Page 46 of The Best Worst Thing

Night Dive

An hour later, Nicole was standing on Logan’s stoop.

After Cynthia had left, Nicole texted him to see if maybe she could stop by when he got home from his night out with his friends, that she knew he’d only just gotten back into town but she was having a really shitty day.

A few minutes later, he’d called to make sure she was okay, clarify his plans were actually inside the home, remind her she was always welcome at his place, and tell her to practice her eye roll …

because tonight was his Dungeons raging orange-red wildfires; and a charred, crumbling castle.

Bathed in the map’s glow, men in their midthirties to late forties swarmed the room, drinking and eating and sifting through their notes before beginning to settle into their seats.

“Hot, right?” Logan said, giving Nicole a squeeze. “Dave coded the whole thing himself. Took him a year. Did it on company time too, so don’t take any pictures, okay? He could get sued.”

“That’s not going to be a problem. I would never document this.”

Logan laughed, then walked Nicole toward the table, where a few of his friends had already glanced up and waved hello.

“Guys, this is Nicole.” More nods and greetings. “Nicole, this is, well, everyone.”

Nicole bit her lip, then smiled as Logan began to take her from seat to seat to meet each friend individually. He was good at this, of course: schmoozing. With every introduction, he offered up a silly anecdote or common ground for Nicole to work with.

“J.P.’s from Saint Louis too,” Logan said as they arrived at friend number four. “J.P., Nicole’s dad once did an emergency tooth filling for Albert Pujols.”

“Before or after we burned his jersey?”

“Before,” Nicole said. “When he signed with the Angels, he closed his practice for two days of mourning. Paid time off for everyone—bereavement. And when Kroenke moved the Rams to LA, I was already living here, and he wouldn’t speak to me for, like, a month. He even removed me from our group text.”

This continued for maybe ten more minutes.

Nicole—now halfway through Logan’s beer—worked the room.

She shook hands, she talked about World War II, she teamed up with several of Logan’s friends to make fun of Logan right to his delighted face.

But by the time she’d arrived at the head of the table, where a handsome man in clear-rimmed glasses and an old Radiohead shirt stared into his laptop screen with narrowed lips and a tight jaw, time slowed down.

The room, somehow, fell quiet. Nicole’s noisy heart began to beat a bit too fast.

“Dave, this is—”

“Hey, Nicole,” Dave said, pushing his laptop back a couple of inches. He smiled pleasantly, although the warmth never really reached his eyes. But Nicole couldn’t read too much into that, right? After all, he seemed pretty busy Dungeon Mastering, whatever that meant.

“It’s, um, it’s so nice to finally meet you.

” The rest of Logan’s friends had gotten back to their conversations, their IPAs, their pregame routines.

“I’ve heard so much about you. Your map is very cool.

I really like all the topography. My sister’s a software engineer too.

She works at Google … Anyway, I’m sorry to crash your game.

I tried to bring snacks, but Logan told me they were too bougie and hid them in the kitchen. ”

“Well, the man does think Pop Rocks are a food group, so …”

Nicole chuckled. Dave, again, smiled politely, then twirled a mechanical pencil between his fingers and clicked its eraser a few times.

“You playing with Logan, then? Or just watching?”

“Nic’s going to play herself,” Logan said. “I want her to learn.”

Dave rubbed his still-working jaw. He wore a wedding band, silver and slim. “We’ve got a lot to cover tonight, man. Probably no time to teach as we go. Why don’t you guys just team up?”

“She’s a quick study,” Logan said, putting his arm around Nicole, who was suddenly very busy inspecting her bare feet. He gave her a little squeeze. “She’s read a lot of medieval literature. If you get her tipsy enough, she’ll recite the first twenty lines of Beowulf, for fun and for free.”

“That’s, unfortunately, completely true. I should not be overserved unless the crowd has been prescreened and only includes Seamus Heaney’s ghost.”

Dave smirked at both of them. “Just adorable,” he said. “Come pick a player, then.”

Logan nudged Nicole toward the table, then hunched over one of Dave’s books and flipped through a few pages. “You should be one of these,” he said, pointing at a horned creature with boobs and a giant tail. “They’re called tieflings.”

“Uh, why?”

“Because they’re very hot. And extremely rude.”

Nicole, cheeks burning, glared at him. Logan, eyes twinkling, lifted both shoulders.

All while Dave, watching the two of them ogle each other like eighth graders at a school dance, shook his head and reached for his laptop.

He assigned Nicole a periwinkle avatar and placed her on the outskirts of a dense forest just before the decrepit castle’s broken gates.

“We play pretty fast,” he said, handing her a blank character sheet and a massive textbook.

“Most of us have kids, so we try to finish up by ten thirty or eleven if we can. Logan’ll help you figure out the sheet before your first turn.

The rest he can explain as we go. Try to decide what you want to do before we get to you.

There’s an element of groupthink here too, so whatever you do, make sure it serves the story. ”

Nicole nodded as Logan sat on the edge of the couch, then scooted over a few inches. She plopped next to him and sifted through her materials while Dave loosened the drawstring around a purple velvet pouch.

“All right, idiots.” He dumped a handful of dice onto the table. “Let’s play.”

And so they did. The music hushed and the chatter dwindled while Dave—between the occasional good-spirited interruption—recapped last week’s events and began to set the stage for tonight’s adventure.

He spared no detail, even describing the dead ivy that covered the castle’s withering walls as wooden cobwebs spun from splintered bark, gray as ash.

“The castle you’ve entered—despite warnings from good people along the way—groans ominously,” Dave said, reaching for a few Sour Patch Kids. “Its stones, black; its skeleton, cold. And as its rotted doors slam shut behind you, a shiver runs up your spine. Then, as—”

“But I don’t have a spine! Ian broke all my bones last week!”

“Sorry, man, but that weird half-prince dude told me I had to punish you because you looked at his sister’s corpse wrong, and that he had a Gold Canary he would give me if I followed his orders, and …”

Once Dave was done painting the picture, and as Logan helped Nicole fine-tune her character within the oddly specific species and class-related constraints he seemed to know off the top of his head, the game really began.

Every player took his turn—cross-referencing his skills and spells and strengths, then deciding whether to cower in a candlelit corridor, chase the glimmering green light that beamed from the window of the castle’s tallest tower, or dare to force open the dungeon’s nailed-shut, throbbing doors to fight whatever lurched below.

After Nicole scrambled through her first turn with quite a bit of help from Logan, he pulled her closer and whispered in her ear.

“Don’t worry about Dave,” he said, drawing swirls on her wrist underneath the table. “He just takes a little time to warm up, that’s all.”