We were drinking coffee at a coffee shop across from the Cathedral. Callie hadn’t said a word except to tell me to follow her, and had led me to here, asking me what I wanted to drink before we settled into a table. It was nearly noon, so the shop was nearly empty, and we could still see the magnificent building across the street from us while still having relative privacy in the nearly empty shop.

She took a sip of her coffee, a simple Sumatra roast with cream and sugar, and looked at me closely. I had my coffee with creamer, but no sugar. I had never been terribly fond of oversweetness, and I matched her sip of my Tanzanian Peaberry.

“You are an idiot.”

I nodded, enjoying the taste of the coffee. For a coffee shop, it was actually pretty good, and I was a bit of a coffee snob. The lack of sweetness prevented sugar from covering up the actual flavor of the beans, and a lot of commercial chains liked to use beans that should have been used in a forge instead of as a drink, after getting roasted into charcoal.

“Yes, I am. In fact, one of the first things I told you when we first met was that I was not that smart. It shouldn’t be any kind of a surprise.”

She shook her head, “I mean you are not not smart, or rather you are smart, but you are still an idiot.”

I chuckled, taking another sip. “Of course. So, would you mind telling me what sort of idiotic thing I did this time?” The list was long and distinctive, so I was curious as to which particular incident of idiocy she was referring to, exactly.

“You disappeared. I even checked out your work. Brad said that you got into some kind of a fight with some dude named Ramone, left, and never came back. He was really mad at you. I thought that after what Sif said, you were mad at me or something, but this went way past that. You disappeared completely. And then a year later, you are in prison on a bullshit power resisting charge and nothing else, with a file that was so redacted that it should have been made out of carbon paper. Did you know I showed up, in full costume, and Proteus refused to let me talk to you?”

I sighed. “That was stepping over the line a little I think. I didn’t expect any visitors, but I wasn’t supposed to be restricted access. I guess they were worried that I would talk. I love the hair, by the way, it’s an amazing dye job and looks totally natural. With someone like you looking in on me, I probably would have talked. Proteus and the DMA missed a chance there.”

She shook her head, the auburn waterfall drifting over her shoulders like rain in the middle of a drought, riveting my attention. “This isn’t a dye job. The blonde thing goes with the outfit, one of Carbine’s inventions. That’s why I had to wear it up, the image generator only had a short range, but he said that the hair was the biggest giveaway of secret identities. So he invented a device that absorbed certain light frequencies when they hit keratin. Sometimes the results are a little freaky, like Riptide’s hair turning neon pink, but it certainly does help with the identity thing.”

She sighed. “That’s why I was laughing with Sif when you were droning on about red hair. She did her communing thing, and she’s a very experienced hero and I take her advice seriously. I wanted to go out with you, and she said to ‘cultivate him’ whatever that meant, but when I went looking for you, no answer to texts, and you were totally in the wind.”

I shrugged, “You know I was trained as a doctor, right?”

At her nod, I continued, “Let’s just say that my brother sold me as a cook to a drug dealer to pay off some outstanding debts. I spent that year with guns pointed at my head churning out happy days for one of the bigger regionals.”

She nodded, “You got freed in a raid?”

I nodded back, “Sort of. I saw a little too much and agreed to plea no contest to a bullshit charge so they could keep me in protective custody. The folks that wanted me to have deep pockets, and some hints that witsec was compromised meant I got to spend a lot of time in solitary. Proteus decided that they wanted me to be a little more active, though, and so they decided to send me out to meet up with some teams, I guess assuming that I’d be safer surrounded by capes.”

She sighed. “Yeah, Sif said you were pulled out last week. She met with some seriously irate agents who said you vanished, again, someone named Victrix pushed you through a hole in the ground. I was really worried because they said your signal got zapped, and then a week later you show up here.”

I nodded, “Yep, Victrix was compromised by a meta named Copperhead that was like, the unofficial enforcer for several of the cartels. Just like Ramone. I doubt very much it’s going to happen again, though.”

“Why?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Because I killed him.”

She sat there, looking a little stunned as I took another sip of my coffee. I finally asked her, “Does this mean the plans for a date are a no-go?”

She shook her head. “Yes, but not because of that, I mean, supervillain metas and drug dealers sometimes get killed. A guy that kidnapped you twice probably had it coming.”

I nodded, “Sif?” and she shook her head.

“No.” She answered. “I am kinda dating someone.”

I sighed. I couldn’t say I wasn’t disappointed, but she was sweet, beautiful, and had a decent talent for kicking ass. It would have been weirder if she hadn’t been dating someone, especially at her age.

I chuckled a little, “It’s cool. I hope you are happy. I know it sounds stupid, but I genuinely do, and besides, kicking his ass probably wouldn’t do me any good, especially since I am still on parole. The only thing it would gain me would be a new girlfriend named one-eyed Bubba with a fondness for making people pick up the soap.”

She took another sip of her coffee. “Yeah, I am not going to apologize or anything or talk about him. I kind of have a directive to get you to Chicago. I could probably call up the agents to get there, but I was sort of wondering how you felt about flying.”

I shrugged a little. “I can take it or leave it. I don’t have much in the way of luggage, so it should be fast enough to keep provisional special agent Antonia Andropolis from having a coronary.”

She shook her head. “Not like that. I meant really flying.”

I grinned a little at her, “You can carry my ass now? I am looking forward to it.”

Caroline was much stronger now, and we flew by the simple expedient of her grabbing my hands and lifting me off the ground. She made me wear a jacket and long pants, and I was glad I had since it was a bit chilly. Her powers kept us flying while keeping the wind away from me, which was probably a good thing since, based on the fact that we only took two hours to get there, we were probably doing 500 miles an hour. Neither of us was sore when I got there, which I was grateful for.

“You know,” I mentioned as we landed. We hadn’t talked much during the flight, as I was just sort of taking in the feeling of speed and enjoying the hell out of it. “When the guy breaks your heart, I reserve the right to kick his balls out through his neck, right?”

She laughed. “It’s not too likely. He’s kind of a shut-in, and very sweet. I like him a lot, and while it probably won’t be a permanent thing, since we are both attached to Proteus and neither of us would be good at the long-distance thing, it’s more likely to end with text messages about reassignment than it is with heartbreak, but I appreciate the thought. Are you going to be okay?” She pulled out a card with her number and name on it, her civilian one, and wrote a number on the back because I didn’t have a cellphone for her number yet. “This is my personal number, for Caroline. Don’t lose touch, okay?”

I nodded, “Yeah, the most beautiful woman I have ever met just friend-zoned me, and I haven’t been touched by a woman that didn’t have handcuffs in over 5 years.” I grinned. “I will be fine. Seriously. Just let Sif know that I am still breakable, or she might decide to show up and break me in the interests of keeping me healthy. I know she still carries a torch.”

Caroline laughed, “I need to get back to work. I am serious about not losing touch, though. I could use a good sparring partner, and Chicago isn’t that far away if I cut loose. Wind controllers don’t cause sonic booms, you know?”

I smiled as I saw Agent Baldwin and special Agent Andropolis approaching from where they had parked their car at the edge of the park we had landed in. “You bet I won’t,” I said, feeling a little guilty about the lie even though I was pretty sure we both knew what it was.

Antonia held out the tracking anklet, and looked surprised when I shook my head, “No.”

“What?” she asked. “You have to wear it or I have to take you back to Prison.”

I shook my head. “No. I won’t wear an anklet, I won’t pretend to be on fake parole, and I won’t wear the monkey suit anymore. If you take me back, I will have Axeface file an appeal, and you know as well as I do that without a paper trail I’ll be on the street in ten minutes, probably with a personal apology letter from Proteus and a pocket full of settlement money, as well as a couple of networks begging for an exclusive.”

Antonia sighed. “You know that we cannot protect you…” and I interrupted her. “Sweety, I think we have definitively proven that you cannot protect me with or without this farce. I am still willing to play this game, but I will do it as myself, and when they catch the remaining members of the cartels, if they ever do, I will happily testify if they are still alive. But I won’t pretend to be a superhero, which I am not, or that I am some kind of repentant criminal or vigilante. If Proteus wants me to keep doing this, they will have to reimburse me for my time and energy instead of throwing me a bare bone and pretending it’s filet mignon.”

Baldwin was smiling a little, but he said, “What about the kidnappers? It’s happened twice already.”

I shrugged, “I have taken steps to make sure that I am protected. Most of the heads have no idea who I am, since, when I saw them, it was an important moment of my life, but to them, it was a Tuesday. They don’t know me from Adam, and the only one that did know me and had a clue what I can do cannot touch me now.”

“How did you manage that?” asked Baldwin, genuinely curious.

“Let’s just say that Satan isn’t letting people out on good behavior and leave it at that.”

“You killed copperhead?” Antonia said, a look of raw surprise on her face.

I shook my head. “I plead the fifth. I can neither confirm nor deny that I have had any contact with Copperhead in international waters. The only thing I can state is that I am reasonably certain that his head was not, in fact, made of copper, or else it would be too heavy to float, and that his favorite mercenary makes a poor melee weapon.”

Antonia stepped away from Baldwin and me as she started calling someone on her phone. Baldwin watched me warily for a moment and then smiled slightly. “Off the record, seriously, both Copperhead and Totem are gone?”

I shook my head, “I am not turning you into a material witness, even on hearsay. But I can confirm that there are, in fact, sharks in the Gulf of Mexico”

He nodded, “I am not going to pretend to understand how you did it if you pulled it off, but there’s a twenty-two million dollar bounty on Totem from Proteus and several private bounties as well. If you can prove it you would be rich.”

I chuckled. “Proteus is an international organization. I am not registered as a superhero and do not intend to become so. If someone collected on those bounties, How long do you think it would take before they were declared a supervillain and happy capes started hunting them?”

Baldwin shrugged, and I could hear Antonia’s voice getting louder in the distance, although I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying. Still, she sounded agitated. “You know you already have a bounty out, right?”

I shook my head. “Not for long. Bounties require confirmation, even among the bad guy set. When the holding company notices that he’s not taking calls, they will cancel it. That just leaves Proteus and anyone that might be dirty working for them. I am not Alchemyst, he’s a criminal. I am just Louis Albert McCarthy, a private citizen, volunteering to help Proteus as a specialist as a way of showing I have no hard feelings about my false arrest and imprisonment while my record gets expunged and we figure out a settlement.”

I smiled at Baldwin, “I know that you both will probably stick with me so that both the government and Proteus feel like they still have me under their thumb, but I don’t need your protection anymore. I can protect myself if I have to. I am cool with you, I appreciate your devotion to your job and your badass secret police aesthetic, but if you need to get replaced with someone more expendable, I will understand that as well.”

He shook his head, “Secret Service, and we are all expendable. It comes with the job. They might replace Andropolis, though. She kind of fucked up big time.”

I nodded, “I hope not. She’s cute in kind of a way too high-strung way. I may not need her protection, but I like the way she made that prison table her bitch. Is she single?”

Baldwin laughed! “Good luck with that. She still keeps talking about you like you are a perp and calls you ‘the convict’. I showed her the paperwork about the drugs, but I think she’s still not convinced.”

I grinned at Baldwin, “I would make a bet with you, but you’d probably cheat. No girl gets that ragey about a guy that hasn’t really hurt her or anyone she knows unless she’s got a dog in the race. I am thinking I can get a kiss, the real thing, from her within a week unless she gets reassigned.”

He chuckled, “I would have taken that bet. I think she’s got a thing against meta dudes. She fricking hates you, and even blames you for getting kidnapped and trying to wreck her career.”

I laughed, “Did she actually say that?”

Baldwin nodded, “Yeah, yesterday morning. I told her that we still hadn’t gotten a clue where you were, and she said, and I quote, That son of a bitch just had to go and get himself abducted again on my watch. I swear he’s trying to wreck my life!”

I shook my head, “Okay, I am changing my opinion.”

“Ready to give up already?” Baldwin asked me curiously.

I shook my head, “Nope. Changing it to three days.”

He grinned.

I was probably being overconfident, but I did actually like her a good deal. I didn’t plan to make moves on her, I didn’t want to be too attached to a girl whose career involved getting shot at, but I had no problems with trying to make friends with her, even kissing friends. I hadn’t touched her yet, but I figured she was around a class E. Not remotely bulletproof, but strong enough to wear decent armor in an emergency and pound hand prints into a solid steel table.

Call me old-fashioned or a fuddy-duddy, or even a sexist pig if you want. I didn’t necessarily want a 50’s housewife, although I wouldn’t object, but I would prefer someone I could count on to not get murdered by an angry suspect. I had already lost one family to casual murder, and I would not leave myself open to it happening again.

Men look for youth, health, and respect in a mate. We may be willing to settle for less, but those are the things that drive us. Not moneymaking potential, not power, not even a mothering instinct. They can fade and be replaced with fondness over the long term, but those three things hit us in our most basic instincts. That’s why an otherwise good man can be lured away from a wife he’s loved and been honest with for decades by his cute young secretary. It is kicking us right in our balls, a healthy young woman that seems to respect us, and it takes an incredible amount of willpower to resist thousands of years of tribal life telling us that the young healthy respectful woman will help spread our genes.

Not power, not earning potential, or those other things that women’s magazines promised would land them the perfect mate. Those things are attractive to women, not men. If you are a lesbian, that’s a great way to make yourself desired, but if there are long lines of men chasing a powerful female corporate CEO, it was because they wanted what she had, not her.

Women are looking for something different. Confidence, protectiveness, and strength. Those three things are what would keep her alive throughout history, and if you provide all three your woman will be happy. She might settle as well, but if you don’t project one of those virtues, She will always know that she settled, and it will eat at her as much as the sabretooth you didn’t kill for her sake will.

Strength can be shown in many ways. Willingness to do violence, wealth, and sheer musculature are three of the most common. Protectiveness can be shown with strength, greed, and possessiveness. That’s why some amazingly gross and scummy guys wind up with amazing women and serial killers get love letters and marriage proposals. A violent and possessive criminal that has confidence is like chocolate because despite how badly he gets along with the mores of society, he hits the most basic possible instincts in most women.

This is not a hard rule, but it’s definitely a hell of a well-supported generalization, a stereotype that has made both happy families and unethical exploiters manipulating those instincts for all of history. Sure, there were exceptions, women who loved to dominate men, and men who loved being dominated, but those were exceptions that proved the rule, not the rule itself.

While I was under Agent Andropolis’ protection, there was no chance she would have been interested. It was like I was her child. But I knew that I was strong and protective, and I was very confident in myself and my abilities. Now that I refused to be protected, that dynamic was changed, and I knew very well that she found me attractive. Hell, I could smell it without even touching her.

I wasn’t going to exploit it, since the very concept of civilization demanded that you set your own limits and obligations regardless of what your instincts say, but I had gotten much better at making friends since I was in high school. I probably, maybe, wouldn’t say no if she slipped into the shower while I was taking one, but I was not looking for that. I didn’t want her to become my relationship with a capital R, and I was selfish enough that I didn’t want to settle for anything less.

I was wondering, though, if I hadn’t allowed Callie to defeat me regularly if I weren’t the weak mortal that needed to be protected by the strong meta, would she have tried harder to come to see me in prison? Maybe I would have decided to not take protective custody if I had a reason not to.

It was a sobering, if not a depressing thought.

I wasn’t going to immediately throw myself into the ring for dealing with the Defender’s problems, but when Antonia came back from her phone call and muttered, “Fine.” I grinned and said, “Great! Let’s go eat and find a place to crash tonight, and let them know we will get a fresh start tomorrow morning. Oh, and Baldwin, I would very much appreciate it if you would get me the following items to do my job if you are fine with that?” I handed him a list. I was getting good at making lists of ingredients, and I knew this one would probably not put him out much, except for the menopause drugs. Some guys get kind of funny about buying menopause relief medications.

The three of us had dinner at a very nice steakhouse. Not a black-tie place, those usually had a waiting list weeks long for reservations, but the Chicago smokery was well known for having damned fine food. The ambiance was interesting, more resembling an old west cafeteria than fine dining, but I didn’t own a black-tie right now.

Antonia tried to order a salad again. I glared at her while she was ordering until she said, “What?”

“Dinner is on me. Order real food or go find a hotel for us.” I snapped. “Steak is an art form and you aren’t a Vegan. I will be very put out if you just sit there and eat salad again, and then later on go grab snack food because you are hungry.”

She scowled back at me, and we had a scowling competition while the server looked between us helplessly. “Fine.” She growled. “I will have your 32-ounce sirloin, the bacon potatoes, the French onion soup, a side spinach salad, an onion flower, deep-grilled side scallops, and afterward. The double-decker fudge cake. With whipped cream.”

I grinned as she grabbed some of the most expensive menu items, and put in my own similarly large order. “Also, could you bring another one of those loaves of spinach bread and chili butter while we wait for our dinner? We are hungry.”

She angrily chewed on the spinach bread and chili butter while we waited for dinner, but it was delectable, and I noticed she was having a tough time staying angry.

We finished up, and I paid with the card. All said it was almost two hundred dollars, but I felt like watching Antonia trying to angrily put away that much delicious food had been worth it. She didn’t even take a doggy bag, and I imagined she had been pretty hungry. I hoped that Proteus paid its meta agents extra salary because a meta appetite was truly no joke to keep appeased.

We did not stay at an expensive hotel, as even my largess had a limit, but surprisingly I heard a knock on the door during my workout time. I was a master at working out without appropriate gear, but even working up a decent sweat with vertical push-ups was getting more difficult. I had managed it and wrapped a towel around my neck before I looked through the spyhole and opened the door for Antonia. “Provisional special agent Andropolis.” I remarked, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She stepped into the room confidently, refusing to look at my bare chest and closing the door behind her. I was wearing my shorts, though, so I was fairly decent. “We need to talk.”

I nodded, and turned around, heading back to the wall and dropping the towel on a chair. I pushed myself back up against a wall and started doing vertical push-ups again, facing into the room and watching her upside-down. She was wearing a pair of long pajama bottoms with coffee cups on them and slippers, as well as a tee-shirt with a cup of coffee on it. She spun one of the chairs around and sat on it, putting her arms on the back of the chair and looking around the room rather than at me. “Agent Baldwin informed me that you… umm.. may or may not have dealt with Totem and Copperhead in a decidedly unofficial fashion.”

I nodded, pausing halfway down in the pushup and watching her. “He may or may not be right,” I answered, lowering one leg until it was straight out in front of me and then the other, scissoring my legs. I was not trying to seduce her, but I honestly forgot that she could look right up the legs of my shorts while I had my leg extended. I lifted my legs back up when I noticed a blush and started doing pushups again. “Stop acting creeped out. I know perfectly well that you saw me in my cell long before they would let me wear pants. Nothing here you haven’t seen before.”

She nodded and seemed to stiffen a little. “Right. Well, we received a video this morning from one of our sources.”

I nodded, turning a little and then stepping down. I wish I had a pull-up bar, but I was able to wrap my fingers around the edging on the bathroom door, extend my legs straight out, and do pull up with my fingertips on the edge of the frame. Good exercise. “By sources, you mean one of the undercover agents you have inside the cartels, maybe more than one.”

She coughed a little, “Right, well, this video was very interesting. It involved the two aforementioned Metas being brutalized.”

I nodded, “Yep. Totem tried to cut the big guy’s friend in half. Did a pretty good job of it too, and of course, Copperhead has a long history of torture and kidnapping. Did you know, this one time, he said he was going to sew my lips shut if I kept talking? He was serious, too, I saw him do it to one of his girlfriends once. And then he sewed her nipples together and then sewed her girl bits shut, and finally sewed her legs together. He cut off one of the guy’s hands and tourniquet-ed them so he wouldn’t bleed out. All she was doing was flirting a little with the guy, and he threw them both into a hole and then backed a dump truck full of dirt onto them.”

She looked a little sick. “Are you exaggerating?”

I shook my head, “Nope, South America is a tough place. They invent all sorts of imaginative tortures to keep each other in line. I saw him butterfly a twelve-year-old girl once. That’s where they cut holes…”

Antonia coughed and said “Enough. I get it. They deserved what happened to them and worse. But… was that you? He looked very much like you, just much much bigger.”

I was not going to tell her that the stuff they had done to me at the slightest hint of disobedience, once they realized I could eventually survive and regenerate from almost anything that didn't kill me instantly, made those stories I told her pale in comparison. Totem and Copperhead received far less punishment than they deserved, and I hoped that Satan was making them both butterflies for a thousand years. I may not be terribly religious, but when you live among people like that, believing that The Devil is real becomes very easy.

I stopped doing pull-ups and lowered my legs. I had a nice sweat going now, but my fingertips were a little sore from the door frame. I shook my hands for a few moments to restore circulation, and then said, “You know, that skirts perilously close to an identity exposure felony. If that was me, and I am not saying it was, then they would have had to accidentally stumble on a way to keep me from doing it for over a year, or perhaps I could have figured out a way to do it while I was in a featureless prison cell for two years, and had nothing to do but think and practice and improve my abilities.”

I shrugged, “Both scenarios seem a little far-fetched. I mean, it’s not like metas ever improve their abilities under stress or with concentration, or have certain conditions that must be met to unlock their abilities, right? It could not have been me, or I could have broken out of my prison cell at any time with ease. Unless I liked it there. Heck, if that were me, Victrix probably couldn’t have kidnapped me to meet with the guy that held her son captive and was threatening to torture him to death if she didn’t cooperate, right?”

Yeah, I was laying it on a little thick, but I was getting just a tiny bit tired of her righteous indignation. I had worked hard to survive and would continue to do so, even if that survival didn’t necessarily fit Proteus’ agenda.

She nodded, gulping a little, “Yeah, obviously.”

I smiled at her and picked up my towel again. “Right. So that obviously couldn’t have been me. I am a nice guy, I like both you and Agent Baldwin, even when you are glaring at me over a steak you are attacking. I am way too nice to ever casually pop a monster’s head off and then use the other guy as a nunchuk, simply because they were absolutely horrible people who I’d seen do far worse to countless others. After all, that would be vigilantism, and being a vigilante is illegal, right?”

I grinned at her, standing in front of the bathroom, and then casually stripped off my shorts and headed into the bathroom out of her line of sight. “Hey, I need a shower badly. You are welcome to come and talk to me in here or wait, or maybe we will talk tomorrow.”

I turned the shower on and stepped into the piping hot spray. It was rather noisy, but I still heard it when my door quietly clicked shut. I smiled a little. I hadn’t expected her to join me in the shower, especially not after scaring the shit out of her, but a guy cannot help but dream, right?