Page 59 of My Cosplay Escape
“Fine! Save me the cost of extra security.”
“What?”
Adam glances at me as if I am a customer who has failed to escape the simplest room. “I’m going to need extra security now for you.”
Unbelievable. “Yeah, and what about you? What do you need if you go around beating up drunk frat boys?”
“What, now you’re defending them?”
Adrenaline pumps through me. Fight or flight, and I needed flight. I need to run for the next three days straight. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know!” Adam yells.
“Take me back to the alley,” I demand.
“No!” Adam shouts.
“Stop the car! Stop the fudging car!”
He swerves across a lane of oncoming traffic and skids into a parking space on Garnet.
Garnet Avenue is glowing in neon pinks, blues, and greens. It is a sophisticated, twenty-first-century scene, unrecognizable from the time warp of bubble-gum-stained sidewalks and fast-fashion dives that I knew back in middle school.
Adam white-knuckles the steering wheel. “I don’t know you. I don’t know where you come from or where you go after work, but I do know that everything has to change, because it’s not safe. You are not safe.”
“Those boys were drunk. They were idiots. But they weren’t murderers or rapists. Things were fine.” I say the words to reassure myself as much as Adam.
He lets go of the steering wheel, and I swear the car whimpers. “Then why did you call?”
Because I was scared. I’m still scared. I couldn’t call anyone except you because anyone else might turn me into a Sunday school lesson. A cautionary tale of why women do not parade around in sexy cosplay.
My mouth twists up in a practiced Catstrike smirk. “I missed you.”
Adam stares at me with his gorgeous, ocean-gray eyes. My heart careens, and I feel more terrified than I did in the alley. Shirley Temples, he’s beautiful. “You’re fired,” Adam says.
“The fudge I am.” I grab his face and kiss him. Hard. And when he kisses back, I climb into his lap, the vinyl of my costume crunching and crinkling with the movement. I kiss him. He kisses me. It is wonderful but not enough. I catch his bottom lip between my teeth and pull until he yelps, but he doesn’t stop.
I kiss him, and forget that I’m wearing a mask and he has no clue who I am. I kiss him, and I’m in his hoodie, lying on his couch with wet hair. I kiss him, and it’s me, not the sexy, cosplaying, Catstrike me, but all of me. Me with the pathetic past, me with the hoodies in econ, me running, always running, trying to escape my life.
I’ve wanted this since Adam held me, snot bubbles and sobs, outside the lecture hall when my world was falling apart, buckling under grief that felt as fresh as the day I miscarried. I’ve wanted this since white T-shirts and escape boxes. Since I picked up comics and dreamed of a man who would fight with me, for me.
His arms are at my back, across the laces of my corset. Moving up, pulling me closer, until he gasps for breath.
“I can’t do this,” he says.
His hand glides gently down to my elbow, where it rests. Can’t, huh? I’m not convinced. “Why not?” I purr. “Don’t you want me?”
“I want you.” His fingers trace the lines of my mask. “But not like this.”
I pull away. My muscles tense up, and my neurons, which were doing the equivalent of a Fourth of July firework spectacular just moments before, screech to a cold stop.
I’m off him and out of the car in one motion. I lean in before shutting the door. “Call me if you change your mind.”
“I won’t—”
I’m so furious, my voice comes out in a rough growl. “I mean about work.”
I slam the car door and disappear into the night.
