Five
You Can Read the Previous Chapter HERE!
You Can Read the Previous Chapter HERE!
As he straightened his tie and stretched an arm into the jacket of his new blue suit, Reed Richards said, “Ready, Sue?”
“What do you think of this, darling?” Sue asked, leaning into the doorway of their Baxter Building apartment. She wore a gold strapless evening gown cut low in front and plunging to her waist in back. The shimmering gown hugged her perfect figure where it was supposed to, and Sue looked every inch the model she had been before she had met Reed.
Appreciative, Reed circled his slim wife and whistled. “You’ll be the center of attention in that—dare I call it a dress? Is there enough material in it to legally call it a dress?” His eyebrow arched upward in mock seriousness.
Sue pouted. “Do you like it or not? And, please, don’t leer. It just doesn’t become an internationally known scientist such as yourself to leer so salaciously. After all, what if our son saw you like that?” She tsked him with a broad smile, then turned away with great flourish.
Reed crossed the room and took Sue into his arms. “I can ask the same, darling. Mothers didn’t look like you when I was growing up.”
He smiled a broad smile and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you lovelier: not when we first met; not when we got married. Maybe I’m going crazy, but as you get older you get more and more beautiful.
“You don’t have an old painting aging in the closet by any chance, do you?” He laughed, then bent his head low to kiss her, not the mild kiss of a long-married couple familiar with each other, but the passionate kiss of a couple newly married, still anxious and fresh. It was long, fierce, and warm.
He felt her warm shoulder sway in his arms, and he was unable to remember ever caring about anyone before he had met her. Perhaps he had never even cared about himself.
He had always thought of himself as rather stiff and cold, all too logical. He had been raised in an orphanage and couldn’t remember what it must have been like to be loved and to love someone else in turn.
Work was all he busied himself with: the logical doings of the mind, he always told himself. The endless limit of his imagination could extend itself, should extend itself. He submerged his emotions, thought about nothing but his work.
Then he had met Sue, and she was always warm and laughing. So much the opposite of himself, yet he was fanatically drawn to her—not so much for her subtle beauty, but for how she acted when they were together.
She would readily listen to his hopes and dreams, and somehow she would always say something that would spur him ever on. She understood little of his work, but she cared about what he did because she cared about the man.
Sue Storm was able to make you the whole of her concern; nothing but you mattered while she was with you.
But she didn’t live for you alone. She had her own full life. She had been a model and at one time her all-American face was featured on every woman’s magazine. She was an actress who many considered a natural—“the new Hepburn!” the critics had called her. Her miraculous sensitivity somehow was reflected on the silver screen fifty times larger than life itself.
Yet she left the movies as unfulfilling. “I don’t need to play-act,” she said in one interview. “I have my own life I want to lead; I have things to do.”
At a White House reception for the sciences, Sue Storm spotted a tall, awkward-looking man sitting quietly in a dark corner, scribbling on a paper napkin with a blunt pencil, obviously oblivious to the social function he was attending.
The man was somewhat handsome, his brown hair already gray at the temples. “Excuse me,” she had said. “This seat taken? Your wife here?”
Reed Richards glanced up from his paper, somewhat confused. “Uh, no. I’m not married.” His stare returned to the paper and he continued to scrawl a complex formula on the napkin.
She sat next to him. “Let’s see, now. I take it you’re not one of the caterers working out the cost for this party. Am I right?” Once again Reed glanced up, confused. She was smiling broadly, and he then realized she had been watching him for ten minutes as he wrote down the formula for a non-fossil fuel he was trying to develop.
Her smile was contagious. “I’m sorry, Miss. I didn’t know I was being rude. It’s just that I had thought of substituting an alcohol-base compound for—I’m doing it again, aren’t I? I—”
“Don’t apologize. I was bothering you. My name’s Susan Storm . . .” He listened, not connecting the name, or perhaps he had never heard it before.
He put out his hand and took hers. “Richards, Reed Richards. I’m with the institute.”
“Well, do you like it or not? You still haven’t said anything.” Reed shook the cobwebs from his mind and grinned.
“Let me put it this way, Sue. If I had never known you before, I would fall instantly and madly in love. Yes . . . I like it. Does that make you feel better?”
Sue threw up her hands. “A romantic! I married a man as romantic as Swiss cheese. What did I ever see in you, Reed Richards?”
Reed shook his head, wondering. “I don’t know, but if I ever find out, I’m going to package it and sell it as a guaranteed aphrodisiac. By the way, have you seen Ben and Alicia?”
“If ya didn’t, ya just didn’t look in the right places.” Ben’s gravelly voice boomed from behind them and they turned to see the orange-skinned Mr. Grimm dressed in an ill-fitting black tuxedo, a flourished white shirt, and absolutely no shoes at all. He looked like a bizarre grotesquerie created for a comedy film by Mel Brooks.
“Whadda ya laughin’ about, Stretcho? Ya know it ain’t easy ta find a tux in size two-hundred gorilla.” Indignant, Ben looked at Alicia. “Ya believe the nerve o’ them, kid? Sheesh, I tell ya, with friends like these . . .”
Alicia smiled. “I’m sure if I could see you, Ben, I’d probably have the same reaction. From how Reed describes you, you probably are a rather strange sight.”
Ben grumbled. “Just ’cause I look like a monster, everyone’s gotta pick on me—even my gal.” Ben’s voice seemed disturbed, but he knew better. Despite his gargoyle appearance, Alicia loved him—and not because she was blind and couldn’t see his monstrous features.
Alicia was a sculptor, perhaps one of the best in New York. And her blindness only enhanced the empathic sensitivity her work displayed. She had created many statues of Ben in the years she had known him, and they all portrayed his strengths and virtues, somehow clearly apparent even over his seemingly brutish appearance.
She was the stepdaughter of one of the Fantastic Four’s earliest foes, yet she loved Ben and his friends though they had to battle her father time and time again. If only her father, with his two sighted eyes, could see them as clearly as she could, blind.
Ben was sweet, gentle, kind, and giving, and there was something tragic about him that brought out her love even more.
He had been turned into something inhuman, his temper was at times ferocious, and his power was enough to level a city block with apparent ease, yet he could take a wounded bird in his thick, brick-like hands and shed a somber tear when the bird had died.
He may be a monster to some who can only see his thick orange skin, but he had more humanity in him than almost anyone Alicia Masters had ever known.
“Well, we leavin’ or stayin’? I gotta get this monkey-suit back ta the shop by mornin’.” Ben reached for a large cigar and stuck it in his wide mouth. “C’mon, I ain’t got all day.”
Sue turned toward the monitor screen and pressed for Johnny’s room. “Hold on, I just want to say good-bye to Johnny.” The viewscreen flickered and Johnny’s face appeared on it. “We’re going, Johnny.”
Her brother smiled. “Have a good time, Sis, and don’t worry about anything here. Franklin’s off with Agatha Harkness and I’ve got a date. Just enjoy yourself, okay, Sis?”
Sue nodded and flicked off the image. Agatha Harkness was their son’s tutor and sitter, a strange woman who lived in an old mansion in upstate New York, in a place called Whisper Hill. When they hired her, they thought she would merely be a baby-sitter. They didn’t learn until much later that she fit into their extended family better than they could have expected.
Agatha Harkness was a witch, and she was damned good at it.
To Be Continued...Tomorrow at Atomic Kommie Comics
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