Page 20 of All In

“He’s the best person I know,” Leo says, and there’s no hesitation in it at all, no qualifier. “It was just the two of us growing up, mostly. My mom wasn’t really built for parenting. She tried, for a while, or said she did. It didn’t take.” He says this lightly, the way you’d mention old weather, a storm that passed through a long time ago and left without much wreckage worth describing. “She’s still around. We’re cordial. She calls on my birthday and other major holidays. But she doesn’t still live in our small town.”

“You don’t seem angry,” I say.

“My dad raised me to believe holding onto anger adds to your burden in a way that prevents you from carrying anything else.” He lifts one muscular shoulder in a shrug. “Made sense. So I let go of the anger. KiKi is just KiKi. My dad though, he was all the parent I needed.”

“So. Ranch kid. Tech nerd. Card-carrying member of the Hill Country of Texas Nerd Squad. What else am I missing?”

“That’s pretty much it. But I should mention that the HCoTNS is a real organization. Very prestigious. Hard to get into.”

I laugh, and it loosens something in my chest that’s been sitting heavy since the part about his mother. “Are you taking applicants?”

“You interested?”

“Obviously. Though I’m not exactly in the Hill Country.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Fair enough. For what it’s worth,” I say, echoing him, “raising a kid mostly solo and still managing to make him this—” I gesture at all of him, the easy shoulders, the unhurried calm, the way he’s been steady and warm through every single version of today, “—isn’t a small thing either. That’s not luck. Somebody did real work there.”

Something flickers across his face. More surprise maybe. A little embarrassment.

“Yeah,” he says, quiet. “He did.”

We sit with that for a second, the restaurant noise washing pleasantly around us. I realize in that moment that this is the best date I’ve ever had. And it’s not even a real date.

chapter

six

Leo

“Okay, important question,” Juniper says, somewhere around her third slice. “Is this a date?”

My initial response is YES, this is definitely a date. But I force myself to simply respond with, “Define date.”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you. We’ve established I kissed you under false pretenses, you’ve established you’re fine with that, we went to a panel holding hands for purely strategic reasons, and now we’re eating pizza under an assumed superhero identity. I genuinely don’t know what column this falls into.”

I smile at her. “I think,” I say, “this falls under a very specific, narrow category.”

“Which is?”

“A meal between conspirators.”

She points her slice at me triumphantly. “That’s what I said in my head three minutes ago. A meal between conspirators.”

“Great minds.”

“So, not a date.”

“Categorically not a date,” I tease. “Conspirators don’t date. That would compromise the operation.”

“What operation.”

“Operation Avoid Eric. Still very much active. I take my role seriously.”

“Your commitment is admirable.”

“I trained for this my whole life,” I say. “Specifically the last four months, building a costume so good a stranger mistook me for an actual superhero and assaulted me with her mouth.”