With barely a warning, Theo leaned forward, and he kissed Elliot on the lips. It was a small kiss, a chaste kiss. He didn’t go any further, but he also didn’t pull back all the way.
“Minty,” Theo said.
“What?” Elliot tried to say. The blood rushed in his ears.
“Your lips. Your toothpaste.”
“Uh huh,” Elliot tried to say.
Theo lifted a thumb to Elliot’s lips. He smiled, and he ran the pad of his thumb along Elliot’s bottom lip. “I have an idea,” Theo said.
Elliot worried that his stomach might churn up a little more bile if this was to go any further.
“Let’s play your game,” Theo said.
That was… not what he expected. It was enough to almost make him forget to be nervous, and he laughed. “What?”
“Let’s play your game. Beasts of War.”
Elliot’s brow wrinkled. He pulled back to get a better look at Theo’s face, to better read it. “For real?”
“Yeah, why not? I said this was your night. Let’s do something you’re comfortable doing. I like a good RPG game.” He put his palm on Elliot’s cheek. “And after, whatever happens, happens.”
The grin on Elliot’s face widened. He stood up, and he offered his hand to Theo. “Then come with me to my lair,” Elliot said.
Chapter Seven
Theo
Compared to the rather vanilla decor of the out rooms, this room was an assault of colors. Not from anything on the walls, but from the posters on the wall and bookshelves filled with not only books but also action figures of all shapes and sizes, vintage toys still in their box, and a giant replica sword gleaming on a stand. The centerpiece of the room was the thing that Theo took a cautious step toward first.
“Can I touch it?”
Elliot grinned at him. “Of course.”
A life-sized storm trooper from the movie Star Wars. It was made of clean, white hardened plastic, Theo assumed, and it even held a replica of a laser assault rifle from the movie. “How do you have this?” Theo said.
This time, when Elliot crossed his arms, it didn’t have the effect of embarrassment. It was a sign of his pride as he leaned against the doorframe. “I looked for that for a long time. I won it in an auction.”
“Are you serious?”
“Totally serious.”
“Are you rich?” Theo reached up and poked a finger at the white hood of the storm trooper. “How much did this thing cost?”
“Not as much as you might think. It’s a replica. But it’s still—”
“Damn cool,” Theo finished for him.
He took in the rest of the room. “I see where you spend most of your time,” Theo said.
“Yeah.” Elliot moved from the doorframe and came into the office. “This is where I keep all the cool stuff. If the building caught fire, this is the first place I would run for stuff to rescue.”
Theo laughed. The computer on the desk was amazing too. Three wide screens spread across the length of the desk. Clean and organized, but it was still a gaming superstation, complete with keyboard, mouse, and a variety of game controllers.
“I play a lot of games,” Elliot said, almost as if apologizing.
“It’s freaking awesome, bro.” And Theo meant it. “Probably the most advanced system I’ve seen. You sure you’re not landing the space shuttle in this room?”
“Maybe one day,” Elliot said, grinning. “I don’t just play games here. I do some work too. And I program.”
Theo quirked an eyebrow at Elliot.
“Gaming,” Elliot said. “I want to make games one day. I figure I play them enough, it might be cool if someday I could get paid to make them.” He waved the comment away.
“Have you made anything?”
Elliot moved toward the computer desk. He flipped a switch, and all the monitors lit up. When he moved his mouse, the screens filled with a multi-screen image. “I have some code.” He sat in the chair, and he moved the mouse, opening programs and clicking on files. The screens responded as if at the command of a virtuoso. “Here,” Elliot said. He clicked a button on one of the windows he opened, and all three screens changed to show a game character falling down a flight of stairs. “I’ve been experimenting with my own proprietary physics system.”
The unfortunate character on the perpetual stairs of death moved through smoke, and the smoke reacted. Fire caused the armor that the character wore to bubble and warp.
“Everything in this world acts like it should,” Elliot continued.
The on-screen guy fell into water, and the water rippled outward. The guy’s body floated out, the water reacting with rings pushed by his body. Then the water overtook the dead character, and he sank.
“It’s silly. It’s just a hobby right now.”
“Are you kidding?” Theo kept watch on the guy on the screen. Particles floated through the water like in the real world. If he didn’t know any better, he would have guessed he was seeing something filmed. “You made this?”
“Pretty much. I mean, it’s just math. I wrote the code to make it happen.”
Theo laughed. “Math. I can barely add numbers. I have thirty-two credits left in my undergraduate degree, and most of it is math and science. The thought of taking those classes gives me hives.” Theo mocked a shudder through his body. “I have no mind for numbers. It all scares me.”
“Math is easy,” Elliot said.
Theo saw a second desk chair in the corner of the room, and he pulled it close to sit next to Elliot. “It’s not easy for me,” he said.
He caught Elliot looking at him. “I can help you. If you want, that is.”
“My tutor?” Theo smiled.
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” is all Theo said. He doubted this would happen. People made those promises a lot in his experience. Rarely did they follow through on them. “So this game, Beasts of War, break me in.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said. “I have a laptop that can run the game.”
It turned out that Elliot had a second account on the game too. To Theo’s surprise, the game wasn’t all that bad. He was bad at the game, but the game itself was fun. He wasn’t lying when he said he liked to play RPGs. Maybe he wasn’t as gung-ho about them as Elliot, but he still had experience in plenty of games that were similar. They had the same basic sort of maneuvers, so he picked up things like character movement pretty quick. It was the timing that made him bad.
“Son of a bitch,” Theo said to the computer screen.
Theo was playing a priest character, a character meant to heal and deal some kind of damage he hadn’t quite mastered yet. And he hadn’t even really figured out the healing part yet either. His face was inches from the screen as he studied a bunch of green bars that fluctuated up and down as characters in this game took damage, and it was his job to try to get their green bars back to full again by casting his healing spells.
So far, he let four people die. He couldn’t quite get to the buttons on the screen for his healing spells fast enough.
“What the hell?” A male voice came over the speakers. Both he and Elliot wore headsets that made them look like they were battle commanders for a kind of drone war. Beasts of War was a game played with other people, and they joined with a group of other gamers from all over the country to take down a big, purple monster with tentacles that shot water out as some kind of mega damaging spell. It was that water spell that caused Theo’s forehead to break out in a sweat while he pounded the keyboard and mouse buttons.
“It’s just freaking water,” Theo shouted back. “Why’s it hurt people so goddamn much?”
Elliot laughed at him, but people died on Theo’s screen. Theo wasn’t laughing. In fact, they were dying in large numbers now. A disaster, that’s what it was. He started to regret even suggesting it because clearly he was not very good at this game.
But Elliot was something else. He spoke into the microphone attached to his headset. “Everybody pull your heads out of your a
sses and come back. Let’s set up and do it again.” Elliot was the leader of this group.
“It’s that healer,” a guy said over the speakers.
“Shut up, Hoffman,” Elliot said. “He’s new.”
Theo leaned back in his chair. Their chairs were side by side, so he was almost touching his shoulder to Elliot’s shoulder. “Sorry I’m not doing that great.”
Elliot smiled over his shoulder at him. “You’re doing fine. Hoffman’s just an asshole.” Into his microphone, Elliot spoke again: “Okay, let’s do this again, people. Let’s not fuck it up.” He barked out instructions like a drill sergeant to everyone on the screen about where they should be, and he went over the techniques for fighting this big boss monster once again.
Theo watched Elliot. He should have been looking at his screen and moving his priest character into place, but he couldn’t stop watching Elliot more. When Elliot finished speaking, Theo covered his microphone with his hand. “Who are you?” he said.
Elliot glanced over his shoulder as if unsure who Theo was talking to. “Me? I’m the rogue character.” He pointed to his own computer screen.
“No,” Theo said. He was grinning. “I mean, you’re not the same person who wasted a perfectly good beer by puking down his kitchen sink.”
Elliot laughed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re in charge.”
“I have to be.” Elliot shot Theo an expression as if that was clearly self-evident. Then he turned back to his screen.
But Theo leaned close to Elliot’s ear. “I like this side of you,” he whispered.
Elliot scrunched up his neck and looked back at Theo. He was smiling.
“Theo. Heal!” Elliot said into his computer screen. “Heal!”
Theo turned back to his screen, and he looked at the health monitors laid out on his screen. Right. He clicked on the one that was getting dangerously low to get his priest character to cast a healing spell. The health bar, when his on-screen character finished with the spell, only went up by a small amount. “Shit,” Theo said. “Sorry. Sorry,” he said into the microphone. He clicked the healing spell again. And again.
And again.
Then he couldn’t cast anymore. His buttons grayed out and were not clickable.
“Um,” Theo said into his headset. “I’m stuck.”
“You’re out of mana, douche bag,” someone said over the speakers, a girl this time. “It’s your blue bar, noob.”
She was brutal. But Theo found it. The blue bar. And, she was right. It showed almost nothing, and it built up far too slowly for Theo’s liking.
On the screen, the character that Theo was trying so hard to save blanked out. Dead. Then another. And another. And then the big tentacled monster came toward Theo’s character, and he tried to run his character to a place of safety.
“Just die, dick wad,” someone else said over the speakers.
“God!” That was Hoffman. Theo was recognized his voice by now. “Who the fuck is that healer?” he said over the speakers.
“Sorry,” Theo said again. On the screen, the big monster lashed out with a tentacle and, in a flash of red, Theo’s screen dimmed.
Elliot sat next to him, and he glanced over at Theo. The conversation on the speakers filled with hate for the failures of Theo’s character. But Elliot grinned at him.
“Sorry,” Theo said again, this time to Elliot.
“It’s cool,” Elliot said. Then, into the microphone: “Everybody quit your bitching and get back to your corpses. Let’s go again.”
Someone continued to speak.
Elliot cut him off. “I said shut up! Reset and let’s go!”
Theo focused on Elliot for a second time as if he had somehow been replaced with a doppelgänger.
“You really are a natural,” Theo said.
It took Elliot a moment to realize that Theo was talking to him. Elliot turned to Theo. “What?”
“Leading. You got this down.” Theo reached over gave Elliot’s arm a light, playful punch. “You’re a natural.”
Elliot shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it’s a game.” He blushed also, which Theo had to admit was growing on him. Most cases, a shy guy was somebody he would ignore. Shy was kind of a turnoff, he always thought. But Elliot was making him reconsider that. He was cute about it. Especially now when his cheeks turned red, and he smiled a goofy grin that lit up his face and bit his bottom lip.
“Are you coming back?” Elliot asked him after a stretch of time. There was a sense of urgency in his voice.
It took Theo a second to realize that he meant in the game. He turned back to the laptop screen and clicked the button to release his character’s spirit so he could run back. “Yeah. Sorry.” He glanced back to Elliot. “I was too busy checking out my boss in this game,” he said. He caught Elliot smiling as he took note of his own computer screen.
When they set up again, Hoffman said, “We need to find a replacement for that faggot healer.”
Theo’s head snapped back to the screen. He reached over to his keyboard and punched his speak button. “Who the fuck was that?”
“Who what?” someone responded.
“Who called me a faggot?”
“Theo, it’s okay,” Elliot said from beside him.
“No, Elliot, it’s not.” Theo pressed the button again. “Listen here, motherfucker. You’re real tough when you got a computer screen a bunch of miles between me and you, aren’t ya?”
“Oooh,” came the chorus of responses. “Internet tough.”
Theo clenched his teeth. “Yeah, okay, you pencil-dick freak. Just know that I’d happily knock the shit out of whoever you are, and I won’t even break a sweat.”
They laughed at him over the speakers. It only pissed him off even more.
“Everybody shut up!” Elliot raised his voice. It even caught Theo off guard, and he realized he was talking into the headset again.
And people listened.
Elliot continued: “Hoffman, I’m about two seconds from kicking your ass out of this group if you don’t knock it off. Katina, you too! Now everybody get into your spots, get your shit together, and the next person who says a word and calls my friend a name, you’re out of here. Got it?”
After it was clear nobody would talk back and there was complete radio silence, Theo leaned over to Elliot. “You’re making me hard, Elliot,” he whispered.
There was laughter over the speakers. Theo realized he still had his hand on the push-to-talk button.
And now it was his turn to feel red faced. Elliot blushed too, but he was also laughing.
The group got under control, and it took two more tries until Theo figured out how to balance his character’s healing power with his resources. One more attempt after that, and they killed the monster. The reward was a bunch of stuff that Theo had no real idea what it meant. They were good items, he guessed, as there was plenty of squabbling over who got what. Theo just listened and played along.
When they finished, Theo turned his chair to face Elliot, and he leaned back. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Elliot said. He sat back in his computer chair with his hands on his stomach.
“Why is it you’re able to talk down people in a game, but you can’t do it in person?” Theo leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He wanted to see again into Elliot’s soft, brown eyes that reminded him of milk chocolate flecked with green like pistachios and even hints of amber.
Elliot huffed a small snicker. “Because I don’t look like you,” he said.
Theo’s brow furrowed. “You keep saying that. What does that mean?”
“It means—well, I mean, look at you. You’re on a whole other level from me. I’m a geek who feels nauseous anytime someone puts me on the spot. You can walk into a bar full of people, and half the people in there turn to check you out.”
Theo leaned back. He rolled his eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“Yes, it is,” Elliot said. Now it
was his turn to lean forward. “That’s how it was when I saw you tonight. I wasn’t the only one who saw you walk into that place. You had three girls line up to give you the once over as you walked past, and even more followed your every move through the bar.”
Theo shrugged. “I guess I didn’t notice.”
“What do you mean you didn’t notice?” Elliot was smiling. “Are you telling me you don’t know that you look good?”
“I know how I look.” A sheepish grin spread on Theo’s lips. “I know that I get checked out. I have self-confidence. But I guess that’s how it’s always been.”
“For you. Not for me.”
Theo leaned forward again, this time to look Elliot in the eye. “But it could be,” he said.
Elliot shook his head, and he started to pull away, but Theo reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“I mean it. You’re not a bad-looking guy,” he said.
“I don’t get people looking at me like they do you.”
“I think you do. You just don’t see it because you’re not used to letting yourself notice.” He kept Elliot’s wrist in his grip, and he moved his thumb along the back of Elliot’s hand. “I noticed.”
Elliot blushed, but he smiled and tried to turn away.
“You don’t have to look like me to be confident,” Theo said.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“No. I mean it. You only have to look like yourself and believe in yourself. People see that.” Theo touched Elliot’s jaw and turned his face until he could see into his eyes again. Comfortable eyes, eyes that, if circumstances were different and this wasn’t a one-night deal, he could want to come home to. “Elliot, you can have anything you want if you’re willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it,” Theo said.
Elliot’s eyes flashed a moment of understanding. This time, he wasn’t blushing. He wasn’t trying to pull away. “You should be some kind of motivational speaker,” Elliot said.
You May Have Met Him Page 8
