Page 21 of All In

She chuckles. “I did not assault you⁠—”

“You absolutely did. I have witnesses. The Black Widow cosplayer saw the whole thing.”

“She did not see the whole thing, she saw us politely posing for a photo forty minutes later.”

“Circumstantial evidence is still evidence.”

Juniper laughs—the real kind, the kind that makes her press the back of her hand briefly against her mouth like she’s trying to contain it and failing.

Something in my chest does a slow, warm thing, and I choose to just enjoy the sensation rather than analyze it.

“So if this isn’t a date,” she says, once she’s recovered, “what would a date look like? Hypothetically. For research purposes.”

“Hypothetically?”

She nods.

I lean back, pretend to think it over, even though the answer arrived the second she asked. “A date would probably involve me admitting, out loud, that I have no interest in Eric’s continued safety and have several uncharitable theories about that mullet.”

“That’s not a date, that’s slander.”

“A date would also probably involve me telling you that I’ve been doing everything I can think of to be able to look at your pretty face for as long as possible.”

The teasing drops out of her expression for half a second, replaced by something quieter, more careful. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I hold her gaze, no joke left in it now. “A date would involve me being honest about the fact that I have not stopped thinking about that kiss since it happened, which is an embarrassing thing to admit to the woman responsible for it, but here we are.”

She doesn’t say anything for a second. Just looks at me, something working behind her eyes.

“Conspirators,” she says finally, “could probably get away with that too.”

“Could they.”

“I think the lines are blurrier than we’re giving them credit for. Because I am fairly certain that conspirators also think about kisses.”

“I think you might be right.”

We walk back to the hotel slow, no real reason for it except that neither of us seems eager to get there any faster. It’s still the time of the year in Texas where the heat remains in the air long after the sun has set.

She tells me about her favorite cosplay disaster — a hoop skirt that collapsed during a photo op two years ago, taking out a folding table and, in her words, “my entire sense of dignity, briefly.” I tell her about the time I 3D printed a piece for an earlier costume slightly too small and didn’t realize until I was already wearing it, four hours into a con day, and had to walk around for the rest of the afternoon essentially vacuum-sealed into half my own armor.

By the time we reach the hotel lobby, I’ve learned that she once stood in line for six hours to meet a voice actor and it was, unequivocally, worth it. She’s learned that I built my first website at thirteen because I wanted to track which Star Wars Lego sets were going out of production, and that it is, to this day, the single most useful skill I ever taught myself completely by accident.

We stop at the elevator bank. The lobby’s mostly quiet this late, just a couple of late-arriving con-goers dragging suitcases toward the front desk, the soft hum of fluorescent lights providing the soundtrack.

“This is the part,” Juniper says, “where I say goodnight and go up to my room and you go up to yours, and we both pretend that’s a totally normal, reasonable thing for conspirators to do.”

“Is it? Normal and reasonable?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never run a covert op before.”

“Same. First time for both of us.”

She looks up at me, the elevator doors chiming open behind her, neither of us moving toward them.

“Can I kiss you goodnight?” I ask. “Properly. Not an ambush this time. Asking first, like a person with manners.”

Something in her face goes soft. “You’re asking.”