"What the fuck," I said eloquently.
Then Tempest turned, and I got a good look at his face. An incredibly familiar, mostly unwelcome one. I shot to my feet.
"What the fuck?" I repeated, but with an undercurrent of anger that was impossible to miss.
A strained smile. "You already said that."
"And I might say it a few more times! What the fuck, Ezra? Did you jump Tempest in a dark alley this morning?"
"What? No!" he balked, offended. "This is mine! I didn't steal anyone's costume. Is it really that hard to believe I am Tempest?"
"Yes," I said flatly.
My ex-boyfriend frowned. My very normal ex-boyfriend, who was still labelled "Insufferable Twat" in my phone, who abandoned me after Shade dropped a building on me, and who watched me nearly get run over by a car shortly thereafter without lifting a finger.
Running a hand through my hair, clumsy fingers catching on stray tangles, I felt compelled to pace the narrow expanse of my room, like a lion in a zoo eyeing the tender morsels on the other side of a barrier, except my little room did not possess the required space to allow for both company and rage-induced exercise, so I settled for periodically tossing angry looks at him over my shoulder. The last thing I wanted was to talk to Ezra of all people. Did I not have enough problems? Had I not suffered enough in my life?
...this was a part of my curse, wasn't it? My bad luck had twisted the space-time continuum so diabolically that it folded in on itself, added glitches into the matrix, just to punish me by turning Ezra inexplicably into Tempest.
First, Shade was most likely my best friend's brother; now, this! Frankly, I didn't know which outcome I found worse. It was the thin difference between horrifying and mortifying.
"I can prove it," Tempest — Ezra — said, edging forward, and I glared at him in annoyed, thoughtful silence, because I didn't need him to prove anything. Unfortunately, I believed, if not him, then in the mere idea that I was unlucky enough for it to be true.
No girl deserved an ex-boyfriend for a superhero, let alone for him to be the most sought after, the most fawned over, the most idolized by womankind everywhere.
But since I didn't say anything to the contrary, he waved a hand and summoned a gust to breeze around me, a warm blanket amidst the cooling early autumn, proving that which I needed no evidence of.
"You have a lot of nerve," I said. "You're telling me that my garbage boyfriend who abandoned me beneath a collapsed building was actually running off so that he could hide his identity and fight supervillains anonymously? I've devoted many hours to being annoyed with you about leaving me to save your own neck, so don't think this changes anything. It doesn't. How is this even possible? How didn't I notice?"
It wasn't like we'd only had a brief, week-long dalliance where we weren't around each other long enough for me to notice any inconsistencies in his behavior. For years we ran in similar circles around school, sharing several mutual friends and even more mutual acquaintances, until eventually ending up in the same miserable history class my sophomore year. He was older, a junior, doing his best to please the unpleasable Mr Jordan, and failing spectacularly. On the first exam of the school year he managed to score a jaw-dropping four percent, and since I did considerably better — which wasn't all that hard to — he asked me to help him. Begged, really, though it was the coffee bribes that won me over.
Somehow, our coffee-house study-dates turned into actual dates. He scraped by the end of the year with a respectable, albeit low, B grade and then astonished everyone who knew him by graduating a year early. He kept that plan close to his chest, not telling a soul until he dropped the bomb that we wouldn't be joining us the following year. School hardly seemed to be a passion for him, so the fact that he'd reached all his graduation pre-requisites a full year early came as a shock, but who were we to judge? That was probably why he always seemed so busy, I reasoned, and moved on from the subject without a second thought. I had no real reason to suspect he was leaving school early to become a superhero. That would have been a literally insane leap of logic for me to make.
YOU ARE READING
Super•Villainous
Fantasy"I've been looking for you." There was an unexpected rasp to his voice, a hint of desperation. He stretched out one hand, as if to brush it across my cheek, or perhaps wrap it around my throat. Oddly enough, I didn't know which option frightened me...
