The Almost Sisters(84)

“I’m sorry. Digby is what I’ve been calling the baby.”

“Oh,” he said, and very carefully made no facial expression.

“You don’t like it?” I asked, because whether Digby’s father would like the name was not something that had crossed my mind. Not until I was facing Digby’s father.

“I luh-luh-love it,” he lied. He wasn’t very good at it.

Strangely, this obvious lie to please me made me feel a little better. Maybe he was like that cliché about snakes—as scared of me as I was of him. I stayed on my side of the room, trying to read his silence, his dark eyes, his carefully neutral body language, as awkward as my own. Did he have his own worst-case scenarios running in his head?

The first thing he’d said to me was, I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know I will show up. That was the thing he’d said that mattered anyway. He’d dropped everything to appear bare hours after I told him I was pregnant.

Meanwhile I had his kid tucked inside my body. That made Digby wholly mine for now. I hadn’t contacted Sel for months, and when I finally did, I hadn’t mentioned the baby. I could have kept Digby to myself forever, and he knew it.

Maybe that was his worst-case scenario. Was he scared of being locked out of his own kid’s life? I wanted his words, for him to tell me, but they were trapped inside his mouth. So I took it as my best, most hopeful guess, and I rolled with it.

“Digby can be what we call him while I’m pregnant, like Rachel called Lavender ‘Beanie’ before she was born. We can figure his real name later. Something we both love. If you want.”

His smile appeared, relieved and beautiful, and I knew I’d guessed right even before he said, “Gug-guh-gggg . . .” trying to get out some affirmative. Good, or maybe Great. He snapped his mouth shut, nostrils flaring, frustrated.

I said, “Don’t be nervous. We’re on the same side here, I think. Aren’t we? I think about Digby—Digby-for-now, or whatever we end up naming Digby—and I’m on his side. Are you?” He nodded in sincere, vehement silence. “Okay, then. So we have to find a way to talk. I’d offer you a beer, but there isn’t any in the house. We have bourbon, but between your evolution T-shirt and drinking before noon, Wattie might go find the old shotgun and run you off.” His gaze had turned speculative. I was flat-out babbling, my own nerves causing the words to run out of me, trying to make up for all his stuck ones. “What if we got our phones? We could sit in the same room and text. It’s very modern. Lavender and her friends do it all the time.”

He put his hand briefly over his eyes again. When he took it away, his expression was rueful. He held one finger in a wait-a-sec gesture, and now he was the one blushing. Furiously. So furiously that I could see the red wash rising in the undertones of his skin, especially in the tips of his ears.

He turned away and set his gym bag down by my laptop on the Singer table, opened it, and set his book aside. It was a hardback of Saga, as battered around the edges as my own beloved copy back in Norfolk. He really did have damn good taste in comics. He pulled out a wad of black cloth and unfurled it, his back still to me, and then he pulled it on over his head.

It was the cowl, the same one I remembered from FanCon, with the bat ears poking up. The long cloak fell behind him to midcalf. He pulled at the neck, simultaneously twitching his shoulders, getting it all to lie correctly in one practiced motion, and then he turned back around to face me.

“Hello,” said Batman. And it was him. Sel Martin was gone. This was the hot Batman with the lush mouth, flashing the cocky smile that had caught me at the hotel bar. His eyes glinted through the slits in the mask.

“Hel-lo,” I said.

The gym bag was empty. He hadn’t brought the rest of the suit, but it didn’t matter. The pieces he had worked fine with the gray shirt and the dark jeans, kind of like I’d run into Batman on casual Friday.

“Let’s talk about this kid.” No stutter. Not even a hint of one.

“Damn,” I said, and I realized I was grinning back at him, hugely, dorkishly. I shut it down, embarrassed. I gestured at his cowl, his cape. “That works?”

“Always.” He shrugged. “Even when I was a kid, running around the house in Dark Knight Underoos and a black pillowcase with home-cut eyeholes.”

“Do you wear it to your job?” I asked him, fascinated.

I almost wished he did. I personally would love to be rolled back for surgery to find that my twilight sleep would be managed by one of the Super Friends. It might be a little disconcerting for non-nerds, though.

“I don’t stutter much at my job,” he said, soft like always, but I could hear him fine in the quiet room. “Or with my friends. Not since I was a kid. It only gets bad when I try to talk to pretty women. Or when I find out I accidentally made a baby. Or when I’m alone with one of my favorite artists. I’m three for three today.”

“That’s a total player line,” I said, taking one step closer. The dreadful art monster in me wanted to know who his other favorite artists were and where my stuff came in the ranking, but I shoved that aside for later.

He shrugged, unabashed. “You’re pretty. You’re pregnant. And you’re Leia freakin’ Birch. You know how many times I’ve read Violence in Violet? Plus, I’ve got every series that you’ve drawn for in sleeves.”