by Alex Gabriel
Pat tried not to grin too obnoxiously, but it was a little difficult when he was obviously a genius. It had been a crime that Nick had never used those amazing screens for anything more exciting than armor stress test simulations or whatever.
“The Princess can be snarky, witty and blunt, provided you choose the right dialog options for her,” Nick went on. “And there’s no need to make her a warrior. If you make her a scientist, you can solve the quests in a non-violent manner.”
Wow, he really had gotten into the game, hadn’t he? “So you don’t think I’m like Narcissus, huh? Why not?”
But Pat never got to hear the reasons for Nick’s dislike of Narcissus. The lights went down, the curtain rose on an artfully stylized forest, and Pat forgot about the world.
Why had nobody ever told Pat operas were like this? He’d totally been missing out! There were giant snakes and dead magicians and secret societies and funny bird creatures and — best of all — there was a kick-ass magical witch queen, who took absolutely no shit from anyone. And the music, man. There was no rapping, which was a definite minus, but other than that it was awesome. Some of the women whammied you with the high notes like they were punching you in the face with their voices. Pat wanted to jump up and applaud after every single song.
The intermission arrived just in time for Pat to tell Nick about the many ways in which this show rocked, especially the queen, who was five feet two of pure kick-ass magical superstar. They wandered down to the foyer with the rest of the audience and their attendant appeared with more champagne, but Pat was too busy gesturing to take a flute.
Nick looked smugly pleased and sipped champagne. After a while, though, the smug sipping began to be eclipsed by a more stormy kind of non-sipping. “You do realize she is the villain, don’t you, Patrick?”
Come on, seriously? “What I realize is that she is the greatest, and should totally win all the prizes. Those secret society dudes are always telling her what to do and whining that she’s so evil and out of control for not doing it, but what gives them the right to tell her to do stupid shit in the first place? Enlightenment my ass. They’re just a bunch of losers who can’t deal with how awesome she is.”
Inevitably, Nick had a stupid opinion about this, because he was Nick. “But what about the hero — the young truth-seeker?”
Truth-seeker? Yeah right, that dude just wanted to bang the hot chick. Pat could sympathize, but unfortunately the guy had the personality of a potato. Kinda hard on both the hot chick and the audience, really. “He’s super boring, bro. Plus, what’s with all the talk of seeking the true path or whatever when he just wants to get laid? Don’t get me wrong, that’s a perfectly respectable goal, but why front?” At this point, Nick’s pinched expression finally got through to Pat’s brain, and he realized what should probably have been obvious all along. “Dude. Don’t tell me you identify with that douche?”
“What if I do?” Nick was all stiffness, hard angles and heroically forbidding frown. His mouth had turned priggish and thin, like he’d sucked on a lemon.
“No way. You’re nothing like him.” Surely that wasn’t how Nick saw himself, because that would be both ridiculous and sad. “You don’t crash through the world like some self-righteous yahoo while regurgitating propaganda. You’re so much smarter and — open-minded, or whatever. I mean, you’re willing to look and really see things. You always want to know the truth, isn’t that what you said? Even if it hurts. Even if it’s messy and complicated and inconvenient, and means you have to change your mind. You want to see the shades of gray. That guy in the opera, he’s more like Star Knight. All proud chest and boomed maxims, no active brain.”
Nick blinked at Pat rather dumbly and didn’t immediately reply, so Pat looked around for the hovering attendant and waved her over for a drink. Might as well take advantage of being on this end of the serving heart for an evening, right? Plus, the bubbly would just go flat if he didn’t drink it. No sense letting it go to waste.
“Nicholas! What an unexpected pleasure.” A willowy brunette in a shimmery blue dress came up next to them, smiling brightly at them both. She was very pretty, in a classy kind of way. “How are you enjoying the performance?”
A slightly too-long beat passed in silence, and Pat jumped in quickly before awkwardness could take over. “It’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? Especially the queen. She’s my favorite. The bird creatures also rock hard, though.”
The woman smiled politely and gave Nick an expectant look, but Nick didn’t have anything to contribute.
“I’m Pat, by the way,” said Pat, and held out a hand for the woman to shake. She did so after a moment, the pressure of her fingers around his brief and cool.
She didn’t introduce herself, and neither did Nick. The conversation was pretty much a total loss from the start. Pat didn’t get what was wrong, but whatever it was, it only got worse once Nick finally cracked open his jaw and forced out a couple of monosyllabic commonplaces.
The older gentleman who drifted over after another moment (evidently the woman’s father) ignored Pat entirely. It seemed like a pretty dumb tactic to Pat, honestly; no matter how he was dressed, Pat was clearly accompanying Nick. If these two wanted to get in good with the man, as they clearly did, then ignoring his chosen companion seemed a lot like shooting yourself in the foot before even beginning the fight.
Pat pondered voicing this observation aloud, but decided it would probably put Nick in an even more unpleasant position. It was clear Nick was already entirely uncomfortable with the situation, so Pat simply excused himself instead, wandering over to one of the walls, where a sequence of life-sized pictures of past performances breathed drama and passion into the room.
It took about half a minute for Nick to join him. Pat couldn’t help but slant a sideways grin at him as he shouldered in close, pushing Pat half a step to the side even though there was plenty of room, and he wouldn’t have had to touch him at all.
“So, did you watch any of these performances?”
Nick hadn’t, or at least couldn’t remember. When they checked the little labels next to the frames, they found the images were from classic performances — the most recent one had been taken when Nick was a toddler. Unfortunately, this meant that Nick was at a loss to explain why the singers were posing so dramatically. Nearly all of them were clutching at some body part or other (with chests clearly in the lead as most popular clutch site), faces distorted in various flavors of hyper-strong emotion. Frequently — and this was Pat’s favorite thing — they were also holding out their free hand pleadingly while staring into thin air, exactly as though they were imploring an escaped pet bird to land in their palm.
“This guy here turned up way overdressed for yoga,” Pat theorized when they reached a pic showing an elaborately be-robed older man on his knees, both arms raised above his head. He’d finally let Zen drag him to her yoga class the other week, and this dude would have fit right in. “He’s probably trying to impress someone, but he’s sure gonna regret wearing that crown when they get to the part where you rest your forehead on the ground. Good posture, though. Shoulders down, back straight…”
Nick laughed, and there was definitely a little triumph flavoring the smirk Pat shot him. So what if the pretty brunette in the shimmery dress wore a necklace worth more than Pat’s entire apartment building? She couldn’t make Nick laugh.
Another picture and a theory about a plague of rugs falling from the sky further on, Nick’s hand bumped against Pat’s. A moment later his fingers curled around Pat’s. When Pat glanced over, he seemed entirely absorbed in the image of the swooning opera singer and the threatening pile of floor coverings.
Pat threaded his fingers through Nick’s and smiled stupidly at nothing, heart skipping several beats.
Everything went to hell after the intermission. Pat should have expected it — had expected it, in a way. He’d known the awesome witch queen wasn’t going to win the fight against the overbearing secret society; the
story wasn’t set up that way. It should have been, though. It so should have been, and by the time the curtain fell and people began to applaud, Pat was deeply disgusted with this stupid opera, the stupid audience, and pretty much the entire world, in which not even fictional witch queens were free to be awesome in peace.
“I have a table waiting at the best restaurant in the city,” Nick said, right into Pat’s cloud of gloom and doom. “It has a breathtaking view of most of the city, and the river too.”
Something in his tone caught Pat’s attention, piercing even his despondency over seeing a proud, glorious witch queen brought low by a bunch of self-righteous bores in robes. Nick was watching him very closely, and for once, there was no sign of the pyrokinetic stare. “The food is excellent there, too, but… I feel like I’m doing this all wrong. I shouldn’t be trying to impress you like this. It’s only that I am not sure what else to do.”
Down in the main part of the auditorium, people were on their feet, clapping and cheering as the curtain rose again to allow the singers to take their bows. Pat glanced at the stage distractedly. The entire cast, including the happily flushed witch queen, was applauding the douchy hero, who was smiling fit to burst.
“Nothing wrong with impressing me, dude,” Pat said, slowly. He wasn’t sure what Nick was getting at, and it was totally distracting that from the corners of his eyes, Pat could see the queen actually hugging the secret society bigwig. “I mean, it sucks the queen didn’t get to rule her magical kingdom of coolness, but other than that, this has been a totally awesome night so far.”
Nick shook his head impatiently. “Yes, because you loved the story and the music, Pat. You would have loved them just the same squeezed in a cheap standing room area. I got lucky, that’s all. I got lucky because it’s you, and you were impressed by all the right things, and not at all by my wealth and influence. Which is a good thing, to be clear. A very good thing. It just means I’m flying blind. I’ve been flying blind from the beginning, with you. If I was on a date with Sophia, I’d go to that restaurant, and she would love it. But you’re not Sophia. And I don’t want you to be.”
With a vague sense of wonder, Pat realized that what he was witnessing here was the Nick version of babbling.
If Sophia was the woman in blue, did that mean Nick had dated her before, or was he just using a hypothetical example? Did Nick even date women at all, in a non-hypothetical way? Not everyone was open to the charms of both genders the way Pat was, and the companions listed in the AI’s database had all been male.
Maybe Nick simply never dated anybody (much like Pat, though likely for very different reasons). Considering the social awkwardness, the way he routinely and habitually locked himself away in his lab, and all the companions…
And now he was trying to date Pat, despite everything. He had little to no experience, and he’d chosen a guy who was possibly the most difficult and unpromising dating prospect of all — but of course he’d still want to do the best possible job of dating him, in his typically weird, obsessive Nick way. No wonder he was nervous.
Pat needed a second to just breathe, because there was a weird lump in his throat. He managed to swallow, and finally produced a smile, waggling his eyebrows to try and get Nick to relax the steep angle of his brows. Nick shouldn’t look so worried; he wasn’t the one who’d made a mess of things. And besides, it was all good. Pat wasn’t hard to impress, really.
“No worries, bro. You don’t have to try so hard, you know? I mean, it’s cool that you want to, that’s actually seriously flattering. It’s just, you don’t have to. I’m easy.”
That made Nick’s gaze sharpen and narrow alarmingly. Pat nearly looked down at himself to check his hoodie wasn’t smoldering. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I have to try hard for you, Patrick. There is nothing easy about you.”
Something super weird was happening here, and Pat didn’t actually get it. Even so, he was so rattled he couldn’t even leer at the double entendre. His breathing was off, too; it wanted to stick in his chest, all shivery with nervous longing.
“Patrick West.” Nick was getting alarmingly good at the pyro thing; Pat could feel his face growing hotter beneath his dark, focused stare. “I feel like a falafel sandwich. How about you?”
Pat might not have known exactly what was going on right now, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew a good thing when it was sitting right in front of him, trying to set him on fire with its eyes and offering to buy him a sandwich. “Dude, say no more. I know just the place.”
~~~~~
Pat had never thought of Nick as the sneaky type. He was smart enough to qualify, no question, but he lacked the deviousness and the tricky byzantine streak that it took. Even so, Pat found himself wondering if Nick had remembered there was a Turkish take-out place right across the street from Pat’s apartment — if that was why he’d suggested falafel instead of one of his more customary late-night snack choices, like boeuf bourgoignon, or pizza, or squid ink pasta with baby scallops. Or pizza.
Whatever the motivations for Nick’s untypical falafel cravings, Pat was absolutely on board. The Alibaba made a wicked falafel… and what better reason could there be to invite Nick up to his place than the frosty bite of the night breeze, which made eating outside uncomfortable? Man, Pat was so smooth he impressed even himself.
The plastic bag holding their falafel sandwiches warmed Pat’s cold hands all the way up to his apartment. He was pretty sure he was grinning like a loon.
“You took it off,” Nick said, as soon as Pat’s door had fallen shut behind them. When Pat threw him a glance, he was smiling a subtle, private little smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and softened his entire expression into warmth.
What? Pat hadn’t taken anything off yet, not even his jacket. What was Nick talking about?
Pat followed the man’s gaze back to his couch… which was adorned with the new beige throw Pat had tucked over the battered cushions. (New in the sense that Pat hadn’t had it long; he’d gotten it at the second-hand store downtown. It had a weird border of patchwork owls, but it did a great job of concealing the mysterious stains the sofa had come equipped with.)
Oh, right — the Jaguar couch cover. Yeah, Pat had taken that off. He’d have felt weird having Cat over for movie marathons while Jaguar’s naked torso was plastered all over his couch, as though he were some sort of creeper perving on her dad. Which he absolutely wasn’t, okay. His adolescent crush on Jaguar had been totally above-board and non-creepy. Plus a really long time ago.
Now, though, with Nick smiling at him as though he’d been super thoughtful, Pat wished he’d taken the cover off specifically for Nick. He would have, if he’d thought of it. Probably. Or maybe not, because Nick’s face when he’d caught sight of it for the first time had been hilarious. If he’d known Nick was going to smile at him like that, though…
Pat caught himself swaying forward, and stepped back just in time. Whoa, there. No jumping the gun — he was boyfriend material, and he followed the dating rules. Food first, then talking it out, and then… well. Then they’d see.
Pat was out of paper towels (if you wanted to be exact, he’d never owned any to begin with), so he got two regular towels to spread out on their knees as they sat on his Jaguar-free couch to eat. Garlic sauce dripped down Pat’s hands before he’d even taken his first bite, so yeah, good call there.
“I’ve never had one of these.” Nick had a smear of sauce on his upper lip; Pat was such excellent boyfriend material that he hardly wanted to lick it off at all. Honest. “I have had falafel, of course, but not in sandwich form from a street vendor.”
Pat snorted and rolled his eyes. “It’s like you grew up locked in a luxury lab, seriously. I’m sorry you’ve had to live such a deprived life.”
The Alibaba’s down-market version of falafel seemed to do okay in comparison with whatever Nick’s gourmet chefs had served him. He polished off his entire sandwich in short order, at any rate, only raining down two small chunks of
tomato — which was considerably better than Pat did.
Pat was washing his sauce-sticky hands in the tiny kitchenette when Nick came up too close behind him, depositing his crumpled-up towel on top of the toaster for reasons known only to himself. He didn’t move away again, either, instead hovering right behind Pat like a creeper.
“I thought you were somebody else.”
The flatly uttered words thudded into Pat’s unsuspecting back like blows. He jerked around, splashing water everywhere before he could think to fumble behind his back, turning the faucet off by feel. His heart had dropped with shock; now, it began racing as adrenaline shot into his system.
He’d always been himself with Nick. He’d never pretended — well. He’d pretended to be a companion, sure. But apart from that… “No you didn’t.”
“You misled me.” Nick’s voice was so carefully controlled that Pat couldn’t even tell if he was angry. His expression was frozen and still, only his eyes burning with intensity.
Fuck. There was no denying that one. “Yes. I did.”
“I’m going to have to get to know you all over again, and that’s —”
“Fuck you, no you will not!” Pat would have kept his mouth shut and heard Nick out — it’s what he’d planned on doing, and it was the least of what he owed him — but it was impossible when the man was spouting such bullshit. “I wasn’t pretending to be someone else, I was always just me. Myself. I didn’t pretend with you at all. I don’t… I wouldn’t.” That last thought twisted itself up in Pat’s mouth; he couldn’t get it out coherently, and barely managed to stop talking before he descended into babbling.
Nick blew out a deep breath that was too evenly controlled to be called a huff. “You were deliberately presenting yourself in the wrong context, Patrick.”
Context wasn’t the word Pat would have chosen for the difference between Padraig the hooker and Pat the ex-night manager, but he guessed it fit well enough. He got what Nick was saying, it was just… “Yeah, but context doesn’t, like, turn a giraffe into an elephant. It was still always me, not some kind of made-up pretend person.”
