For the Win

by Brenna Aubrey

  The knock came again and Jordan pulled back as if I'd sprouted thorns. "Shit," he mumbled.

  "What? Who is it, your wife?" I joked.

  He rubbed a hand over his mouth and jaw like he was trying to remove my lipstick. Luckily, my lipstick had worn off hours before and so the telltale evidence he feared wasn't even there. "Sit up and I'll zip you. Put your shoes on. It's Adam."

  I sat bolt upright on the couch and did as he asked.

  He growled at the door. "Just a fucking minute!"

  "How do you know it's him?"

  He stood and ran a hand over his hair, then adjusted his pants as if he could hide the sizeable erection straining against the fly of his jeans. I could barely tear my eyes away even though my heart was drumming in my throat from fear.

  "Two reasons. The way he knocks, and the fact that it's nine and he's out for his evening run. He lives a mile and a half up the road."

  "Is he checking up on you?"

  Jordan bent and grabbed the laptop, snapping it shut and angling it in front of his crotch. "Grab that pad and pretend you're taking notes. And Jesus, don't let him see your mouth."

  I rolled my lips inward to lick them. They felt bruised and swollen from his kisses. Another shot of desire speared me from breastbone to backbone. Jordan spun and strode to the door.

  "What the fuck took you so long?" Adam's voice came from the open door.

  "I'm in the middle of working with my assistant sitting right there." Jordan stepped back to let him in.

  Adam was wearing running shorts and sneakers and a sweat-soaked t-shirt. I licked my lips again, feeling as guilty as if I'd been caught with a dirty book by a parent.

  His eyes widened when he saw me. "Oh, hey April. Sorry about that," he said.

  I assumed he was apologizing for his language. He took in my dress and shoes, frowning, then shot a look at Jordan. "I saw the email about the changed time for the meeting with the banker...thought I'd see if you needed any help with that, but I see you called in the cavalry."

  "April brought me the file from Susan's desk and kindly volunteered to stay and help instead of going out dancing with her friends."

  My face instantly heated. Wow...Jordan's casual lie to his best friend was so convincing that I almost believed it myself. And that was nothing short of scary. Who knew what other lies this man told on a regular basis? What did he say to women in order to get in their pants?

  Although, with the way he looked, did he really have to say anything at all?

  "Uh, yeah...we've been hammering away on the reports, trying to get the data together..." My voice faded as I got a glimpse of Jordan's expression, his frown telling me that he didn't approve of my not-so-suave attempt to follow his lead and lie.

  Well, I sucked at lying so I didn't blame him for wanting to shut me up.

  "How did you even know I was home?" Jordan asked Adam, shifting the laptop from one hand to the other while still managing to cover his crotch.

  "I was running along the beach. Saw the lights on. Figured it was too early for you to have one of your dates back here yet..." Adam then glanced at me again, probably conscious that he didn't want to say much more with me here. But Jordan seemed even tenser than before.

  "I was just about to send April home. If you want to take a look at what we were working on..."

  Adam pulled out his phone and removed his ear buds, winding them up to set aside. "Sure."

  Jordan, however, was trying to send me some sort of hidden signal with a furrowed brow and gritted teeth and overtly pointed glances at the door.

  I had to admit, I really wanted to mess with him. So I pretended not to understand, looking away. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Now that the panic had subsided, I was finding this the most hilarious situation ever.

  "So April was just going..." Jordan repeated.

  I looked up. "Oh? I was? You sure you don't need me to help some more? Run some more searches?"

  If looks could kill...

  I smiled at him and he seethed. After an awkward silence, I stood. "Okay, well, the night's still young. I could probably still catch my friends over at the club."

  Jordan scowled and I ignored him.

  "Good night, Jordan. Night, Adam."

  I grabbed my notes about Jordan's new assigned project and stuffed them in my purse, then nodded to them both. Adam went to the door and held it open for me. At least he was a gentleman.

  But clearly I didn't really want a gentleman, because the wild animal who just had his hands and mouth all over me had been a lot more exciting. My body heat flared up again and the memory of him was causing me to sweat. Weak-kneed, I hobbled back to the driveway and my car.

  His kisses had been amazing and my body was still aching with unfulfilled arousal. Goddamn it, his mouth had been inches from my nipple. I took a deep breath and then let it go. Now I'd never know what it would feel like. What he'd be like.

  Sometimes at work, I watched his hands. They were large, strong hands. Masculine. I'd wondered if he was good in bed. He changed women like underwear, so it was evidenced--and even Adam had alluded to it. Jordan's dates were all six-foot tall, flawlessly beautiful size twos with glowing skin and amazing bone structure. He was an extremely good-looking guy and a millionaire so he had lots to offer, but he must have been pretty good in bed too. The angry ones often were...so I'd heard.

  I sucked in a quick breath. Jordan was giving the sex god Falco of Comic-Con a run for his money in the hot sexual encounters department...and he hadn't even gotten to second base.

  I clicked the alarm off on my car, shakily considering the consequences of what might have happened had we not been interrupted. I'd probably be naked and under him right this moment had Adam not shown up, and that could have been a disaster. Sex with my boss. Way to really screw the pooch, April. At least Falco the sex god was still a safely anonymous encounter that, God willing, would remain that way despite the notorious video.

  I tried to shove the memory of Jordan's kisses and his hands out of my mind. I couldn't allow things to go any further. And judging from the look on his face, he probably felt the same way. We'd gotten carried away--that was it. No more being alone together. No more going over to his house.

  When I arrived home, it was almost ten. Sid was in her fuzzy jammies and yellow Minion slippers huddled over her keyboard with a ridiculously oversized headset on that made her look like a helicopter pilot.

  She was using a commanding tone of voice that she normally didn't use in her face-to-face encounters and saying things like, "Trash mobs just spawned! Hit your AOEs," and "No, no. Secondary heals only! You're drawing too much aggro."

  It was like she was speaking a completely different language.

  I followed her lead and changed into my most comfortable nightie. But instead of pulling out my e-reader and tunneling under the covers, I went to my desk beside hers and started running searches on Google.

  As I skimmed over websites discussing Dragon Epoch, I tried to tune out Sid's laughing and joking with her friends. I only understood about half of it, but I could tell she was having a great time. They were chatting about the game but also about personal stuff, and it seemed as if she were from a different culture, relating to the world in a completely different way than I could. I was almost envious of it.

  I glanced at her a few times and she frowned, curling a hand over her mic. "What are you doing home so early? You pooped out quickly."

  I sighed. "It's a really long story. I got waylaid by the boss to help him with work stuff. Never made it to the club."

  Sid's brows shot up and there was a look of concern in her eyes.

  I went back to my search. There were approximately 35,754,632 hits that came back in seconds on a search for Dragon Epoch. I blew out a breath. Shit... I had a lot of homework to do if I wanted to know my product.

  A short while later, I'd noticed silence from Sid's side of our work area. I glanced up and she was watching me, apparently having fi
nished with her game.

  "What?"

  "So what really happened?"

  "That's what really happened."

  "He made you stay there and work with him on a Saturday night?"

  "Yes." Her lips thinned. I shrugged at her. "What?"

  "He didn't try anything with you, did he?"

  I swallowed.

  "April..." she said when I didn't answer. "You've mentioned before how young and hot he is. I know you already have a crush on him..."

  "I don't have a crush on him. Sheesh." But I blushed. The thought of having a crush on my boss...okay, I thought he was hot. And after seeing him tonight in his trunks. That bod...and then the way he'd kissed me...

  Shit. I had a crush on my boss!

  "Apes, you need to be careful. You're in a very vulnerable state right now."

  I turned away, embarrassed, and pretended to be engrossed in my search. "I have this project I have to work on," I mumbled, motivated to change the subject.

  Sid angled her head to glance at my monitor, brows raised. "Just what are you trying to find?"

  "I'm trying to get a better knowledge of the game so I know my product. I have no idea what project design I can come up with. And he wants three."

  "Well, you could ask me for help, you know, since I spend approximately sixty-two hours a week playing it."

  I shook my head. "Girlfriend, we have got to get you out more."

  She shrugged. "I love my homies in the guild. We hang out virtually. It's a lot of fun."

  "So all these people from all over the world who are logging into the game...how do you find people to play with and how do you make new friends?"

  "Sometimes you just call for people to help you with a certain quest. If you end up grouping with cool people, you keep doing it again and again. Or you'll get invited to a raid or asked to join a guild."

  I shook my head. "You might as well have just spoken Martian to me."

  "Instead of sitting around Googling it, why don't you roll a character and start playing?"

  "Hmm. Are there any good blogs or online magazines to look at?"

  "What the hell did you do all those months you worked in marketing?"

  I shrugged. "Mostly I made coffee and did some graphic design work for internal memos and newsletters and whatnot."

  Sid rolled her eyes. "Okay, so...blogs. There are some really good ones. Unfortunately, my favorite, Girl Geek, is no longer writing on hers. Her stuff is archived, though, over at GameGlomerate. She's awesome...snarky. She blogs about feminist issues and gaming. Like...why the women are always scantily clad in chainmail bikinis or why male gamers have issues with women being as geeky as they are."

  I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down Girl Geek. "Why isn't she blogging anymore?"

  Sid shrugged. "She cited life issues that have come up recently, although I think that it's because GameGlomerate bought her out. Her blog was by far the best, but there are some others that are still producing."

  "Hmm. I'll find her blog and read her old posts then. But for now, I guess I need to form a character."

  "Roll a character. Although it's not really rolling. They just say that because it comes from the old-school type of games where everything was randomly generated by a roll of the dice."

  I frowned. "Uh, okay. Jordan gave me a key code I can use to log in."

  Forty-five minutes later, after loading up the software, opening an account and downloading game patches, I was ready to create my own character.

  "Are you sure you want to play a man?"

  "Yeah. Why not?"

  Sid shrugged. "I guess it doesn't matter. Most of the women running around in the game are played by guys."

  "I can see why. They all look like Victoria's Secret Angels."

  "Okay, so you want to be a male human. You get to choose features like hair color, eye color--"

  "Medium-brown hair. Hazel eyes. Tall. Nice muscular body..."

  "You have quite the clear picture of what you want him to look like."

  I shrugged. I get to watch him die. Over and over. Might as well get some enjoyment out of it.

  "Now you need to come up with a name for him."

  Hmm. Jordan. Jordyn. Joldan? I shook my head. "I just want to call him 'Beast.'"

  Sid gave me a puzzled look and instructed me to type the name in.

  I admired him for a moment, dressed in a bland pair of brown trousers with no shirt. He didn't look exactly like his inspiration, but it would do.

  "Okay, so now that I've created my own monster, aside from rubbing my hands together and shouting, 'It's alive!' what do I do?"

  Sid let out a long-suffering sigh. "You are really going to need me to baby you through this, aren't you?"

  "Girlfriend, I upload sex videos to the Internet without even realizing it. I'm sure that if I press the wrong button on this game, all of Draco Multimedia Entertainment is bound to blow up. So, yes, talk to me like I'm a first grader."

  "Like I don't already do that."

  I smacked her arm. "I know where you live."

  She laughed, nodding. "Okay, okay. Click that button that says Enter Yondareth. It will put your Beast into the world and then you can run around and get quests."

  I did as she said. After a minimal waiting period, I was standing at the edge of a city gate. On one side of me was the entrance to the city, on the other side was a meadow. As I'd seen before in promotional artwork, videos and, most recently, the demo that Mia and Katya had run in the warehouse, the graphics were amazing. It really looked like I was standing in another world. Blades of grass shifted in the wind. Different bricks of varying colors were discernible in the city wall. Nearby, other figures stood, some elves, some dwarves, other humans. All different skin tones, hairstyles and features. Everyone had a name floating over his or her head.

  "Now what?"

  "You want to go up and talk to the NPCs--they're the game-generated people. The other avatars represent real people behind them. NPCs with quests have a shield symbol above their head. You complete quests to gain experience and items which help you gain levels for your character."

  Not too long after, Sid left me to get ready for bed. She wandered into the room between brushing her teeth, brushing out her hair and her various other nighttime routines to give me pointers or nod approvingly at what I'd accomplished.

  "This old elf guy in the kilt wants me to go pick a bunch of flowers for him. That sounds like a dumb quest," I said as she flipped back the covers on her bed.

  "You have to do that quest. There's a whole big story behind it. It's so romantic. And it leads to other, higher-level quests. Everybody does that quest. It's like a tradition in Dragon Epoch."

  "Ah, okay," I said, shrugging.

  Sid let me know she was turning the lights out and going to sleep. I grunted at her, plugging my ear buds into the headphone jack so the sounds of the game wouldn't disturb her. I figured I'd play for another half hour or so before throwing in the towel and getting some shut-eye.

  The next time I looked up at the clock, it was four a.m.

  Four. Freaking a.m. And I had to get ready for work in two hours.

  The game had sucked hours of my life in immersive amusement and I hadn't even realized it. At all. Man, this stuff was better than crack. No wonder so many people loved it so much.

  Even when I lay down, though, it was hard to sleep. I kept thinking about what had happened between Jordan and me at his house. Though it had felt so good and my body had even begun to ache again with the memory of it, I knew I could never follow through with these feelings. I had to fight them.

  But...I might have fantasized about him for a little while before I fell asleep. There was nothing wrong with a healthy fantasy, was there?

  One way or the other, this job was going to be the death of me.

  Chapter 8

  Jordan

  One way or the other, this woman was going to be the death of me.

  Adam had camped out on my couch
for a few hours after she left, helping me go over the paperwork. At first he'd thrown me a few questioning glances, and for good reason. It looked bad...the time I'd taken to answer the door. The way she'd been dressed. Adam probably thought we'd been out on a date together. But up until the moment I'd kissed her, it had all been completely innocent...well, as innocent as not wanting her to go out and pick up some other guy could have been, anyway.

  I buried the rest of my weekend in work--and working out--figuring that was the surest way to get that woman out of my mind. I was spending way too much time remembering the way she felt underneath me as I kissed her and touched her body. And it was a hard sell to get my own body to not react to it.

  My Monday early-morning meeting with the investment banker was lackluster. He'd been fairly cranky about our current situation with the viral sex tape. But the good news was that he seemed to think there were steps we could take to avert disaster.

  Adam wasn't going to like his suggestions, though. Regardless, I was going to do anything--anything--to keep this project going. And I was rubbing up against the two-week deadline he had imposed on me. I'd have to turn the charm all the way up on this one...and point it right at my best friend.

  "Sexual harassment training?" Adam spun from his office window to pin me down with his black stare. "You aren't shitting me, are you?"

  I held my hands out to him, palms up, an 'I give up' gesture. "He had a couple other stipulations as well. There's all this controversy now going on in the gamer community regarding sexist attacks against women--"

  Adam nodded. "Yeah. Yeah. I've been following all that and watching it closely. We've got anti-harassment protocols in our Terms of Service and protective measures--"

  "In the game, yeah, that's great. But with the employees--"

  He sighed. "Of course with the employees. We follow the law of the land."

  "He thinks we need to go the extra mile. We need to hire a consultant and go through a regimented training program. Every last employee, down to the janitorial staff."

  Adam was staring at me like I'd grown another eyeball in the middle of my head. "How long does something like that take?"

  "State law requires two hours every two years. But if we are putting our best foot forward and really trying to cover our asses--"

  He shook his head. "God, no. Two hours is enough, Jordan."