Page 19 of All In

“You’re staring,” he says, when I get close enough.

“I’m allowed. You stared at my dress for an entire panel.”

“Your dress was historically significant.”

“My dress was a costume.”

“A historically significant costume.” He offers his arm, half-joking, half not, and I take it. “C’mon. I made a reservation under a fake name because I thought it would be funny.”

“What name?”

“Steve Rogers.”

“You did not.”

“I absolutely did. I am nothing if not fully committed to my character.”

The pizza place is small, warm, the kind of low-lit, red-vinyl-booth establishment that exists in every town in America and somehow always smells exactly the same. We get a corner booth. Leo orders something with too many toppings and defends it passionately when I question his choices, and somewhere between the breadsticks and the first slice, the conversation drifts somewhere realer than costumes and panels.

“So,” he says. “Tell me something true. Not con small talk. Real.”

“That’s a big ask for someone who’s known me for six hours.”

“Since you ambush-kissed me, I think we’re past small talk.”

“Okay.” I turn my glass in a slow circle on the table, deciding where to start. “It’s me and my sister, mostly. Clover. Has been since I was seventeen and she was twenty.” I glance up at him. “Our parents died. Car accident. I was finishing up high school, she was in the middle of college and instead of either of us getting to have the year we probably should’ve had to fall apart, we just—didn’t. We held it together. For each other, mostly. Sometimes very badly.”

Leo doesn’t rush to fill the silence after that, which I notice and truly appreciate. He just waits, attentive, like he’s actually taking it in instead of formulating his next sentence.

“Clover handled it by getting busier,” I continue. “Work, plans, constant motion. She added a major, then somehow managed to combine a master’s degree in there somewhere. I handled it by disappearing into other worlds for a while. Books, then shows, then—” I gesture at myself, at the general concept of who I’ve become, “—this. The costumes. The cons. It started as an escape hatch and turned into something I actually love, which I think happens more than people admit. You don’t always get to pick what saves you. Sometimes it’s just whatever’s closest.”

“That’s not nothing,” he says quietly. “That’s a very real thing. And you and your sister did an amazing job with each other.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s also why Clover worries about me more than I’d like,” I admit. “She thinks I disappear into fictional worlds because real ones feel too unpredictable. She’s probably not wrong. But I also think she copes by jumping from one thing to the next, never letting herself completely settle.” I laugh. “We’ve never once said that to each other’s faces, so.” I shrug. “We’re a work in progress. Both of us.”

“For what it’s worth,” Leo says, “disappearing into a world you built with your own hands for five months straight doesn’t sound like running from something to me. It sounds like choosing something. Those aren’t the same.”

I look at him for a second too long, something warm settling low in my chest that has nothing to do with the pizza.

“Nerdy, creative, chivalrous, and insightful. Leo, you might actually be a super hero.”

“You forgot hot,” he says.

“What?”

“Earlier, you referred to me as the hot stranger. I just wanted to make sure hot stayed on your list.”

“Noted. Now it’s your turn,” I say. “Real thing. Go.”

He exhales, leans back against the booth. “Ranch family. Big one. My dad’s side has been working the same land outside a town called Saddle Creek for three generations. Cattle, mostly. I grew up the way you’d expect—up before sunrise, callused hands by age nine, the whole thing.”

“You don’t strike me as a rancher.”

“I’m not, anymore, not really. I help out when I’m needed, but I went a different direction professionally. Tech. Software, mostly. I started building things on an old laptop in the barn office when I was supposed to be doing chores, and it sort of snowballed from there.” He says it simply, no false modesty, no inflation either, just a fact about his life laid flat on the table between us. “My dad never made me feel like I was betraying the family by not wanting to inherit the cattle business. Which, looking back, is not a small thing. A lot of dads would’ve made that harder than he did.”

“Sounds like a good dad.”