Page 118 of Looking for Group
“Fine.” Drew pushed away from the table. “I’ll go after him. Whatever.”
Andy, who had been keeping his head firmly down since zombiegate, risked a comment. “Um, look. I’m not the biggest relationship expert here, but I kind of think ‘fine, whatever’ isn’t the best strategy for making up with someone.”
“Okay.” Drew made a show of sitting down again. “I’ll stay. Just make up your minds.”
Tinuviel put away the last of the fast zombies. “Andrew, stop projecting. It’s terribly clichéd. Either go after your boyfriend because that’s what you want to do. Or stay. Becausethat’swhat you want to do. But there’s no point getting angry with us because we didn’t cause this situation and we can’t fix it.”
Drew opened his mouth and closed it again. Pointless or not, he still felt pretty angry. And he kind of knew it wasn’t fair but… that wasn’t how anger worked. It just happened. And was there. He fumed helplessly for a minute or two. And, very gradually, managed to dig through everything until he realised that he was mostly upset at his friends because he’d been relying on them to tell him what to do. In fact, it wasn’t even that. He wanted them to tell him to go after Kit so he could do it without it turning into this big public statement of what a dick he’d been.
Even if Kit had been a dick first.
“So I’m going to, um… Sorry.” He got up again, grabbed his coat, and went after Kit.
He told himself he wasn’t going to run. Honestly, he’d probably missed the guy anyway, so he’d just wind up looking stupid. Sort of like when you dashed to catch a bus and it pulled away just as you got to it, leaving you breathless on the kerb with everybody staring.
Aaaaaand he was running.
Shit. Shitshitshit.
He caught up to Kit at the bus stop—where, ironically, there was no bus, pulling away or otherwise. Just Kit. Still on his mobile.
Drew was about thirty-percent mindlessly angry, thirty-percent sorry, and forty-percent really not sure what the hell was going on. Now he was here, now they were both here, he realised he didn’t have a clue what to say. In the end he went with, “Uh, hi.”
Kit looked up. They might have both been there in practice, but he seemed a million miles away. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
And, with that, he went back to texting.
Drew was now seventy-percent mindlessly angry and about two-percent sorry and fuck knew about the rest. “For fuck’s sake, Kit. Do you even want a boyfriend and friends? Or do you want to sit alone in your room playingHoLfor the rest of your life?”
“Right now, I just want you to leave me alone.” Kit’s thumbs skimmed ceaselessly across the gently glowing surface of his smartphone. “And I’ve got friends.”
Drew literally threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Holy crap, for the last time, they are not your friends. They are just people you play a video game with. And when you stop playingthat game, or if anything happens that they don’t want to deal with, you will never hear from them again.”
He’d started strong but, for some reason, all his anger was draining. And now he was just sad. Really fucking sad. “I raided with Annihilation three times a week for three years and the moment I stopped being what they needed me to be, that was it. I haven’t had so much as a whisper from any of those…from any of them.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m sorry it’s made you so upset.” Kit didn’t sound all that sorry, and as Drew was getting sadder, he seemed to be getting colder. “But you do realise the reason it happened is that everyone in Anni thinks aboutHoLthe same way you do? That the game isn’treal, that the people aren’treal. That you have no obligations and nothing to offer each other except your DPS and your raid buffs.”
“That’s… I mean…I…” Nope. Not happening. That would lead to thoughts and feelings and stuff, and Drew wasn’t in a place to deal with thoughts, feelings or, indeed, stuff.
“And what I really don’t get,” Kit went on, “is how you can have gone through that and experienced firsthand how shitty it is and still be so keen for me to do the exact same thing to other people. People, by the way, who have actually been there for me when I’ve needed them. Been there for me in a way that nobody else ever has.”
“Okay but…” Drew rallied slightly. He wasn’t sure how he’d got quite so swept off course, but he was sure he had a genuine grievance. Somewhere. “That’s no excuse for blanking our mates when we’ve gone round their house for the evening.”
“Drew, I’ve known them a month. I like them, but they’reyourmates, notourmates. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I told you something came up.”
“What? What came up that was so important that you had to wreck everybody’s evening?”
“You remember that poet Tiff was seeing? They got drunk and hooked up last week and now there’s a performance poetry thing she’s done all over Facebook, and it’s about Tiff, and it’s really horrible, and she’s really upset about it, and she needed someone to talk to, and Jacob’s got kids, and if I’d found out about it earlier I’d have cancelled, but we were already at Sanee and Steff’s, and frankly, you’ve made me so fucking self-conscious about my friends that I didn’t feel I could tell you about it.”
Drew hit one-hundred-percent sadness, crushed under this horrible mess of loss and failure. The only thing worse than sucking at something was sucking at something you thought you were okay at. And up until now, he’d thought he was an okay boyfriend. “You know you can tell me anything,” he too-little-too-lated.
“No, I really can’t.” Kit drew in a shuddery breath, and Drew realised he was close to tears. “I loved being with you, and some of the time you made me feel amazing and cared for and sexy and wanted. But you also made me feel wrong and broken and like I was letting you down.”
Drew stared at him in horror. “I don’t think that. I’ve never thought that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Because you acted like you did. You got so hung up onHoL, and it was like you wanted to replace my friends with your friends. Like you were doing me a favour. But you just don’t get it. Jacob and Tiff and even Bjorn have been my best friends since I was fifteen. When I met them—even if it was just in a game—I stopped being lonely. I stopped feeling like I didn’t fit anywhere. It was when I first realised it was okay to just be me and people would like me for it.”
“I like you too,” put in Drew pitifully.
