worry, Dave’s got you covered.”
Their waiter emerged, and set a pizza down in front of each of them, before producing an enormous peppermill and brandishing it threateningly until they both insisted they didn’t want any.
“Anyway,” Kit went on, “the opera is basically one of three random scenarios all based loosely on bits of actual theatre. At least I think they are. They’re pretty weird.”
“Which one did you get?”
“Koblencrantz and Gildenbold Are Dead. Have you ever done Trollheim?”
“Isn’t that the really crappy raid that was all just trolls?”
“Hey, it had a dragon at the end.”
“Oh, that’s fine then.”
Kit laughed. “The third or fourth boss was Gragthar the Slave Master. He had this big swarm of kobold minions who would run around and jump on people and sometimes explode. It’s the one with the famous YouTube clip of that champion charging a huge mob of kobolds, shouting his name, and then blowing up the whole raid.”
“Wait, is that ‘many kobolds handle it’?”
“No, that’s the other one. So this event is basically two of that guy’s minions wandering through a compressed version of the entire Trollheim raid, constantly missing it. You have to DPS them while they walk, and every so often a boss from another bit of the instance will spawn, and the tanks will have to pick him up, and the raid will have to cope with all those mechanics, while the kobolds walk past.”
Drew frowned over his pizza. “And the point of that is?”
“We never worked it out.”
It took a while, but Drew eventually stopped worrying about Making Conversation and just let it happen. They talked a lot about HoL, and the friends they had in common and a bit about friends they didn’t, sometimes about books, sometimes about university, all the time finding little points of similarity, difference, and connection. He learned other things too, like all the blues in Kit’s eyes, and the way he sometimes hid his smile behind his hand when he was nervous.
At Drew’s suggestion, they split a cheesecake for dessert, and laughing, Kit nudged the last decorative strawberry across the plate with his fork.
“I was going to use my nose,” he said, “but I remembered I wasn’t a loveable cartoon dog.”
There wasn’t really a good response to that, so Drew picked up the strawberry by the bit of leaf and held it out.
Kit eyed it apprehensively. “I’m sure this would be great in a movie but I’m probably going to mess it up.”
“It’s a strawberry. How badly wrong could it go?”
“I could get it stuck in my throat, the nice old lady over there could give me the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I could spit it into your face.”
“Wouldn’t it be worse if she didn’t give you the Heimlich manoeuvre and you just died?”
“If I was dead, I’d be a lot less embarrassed.”
“Look.” Drew mocked scowled across the table. “If we’re talking about being embarrassed, I’ve been sitting here, holding a strawberry for about five minutes now, while my boyfriend talks about spitting in my face.”
Kit gave a little moan. “Oh God, I’m hopeless at this.”
“And I have way overhyped a piece of garnish.”
Blushing slightly, Kit leaned forward, and took a neat bite of the strawberry. They’d dithered about it for so long, that Drew thought it had become a joke. Except it totally wasn’t. There was something weirdly intimate about it, just in offering, and being accepted.
Also it was, honestly, kind of sexy.
Having Kit that little bit closer. Being able to see tiny details like the flicker of his light-gold lashes, and a faint suggestion of shadow following the line of his jaw. How close his lips were to the tips of Drew’s fingers.
Flustered, he ate the other half of the strawberry and put the leaf back on the plate.
They were quiet for a moment.
“Boyfriend?” said Kit, who was still a little bit pink.
In the midst of all the excitement, Drew had forgotten about that. “Uh. Is that . . . Was that . . . uh.”
“No, it’s nice.”
And Kit put his hand over his mouth, and smiled.
After they’d awkwardly paid for each other’s food, which would have been really faffy if Kit hadn’t turned out to be good at mental arithmetic, they tumbled out onto King Street, where they stood about for a bit, shuffling.
Still slightly strawberry dazed, Drew went for it. “So, like, last time we were on a date, neither of us wanted to go home, but then we had to raid, so we kind of had to. There isn’t a