Page 27 of All In

“Goodnight, Clover.”

“Goodnight. Text me the second something else devastating happens. I have notes app open. I’m tracking this like a court reporter.”

“That’s deeply unhinged.”

“You know me and love how unhinged I can be,” she says. She blows an exaggerated kiss at the camera and ends the call before I can argue further.

I set the phone down on the nightstand, screen going dark, and lie there for a minute in the quiet hotel room, replaying the whole day from the very beginning. I try to think of all the things I saw and did before I kissed Leo, but my mind keeps coming back to that moment and every one since then.

A stranger in a Captain America costume, utterly still for one suspended second, and then kissing me back like he meant it. And I can’t help hoping that maybe, just maybe, he really does.

chapter

eight

Leo

Day two starts with a little girl in a Belle costume staring at Juniper across the hotel restaurant like she’s witnessed an actual miracle.

She can’t be more than six, hair in two crooked braids, yellow dress slightly too big in the shoulders, and she’s tugging on her mother’s sleeve hard enough that the woman finally looks up from her coffee to see what the crisis is.

“Is she a real princess?” the girl whispers. Not quietly enough.

Juniper, mid-bite of pancake, goes very still.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think—” the mother starts.

“I am,” Juniper says, with the kind of grave sincerity that I am rapidly learning is one of her finest qualities. “Elven princess. Very old. Several thousand years, give or take.”

The girl’s eyes go enormous. “You don’t look old.”

“Elves age well.” Juniper leans in slightly, conspiratorial. “It’s the secret. Don’t tell anyone.”

The girl nods so seriously, so solemnly, like she has just been entrusted with the location of buried treasure. I look down at my pancakes to hide my stupidly wide grin, because this woman...

The mother mouths thank you over her daughter’s head, and Juniper waves it off like it’s nothing, but I catch the soft, pleased look on her face after the kid’s gone back to her cereal.

“You’re very good at that,” I tell her.

“At being three thousand years old?”

“At making a six-year-old’s whole morning.”

She shrugs, but she’s smiling. “It costs nothing to let a kid believe in something for five more minutes.”

I think, not for the first time, that I am in real trouble here.

The day moves fast after that—a panel on practical effects, a vendor hall sweep where Juniper nearly buys a replica sword she does not need and absolutely deserves, a solid hour spent debating the merits of three different versions of the same action figure with a stranger who turns out to know more about resin casting than either of us—and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the costume showcase.

I almost don’t enter. Almost. Juniper talks me into it, citing my “civic duty to let people see the shield work up close.” It turns out, I am not above being manipulated with complimentary words, especially from Juniper.

The showcase runs categories: women’s, men’s, and group. I watch from the wings as Juniper walks out in full effect, the jeweled circlet catching the stage lights, the dress moving exactly the way it did yesterday except somehow more, like she’s saved something extra for this exact moment. The judges lean toward each other, murmuring. The crowd actually gasps when she turns for the back detail.

She wins the women’s category outright. No real suspense to it, in retrospect.

I place second in men’s.

First place goes to a guy in an Iron Man suit that—and I want to be clear that I say this as someone who has spent four months building a costume by hand—should not legally have been allowed in the competition. He genuinely hovered four inches off the stage floor on some kind of internal propulsion system that I am still thinking about an hour later.