At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (25 page)

“She’ll talk to you, man. I promise. But…you can’t push it with her. You can’t pull another stunt like you did with the PI. Wait. She will come to you. Trust me on this. And, most importantly, trust
her
.”

I told him good night. It was 2 a.m. as I left and I spent the short drive home switching through my playlist in frustration. First it was “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. Yeah, thanks for
that
reminder, assholes. I punched the next song on the playlist. “The Night You Murdered Love” by ABC. What the hell? Didn’t
anyone
record a happy, mellow song in the eighties? I stopped when I got to Sinéad O’Connor’s mournful wailing of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” How appropriate. I listened, each word of the lyrics cutting into my skin like a tiny shard of glass. It kept me awake as I drove and it kept me thinking.

Nothing compared to Emilia. But also, nothing compared to this pain inside. And they were two sides of the same coin. I wondered how much more of this I could take. And I wondered when she would come to me. Everyone had assured me that she would—even Sun Tzu. But I was full of that same old doubt and fear. The challenge was in not letting it consume me.

Chapter Fifteen

The next day after breakfast, I was about to grab my phone to call her when it chimed with a text message.

Thank you for staying with me last night
.
Thanks for everything
.

My grip tightened around my cell phone and I had to rein in my need to know, that ever-present need for control.

Are you ok? I’m worried
.

Don’t worry
.
I’m fine
.
See you at work tomorrow
.

I hesitated, staring at that last text. Clearly a message to prevent me from going over and seeing her today. I took a deep breath and quelled that first instinct in me to find out what the hell what was going on, or demand answers from her. Obviously my first instincts had gotten me into deep shit with her recently so I was going to ignore them, as ridiculously difficult as that felt.

Instead, I spent the entire day at the office. I was aware of what I was doing but told myself it was specifically for the convention. We
needed
the convention to go off well, especially in the face of this lawsuit coming down the pipeline. I did
not
want my game associated with such negative events rather than seen as a form of entertainment that millions of people enjoyed.

And fortunately, that positive aspect of the game was what the Con was about.

Several days before the beginning of the convention, Draco employees relocated to nearby Las Vegas in preparation for the first annual DracoCon. The event would take place the weekend before Thanksgiving, just before the last week of November. And because preparations were crazy, I put in a few eighteen-hour days and got little sleep. And I saw very little of Emilia, unfortunately.

But she seemed to be hard at work and exhausted with it. We were able to greet each other in passing, stop and have a short conversation. She seemed to want to avoid talking about what had happened between us the night after paintball. And I kept remembering to control my instinct to dig for information. We still needed to sit down, talk things through. Figure out a way in which we could be together, be happy.

I hoped that we’d get that chance after the Con in Vegas.

I remembered the first time I’d visited Sin City—during the last year of high school as an independent study student. I’d had a lot of free time between minimal schoolwork and coding the game that would become Mission Accomplished, my first great success. Lindsay had invited me to spend the weekend up there with her and I felt like I’d stepped into another world.

I’d been a totally oblivious innocent, really, too young to drink (not that I did much of that now anyway) or to gamble. I’d followed her as she took me around to the various casinos. We’d seen a couple shows. It’d been my first trip outside of my little world since leaving Washington and moving to California.

Bright lights of every color burned up and down Las Vegas Boulevard, better known as “The Strip,” from sundown until dawn. Our convention would take place at the Arthurian-themed Excalibur Hotel, built to look like a massive fairy-tale castle. It seemed an appropriate venue, given our game’s fantasy theme.

I made the rounds, personally inspecting and okaying each display before the Con started. Jordan was at my side for a lot of it, rolling his eyes and muttering about my control issues.

“Don’t you have something you need to do?” I finally said.

“Well, there is the warm-up for the cosplay competition. Some of those girls are going to be in skimpy chainmail bikinis. I’ve appointed myself as a judge.”

I sighed, checking off boxes on a checklist on my tablet as I moved to the next exhibit. “Of course you have.”

“What about you? Everyone would get a kick out of you being a judge.”

“I’m sure I’ll be busy.”

Jordan put a hand up to his ear. “Did you say you’ll
be
busy or you’ll be
getting
busy?”

I shook my head and tried to reply in as stern a voice as I could muster. “Sometimes I’m astonished that you are the CFO of my company.”

“C’mon…those interns—”

“Work for me. And so they are off-limits. For me
and
you. One lawsuit at a time is enough.”

After fixing some details at a nearby display, Jordan swept up to my side again. “You’re so uptight these days. How long has it been, anyway? Aren’t you due for a little…stress release?”

I glared at him sidelong. No one, not even him, was privy to the details of my sex life.

“Either get your mind back in the game or go do something else,” I snapped.

The Con itself was three days of pure chaos, pure adrenaline, and an unbelievably fantastic high. People loved our product. Lived our product. There were demos and trials and contests. There were cosplay competitions where people dressed as their characters in the game. And, as Jordan predicted, there were some chainmail bikinis. I was certain that, somewhere, Emilia was violently rolling her eyes.

There were roleplaying events and head-to-head duels—both virtual and recreated in live-action. I’d never been as proud of our game as I was during those days, seeing the real faces of our players. They were surprisingly of all ages, even retirees. I had the chance to walk around amongst the exhibits and contests. Sometimes I was recognized by the players—sometimes stopped by a reporter and asked about the lawsuit, to which I gave my standard “no comment” answer.

When I saw Emilia, she looked tired. It did not appear as if she was getting much sleep. We were playful with one another whenever we had a second to talk. Once she sidled up to me and, when no one was looking, squeezed my bicep. “I just had to get me a little bit of that,” she murmured before walking away.

I resolved to sneak in a covert slap of her ass.

Still, she looked so strange to me. With her large brown eyes and dark eyebrows and that bizarre white hair, she looked almost otherworldly, like the elf maidens she so liked to parody on her blog.

At the employee costume party, she’d added bright pink and purple braids to that white hair. She wore a short skirt in the style of a ballerina tutu and dainty little fairy wings, her face all painted with bright, glittery colors. She looked exotic, different, almost like one of Jordan’s models. Her long legs were prominently on display and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

I’d chosen to go as a famous nonplayer character who gave almost every newly created character his or her first quest. He was a sad, broken-down shadow of a man who pined for his lost love. He gave new players the simple request to go into the nearby meadow and brave hostile creatures in order to pick a bunch of yellow daffodils in remembrance of the woman he’d lost.

He wore his former uniform of the High Guard—complete with an old-style military coat and kilt. Maggie had tracked down someone to put the costume together for me and when I’d shown up at the party, everybody immediately knew who I was supposed to be.

“General SylvanWood!” they exclaimed. I was only missing the pointy ears. SylvanWood was an elf, but I drew the line there. I’d wear a kilt, but I wouldn’t wear pointed ears. Even
my
geekery had its limits.

That last party got kind of crazy in the after-hours. We had some strange competitions and games before the night devolved into a platform pulsing with mildly inebriated dancers and crowds of awkward people installed around the bar.

My kilt, unfortunately, attracted a lot of the wrong kind of attention. Even the five-years-ago me would have been uncomfortable with the flirtatious interns. I’d dealt with overly enthusiastic coworkers before, but this batch of interns from the university just down the road from Draco’s central offices seemed more obnoxious than usual. And they hardly left me alone.

The more alcohol they got in them, the less subtle they became. I finally ended up installing myself with the awkward drinkers at the corner of the bar beside Jordan, while observing the wild goings-on of my employees unwinding after many days of difficult work. As the night wore on, the crowd became less inhibited. And, after excusing herself for nearly half an hour—because I
did
keep track of her movements—Emilia returned and went straight to the bar, asking for a drink.

I caught her eye across the bar and she smiled at me. I didn’t take my eyes off her and she raised her brows at me in a question. I motioned for her to come to me and she laughed, downed her shot and walked off.

I seethed, my eyes following her. Blondie was trying to get my attention, wanted to know if I liked to dance. I ignored her.

Emilia waded into the crowd and began to dance in a group with some of the people in marketing. After fifteen minutes of this, I could see that she was losing her judgment, because the idiots she was dancing with had their hands all over her and she was doing nothing to discourage them.

If looks could kill, the glare I was sending those guys would have flattened them. It might have been all in good fun, but it was pissing me off. One danced in front of her, his hands on her hips, another behind her, moved up to grind on her every once in a while. Fury burned through every vein, stiffened every muscle. I closed a fist on the bar.

Jordan followed my gaze. “Down, boy. She’s just dancing.”

She was more than “just dancing” and appeared to be wasted after one shot. I’d never known her to be that much of a lightweight. I turned to the bartender and ordered my own shot of tequila.

Jordan almost fell out of his chair openmouthed when the bartender poured the drink. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you touch that stuff. A hundred bucks says you can’t down it.”

I raised my brow. It was
so
on. I tilted my head and knocked it back—the entire thing, before I could feel the burn. I admit that I did sputter and cough a little—but not so much that it was unmanly. At least in
my
mind.

But I could hardly feel the desired effect quickly enough so, with my glaring eyes never leaving Emilia’s dancing form, I ordered another one.

“Double or nothing,” I said to Jordan and he shrugged and laughed. “Making a hundred-dollar bet with a multimillionaire is pointless,” he said.

I didn’t care. I wasn’t drinking to impress him, anyway. I downed drink number four before I fumbled off my bar stool and made for the dance floor, toward Emilia and her disturbing shock of multicolored hair. She looked very little like my Emilia, this pale, white-haired imitation. But watching her dance suggestively with my assistant head of marketing was now fucking pissing me off.

The minute I joined them on the dance floor, my employees cheered and clapped loudly. Hopefully they weren’t expecting much in the way of moves. I would have been the first person to admit that I did not dance to contemporary music. In fact, I danced like ass because I’d never learned. I had done ballroom practice with my cousin Britt in junior high school. We’d learned things like the foxtrot, the triple swing and the waltz. But I’d never learned any of these dances.

And I was a computer nerd—when did I have the desire or need to dance, anyway? I did the last two years of my high-school education via independent study. While my classmates were struggling through algebra, I was designing my own artificial intelligence algorithms. And when my classmates had been trying to get lucky in the back of their parents’ cars with their virginal prom dates, I was carrying out a nice, comfortable affair with a gorgeous, experienced law student. So I never went to prom nor had I really wanted to. I’d lived far from the typical teenage life and as a side effect had no idea how the hell to dance this way.

But it didn’t look hard and I had a shitload of alcohol in me. And it was really just about following the beat, right? Emilia was thrusting herself at that asshole Richard (who I was now thinking of as “Dick” because he’d just had his hands all over my girlfriend). The brief question of whether or not she was even my territory crossed my mind. I waded stiffly through the sea of dancers toward her. Whether or not she was truly mine wouldn’t prevent me from staking a claim. I could see Jordan watching me with concerned eyes, but I didn’t care. If I got out of hand, he’d come over and bounce me, surely. But by then I’d probably be passed out. I’d been drunk a few times in my life, but it was far from a regular occurrence for me.

Along with her fluffy white tutu, Emilia wore a purple tank top that clung to her breasts and waist. No matter what she wore, she was gorgeous. The dancing would be a great excuse for me to get my hands on her again.

So I came up behind her and did some awkward gyrations, hoping I blended in enough with the crowd. Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” started and half the room cheered and clapped. And Emilia was playing along twisting her hips and swaying to the music. Her back was to me so I moved in close and put my hands on her waist, trying my best to follow her movements.

She didn’t even miss a beat, apparently unfazed that some stranger (at least I could have been) had come up behind her and was now pressing himself to her backside. It felt dirty. But it felt good, too, fuck it all.