"So I need something nobody wants."
"You need something nobody thought of." She was writing again, fast, crossing out, writing. "Because that’s actually your thing, right? Everybody watches you do something stupid and then it works and they can’t figure out why it worked."
"That’s not a name, that’s a personality disorder."
"It’s a brand." She looked up, and there it was, that competitive fire she got when she’d figured something out before you did. "Crane’s whole point is that the name comes from the gap. The gap between what people expect when they look at you and what actually happens. So what’s your gap."
I didn’t answer right away.
The honest answer was a system in my skull that paid me for being a scumbag and a registration file that would land me in a government facility if anyone checked it twice. The honest answer was that my gap was a canyon and I was standing on one edge of it lying about the depth.
"Unmarked kid," I said. "Dead heroes’ son. Everybody’s got the file before they’ve got the face."
Sloane went still.
Then she reached over and closed her hand around my wrist. The pressure was immediate, deliberate, a little past comfortable. This was how Sloane did physical affection when she hadn’t cleared it with herself first.
"That’s not your gap," she said, and her voice had dropped lower, something steady underneath it. "That’s their gap. That’s the part where they fucked up the assessment."
My chest did something without asking permission. Small shift. Unplanned.
"You’re going to walk into a room four years from now," Sloane continued, "and every single person sitting there is going to have that file open. Unmarked. Late bloomer. Dead heroes’ kid. They’re going to have the whole thing memorized. And then you’re going to do whatever it is you do, and they’re going to sit there and watch their read fall apart in real time." She squeezed my wrist tighter. "That’s the gap. The space between what they wrote down and what’s actually standing in front of them. You don’t name yourself after their mistake. You name yourself after the moment they realize they made one."
The guitar song ended. Something slower started playing through the speaker.
"You’ve been working on that speech," I said.
"I’ve been working on a lot of things." She said it flat and then heard it land, and the entire color spectrum relocated to her face in under two seconds. Her hand jerked off my wrist like she’d touched something hot. The notebook came up fast, positioned like riot shielding. "That came out wrong. I meant positioning. Market analysis. My mother’s whole job is brand management, I think about these things professionally, that’s completely standard operational thinking."
"Sloane."
"Do your homework."
"Sloane."
"Two thousand words minimum, Belmont. Get moving."
I laughed. She kicked me, harder this time, and then her foot stayed there against my leg like she’d lost track of where she’d put it.
We worked.
That was the part I hadn’t planned on enjoying this much. Forty minutes passed. Neither of us talked except when one of us wrote something worth reading out loud. She took my pen twice without asking. I grabbed her notebook once to catch her hero name and she ripped it back before I made it past the first letter. At some point she’d drifted across the mattress until her head was resting on my thigh, pink hair spilling over my knee in a way that probably looked more deliberate than it was. She had the tablet angled up above her face, writing at a position that had to be destroying her shoulder.
Her handwriting degraded in direct proportion to how much she cared about the content. I clocked that pattern around the thirty-minute mark. The paragraph breaking down Sigma’s atmospheric approach mechanics was borderline illegible, all sharp angles and aggressive loops.
"Read me yours," she said, eventually.
"It’s not done."
"Read me the part that’s done."
I read her the opening paragraph. The one about a Hero who’d won by refusing to make the fight about herself. I got maybe six sentences in before Sloane’s hand found the front of my shirt and pulled.
I stopped reading because she’d sat up and kissed me, and there wasn’t room for narration anymore.
It wasn’t gentle. She kissed like she fought, all forward momentum and zero hesitation, her mouth pressed to mine with enough pressure that I felt it register through the bond before my brain caught up to process it. Her hand slid up from my collar to my jaw, then higher into my hair, fingers curling against my scalp hard enough that it pulled slightly. The tablet hit the floor somewhere to my right. I didn’t track where. Her other hand had moved to my shoulder for balance and she was leaning into me now, weight shifting forward, and I felt the exact moment she stopped thinking about it and just committed.
The bond hummed between us. Not overwhelming. Just present. A warmth that sat behind my ribs and reminded me she was feeling whatever I was feeling in real time, which meant she knew exactly what this was doing to me and hadn’t stopped yet.
Then she broke off with a sound that was half laugh, half groan, and dropped her forehead against my shoulder.
"No," she said. Not to me. To herself. "No, no, we’re not doing this. I told you. I’m sore. This was a strategic error on my part."
"You kissed me," I said.
"I’m aware of who kissed who." Her voice was muffled against my collarbone. "It’s your fault for writing a good paragraph. You know that’s a thing for me. You know exactly what you’re doing."
"I genuinely did not know that was a thing for you."
"Well now you do and I’ve made my situation significantly worse."
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
She didn’t move for a second. Then she reached over without lifting her head off my shoulder, thumbed it awake, and I felt her go rigid against me before the bond even caught up.
Diane’s name sat at the top of the screen.
Sweetheart. Tell Lukas his interview clip crossed two hundred thousand views and three agency scouts have pulled his file this week. I need to talk to both of you before Friday.