Page 15 of All In

“Yeah, okay, it’s the costume,” she says, when I’ve completed the rotation. “Mostly the costume.”

“Mostly. I think maybe you were just checking me out.”

She shrugs. “You’ll never know.”

“How do you know they’re not staring at you for being unfairly attractive in a gorgeous costume?” I ask.

She tsks her tongue as if the mere thought is completely ludicrous.

A woman in a Black Widow costume stops us before I can argue the point further, asking if she can grab a photo—“the detail on that shield is unreal”—and Juniper steps graciously out of frame. I pose with the shield raised the way I’ve practiced approximately forty times in my bathroom mirror at home, which I will not be telling anyone, ever, including Juniper.

“You’re good at that,” Juniper says, once the woman’s thanked us and moved on.

“At what?”

“Posing. Some people freeze up. You just—” she does a small, surprisingly accurate impression of the stance I just held, “—commit.”

“Four months of practice.”

“Practicing the pose specifically?”

“Dammit, I litereally just mentally swore I would not admit that to you.”

She giggles. “Please tell me you did it in your bathroom mirror wearing your tighty-whities.”

I laugh, despite myself. “First of all, I do not wear tighty-whities. Secondly, I mostly had to practice being comfortable enough in the costume that posing didn’t make me feel like a complete moron.” I glance down at her, at the way the silk of her skirt is catching the overhead lights even just standing still. “You don’t have that problem.”

“I’ve had years of practice not caring what I look like to strangers. And some family members, to be honest.” She says it lightly, like it’s nothing, but there’s a current underneath. “It helps that today I get to be three thousand years old and devastatingly beautiful instead of, you know. Myself.”

“You’re devastatingly beautiful as yourself,” I say, before I can stop myself.

She glances up at me, something flickering across her face. Surprise, maybe, or pleasure? Whatever it is causes the back of my neck go warm in a way that has nothing to do with the convention center’s questionable air conditioning.

“I can’t tell if you’re just really smooth and these are lines or if you’re truthful,” she says, but she’s smiling when she says it, and her hand tightens slightly around mine as we start walking again.

We get stopped twice more before we make it halfway down the hall. Once by a group of teenagers who want to know where I got the shield (“I made it,” I tell them, and watch their faces do the math on that and come up impressed), and once by an older guy in a faded, decades-old Star Trek uniform who tells Juniper her costume is the best Arwen he’s ever seen, and means it so sincerely that she goes a little pink and has to look at her shoes.

“How long did yours actually take?” I ask her, once we’re moving again. “The real number. Not the number you tell people who ask politely and don’t actually want the real number.”

“You want the real number?”

“I want the real number.”

She exhales, like she’s bracing herself. “Five months. Give or take. There was a month in there where I was hand-embroidering the underlayer at two in the morning because I’d convinced myself machine stitching would look wrong under convention lighting.” She glances up at the track lighting up above us. “Which, as it turns out, would not have mattered. But I didn’t know that at the time, so.” She shrugs, like this is a perfectly reasonable amount of effort to put into something. “Five months.”

“That tracks. The detail on it is—” I look at her properly, the full effect of it, the way the layers move when she breathes. “It’s not costume-quality. It’s costume-design-quality. There’s a difference.”

“You can tell the difference?”

“I printed my shield from my 3D printer. Then spent a couple of weeks painting it, then another three weeks getting the weathering right because I decided a shield that’s blocked a hundred imaginary bullets should look like it’s blocked a hundred imaginary bullets. I can tell the difference.”

She laughs, delighted, like I’ve said something better than I think I have. “You are a nerd,” she says as if it’s a big discovery.

“I think it’s safe to say that about everyone in here.” I lean closer to her. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

“Well, not everyone is okay being called a nerd,” she says.

“True. But I’m not one of them. I’m a card-carrying member of the Hill Country of Texas Nerd Squad.”