Page 33 of Single Mom's Guide to Love

That’s when I know this is serious and I’m in trouble.

The question is, for what?

I press pause on the game, set down the controller, and turn to her. Her dark eyes are blank, and her hand is propping her head up as if she’s bored.

Oh no, this is about to be a sarcastic verbal spanking. That’s when she’s the most vicious.

I start to open my mouth to get ahead of whatever she’s going to yell at me for, but I’m too late.

“I thought that when I quit the corporate PR world to take you on as my only client, that my life would be easier,” she begins. “Only one person to worry about. I know everything about him. And he’s a self-proclaimed nerd. A man I once had to do a welfare check on because he was in the middle of a thirty-six-hour video game marathon. What trouble could he get into? He’s never been one to stir the pot. Surely I’ll be able tosleep more than I did for the first seven years of my professional career.”

Lectures like this have happened enough for me to know that I’m not allowed to talk until she tells me to. So I just sit back and brace myself for whatever is coming next.

“But no! Somehow I’m getting calls in the middle of the night from fucking rag news websites wanting to know why Logan Matthews is at a high-society New York party, caught in 4K sitting at the bar, alone, playing a fucking video game on his phone, while his date, Candace Kross, the woman starring in next week’s primetime lingerie fashion show, is dancing and all over another man? Care to tell me what was so important that you couldn’t even pay attention to her for two hours?”

I shrug. “She said she wanted to dance. I didn’t want to.”

Kat’s eyes go wide. “You didn’t want to? Seriously, Logan!”

“I’m sorry, but she was the worst of the dates you’ve set me up on.” I sound defensive because I am. “She told me FarmVille was her favorite video game, and the music at this club was awful. Fucking EDM bullshit. So I sat at the bar and took out my phone. My fingers just happened to navigate to a game. What’s the big deal? Better than me being spotted with another woman with her there, right?”

Kat throws her hands up in the air. Apparently that’s wrong too. “What the fuck, Logan? I thought we had an agreement. You go on fake dates and have pseudo relationships so your name is out there, you don’t look like a video game nerd recluse, and people will still talk about you despite there not being a second game in sight. In return, the models get good press for not dating fuck boys. This is the opposite of that.”

I hold up a finger. “In my defense, I didn’t want to be out with her. Or any of them. This entire plan is all your doing.”

Did I know this comeback was going to anger Kat? Yes. But that doesn’t make it less true.

“Oh no, Logan Matthews. You don’t get to throw this all on me. Was it my idea? Yes. I’ll take that smoke. But you went along with it. There was never one objection. So don’t throw all of this on me and act like a victim.”

I throw down my controller and hang my head. She’s right. The people pleaser in me didn’t offer one objection to her plan. In fact, I thought it was brilliant when she first came up with the idea to put me in the public eye.

It was what we had to do at the time to make sure my legacy didn’t end as a one-hit wonder.

I was twenty-two when I finished the final design of SpaceCraft, but the idea started long before that, back in England. When I needed something for my master’s degree project, I knew SpaceCraft was what I wanted to create, and it was the hit I thought it would be. But I wanted more.

What did I know about disseminating a game to the population?

Enter Kat Smith.

We were living together in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles after graduation. She got a junior job at a PR firm, and I was slaving away as a coder for some tech company. But I never stopped thinking that SpaceCraft could be more. And one night, as we huddled around our tiny table eating bad Chinese food, bitching about our jobs, she looked at me and said the one thing that would change my life.

“Just fucking do it. Figure it out and quit bitching about it.”

I told her she should double as an inspirational speaker. She told me to fuck off.

If that doesn’t sum up our relationship, I don’t know what does.

After she slapped me with her words of wisdom, I took the challenge she laid out and ran with it. I spent every free second I had further developing the game, and Kat discovered an angelinvestor, who is the only reason I was able to continue. I was able to bring on a small staff—all five of us—and we worked day and night on development, potential marketing, and distribution. The game went through a year of beta testing before launching, and though it had plenty of great feedback, I was still nervous. What if it was a flop? What if no one played it? What if my one idea was a disaster?

But what happened next, no one predicted.

In the first month of release we sold a million copies. I remember thinking the numbers and stats weren’t real. And this was all with a bare-bones marketing effort and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations from gamers.

By the second year of SpaceCraft’s existence, I needed a chief financial officer to make sure that everything was on the up and up and more accountants than I thought I’d ever need. We had merch, and expansion packs of the games, and everywhere you looked, SpaceCraft was the top game in the market. There were bloody action figures! My once-small staff of five turned into a staff of five hundred. I was the CEO of a company I originally started for tax purposes. I knew nothing about business or running a private firm. I was just a video game geek who once sought refuge in a digital world and wanted to give kids today the same feeling.

In no time at all the path was clear: it was time to take the company public and hire a board of directors. I figured I could be the CEO by title, and still maintain control of the day-to-day operations, while the board could handle big picture decisions and use their expertise to help guide me and my company.

Which is how we’re here today: they want the next SpaceCraft.

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