The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 561

Chapter 561: 561 | Proof

The back of my knees hit the mattress and Diane pushed me down onto it like she’d been waiting eleven days to do exactly that. Which, according to her, she had.

"Off," she said, tugging at my hoodie. "All of it."

"You could ask nicely."

"I could." She didn’t. She yanked the hem up and I lifted my arms so she could pull the whole thing over my head, and the second my chest was bare her hands were on it, tracing the lines the Demigod trait had been carving into me while I slept. Her fingers moved slow over my sternum, down across my abs, and her breath went uneven in a way that had nothing to do with tears anymore.

"Your body keeps changing," she murmured. "It’s genuinely unfair. I raised you. I have documentation of you as a scrawny fourteen-year-old who couldn’t do a single pull-up."

"And now?"

"Now I have opinions I shouldn’t have about the son I raised, and I’ve made my peace with all of them." She pressed her palm flat over my heart, felt it kick against her hand, and something in her face went soft and hungry at the same time. "There it is. There’s my proof."

I reached for her blouse and she caught my wrist.

"No." She guided my hand back down to the mattress. "Not yet. You’ve been in a hospital bed for eleven days. You don’t do a single thing tonight, baby. You lie there and you let mommy take care of you."

There’s a specific thing that happens in my brain when Diane uses that word in that voice, and it is not a thing I’m proud of, and it works every single time. My whole spine went to static.

She watched it happen, saw whatever crossed my face, and her mouth curved into the smile she saves for closing deals she already knows she’s won.

"There he is," she said.

She stood back and started undoing her blouse. Not fast. She never did anything fast when she wanted me watching, and she knew I was watching, and she took her time with each button the way she took her time with a sentence she wanted to land three seconds after she said it.

The cream silk slid off her shoulders and pooled on the floor, and underneath it she wore a lace set the color of dark wine, the kind of thing that cost more than most people’s rent and looked like it.

"Diane."

"Hm?"

"You wore that under a blouse for a two-hour drive."

"I was optimistic."

She reached back and unhooked the bra, let it fall, and stood there in nothing but the lace at her hips and the gold at her ears and a body her Aspect had been maintaining at some impossible standard for longer than I’d been alive.

The evening light through the curtains caught every curve of her, and the Luster hummed at that low continuous level that made photographs of her outperform physics, made her look in person like the best version of a memory. "And I was right to be. Look at you. You’re staring."

"I’m appreciating."

"Appreciate quietly. I’m concentrating." She hooked her thumbs into the lace and slid it down, stepped out of it, and there was nothing left between her and the light. Then she was climbing onto the bed, over me, her knees bracketing my hips, her pink hair falling forward across her face in the way that looked accidental and never was.

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