot, and what she presents and who she is, they’re . . . not the same.”
“You’re close?”
“She’s a good friend. We came to Davenport at the same time.”
“You did?” That was a surprise though I had no idea why it should be. After all, I knew nothing about Guy Bookman. Blaze, I could quote you chapter and verse about. But the man behind the mask, to put in it in cliché form, he was a mystery.
“Yeah. I’ll, um, I’ll tell you about it sometime.” We stopped outside of Room 704, my new home. “After all, it’s the least I can do.”
“For what?” I asked, puzzled.
“For . . .” Guy looked away. When he looked back at me, his stare was as intense as it always had been behind the mask, whether he was pulling me out of a flaming volcano or fighting off the latest death-ray-wielding super-genius. No wonder I’d never noticed his eyes as Guy, I thought distantly as I waited for him to control himself. They’d always been hidden behind glasses. With those out of the way, I could see every fleck of gold and brown in the brilliant green.
“It’s all my fault,” Guy finally said, and I blinked, drawn out of the trance his gaze cast over me.
“What? What is?”
“This whole mess, that’s what.” Where others might have tried to pace, Guy stayed entirely still. “Every
time I saw you at work, I wanted to apologize, to beg for forgiveness. But I couldn’t. Not without giving up my secret.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Bl—Guy, what are you doing?”
He gave me a pained look. “I’m trying to apologize.”
“Well, stop trying. I don’t want your apology.” I also didn’t want his intense gaze focused on my face like that. Even with my new muscles and body, it made me feel oddly vulnerable, and I really didn’t like this feeling, on top of everything I’d been through.
“But it was my fault,” Guy said.
“Really? Did you tell all those villains, super-geniuses, and madams of evil to kidnap me?”
“No, not exactly—”
“Then you don’t owe me an apology. If anything, I owe you my gratitude.”
“You don’t,” Guy insisted.
“We could probably stand here arguing this all night,” I said, and looked at the door. Guy’s intensity was the last thing I needed on top of this unending day. I wanted to get horizontal and stay that way for a few hours. And even more, I wanted to get away from the intensity of Guy’s stare. “But I’m a little wiped out. Would you be terribly offended if I declared a temporary moratorium on this conversation until I’m better able to handle it? My brain’s swimming as it is.”
Instantly, Guy took a step back. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be pressing the matter. I imagine you’re tired.”
Bone-weary was more like it, but I just nodded. “I could use some sleep. It’s been a long day—hell, a long month.”
“Right. Right. I’ll, um, I’ll let you get some sleep.” Guy took another step back. “Good night, Gail.”
“Good night, Guy.”
Guy looked like he might have liked to go in for another hug or a handshake or something, but he chose just to nod at me and walk back the way we had come. I deliberately turned away as well, to face my door.
“Um, Guy?”
Immediately, he stopped and looked back. “Yes?”
“No, um, just there’s . . .” I gestured at the door, a blank white expanse. “There’s no doorknob.”