Page 16 of All In

Her lips fold in, then she burst out laughing. “Did you just make that up?”

“Affirmative.” I toss my pretzel and give her a smile. “I’m pretty sure you know now that I have no game so everything I’ve said has been completely honesty.”

“I’m beginning to put that together,” she says. “Okay, so, yours. You made the shield, but what about the rest?”

“I made it.”

She stops walking again, properly this time, turning to actually look at the chest plate like she’s reassessing it from scratch. “All of it?”

“Most of it. The plates are 3D printed. I designed the molds myself, printed them, sanded and primed and painted everything by hand.” I tug on the tight blue against my skin. “The base layer’s spandex, molded to fit, which is part of why it reads as—” I gesture vaguely at my own torso, slightly self-conscious about finishing the sentence.

“As built like an actual superhero,” she finishes, unhelpfully.

“That wasn’t where I was going with that.”

“It’s where I’m going with it.” Her eyes do a quick, almost involuntary sweep, and then she seems to catch herself doing it and looks immediately, fiercely interested in a nearby banner advertising a panel about practical effects in low-budget filmmaking. “Anyway. 3D printer. Very impressive. Very creative. I respect it.”

“High praise.”

“The highest.” She glances back at me, the pink in her cheeks not entirely gone. “I didn’t peg you as a 3D-printer-and-CAD-software type, if I’m honest.”

“What did you peg me as?”

“I don’t know. Foam and hot glue, like the rest of us mortals.”

“I started with foam and hot glue,” I tell her. “Upgraded once I got tired of things falling apart by hour six of a con day.”

“Disgustingly practical.”

“I contain multitudes.”

We’re nearly to the panel hall. I see the sign for it up ahead, a hand-lettered placard propped on an easel, a line already forming along the wall. That’s when I see him. Eric, she called him.

I recognize him immediately, even without the Klingon prosthetics fully visible from this angle, mostly because Juniper’s whole body changes the second she spots him. Her hand goes tight in mine, not panicked exactly, but braced, the way you brace before a wave you’ve already seen coming.

He’s closer than I expected. Closer than either of us has time to avoid.

“Juniper!” He says her name like he’s pleasantly surprised, though something underneath it doesn’t match the tone. There’s something coiled and a little too sharp at the edges. He’s holding a convention program rolled up in one fist, the bat’leth still slung across his back, the forehead ridges looking… not at all how I bet he thinks they look. Wow, that’s really unfortunate. And very penile. I swallow a grin.

“Eric.” Juniper’s voice goes carefully even. “Hey.”

His eyes drop to our joined hands. Linger there a beat too long.

“Wow.” He says it slowly, like he’s working out a math problem he doesn’t love the answer to. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”

“It’s—” Juniper starts.

“Must have slipped your mind,” Eric says, before she can finish, and the smile on his face is beginning to look a little too smiley. The humor definitely doesn’t meet his eyes.

I do not like him. At all.

“Funny, considering how many times we talked about today. You’d think that would’ve come up.”

I feel something in my chest go very still and very deliberate, the way it does right before I say something I mean to land.

“I’m Leo,” I say, and extend my free hand, easy, unhurried, the picture of a man with absolutely nothing to prove. “Juniper mentioned you two met last spring. Small world.”

Eric looks at my hand for a second too long before he shakes it, his grip a little harder than it needs to be, like he’s testing something. I let him. I don’t test back. There’s no version of this where I need to.