Free Heroine Addiction by Jennifer Matarese Page A

to try to catch his gaze. His injuries are relatively innocuous. He's upright, he's conscious, he's not suffering from anything more serious than he would have achieved on a busy day of light villainy.
    It's a sign. If my mother had been the one to give him those black eyes, they wouldn't just be black eyes. With enough incentive to start a fight with Morris in the first place, Mom would have punched him hard enough to put a fist through his skull. Or to put his skull through a steel-reinforced brick wall.
    Somebody with normal to slightly-stronger-than-normal strength did this. Someone who would have been with Mom when Morris searched for her.
    “He wouldn't,” I hear myself say.
    “Apparently, he would.” Morris sounds like he can't decide whether to be sad or bitter, and just settles for exhaustion instead.
    I bolt to my feet, the urge to pace off my anxious energy overwhelming me. Morris watches me with uneasy intrigue, my hands absently wringing as I try to work out how this would even be possible. Even outside of a costume, Everett Noble keeps his cool no matter how dire the situation. His superhuman mental abilities lead him to more intellectual pursuits, to tranquil hobbies and a lack of overreaction. He plays Go and chess and enjoys reading biographies of great superheroes throughout history like Mad Markos or Teddy the Bear. In his everyday life out of the spandex, he's never punched anyone.
    My heels clack against the hardwood floor as I pace.
    “Dad wouldn't hit you.”
    “Your father,” Morris says, “wouldn't even hit me when we were mortal enemies.”
    “So why would he hit you now?”
    “Perhaps there was a fly on my nose and he wanted to guarantee he killed it?”
    I ignore his sarcasm and ask, “What did you say right before he hit you?”
    He pretends to sink into deep thought, the wry tilt of his grimace a sign that there's only more aggravation to come in the near future. “I believe the incendiary insult I said to warrant that enjoyable beating was something along the lines of, 'Hello.'”
    “Hello?”
    “Yes, clearly I was asking for it,” he says dryly, clasping his hands and resting his forearms on his knees.
    Sighing, I mutter, “I didn't say that.”
    “And I don't believe you meant it, either.”
    I pause in the middle of the cafe's reading area, leveling my gaze at Morris, searching for anything flip in his words or expression. There's nothing. He might be sore and bruised, he might be angry and depressed and weary all at once, but he doesn't believe that I'd enjoy seeing him this miserable. I should probably take that as a compliment.
    “I apologize for implying as much,” he says with grudging graciousness. He runs his palms over the crisp pressed pleat in his trousers. “I have not exactly had the best of weeks, and so far you've been the only person who's listened to me and not responded to said conversation with violence. Sad as it is, you're currently the closest thing I have to a friend.”
    “That,” I tell him, “is the most depressing thing I think you've ever said to me.”
    Morris's smile almost breaks my heart. Almost.
    “Trust me,” he says. “I've noticed.”
    I rest a hip against one of the booths and cross my arms, drumming the fingers of one hand against my skin as I ponder just what this all means. Dad, who's secretly shared a bed with Morris for the past five years, would never break up with him at the end of a fist, no matter how disastrous their breakup might be. Dad didn't get angry, he got quiet. You knew you were in trouble when he wouldn't even speak to you, when you were lucky if he acknowledged your existence at all.
    All I can picture is the smug smile stretching across his face as he stood atop the felled robot, how out of character it appeared. It felt like he stole it from someone else to wear, some sort of macabre mask belonging on some happier person's face.
    “Robot.”
    Morris flinches when I speak, his attention obviously yanked away