Page 59 of Looking for Group
He felt Tinuviel uncurl. “I’m just down the hall if you want anything.”
Sanee slapped him somewhere in the region of his arm. “It’s all right, mate. We’ll still be friends. Even if you do get a taste for dick.”
“Thanks,” mumbled Drew.
And then he heard the door swing closed behind them.
Once he was sure they’d gone, he made a futile attempt to get back intoHawkeye, but it was no good. He had too much stuff in his brain. The one thing he was pretty sure he didn’t want to do was lie here trying to work out if he was gay or not. If that was even possible. So he tried to break the whole mess down into manageable chunks, like he’d do with a design project or a maths problem. Chunk one was “Am I gay or what?” but there was nothing he could do with that on his own. Tinuviel mighthave been all sexuality is fluid blah, but that didn’t really mean anything if he couldn’t hold hands with a boy or kiss a boy or fall in love with a boy. Even if the boy was Solace.
Chunk two was being lied to, or if not lied to, then misled. Or whatever it was that made him feel bad about everything. Thinking back, and trying to be as objective as possible given the circumstances, he could sort of see that he hadn’t really given Solace a chance. It had been hard enough psyching himself up to ask someone out on the internet. He had no idea how you’d slip, “Hey, you know I’m not a girl, right?” into the conversation. But while some part of Drew understood that side of it, it didn’t stop him feeling shitty and hurt.
He wondered briefly how Solace was feeling. If he was sad as well, or angry, or confused. Or maybe he was hurt because he’d thought Drew knew, and he hadn’t, and that what he’d said after was right: Drew had only been nice because he thought Solace was a girl. Or maybe Solace didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and was just weirded out that Drew had thrown a wobbly.
Which got him onto chunk three, which was, well, Solace himself. And it occurred to Drew that it was really odd to be thinking so hard about this guy when he didn’t even know what his name was.
And he wanted to know. He wanted to know all that stuff.
What he was called, and what he was feeling, and what he was thinking.
Except even that was weird now, because every time Solace came into his head, Drew would do a kind of mental stammer and have to switch theshefor ahe. And that meant he couldn’t tell if it was really Solace he was missing or this imaginary girl who’d never even existed.
And that brought him back to “Am I gay or what?” Which was not where he wanted to be. He wasn’t Tinuviel. He couldn’t just be straight for nineteen years and then decide that everything was an arbitrary social construct so he might as well date anyone. It would have been different if he’d met a guy and been into him. Well, it would still have been pretty confusing, but at least it would’ve been clear-cut.
Except wasn’t that exactly whathadhappened? He had, in fact, met a guy. And he was, in fact, into him. And, okay, he’d thought the guy was a girl, but he’d also known he might not be. And charged…or stumbled…ahead regardless. Which either meant he’d been wildly optimistic, or some part of him (even if it wasn’t something he’d ever noticed or admitted) hadn’t minded.
So maybe he was—as Sanee would surely put it—a gay.
Or at any rate: a bi. Since he was pretty sure he was still into girls.
Although maybe he wasn’t. Because he hadn’t had that many relationships and part of the reason Tinuviel hung out with him and Sanee was that they were basically the only men on the course who hadn’t tried to get into her pants. So maybe he’d just been pretending all this time. Maybe getting a girlfriend had been kind of like getting your A levels—just sort of something you were expected to do in your late teens.
He gave a little whimper and stuck his head back under the covers. Right now, he had no idea who he was or what he was or where he was going or what he was doing or what he wanted. Tinuviel would probably tell him placidly thatThis is all very fluid and complicated, Andrew, and thatlabels are meaningless.
But, honestly, this felt like a time in Drew’s life when a label would be really comforting.5 It was one of the things he enjoyed about trad MMOs. Everybody had a role and name and you knewwhat you were supposed to be doing and how you were supposed to be doing it.
He hid for a bit longer. He really needed to talk to someone. Someone who wasn’t going to laugh or express their bewilderment at the way he clung to bourgeois conventions of blah blah blah.
Basically, he needed to talk to Solace. And not just because there was no one else, but because he was starting to realise that the only thing he wasn’t confused about was that he really missed her. Um. Him.
Drew crawled out of bed, booted up his PC, and signed into the game. He was greeted by a stream of cheery hellos in the guild, but Solace wasn’t online.
He stared blankly at the screen. He had nothing in particular to do in-game, but logging in and then logging straight out again would look kind of pissy and odd. Also, having spent the best part of a day thinking in circles to get to this point, it was really frustrating not being able to see it through.
Sod it. He was bloody well going to start that World Explorer achievement.
Whipping out El’ir Reborn, he took to the skies.
He started by filling in the blanks around the City of the Stars and Arandiel’s Vale. He wasn’t quite up to doing it on foot, but he took his time and watched the scenery unfurling beneath him. He hadn’t spent very long in this area at all, because he’d never rolled an elf. It was very sub-Tolkien: all trees and stars and dwindling. He found a narrow path that spiralled to the crest of a hill and under a pretty impressive waterfall. It tumbled between the rocks in silver-crested streams and down into a pool that shimmered, blue and green, with the reflected images of the surrounding forest.
He paused to admire the ray tracing. Obviously, the game was getting on a bit and it wasn’t much by modern standards, but someone had clearly put a lot of effort into getting the scene just right. He’d already got credit for exploring Arandiel’s Vale, but since there seemed to be a cave behind the waterfall, he thought it’d be nice to poke his head in.
It turned out to be the standard cave model, and it was full of level fifteen bullywugs who were probably some kind of bandits or cultists or something. When you were new to the game this cave was probably a complete nightmare, but Ella was high enough level that the mobs basically ignored her except when she actually ran through them. In the end, Drew dragged a bunch of them into a corner and massacred them wholesale with a single Circle of Corruption. There was a certain base satisfaction in one-shotting a bunch of low-level creatures.
Solace has come online.
[Guild][Morag]: Hey
[Guild][Heurodis]: yo
