Super•Villainous

XXXVIII

Ezra's lips pressed into a thin line, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed down the disappointment brought along by my response to his proposition. "Why?" he finally asked, the words catching somewhere on their way up his throat. "You know everything now! We never would have broken up if you knew it was actually me rescuing you. Why are you still trying to punish me? We've been getting along alright, haven't we? Doesn't that prove we could still work?"

Unprepared for a rejection to my rejection, I scrambled for an excuse that didn't hint at my future misdeeds.

"You lied to my face," I accused. "As Tempest. You said you weren't the one to stop me from getting hit by the car at that coffee shop, but you were there — as you! As yourself? Out of costume, as a — a human." I scrubbed a hand down my face and groaned. "You know what I mean."

"I didn't lie." Then, wincing, he amended, "That time, at least. I was telling the truth. I don't know who else has wind powers or who may have done it, but it wasn't me. I wish it had been, truly, but I reacted too slow, and before I knew it you were already on the air, freaking out."

"I did not freak out. I was proportionately distressed given the circumstances."

"Sure," he said in the spirit of appeasement, without any true conviction. "But I didn't lie, so if that's your only reason—"

"It's not," I interrupted. "What's this really about? We'd been friends for awhile before dating, but we were never that serious. Like, come on, you're a superhero, and not just any Super, either. You're the Super other Supers compare themselves to. Don't try to convince me that you can't get any girl you want, because I won't believe you. They'll be lining up down the street just to meet you, so there's no need to be so pressed about this. You'll find someone else."

Someone not trying to steal his employer's secrets and abscond off into the woods to live their days in isolation, preferably.

He surprised me with his sincerity, and the vulnerability of his response. "I don't know if I will. I'll never know if they're only seeing me for my mask and my fame. I'll never know if their feelings for me are genuine. I want something real, someone who likes me for me."

I almost impulsively snapped that at the moment I wasn't liking him very much, either. Alas, that was too mean, even for me. To the contrary of what he seemed to think, we had no romantic future together whatsoever, but how to convince him of that?

"Ezra..." I sighed. "Can't you do again what you're doing here? Get to know a girl, and then when you're sure she's not after you for being Tempest, spring it on her that you're actually a superhero. There! Problem solved."

"Because that's obviously working so well for me right now," he said, walking the edge between sounding sarcastic and plain whiny.

Either way, my dads did not raise me to give into the whims of whiny men. No guilt trip would ever work on me. I was immune. Impervious. I'd drawn my firm line in the sand, and now it was up to him to see it.

"That tactic's not working with me because we obviously aren't meant to be together in the long term," I said, not unkind, but firm. "When it's meant to be, your girlfriend will understand why you kept the secret from her, and she'll accept you as you are."

Not me, though. Better luck next time, buddy.

"I can't go around telling girlfriend after girlfriend about my secret identity and hope that eventually it works out. When it doesn't, that will just be one more person out there who knows who I really am. Maybe you don't understand the risk that comes with having your identity known to the public, but it's never good."