Chapter 111

“I’m going to beat the absolute shit out of you,” Leia said.

“Says the lady who brings a gun to a fistfight,” I retorted.

Then I hit her with my laser eyes.

“You have superpowers! Of course Joker needs to bring a gun and a knife. Even Batman uses weapons,” Leia said, mashing the buttons on her Nintendo Switch controller.

Our lunch plates were only half-eaten, lying almost forgotten as we sat on the floor of the Singles Boat living area. Leia had brought me down from the lunch buffet line and shown me that she’d hooked up her Switch to the shitty TV the house boat came with. Then she challenged me to a duel.

We were already on our second match and I could tell that she liked the DC fighting game a lot. I’d played it a bit before, and I liked fighting games, but I hadn’t mastered any of the controls. Leia, on the other hand, knew how to do special attacks. The only reason I was able to keep up was that I had a better natural instinct for the defensive parts of these sorts of games and could block moves.

I glanced over at Leia, who was grinning widely with a look of concentration as she stared at the screen. She was one of the prettiest women on the trip, though that was like saying she was an angel among angels. Or a supermodel on a runway of supermodels. Still, where Wanda was beautiful in that all-American girl next door sort of way, and Cattie had the somewhat gothy princess vibe when she played it up, Leia was like a soft Greek statue with a slightly skewed bust-to-waist ratio.

“Gotcha!” she crowed as the Joker shot Superman in the face, my momentary distraction meaning I didn’t duck in time. That set off a cascading effect of Superman indeed getting beaten the shit out of him. I managed to come back for a moment, but the deficit was too large and the next time Leia caught me with a hit she combo’d it into a finisher and ended the round.

“Fuck yeah!” she laughed, then grabbed her burger from her plate and took a big bite of it. “M’told you.”

“Well, I want a rematch. And this time you have to use a different character,” you said.

“Fine,” she giggled. “But I want a prize if I beat you a third time in a row.”

“Yeah?” I asked, munching down some of my own burger quickly. “What prize do you want?”

“Hmmm,” she made a show of thinking. “Maybe...”

“If you say you want another massage, all you have to do is ask,” I teased her.

She flushed, but her smile didn’t slip. “That’s not what I was thinking,” she said. “Well, not entirely. If I win, I think you need to take off your shirt.”

I raised my eyebrow. “And what if I win?”

“Same thing?” she asked. “Not that it matters, ‘cause I’m going to kick your ass over and over.”

Leia was dressed in a thin t-shirt, her bikini top ties visible at the nape of her neck from under her shirt, and a pair of spandex booty shorts that hugged her wide hips.

“Deal,” I said.

Three minutes later I was peeling off my shirt as she did a little dance from her spot on the floor next to me. Turns out Wonder Woman could not, in fact, defeat Harley Quinn.