Chapter 31 Convalescing on a Fainting Couch
thirty-one
convalescing on a fainting couch
I don’t have the time—or the courage—to check my Play’N account in the morning before work.
I do, however, check my phone. No new messages from Damien.
I have no idea if he saw my little gambit last night or not, but I had decided to give him his space until he feels like talking to me, so that’s what I’m doing.
It’s hard to keep my mind off all of it while I’m in the shop all day, but I don’t let myself check the Play’N app on my phone. Partly because it always makes my phone crash, and I don’t need my phone or my brain imploding while I’m trying to work.
But the second I get back to my apartment at the end of the day, I wake up my computer and zero in on my Play’N dashboard. A ton of notifications that I’ve been tagged in community posts and forum threads, as well as comments on the archive of last night’s stream. I ignore all of them for now.
I click over to my private messaging tab and find that I missed several voice calls from Damien last night and this morning. He must have seen the video, then. But he didn’t leave any text messages in that time.
The only message is from about an hour ago, around the time his streams typically end.
A link to the archive of his latest stream. From today.
I open it immediately, but for a second, I think he must have sent me some sort of private video link. Because I can see his whole face.
One glance at the chat log, though, and nope; this was his actual stream.
Holy heck.
“Yeah, yeah, settle down,” he says as he adjusts his headphones over his ears after checking in on the chat, which had instantly erupted the moment he appeared. “I figure there’s no sense in sparing you from this mug when it’s already floating all over the webs.”
He keeps his attention on his main monitor in front of him, where the screen-sharing shows that he’s selecting an older save of The Stones of Ayor 3.
“I’m sure you all missed me, yes,” he says dryly in response to someone asking where he’s been for the past few days.
“But I was sick of getting cyber-bullied in my own home and needed to spend some time convalescing on a fainting couch for a while. Don’t worry, I’m in the peak of health now.
” He flashes the camera a sarcastic smirk before returning to the game once it loads in.
“And I know we were in the middle of a pretty major dungeon in Stones 4 last time,” he adds, “but I feel like doing something a little different today. One of my favourite quest lines from Three. Because I deserve a little comfort after being called a Conservative, and worse—a hetero. So, excuse me.”
His tone is flippant, but his expression makes it clear there’s no real bite to his words. Like he really is over it. (Unless maybe he’s suddenly gotten really good at acting. Which is unlikely.)
He takes a couple of minutes to quickly look through his inventory and his quest log, since he hasn’t touched this save in a couple of years, according to the file date, and probably doesn’t remember what this character has already. When he selects which quest to make active, my face heats.
It’s the stupidest thing. But he just chose Hadley’s companion quest line, the one that leads to the option to romance him. And for some reason, my brain jumped to the idea that this is for me.
“Okay, chat, help me lock down a beefy husband,” he says casually as he starts to run towards the next quest marker.
He fast-tracks the quest over the next hour and a half—the usual length of his streams—and I’m holding my breath when he reaches the major romance dialogue moment. My favourite.
Damien’s character says his line, and then Hadley says his.
You know, after everything we’ve been through…oddly…I adore you.
And Damien smiles at that, like maybe he’s thinking about when he said those same words to me. I know that’s what I’m thinking.
ToastOnBeans: Wait, is this what Oddly’s handle is from?
I actually laugh when I read that, not because it’s funny, but because I’m so overwhelmed with emotion.
I can’t believe that TOB is giving Damien another chance, after all of that—I didn’t even know they watched his streams except for our joint ones.
I feel like my The Real Scones clip show might have swayed them.
He seems to smile when he reads that, too. “Oddly, your secret’s out,” he says, though his focus is back on his game. “Now everyone knows you’re a huge sap for Hadley.”
HadTrash93: No, we already knew that
I don’t even wait to finish the end of the stream before I switch over to our private messages again and hit the video call button as fast as I can.
Usually we’ll send a text-based message first, to make sure the other person is around to take the call, but I can’t think that far ahead right now. All I know is I need to talk to him.
But he doesn’t answer. Not via video call, anyway.
SconesOfAyor:
I can’t do video calls on my phone
The app is a piece of shit
Oh sorry I didn’t realize you weren’t at your computer
Are you out?
SconesOfAyor:
Yeah, sort of
When will you be home?
SconesOfAyor:
That depends
Depends on what?
SconesOfAyor:
Whether or not you let me in
Before I can even ask what he’s talking about, there’s a knock at the door of my apartment.