At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (22 page)

Was that a joke? I turned my head. “What?”

“You could be having a stroke.”

“I’m not having a stroke. It’s actually feeling a little better.”

She bent over me. “Will it hurt if I shine this key light in your eyes? Just for a second?”

“Why not just jab some chopsticks in there while you’re at it?”

She sighed.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment. The majority of the pain was easing up, slowly.

“Okay, you can look, but no more than two seconds.”

“Two seconds per eye?”

She bent over me and pushed on a tiny light—what I thought was her key light. Asked me to open my eyes as she leaned in close. I could smell her skin, her hair, the laundry soap she used on her clothing. The familiar scents of Emilia. My gut tightened. My hand twitched at my side. I wanted more than anything to reach up and touch her. To smooth my hand across her cheek. I let it fall before it was an inch off the surface of the couch.

She straightened, turning off the light. Thank God, because it’d felt like she was sticking pins in my eyes as she used it.

“Anisocoria,” she said, her voice heavy with concern.

“Do what?”

“Your pupils are not dilated to the same size. Has anyone mentioned that to you before? I’d never noticed because your eyes are so dark.”

“My pupils aren’t the same size? Huh. I’m lopsided?”

“It’s common enough if they’ve always been like that—one fifth of the population has anisocoria, but if they haven’t been…well, you should get a CAT scan or an MRI to check.”

“Had both done, many times.”

She paused. “Really? How long have you been having these headaches?”

“Since I was twelve.”

“Shit. How come I never knew?”

I was silent for a moment. “There’s a lot you don’t know, isn’t there?” A lot she’d never bothered to stick around long enough to learn.

She paused. “You do love your secrets.”

Yes. That was true. We
both
did.

“Are you sure I can’t get you some water?”

“Just stay here and talk to me for a minute. I’ll be okay.”

She shifted beside me, sliding on the floor but resting her arm on the couch beside me. “Okay. But I’d really like to do
something
. I feel helpless.”

“I’ve known that feeling all too often lately.”

She sighed. “What therapies have you tried? For your migraines?”

I blew out a breath. “I don’t want to talk about my migraines.”

“What about acupuncture, or acupressure?”

“No one is sticking needles in me.”

“I know some pressure points for migraines. My mom had them when she was…when she was going through chemo. Medication didn’t work, so I studied up on pressure points.”

“A codeine and Vicodin cocktail can barely put a dent in a good migraine. I doubt poking me is going to do anything.”

“Can I try?”

“You’re going to make the world’s weirdest doctor. Western MDs usually don’t go in for that stuff.”

“Give me your hand,” she said.

I held out my hand and she turned it over, resting it atop hers so that my palm was facing up. Then she placed a finger at the center of my wrist, measured about an inch up and applied pressure. A weird, almost electric jolt shot up my arm.

“Does that help at all?”

“No.”

She increased the pressure for a long moment. “How about now?”

“Nope.”

“Hmm. Well, this is the spot. There are others on the feet.”

“Why not just use your Jedi powers to heal me?”

She laughed. “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a Sith lord!”

I laughed and then moaned when a fresh shot of pain lanced my skull.

“This sucks,” I muttered.

“I can’t even imagine.”

“You’ve never had a migraine?”

I flipped my hand atop hers so that our palms were together and I wrapped my fingers around her hand. “Wait…I’m starting to feel something now.”

I could think of two possibilities that might arise from this action. She might try to slip her fingers out of my hand with a light reprimand or she might lean in and kiss me, press her face to mine, open her mouth to me. I closed my eyes, indulging the fantasy.

Instead, she tightened her fingers around mine.

We sat together in the dark, long moments, holding hands. I turned my hand so that our fingers laced together. She let me.

“Is your head any better?”

“A little.”

I ran my thumb across hers, tracing every contour from the delicate bone at her wrist all the way to her thumbnail. Even there, her skin was soft. She inhaled sharply and I felt a little resistance from her, like she wanted to withdraw her hand but didn’t quite succeed in doing it.

I loosened my hold on her, giving her the out, but she didn’t pull away. Our hands played against each other, as we each applied a light pressure, shifting our weight, almost as if we were dancing with just one hand each, pressed against the other. This moment, sitting together with her in the dark, felt so comforting and yet so painful. So close and yet so distant. Need was a giant cavity inside my chest. And it wasn’t just physical desire. I needed her presence, her spirit, her soul. I missed her so fucking much.

I let my head loll backward. If I hadn’t been feeling like such complete shit both physically and emotionally, I might have made an advance. Not a sexual one, but some sort of tentative approach. But the breakup had battered me bloody. Somehow, again, I was as defeated as that powerless, bullied kid I’d once been.

Our hands continued that strange, comforting rubbing against each other. Like my hand was making love to her hand. Maybe it was, in a way. Maybe this was all the love for each other that we still had left.

“Adam,” she said. “I’m sorry—”

“Shh,” I said. “Let’s just be in each other’s presence. Let’s be at peace.”

“I want to be your friend.”

Friend
.
That word reverberated in my brain, rolling around like a tin can in an empty, echoing room. “I can’t just be your friend.”

“But…you’re dating. You’ve moved on. That’s—that’s good.”

“Oh really. You think so? That it’s good?”

She paused. “No,” she whispered. “But that’s what a friend would say.”

“You broke up with me. Why do you care?”

I glanced at her bowed head, still holding her hand. I never wanted to let it go.

“I never said I didn’t care. But I never said I wanted to have your love life shoved in my face either…”

I sighed wearily. “I’m sorry. Jordan was being an asshole. I don’t know why he said that.”

“I’m sure he’s ecstatic that we broke up. I bet he’s the one who set up the date. Probably with one of his perfect supermodel friends.”

Stunning how she was correct on every single one of those points.

“I don’t want to talk about the fucking date.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about us.”

She hesitated, her hand stilling. “We’re having a moment, here. We’re being present. We probably shouldn’t go there.”

My hand released hers and the backs of her fingers stroked the backs of mine. I’d rarely felt a touch more erotic, enticing. Now that my headache was easing up, her presence was having another effect on me. I wanted her. I went hard at the thought of her spread out on this couch, open for me. I sucked in a deep breath and figured I’d better start thinking about baseball—or programming—or anything but the memory of her long, curvy legs wrapped around my hips as I pushed inside of her.

My hand clamped around hers and I pulled it to my lips, kissing the back of her hand. She froze and I released her. Our moment was over, already fading into the past, along with the rest of those glowing moments we’d shared and now buried. Slowly she stood and turned to leave, but I stopped her, putting my hand on her arm.

“Thank you.”

She hesitated, then she bent. I didn’t turn toward her, but I held my breath, hoping she meant to kiss me. Her warm mouth landed on my temple.

“I miss you,” she breathed. And then she was gone.

I miss you.
What the fuck was that? Why on earth had she left me with that to chew on? She missed me. What a load of crap. She missed me while she was flying out to Baltimore to plan her new life without me? Yeah, I’m sure she cried for hours because of that.

She was lucky that that was the last thing she said to me instead of the first or that whole conversation in my office would have gone a lot differently than it had.

What the hell was I supposed to do with that? She would have been more merciful just jabbing needles in my eyeballs or slapping me upside the head with a cartoon-like anvil to bring my headache back. Because, thank God, it had faded shortly after she had left, leaving me with only an empty, vague phantom ache.

***

Over the next week, as I continued to put in long hours, I rarely saw her again in person, but her presence seemed to be all over the place online. Some of the bigger blogs were making comments about the lawsuit and feeding the rumors of a congressional hearing on the addictive properties of online video games. They were getting some blowback from Girl Geek in the comments. And despite her admission that she cared more about chainmail bikinis than lawsuits, she was rebutting their arguments on her blog.

When she’d first started her temp job at Draco, we’d unofficially agreed that she would not blog about the game, as it went against the nondisclosure policy that all employees were required to adhere to. But how could I call her on this? She was sticking herself out there, getting no small amount of heat for it, and doing it to defend me.

And I’d bet she did it without ever realizing that I’d notice. But I did. I noticed everything. She’d even cut out her fun and snarky commentary on Dragon Epoch. Instead her blog posts emphasized how almost every standard fantasy roleplaying game was misogynistic. She was getting crap for it and I took note to keep my eye on that because I knew that women tended to be susceptible to cyberbullying in the online gaming world.

It was kind of her to stick her neck out for me and it forced me to reconsider my stance on the quest. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should give up a few of my secrets. But even the thought of it was painful. Those secrets were like my armor, were what separated me from the bumps and miseries of the world. How could I surrender them so easily? In
The Art of War,
the Master
never
discussed terms for surrender. And I lived by his code now.

The latter half of November approached and finally, it was the weekend before we were scheduled to ship out for DracoCon. As the ultimate team-building exercise—and as a little treat for my employees, given their hard work on convention preparation—we took the day off to fight our epic rematch war against the Blizzard employees. That horde had barely beaten us last year and they had payback coming. They’d been training, too, so it wasn’t going to be an easy fight.

But Heath, Jordan and several of my other squad leaders were pros and knew their shit. We’d been working out strategy for months, and they’d be leading the regular employees in their maneuvers. And we knew the twenty-acre partially wooded course we’d be fighting on.

The teams would be participating in three different scenarios. Two shorter ones and then a long one that had been intricately designed. We had approximately three hours for each setup with short breaks and meals in between.

It was an extremely hot, dry day. So in the parking lot, before we got started, we passed around the bottles of water, sunscreen and geared up.

Emilia showed up with Heath, pulling on one of his spare facemasks—which was far too big for her. And she hefted a gun that fit her much better—presumably one that she had purchased for herself. She wore sensible clothing—jeans and long sleeves covered by a denim jacket to protect her from the hard paintballs. Heath had likely informed her how much paintballs could hurt. Even though she was in an old T-shirt and frayed jeans, I couldn’t take my eyes off her—the way the shirt stretched across her breasts, how her jeans hugged her waist, her round ass. That weird white hair was pulled back into a ponytail and capped with a denim hat. Even with the stupid hair, she was hot.

She didn’t look up as I watched her fiddling to adjust the mask so it would fit her. With a shake of my head and a reminder that I had to get my mind back in the game, I turned my eyes away, checking my equipment and trying to focus on the tasks at hand.

The rest of our team used rented equipment or spare weapons loaned out from our more serious paintballers. And as a gaming company, we were in no shortage of paintball geeks.

I was talking to my majors—Heath among them—while we were lotioning up. Fortunately, we were mostly covered—some heavily so, fearing the painful paintballs. As usual, the regulars just wore camo.

I was talking with Heath when a gaggle of young interns from marketing approached us. “Adam, are you done with the sunscreen?” one of them asked.

I had no idea who she was. She was young—probably no older than nineteen or twenty—and had yards of wavy dark blond hair.

I turned to her, handing her the tube of sunscreen. “Here you go.”

Instead she turned and held her masses of blond hair aside. “Can you put some on my neck and back? Please?” She batted her eyes at me flirtatiously over her shoulder. I tried not to scowl, noting she was wearing a fairly skimpy tank top.

“So you know these things hurt when they hit you, right?” I said, squeezing a blob onto my hand and giving her a cursory rub down on the back of her neck. The minute I did this, three of her friends appeared next to her.

“My shoulders too, please?” she said. I almost told her I was busy and handed the tube of sunscreen to one of her friends to finish when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Emilia was watching me with these girls. Intently watching.

So I finished up on Blondie and turned to her friend, a dark-haired girl with bright blue eyes who looked like Snow White. She smiled at me demurely. “Can you do me, too?”

Her friend next to her—an impossibly thin, tall young woman—snorted at the innuendo that Snow White had likely purposely dropped on my lap.