Chapter 14
Stepping into the convention center was like entering another world. Felix had thought the lobby of the Hotel Paragon was a sight to behold, but it had nothing on the foyer he was currently gaping at.
“INDIIIII,” hollered a voice from somewhere in the crowd.
“CON!” screamed back literally everyone else. On pure instinct, Felix ducked like he was dodging a punch.
“Okay there, man?” asked Trey, who hadn’t left his side since they shook hands in the hotel lobby a few minutes ago. He patted Felix on the back and chuckled. “This is a pretty intense choice for a first con.”
Felix laughed off his embarrassment. “I guess I don’t like to half-ass things.”
“Neither do they,” Trey said, gesturing to the group of Jo’s friends who walked ahead of them, deeper into the abyss that was Indi-Con. “At least we have a guide who’s easy to spot.”
Felix grinned toward Heather, the leader of the pack who was in costume as her demonkin character, Rosalis the rogue. With pink face paint, a pink wig, and a full set of leather armor with rose gold studs, she was hard to miss.
Jo’s friends were, frankly, intimidating as fuck. Kim was practically skipping in her fifties-style, dice-patterned dress—which she’d proudly declared she’d made herself. Young, with sunglasses on indoors, a sky-high pompadour, and a slim-cut yellow blazer with the sleeves rolled up, exuded cool. Then there was Aida, Jo’s best friend, who walked with purpose everywhere she went and looked more at ease in stilettos than Felix felt in tennis shoes.
David was more chill, but he didn’t seem to want to talk much. He had a relaxed Southern-California-surfer vibe, although maybe Felix was only getting that because of the long hair, golden--brown skin, and floral board shorts. The flower crown and the elf ears sticking out from his hair didn’t seem to scream “surfer,” but then again, Felix had never met one (oran elf, for that matter).
Max was harder to get a read on. He barely looked up from his phone except to check that he was still with the group and wasn’t about to walk into any walls. He had greeted Felix with a chin lift and a “’Sup, tornado guy?” before fading into the background.
As they wound toward the gaming hall, another “Indi” and “Con” call-and-response rang out in the foyer behind them. Max huzzahed without looking up. Felix kept his gaze fixed on Heather’s pink wig so he didn’t get lost… until Jo turned around. She paused to let him catch up to her. Trey slipped away toward Aida and draped his arm around her shoulder. She caught his wrist andleaned into him in that easy way reserved for couples who’d been together forever.
“What do you think so far?” Jo asked.
Felix felt the timid nudge of her fingers on his. He captured her hand and interlaced their fingers. God, it felt so good to touch her.
“I think I’m glad I’m here with you,” he responded. “And I think I’m going to need more coffee.”
Jo squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back.
The wall outside the SWOP gaming hall was papered with white printouts. Felix knew what to expect here, thanks to Jo. All of this weekend’s Organized Play games had been posted online for GMs and players to sign up for in advance. The printouts listed names and table assignments for each game, so people knew where to go. Jo had assured him there were always lots of spaces available day-of for people like him to sign up last minute.
Kim made it to the wall first. “We’re at table twelve.”
They had all signed up to play a high-level game with their characters from Jo’s campaign, with Jo playing one of her own characters. Most of the group followed Kim into the hall, but David held back, reading over the sign-up sheets for the afternoon games.
“Do you want to find a game for the morning session?” Jo asked Felix.
“I’d prefer to watch first,” he replied. “Is that allowed?”
“Yeah, of course. Just don’t, like, hover over the GM’s shoulder or anything. But if you want to play this afternoon, we can look now.”
“Lead on,” Felix said, gesturing toward the wall. Jo and David helped him find an intro-level game with open seats. He jotted down his name and made a mental note of the table number and GM’s name.
“What about the evening session?” he asked. “Should I find a game then too?”
“Tonight’s the Legendary,” David said.
Felix glanced between him and Jo. “What’s the Legendary?”
“All of the tables play the same adventure at the same time,” he explained, “with different objectives depending on character level. What happens at one table might impact another, and every-one wins or loses collectively. It’s completely bananas.”
That overwhelmed feeling rose up, and Felix’s stomach started to churn. “That sounds like the perfect time to check out the exhibit hall with Trey.”
Jo nudged him with her elbow. “You could watch for a little bit?” she suggested. “Any event with at least five tables can host a SWOP Legendary. If the library event grows enough, who knows?”
“Plus, Jo’s GMing for it,” David added. “She’s great at Legendaries.”
“Aw, thanks,” she said.
“I’ll come check it out,” Felix promised. Jo smiled up at him, and he steeled himself as the three of them entered the gaming hall.
“I’m going to stand up on the dragon’s back,” Max said, hopping up and straddling his chair. He opened his hand and slowly drove his palm forward as if pushing against a heavy weight. “I reach through its razor-sharp scales to the thick hide underneath. I say, ‘I’ve killed greater beings than you, Longfang. You’re nothing but an oversized bird.’ And as I touch it, I cast Bite of the Vampire at level ten.”
“Ten?!” Kim yelled.
“You better fuckin’ hit,” said Young.
Jo bounced in her seat and cried, “Get its ass!” God, how she’d missed this. She’d almost forgotten how much Max came alive as Lyric, his bard persona.
Still on his feet, Max picked up a d20. Then he set it back down and chose a different one. He exhaled. And rolled. The die traveled to the center of the table. Everyone, even Felix and Trey, even their GM Richard, leaned in.
“Yes!” Max crowed as the entire group cheered. “That’s a roll of eighteen, plus my spell bonus. Twenty-nine!”
“The dragon is hit!” cried Richard. “Roll your damage.” As Max picked up a massive handful of dice, the GM narrated, “The ancient creature writhes and twists, attempting to throw the bard off its back. It’s injured, badly, and it knows it.” The dice clattered onto the table in front of Max, and he began to add up the total. “You see Longfang look to the skies, about to make a break for it, hoping to live to fight another day.”
Heather muttered under her breath. “Don’t you dare, you mother—”
“But the bard’s spell strikes true,” Richard gestured at Max right as Max looked up from his dice.
Max’s grin was as luminous as the life-giving magic wielded by the strongest cleric. “Sixty-nine points of damage,” he said.
Everyone started talking at once.
“Nice!”
“Nice.”
“What, really? That’s hilarious.”
“Damn, son.”
“That’s got to be enough to kill it, right?”
“Shhh!”
Richard smiled and said, “Longfang, The Scourge of the North, The Wingèd Death, begins to screech. The Bite of the Vampire spell pierces its flesh, and its life force is drained before your eyes. Lyric, you feel the power of the dragon surge up your arm, transferring its health to you. You gain sixty-nine health.”
“Nice,” multiple people said.
Max nodded. “I now have seventy.”
“You were at one?” Aida cried.
“It’s fine,” he quipped.
“Longfang’s eyes go white and milky,” Richard said. “Its jaw goes slack, and its screech dies on the wind. The wings go limp, and it is falling. Its corpse is crashing to earth, with the bard on its back.”
“Teleport away!” Jo cried, unable to keep the laughter out of her voice.
“I’m out of spells!” Max shouted back.
“So am I,” said Young, their cleric and healer. “So don’t die.”
Richard rolled a handful of dice. “Lyric takes… thirty-eight points of damage from the fall.”
“I’m alive!” Max roared. The entire table applauded, and Jo’s cheers were the loudest of all.
Heather, though, was still in character as Rosalis, Lyric’s snarky cousin. “Every time I’m about to inherit your share of the family tavern, cuz, you ruin everything.”
“Hey,” Max shot back as Lyric, “if you hadn’t run away when the dragon came down on us, I wouldn’t have been alone to take all of its attacks. It was your fault I almost died in the first place.”
“I didn’t run away. I fell back to a more advantageous position,” Heather-as-Rosalis argued.
Jo addressed Richard, “They’re always like this. You can cut them off anytime.”
“In that case…” Richard jumped in with a glance at his watch. The morning session only had a few minutes left. He concluded the game succinctly with rewards and a heroes’ welcome in the town where the adventure had begun. With a final flourish, he said, “Thank you all for adventuring with me today. May your next tale be even more epic.”
They all applauded politely and thanked Richard for the game. Across the table, Felix stood and came around to Jo. He and Trey had observed the entire three-hour game. For most of that time, he’d watched her. It was all Jo could do to keep her head in the game.
Now standing behind her, Felix bent and whispered into her ear. “You’re incredible.”
She gazed up at him. “How so?”
“You’re electric when you play,” he said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off you.”
Jo’s body flushed warm all over. She shook her head, about to remind him that she wasn’t the only good roleplayer at the table—but she stopped herself. She’d accepted David’s earlier compliment; she didn’t need to let it feel different with Felix. “Thank you.”
Felix smiled at her.
“You, on the other hand, are extremely distracting,” she told him as she packed up her dice and character sheet. “Next time, sit behind me.”
“Trust me, Jo,” Felix said, even softer and lower than before. He brushed his thigh against her ass as it hung generously off the side of the chair. Jo’s spine straightened. “I like the view from back here, but your eyes are much more fun to watch during a game.”
“Well, if you’re going to do that, never mind,” she said airily. “That’s even more distracting.”
“Good.” The word was guttural and raw. Less a word and more of a sound.
The muscles deep in the core of her body tightened. She squeezed her thighs together. And then, just like that, Felix was upright again, going over to Richard to ask some GMing questions.
Jo’s phone buzzed in her pocket, which it had been doing off and on throughout the game. She pulled it out to find a text notification from Aida, who was only two seats over, phone in hand, chatting innocently with Trey.
Aida
That’s a point for Team You Two Should Fuck
Jo unlocked her phone to respond, only to find a whole string of texts from Aida.
Aida
He’s looking at you
I’ve counted six lip bites so far
Seven
Is he taking notes? That’s so cute.
Did you hear that little “woo” he did when you rolled a 20?
I lost count but I think we’re up to ten lip bites
Babe seriously where did you find this guy?
Eleven
That’s a point for Team You Two Should Fuck
Jo
Are you keeping score?
Aida
If every lip bite is a point, I’m totally winning
Aida stood smoothly. “Where are we getting lunch?”
They decided to split up, since they only had an hour until the afternoon session. Every lunch place within five blocks was about to have a line out the door. Hand in hand, Jo and Felix headed toward a deli the next block over.
Holding hands with him felt as natural as breathing. His was large and warm compared to hers. Comforting. Strong. She’d never held hands with anyone whose palm muscles bulged with each twitch of a finger. Without warning, her mind conjured up the memory of the morning after the tornado, when she imagined what Felix’s touch would feel like on her body. A shiver ran down her spine, even as they walked through the early summer sunshine. She could feel the ghost of his fingers against her skin, right under her bra, where they’d been the night before. Without thinking, she arched her back and rolled her shoulders.
“Do you have an itch?” Felix asked.
“If I say yes, will you scratch it?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Then yes.”
Felix let go of her hand, slowed his pace, and touched her upper back lightly. Soft and sultry, he said, “Tell me where.”
“Lower.”
His hand shifted, and sparks glittered over every inch he touched.
“Left, and down a little more.”
Felix obeyed her directions and ran his nails back and forth at the base of her shoulder blade. The sparks intensified. Not only over her skin, but deeper, into her muscles. They spread from that one spot and cascaded across her body. Even her scalp tingled.
Jo hummed in delight. “Right there.”
“Can you even feel me through that denim jacket of yours?” he asked. “Or should I slip underneath?”
Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?
“I feel you just fine, thanks,” she said, light and breezy.
“You really are going to be the death of me, you know.”
She grinned at him. “A little to the right, please.”
Felix groaned through closed lips, but he continued to scratch her back all the way to the deli.
After lunch, Felix sat at his first MnM table without Jo. He could hear her laugh from halfway across the hall where she sat ready to GM a game. Felix had taken a seat facing away from her to keep the distraction to a minimum, but that laugh sure did carry. His girlfriend’s laugh. Felix smiled like a teenager with a crush, all goofy and lopsided. He was thirty-six, for crying out loud. He should not be this dopey over having a girlfriend.
He turned to look over his shoulder and spotted Jo in the crowd, loose auburn curls bouncing as she stood up to adjust something at the center of her table. One of her MnM books was open and pressed against her chest. Felix found his attention glued to the hint of green and orange on her hand that was splayed over the book’s spine. The touch of those hands had lit such a fire in him—he’d never felt anything like it. He wanted to feel it again.
His thoughts were interrupted by his GM, a young white woman named Grace, arriving. They introduced themselves, and once the table filled up, the adventure got underway. The din of the gaming hall built up to the point that Felix couldn’t hear Jo anymore. That was probably for the best since his mind tended to wander whenever he did.
Someone else caught his attention, though. Trey and Aida were playing at a table nearby, and Trey was doing some bizarre character voice, like a child actor rejected from playing a street urchin in an Oliver Twist adaptation. There was also a lot of meowing involved, which made Aida crack up every time.
At Felix’s table, the story followed a format similar to the sample game Jo had run for him. Grax and his party were hired by a small-town mayor to investigate some strange noises in the local copper mine. The whole thing was rather Scooby-Doo-esque, with fake ghosts, crotchety old landowners, and an actual line about meddling kids. Jo would have played up the comedy of the adventure, Felix thought. She would have had the entire table rolling with laughter as she embellished the silly parts rather than skimming over them as Grace did. Grace was a fine GM, but she seemed more interested in keeping the game moving than anything else. Felix wouldn’t put it past Jo to also add a Great Dane with a penchant for snacks into the mix.
When the game wrapped up, Felix noted the details on his SWOP logsheet and thanked Grace and the other players. He stood, and his eyes instantly found Jo, still in the thick of her game. Before he could decide whether to head over there, he heard his name. Aida was waving him over. She and Trey were the only ones left at their table.
“How was your game?” he asked as he sat alongside them.
“Great,” Aida replied. “We killed some ghosts and saved a temple from a necromancer’s evil schemes. You?”
“Sadly, all of my ghosts were merely illusory diversions. Which made them very hard to hit with a sword.”
“He gets a sword,” Trey said indignantly.
“It’s an imaginary sword, T,” Aida said with a long-suffering sigh. “It doesn’t count.”
“Trey, I have to ask,” Felix jumped in, “what’s with the meowing?”
“You heard that?” Aida asked with a laugh.
“Oi, guv, that’s jus’ Jolly,” Trey said, returning to his god-awful Cockney. “’E’s a li’l catfolk tryna be a wizard is all. Jolly loves castin’ spells, wot?”
“God, I love Jolly,” Aida said, covering her face with her hand. “It’s so dumb, but he makes me laugh every time.”
“Why do you think I bring him to every convention, lovey?” Trey said in his regular voice. He uncovered her face and pecked her on the cheek.
“So, Felix!” Aida said brightly. She angled toward him and leaned back against Trey’s shoulder.
“Here it comes,” Felix said with a knowing grin.
“You and Jo, huh?”
“Me and Jo,” he confirmed. “Are you going to ask about my intentions toward your best friend?”
“We’ll see,” Aida said. “Thoughts on cats?”
“Slight preference for dogs, but I like cats too. I had both growing up.”
“Coffee or tea?”
“Coffee. Con leche. And vanilla.”
“Why boxing?”
“Because it’s a good stress reliever, I enjoy the discipline it requires, and it makes me look really good.”
“Why Ashville?”
“My grandpa lives there, and I didn’t want him to be alone.”
Aida paused and cast her eyes around like she was thinking. Felix was mildly surprised she didn’t have a list of questions memorized.
“What do you think of MnM?” she asked.
“The jury’s still out, but so far it’s been pretty good.”
“What do you think of Jo?”
“She’s amazing and funny and cute as hell, and I love being around her.”
“Right back atcha,” said Jo from directly behind him.
Felix jumped. Jo was smiling down at him with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her tote bag over the other.
“How long were you there?” Felix asked.
“Not long,” Jo replied, sliding into the seat next to him. “Jury’s still out on MnM?”
“Yeah,” Felix said, a bit disheartened. “My last game wasn’t nearly as fun as playing with you or watching this morning. But I did make it to level three.”
Jo gasped with delight. “Congrats! You’re officially a pugilist. Do you need help leveling up?”
“I’d like to try it myself first, but thank you for offering. I’ll let you know if I have trouble.”
Jo clapped for him, and Felix felt a rush of pride.
“Sorry the game wasn’t great,” she said, a look of concern washing over her features. “That happens sometimes at cons. Not as much character interaction playing with strangers, and the hard time limits can stifle creativity. Was there anything memorable that stood out?”
Felix smiled. “Probably when I attempted to stab a ghost, and it turned out to be an illusion. The GM said I ran right through it, ate shit, and dropped my sword. I was already in a Scooby-Doo mindset, so imagining it in that old seventies animation style was fun.”
“See, if Veena had been there, she would have given you so much shit for that,” she said, and then her eyes flashed with realization. “Wait, we haven’t signed up for a game together. Let’s come a little early tomorrow to make sure we find a table.”
“Absolutely,” Felix agreed. “Grax and Veena are a good team.”
Jo grinned and leaned in. “I think so too.”
Felix met her halfway and kissed her. Sweet and simple. Easy.
“Gross,” said Aida.
“Get a room,” Trey added.
“Way ahead of you,” Felix said with a wink.