Page 45 of Dragon Chaos Around

“Try fourteen for the primary supports and eighteen for the secondary fan ribs. The load-bearing structure handles the spread while the lighter ribs flex during movement.” He reached for the wire sample clipped to the edge of her bench. His forearm crossed her sightline. The cape—his cape, which he was still wearing—shifted with the movement, and the matte-silver lining brushed against the back of her hand where it rested on the shoulder panel.

She looked at the point where his cape touched her hand. Looked up.

“A dual-gauge system,” she said. Her voice had changed—the quick, confident workshop cadence slowing. Softening. “I didn’t consider—the differential flex would absorb the walk movement while the primary structure maintains⁠—”

“—the spread integrity. Yes.” He was still holding the wire sample. She was still looking at him. The distance between them had contracted through the natural geometry of two people examining the same object on the same bench, their heads inclined toward the wire sample, their shoulders angled inward, their breathing⁠—

“—that’s brilliant,” she said, and the word carried a weight that had nothing to do with wire gauge and everything to do with the way his proximity had altered the air between them into a charged, impossible density she couldn’t breathe without tasting.

“It’s basic structural engineering.” His voice scraped. The cape’s fabric pressed against her knuckles. Her hair—the escaped strand—fell across the curve of her cheek and caught the light.

“Chaos.”

“Yes.”

“You’re very close.”

“I’m examining the wire armature.”

“You stopped looking at the wire armature four sentences ago.”

She was right. He was looking at her mouth. The lower lip she bit when she concentrated. The way her breath caught and her pupils expanded and the LED test-lights reflected in her eyes like small fires, and the air between them was two inches of charged silence and the cape was still touching her hand.

The kiss was not planned. He would establish this for the record, in the event that future analysis required a clear accounting: he did not decide to kiss Alani Nores in a Brooklyn cosplay workshop on a Saturday afternoon in September while wearing a prototype villain cape. His body closed the two-inch gap without consulting his centuries of strategic discipline. His hand rose to her jaw—her jaw, where the gold hoops she wore threw small reflections and the skin was warm and the line of bone beneath his fingers was delicate and precise and his, and the word arrived without historical precedent or intellectual justification, and he could not un-think it.

She tasted like coffee and solder flux and the particular sweetness of a mouth that smiled more than it didn’t, and she made a sound against his lips—a short, sharp intake of breath that collapsed into a hum that vibrated between them—and her hands came up to his chest and gripped the cape’s fabric at his collar and pulled, and the cape held, and he was lost.

The kiss deepened. His other hand found the curve of her waist where the tank top met the bare skin of her hip and the heat that rolled through him was not the usual warmth, not the controlled burn that he managed in meetings and across conference tables. This was the dragon’s fire banked to its lowest, most dangerous register—not the blaze but the bed of coals beneath it, the heat that sustained itself without spectacle and could not be extinguished by will alone.

She pulled back. One inch. Her hands still gripping the cape. Her breath uneven against his mouth.

“You’re still wearing the cape,” she said.

“I’m aware.”

Her laugh—low, breathless, pressed against the corner of his mouth—was the finest sound the workshop had ever produced, and the workshop had produced villain theme songs and the hum of creative devotion and the laughter of three women who loved stories enough to build them with their hands, and none of it compared.

He kissed her again. Slower. The workshop’s fluorescent lighting hummed above them. The playlist had cycled to a ballad—some anime ending theme, strings and piano, the kind of music that scored the moment after the battle when the characters realized what they’d been fighting for. The cape’s fan-spread had relaxed during the kiss, the wire armature settling into a neutral drape, and the silver lining pooled between them where her hands held it.

A camera shutter clicked.

Crystal.

He broke the kiss. Alani didn’t let go of the cape. Crystal stood six feet away with her phone raised and the look of someone who had been waiting for this exact photograph since the walkthrough and intended to preserve it forever.

“Delete that,” he said.

“Absolutely not.” Crystal lowered the phone. “This is going in the group chat.”

“The group chat.”

“The group chat.” Alani’s smile—pressed against his jawline, half-hidden, radiant—carried the warmth of a woman who was not sorry and would never be sorry and whose joy was so concentrated it had a physical temperature. “You don’t know about the group chat yet.”

“I’ll be learning about the group chat.”

“You will.”

From the floor, Giselle’s voice arrived with the calm efficiency of mission control during a successful launch: “September twenty-first, four-thirty-one PM. First kiss. Workshop setting. Cape on. Duration: approximately forty-five seconds across two instances. Initiated during discussion of wire-gauge optimization. Crystal has photographic documentation. Updating timeline.”