Page 9 of All In

“Tactical version. Not the parade one.”

“It looks expensive,” Henry says.

“It was.”

Oliver shifts in his seat. “It looks uncomfortable.”

“Deeply,” Henry agrees. He squints at the screen. “It looks… ”

“Do not say stupid.”

He looks up at me. “I was going to say involved.”

“Sure you were.”

Henry takes the phone and swipes through the photos slowly. He’s genuinely trying to understand what he’s looking at. Which I appreciate about Henry. He might not get it, but he makes the effort.

Months of work in those photos. Molded armor plates built up piece by piece over a compression base layer, sealed and detailed until they actually look like something that could survive a fight instead of a costume contest. The star on the chest was hand-painted, not printed, because I could tell the difference even if nobody else could. The shield was a separate project entirely ‚fiberglass core, an aluminum rim, and a paint job that took longer than the rest of the costume combined. More hours than I’d admit to Oliver, who would use the number against me.

Worth every single one of them.

Henry hands the phone back. His expression is the particular one he gets when he’s landed somewhere between impressed and baffled and isn’t sure which one wins. “You made this?”

“Most of it.”

He nods, slowly. Like he’s filing it away somewhere. “Huh.”

That’s a Henry compliment. I’ll take it.

People make assumptions, I’ve noticed. They look at me, the Texas accent, my family owning land in several counties, my own company doing quite well, and they construct a version of me that’s mostly accurate and partially not.

The tech part, they get. The ranch part, they get. They do not understand the part where I have very strong opinions about the internal politics of fictional interstellar empires. Nor the part where I have spent more time than I will publicly admit crafting original prop replicas. Very few people outside of a fandom would get the part where my internet search history at any given moment contains a minimum of three active rabbit holes about worldbuilding or lore or production design.

That tends to catch people off guard. Like when I took Home Economics in High School. I met my first girlfriend in that class. Up until that point, I think everyone—my family included—expected me to come out as gay.

Already, I was the nerd trifecta: not a giant beefy guy, like the rest of the men in my family (my father included), tech genius, and science fiction aficionado. It really is a wonder that I didn’t get my ass kicked more in school.

Probably helped that everyone knew how much money my family has.

In any case, I’ve never spent much energy managing other people’s expectations of me. Dad raised me to know who I was and be comfortable there. For which I will always be grateful. Were it not for him, I’d likely still be trying to earn approval and affection from my mother.

Whatever else you can say about our family, we’re not a group that apologizes for taking up space.

But Comic Con is different.

Not because I feel like I need permission anywhere else. More because it’s the one place where nobody does the quick recalculation. Nobody clocks the nerdy shirt and files a note somewhere. Nobody asks if I’m really spending my hard-earned money on toys and comic books.

At Comic Con, my LEGO shirt is just a shirt. Only there people will get it and laugh.

My people are there. Thousands of them, strangers who are not quite strangers, who all know the language and speak it fluently and don’t need it explained. Three days of that, uninterrupted, is… I don’t know, necessary. A specific kind of necessity that feeds my soul.

“You’re smiling again,” Henry observes.

I hadn’t realized. “Can’t help it.”

“You’re that excited?”

“Yeah.” I take a sip of coffee. “I really am.”