could eat and talk and play a bit of Torment and . . .” He blushed.
Consumed by <3, Drew threw his arms around Kit and kissed him, gentle at first, and then not so much. “This is the best,” he said, quite a bit later.
They settled down on the picnic blanket and tucked in.
Kit gave him a mischevious look from behind some walnut bread. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get any dough balls.”
“Well, that’s it. We have to break up.”
“I mean, you can get them. It’s just I don’t have an oven.”
“You know I’m not actually obsessed with dough balls, right? I do eat other things.”
“Like strawberries?” Kit produced a punnet from their place of cunning concealment inside a Tesco’s bag.
Now it was Drew’s turn to blush. “Yeah.”
Kit was kneeling a little primly on the edge of the blanket, the strawberries cradled in his lap. “Given the complexity of this encounter, I was thinking maybe we should . . . well . . . Practice makes perfect, you know.”
“Once you get the mechanics down, it’ll be a faceroll.” Drew leaned forward, plucked a strawberry from amongst its fellows, and held it out to Kit.
It was probably a combination of knowing each other better, having got more comfortable—a lot more comfortable—with touching, and not being in a Pizza Express full of strangers, but any raid leader would have commended their coordination, situational awareness, and teamwork. They even moved on to the hard-mode version, seeing how much they could tease each other’s fingers between bites. And then Drew deliberately dropped one and kissed Kit instead—his mouth as soft and sweet as the strawberries.
Once they were out of fruit and the remains of the picnic had been tidied away, they settled down on Kit’s bed, got his laptop, and disappeared into Torment, which was still as bewildering and intriguing as it had been on Saturday. Progress remained somewhat oblique, but Drew’s competitive spirit had kicked in, and now they were keeping extensive and detailed notes about who people were, what they wanted, and most importantly, where the hell they were standing.
They took it a lot slower than Drew would have if he’d been playing alone, but it was honestly more fun this way. They talked to basically everybody with a name and some people without names because Kit was slightly obsessive about it. They went everywhere and discussed everything, and got far too invested in tiny decisions, like whether they should spend their limited resources buying a pet Lim-Lim (Kit felt very strongly that they should) or whether they should tell random strangers their name was Adahn even though it wasn’t (Drew felt very strongly that they shouldn’t).
It was like they’d stumbled into a lost wilderness of gaming. Drew couldn’t remember the last time he’d played a game where he genuinely hadn’t known what he was supposed to do next, what was important, or what the consequences of his choices might be. He honestly couldn’t decide whether it was terrible game design that the industry had quite rightly grown out of, or if it was something special that had been lost. Perhaps it was a little bit of both.
In any case, the evening whisked by as they snuggled even closer to each other beneath the laptop, heads together, feet entangled. Annoyingly, the more Drew noticed his own enjoyment, the more worried he got about it.
Which meant he finally blurted out, “Kit, do you think we spend too much time playing games?”
Kit parked their party of randoms in a corner of the Gathering Dust bar, and gave Drew a slightly quizzical look. “Well, no. But I’m confused why you’re asking.”
“You don’t mind we just played a video game all evening?”
“Again, not particularly.” Kit’s brow wrinkled anxiously. “Do you? Are you not having fun?”
“No, no, I’m having a great time. It’s just we spend a lot of time in HoL as well.”
“That’s where my friends hang out. And I like playing it.”
Drew felt sort of confused and uneasy. He’d been thinking about this quite clearly on his way down, but now, he couldn’t make the ideas stick together right. It didn’t help that Kit seemed totally unaware of the possibility there could be a problem here. And that made him wonder if Sanee had thought the same thing about him. “But you have to have other things.”
“What’s this about?” asked Kit gently, closing the laptop and putting it to one side.
That was the point Drew realised he hadn’t brought this up as casually as he’d meant