Chapter 40
Dating Sim Fundamentals
He was eating.
The small meals were staying down: soft bread, thin soups, rice that Asher cooked until it was paste.
Applesauce with cinnamon stirred in, which Asher fed him from a spoon like Levi was three years old.
Three times a day, Asher sat next to him on the couch and fed him by hand, piece by piece, and Levi hated it, but the food stayed down.
Asher was patient about it. That was the part Levi couldn’t square.
In the game, Asher had never been patient — everything was immediate, everything was now, every want chased the instant it formed.
But with the food, he sat beside Levi, held up a piece of bread and waited, his hand steady and the bread an inch from Levi’s mouth.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Five. Until Levi’s mouth opened.
Levi’s mouth always opened.
He hated the hand-feeding. He hated that he couldn’t do it himself, that his throat still closed when he tried, and the gag only stayed quiet when Asher’s fingers were the delivery system.
His body made eating into another thing that required Asher.
The tube, the walking, the sleeping — and now this.
One more dependency added to the shape of a life that was getting harder to tell apart from captivity.
But he was eating. His face in the bathroom mirror was filling out, fractionally, the worst of the hollows softening. The tube was still in, but it wasn’t the only line in anymore. Real food was going in and staying in, and his body was doing something with it.
It had been a week.
A week of Asher in his apartment, in his clothes, in his bed.
A week of the foot of space on the couch and the arm across his ribs at night, and the questions — two a day, carefully chosen, the answers building a map of a man Levi was learning to navigate the way he’d once learned to navigate resets.
A week of the shower Asher took with him every morning, not as aggressive as the first one, but it wasn’t optional either.
The same hands in his hair, the same body close in the small stall, and refusing cost more energy than he had.
Thankfully, Asher didn’t seem interested in repeating everything from that first shower, but the whole process was invasive.
Despite all that, he was starting to feel okay.
It hadn’t been a moment — it was a gradient, the way a fever doesn’t break so much as loosen.
He could sit on the couch with Asher on the other end and not count the knives in the kitchen.
He could hear Asher moving around and not flinch at every cabinet door.
Asher’s arm came over him at night, and his body would go rigid for thirty seconds instead of four hours.
The blips were still there, though.
Sometimes he blinked and the walls moved — a small shift, the dimensions rearranging as the kitchen stretched into a hallway that wasn’t there.
Eyes peered out from the dark of the bathroom doorway — not real eyes, just shadow and the light catching the tile, his brain insisting on a face.
He’d stare until the face went back to being tile, and the apartment would resettle around him like something that had only been pretending to be solid.
Three days ago, Asher dropped a handful of silverware on the kitchen floor.
The forks hit the tile and scattered, and the sound — the bright metal clatter, the skittering — was the crawlers in the sanitarium.
The things in the walls. The clicking of their broken legs on concrete, metal fingertips scraping metal.
Levi’s whole body locked. He was on the couch, and his vision tunneled because the apartment was the sanitarium, the crawlers were in the kitchen, and Asher was on his knees, picking up forks.
Asher noticed. Asher always noticed. He came to the couch and put his hand on Levi’s back and just said it’s forks, it’s just forks, you’re in your apartment, I’m here.
The crawlers eventually went back to being silverware.
The sanitarium went back to being a four-hundred-square-foot studio apartment.
Asher’s hand on his back was warm, and Levi let it stay, and he hated that letting it stay was easy.
Feeling okay was built on sand, and the sand was built on Asher, and Asher was built on something Levi still couldn’t look at directly. But it was okay. For now. Today. This afternoon.
He fell asleep on the couch sometime after lunch.
The barbershop.
Riverbend. The floorboards, the dust, the knife coming down.
Then Asher’s mouth on his. Kissing him with the knife still in his hand and Levi’s hand pinned to the floor, the pain so big it had a sound…
and the dream shifted — the barbershop was the shower and the knife was Asher’s hand on his throat and the floorboards were tile, and the water was hot and —
He woke up on the couch. Gasping.
His hand went to the front of his sweatpants before his eyes were fully open.
He was hard. Again. The nightmare was still behind his eyes, and his body was doing what it did, the wiring lighting up the way it had been trained to.
He grabbed a throw pillow and pulled it into his lap in one motion because Asher was —
Asher was on the other end of the couch, not looking at him for once. His brow was furrowed, and his mouth was turned down at the corners.
“What’s wrong?” Levi asked, his voice still rough with sleep.
“What is this?” Asher held up the Switch, the screen facing Levi.
It was a bizarre dating sim several of his former followers wanted him to stream, which involved dating household objects. Levi had downloaded it as a joke. He’d played for maybe two hours.
“It’s a game,” Levi said. He shifted the pillow.
“It’s a dating game,” Asher said it the way other people said cockroach. He turned the Switch back around and scrolled. “You’re dating a box of board games?”
“It’s a joke game, it’s not —”
“The board games have a personality profile.” Asher was reading off the screen, his voice flat and offended. “He has an ‘unsettling stare’. Levi…why would you date board games with an unsettling stare?”
“Apparently I have a type—”
“You took a lamp to dinner.” He looked up, almost pouting like a kid whose favorite crayon had been used by somebody else. “I bumped into the fan while you were sleeping, and I think it moaned.”
The nightmare was still in Levi’s body. The arousal was draining out of him by degrees. And Asher Kane, who had killed his mother and choked him into eating ice cream and forced an orgasm out of him in the shower, was sitting on the other end of the couch being wounded by fictional objects.
This was Levi’s life now. He really should start keeping a list.
“Have you dated other things?” Asher scrolled the menu. “The dishwasher? A clock?” He stopped, his mouth agape. “You can date the concept of existential dread?”
“Asher, it’s not a real —”
“Have you dated existential dread?”
“Not in that game —” Levi was trying to keep a straight face, but Asher looked so genuinely bewildered he started laughing. It came out before he could stop it — short, real, surprised out of him. His hand came up to cover his mouth, but it was too late.
Asher’s head came up. “It’s not funny,” he said. But his voice had changed into a lighter register, the bother dissolving, because Levi had laughed, and the laugh was worth more than whatever he was seeing on the screen.
“It’s a little funny,” Levi chuckled from behind his hand.
Asher kept playing. He navigated the dating sim with the focus he gave everything: total, intense, and somewhat baffled by the mechanics, and he kept asking questions without looking up. “Why would someone create this? What is the point?”
It was the closest thing to normal they had ever had: just two people on a couch, one of them playing a game badly, the other one watching. It was so ordinary it felt like a lie.
Levi was content to sit in the lie a little longer anyway.
Asher eventually set the Switch down and smiled at Levi. “You should pack.”
Levi blinked. “What?”
“I called a car,” Asher said. “While you were asleep. It will be here in about an hour.”
“A car to where?”
“My house.” He said it the way he said everything, as a fact the world was going to make room for.
“I have a house outside the city. It’s bigger than this.
” He looked around the studio. “You can’t get better in a box, Levi.
You need space. We both do. We need a kitchen that isn’t four feet from the bed. ”
No no no…
“I didn’t agree to —”
“You should pack. Whatever you want to bring. Clothes, the Switch.” He stood up and held out his hand like he was inviting Levi to dance. “There’s a yard. Real grass. And a shower with a bench and two heads. I think you’ll like it.”
Levi sat on the couch with the pillow in his lap and the taste of a laugh still in his mouth, and Asher was telling him to pack. “What if I don’t want to go?”
“Then I’ll carry you,” Asher said with a bright smile, light, the smile he used when he knew he had already won. “You barely weigh anything.”
There is no version of this where I don’t go with him.
He almost laughed again. He didn’t have the room for it twice in one afternoon.
He got up and went to help Asher pack.