Andrew: They’re done. How is the shoot?
Tessa: It’s fine. I have a question.
Andrew: Why am I not surprised?
Tessa: How did you and Nick start Lightning Man?
Andrew: It was after my accident. Nick spent a lot of time at the hospital with me. We had to do something besides stare at each other and drive each other crazy.
Tessa: So you just started telling stories?
Andrew: Something like that. Why?
Tessa: Weren’t you afraid your stories or your drawings wouldn’t be good enough? That they’d suck?
Andrew: Is this a weird way of telling me you don’t like my comics?
Tessa: No. They’re brilliant. Which your giant ego already knows.
Andrew: My giant ego appreciates the compliment.
Tessa: But you didn’t KNOW it was going to be great at first.
Andrew: No. But it was better than dying. By the way, Nick is back from his honeymoon. He talked to our mother. Now he thinks you’re my girlfriend, and he also doesn’t like you.
Tessa: Oh my God. Wear one FUCK shirt and get a permanent bad reputation.
Andrew: There goes the neighborhood.
Tessa: What can I do to impress him?
Andrew: You don’t need to impress him because you’re not actually my girlfriend.
Tessa: Right. Like Judy Gravity isn’t ACTUALLY Lightning Man’s girlfriend.
Andrew: She isn’t.
Tessa: She so is.
Andrew: No, she isn’t.
Tessa: They’re calling me. Off to show the girls for money, then to Miller’s for my shift. And she is.
Andrew: Damn it, Tessa.
* * *
On the sameday my air conditioner was fixed, the heat was finally breaking. As I worked my evening shift at Miller’s, the wind kicked up and there was a dark bank of clouds on the far horizon. I watched them as I stood in the back alley on my break, feeling the hot, angry wind throw dirt onto my skin. My bobbed hair flew upward as the air swirled.
“Looks like it might storm,” Nate said when he came out to join me, pulling a cigarette from the pack in his pocket.
I nodded. There seemed to be no lingering repercussions from my turning down my boss for a date, though I noticed him looking me up and down more often than I was comfortable with. And he tended to join me on my breaks, like now. “I guess it might,” I said.
“About time the heat broke.” He lit a cigarette and offered me the pack. “Want one?”
“No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”
“I noticed that. Why do you come out here on your breaks, then?”