Chapter 1: Flattery and a Baseball Bat
The scent of his shampoo—something clean and woody—was the first thing Harley noticed before she even moved. That, and the frantic rabbit-thump of his heart under her knees where she straddled him. Moonlight cut through the sheer curtains, painting his stunned face in stripes of silver and shadow. Her baseball bat lay cool and heavy across his chest, a casual barricade.
“Leo Vance,” she sang, tilting her head. The blue and pink ends of her pigtails brushed his collarbones. “You’re cuter in person. Less… wordy.”
He didn’t scream. She’d give him that. His sharp green eyes widened, then narrowed, scanning her face, the bat, the way the moonlight glinted off the chipped red polish of her fingernail as she traced his jaw. She could practically hear the calculations whirring behind his eyes. Fight, flight, formulate a sentence.
“Harley.” His voice was a dry rasp. He cleared his throat. “This is a… dramatic editorial meeting.”
She giggled, the sound bouncing off the sleek, dark walls of his tidy bedroom. A sanctuary. How boring. A framed photo of Gotham’s skyline, a cluttered desk, a single red rose on the nightstand—its petals were crushed, probably from her knee. “You wrote I was a ‘tempest in fishnets.’ I liked that. Also the bit about the ‘symphony of gleeful destruction.’ Pretty.”
“It’s my job to observe.”
“Observe this.” She leaned down, bringing her face inches from his. She could smell the faint, stale trace of his afternoon coffee. “You wrote another thing. Last Thursday’s column. Said I was ‘Gotham’s most tragic palindrome.’ That inside the chaos was just… a sad girl looking for a home.” Her grin didn’t fade, but something behind her eyes hardened, went still. “No one gets to see the sad girl, Leo. Not without an invitation.”
He held her gaze. Brave. Or stupid. “And this is my invitation?”
“This is your choice!” She popped back up, gesturing with one hand, the other keeping the bat steady. “Option A! You get the exclusive. The real story. Not what the GCPD files say, not what Johnny-come-lately bloggers speculate. From my lips.” She leaned close again, her whisper a ghost against his mouth. “To your ears. You write it. You tell ’em why.”
“And Option B?” he asked, his voice low.
Her smile turned razor-edged. “Option B is I show you why your words don’t do me justice. Let’s start with the anatomy of a knee cap. It’s more complex than your thesaurus thinks.”
He was breathing shallowly, the bat rising and falling with his chest. She watched him wrestle with it. The career-making scoop. The mortal terror. The weird, thrilling glint she saw in his own eyes—the one that probably got him into this messy profession in the first place.
“You read my column,” he stated, not quite a question.
“I read all of them. You look at me and you don’t just see a villain. Or a victim. You see… a person. A messed up, glitter-bomb of a person.” She shifted her weight, felt him tense beneath her. “It’s been a long time since someone looked at me and saw a person, Leo. It gave me a feeling. Like a spark. You know what I do with sparks?”
“You start fires.”
“I light up the room!” she corrected, laughing. Then she sighed, the manic energy softening for a microsecond into something almost genuine. “I’m lonely. It’s a cliché, ain’t it? The clown is lonely. But your words… they felt like a hand in the dark. A weird, creepy, journalist hand. But a hand.”
Silence spun out between them, thick and charged. The clock on his bedside table ticked.
“If I say yes,” he said slowly, “how does this work? You’ll just… drop by? For interviews?”
“I’m here now, aren’t I? First session’s free.” She finally lifted the bat off his chest, twirling it in one hand before letting it rest beside her on the duvet. The threat, for now, was gone. The invitation remained. “So? Do you wanna write a boring obituary for a caricature… or do you wanna write the biography of a hurricane?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He looked at her—really looked—past the makeup, past the reputation, past the pigtails. He saw the intelligence burning in her blue eyes, the weariness under the glee, the terrifying, fragile hope.
He let out a long, slow breath. “The biography of a hurricane,” he repeated.
Harley’s grin this time was different. Smaller. Real. She rolled off him and flopped onto her back on the bed, staring at his ceiling. “Good boy. First lesson. Hurricanes have names. Mine’s Harley. And you’re in the eye now, Leo. It’s quiet here. For a minute.”
He pushed himself up on his elbows, looking down at her where she lay amid his rumpled sheets, a chaos of color against the deep blue. “What’s the second lesson?”
She turned her head, her cheek pressing into his pillow. It smelled like him. “The eye passes. And then the real storm hits. You sure you’re ready to get wet?”
Down on the street, a siren wailed, distant and fading. In the room, the only sound was their breathing, slowly syncing. The crushed rose on the nightstand seemed to pulse in the moonlight, a stark, red warning he had already chosen to ignore.