Chapter 17
seventeen
feral
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Uh, the usual, I guess?” I reply, returning my attention to the game in front of me. “Coffee with Victory, dinner with the family, stay up way too late playing video games and then feel like a zombie on Sunday.”
“Right. I forgot about—You’re busy on Saturdays, yeah.”
I wait to see if he’s going to elaborate, but he stares straight ahead at his own game. “Why do you ask?” I try to sound playfully—rather than anxiously—curious.
“I’ve already cancelled tomorrow’s stream, since today’s was so long,” he says, “so I thought maybe we could hang out.”
“We can still hang out like this between stuff—”
“I meant like you come over here and we play Nintendo or something,” he says, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was nervous about this as well. “But obviously that doesn’t work for you—”
“I could come over,” I say quickly. I try not to let my burst of excitement show—he’s inviting me for video games, after all. That’s all this is. “I mean, I can bump coffee to the morning and then be home by dinner. That’d be okay, right?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“And maybe I’ll finally meet your imaginary roommates,” I joke, and he looks at our chat window, smirking. “Malcolm is real—ish—but the others… What were their names? Elliot and… Nick?”
“Nathan,” he says. “And they are not imaginary, unfortunately, or I would have my own room.”
“I thought you just loved bunk beds.”
“Well, there is that.” He laughs dryly and turns his attention back to the game. “Anyway, they might be around, yeah. They probably think you’re imaginary.”
“They know about me?” I ask, feeling weirdly self-conscious all of a sudden.
“Malcolm told them that you’re the reason I’m constantly on my computer instead of, like, being a person,” he says casually.
“I assumed you were always on your computer anyway.”
He looks a bit embarrassed by this. “Maybe not…quite so much,” he says, and then shrugs. “But it’s not a big deal.”
“Do they think I’m just like your ‘girlfriend in Canada,’” I say with air quotes, smirking at him.
“That doesn’t work if we’re actually in Canada,” he laughs. “But Malcolm seems to think you’re my girlfriend. He is not subtle.”
I feel my face heat up but try to keep an indifferent smile on my face. The way he says it so casually, like it’s not a horrifying idea, sparks a flicker of hope in my chest that I try to tamp down. “No, he’s not.”
“Don’t worry,” he adds, looking at his other screen again—at me. “I know that’s not what this is.”
“Okay…” The flicker of hope turns into a knot of dread in my chest, constricting me. Any remaining chance of something has been shattered.
“You’ve said on your streams that you’re ace, and I totally get that, but he’s acting like it’s a foreign concept to him, even though one of his sisters is aro,” he says with a small laugh.
“I—How did you know that I said that?” I ask, unable to keep the shock off my face.
He frowns a little, thinking. “I think you mentioned it a couple of years ago. Or—Maybe it was earlier?” He sticks his tongue between his teeth as he mentally calculates something. “Yeah, maybe it was when you were still streaming Animal Crossing and stuff.”
I take a minute to process this. It doesn’t make sense. “That was four years ago,” I finally say, staring incredulously. “You watched my streams back then?”
He smiles, though he still seems a bit embarrassed. “Yeah, I’d put them on when I was working on my island.” He laughs again. “I stole your idea to put a T-rex skeleton in the middle of a hedge maze.”
“That’s… I didn’t even know your channel back then.”
“I hadn’t started it,” he says with a shrug. “I kind of…got the courage to start my channel after watching yours for, like, a year. You made it seem pretty chill.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I say, though I sound angry without meaning to.
He looks taken aback by my tone as well. “Sorry, I didn’t realize that would bother you—”
“I’m not—I’m fine,” I insist. “Just, you apparently knew all sorts of things about me before we even met, and I didn’t even know what your face looked like!”
“It was all stuff you shared publicly, Audrey,” he says defensively. “Anyone can know this about you.”
I still didn’t expect people to remember the stuff I said years ago, especially since a lot of those early streams weren’t even saved to my archives. And for Damien to remember—to have known this whole time…
“Sorry, I know, it’s just—” I take a steadying breath. “It’s surprising that you’d remember that sort of thing.”
“I remember a lot of things,” he says, his expression flattening. Like I’m the one who’s bothering him now.
“Okay, then,” I say bitterly. I hate that I’m being so weird about this, but I don’t even know how I feel. “At least you’re cool with it.”
He frowns at me in disbelief. “Are you mad at me right now?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was a secret or—”
“It’s not a secret,” I argue. “But it’s still personal, and I—Just because I might be ace doesn’t mean I can’t date anyone ever—”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s a spectrum anyway! It’s not like I can’t—” I stop before I embarrass myself further, taking a deep breath to continue, more calmly. “Sorry, this is just—It’s something I’ve been struggling with lately and it’s a sore subject. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s okay. I get it,” he says quietly.
And I believe him.
I nod my head, trying to figure out what to say next, but it doesn’t come to me.
Instead, I watch his face, trying to notice subtle shifts in his expression.
I don’t really register that it might be weird to stare at him like this, because his eyes are slightly downcast—looking at his monitor and not his webcam—and it makes me forget that he can see me, too.
Either way, it doesn’t seem to bother him. He smiles a little, and I can’t help but smile back.
“What time?” I ask, and his eyebrow quirks up in question. “Tomorrow, I mean.”
As expected, Victory has no problem moving our Saturday coffee date to the morning, especially since Pal has the afternoon off so they can spend time together. As if they don’t do enough of that already.
She seems to think it’s promising that Damien wants to hang out in person again, after the awkward rejection last week, but I know it doesn’t mean anything like what she’s thinking. I didn’t bother telling her about our conversation last night.
This whole time, Damien has known that I’m asexual—sort of, probably, maybe—and he assumed that meant I don’t date. Which is technically pretty accurate, since it has been over five years—and even then, I didn’t care for it much. But in theory, I could date.
Still, he wants to hang out with me knowing—presuming—that I have no interest in him like that. Which means he has no interest in me like that. It’s pretty straightforward.
And, despite the fact that I have other friends now and losing him wouldn’t make me a loner again, I still don’t want to lose him.
In the span of a month, he’s managed to lodge himself into my life with so much force that removing him would leave a gaping wound that I don’t want to have to try healing.
So whatever might be going on in my head—or other places—around him can just stay there. Telling him any of this would be hazardous to my health.
But upon seeing him in person for the first time since the aforementioned awkward rejection, a torrent of emotions overwhelms me, and I wonder if coming here at all was a mistake.
And when he hugs me hello out in front of his building when I arrive, I just know I’m going to say or do something stupid.
I finally get a chance to meet Damien’s other roommates as they are on their way out, so now I at least know that they really exist—and vice versa. They are definitely not as outgoing as Malcolm, but I imagine it would be hard to live with him times three.
They’re both extremely introverted, Damien tells me after they’ve left, but they’re weird and nerdy in different ways than him or Malcolm, and sometimes they clash a bit with each other. But the four of them have been friends since university, living together this whole time.
The only reason he doesn’t lose his mind living here, he says, is that none of his roommates are home nearly as much as he is.
None of them work from home like he does, and they actually have social lives that don’t exist solely on their computers—even Nathan, who barely said a single word to me, which is a little surprising.
As for Malcolm, he’s currently out doing a costume fitting for his RPG friends, which is a little disappointing because he’s pretty delightful, in his own obnoxious way.
There’s a heavy awkwardness in the air when Damien and I get to the living room, as if something has changed since the last time I was here.
But nothing has changed, not really. Except my feelings for him, but those shouldn’t count because he doesn’t even know about them.
So maybe the awkwardness is all in my head.
He makes us both tea and we pick out a movie to watch—How to Train Your Dragon, since I already made him watch my favourite movie. His commentary somehow makes it even better, though I can tell that this movie means something to him, even when he’s roasting parts of it.
By the end of the movie, I’m all warm and cozy from my tea, slumped happily against the back of the couch with my legs up on the seat, criss-crossed.
Damien is similarly slouching in his seat, but his legs are outstretched, crossed at the ankles, with his feet on the coffee table.
My knee has been digging into the side of his leg for the last half hour, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“So, if Frozen is my favourite movie because I have issues with my sister,” I say, rolling my head to the side to smirk at him, “does that mean this is your favourite movie because you have issues with your father?”
“Ouch,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, yes, but ouch.”
“I’m only teasing.”