Chapter Four — The Trouble with Being Two Men

By Wednesday afternoon, Asher had begun to suspect that dating Luna Reyes meant accepting a permanent, low-level threat of being turned into a joke.

There were worse things. His blue lantern still leaned on his kitchen counter like an exhausted municipal building. Every time he looked at it, he remembered Luna's rain-cold fingers slipping between his, then the startling warmth of her lips against his cheek.

They had found a half hour for coffee between her shift at the library and a session he had to reach across town. She stood beside him at a sidewalk kiosk, studying the pastry case with the concentration of a museum conservator examining a suspicious acquisition.

“Lemon bar,” Asher guessed.

“Presumptuous.”

“You've bought lemon-flavored something every time I've seen you near a counter.”

“That's twice.”

“An impeccable sample size.”

She bought the lemon bar. He had the wisdom not to celebrate.

They carried their drinks to a bench under an awning striped red and cream. It was pleasant to sit with her while buses complained at the curb and the city carried on without offering either of them a dramatic soundtrack. Asher was telling her about an absurd rehearsal problem: three technicians had spent an afternoon hunting an intermittent metallic click that turned out to be a radiator, faithfully keeping time with the percussion.

“Eventually Nico put a microphone near it,” he said. “Said if it wanted to join the session, it could start paying union dues.”

Luna laughed. Then her phone buzzed on the bench.

Her eyes flicked to the screen. The smile changed.

“Sorry. Give me a second.”

Asher took a sip. One second stretched into fifteen. She was scrolling now, brows drawn together, the half-eaten lemon bar abandoned on its wrapper.

“Did somebody die?” he asked.

“No. Somebody's being an idiot about VESPER's old stage show.”

The name landed between them with an unpleasantly familiar weight.

She tilted her screen away to type. Asher caught only a frozen video thumbnail: a masked figure standing before mirrored panels, light passing through the moving seams. He remembered the night. He remembered the technicians sweating behind those panels, and the ache in his legs afterward. The clip had been edited to remove the five seconds that made the visual trick work.

He could have explained all of that. He didn't.

Luna pressed Send with the satisfaction of someone who had corrected a historical plaque before it could mislead future generations.

Asher watched her thumb leave the screen. “You know, if I'd brought a mask, I might have been allowed to finish my story.”

He meant it to land lightly. He even smiled.

Luna looked up. “What?”

“The radiator. Remember? My big moment with the unionized heating system.”

“Oh.” Her eyes moved to his untouched coffee. “I'm sorry. I was listening.”

“Were you? Because I haven't actually reached the part where it gets funny.”

“You said Nico put a microphone near it.”

“That's the middle.”

She put her phone facedown. “Okay. I'm here now.”

He should have taken the opening. Instead he heard himself say, “Should I be flattered that I'm apparently competing with a man in a mask for the privilege?”

Her expression closed by a degree. “Don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it sound stupid. I've followed his work for years. That performance mattered to me.”

“I didn't say it was stupid.”

“You said it with the voice you use when you're calling something stupid.”

He set down his cup. “Luna, I am sitting right here. I wasn't asking you to renounce music. I wanted to tell you something about my day.”

“Then tell me. You don't have to insult something I love to get my attention.”

That was unfair. So was what he said next.

“You don't know the man, Luna. You know a stage act. Maybe it doesn't need you defending it every time somebody on the internet makes a face.”

The silence afterward was sharp enough to cut through the bus brakes and the kiosk blender.

Luna sat back. “You think I don't know the difference between a person and an artist?”

He had the insane impulse to say that he knew exactly what the difference was. He swallowed it.

“I think,” he said, “that I came here to see you, and you left me halfway through a sentence to fight strangers.”

For a second her expression faltered. She had done that. He saw her recognize it. Then pride took over.

“I can apologize for being distracted,” she said. “I won't apologize for caring about something that existed in my life before you did.”

“I didn't ask you to.”

“You're acting like you did.”

They stared at each other across the narrow strip of bench where their hands had rested together two nights earlier.

Asher could feel his next defense assembling itself. He could also see that using it would make the afternoon worse. He hated that those were not the same thing as knowing how to stop.

Luna wrapped the rest of the lemon bar in its paper. “I have to get back.”

“You said you had another twenty minutes.”

“I know what I said.”

She stood. The gesture made him rise too, almost automatically. He wanted to touch her elbow and didn't, because she looked as if she would hate being coaxed out of her anger.

“Luna.”

She waited.

“I wasn't laughing at your music.”

“No,” she said. “You were laughing at me for loving it.”

She walked toward the crossing without looking back.

Asher remained beside the bench while his coffee cooled. He could command a stadium full of people as VESPER, and he'd just lost the attention of one woman to his own performance, then made her feel ridiculous for noticing it.

The really humiliating part was that he'd deserved some of her anger. Not all of it. Enough.