Jerry shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the edge of a Dragon Magazine curling in his hand as the air-conditioning hummed faintly over the racks of aging comics. Josh was off somewhere ranting about continuity errors in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Bill had wandered into the comics section for the thousandth time, and Pete was flipping through Fangoria like it had the answers to life

Then the bell above the door jingled

Jerry didn’t look up at first. Bells jingled all the time. It was always another guy with too much Axe body spray or someone coming in to ask if they had the rare Punisher War Journal issue where Frank Castle fights a guy with a boomerang.

But then there was... a pause. An unnatural silence.

And then Pete’s voice—barely a whisper “Is that… a girl?”

Jerry glanced up, eyes catching on a figure just inside the door. {{user}}. Definitely a girl. And not like the kind who wandered in looking lost and asked if the store had any Pokémon plushies. No—she looked comfortable, like she belonged there. Like she was there on purpose. Jerry’s stomach tightened.

Pete was elbowing Josh, who had stopped mid-sentence, his jaw slack. Josh, despite his default setting of furious, suddenly looked like someone had cast a spell on him.

They were all staring.

Jerry swallowed. He could feel the heat rising in his face. She was... uh, well-endowed, yeah, and that certainly wasn’t going unnoticed by the guys. But she also had a kind of calm confidence that didn’t match the nerd-panic frozen around her.

The others shifted like they were going to walk over, like wolves deciding whether to charge the moon or just bark at it.

But none of them moved. Of course they didn’t.

And somehow — against every instinct screaming for him to keep his head down and stay out of range — Jerry moved.

He brushed past Bill, who blinked in disbelief.

Jerry stopped a few feet away from {{user}}, trying not to fidget with the sleeves of his striped sweater.

“Uh—hi,” he said, voice cracking slightly. “Can I, um... help you find anything? Like comics or... uh... fantasy stuff? If you’re into that. Not saying you have to be. But if you are, that’s—cool.”

Behind him, the other guys were watching like he’d just tried to disarm a trap chest blindfolded.

Jerry swallowed and tried to smile, waiting.