Level Up for Love

Prologue

I was promised one night off from the bane of my existence. Yet here he is, soaking wet and shivering on my front porch.

Wesley Locke’s hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his dark pants, his shoulders hunched up to his ears.

His short sandy hair, usually gelled back in a slick wave, hangs in dripping curls across his forehead.

He’s still as buttoned-up as ever, always hiking across campus looking like he got caught on his way to a date or church or a job interview.

His poor blue linen shirt, with its sleeves rolled up his forearms, is soaked through and clinging to his chest. Rain continues to fall in sheets behind him, and a roll of thunder rumbles forebodingly through the dark sky. The perfect entrance for a villain.

Professor’s favorite, brilliant, asshole extraordinaire.

Shock flashes across Wesley’s clean-shaven features, and his thick brows draw together in confusion.

Then there’s that coy smirk, drawing a lopsided line across his face and dimpling his right cheek.

I still remember how I admired him and his charming smile on that first day of orientation four years ago—before he opened his mouth and shattered the illusion.

“Reagan Riley.” His voice is thick with amusement. “I didn’t know you lived here. This is your party?”

I shut the door in his face.

I swing to confront my living room, which is packed with most of the students from my cohort. “Who the hell invited Locke?” I snap.

The music’s so loud that half of them don’t hear me, but I narrow my eyes against our strobe lights and scan the expressions of those who do.

Eddie’s round face creases with confusion; my roommate, Nali, widens her dark eyes first in concern and then in amusement; and Owen scowls in solidarity with me.

But a ginger-haired kid from my animation class—Garrett, I think—rubs the back of his neck and avoids my eyes.

I pin my gaze on him and wait.

“You threw a graduation party for the whole department, Reagan,” he finally says, exasperated. “How was I supposed to know Wesley wasn’t invited?”

“Oh, come the fuck on. You think I’d ever want him in my house?”

People are starting to take note of the tension. Some dancers have slowed to an awkward sway, looking toward us in the front room, while couples chatting in the kitchen hesitate before dipping their Solo cups into the bowl of jungle juice Nali and I brewed.

“I don’t know,” Garrett groans, uncomfortable with the sudden attention.

His glasses slide up as he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“He overheard me talking about it with Eddie,” he says with a sigh.

“But the semester’s over, and you’ll never have to see him again. Can’t you just…let it go? For tonight?”

No, I want to growl. Tonight is supposed to be a celebration—my celebration.

In my defense, I hadn’t invited everyone in our state university’s Game Design program.

Since we attended the largest school in Connecticut, that would’ve filled my house three times over.

So Nali and I had invited just our inner circle: Eddie and Owen—who, as a business major, wasn’t technically in the program but had taken so many electives he might as well have been—plus a few of their friends, and some of the others I hadn’t minded so much, maybe even a couple juniors, and…

Okay, I suppose it was an open invitation.

Regardless, everyone here has been subjected to enough of my and Wesley’s arguments in every seminar, workshop, and class from the last few years that I figured my feelings about him were obvious.

It never crossed my mind that anyone might actually invite him.

“Well, I kept my promise, Rea. I did not invite him,” Nali says. “But…”

“He’s here now. And I feel a little bad for him, standing out there in the rain.

” Eddie flashes me an apologetic look as he squeezes past me toward the front door.

He’s always been nicer than me—but he’s always been my friend first. So he hesitates with his hand on the knob and looks to me for permission.

“Fine,” I say, flexing my fingers irritably at my sides. “Fine! It’s fine. Let him in.”

Eddie opens the door, and for a moment, I hope that in the hundred or so seconds that have passed since I shut it, Wesley decided to bother some other house.

But he’s still there, relaxed, his hands casually dipped into his pockets as if he always expected to be allowed entry eventually.

It’s the same expression he wears whenever he’s listening to another student’s glowing feedback in seminar, or a professor’s confirmation of his correct answer: unsurprised, expectant, and mildly amused.

Only when he straightens do I realize he was leaning forward, listening.

I exhale once, sharply, and imagine smoke billowing from my ears.

Nali steps up. “Welcome to our humble abode,” she drawls as she gestures him inside.

Humble is a good word for it. Like every other old house on the block, ours has seen the cycles of mistreatment and unreturned security deposits that inevitably come when you rent solely to college kids.

But Nali and I have made the most of it.

Our walls, with their patches of cream-on-white paint, are covered in cheap tapestries and posters.

Plants are crammed on the windowsills to distract from the fact that the windows fall out if you try to open them.

Mismatched rugs stretch across the worn hardwood floors, which are scuffed from dragged furniture and feet from dozens of parties, ours included.

“It’s warm. Cozy,” Wesley says, his gaze pinballing among all the decorations—from the chunky knit blanket balled up on the couch to the flower-shaped floor lamp in the corner—before finally landing on me.

It’s the same thing he said in seminar about the woodland creatures–themed farming sim demo I made junior year.

His tone had been sweet, patronizing—before he launched into a blazing criticism and tore the game apart.

But all he says now is, “Where can I put this?” He shrugs off a backpack and draws out two tall bottles: watermelon vodka and Sprite. Nali and I step to the side as Eddie kindly leads him into the kitchen.

Coming to a party alone is a brave thing to do, but Wesley isn’t alone for long.

Never mind my vendetta against him—most of my cohort couldn’t care less about our rivalry.

He’s greeted with claps on the back and easy grins as he makes his way into my house, and in no time at all he’s circled by a group of people I don’t know well who bend toward him like flowers to the sun.

Nali presses a plastic cup into my hand, interrupting the angry line of my laser-beam gaze on the back of his head.

I hadn’t even noticed her step away to fill up from the dangerous pink punch bowl.

“Leave it, Rea,” she says as she tilts her head toward the living room, a clear command for me to find a distraction. It’s our party, isn’t it?

I don’t argue.

Two Solo cups later, everything is noise and pulsing light as Nali and I join the dancers in the living room.

I glance at where Wesley leans against the wall, engaged in a loud debate with Garrett and his friends.

A shorter girl whose name I can’t remember hovers in Wesley’s shadow, nodding enthusiastically at everything he says.

But I don’t let my attention linger. The best part of throwing a party at your house is picking the playlist, and I’m too gratified by how many people are dancing to worry about how much of a fucking pain it’ll be to clean up these sticky footprints tomorrow.

I dance with everyone—I always do. Dozens of weekends out over the last eight semesters have left Nali and me with nearly choreographed routines to all of the hits, and we drag Eddie to the center of the room, where he belts out choruses with abandon.

When Owen is brave enough to join us, he skates his palms lightly over my hips, and I let him.

It’s not the first time Owen has tried to nudge our long friendship in a different direction, but I haven’t made up my mind about whether I’m willing to risk ruining a good thing.

So instead, I put it out of my head, my eyes fluttering closed as I lose myself to the beat.

Days could have passed like this. But when I open my eyes again and find Wesley disappearing down my hallway, I immediately grow suspicious. I take a step backward, and Owen lifts his head from where he’s nuzzled it against my shoulder. “Where are you going?”

“I need to check something.”

I weave through the press of bodies, past the people huddled around my tiny TV playing Super Smash Bros. and the group giggling at one another in the wide mirror of the bathroom Nali and I share. I look down either end of the hallway. Nali’s door remains shut, but mine is gently cracked.

I shove it open.

Wesley doesn’t even look up.

My tiny desk lamp fills the room with a weak yellow glow, barely enough to see by, and he leans in to examine my bookshelf.

It hardly lives up to the name, given that it’s more cluttered with figurines, trinkets, gaming reference guides, and board games than books.

Wesley’s thumb idly strokes down the spine of my Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, and my hands curl into fists at my sides.

Finally, he looks over his shoulder and grins at me. “This makes a lot of sense, you know.” He flicks the guide. “I bet you’re a great Dungeon Master.”

I ignore him. “What are you doing in here?”

“I was looking for the bathroom,” he says mildly. He doesn’t even try to sound convincing.

“Wrong turn, Wesley.”

But he’s already moved on to strum his fingers along my collection of tabletop roleplaying games. Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, Cyberpunk…“Is this where it started for you, Reagan?”

“Where what started?”

“You know,” he says. His lazy tone turns brisk, impatient. Keep up, it demands. “Gaming. Did your love for it start with board games?”