At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3) (7 page)

“Hello, Mia,” he said with a nod as he sat down on the chair, facing me where I reclined on the couch. His mannerisms were formal and stilted in social situations. I was used to his autistic quirks by now but sometimes I think they made Heath uneasy. I sat up, racking my brains trying to remember if I’d brushed my hair that morning. I ran a self-conscious hand over it, gathering it behind me into a makeshift ponytail. William hardly noticed.

“How are you feeling?” he said, his eyes on the floor in front of him.

William didn’t know about the pregnancy or specifically why I was feeling under the weather at this time. But Peter and my mom had told him about the cancer. They’d broken it gently but Mom had told me that he’d been very upset, suffering an anxiety attack. Peter had been able to calm him down but they’d all discussed it and decided it would be best if he didn’t visit me until he felt he could handle it.

Apparently this was that day. So I was going to make extra sure to put him at his ease. While the thought of doing that should have exhausted me, it actually was comforting to know that I could step outside of my own misery and worry about someone else for a little while.

“I’m doing just fine, William.”

He nodded, bringing his eyes up to my chin before they drifted down again. He rubbed his hands across the front of his jeans and appeared out of things to talk about already.

“How’s work?”

He grunted and shrugged. “It’s okay. There is a lot to do. We have deadlines to meet for the new expansion.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait until that comes out.”

He frowned. “Well, unfortunately, you have to.”

I smiled at his literal interpretation. I usually tried not to use figures of speech around William because they weren’t his forte.

He rubbed his palms over his lap again a few times before bending to snatch up the box he’d set next to him when he’d come in. “I have something for you.” And he presented me with the box.

I took it from him. “Oh, thank you.”

It looked like a portable box for fishing tackle. I knew, because Heath had one like it, which was actually full of stuff he took on his camping trips. I gave William a fearful look and he said, “Do you want me to open it for you?”

“Uh…no, that’s okay. You know I don’t fish, right?”

William stared at me like I’d spoken to him in Martian. So instead of saying anything further, I opened the box. Inside, each tiny compartment that had been designed to hold fishing tackle items was instead filled with pieces of foam cut to fit each square. Resting in the middle of each piece of foam was a tiny pewter figurine—the figurines he loved to paint in his old room when he was visiting his dad’s house.

I touched one, gently taking it out of its resting place. “Oh, William…they are so gorgeous.” One dozen carefully painted figurines, all in different poses and portraying different types of characters. There was a jester and a knight in full plate armor, a scholar and a man holding a map and a sextant.

“Those are the ones you’ve admired when you have visited.”

I blinked, looking back at the box and noted that he was exactly right. These were the figurines that, in the past, I’d pulled off the shelf behind his worktable to take closer looks at them. Among hundreds of figurines that he’d had sitting there, he had remembered every single one I’d specifically admired.

I took the figurines out of the box and arranged them on the coffee table in front of me. “I’m going to find a special place for these. So I can always see them. They must take forever to paint.”

“Not forever. Or I’d never finish more than one. Depending on the figure, they take about six to nine hours to complete. First, I need to prime them with base paint, then I do the biggest amount of base color…”

And he went on like this for about the next ten minutes, tirelessly explaining every step while I nodded and smiled and examined each figurine in turn.

Heath brought him a beer at some point—maybe hoping that would break his monologue—but William didn’t quiet down until Adam arrived. And William grew visibly uncomfortable at the sight of his cousin.

“Hey, Liam,” Adam said as he sank down on the couch beside me and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

William gave Adam a cold nod. I raised my eyebrows and Adam frowned and pretended not to notice the brush-off.

William looked at his watch and then, with dismay, at his nearly finished bottle of beer. “I need to wait another forty-five minutes or so to metabolize the beer before I can drive home.”

“I think you’re probably good, William,” Heath said. “You’re tall and it’s just one—”

But Adam cut him off with a hand gesture. “Yeah, best to drop it, Heath, and just let him stay. There’s no point in arguing it.”

Heath got up to answer a text message and I reached out and took Adam’s hand. William watched with interest, so I held our hands up and smiled. “See, William? All’s good with us. You don’t need to be mad at Adam anymore, okay?”

“I was angry with both of you,” he said simply. “You were both behaving immaturely.”

Adam and I exchanged a startled look. I hadn’t meant to open that can of worms. There was an awkward silence but then William continued. “If you would have talked to each other, you wouldn’t have had the problems that developed.”

I swallowed and Adam’s hand tightened around mine. “You’re absolutely right. But we really don’t want to talk about all that right now. It’s not productive.”

William peered at his cousin through slightly narrowed eyes and then nodded. “How did you two…How did you start dating?”

Adam and I shared another long, uncomfortable look. Of our friends, only Heath knew the sordid circumstances of our beginnings—the virginity auction, Adam winning the bid and pretending he hadn’t been my online friend already for over a year. It was all a complicated mess that was either a) too hard to explain, b) too embarrassing to explain, c) none of their business or d) all of the above.

“We met in the game, Liam. I told you that,” Adam said.

“Yes, but you were only friends then. When did you ask her to go out on a date with you and how did it happen?”

I shifted in my seat and fought the urge to giggle at Adam’s discomfort. It was funny, actually, watching him sweat it out, but I decided to let him off the hook and answer. “Adam and I decided to meet and then after we hung out for a while—as friends—things developed into more.”

Adam’s dark eyebrows raised briefly at my careful arrangement of the truth and William seemed to accept that. Adam’s cousin frowned and then rubbed his thumb along his forehead. “So how do you go from knowing someone—maybe even being a friend—to having a romantic relationship?”

Adam opened his mouth to answer and then shut it, looking utterly lost as to how to answer that. By now I was suppressing laughter behind my free hand. William really was asking the wrong person that question! Adam had had no romantic relationships before me. Just a series of standing hookups with various partners over the years—not so affectionately referred to by me as “fuck buddies.” In fact, our mutual inexperience in the relationship department was a big part of why our relationship had run into trouble in so short a time.

I turned back to Adam’s cousin. “William? I’m curious, is there someone you’ve been thinking about asking out?”

William looked down, a small smile on his mouth before he blushed and then straightened in his seat. “Yes.”

Then he stood up and grabbed his keys. “It has only been forty minutes, but I can spend the last five minutes walking to the car.”

I went to stand up but Adam stopped me.

“William, can you spend fifteen seconds of that giving me a hug?” I said. And he stiffly bent and allowed me to give him a hug. “Thank you for the figurines. I love them.”

And he was gone. Adam locked the door behind him and sat down beside me again with a smile on his lips, shaking his head. “Poor guy has no clue that I’m the last person he should be asking for advice about women.”

“Hmm,” I said, leaning over to rest my head on his shoulder, relishing the feel of his arm coming around me. “I think you do quite well with the ladies…
too
well, as a matter of fact.”

He laughed and tucked me into bed not long after that. But I noticed, when he thought my eyes were closed, that he picked up the pill container and checked the level on it.

***

One week later and with the help of a blood test, I was declared officially no longer pregnant and ready to start rounds of chemo. It was honestly as matter-of-fact as that, like being told my red blood cell count was low, or something.

I tried my best to show a brave face to everyone around me. To make sure those feelings of hollow worthlessness at what I’d done didn’t show on the surface. Heath checked on me regularly. My mom came over every day to spend hours with me. We’d talk about other things, never about what was happening to my body…that I had allowed my fight against cancer to kill the little life inside me one rapidly dividing cell at a time.

And Adam. He spent lots of time over at my place. Things were tense between him and Heath for the first few days, but after that, they seemed to begin to go back to normal.

Adam and I got along great on a surface level. But beneath that, it was weird—as if there was some kind of unseen barrier between us. Ironic, since we had both shed all our secrets. It seemed like we were finally open to each other, yet neither of us could really turn and look at the other and see them for who they were.

Would it get better? Or was the demise of our relationship only a matter of time? We had way more baggage than any two people our age should have. And we were currently wading through the worst of it now. I worried about what our future would be—even more so, I think, than my own future. I took for granted that I’d still be around to worry about all of this stuff.

Sometimes I caught him looking at me, his dark eyes nearly unreadable, but I could detect a sharp sort of worry. That look made my heart hurt. I didn’t doubt he still loved me. But there was some essential ingredient to that love that seemed missing now. We’d hurt each other and he hadn’t quite been able to see past it yet, despite all his earnest attempts to focus on the bigger problems in our life at the moment.

“So…” Adam began when we were sitting side by side on my bed, each with a laptop resting on our legs. I was still a little weak from the pain but aware enough to pick up the subtleties in his behavior. “With all this going on, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that the hidden quest has been unlocked.”

I hesitated and studied his face. He was looking at his screen and typing at his crazy-fast pace.

“I, uh, I know,” I said.

He stopped typing and looked at me with a faint smile. “I know you know.”

I blinked. “How did you know it was me?”

“You left your rig on the log-in screen the other day. I knew the name of the character that unlocked it.”

I raised a brow. “So what does this mean? Are you going to disable my account?”

He frowned. “Why would I do that?”

“So I won’t blog about it.”

He shrugged. “You can blog about it if you want. And you can blog about it how you want.”

I looked askance at him. “You mean…you’re okay if I spill all the secrets?”

He looked at me again. “I have no control over how you dish your scoop.”

I frowned…there must be things he wasn’t telling me. Or maybe it was my own discomfort at the thought of spilling the secrets to his beloved project that he’d spent so long developing. “But it’s your big secret quest. You love that quest.”

“It was meant to be enjoyed by players. It’s time. I’ll think up something new and even more frustrating for them to look for next.”

I snorted. “More frustrating? I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“You know me, don’t you? It’s entirely possible.”

I nodded. “Oh yes, you’ve cornered the market on frustrating.”

“Besides, you’ve unlocked it but you haven’t solved it. And you don’t even know what the quest is supposed to accomplish.”

“Yes, I do… Save the poor, helpless elf princess Ally—uh—Alloreah’ala—or however the hell you pronounce it. How
do
you pronounce it, anyway?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. I jumbled a bunch of vowels and apostrophes together to make it look Elvish. Do you know how to pronounce half the Elvish names in Tolkien’s books?”

I smiled. “Nope. But I do know this quest is a standard save-the-princess type of quest.”

His sensual mouth turned up at the corner. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“What else could it be besides that? She’s been captured and dragged away, imprisoned under the mountains by big, nasty trolls. Of course the quest is to go and save her.”

He leaned back against the wall, watching me. “Okay. If you want to think that.”

I narrowed my eyes at him and his smile grew. “You suck,” I said.

That gorgeous dimple I loved so much appeared just below and to the left of his mouth. “Sometimes, yeah. And I like it.”

I smacked him on his hard bicep with the back of my hand and went back to my blog post—a commentary on another game that I’d been beta testing. That article had been started and left unfinished due to recent chaotic events. I was almost done when Adam, who appeared to have finished whatever he’d been working on, turned to me.

“There’s something I want to talk about…” he began. I held up a finger to finish typing my thoughts before hitting the save button and closing my computer.

I turned to him. “You want me to move back to your house,” I said matter-of-factly.

His dark eyebrows rose. “Umm, yeah. That’s a neat trick. Do you read minds now?”

I smiled. I wished. I’d have loved to know what went through his mind most of the time. He hid his feelings and thoughts so well.

“Nope. But I know you well enough to predict that you’d be angling for this soon enough.”

“I’m not ‘angling’ for it. I wanted to know if… Well, I’d like to take care of you.”

I hesitated. Things had not gone well between us the last time we’d lived together and I didn’t want to upset the shaky ground we seemed to be standing on now. “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”