Looking for Group - Alexis Hall Page 0,68
pressed right up against each other, wriggling and kissing, and trying to find places to put their hands.
“This is nice,” said Drew sleepily.
Kit answered with a murmur, drowsy and content. He rolled onto his other side, and Drew very naturally curled up round him. Only slightly self-conscious because kissing and closeness and stuff had sort of . . . well . . . if Kit had ever been worried Drew wasn’t into him, he now had, um, concrete evidence he was.
Drew was just dropping off when Kit suddenly twitched in his arms. “What’s wrong?”
“I just realised something.”
“Huh?” This was kind of worrying.
“We met a guy in the hive called Mourns-For-Trees.”
Now Drew twitched. “We should totally check that out. Can you remember where he is?”
“I remember he was wearing green.”
“I think I saw someone like that near the Flophouse but that might have been the weird guy who gave us the box we weren’t supposed to open.”
“It might have been down by the Burning Corpse, or maybe I’m thinking of Amarysse. We can look tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” Drew was smiling as he tucked his head against Kit’s neck. “We can look tomorrow.”
Between HoL, Frisbee, and coursework, Drew wasn’t able to visit Kit in person until Thursday. They’d raided together and hung out in the game a lot, but since Drew had got used to seeing Kit and, well, touching Kit, it wasn’t quite the same.
He was just stuffing his toothbrush and a spare pair of boxers into his laptop bag when someone banged on his door, and before he could respond, Sanee barrelled in and settled into the chair like he was camping a spawn point.
“New Mortal Kombat. Tournament. My place. Right now.”
Drew stared for a long moment. Then pointed at his bag o’ pants.
“What?”
“I’m spending the night at Kit’s.”
Sanee shrugged. “Bring him along. There’s no better way to meet a bunch of people than to have them rip your spine out.”
Drew was kind of aware he’d been blowing Sanee off for a week, but he was pretty invested in a romantic one-on-one evening with Kit and a retro video game. And replacing it with a violent beat ’em up and an undisclosed number of his mates was just . . . not something he wanted to do. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got plans.”
“But do your plans involve buckets of CGI blood, creepily detailed boob physics, and the opportunity to explode heads as a thunder god in a stupid hat?”
“Well, no,” Drew admitted. “It involves getting to see my boyfriend when I haven’t since Sunday.”
“You saw him on Tuesday. That’s why you didn’t come to the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out.”
“We were in HoL. And we were running dungeons with two of his friends from the guild.”
Sanee was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “Mate, are you saying that you skipped the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out so you could pretend to be an elf in a video game?”
Sanee had a point. It had been fun hanging out in HoL, but Drew had been slightly paralysed by the knowledge that other stuff was going on and he wasn’t there. Kit might have made peace with missing out, but a tiny part of Drew still thought he should be doing everything, and he could never quite shake the fear that the best experience of his life was happening right now to somebody else. “It was the only time we could do it, and Kit has a regular Tuesday night thing with Morag and Ialdir, so it was really important to him.”
“So, you didn’t hang out with your real friends because your boyfriend wanted to hang out with his imaginary friends?”
Drew stole a look at the time on his mobile. Sanee was clearly upset and that was stressful, but he had somewhere to be—somewhere he really wanted to be—and that was also stressful. Basically this was just stressful. “I’d already agreed, and the Tuesday thing is always a bit up in the air. Like, last week we spent about two hours debating whether to play board games or watch a movie and then didn’t do either.”
“This is a total mischaracterisation of what happened. We played Munchkin.”
“Dude, nobody actually likes Munchkin. It’s just bland enough that no one can strongly object to playing it.”
Sanee gave him a wounded look. “Well, then, object next time. Don’t just go along with it, and then throw it in my face a week later.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was a one-off. I’m not one