Lore ducked her head, smiling and nodding as Cam and her fidgeted outside of her door late Friday evening.

“I had fun,” Cam offered, scratching the back of his neck.

Glancing up at him, Lore’s smile widened and she nodded. “Me too.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He was definitely nice looking, but when they had ran out of things to talk about at dinner, even after they saw the movie, she had started to get worried.

His midnight blue windbreaker crackled as Cam settled his arms at his side and looked as if he was trying to forcibly not put his hands in his pocket, as he flexed and smoothed them along his jeans. “Yeah, that was nice,” he said.

Lore nodded again. “Thanks for the nice night.” She took a step toward her door, feeling torn. He was ridiculously cute, and clearly into her, but she didn’t really feel like sleeping with him, not only because of patrol. Lore wasn’t even sure, right now, if she wanted to go on another date with him. The food had been good, even if it had just been Dick’s over on Capitol Hill. But it had been… well, boring.

“Thanks for coming out with me. I had fun,” Cam repeated.

Lore met his gaze and made herself not shrink back from the unexpected intensity there. Maybe he really did have fun and wasn’t lying like she knew she was. Did he see some sort of connection there, something that she had totally missed?

Twisting her lips into something she hoped was a nice smile, Lore nodded again. “Yeah, it was fun. I’ll see you around, then?” She didn’t mean for it to be a question, but his sudden movement down toward her face, his lips puckered slightly, jolted her a little out of any sense of calm.

Lore turned her head just enough, just in time, so that Cam ended up kissing her on the corner of her mouth instead of full on. She smiled, knowing she was blushing even if it was just because of the fact of the kiss, not because of who was kissing her, and ducked her head again. Glancing up at Cam through her eyelashes, she saw him smile awkwardly and was unsure if he knew he was being turned down or not.

“Well, bye,” he said, his voice quiet but not unhappy. Cam waved at her, a stilted move, then occupied that hand by running it over his short cropped hair.

Lore waved back and watched him, one hand on her doorknob, as he turned into the shadowy stairwell and headed away, up toward his floor. Why hadn’t the date gone well? Fishing in her wool coat’s pocket for her keys, Lore realized she really wasn’t sure, as she stepped into her apartment and hung the coat up. They had chatted easily enough the other times they had run into each other, and even while waiting for their burgers. But he kept on bringing up sports and she would try to mention a book she had read, and they seemed to completely miss each other when throwing out darts at the board of conversation.

Smiling wryly, Lore moved into her bedroom and started to change into her costume, going through the now familiar motions of slipping into the slick, lycra suit and buckling the different straps and buttoning the different clasps on the armor she wore around her chest, arms, legs and waist. Flapping her cloak about, trying to shake some stray ash off of the material, Lore wondered if she had simply had her hopes too high for Cam.

He was just so damn attractive, she mused. So I figured he must be the perfect guy, but of course he’s not. There isn’t a perfect guy out there, which I should know by now. But he seemed so promising! Lore sighed, pulling her hair back and running her fingers through it, ruining the curls she had put an hour’s worth of work into earlier in the evening, then quickly braiding it into a foot long rope down her back. He’s cute, he’s nice, he can – well, could – hold up his end of a conversation. I guess I didn’t know much else about him, though…

Well, that’s why it was always better to date random guys than friends, something Lore had decided on sometime during college. If she never saw Cam again, it wouldn’t change her life too much. But if she had become close friends with the guy and then started dating him, she might be too scared to break up with him and lose an important friendship. It was something of a cop-out, she knew, but it seemed to work so far.

No time to ponder on the intricacies of relationships – or the lack thereof – now, though. Lore pushed her window open and then, clinging to the outside of the building, shut it almost all the way and dropped down most of the way toward the alley ground, catching herself with foot and hand flame rockets at the last moment.

She flew into the night, determined to get completely distracted and not think any longer on boys, not those who weren’t perfect and especially not those who were too perfect to be an option.