CHAPTER THIRTY
“I’ve got one more question,” Chloe said after Aria insisted on paying their bill for them.
“Shoot,” she replied.
“Is it true that Recovery II is going to have mod support?”
“Yes. That’s coming out in an interview that’s dropping in two days anyway, so I might as well tell you.
Yes, we’ve upgraded to a more streamlined and accessible game engine and we very, very much want to lean into the modding community.
We want it to be fun and easy. We’re actually–” She paused.
“Well, you’ll see. Suffice to say, yes.”
“Okay, awesome. Because I have been wanting to get into modding and Recovery II would feel so perfect to cut my teeth on.”
“It will be,” Aria promised. “Now…” She checked her phone. “Oh. That’s more time than I thought had passed. Um, I gotta go.” The waitress came back with her card as she began gathering her things. “So, Gabe, you’re pretty much sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Honestly, the only reason I’m not completely sure is that I haven’t had enough time to consider it and see if I’m missing something.”
“Always important to do that.” She finished gathering her things and stood up. “It’s been very nice meeting both of you. You will both hear from me soon, within the next week or so at least. Farewell for now.”
They both told her farewell and watched her go, then sat there in silence for a little bit. Finally, Gabe checked his phone.
“Shit,” he muttered, “a lot of time has passed. We gotta get back.”
“Oh, why?” Chloe asked, sounding a little dazed.
“Ellen’s first therapy session is today and I wanted to go with her.”
That seemed to bring her out of it. “Oh, fuck. I completely forgot about that. Shit. Yeah, let’s go.”
They headed out and started driving home. Gabe felt a curious and strong tempest storm of emotions as they hit the highway, but one came to the front rather quickly.
“Chloe, uh, sorry,” he said.
“...what?” She looked over at him. “Sorry for what?”
“That meeting was supposed to be about you entirely and it pretty much became about me entirely and I now I feel bad.”
“No way! Gabe, I just wanted to know if I could stream the game, and I can! I am fucking ecstatic that this happened! This is amazing! My fucking husband is going to be writing official novels for one of my favorite fucking games! That is way beyond anything I was expecting or hoping for from this meeting. I feel fucking high right now! Do you realize how amazing this is from my perspective?! I full-on had fantasies about you when I was reading your fan fiction–if you laugh at me I will rip your tongue out–and then I actually found you and began dating you and fucking got engaged to you and you picked back up that fan fiction for me and now it’s going to be official fucking canon! ? This is beyond crazy!”
“That is pretty fucking amazing, when you think about it,” Gabe murmured.
“Oh man, I’m not going to be able to sleep for the next few nights.
I need to prepare my channel. I’ve got some shit I’ve been putting off but now I’m gonna just dive the fuck in and make everything awesome.
I imagine there’s going to be some people out there who are gonna come to me to see Recovery II exclusive early access content.
Actually…” She pulled out her phone. “I made a whole list of shit I still need to do, I need to see if there’s anything I forgot… ”
Gabe laughed softly and left her to it.
…
“Our husband just won big!” Chloe yelled the moment they were inside.
Gabe felt heat rushing to his face as he heard several responses, the other women calling back and coming closer. Ellen was there first, stepping out of her office.
“How? What happened?” she asked.
“Wait, what happened?!” Holly called from upstairs.
“Did someone say something!?” Krystal yelled.
“I am almost certainly going to write official fan fiction for Recovery,” Gabe replied.
“Wait, what!?” Krystal yelled, her voice getting closer.
“Seriously? How?” Ellen asked.
“I must have misheard that!” Krystal appeared in the hallway ahead of them, emerging from the basement.
“The lead dev of Recovery has read my story, thinks it’s amazing, and wants to publish it and likely more,” Gabe replied. “And Ellen, you aren’t dressed yet. We’re going to be late.”
“We-what? Oh shit! I fucking lost track of time. Congrats, honey!” she said, gave him a quick kiss, and began hurrying upstairs past Holly.
Gabe let them swarm around him and ask him questions that he tried to answer but Chloe kept jumping in so he let her fill them in on the situation.
Krystal looked like she was about ready to burst with shocked excitement and Liz looked...
really fucking good in her sweat-soaked tanktop and gym shorts, clearly having been in the middle of an intense workout.
She smiled a small smile when she noticed.
“I know that look,” she said.
“Um, yeah…” Gabe murmured, thoughts of everything that had just transpired temporary ejected from his mind.
“What? Oh, yeah, I know right?” Krystal said when she noticed him staring and realized what he was staring at. “But like this is real, right?”
“Straight from the woman’s mouth herself,” Chloe replied giddily.
Gabe found himself slowly and inexorably drawn to Liz, who seemed happy to let him drift closer. But that all stopped when he saw Ellen reemerge at the top of the stairs and snapped out of it.
“Shit, uh, we gotta go,” he said.
“I understand. I’ll be here. And, congrats,” she said, smiling, then turning around and showing him her amazingly broad, firm ass, her shorts plastered to it well enough that they might as well have been painted on.
Fuck did he want her bad just then.
But it was time to go. He and Ellen said their goodbyes and headed out the door. A moment later, they were in the car and backing out.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Um...yeah,” Ellen replied.
“You do want me to go, right?”
“What? Yeah...yes, I do.”
He hesitated, looking more closely at her as they rolled to a stop at a stop sign. “It’s okay if you want to go alone, babe. I won’t take it personally.”
“No, it’s fine. I want you there, I mean, you know, to take me and wait for me. Just...I feel weird about this. It’s throwing me off my game.”
“I’m sorry, honey. And I will be here with you.”
That seemed to clear the dark clouds that had settled over her, at least a bit, and she gave him a serene but surprisingly vulnerable smile.
“That means more to me than I can really speak...I’m kind of fucked up about this.
I mean, I’ve never been great about the idea of therapy.
It was, at best, out of reach financially, at worst something only weirdos and psychos were forced to do.
And I definitely drank my feelings through pretty much all of my twenties.
And just...I wanted to get therapy during the last year of my relationship with Blake.
” She stopped, sighed. “I hate that I’m still talking about him... does it really not bother you?”
“I mean it bothers me that he made so miserable and he was such a piece of shit, but it doesn’t bother me if you want to talk about him and what happened between you two.
You had things happen to you, bad things, and one of the most common ways to work through this fact is to talk about them.
Yeah, to a therapist, but also to people you love and trust.”
“You are definitely someone I love and trust. God, it still just absolutely shocks me sometimes how reasonable you are. I mean, I’m used to it, but...
you haven’t yelled at me one time. Not once.
I was really thinking about this today. You haven’t tried to guilt trip me, or trick me, or pressure me, or freeze me out.
Not one time. Any of it. In every other relationship I’ve been in, more than one of those things had for sure happened, more than once usually, within the first two months.
And the thing that’s really fucking with me is how goddamned normal I thought all that shit was. ”
“Well...you aren’t alone,” Gabe replied. “I ran into much of the same before you.”
“What’s getting to me even more is that it’s not happening because you just ‘love me that much’, it isn’t happening because you are fucking emotionally mature.
We don’t fight. We’ve never really fought.
We’ve had debates, and we’ve called each other on our bullshit, but that isn’t the same as a fight.
And I just...didn’t know it could be like this.
And I just-you know, I keep coming back to the last time I really interacted with therapy. Or tried to.”
“What happened?”
She sighed, shaking her head miserably. “The moment I mentioned it, he flipped. Like I’d stuck him with a fucking taser or something.
He almost jumped. And immediately started asking me why I wanted to, but wouldn’t even let me answer.
Just jumped from that to how I didn’t need it, and it was all bullshit anyway, and whatever head-fucker I ended up with was going to turn me against him, because that’s what they all did, because they were all so miserable or crazy.
Like he really got pissed over it and basically made me promise not to go.
So, I did, because I was already pretty iffy on it.
And that left a mark in my memories about the whole ordeal. ”
“It was self defense,” Gabe murmured.
“What?” she asked, sounding almost startled.
“He was right. About one thing, at least. If you’d gone and gotten therapy, there’s a really good chance the therapist would’ve eventually correctly discovered you had a terribly toxic relationship.
And he knew that. Probably because he was spending all his time on ‘alpha’ forums and a lot of these guys got broken up with after their girlfriends and wives went to therapy and realized the same thing. ”
“...holy shit, I don’t know how I never fully put that together. I thought he just didn’t want to spend the money on it, or didn’t want it to get out that his fiance was going to therapy. But yeah, he knew. God, what a piece of shit.”
“Yeah, definitely.”