Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cat
Rosalie, my only friend from my college sorority days and the only person besides Lou I hang out with on a regular basis, calls me on Tuesday morning asking if I’d like to be her plus-one to Denver’s annual food-and-wine festival on Wednesday night. Despite the pile of work making puppy-dog eyes at me—Evaralin is coming along nicely, but I’m itching to get started on Catha—I say yes, because what kind of person turns down free hors d’oeuvres and booze? A monster, that’s who, and I’m no monster.
“The hubby cancel last minute?” I ask when I get to the convention center. It took me a few minutes to locate Rosalie. Like me, she’s short and a bit on the heavier side, which makes her tough to spot in a crowd. On the plus side, I’m pretty sure our less-than-conventionally-attractive bodies are what drew us to each other at Sigma Sigma Sigma.
“Yeah.” Rosalie scrunches up her face. “He’s got a work thing. Thanks for being my eleventh-hour date. Your girlfriend doesn’t mind?”
I scoff. “About that …”
“What?” Rosalie asks, immediately concerned.
Shaking my head, I point to the double doors. “Let’s get inside first.” On my way over, I decided that since I can’t tell Lou the truth about Sally and me (both because they’re coworkers and because I’m not confident in Lou’s ability to keep a secret around my family come Thanksgiving), I’d tell Rosalie. I need at least one person in my life I can be me around.
“Well, now I’m curious.” With renewed enthusiasm, Rosalie links our arms and pulls us toward the crowd waiting to get in. As an event promoter, she gets access to all sorts of things, from the objectively awesome (this food-and-wine shindig) to the very esoteric (who knew the National Paper Football Conference was a thing?). I don’t know what she does besides travel all over the States and post a lot of stuff on social media, but I know she’s successful from the way our Tri Sig sisters talk about her: like her name is a kidney stone they can’t wait to pass.
As the glass double doors open, we shuffle inside. Bit by bit, the press of people around us unclogs, revealing the interior of the convention center. My jaw drops.
Buffets twice as long as any Downton Abbey dinner table line the middle of the main floor like a maze. Displays of chocolate-covered entremets stretch up toward the ceiling between scalloped tureens of stew and glittering towers of champagne glasses. In the corner, a plaster tree extends its doughnut-bedazzled limbs over the heads of ambling diners. On the opposite side of the room, fat sizzles on a grill as another chef assembles mini Kobe beef sliders.
“Careful,” Rosalie says, laughing at my dazed expression. “If your eyes get any bigger—”
“They’ll fall out of my head, yeah,” I finish. Kicking into high gear, I swipe at a pani puri from an Indian restaurant up in Erie I’ve been meaning to check out.
Rosalie raises her eyebrows. “On the upside, you could use your sockets as soup bowls.”
I swivel my head around. “Gross, Ros.” I’m smiling, though. That’s another thing I’ve always liked about Rosalie. She’ll say the clever thing over the right (aka boring) thing any day. It’s probably what makes her such a good promoter.
Once our hands are weighed down with free samples, we find a spot under the doughnut tree to camp out and gorge ourselves silly. The hard part of the evening is over for Rosalie and she seems determined to go hard, so I match her drink for drink. The sample cocktails are small enough that I’m not worried about getting drunk. I still have aspirations of going home after this and squeezing in another hour of work.
“So?” Rosalie asks, tipping a concoction of white rum, guava juice, mascarpone, lime, and mint down her throat. “Spill. How are things with your ladyfriend?”
I swallow a beautiful bite of okonomiyaki before answering. “Complicated. But not in the way you think.”
“What do you mean?”
Because my mouth wants to get back to consuming delicious things, I summarize the situation for Rosalie as quickly as I can. “We played our first session of D&D last Friday with her friends,” I finish a minute later. “No one caught on.”
“Whoa, okay, back up,” Rosalie says, throwing up both hands. “First things first. Sally, your now-fake girlfriend, is still friends with her ex?”
“Yeah.” I flick my wrist. “That’s not a big deal. It’s a lesbian thing. Plus they only dated for like a few months.”
Rosalie flutters her eyelashes like she’s warding off a fly. “And this ex—”
“Andi,” I supply.
“Right, Andi. They’re your boss?”
I plow into a slider. “Yeah.”
“Whom Sally is trying to make … jealous?”
“Sort of,” I mumble around a mouthful of brisket. “Sally’s trying to get back at Andi for the way they broke up with her.”
“But she’s not trying to get back with them, per se,” Rosalie recaps.
Shrugging, I wash down the remnants of my slider with a swig of craft pear cider. “Not as far as I know.”
Breaking into an artisan char siu bun, Rosalie offers me half. “This is messy.”
“You’re telling me. What’s worse—or maybe better, depending on your point of view—is that Andi and I don’t exactly get along. You know how much I love romance in video games, right?” Rosalie nods. “Well, put a big negative sign in front of me and you basically get Andi. So last Friday wasn’t exactly smooth sailing.” I stab at the mini cheesecake on our shared dessert plate.
“Why not call it off, then?”
“No way,” I say emphatically.
Crossing her arms, Rosalie regards me skeptically. “Is this really what you want for yourself for the next however many weeks?”
“What choice do I have?” I shoot back. “It’s either this or go through another spate of holidays being a complete disappointment to my parents and sister. My lack of an SO will dominate our conversations for their entire visit. You don’t know what it’s like, Rosalie. You’ve been married for years.”
“That may be true, but there’s no reason you can’t jump back on the dating apps and find someone else. Something real.”
I laugh under my breath. “No one wants to date me.”
“C’mon now, Cat.” Rosalie moves to clasp me about the shoulders. “Gaming is practically mainstream these days. People wake up, visit each other’s Animal Crossing islands, then go out for brunch and ros é followed by mani-pedis all the time.”
“Yeah, normal people,” I interrupt, shrugging her off. “Not people like me. Not people who got their heads frickin’ swirlied growing up if they so much as sneezed because some jackass heard them say Pikachu.” I’m making this last bit up, but I’m too heated to dial it back. “It’s so unfair. Like, shouldn’t all the normies who watched a few seasons of Game of Thrones and suddenly think they’re ‘hashtag nerds’ have to pay some sort of bully-victim tax first?”
Pursing her lips, Rosalie sighs. And because she knows me way too well, she pulls out a napkin and hands it to me before asking, “What’s this really about, Cat?”
My posture goes slack. What’s this really about? It’s about how deep down, I know my problem isn’t just that I’m a gamer, because look at all the people at Heartrender who are happily coupled up or married. Look at Ferret, who, despite being an objectively odd person, has a wife with a kid on the way. Hell, look at Andi, who at some point had Sally.
No. Deep down, I know my problem is me. Who I fundamentally am. Or, at least, the combination of all the weird things that make me me.
For the second time this week, a fat tear works its way free and rolls down my cheek. Dabbing it away, I sniff, “Everyone says how big the world is, how many fish there are in the sea, and they’re right. Eight billion people live on this goddamn planet.” I scrunch the napkin in my hands. “But when you’re someone like me—someone Asian American and not exactly skinny and way too into a somewhat niche hobby and, on top of everything else, queer—it can feel so very, very small. So small that even on the best days, it feels like all I can get, and maybe all I deserve, is something fake.”
“Oh, Cat.” Clearing the food between us, Rosalie scoots close and hugs me against her. I let myself melt into her arms.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“Don’t apologize.” Rosalie squeezes my shoulder. “You deserve everything, okay, Cat? More than everything. It’s just that life has dealt you a series of crappy hands when it comes to love—which sucks, because at the end of the day, all you can do is remember to be kind to yourself, get out there, and try again.”
I nod like I agree—and I do—but I also want to not get rejected again so badly, a part of me would rather throw myself into all the fake romances in the world, digital or otherwise, than try again. Because what I didn’t tell Andi is this: my favorite thing about romance in video games is that you can choose a love interest and, as long as you say and do the right things, they’ll choose you back. You don’t need to worry about ending up alone unless you want to.
In real life, there are no guarantees.