Page 63 of Looking for Group
[Group][Solace]: Just as friends
[Group][Solace]: I mean if you still want to
[Group][Solace]: But I get it if you don’t
Part of Drew—a big part of Drew—wanted to say,No way, you made me look like a prick and now I’m having a total crisis and it’s all your fault.Except then he realised it wouldn’t be particularly satisfying. And also it wasn’t true. Well, he was having a crisis and it was sort of Kit’s fault, but none of this would have happened if he hadn’t genuinely liked the guy. Or liked Solace. And probably that was the same thing. On the other hand, he didn’t want to be allOh, it’s fine, no probs, because that wasn’t true either.
Time was passing and the chat window was empty. And an empty chat window could be one of the scariest things on the internet sometimes. However mixed up he felt about Kit right now, he didn’t want to just leave him hanging. If it had been the other way round, he wasn’t sure he’d have the balls to put himself out there like that and risk getting shot down by a guy he knew was pissed off at him.
[Group][Orcarella]: let me think about it
[Group][Orcarella]: sorry that sounds shit
[Group][Orcarella]: it just
[Group][Orcarella]: i just
[Group][Orcarella]: i think id better go
Drew’s heart was beating way too fast as he logged off. He couldn’t tell whether that had gone fine or terribly. Nor had it miraculously cleared up the “Do I fancyguysorthisguy?” question.
It was late, but he’d spent most of the day in bed, so he didn’treally feel like going back there. Normally, this would be when he’d log intoHoL. Except he’d just logged out ofHoL.
He booted up Steam and browsed his library listlessly.
Then it occurred to him he could roll an alt, so he logged intoHoLagain. Unfortunately, the second name on his character list was the medusa he’d rolled to play with Kit.
He shut the game down in an attack of feels.
Which brought him back to his Steam library. He didn’t have masses of spare cash, but there’d been enough flash sales and Humble Bundles that he’d managed to rack up a collection of just over a hundred games. And he basically didn’t want to play any of them.
In the end he settled forX-Com6. He’d stalled out on his IronmanEnemy Withinplaythrough about eighteen months ago. Loading it up, it was incredibly disorientating to realise he’d named his squad after a bunch of his mates from school—people he basically hadn’t thought about, bar the occasional Facebook message, for the best part of a year.
It would’ve been too weird to go back, so he started a new game. He honestly wasn’t all that enthusiastic, but he just wanted something to take his mind off…everything. It worked for a little while, letting him fall into a comfortable strategy rhythm of move, overwatch, move, flank, shoot.
Then Sergeant Sanee “Hazard” Kumar had got jumped on and eaten by a giant killer-insect thing while attempting to the save the life of a civilian during Operation Broken Hymn, come back as an infected alien zombie, and had to be put down by his former squad mates. Sanee would have been so pissed the South Asian guy was the first to go. Drew almost felt too guilty to continue.
It didn’t, however, stop him relating the story to his course mates the next day.
***
One of the annoying things about small personal crises was not only did everything carry on in the background, but you didn’t even have an excuse not to carry on with it. Drew’s project still needed finishing, his UF team still needed him at practice, the guild still needed him to MT raids. It didn’t seem fair to say,Sorry, I can’t do all that stuff, I’m a bit sad and confused right now.Even worse, it wasn’t like anything could change or be fixed. Not unless he randomly met a girl who was so overwhelmingly perfect for him that he stopped thinking about Kit completely. And he hadn’t stopped thinking about Kit completely.
He hadn’t stopped thinking about Kit at all.
Every now and again, he’d vaguely look at guys and try to figure out if he found them attractive. Except most of the guys he met on a day-to-day basis weren’t interacting with him in that sort of way so there was no real context for the exercise. He thought about checking out the LGBTQ+ society, but wasn’t sure what he’d say.Hi, I’m probably not gay but I just wanted to see if I fancied any of you.
So life just sort of went on. He put the final touches to his chair. It was a good chair. Sanee and Steff got a copy of Dead of Winter, and they passed several pleasant evenings starving, betraying each other, and getting eaten by zombies.
On Monday, in the light of various changes to the core lineup—including Drew as MT—the guild decided not to press any farther into CoT that week, focusing instead on farming earlier content, gearing up, and, as Bjorn put it, “learning to work together so we do not repeatedly chain shit through the raid like a bunch of little noobs.”
This wouldn’t have been Drew’s preference, but he still enjoyed the atmosphere and the more casual guild membersreally seemed to appreciate the opportunity to get their hands on a pile of loots that were, to them, still shiny and new. In any case, it was actually more effective than he expected, because the next time they took on CoT, the first bosses went down like Jell-O shots.
Morag had recovered from her attempt to date a performance poet and was back RLing. Drew told himself he wasn’t disappointed. He’d been too angry and upset at the time to really deal with it, but he’d liked seeing that side of Kit. Being able to hear him talk.
Drew had honestly assumed that Kit had been staying quiet in Mumble deliberately so he wouldn’t catch on. But, actually, it seemed like he was just kind of quiet. He kept his banter in chat and only spoke to direct the healing team in a fight. Now Drew thought back, he was pretty sure Kithadspoken in earlier raids. He just hadn’t been listening because he’d been too busy doing his own job. And secretly hoping to hear from a pretty elf girl.
It made him feel a little bit better. A bit less of a fool and a bit less betrayed. And that freed his brain up to think about the other stuff. How nice it had been hanging out with Kit. All the sweet things he’d said. The ways he’d tried to be honest about what he’d done and why he’d done it.
