Page 30 of Looking for Group

Drew had barely sat down in the Slug and Lettuce on Friday evening before his friends were bombarding him with questions about his big date with the guy from the internet.

Sanee opened with, “So, are you, like, an official gay now?”

“Oi”—Steff poked him in the arm—“we talked about this.”

Drew just rolled his eyes. “No, I’ve got to send in four passport-sized photographs first.”

“Hey,” protested Sanee, “I wasn’t being rude. I didn’t mean gay like lame, I meant gay like gay.”

Tinuviel doubled facepalmed. “Sanee, that’s ableist and homophobic.”

“I’m just asking a question.”

“No, a question would be something like ‘Did you have a nice time?’ or ‘Did he like your whale T-shirt?’ not ‘How can I best put your sexual identity in a box that I find comfortable to think about?’”

Drew realised that if he didn’t do something now, this would go on all night. “I had a lovely time,” he announced. “He liked my T-shirt, we had coffee, and then went raiding. We downed Lady Bloodrose on the final attempt of the evening.”

“Dude,” said Andy, “you took a guy raiding on a date?”

“No, we were raiding anyway.”

Sanee leaned over the table. “That’s how they met. Massively multiplaying online.”

“Seriously?” Andy blinked. “You’re dating someone you met in a video game?”

Now Drew double facepalmed. “Look, yes, I’m dating a guy. Yes, he’s a guy I met online. No, he’s not a twelve-year-old French boy. Yes, I’m pretty sure he’s not a serial killer. No, he’s not a minger. Yes, I really like him. No, he doesn’t ask me to dress as an elf.”

“What about a hobbit?” asked Sanee.

“He doesn’t ask me to dress as anything. And, before you ask, I don’t ask him to dress as anything either. I like him just the way he is.”

“That’s very sweet, Drew.” Tinuviel smiled her vague smile. “But there’s nothing wrong with a little creative cosplay. I once went to Nine Worlds as Geralt of Rivia.”

There was a long silence as everyone processed the image.

Sanee got there first. “Do you still have the outfit?”

“No, I took it apart. This year I’m going as Viserys Targaryen.”

There was another long silence as everyone processed that image.

“Um, why?” asked Andy eventually.

Tinuviel thought about it. “Well, I had the wig. It was that or Sephiroth, but he seemed a bit dated.” 1

“Did it not occur to you,” suggested Drew, “that you could have gone as, say, Daenerys.”

“I don’t really identify with Daenerys.”

“So, what, you identify with her psycho, abusive, petty tyrant brother?”

“I don’t identify with him, but I think I understand him better.

Daenerys is very admirable, but I find it difficult to relate to admirable people 2 , and I feel Viserys is treated unfairly by the world he lives in because he fails to embody conventional masculine virtues.

Also, the actor who played him is terribly pretty. ”

“Don’t you ever like to dress as girls?” asked Steff.

“Oh yes. Two years ago I was Madame Morrible.”

Drew sipped his pint. The nice thing about having a deeply weird, highly opinionated friend was that you never had to be the centre of attention if you didn’t want to be.

The conversation drifted back towards the latest season of Game of Thrones , which Sanee was illegally torrenting for the group and had forbidden anyone to watch until he had the whole thing so they could sit down over a weekend and do a proper Throne-athon.

They spent the rest of the evening bickering about spoiler etiquette and deviations from book canon.

Once the pub kicked them out, they headed to Sanee and Steff’s for their traditional Friday-night board game-age. They settled into a postmidnight session of Arkham Horror that ended with them heroically beating up Yig with tommy guns, and then feeling faintly short-changed.

“Poor old Yig,” said Sanee, as he carefully stacked twenty-five different sets of cards into their proper places in the box. “He’s more of a mediocre old one, isn’t he?”

Drew was kind of sleepy and a little bit sad.

He always enjoyed Arkham while he was playing it, but afterwards it always felt like an anticlimax, whether you won or lost. He blinked the board game haze out of his eyes and looked round at his friends.

Andy had actually fallen asleep while trying to close a gate to the Great Halls of Celeano and was now slumped facedown on the coffee table.

3 Steff was curled up in Sanee’s lap, handing him loose counters, and Tinuviel was reading the Fantasy Flight brochure that came with the game.

Drew missed Kit.

He tried to imagine him here. He sort of managed and sort of didn’t.

He couldn’t picture them sitting in each other’s laps—not least because Kit was pretty tall, and Drew had played a lot of rugby when he was still at school, so it wasn’t really clear whether the taller or the heavier one should go on top or underneath—but maybe they’d hold hands under the table and smile at each other when nobody was looking.

By the time he got back to his room, it was the kind of late that was technically early, and he woke up the next day with the sinking realisation that the sun wasn’t going to get any higher.

He pulled on his pyjama bottoms and logged onto HoL , did his auctions and ran a few dailies with Ialdir and Prospero.

And then he had to prepare for his date.

Which was complicated by the fact he was coming to the end of a laundry cycle and he’d already worn his best T-shirt.

He’d hoped that, by this point, he’d have this down, but he ended up dithering all over again about what to wear.

A shirt seemed appropriate for dinner, but not appropriate for, well, him.

In the end, he decided to compromise by wearing a shirt over his T-shirt, but leaving it unbuttoned.

Of course, this left him with a problem because anything with a slogan on it would be hard to read and probably looked kind of cluttered.

He was hesitating over his Caffeine Molecule when he remembered he had an Epic Purple Shirt kicking about at the back of a chest of drawers.

He hadn’t worn it much because he hadn’t been sure he could get away with a purple T-shirt for reasons that now seemed pretty stupid.

He took a quick glance in the mirror to make sure he didn’t look like a complete knob end, decided he didn’t, and headed off to meet Kit.

He’d had the foresight to book a table in advance, which turned out to be a good thing because it was a Saturday night and the place was packed. Kit was waiting just outside, still in blue, still looking like a model, still reading A Canticle for Leibowitz . 4

He closed the book and smiled, and Drew grinned back and waved, and then felt like an idiot because waving at someone when they were eight feet away seemed a bit much.

“Hi,” he said, wishing he could just do less-than-three, and not have to worry about whether he looked happy enough, or too happy, or if he’d be able to think of anything witty to say.

They trooped in, and Drew gave his name to the waiter. He knew it was just Pizza Express, but having to do the whole ritual of booking and being shown to your table made him feel like he was doing an impression of someone he’d seen on TV. 5

The waiter led them to a table for two tucked into a little niche. There was even a flower in a blue glass-vase thing.

They got sat down, and Kit vanished behind an enormous menu. Drew stared at an equally enormous but totally incomprehensible wine list.

“So,” he asked, trying to sound suave, “shall I order the merlot?”

Kit’s eyes appeared over the top of his menu. “Um, do you want to?”

“I don’t know… I just thought it would be a thing…that we could…do.”

“Well, you can if you want, but I don’t actually drink that much wine.”

Drew had this horrible image of trying to drink an entire bottle of merlot on his own, and he wasn’t even particularly sure what a merlot was, other than the second-cheapest, most pronounceable wine they had. “Me neither. I panicked. I might have a Coke.”

Kit hid his face behind the menu again.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Maybe a little bit.”

Drew didn’t really mind. It was sometimes nice to be laughed at. If it was the right person laughing. He tried to redeem himself. “I thought we could have the dough balls doppio to start.”

Except that just made Kit giggle again.

“No, it’s really good. We had it when I came here with Tinuviel’s parents.”

“The girl from your course? I thought you were just friends.”

“We are. She’s got those sort of parents. They’re academics. They’re really weird.”

Kit reappeared, his eyes glinting. “Did they order the merlot as well?”

“No, they had the prosecco, but it’s slightly out of my price range.”

“Oh.” He looked a bit flustered. “Were you going to pay for this?”

Drew wasn’t sure he’d actually thought about it, but in his experience, dates were things you paid for.

Unless you dated Tinuviel, apparently, because something something patriarchal assumptions something something commodity model of sex something something.

“I guess so. I mean, I don’t have to. I mean, um. ”

“Well, how does it usually work?”

“Normally the guy pays, but I’m starting to see the limitations of that model.”

Kit thought about it for a moment. “Well, why don’t we split it?”

“That doesn’t seem very…special somehow.”

“I don’t see how the way you pay for it is what makes it special.” He smiled across the table. “But if you like, I could pay for your food and you could pay for my food.”

Drew was pretty sure that was a silly idea, but it seemed like the best compromise they had. “Okay,” he said. “So shall we start with the dough balls?”

“Do these dough balls have cocaine in them or something?”

“Actually, I think they might. I really like them. Also, it’s a sharing thing.”

Kit’s eyebrows quirked mischievously. “Are we going to order a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs for a main?”