Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Andi
Somehow, in the past half hour, I’ve told Cat more about what happened with Jan and Aftermath than I’ve ever shared.
It’s only because we’re not friends, I’m pretty sure. Because Cat and I are just coworkers—because I mean nothing to her and she certainly means nothing to me—we can say things to each other we normally wouldn’t. With Philo, Gabe, and Dom, I have to worry about how they’ll perceive me and my ability to ship Compass Hollow , whereas with Cat, I have nothing to lose by sharing with her what happened all those years ago.
Cat and I are practically strangers, and that’s all there is to it.
Except now she’s curled up on the chaise longue by the window in my hotel room. Her nose is pressed up to her Switch, and the tip of her tongue is poking out from her mouth as she frowns at the screen in concentration. I want to ask her what about the game has her so captivated but can’t figure out a way to phrase the question without inadvertently offending her, so instead I wrangle my attention onto my own screen, where I’m grappling with Dane x Sentinel. I’m a few good hours away from finishing my first draft, but the words keep slipping away from me, like silvery fish in fast-moving water.
“Kratos’s shitter!” Cat curses.
I peer in her direction, my curiosity getting the better of me. “What is it?”
“This DILF likes flowers, so I brought him some yellow marigolds, but I guess they symbolize love lost to breakup or death? Anyway, he hates me now.”
I stifle a laugh. “Does this mean now you’ll have to pick a different DILF to romance?”
“Nah, I think I can win him back,” Cat says.
“I thought you said the enemies-to-lovers trope doesn’t exist in games.”
“Sheesh, Andz, I gave him the wrong flower. That doesn’t make us mortal enemies. Besides, I said it’s not as common, not nonexistent.” She glances up and catches me looking her way. Reddening, she mumbles, “Sorry. I mean Andi.”
“You can call me Andz,” I say. “I don’t like people who only know me from the internet calling me Andz. That was my Aftermath handle—[email protected]—so it comes with a little baggage, I guess. But you …” I break off, fiddle my thumb over the trackpad of my laptop. “Well, we’ve spent some time together.”
“Andz,” Cat says tentatively, like she’s trying the syllable out. “Cool.”
When the sun tucks itself to sleep beneath the horizon line, I shut my laptop and crack my neck in either direction, then call Cat over to the edge of the bed. We order off the hotel menu: mozzarella sticks, moules marini è res, a burger and steak frites to split, and—at her insistence—a slice of pineapple upside-down cake. As soon as I hang up the phone, Cat picks up her Switch again.
“That good, huh?” I ask. I check my tone and am relieved that it’s passably neutral, even though I’m a little stung by her eagerness to dive back into the wonderful world of fantasy DILFs.
“Yep,” Cat says. “What kind of gamer would I be if I didn’t spend at least one entire night of IAX holed up by myself, being antisocial in digital space?”
“You’re not by yourself, though,” I point out.
“True,” Cat concedes. Angling her right hand up, she offers me a view of her Switch. “Wanna play?”
Why not? I’ll try anything once, dating sims included. Scooching up toward Cat and the bench at the foot of the bed, I nod. “Sure. Will you teach me how?”
Cat jerks away from me before I can react, holding the console high above her head. “You can’t make fun of me, though. Or any of the DILFs. Promise?”
I bite back a smile, mostly because her arms are so short I could easily snatch the console from her without even stretching. “I promise,” I say, keeping my expression perfectly still and serious.
“Okay.” With one final warning glare, Cat leans in and passes me the Switch. As she does, her hand catches on mine, and I’m taken aback by how warm and soft her palm is.
I swallow, tighten every muscle in my body, including the ones in my belly and farther down.
“There’s no objective, per se,” Cat says as she points to various icons in the HUD. “You play as a single dad who’s moved to this suburban town that happens to be chock-full of other single dads. Besides raising your daughter Abigail, you spend your days teaching Comparative Lit at the local university and wooing whichever DILF catches your eye. The game ‘ends’ when you get married.”
“And this florist.” I squint at the screen. “Javier? He’s the one you gave marigolds to?”
“Yeah.” Cat rubs the back of her neck. “In retrospect, I should’ve given him something he’s less knowledgeable about.”
Javier struts to and fro between my thumbs, lifting bags of soil and generally showing off his impressive physique. “So how do we get him to like us again?”
Cat tilts her head at me. “Do you actually want to know?”
In response, I nudge the left joystick to engage Javier in conversation. A series of dialogue options pop up, and I scroll between extending Javier a handshake, talking about the weather, complimenting him on his hair, offering to help with this weekend’s farmers’ market, and insulting the quality of his mums. “Isn’t the answer here obvious?”
“Not always,” Cat says. “Different DILFs have different love languages, so you have to take that into account. And your daughter, Abigail, needs to be bought in too for the wedding to happen. There’s a lot of strategy involved.”
“Now that’s something I haven’t considered before: the intersection of strategy RPGs and dating sims.” I smirk at Cat to let her know I’m joking, then press X on the fourth option.
We play like this, our heads bent over the tiny screen, until our food arrives, rolled in on a cart laden with heavy tableware and silver food domes. I tear into the fries five at a time while Cat helps herself to the mozz sticks. We eat without speaking for a while, more ravenous than either of us realized, until we both begin to slow down and I notice Cat eyeing the pineapple upside-down cake.
“Go ahead,” I say, turning around to pull a beer out of the minifridge.
“I’ll leave you half?”
I pop the bottle and toss the cap into the plate of mussel shells. “All yours. I’m not a big dessert person.”
Cat’s eyes bug out. “Not … a dessert person?”
“I like Twinkies,” I offer. “And gas station candy. But in general, I prefer savory to sweet.”
“What about doughnuts?” Cat demands. She punches the air as if readying herself to go to war.
“Doughnuts are good,” I hedge.
The maniacal gleam goes out of Cat’s face. I exhale, long and slow, relieved to have skirted her ire.
“Why Twinkies?” Cat asks after a minute. “They were in Aftermath too.”
I don’t answer right away. How to explain the weirdness of my upbringing, the way my mom and I would spend entire weekends hiking through the dusty parts of Colorado, intending to go for a “walk” and coming back thirty-six hours later with dirt in our ears and scrapes on our knees? After my dad left us, it was like the only place my mom could find peace was out in the hinterlands, where electricity and all its baggage didn’t exist.
I slug back the neck of my beer. “It was an Easter egg for my mom, except she doesn’t play video games, so really, it ended up being an Easter egg for myself. My mom raised me on her own. Growing up, we’d go on these camping trips, except she was crap at planning and I was eight, so we’d eat a lot of gas station food. Big Bite hot dogs and Brisk and lots and lots of Twinkies.”
Cake forgotten, Cat nods for me to go on.
“I read so much on those trips. We’d be in the car for eight to ten hours at a time without radio reception, so I got in the habit of checking out the biggest library books I could find, which were always fantasy or science fiction series.” I chew on my bottom lip, remembering all the Redwall and Dragonlance I tore through. “That’s what got me hooked on strange, impossible worlds. From there, it wasn’t a far leap to games.”
A corner of Cat’s mouth cants up into a half smile like she’s imagining me as an eight-year-old, hunched over a Weis and Hickman novel while in the passenger seat of an off-roading SUV. Picking at the label of my beer, I continue.
“My mom actually took me to my first arcade. There’s this one mountain in the Rockies we used to go to a lot. One time, she dropped me off at a strip mall at its base and gave me five dollars’ worth of quarters.” I touch the tattoo on my left forearm. “Those mountains mean so much to me, I convinced the art team at Sandcastle to put them in Aftermath .”
“Mission six,” Cat says.
“Mission six,” I echo. The mission where Connor learns his parents are—without a doubt—dead, thanks to a fast-evolving virus that renders five percent of its victims unable to wake up from endless sleep.
Outside, an elevator bell dings. I press my lips together, aware of how long I’ve gone on reminiscing. “What about you?” I ask. “How’d you get into gaming?”
Cat lifts a shoulder. “I didn’t have very many friends growing up. I was a fat kid who hadn’t yet learned how to keep my mouth shut. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, because you’re …” Nose wrinkling, she pivots. “Anyway, people sort of expect fat kids to be quiet. Like how much noise you’re allowed to make is inversely correlated with how much space you take up. Suffice it to say, not a lot of people liked me for upending that expectation.
“Then, one year for Christmas, GSL asked for and got a Game Boy Advance. She got bored of it after one day, so I picked it up. Started making friends with fake people and haven’t stopped since.” With a laugh like a bark, Cat stabs her fork into the last piece of cake. “It’s probably why I’m so bad at dating. You must think I’m a premium-grade moron for thinking romance in video games is realistic.”
Bad at dating? What is she talking about? Instead of asking, I watch as she uses the tines of her fork to smash the cake into crumbs. Taking another swig of beer for courage, I admit something I’ve never said out loud to anyone: “I cried at the end of Mass Effect .”
Cat stops fidgeting, her fork clinking to a halt. “You’re kidding. You’re saying shit to make me feel better.”
I shake my head, even though I want to take the admission back. “No lie. For three days straight, I cried like a baby. Beating that game felt like losing a family.”
“Right?” Cat jumps up, grabbing the ends of her hair. “So good. My dream in life is to make one game—just one—that drives someone as feral as Mass Effect drove me.”
She smiles down at me and I smile up at her and for an instant, I swear my heart stops beating. Then it picks up again, faster than it’s ever gone before. Pounding hard enough to test the structural integrity of my sternum.
Coughing into her elbow, Cat sits down again. Together we stack the dirty dishes, wrap a napkin around the used cutlery, and move the room service trays outside the door. Once we’ve finished cleaning up, Cat returns to her perch on the chaise longue and I settle cross-legged on the bedroom bench. Silence, thick and suffocating, descends between us.
Should I ask if she wants to play more games together? Or maybe she’s tired of sharing her Switch and wants to go back to her room and is piecing together a polite way to say so. I discard that notion as soon as it occurs to me. That doesn’t seem like Cat. Cat isn’t polite, at least not around me.
“Who’s GSL?” I ask right as Cat babbles, “Who’s ’Ris?”
I tense. Slapping both hands over her mouth, Cat emits a low moan, as if she already regrets bringing up the Love Letter card game she unearthed last week before D&D and the sticky note on top of it. “Sorry. Forget I asked that. I told you, I have this problem: can’t keep the old pie hole corked. So, yeah. Ignore me. I’ll shut up now.” She shuts up for exactly three seconds before adding, “GSL’s my sister, Sadie. I … I call her the Great Sadie Li in my head. Hence, GSL. Right. Being quiet now.”
Her self-flagellation is so chaotic and fumbling that I can’t help but crack a smile. “It’s fine. GSL, eh? Sounds like a type of standardized test.”
“You’re not wrong. Sadie has a shocking amount in common with the SAT,” Cat mutters. “For instance, both contain big words and are objects of endless fascination for Asian parents.”
I hold back a grimace. What happened there? Deciding it’s none of my business, I swerve. “Iris—’Ris—is my ex. We, um, had plans to get married. Until we didn’t.” I wave my left hand in the air. “Clearly.”
“Andz—” Cat begins, her voice gentle without being pitying.
“It’s fine,” I say, crossing my arms. And it is. Revisiting the past isn’t comfortable—I’m not sure it ever will be—but with Cat, it feels oddly natural. Like for the first time, we’re having a real conversation. “It was a long time ago. She chose her career over our relationship, which in retrospect is fair. We were young—”
“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt,” Cat cuts in quietly. “When you choose someone and they don’t choose you back.”
I drop my shoulders. “Right.”
Sliding off the chaise, Cat picks up the Switch from where we left it on the TV stand. “Wanna play more?” she asks, holding out the console.
I look up at Cat, who’s smiling her overbright smile again. My stomach flips. As I take the green and pink Joy-Cons from her, my thumbs skim hers and my breath rags the back of my throat. Without realizing what I’m doing, what I’m risking, I rise to my feet, tilt my head down, and—freeze, because what the hell? Get a grip, Andi! But then, like she can read my mind, she takes my chin in her hand and …
Kisses me.
It’s like dropping a lit match in a room full of liquid oxygen, the way my body lights up. The instant our lips meet, fire unfurls in my chest and runs down the length of my torso. For a second I think we’re both going to come to our senses and pull away, but then Cat sinks into me, her tongue flitting out to caress mine. She tastes like spring, like rushing water and greenery and sleepy things unwinding after a long thaw, and suddenly, I want more, want not just the taste of her mouth but the feel of her skin with all its curves and hollows under mine and—
The sound of a Switch slipping off the bed and onto the floor sends me crashing back down to reality. I jump back. Heart thundering hard enough to rupture my eardrums, I rush out, “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Cat says, her whiskey-brown eyes wide. “That was—”
“Not good,” I agree preemptively.
Stilling, Cat looks down at her toes. A long moment passes. Then, her hands—which a moment ago were pressed up against my sides—go to her hair. As she tightens her messy ponytail, her expression wrinkles and goes blank. “Maybe we should just—” she begins.
“Yeah,” I croak.
“—play games,” she finishes, pointing.
I follow her finger toward the forgotten Switch. Dashing a wrist across my chin, I will my pulse and several other things besides to stop throbbing.
“Unless you want me to …?” In question, she darts a glance toward the door.
“No, stay,” I say. Forcing a laugh, I plop back down on the bedroom bench. “I don’t know what came over me just now, and you … Well, you’re with—”
“Sally,” Cat supplies.
I bite down. “Right.” Right. She’s with Sally. And I—I’m just another complication no one wants or needs.
“Andi,” Cat whispers. “About Sally and me—”
But I don’t let her twist whatever knife she’s already sunk into my belly. “Whatever that was, it didn’t happen,” I interrupt, forcing another laugh. “Shall we? Get back to Javier?”
It takes Cat a beat, but eventually, she says, “I guess.”
Without lifting my gaze, I make room on the bench for her. As she sits, her ponytail comes loose once again, sending the smell of her shampoo into the air. I tuck my hands into my pockets.
Never have I been more eager to dive into a video game.