Page 37 of The Dating Contract

He laughed. “No,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not…there yet. Heck, I don’t know even if I’m there on the other side.”

“Stop doubting yourself,” she said. “You’re amazing at what you do. You’re picking up admirers—talented admirers—left and right. Carly’s husband. Didn’t he say that they got a mezuzah?”

He nodded. “Right.” Bryce had repeated himself at the end of practice, and his wife, Carly—Leah’s client—had said how much she loved the mezuzah.

Which was wonderful…such a great thing for him to hear. But this kind of professional validation wasn’t what he was expecting for tomorrow.

He wasn’t expecting hostility, per se, but… “This is different,” he said.

“How? Same convention center, same exhibit space…”

“Different crowd,” he replied. “It’s entirely possible people will come up to the table and tell me that I have no place mixing streams like I do. That either I’m too much of a Jewish artist for lettering or too much of a secular person to be a sofer.”

He couldn’t see her face in the mirror, but he wondered what she was thinking. “So I’ll need a sword and a history of comic books, then.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I didn’t forget everything I learned when we were together,” she said with a laugh. “I know about how integral Jews were to the comics industry in the US and how many allegories for the Jewish diaspora are in famous stories told in the comics.”

He nodded. “That’s history and it’s important, but there’s been a problem in the last few years.”

“What?”

She sounded genuinely concerned, as if he’d destroyed her idea of what comics were, and what the world he worked in was. “People are removing the Jewish heritage from those stories, and assuming Jews have no place in the industry.”

“That’s…” She shook her head. “It’s awful.”

“It is. Dejewification,” he said as she pulled into the parking garage near his building, “and it doesn’t have a solution, or it hasn’t yet, because it keeps happening. I mean there are notable exceptions, Sam Moskowitz and Shadow Squad is one of them.”

“This sounds sadly familiar,” she replied.

“How so?”

“From what I know,” Leah began after clearly thinking for a while, “Jewish athletes and artists are finding community as the industries they’re a part of widen their reach and begin to search for voices from marginalized communities. Heck,” she said with a laugh, “Melanie Gould herself can probably tell you what’s going on in the romance genre with Jewish writers. Which isn’t exactly the same as combatting what you’re calling dejewification, but it’s creating space in areas that hadn’t actually acknowledged Jewish contributions previously.”

He nodded. “I have heard of that,” he said. “I guess people in comics have to reclaim that space, you know?”

Leah nodded. “You do,” she said. “They’re claiming space in hockey. If you see Asher you should probably ask him about that.”

“Asher…?”

“Judith’s fiancé.”

He nodded. “Right.” The other party of the ketubah he was making, the whole reason they’d been brought back into each other’s orbits in the first place. “Thank you.”

She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

It was nice collecting moments like these with Leah, sitting in her car, the windows down.

“So tomorrow? What time do you need to be there?”

And then they were back to business, back to planning. “Right. My signing’s not till later, but I’ve found the doors are easier first thing.”

Leah blinked. “When they open? I mean when the con opens for the day?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s weird but that’s when security’s at its best.” He did not mention the added benefit of being able to possibly spend the day with her.

“That’s fine,” she said, taking his argument about security without question; after all, she was ostensibly helping with crowd control, whatever exactly that was. “So tomorrow morning?”

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