"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.
In retrospect, however, his free time never appeared to increase, even after leaving school, and whenever we met up he always had another injury and even more excuses as to how he got it. "I fell out of a tree trying to rescue a cat," or "I walked into a set of cabinets. That's how I got this black eye. Definitely not anything nefarious, like, oh, I don't know, being punched in the face by someone robbing a convenience store."
"You're not even going to school, are you? That was a lie to cover up for," I waved a hand up and down his general form to encompass his suit, "this, wasn't it?"
"Yes..." he said carefully. "I had to come up with some reason for why I couldn't be around all the time. I thought saying I had a regular job wouldn't explain the weird hours I had to be on call."
"I see." I nodded absently, as though this was all terribly normal. "Now get out of my room before I start throwing things at you."
"I— first of all, that won't work, I'll be able to stop them from hitting me," he reasoned with a note of repressed panic in his voice. "Secondly, no. I'm not leaving. We need to talk, and I knew you wouldn't trust me if I was just Tempest."
"And you think I'll trust you now?" I all but shouted, before deliberately injecting calm into my veins. Every Super on the floor did not need to know my business. More level, I said, "All you've proven is that you lied through our entire relationship! Did you know Leigh kept telling me to break up with you because she thought you were sleeping around?"
"Wait, what? So that's why she doesn't like me?" He blinked several times in rapid succession, following up with an obvious, "I wasn't cheating on you."
I rolled my eyes. "Yes, I can see that now."
And although I probably should have viewed his actions with a degree of rightful suspicion at the time, I never actually believed he was unfaithful. Naively, I thought he didn't seem the type. Too... oblivious? Like he wouldn't notice a girl was flirting with him unless they planted themselves right into his lap. To his innocent mind, other's flirting was just people being nice.
Besides, I didn't necessarily want him to be more available. I enjoyed my alone time. Leigh wanting to do all of the things all of the time was enough of a strain on my introverted lifestyle that I didn't need anyone else taking the precious time I used to recharge my social battery.
Approaching the desk, Ezra, slumped down into the chair, deflating right before my eyes. "I can't believe she thought I was cheating."
"You wouldn't believe the number of times I talked her out of hiring a private investigator." I couldn't help but laugh at how disastrously that would have gone for him. That freshly minted secret identity wouldn't have been a secret for very long. "Now, I kind of wish I hadn't."
"They wouldn't have found anything," he said, but sounded audibly doubtful.
My frown returned in full force. "Didn't I tell you to leave?"
"Not until we talk."
Well, I did warn him. Taking a fistful of clothes folded into my half-unpacked suitcase in one hand and my pillow from my unmade bed in the other, I started throwing anything and everything I could grab, whatever was within arm's reach and had a reasonable chance of working as a projectile.
"Get—" throw "—out—" throw "—of my room!"
Ezra valiantly dodged the first few items, until the sheer volume of my possessions arching threw the air became too great and he drew up a current of air that tossed everything into a pile over my shoulder. "Lily, this isn't like you to be so aggressive—"
I snapped, "It's not like you to have superpowers, so maybe we don't know one another all that well after all."
Blindly searching, my hands felt behind me for something else to throw, coming up disappointingly short. Ezra watched me lock onto the lamp on the side table a mere two steps out of my destructive grasp and he dived to reach it first, cradling the stained glass and ceramic fixture protectively in his arms.
"Why are you so mad?" he asked, absently petting at the askew lamp shade, not unlike a cat. "You know I couldn't tell you about my superpowers. Nothing you've ever said to me has given me the impression that would have been a good idea. The last six months you've done nothing but reminisce on the amount of money my secret would get you from the tabloids, for heavens sake!"
"Why tell me at all?" I demanded. "You just explained why it's a bad idea, so why do this?"
It felt like I lost a friend, of a sort. I gave different parts of myself to different people, so to discover I accidentally gave part of myself to someone I hadn't intended to felt like a violation, as though Ezra had read through my private texts to a dear friend. Sure, nothing I ever told Tempest was all that personal, but it was the principle of the matter.
It sounded so stupid, even in my own head, where no else could judge. I'd never be able to put words to it without sounding absolutely insane.
"Because you froze me out!" he exclaimed. "You froze me out as myself and then you started to freeze me out as Tempest and I miss being friends! I thought, at least this way we could talk it through and you could explain to me what I did to upset you. You wanted to break up before because you thought I left you to die, I get that. It made sense, but now you know that's not what happened at all, so things can go back to how they were... right?"
He sounded so hopeful, and all I could do was stare at him blankly, bordering on twisted incredulity, because, although our initial breakup had been under false pretenses, as I now understood, I had become a completely different person since then. After all I'd been through, all I'd discovered about myself, I couldn't see how our puzzle pieces could possibly connect anymore. How could he not see what was so glaringly obvious to me?
And beyond that, I was unregistered as a Thaumaturge. If he found out about that, and the fact that I was looking into Guild secrets, would his loyalty lie with them, or with me?
He'd never follow me into the woods to live a life where my curse harmed no one else. Like my grandfather, he might have had a good heart, but he also wallowed in the glory. He graduated school early just to live this extraordinary life of fame and adoration by the masses.
He'd never choose me.
And I didn't want him to.
At most, we'd have a few weeks of fun, before parting ways. Was that what he wanted? Would he accept that compromise, or would he try to convince me to stay? I wouldn't, of course. If I couldn't stay for my dad or Adrian or Alexia or Leigh or even Nicole, my heart wouldn't waver for Ezra.
Part of me was tempted to bring the offer to his attention, despite all the cons. Lay out what I could safely disclose and let him make his own choice, meanwhile using his own Guild knowledge against him in my search for answers. He would be the perfect pawn, if I was calculating enough to use him.
I almost said, Okay. Let's give dating another shot. The sentence was on the tip of my tongue, fully formed in my brain to best suit my end goals. Then, I made the mistake of meeting his eyes and the words crumbled to ash in my mouth.
Of course, I simply had to sprout a conscience at the worst possible time. Some people could manipulate and con others without a care, stealing their money or cheating their way through life and relationships, and yet there I was, afraid of prancing off into the wilderness because I worried it would make my dog sad. Unable to insincerely date an ex, because I knew that if I got caught, I'd be taking him down with me, and I couldn't do that sort of thing to the person who saved my life on more than one occasion.
"Sorry," I said, my extended silence while I thought things through lasting far too long to come across as casual. Luckily, however my voice came across as strong, unwavering and bordering on detached. "It wouldn't work out between us."