Page 62 of Don't Hate the Player
As good as not kissing Jake Hooper felt, I have to say, kissing him is so much better.
PART IV
Jake!!!
BOB HAD GONEthrough a lot of trouble to make the Team Unity green room feel like home. He’d brought in blue curtains for all the sense that made, since none of the green rooms had windows, and had tacked them up on the walls like a college student trying to create a sexy, tasseled opium den vibe in their concrete dorm room. There was also a gold star chart pinned up with everyone’s names to reward good ideas, which had quickly devolved into a black star chart marking down anyone who cussed and now functioned as an analog LanguageBot.
Ki had brought a few LOONA light sticks in a glass vase that sparkled like distracting electric flowers, and Penelope had brought a busted-looking black ottoman her sister was going to throw out if P hadn’t found something to do with it. Muddy’s contribution was a bag of cheddar cheese popcorn, which he ate by himself; his decor contribution could generously be described as the orange powdery marks he’d left on the couch.
Out of all the things Jake helped Bob drag to the green room that morning, half out of punishment for getting caught with Emilia and half out of necessity because the sheer volume of swag he’d packed in his trunk would take one man two trips, he liked the blankets best. They were navy blue, were extremely fuzzy, and felt amazing when he launched himself facedown into one and screamed into its fluff. It was a good scream. Team Unity’s match was over. They were in the finals.
“Blue cross!” Bob bellowed when he entered the green room after Jake. Jake had skipped ahead of everyone else and gotten to the room first. He could have skipped his way around the arena eight times and still had the energy for another match at the rate he was going. He was having the best day of his entire life.
“Black shield!” Ki and Penelope chanted after him and flopped down to flank Jake on the sectional. Jake felt one of them scratch at his back in excitement. He felt like a beloved family pet. Whatever Bob felt about Emilia and Fury, this win had to have wiped it out.
“Can’t lose. Apparently.” Muddy strolled in after everyone. He’d been a little more leisurely in his pace down the ramps from the stage, dodging and bending to photobomb people taking videos and selfies in the halls. Jake didn’t know why he bothered; someone had been backstage to take their picture the second they won the match. Thibault Adige wanted everyone in the city to know which players had a fifty-fifty shot at repping Philly in the Guardians League. Bob even stopped to say a few words to an esports reporter about his team and what they’d bring to the league.
For the second time since this tournament had started, people werelookingat Jake. On any other day, the attention would make him curl up into himself, dropping his head to make sure no one had a problem with his face and apologizing for taking up any space in their field of vision. Today he was smiling, laughing, posing even. Look upon his works, ye mighty: Jake kissed Emilia.
And yeah, he’d also healed his ass off against Beast Mode, but that victory felt like a direct result of the one that came before. Kissing was awesome; did everyone know that? Like objectively it seemed great, butmouths, man. They do so much that should make them gross, but they’renot.
He hadn’t gone to their hiding spot to kiss her, honest. It would have been so much cooler if that had been his goal, though. Just like, swoop in, give the pep talk of the century, dip her like a romance cutscene, and get down to smooch town—that would have been dope, but it wasn’t the story. Jake knew that Emilia would try to cut loose the second he heard Thibault announce the league, and the ridiculous, heart-tugging loyalty he felt for her wouldn’t let him see her do that without hearing him out.GLOwas the reason Emilia talked to him, the only reason she even saw him. When she got on voice chat after the Matcha Attack, he’d nearly peed himself on his dad’s creaky old office chair. She was different when she talked aboutGLO; she kneweverythingabout it. Emilia laughed and opened up when they talked about games. She got sparkly somehow, way brighter than he’d seen her in the month since he got to Hillford West and saw her going through the motions of being the junior class’s student-athlete queen bee. Jake had only hoped to convince her to keep playing so she could stay sparkly, and,bam, she’d kissed him.
What were the odds of that? Batman would shoot someone at point-blank range before Jake thought he’d get to kiss Emilia Romero.The Elder Scrolls 7would come out on the PlayStation 79. Nintendo would reveal MissingNo as a starter Pokémon in the first generation of game consoles playable on Mars. Those were the odds, andyet.
Jake wasn’t even embarrassed that he’d gotten his first kiss at fifteen. Quality definitely won over quantity in this case. And Emilia was . . . ?a chef’s kiss kind of kisser. Probably the best kisser in the world. He had literally nothing to compare it to, but Jake didn’t have to be a completionist to know when he’d scored a platinum trophy.
Whew, he really had to stop thinking about kissing. Now that everyone was in from backstage, it was time for Bob to give a speech. The only worse time to get a boner would be mid-match. Or walking across the stage. Or in the postgame photos. Now that he thought about it, there were a lot of bad times for boners. Really only a handful of good times for one, Jake guessed. This wasn’t one of them.
“All right, everybody, circle up,” Bob called. Jake wiggled around to get his face out of the blanket and settled between Ki and P on the couch.
“Great match,” Bob continued. “If the star chart was still a star chart, you’d all be getting a sticker.”
“And four stickers for you, Bob,” Penelope yelled.
“You go, Bob,” Ki echoed.
Bob shimmied his shoulders like the praise was showering down on him from above. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell y’all about the league. Wizzard reached out to the captains after Round One and told us they’d get better reactions if everyone was surprised onstage. So if I’ve seemed like a hard”—he stopped himself and glanced back at the black star chart—“butt lately, it’s just because I knew what we were fighting for.”
“And here we are,” Muddy said smoothly. Jake noticed that Muddy had taken the long part of the sectional for himself and was kicked back with his feet up on the couch. Muddy’s eyes narrowed when he caught Jake looking. Whatever that was about didn’t matter. This was Unity’s parade, and Jake felt like he was riding the biggest damn float in the route.
“One more match and we’re in the league,” Bob said. “Now let’s find out who we’re going to have to take down next.”
“Let’s see,” Ki groaned sarcastically while Bob picked up the remote for the green room’s live feed of the competition. “I’m going to go with Fury, or maybe Fury.”
Penelope squinted at the screen. “Turn it up, Bob. We missed the start of the match.”
Bob obliged, and Jake leaned back against the couch’s cushions to watch Emilia play. He cautioned a look at Bob, who caught his eye knowingly before turning to watch the match as well.
“Whatever happens, we have to talk after this. As a team,” Bob said ominously. Jake felt his stomach twist. That parade feeling was fading out into a suspicion that winning today wasn’t enough to get Bob off his back. He was also nervous for Emilia, so either way his abdominal region wasn’t going to feel great.
“Chronic came out with Grendel,” Muddy noted as the hairy, one-armed form ofGLO’s resident monster type tank stomped around in the commentator’s third-person screen view. “Smart of Fury to give VANE the swap so he could play Jubilee.”
“Ugh, it’s gonna be a monster fight.” Ki shuddered. She didn’t like any ofGLO’s monster characters, preferring to ice people out as the light-footed mad scientist Doctor Jack.
“He did the mash . . . ,” Penelope sing-whispered to Jake. The two of them had healed in lockstep today, and Jake could tell she was feeling cuddly.
“He did the monster mash,” Jake whispered back before Bob shushed them both. The match was getting serious on-screen.
