TSTA interlude

Bruce read seven newspapers a morning, cover to cover. So while he had never met Wonder Woman as Diana, or her him as Bruce Wayne, he was aware that when he walked into the Botanical Society’s Spring Fundraiser, he found Diana enjoying her usual fawning attention she got on the society pages. The brunette was a good dresser. She looked stunning in a low-cut black sheath dress and black heels. She wore bright-red lipstick and nail polish that finished off her appearance, made her look like a painting come to life, or some devilishly photogenic picture that managed to keep its flattering aspect no matter what the angle or how much time passed. While one man fetched her a drink, another lavished her with compliments. Many more listened attentively, trying to draw her eye, even as she simply engaged in gentle conversation with the alpha of the group.

Bruce caught her eye and she gave him a sustained look before returning her attention to her guests as politeness dictated. Bruce was taken aback. He’d performed as Bruce Wayne with care and precision, and his informed read on Diana was that she’d have no interest in a millionaire playboy, no matter how many millions there were or how much play.

He shook it off. His chief thought when dealing with Wonder Woman was not to underestimate her. It was more than possible she knew something of who she was; that he was funding Batman if not the whole story. Others had gotten that close before. The evening progressed, Diana being freed from her fan club when the speeches started. Bruce dutifully paid attention as well, at least until a waiter came to him with a drink on a tray.

“From the woman,” he said simply. There was no need for further elaboration.

Bruce took the glass. He smelled it. There was nothing but ginger ale inside.

So, she did know.

Diana had walked out onto the terrace. Bruce followed her. The floor was glass, or close enough to it to be completely translucent. The parapet was ringed with small flower gardens, so fronds and rosebuds grew along the edge of the balcony. It had an especially intoxicating effect with Diana standing there. Seeing her bare shoulders, her hair up with its few artfully loosened strands, her almost invisible make-up, he thought of some primordial jungle girl out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. 

She was that, nature, savagery, life in all its sensual and natural simplicity. Somewhere close to her core, tightly controlled and heavily buried. But she was also the woman standing in mid-air. The stylish dress. The artfully combed hair. The picturesque face that didn’t belong to a brutal warrior, nor a fine intellect, no, it was pure beauty. It should’ve been cold and still, a painting, a statue, a gemstone, but instead it was thrillingly alive, each minute expression and flicker of emotion speaking of a rich inner life, a voluptuously lived existence that shamed his own ascetic discipline. Whatever battles she won, whatever evil she fought, she stood apart from then and she reconciled them and she balanced them in a harmony he could only approach by the most heavy-handed honor, the most vicious training. He controlled his warlike heart, but Diana, she had tamed it.

“You hardly look more comfortable,” she said, “without all that armor.”

“You hardly look more beautiful,” he answered, “with all that armor.”

She smiled. “It’s more customary to compliment a woman’s dress.”

“You don’t need it.”

“The compliment, or the dress?”

Bruce sidestepped the question. “What do you need?”

She sidestepped in turn. “See what you can give me.”

He didn’t kiss her. She let him kiss her. But still, Bruce did it so quickly that he caught the taste of surprise on Diana’s lips, the quick-witted approval of this sudden pleasure in a snap decision, no hesitation or indecision. Bruce reached up to cup Diana’s face and felt her hands grip his wrists. She cradled them inside her grip, imposing her own will on the kiss, lowering his fingers a hairsbreadth from her cleavage, tantalizingly offered by both her low-cut dress and the succulent holding of the last breath she had taken. It trickled out of her lips, inches from his own, warm and sweet like a rose being dragged across his face.

“Is that all you can give me?” Diana asked him, not a pouting tease or a girlish taunt, but a challenge. A woman’s challenge. And, coupled with the look in her eyes and the bloom in her cheeks, a promise.