His Work of Art (4 page)

She groaned. “No. Their movies are improving. I could do Batman.”

It was his turn to groan. “The idea of college is to broaden your horizons and learn something. If you write about Batman, you'll get bored. You know it all.”

“At this point in my academic career, I'm looking for easy. I'm ready to be done.”

He was well acquainted with that feeling. “How about an analysis of the mythology of Thor? It would give you an excuse to sit and watch movies by calling it research.”

He knew she liked the idea because something lit in her eyes.

“I'll even bring my copy on Saturday. You do your research between now and then and you can compare it to the movie. Still easy.” It'd be nice if someone came along with ideas for him whenever he faced a school project.

“We'll see. But I'll have your story done—your superhero's story. You sure you don't want to at least give this guy a name?” Her cocky smile returned and she had a scheming look in her eye.

“Nope. I trust you. As long as you don't kill him.”

“Fine. But torture is totally still on the table.” She grabbed her jacket off the chair and headed for the door. “See you Saturday.”

Adam stared after her for a while, unsure of what he'd gotten himself into. Hanging out at her apartment, working, watching a movie. He hoped she didn't get the impression this would be a date. He didn't need that kind of complication as they headed into this partnership. Plus, as much as he liked Reese, she was all wrong for him.

R
eese was nervous about Adam coming over. She'd had plenty of friends at her apartment over the years, both guys and girls. She'd even had boyfriends spend the night. But having Adam in her home was strange. Their relationship was so undefined. Were they friends? Partners? He was right when he'd pointed out that they had a hard time getting along, but even their disagreements were fun.

Having him here would change who they were. He would know more about her than she knew about him. She didn't like that. He texted that he'd be there around eight and offered to bring dinner. He'd supply the burgers and she had the beer. She also had plenty of junk food to fuel their creativity for the night.

She had roughly five weeks before she launched her campaign. By that time, she needed to have at least part of the anthology done; illustrations would make the sales. Take out a few days for the holidays, and they would have maybe a month of work time and both she and Adam still had classes.

Depending on how well tonight went, they might just be able to pull some late nights to get things moving. She tossed a blanket over the couch to cover the worst of its age. When the doorbell rang, she took one last look around to make sure she hadn't left her underwear on the floor, or anything equally embarrassing, then ran down the stairs to let Adam in.

She swung the door open and said, “Sorry. The buzzer's broken. I'm upstairs.” She turned and led the way back into her apartment.

Adam followed her through and set the bag of food on the coffee table. She locked up and asked, “You want a beer or pop?”

“Whatever you're having.” He shucked his jacket and hung it on the overloaded coatrack. “You want me to take my shoes off?”

“Doesn't matter. I like to be barefoot, but it's not a requirement.” She snagged two bottles of beer from the fridge and joined him at the couch.

Adam unpacked the food and asked, “How much did you get done this week?”

“Story?”

He nodded. “Or paper.”

“Lyrid's origin is done, but not broken into panels. I'm finding that's hard to do. Trying to find the right place to break things, how much to fit in each panel, deciding which panels should be bigger because they're more involved.” She sat on the floor and crossed her legs. “Your story is done too.”

“My story?”

“Your superhero. I still don't have a name, but I'm working on it. You'd be surprised how many names are already used in comics. Everything I came up with I had to toss because Marvel or DC had already used it. That doesn't even touch the smaller pubs like Dark Horse. Google was not kind to me this week.”

Adam settled back on the couch with a burger in his lap and said nothing. So she continued, “His is a story of redemption. He's badass, a felon, always in trouble. Then, one night, he does the unthinkable. He gets his girlfriend killed.” She bit into her burger and let Adam digest that part of the story.

“Ouch.” Adam narrowed his eyes as he took another bite. “But I like an anti-hero.”

“Totally!” She took another hasty bite and continued, “So while he's in prison, he saves some dude's ass—literally and figuratively. And he likes it. He starts to think that if he does enough acts like that, he can make up for all the bad he's done. When he gets out, he takes a menial job, because how many choices does a guy like him have? Whatever that job is, it puts him on the streets where he can help people.”

“That sounds way more superhero than anti-hero.”

“It's a work in progress. The anti-hero part is that he's not doing this for other people, he's all about saving himself, which means he spends a lot of time being an asshole to everyone.” She took a pull on her beer to wash down the food.

Adam laughed. “You sound like you're getting off on him being an asshole.”

She snorted and beer bubbled up her nose. Crap.
Real sexy, Reese.
She coughed to cover how much that hurt as she wiped a napkin over her face.

Adam stood. “Are you okay?”

She nodded and waved him off. He returned to his seat and finished his food while she attempted to regain her composure. When she was able to breathe normally and her nose burned only a little, she went back to her dinner. “I don't get off on him being an asshole. I just think it makes for a deep and intriguing character.”

He laughed. At her. “It's okay, Reese. Call it whatever you want. You like bad boys. You wouldn't be the first girl.”

She whipped a French fry at him. He picked it up and ate it.

“On that note, I want to use him. Don't you think he'd make a great mentor for Lyrid?”

“What?”

“Think about it. They're both reluctant heroes. He thinks he has to be one to clean the slate. She's afraid to be one.”

“He'll feel the need to protect her like he couldn't his girlfriend.”

Reese stood. “See, you are good at story. You just need a little prompting.” She gathered all their trash and tossed it in the kitchen.

By the time she returned to the living room, Adam had the table wiped off and their bottles moved to the side table. He had pages spread out, but they were all blank.

“I thought you were going to have drawings.”

“I will. I'm fast. At least the first sketches. I need to see the story, to know the layout. That's stuff we need to do together. Unless you're leaving all of that to my judgment.”

Hell no. She grabbed the notebook that contained her stories and knelt next to him at the table. “Here's her origin.”

She laid the notebook down and then scooted back to sit on the couch while he read.

“You actually write on paper? I thought everyone used computers.”

“Paper doesn't lose battery power. It doesn't crash or accidentally erase. You work on paper.”

“I like the feel of it.”

“So do I. If my writing's too hard to decipher, I can type it up. It wouldn't take long.”

“You're fine.” He spoke softly because he was already reading.

This was harder than just handing over a folder of her work. This was even harder than having to read a sample aloud in class. She gulped the rest of her beer and went to the kitchen to grab another. She came back and Adam had abandoned the notebook and was already scribbling on his sheets.

She knelt next to him, her freshly opened beer forgotten. He scribbled in the boxes of the panels, outlining the story. His drawings were placeholders, little more than blobs and sticks. She could've done that. He said nothing, but continued to scratch through one page after another, occasionally referring back to her notebook.

As he finished a page, she took it and outlined where the text boxes and speech bubbles would go. It started to take shape, like a real book. When he had five pages done, he stopped and looked at what she'd done on the first three.

“What do you think?”

She eyed the last two pages. “That's not the end.”

“Nope. I think we can turn this origin story into a full book, not a mini-book.”

“But there's not a whole lot of action to show. No one wants to read big blocks of text.”

“There's enough to look at. Trust me. But this”—he tapped page three—“I think this one needs to be a full page. Getting struck by the power of what she thinks is a shooting star changes the entire course of her life.”

Reese looked at the panels. “If we juggle these,” she said, pointing to the small panels on the top of the page, “stretch them to be three long panels instead of boxes, then the next page will be the big splash.”

Adam dug through his pile of papers for a new sheet, this one with the panels as she described. How much did this guy spend on copying panel pages? He came prepared with everything.

As Adam laid out more blank pages, he was in the zone. This was what it was supposed to be like when you created a real story. Until now, he'd never experienced this kind of collaboration. Bouncing ideas off Reese was so much better than trying to talk to Hunter, who just didn't get comics. For over an hour they worked, arguing over layout and important plot points. But in the back of his mind, he knew there was something special about this story. The origin of Lyrid was personal for Reese.

She scribbled quick lines of dialogue and description on the pages he'd already sketched and he glanced at her from the corner of his eye. The pain she described of Alexis's home life, living with an abusive father, made Adam wonder. He looked around the small apartment. He saw no sign of any man, but that didn't have to mean anything.

With the exception of things he'd left at his mom's house, there was no sign of a man there either and his father hadn't been abusive. He returned his focus to the remaining pages in front of him. Rough sketches that wouldn't mean much to anyone stared back at him. This was a huge undertaking.

Part of him worried he wouldn't be up to the challenge. On the other hand, they'd just managed to draft an entire comic in one night. They could do this. He sat back on the couch and drank from a glass of water that Reese had brought in for him. He waited while she finished off the text. “I brought
Thor
.”

At first he wasn't sure if he'd said it out loud because she didn't respond. He'd debated for a long time before leaving his apartment about whether he should bring the disc. She hadn't asked him to and he didn't even know at this point what her paper was about, but he wanted to share something he liked with her.

She finally looked up from the page. “Thanks.” She glanced down again and then asked, “Did you want to stay to watch it?”

“Sure.” Adam dug in his bag to grab the box. “I'm not trying to strong-arm you into watching a Marvel movie. If you decided on something else for your paper, we don't have to.”

She looked up again and her cool eyes met his. “Contrary to what you think, I don't hate Marvel. I've seen some of the movies. I really liked
Guardians of the Galaxy
.”

“I am Groot.” He couldn't help it. Three words ended up defining the movie. He walked over to the DVD player and inserted the disc. “I assume you took note of all of the kick-ass women in that movie. Marvel is flush with them.”

“Yeah, yeah. We're getting a Wonder Woman movie.”

“Eventually. If they don't screw it up.”

As Reese dealt with the remote to get the movie started, Adam cleaned up their work. “Do you want me to start inking these when I have them ready, or do you want to see them first?”

She scrunched up her whole face. “I think I want to see them, if you don't mind. It's not that I don't trust you. I just . . .”

“Want to make sure I don't screw it up?”

“Yeah. I mean, no offense, but this is my grade we're talking about. If it's still in pencil, we can make changes, right?” The previews blared to life on the TV screen as she settled on the opposite end of the couch.

“It's fine, Reese. I get it. You want majority control.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Okay, you just want final say.” At this point, he was just poking at her because it was fun, but she didn't seem to get it.

Her face scrunched up again. Then a look of defiance came into her eyes. “Yeah, actually, I do. I might not be able to draw for shit, but I have a vision of what I want the books to be.”

Adam laughed, which seemed to frustrate her even more. He waved a hand. “I'm fucking with you. We both need to accept that there are things we'll go to bat for in our work. We didn't have any problems tonight and we got the first book done. I'm not concerned with your final say.”

She shot him another dirty look. She should learn that doing that only made her look sexy, not mean. Reese returned her attention to the remote and went to the main menu. As the opening credits rolled, she pulled out a notebook and pen.

“Taking notes?”

“I need to have specifics for my paper.” She brought her legs up onto the couch and crossed them with the notebook balanced on her knee.

“Wait. Did she just hit Thor with her car?”

Adam held up a hand. “This is like a prologue. It'll go back and you'll understand everything. Be patient.”

About halfway through, Reese paused the movie, and said, “I don't get it. I've heard so many people talk about Loki. Where's the love coming from? I don't like him. He's a weasel. As a character, he's complex and has great motivation, but I don't think I'll ever be rooting for him.”

“Maybe they're just crushing on Tom Hiddleston.”

“You might be on to something there.” She slapped his leg. “I'm hungry. It doesn't seem right to be watching a movie without popcorn. You want some?”