He’d dated before Jenny, of course. Like most men, he had physical needs. Close companionship hadn’t interested him. But satisfying those needs had, and he’d never been one to pay for that kind of thing.
So he’d dated, but never without a thorough background check of the woman in question, during which his investigator invariably turned up material that confirmed his suspicions (at least in his own mind), and prevented the development of a longer-term entanglement. Which was fine. There was always another woman.
And then Jenny.
From the beginning, she’d been different. An accountant by training, she’d worked for one of the smaller biotechs he controlled, one developing new treatments for diabetes. He’d met her at one of the company meetings he occasionally attended, and she’d intrigued him.
It had begun with her hand.
He disliked shaking hands. People’s hands were dirty. Coated with disease and filth. He tolerated hand shaking only because it was good business, and politeness demanded it. But he kept a small bottle of liquid hand sanitizer in his pants pocket at all times; and he would slip his hand in his pocket to surreptitiously cleanse it after each offending, germ-soaked shake without removing the bottle from his pocket.
He hadn’t done that after shaking Jenny’s hand, not one squirt of lemon-scented, bacterial death. He hadn’t felt the urge, hadn’t pictured in his mind, the way he normally did, the millions of microbes teeming across the surfaces of her palm and fingers. He didn’t understand why.
He’d also had no clue as to why he was able to look her straight in the eye when they first met. Looking people in the eye usually made him uncomfortable. Hers had been beautiful eyes. Green, to go with her red hair.
He’d observed during that first meeting, and subsequent ones, how other people were drawn to her warmth, as if she were the sun, and they the planets orbiting around her. She had a positive energy she transmitted to those around her. To him, she was unflaggingly kind and professional, but otherwise hadn’t shown the extreme deference, bordering on sycophancy, as the others who worked for him did. He liked that.
And her laugh. God. Her laugh had been like a drug to him. Other people’s laughter often annoyed him, grated on his ears, like a knife scraping against a glass bottle. Her laughter was music.
The more he was around her, the more he’d wanted to be around her. He’d started to schedule more meetings at her company just to have an excuse to be in the same room with her. And, privately, he’d fallen for her. It didn’t occur to him to ask her out. He’d simply watched her, content to admire her from a small distance, delighted to have joined her orbit.
Until the thing happened with the comic books.
Finney was a comic-book fan. Science fiction, too. As a kid he’d been a fanatic, had spent all his free time (and, without friends, he’d had a lot of it) poring over comics and science-fiction novels. He’d loved and collected the classic comics—kept them in special airtight plastic bags with cardboard backing, and would handle them only with white-cotton gloves—but he’d devour whatever he could get his hands on: old, new, valuable, worthless. It hadn’t mattered.
As a child, he’d dismissed the action figures and other toys that went with them as, well … childish, because it was the stories he loved. He’d steeped himself in their arcana with the seriousness of a professor. He’d even tried his hand at writing a few though he knew he wasn’t any good. He could wax poetic on the differences between steampunk and cyberpunk, expound on the history of Japanese manga, or recite the origins of even the most minor characters in the most insignificant, short-lived series.
The thing with Jenny had happened at Comic-Con, an international convention of comic-book, science-fiction, and fantasy fans. Each July, tens of thousands of Comic-Con conventioneers seized San Diego by the throat. Legions, shuffling from one exhibit to another, dressed in absurd costumes, clutching tote bags full of free tchotchkes, clogging sidewalks and streaming across downtown intersections in packed, multicolored lines like army ants on the march through the jungle. To him, it was the biggest Halloween party ever for grown-ups.
But it hadn’t always been like that. Finney had attended Comic-Con for years. Decades. Each year, growing up, he’d begged his parents to drive him the hundred-odd miles south from their home in Los Angeles to San Diego until he was old enough to make the trip on his own; and, each year, his bemused parents had acquiesced.