At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3) (18 page)

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“No, machete order states that the
Star Wars
saga, instead of being about Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall, as George Lucas would have us believe, is actually about Luke Skywalker.”

I frowned. “Okay. I’d buy that with Episodes Four, Five and Six, but what about the other two? He’s not even born until the last five minutes of Episode Three.”

“Yeah, so machete order states that you should start watching the saga with Episode Four,
A New Hope
, then Episode Five,
The Empire Strikes Back
.”

“Okay. I’m with you so far. Those two are my favorites of all of them. Then you stop there, I take it?”

She frowned at me. “How can you stop there?
Empire
ends with Han frozen inside carbonite and a prisoner of Boba Fett.”

I shrugged. “I could live with that mystery if it means I don’t have to sit through three hours of Ewoks in
Return of the Jedi
to discover how it resolves.”

“Well, machete order doesn’t involve editing out Jar Jar or the Ewoks. It just states that since the saga is about Luke, you watch
A New Hope
and
Empire Strikes Back
first, and then treat Episode Two,
Attack of the Clones
, and Episode Three,
Revenge of the Sith
, as flashbacks. Then conclude with
Jedi
.”

“So the only thing machete order does is eliminate the existence of
The Phantom Menace
.”

“Yep. But it’s worth it, isn’t it?”

“Hmm. Would be more worth it if someone pulled out a machete and hacked Jar Jar’s head off in the first scene.
That’s
what
I’d
call ‘machete order.’”

She giggled, nibbling on one of her ginger chips. I watched her, a gray knit cap pulled tightly over her head, her beautiful brown eyes peeking out just under the edge. “So how are you feeling?”

Her mouth twisted and she gave me a look.

“Yeah, I know I ask you that a lot but I still want to know.”

“I’m fine. Just great. For a few more days, until the next dose of death.”

I frowned. “Just means we need to enjoy these days even more, then, don’t we?” She darted an unreadable look at me and turned. Grabbing her glass of ginger ale, she sipped, looking out over the harbor as we puttered along at a measly three knots in the little electric boat. The sea air was bringing a healthy pink flush to her cheeks.

I took the opportunity of her distraction to admire her. She was lovely, even when obviously ill. And she kept her head up. She was braver than anyone else I knew. My heart swelled with pride to recognize that in her. I just wished I knew what monologue was going on inside that head of hers when I saw those flashes of pure sadness pass like a ghost through her eyes.

I wished we could do things over, apply a brand of machete order to our own lives. There was a lot about how I’d handled things between us that I wish I could just cut out. But there was no way out of this Hell but straight through it, with the dogged hope that our love would still be intact on the other side.

“Emilia…”

She turned, her eyebrows drawing together in a tight frown. I opened my mouth to continue but the way she was watching me caused me to pause. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t call me that anymore…or at least you haven’t. You’ve been calling me Mia like everyone else.”

“Oh. Yeah…”

“I liked it. I was wondering why you’d stopped.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. The reason I’d stopped calling her by her full name had everything to do with the reason I’d started. When we’d first met, it had been a way to verbally intimidate her. Then it had grown into a habit. Her name, her full name, to me, was a term of endearment. The name that no one but me called her. But I couldn’t help but remember that every time I’d tried to claim her, to pull her into my orbit, I’d changed her life irrevocably and not always for the better.

I took a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure you liked it…you didn’t, at first.”

She looked at me, her face very serious. “You’re right. I didn’t like it…at all.” She turned and gazed out over the bay again, a small smile on her lips. “But I was determined I would
never
give you the satisfaction of letting you know that.”

“But…that changed?”

She reached up and tucked her hand under her hat, rubbing her scalp. ‘Yeah…I started liking it. A lot. I think sometime around the first night we spent on your yacht. It’s not like I’ve hated my full name…it was just never…
me
. But that night…” She took a deep breath and then let it go shakily. “I began to realize it was the way
you
thought of me. Of who I was to you…the way you said my name sounded so right.” She glanced at me shyly and then away, smiling.

That pride I’d felt earlier was morphing into something else—this muted joy of just being in her presence, of enjoying every moment with her. But we had things to discuss…

“So I was thinking that maybe we needed to talk,” I began.

She turned to me, her eyebrows raised, and I patted the seat next to me. I couldn’t move to her because I was seated behind the steering wheel of the boat. She frowned, scooting down the bench to sit beside me.

“We have been talking,” she said, glancing up at me a little nervously.

“Sure…but I thought maybe…about last night?”

Her mouth fell open and she looked away. “What’s to talk about?”

I drew in a long breath and then let it go. “Well, I get the feeling that you’re not so keen on the ‘going slow’ plan.”

She closed her mouth and then, without looking at me, shrugged. “I’m just not sure what it’s supposed to accomplish.”

I turned, suddenly uncomfortable, focusing on the polished wood of the steering wheel, running my thumb over the smooth surface. “It’s not because I don’t want to. You understand that, right?”

She looked down, clasping her hands together in her lap. “It’s hard to understand what’s going through your head regarding sex these days…”

“I just want to do things right this time. I’m…I’m scared of screwing up again.”

“I thought—” she said, and cut herself off, shaking her head.

“What?” I prodded. “Tell me what you thought.”

“I thought it was because you resented me.”

I frowned, watching her. She still couldn’t meet my eyes so I reached out, took her chin and lifted her eyes to mine. “I admit that…I still have some issues about your keeping this from me when it all started. It…makes it hard…” My voice died out before I let myself complete the thought.

But she understood perfectly what I’d been getting at. “You don’t trust me.”

I swallowed. Yes, it was true. I didn’t trust her—not fully, not after last time. But I was determined to find that trust again. And I would.

We still had a long road to her recovery—she had months more of chemo treatments in front of her. We had time. “I think we both need time…to learn to trust each other again. To learn how to be healthy—not just physically but in our relationship, too. I believe that we need to be slow and rational about this.”

Her eyes looked slightly haunted as she nodded. “Rational. Right. So until we figure that out, we’re just…roommates.”

Navigating this conversation was beginning to feel like walking a minefield. I took a deep breath, dropped my hand from her chin. “If being deeply in love with someone but not having sex with them counts as roommates…”

Her brow furrowed but a small smile played about her mouth. Something in what I’d said had pleased her. Perhaps it was the reassurance that I loved her. Perhaps that was what she sought whenever she pressed me for intimacy. I resolved to reassure her more often that I did love her. Very much.

“Come here,” I said.

And she leaned forward. I kissed her and felt no fear that she would attempt to pull me into something deeper like she often had tried, of late. I tasted her lips—with that hint of ginger chips—as always just as sweet as I remembered. When I pulled away, she was smiling. That smile did amazing things to me—made me slightly disoriented. That magical moment, those few split seconds after our lips left each other, contained all of the thrill and excitement of those first days we had spent together, quickly—if reluctantly—falling in love.

I opened my mouth to tell her again that I loved her. But she held her hand up and turned her head away, looking as if she was trying to fend off a sneeze.

“Just a min,” she said, her eyes half closed, and then she let loose with the most violent chain of sneezes I’d ever seen from her. People in nearby boats looked over, shocked by the loud sounds coming from our boat.

At one point I thought I’d have to grab her to prevent her from falling into the water. She’d sneezed a grand total of five times in a row and had to hold still afterward, convinced that she’d start again in seconds if not.

But she didn’t, thank God. I handed her a wad of tissues and she blew her nose a few times and then sat back with relief on her flushed features. “Wow…where the hell did that come from?”

But I could only stare, because I just realized that something was very, very wrong. She frowned at me but only one of her eyebrows lowered—because the other one had, it appeared, been completely blown off by all the sneezing.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to say something or allow her to keep the illusion for a short while longer—until her next glimpse in the mirror, anyway—that she still had her brows and lashes. Because it appeared that they were not long for the world. They’d finally succumbed, also, to the chemo.

She looked like she was permanently raising her eyebrow at me, like Mr. Spock’s freeze-face. I half expected her to turn to me and say, “That is illogical, Captain Kirk.”

And I knew, under any other circumstance, Emilia would be laughing at this situation. But she was so delicate now, especially about her looks. I just didn’t have the heart to laugh, or even break the news to her that she was now one eyebrow short of a good frown.

Without another word, I turned to the wheel of the boat and maneuvered us the short ride across to the slip beside my house, dodging the tiny ferry that went from the mainland to the Balboa peninsula and back multiple times every day.

When we got there, Katya was waiting for us, sunning her very pale Canadian skin on one of the lounges on our small beach. When she caught sight of us, she came running up, wearing big, white sunglasses and a huge smile.

When she saw Emilia, the smile dropped off her face. Before I could flag her and signal her to shut up with a finger slashed across my throat, she lifted her sunglasses and squinted at Emilia.

“Huh. What the hell happened to your eyebrow? It’s gone!”

Ah, goddamn. So much for preserving Emilia’s feelings. She ran straight into the house, demanding to look in the mirror. I gave Kat a long-suffering look.

“Yeah, you could have handled that better.”

Her eyes widened in surprise and she threw up her hands. “What? Like you could have hidden it from her that she looks like she’s permanently about to say something sarcastic. I mean, she’s
her
and she’s always saying something sarcastic, but damn. How long were you going to let her walk around with just one eyebrow?”

I sighed, giving up. When I saw Emilia about a half an hour later, she had no eyebrows and most of her eyelashes were gone, too. She’d either pulled them out or shaved them. I didn’t have the heart to ask which. In fact, I never mentioned her lack of facial hair at all.

I resolved to get my hair bleached blond and dyed pink if her looks became a big issue for her. At least I’d be drawing the freak looks to me instead of her.

Chapter Nineteen
Mia

I was sure that Adam thought I couldn’t handle a little more hair loss. The truth was, I’d been expecting it. So I got a few different shades of eyebrow pencil and even a hypoallergenic Sharpie pen and practiced drawing in new eyebrows with Kat while we watched still more make-up tutorials online about eyebrows and eyelashes. With the swish of a pencil, I could go from appearing fierce and angry to permanently shocked or even a purely logical Vulcan. I could draw in weird zigzags and symbols, like a rock star.

In short, I decided that I could either cry about it or laugh about it and since there had been so much to cry about lately, I chose the latter. This whole situation was starting to teach me something about the nature of happiness.

And having Kat around to help me laugh at myself sure helped too…

“Spock, Captain Kirk, Mr. Sulu,” Kat said to me a few days later when I was thumbing through my notes on the secret DE quest in order to prepare for another blog post. We were on the floor in my room and I was using the bed like a desk.

“Hmm,” I said, tapping my lip. “Original series or reboot movies?”

“The reboot. Duh.”

“Let’s see…Fuck Spock. Marry Sulu. Kill Kirk.”

Kat raised a brow at me and we both laughed. “Yeah, I kinda want to kill Kirk, too,” she said. “Okay, my turn.”

“I think the dudes from The Big Bang Theory,” I said. “Leonard, Howard and Raj.”

“Dude, no!” She started laughing. “I want to kill all those guys.”

I pinned her down. “The game is called Fuck, Marry, Kill. Not Kill, Kill, Kill.”

“That’s brutal, Mia. Damn…uh. Fuck Leonard. Marry Raj. Kill Howard.” And then she shuddered.

I would have laughed, but I was already distracted by my notes.

“Are you obsessing over that quest again?” she asked.

“Yeah…I’m completely stuck. I’m this close to finding out where the princess’s prison is located but every time I get near the location, I get wiped out. I wish I had a healer…”

Kat looked at me like I was crazy. “And what is Persephone, chopped liver? I’m one of the best healers on the server.”

I stared at her for a minute, a little shaken by having missed something so obvious. If it had been a dog, would have bitten me in the ass. “Uh, yeah, I suppose I could do the quest with other players…you think that’s okay?”

She shrugged. “Uh. Hell if I know. Ask your boyfriend.”

“Oh no, he doesn’t ever say a word about anything to do with the quest.”

Kat wagged her eyebrows at me. “You haven’t tried to use sexual favors to bribe him?”