Page 34 of Looking for Group

Between HoL , Frisbee, and coursework, Drew wasn’t able to visit Kit in person until Thursday. They’d raided together and hung out in the game a lot, but since Drew had got used to seeing Kit and, well, touching Kit, it wasn’t quite the same.

He was just stuffing his toothbrush and a spare pair of boxers into his laptop bag when someone banged on his door, and before he could respond, Sanee barrelled in and settled into the chair like he was camping a spawn point.

Drew stared for a long moment. Then pointed at his bag o’ pants.

“What?”

“I’m spending the night at Kit’s.”

Sanee shrugged. “Bring him along. There’s no better way to meet a bunch of people than to have them rip your spine out.”

Drew was kind of aware he’d been blowing Sanee off for a week, but he was pretty invested in a romantic one-on-one evening with Kit and a retro video game.

And replacing it with a violent beat ’em up and an undisclosed number of his mates was just…

not something he wanted to do. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got plans. ”

“But do your plans involve buckets of CGI blood, creepily detailed boob physics, and the opportunity to explode heads as a thunder god in a stupid hat?”

“Well, no,” Drew admitted. “It involves getting to see my boyfriend when I haven’t since Sunday.”

“You saw him on Tuesday. That’s why you didn’t come to the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out.”

“We were in HoL . And we were running dungeons with two of his friends from the guild.”

Sanee was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “Mate, are you saying that you skipped the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out so you could pretend to be an elf in a video game?” 2

Sanee had a point. It had been fun hanging out in HoL , but Drew had been slightly paralysed by the knowledge that other stuff was going on and he wasn’t there.

Kit might have made peace with missing out, but a tiny part of Drew still thought he should be doing everything, and he could never quite shake the fear that the best experience of his life was happening right now to somebody else.

“It was the only time we could do it, and Kit has a regular Tuesday night thing with Morag and Ialdir, so it was really important to him.”

“So, you didn’t hang out with your real friends because your boyfriend wanted to hang out with his imaginary friends?”

Drew stole a look at the time on his mobile.

Sanee was clearly upset and that was stressful, but he had somewhere to be—somewhere he really wanted to be—and that was also stressful.

Basically this was stressful all the way down.

“I’d already agreed, and the Tuesday thing is always a bit up in the air.

Like, last week we spent about two hours debating whether to play board games or watch a movie and then didn’t do either. ”

“This is a total mischaracterisation of what happened. We played Munchkin.”

“But nobody actually likes Munchkin. It’s just bland enough that no one can strongly object to playing it.”

Sanee gave him a wounded look. “Well, then, object next time. Don’t just go along with it, and then throw it in my face a week later.”

“Look, I’m sorry. It was a one-off. I’m not one of those people who can’t tell the difference between real life and video games. I’m not going to die of exhaustion in a café in South Korea.”

“I dunno.” Sanee rocked the chair onto its back legs.

“I think you might be heading that way. You used to play Mondays and Wednesdays. Then it went up to Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And you were there on Thursday and Tuesday. And it sounds like this game is most of what you do with your weekends as well. That’s not a hobby, mate, that’s an addiction. ” 3

Drew let the laptop bag slump to the ground. “Wow, you went there really fast. Especially when I know for a fact you put a hundred and eleven hours into Skyrim .” 4

“It’s not the same. Like, if you were an alcoholic—”

“There’s no way I’m going to be able to put up with the end of that sentence.”

“I’m serious, Drew. I’m trying to help you here.” The chair crashed onto its front feet as Sanee leaned forward intently. “Being an addict isn’t about how much you do something, it’s about feeling you have to do it all the time.”

“Have you been on Wikipedia again?”

“You’re not even going to think about it, are you? If you didn’t know I was right, you wouldn’t be acting like this.”

“I’m acting like this—” Drew wasn’t quite shouting—“because I’m late to see my boyfriend—my real, actual, physical, real-life boyfriend—and you burst in here and called me a junkie.

” He hoisted up his laptop bag again and stomped out.

“Make sure the door locks when you decide you’re ready to leave. ”

He was still pretty shaky by the time he got off the bus at the Botanic Gardens.

Because, actually, Sanee had been wrong when he’d accused Drew of brushing off his concerns.

Right back when he’d first met Solace, he’d been worried that “she” didn’t seem to have anything in her life outside HoL and studying.

And, honestly, there’d been a part of him that had secretly liked the fantasy of coming into this person’s life and drawing them out of their shell and into the real world.

But now it looked like the opposite was happening.

Drew had always been quite proud that he was a gamer who wasn’t like gamers were supposed to be.

5 He played sports, he was not completely socially awkward, he’d had girlfriends and…

a boyfriend. He went to the pub with his mates like ordinary people did.

Yes, they sometimes talked about video games while they were there, but that just happened to be a common interest. One of the things he’d liked about raiding with Anni was that the game was a means to an end.

Every single person in that guild wanted to prove that they could compete at the top level.

It wasn’t about HoL , it was about the challenge.

And after he’d left, it had been really nice to hook up with people who appreciated the sunsets and elves side of the game, but part of the problem with appreciating a virtual world was that you began to treat it like a real one.

He passed the spot where he and Kit had first kissed, and that cheered him up a bit.

Worrying about his game/life balance suddenly seemed a lot less important than having met someone he really, really liked.

Who he was going to see right now. And whose evening he didn’t want to wreck by dumping all this crap on him.

He resolved not to think about it. And even managed to forget about it completely when Kit opened the door, smiling and looking sufficiently gorgeous that Drew had a rush of oh my God, I can’t believe I’m dating this guy so intense it knocked everything else out of his head.

“So”—Kit gave a slightly self-conscious flourish— “I’ve sort of done a…sort of picnic. Which it belatedly occurs to me that we could have had outside. But it’s all set up now.”

He’d laid a tartan blanket (which looked new enough that Drew suspected he’d bought it specially) on the floor, and put out a variety of breads, cheeses, cakes, and fruit.

It was probably the most romantic thing that had ever happened to Drew, since most of his dates had followed a very set format and he’d never quite had the confidence to suggest anything more controversial than dinner and a movie.

Kit appeared to be accidentally enacting the /shy animation. “I hope it’s okay. I thought we could eat and talk and play a bit of Torment and…” He blushed.

Consumed by ? , Drew threw his arms around Kit and kissed him, gentle at first, and then not so much. “This is the best,” he said, quite a bit later.

They settled down on the picnic blanket and tucked in.

Kit gave him a mischievous look from behind some walnut bread. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get any dough balls.”

“Well, that’s it. We have to break up.”

“I mean, you can get them. It’s just I don’t have an oven.”

“You know I’m not actually obsessed with dough balls, right? I do eat other things.”

“Like strawberries?” Kit produced a punnet from their place of cunning concealment inside a Tesco’s bag.

Now it was Drew’s turn to blush. “Yeah.”

Kit was kneeling a little primly on the edge of the blanket, the strawberries cradled in his lap. “Given the complexity of this encounter, I was thinking maybe we should…well… Practice makes perfect, you know.”

“Once you get the mechanics down, it’ll be a faceroll.” Drew leaned forward, plucked a strawberry from amongst its fellows, and held it out to Kit.

It was probably a combination of knowing each other better, having got more comfortable—a lot more comfortable—with touching, and not being in a Pizza Express full of strangers, but any raid leader would have commended their coordination, situational awareness, and teamwork.

They even moved on to the hard-mode version, seeing how much they could tease each other’s fingers between bites.

And then Drew deliberately dropped one and kissed Kit instead—his mouth as soft and sweet as the strawberries.

Once they were out of fruit and the remains of the picnic had been tidied away, they settled down on Kit’s bed, got his laptop, and disappeared into Torment , which was still as bewildering and intriguing as it had been on Saturday.

Progress remained somewhat oblique, but Drew’s competitive spirit had kicked in, and now they were keeping extensive and detailed notes about who people were, what they wanted, and most importantly, where the hell they were standing.