Page 74 of The Player Next Door
Brooks’ date was his usual; tall and blonde and just nice enough that she could probably do better. They had met on an app and she told Brooks she wanted it to be “more of a group thing” and was bringing her friend along, which was the reason for Logan’s presence. Her friend, Steph, was a brunette with blonde highlights, with a job in marketing of some sort. Logan hadn’t been paying much attention when she introduced herself, but at least she looked nothing like Clare, which was good. The last thing he needed was to go down another spiral of self-pity.
“What about you?” Steph asked, and Logan had to feign being unable to hear her, because he had absolutely no idea what her question was about.
“Sorry?”
Steph raised her voice. “I said, what do you want to drink? I’m going to go get us a round.”
“I’ll help,” he volunteered, standing and helping push their way through the crush of bodies to the bar.
Logan was careful not to crowd her as they reached the front of the line. “What’s the order?” he asked.
“A vodka Sprite and two gin and tonics.”
Logan nodded and caught the bartender’s eye, throwing her a practiced grin. “Vodka Sprite, two gin and tonics, and another Martini,” he called, and she got to work.
“How did you do that?”
“I come here a lot. The bartender recognizes me,” he said honestly.
Steph smiled and yeah, he could do this again, he decided. It was like riding a bike.
But that was about the last thing that went according to plan. Logan spilled the vodka Sprite down Steph’s arm when trying to hand it to her, and when they made it back to the table his usual supply of easy-going chit chat seemed to have dried up. All his conversation starters landed with a thud, and within five minutes Brooks was sending him sideways looks and Steph was clearly searching for an exit.
Logan decided to give up. He announced that he needed to get going and let Brooks follow him to a few paces away. “What the fuck, man?” Brooks said. “What happened to you?”
The truth was, Clare happened. Logan was still furious with her, but he missed her too, and he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to untangle those feelings. “I dunno.”
Brooks narrowed his eyes. “Is this about whatsherface, Roth’s niece? That little blonde.”
“What about her?”
“You’ve been acting weird since you slept with her. Boring, mostly. And you were really fucking possessive of her that night at Pour.”
Logan sighed. He was so sick of this shit. Sick of himself, sick of Brooks, sick of everything. “So what? Why do you even give a shit?”
“It’s just pathetic, that’s all. You can do way better than her. She’s not bad looking, but come on, she looked like a—”
Whatever Brooks was going to compare Clare to, he never got the chance.
Because Logan punched him in the fucking face.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Craig took his seat next to Clare, casting her a sideways look. “Everything all right there, kid?”
Clare smoothed her hair back and fiddled with her stylus. She had taken extra care with her hair and makeup that morning, aware that she looked like an orcling corpse these days. She’d barely been sleeping since her fight with Logan, and the stress of Noah knowing the truth, and the upcoming pitch meeting hadn’t helped things. It had been a long, grueling week, but she thought she had done a better job of hiding the way she had fallen to pieces. Just outside the window, thunder rolled and rain poured down in sheets, a perfectly melodramatic demonstration of her mood lately.
“Just nerves,” she shrugged, and waited for Craig’s usual encouragement. She needed him to come through now, and prove that she was right to have listened to him in the first place. Instead, he gave her a bland smile and turned back to Noah, who was laughing about something that had happened while they played Call of Duty together online the other night. He hadn’t said anything about Logan either to her or in front of the rest of the group, which made her feel incredibly uneasy. She couldn’t tell if he was keeping her secret or waiting for the right moment to detonate it.
She couldn’t get her talk with the group out of her mind, either. It was looking more and more like they had a point about Craig, but she also didn’t know what she could do about it, and anyway, she still had to get through the meeting. Everything was about as terrible as it could be.
It was hardly the best mindset for the big pitch meeting, but she was just going to have to pull herself together and forget entirely about Logan’s stricken face in the parking lot and the horrible things he said to her.
At the front of the conference room the leadership team called the meeting to order, beginning with a short summary of the vision they hoped to project with the new launch. There was a lot of corporate-speak, like “expanding our reach,” and “new demographics,” and “reaching out but also reaching in,” which honestly didn’t even make sense, and then they gestured to the Elfborns to begin.
The Elfborns’ team lead, Natalie, stood up and began the introduction to their presentation. They had gone in a gentler direction than Noah and the guys, designing a portal world adventure that took players to alternate dimensions. Some of the worlds people could visit might be violent, others just silly fun. It was a type of one-shot world that Clare herself would enjoy, quite frankly.
The Mages were scheduled to present second. Craig had structured the presentation into two prongs; the first would be led by Noah, about several new classes of monsters and a one-off adventure based on slasher movies, followed by Clare’s more character-focused pitch of Captain Ellis Ravencroft. Craig’s reasoning was that the two would work well together, balancing the thrills of combat with her softer approach, and while she didn’t totally see it gelling, Craig usually had a point, so she was going to assume he knew what he was doing.