Wolverine in a Weapon X facility.”
Gus chewed without responding, in part because he had no idea what the latter words meant, in part because his brain was stuck on bathtub and submerge me. He didn’t need to be imagining Reggie’s body slick with delicious dressing. His brain wasn’t cooperating, though, and the look of pure bliss on her face wasn’t helping.
Bathtub.
Naked.
Lick.
Okay, no one had even said anything about licking, but that image popped into his head and his mind seemed reluctant to part with it. Gus picked up a slice of his pizza and shoved almost half of it into his mouth, needing to do something, anything to keep his thoughts from continuing down their current path—even if that meant possible asphyxiation.
“I hope you like artichoke leaves,” she said. “My favorite pizza topping.”
All he knew about artichokes is that they’d once been considered an aphrodisiac—he’d picked that up in a trivia puzzle game.
“Artichokes are great. And I left a jar of this dressing in your fridge,” he said after he’d swallowed the cheesy slice, voice so deep he felt it rasp in his throat.
Her head whipped up and her gaze was warm as she looked at him. She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, and paired with the way she was staring at him, he couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the dressing or him. That he wasn’t sure made his brain rewind back to that whole licking scenario.
No, he was here to work on a project. Not to think about Reggie’s tongue swiping over her lower lip, or his tongue running over her—
“The escape room!” he shouted. She jumped in her seat and he recalibrated his tone. “You think the overall idea is good?”
“Yeah. I think your initial idea of having it be a mission to retrieve information from the traitorous Captain Kelso’s camp is good . . .”
“But?”
“But while the puzzles you’ve incorporated so far are cool, overall they don’t match the spirit of the show or the escape room in general. Also, Kelso is a bad guy but he’s not important. The evil queen is Aurora’s nemesis, so something related to her would have much more emotional impact, especially given the ending of the show.” She paused to chew her pizza, her eyes darting back and forth as if she was reading something only she could see. “Oh, and this escape room is a cooperative game. Many of the people playing it will be taking on the personae of these characters while they play, and the puzzles should match the strengths and weaknesses of the characters on the show and also make the people playing feel a growing sense of community, mirroring the Reject Squad itself.”
Gus was no longer thinking about licking, but only because something much more intense was distracting him.
“Your brain,” he said. His heart was beating fast and he wanted to maybe get down on one knee because that was what he linked with the sudden, overwhelming feeling welling up in him. “You’re a genius.”
“I wouldn’t go that far . . . no, you’re right, I guess I am when it comes to some things,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve spent my entire life ingesting media then discussing why I love it with other fans. And then I turned that into a website, where I had to build trust with thousands of readers, had to really figure out what they wanted and how to give it to them—how to show them that they are just as important to me as the stuff I talked about—and also how to bring some of them together in a safe place. So yeah. You can call me a genius, I won’t fight you on that. Polymath sounds good, too.”
Gus just stared at her because even though he was impulsive, he knew he couldn’t always act on things. He needed to take several steps back and try to come at this from a different angle, but his thoughts were like a maze puzzle with every path leading to Reggie. Reggie and her brain and a tub of dressing, which didn’t sound sexy at all but was really working for him in that instance.
Get it together.
She finished the last of her salad. “I have more notes, but let’s watch the first few episodes and then we can see where your head is at.”
He tried very hard not to let his suddenly active imagination take that and run with it.
She pulled the two boxes of pizza toward her