“You’re a romantic,” I said, loud enough for his wife to hear in the back.
“Shut up, dickhead,” Nick said, but he was smiling, too.
* * *
When you makecomics in your suburban living room, you forget that real people are reading them. The download numbers are just figures on a screen, not real people. It’s easy to pretend that there are no real people somewhere past your door, reading the thing you work so hard on.
But it hit home when Nick and I came onto the stage at the convention. The lights overhead were bright, but I could still see that there were over a hundred people in the audience, waiting to see us. Us. The Mason brothers, who had started spinning stories in my hospital room because it was better than pain. Who the hell wanted to see us?
The moderator introduced us, and we waved. The room applauded. They had put a table on the stage with three microphones, one for the moderator and two for us. The moderator was going to ask us questions, and then we were going to take questions from the audience.
My mouth was dry. Cold sweat coated my back. I had no idea if I would be able to say anything at all. And then I looked out at the audience, and Tessa was there.
She was sitting right in the front row. She was wearing jeans and a zip-up hoodie with the name of her nursing school on it, sneakers on her feet. She was the most beautiful woman in the room—her flawless skin, her blonde hair, her gorgeous blue eyes. Those eyes were fixed on me, and she was smiling.
She’d made it.
I smiled back at her, and everything fell away. There was just Tessa and me. That was always how it was with us: Wherever we were, there was just her and me. I tended to forget that anyone else was in the room, and so did she.
The moderator finished his introductions and was about to start his first question when I leaned toward my microphone and said, “I just want to clear something up before we start, because we get a lot of questions. Let’s just make this clear. Lightning Man and Judy Gravity are dating.”
The room erupted—applause, shouts of protest. There was a big divide among Lightning Man fans about the state of the Lightning Man-Judy Gravity romance. It was by far the topic of the most emails we got.
I looked at Tessa again. She was cheering, of course.
“This is going to be a lively debate,” the moderator said. “What’s your opinion, Nick?”
Nick had noticed Tessa, too. Probably because she was sitting right next to Evie, who was also clapping. “Lightning Man,” he said, “is definitely dating Judy Gravity. No question.”
Over the roar of the audience, I watched Tessa laugh.
And I knew, for the first time, that everything was going to be okay.