That had him glancing at me. “What’s a Goku?”
Yeah, I had to clutch the sides of the canvas seat below me as I leveled my gaze at his bearded face. “He’s only the second single greatest fighter in Anime history. He was a character on a show called ‘Dragonball’.” I realized I was whispering and ranting at the same time, and coughed. “It was a Japanese cartoon that I love. You’ve never heard of it?”
Those thick eyebrows knit together and one big foot crossed over the other as he stretched out in the poor, poor chair. “It’s a cartoon… with fighters?”
“Intergalactic fighters,” I tried to draw him in, raising an eyebrow. “Like Streetfighter but with a plot. It’s epic.”
Adding the intergalactic part must have been too much because he just shook his big head. “What the hell is an intergalactic fighter?”
“A fighter…” I stared at him and grabbed two pieces of candy, handing him an Airhead because I knew it was vegan. “Here. This might take a while.”
* * *
“He has a tail the entire time?” Aiden held the same Blow Pop up against his lip that he’d taken from the jack-o-lantern bucket after polishing off an Airhead. I may or may not have had to force myself not to look at his mouth for more than a second or two at a time. “That seems stupid. Someone could grab it and use it against him.”
The fact that he was thinking strategy over an anime that I was so fond of got me pretty damn excited; I just had to be careful not to let it show on my face. “No, he lost his tail when he grew up,” I explained.
We’d been going on about “Dragonball” for the last hour. In that time, exactly four kids had come up to the house for candy, but I was too busy explaining one of my favorite shows in the world to Mr. I-didn’t-have-a-childhood to really focus in on that.
He blinked as he thought about my explanation. “He lost his tail when he hit puberty?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why does it matter? It’s genetic. Guys grow hair in places when they hit puberty; he can lose his tail if he wants to lose his tail. You just have to watch it to understand.”
He didn’t look particularly convinced.
“After that, there’s “Dragonball Z” and GT, and those are even better in my opinion.”
“What’s that?”
“The series when they get older. They have kids and then their kids grow up to become better than them.”
His eyebrow twitched and I was fairly certain his mouth did too. “Do you have that on DVD too?”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
He gave me a side-glance, reaching up to scratch at his bearded cheek with his last three fingers. “Maybe I’ll have to watch it.”
“Whenever you want, big guy. My video collection is your video collection.”
I swear he nodded as if he’d actually take me up on my offer.
With a victorious sigh, I turned my attention back to the street to see that it was completely empty. Not a single soul roamed our block or any other block within visual distance. Something tickled at the back of my head, really making me think about the evening, about Aiden coming out to sit with me.
I bit my lips and asked slowly, “That’s probably it for kids today, huh?”
He lifted a shoulder, pulling the lollipop out of his mouth. “Seems like it.”
I got up with the nearly full container of candy and made sure to keep my face down as I collapsed the legs of the chair together. Something clogged my throat. “Kids don’t really go trick-or-treating in this neighborhood, do they?”
Aiden hummed the most obnoxious non-answer in the world.
And I had my answer.
I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to figure it out.
He had known kids didn’t come out to trick-or-treat in his neighborhood—his freaking gated neighborhood. So he’d come out to keep me company. How about that. How about that.
“Aiden?”
“Huh?”
“Why didn’t you tell me there weren’t little kids here?”
He didn’t bother looking at me as he headed into the house with his chair tucked under an arm. “You looked excited. I didn’t want to ruin it for you,” he admitted without a shy note in his voice.
Bah-freaking-humbug.
If there was something I could have said after that that would have been appropriate, I had no idea what it could have been. I thought about the tiny kindness he’d done me as I took the chair from him and set both of them back into the garage while he went to the bathroom.
My stomach growled and I went about rinsing some chickpeas and drying them while my mind wandered to Aiden. He appeared in the kitchen and sat at the breakfast table, his broad back curling over it as he worked on his puzzle in peace. I made dinner—quadrupling what I usually would have made for just me alone—and told myself that I was only doing it because he’d been nice to me.
I wasn’t even going to bother asking if he was hungry. He was always hungry.
When the food was ready thirty minutes later, I served up two bowls and held the one with three times as much as the other out to him. Aiden eyes caught mine as he took it.
“Thank you.”
I just nodded at him. “You’re welcome. I’m going to go watch TV while I eat.” I made it all the way to where the living room met up with the hallway that went straight down the middle of the house.
“You want to watch that Dragonballs show?”
I stopped in my tracks when he spoke.
“I’m curious now what a little kid with a monkey tail who can supposedly ‘kick ass’ looks like.”
Glancing back to make sure he wasn’t pulling my tail, I spotted Aiden sitting on the edge of his seat, ready to get up if I gave him the notice. I was dumbstruck for a second before reacting. I had to force myself not to smile like a lunatic. “It’s ‘Dragonball,’ big guy, and you don’t have to tell me twice.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I was sitting at my computer when the first massive lightning bolt hit. The house shook. The windows rattled. Wind howled, slapping the house’s siding. The height of the storm I’d seen the meteorologist on TV forecasting had finally come.
And I panicked, saving my work as quickly as I could so I could turn off my computer.
Then the next bolt hit, the light so bright right outside my window it seemed unreal, closer to a nuclear blast than an act of nature. The lights had no hope. Just like a candle going out, they were there one second and gone the next.
“Fuck!” I muttered to myself, already diving from my desk toward the bed, blind, slapping my hands around so I could find the nightstand. My knee found it first, and I cursed, grabbing the spot that I was sure was already turning into a bruise with one hand and finding the top drawer with the other. It didn’t take me long to find the small LED flashlight inside. I made sure it was always in the left corner, and sure enough, it was right there.
Flicking it on, I sucked in a deep breath before jumping back on the bed and sliding under the covers. The flashlight was the best thing money could buy; five hundred lumens for a contraption three inches long. I moved the bright beam around the ceiling and toward the open doorway, listening as the screaming winds outside got louder. I shivered.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t gotten a warning that a storm was coming in advance. It had been raining steadily for some time, but instead of the storm moving away, it had just gotten heavier and heavier. Great.
This was so stupid. I hated being so scared of the dark. I really did. It made me feel like a dumb little kid. But no matter how much I tried to tell myself it was okay, that I was fine….
That didn’t do anything.
I still shook. My breathing still got bottled up in my throat. I still wanted the lights to come back on.
“Vanessa? Where are you?” Aiden’s rough voice carried its way from down the hall. I could barely hear his footsteps as they got lost mixed in with the noise outside.