Page 116 of Looking for Group
“But didn’t being MT for the number one raiding guild on the server make you miserable?” Kit pushed his hair exasperatedly out of his eyes. “Do you think maybe that the reason you’ve been spending more time in the game now than when you were with Anni is that you’re, y’know, enjoying it more?”
Drew opened his mouth, intending to reply, but then realised he didn’t really have one. He felt a little bit cheated, like Kit had put him in a position where he couldn’t disagree, because he couldn’t explain why he disagreed, and had now got him cornered by being right about something slightly different.
“Look, is this even about me?” Kit carefully moved the cake stand to one side so they could see each properly. “Are you genuinely worried about my gaming habits? Or are you unhappy with your own?”
“I’m really confused,” said Drew, slightly plaintively.
Kit reached over and took his hand—and that was such a relief that Drew couldn’t remember if he was supposed to be angry right now. “The thing is, Drew, it took me quite a long time to get comfortable with who I am. I spent the beginning of my first year trying to fit in with the university geek societies, but I never did. Whenever I told people I playedHoL, they’d take the piss, and I kept getting this feeling that the only way they could feel okay with what they liked to do, was by looking down on what I liked to do.2” His lips turned up ruefully. “Some of them even played the game. It just wasn’t socially acceptable to genuinely be into it. And I decided there’s no point pretending you don’t care about things you…do.”
Everything Kit had said swirled around in Drew’s brain looking for things to connect with.
“I care about you,” he mumbled. “And I also care about my friends. And I really want you to like them and I really want them to like you and everything’s…sort of…bleurgh and…this is really important to me.”
Kit’s thumb stroked soothingly over the back of Drew’s hand. “It’s important to me too. But I feel that whatever I do, it could… take something away from me. I want to be with you and I want to be part of your life, but I want to be me as well. But, then, if being me is the thing that messes us up, then…I don’t know how to deal with that.”
“I don’t not want… I mean I don’t want you not to… I like who you are. Can’t we meet in the middle here?”
“Where’s the middle?” Kit sounded kind of wary again.
“I don’t know. Like, maybe could you spend a bit more time with me and my friends. And I won’t bug you about theHoLthing.”
As far as Drew was concerned, this cut right to the heart of the issue, and for a moment, he was a little bit impressed by his own maturity and relationship-fu.
Unfortunately, Kit didn’t look much happier than he had before. For what seemed like a long time he didn’t say anything, and then he sighed. “Well, um. I guess. Let’s give that a go.”
It was somehow a little delicate after that, but by the time they’d eaten the rest of the cakes and finished their tea, they were deep in discussion about the mysterious yellow orb they’d found inTorment, and things were almost back to normal.
Almost, but not quite.
***
A couple of weeks slid by without further disaster. More by luck than by judgement, Drew seemed to have got his Kit/course/friends/HoL/pub balance about right. Which meant in practicethat he only rarely felt under-Kitted or under-friended and, when he did, it was to about the same degree. Also, Sanee had completely dropped the Drew Is A Loser Gaming Addict thing and was only intermittently entertained by the fact he was dating a boy now.
Things were going well withHoLand the guild. Everyone was pretty excited for the next major content patch, which had just launched on the Public Test Realm. Back when he’d been running with Anni, they would have been over there, trying to get as familiar with the new fights as possible, but at the moment, Drew had too many other things to care about. And actually, it was weirdly fun to sort of wait and anticipate and know that they wouldn’t be downing the last boss of the expansion within the first week. And then spending the next three to six months farming it and whinging about it.
They’d never actually discussed it, and Drew wasn’t entirely sure it had been what he’d meant, but he and Kit had abandoned their medusas at level thirteen, freeing them up to see more of his friends, and to spend more time doing boyfriend things. They’d taken to wandering around the Botanic Gardens on sunny afternoons and mellow evenings, holding hands and geeking out. Sometimes they sat under Kit’s favourite willow playing…well… it was stillTormentbecause, seriously, that game was huge and full of words. At least, when they weren’t getting distracted by each other. Which they were. A lot. Requiring a number of hasty retreats to Kit’s room.
Drew was vaguely conscious that something had sort of changed. He thought he remembered Kit being… It was hard to explain, really. More open, somehow? Happier, almost? But it didn’t seem like anything he could pin down, talk about, or fix. And, sometimes, Drew wondered if it was just his imagination.
True to his word, Kit was spending more time with Drew’s friends. He was quiet, but quietly funny, and they liked that, and Drew was glad everyone seemed to be getting along. Kit still tended to be the first to leave things, but true tohisword, Drew didn’t make a big thing about it. Even though it still bugged him a bit.
It was fine. Really. It was basically fine.
Until Zombicide.
Maybe Drew was reading too much into stuff, but Sanee seemed to be making much more of an effort to give their regular Tuesday hangouts a clear structure. There’d been theMortal KombatTournament and then anEye of ArgonReading and then the Using This Damn Fondue Pot Steff Won In A Raffle In Sixth Form evening, which had honestly put Drew off both cheese and chocolate, at least for the foreseeable future. He felt like a dick, because this had sort of been his fault, but he was getting structured-activity fatigue. He was starting to miss the days of just sitting around chilling, even if what they’d mostly been doing while they were chilling was trying to work out what structured activity they’d do next.
This time it was Games Night of the Living Dead. The plan was to drag out all of the zombie-themed board games from Sanee and Steff’s collection. It turned out there were quite a lot of them, especially if you included every game that had a spurious zombie expansion. Drew wore his Plants Versus Zombies T-shirt for the occasion, which Kit had found sufficiently adorable that he wanted to take it off again, and Drew hadn’t really objected, so they’d wound up being kind of late.
Everyone was already settled, helping themselves to Steff’s brain-cakes and immersed in a warm-up hand of Munchkin Zombies. Drew felt weirdly heart-warmed that of all the quick,opening games they could have picked to start the evening, they seemed to have deliberately chosen the one he’d be least upset at having missed. They moved on to Give Me the Brain, which was a long-standing favourite.3 Kit took to it immediately—it made him laugh so much he spent nearly the whole game behind his hand, emerging every now and then to declare, in a surprisingly convincing zombie voice, that he required the brain because he had to count the meat.
From there, they got serious and, after a brief debate, chose Zombicide over Dead of Winter as their main game of the evening.4 It would have been Drew’s preference anyway because he was in more of a “kill loads of zombies” mood than “get killed by zombies while looking for petrol in an abandoned school” mood, but as it turned out, Dead of Winter wouldn’t have taken six players anyway.
Kit was on his phone while they were unboxing and setting up, which made Drew a bit uncomfortable because it wasn’t great board game etiquette. But at the same time, they didn’t really need him, so it seemed unfair to say anything. Finally they were good to go. Sanee gave a quick rules recap—which Kit at least paid attention to—and dealt out characters and equipment at random.
Drew was less than thrilled to realise that not only was he playing the boring, beardy survivalist whose only ability was that he was slightly better at searching rooms than the rest of the characters5, but that his starting gear consisted of two frying pans that he wasn’t even allowed to dual wield. He was trying to be a good sport about it, because there was nothing worse than playing a board game with somebody who’d decided they were screwed from the beginning, but he kind of felt like he was screwed from the beginning. Everybody else would be running around racking up sweet kills with their fire axes and their bonusmoves, and he’d be getting further and further behind, desperately searching a toilet for bags of rice.
“Okay, team.” Sanee stood up and started pointing at the board, like a general in an old war movie. “Our plucky band of survivors startshere. Our objective is to get someone into the bunkerhereand clear it of zombies. Sounds simple enough, but we can’t open the door until we’ve taken the objectivehere, but we can’t get tothatuntil we’ve taken the other objectivehere. Obviously zombies will be spawninghere,here,here, andhere. But there’s no need to panic. If we just stick together, gear up early, and take it slowly and carefully, we should be fine.”
