Looking for Group - Alexis Hall Page 0,81

you may be failing to account for the essentially arbitrary and constructed nature of social conventions, and for their variability between seemingly similar groups.”

Drew was so not in the mood for this.

“If someone gave me a quid everytime you said arbitrary, convention, or constructed, I would own all the expansions for this game by now, and there are a shitload.” Apparently neither was Sanee.

She blinked. “I just meant that maybe he didn’t know how rude you’d think he was being.”

Steff squeezed behind Sanee’s chair and wrapped her arms around him. “He was definitely being a bit weird, but you shouldn’t just let him walk out like that. You know the rule, Squidge, never go to bed angry.”

There was a thoughtful moment. Then Sanee shamelessly one-eightied.

“She’s right.” He turned his head and nuzzle-nibbled the inside of Steff’s elbow. “That’s how we do it, and look at us. If I don’t deal with stuff when it comes up, it just bugs me forever.”

Steff nodded. “It’s true. He got superangry at one xkcd strip and then never read it again.”

“Fine.” Drew pushed away from the table. “I’ll go after him. Whatever.”

Andy, who had been keeping his head firmly down since zombiegate, risked a comment. “Um, look. I’m not the biggest relationship expert here, but I kind of think ‘fine, whatever’ isn’t the best strategy for making up with someone.”

“Okay.” Drew made a show of sitting down again. “I’ll stay. Just make up your minds.”

Tinuviel put away the last of the fast zombies. “Andrew, stop projecting. It’s terribly clichéd. Either go after your boyfriend because that’s what you want to do. Or stay. Because that’s what you want to do. But there’s no point getting angry with us because we didn’t cause the situation and we can’t fix it.”

Drew opened his mouth and closed it again. Pointless or not, he still felt pretty angry. And he kind of knew it wasn’t fair but . . . that wasn’t how anger worked. It just happened. And was there. He fumed helplessly for a minute or two. And, very gradually, managed to dig through everything until he realised that he was mostly upset at his friends because he’d been relying on them to tell him what to do. In fact, it wasn’t even that. He wanted them to tell him to go after Kit so he could do it without it turning into this big public statement of what a dick he’d been.

Even if Kit had been a dick first.

“So I’m going to, um . . . Sorry.” He got up again, grabbed his coat, and went after Kit.

He told himself he wasn’t going to run. Honestly, he’d probably missed the guy anyway, so he’d just wind up looking stupid. Sort of like when you ran to catch a bus and it pulled away just as you got to it, leaving you breathless on the kerb with everybody staring.

Aaaaaand he was running.

Shit. Shitshitshit.

He caught up to Kit at the bus stop—where, ironically, there was no bus, pulling away or otherwise. Just Kit. Still on his mobile.

Drew was about thirty-percent mindlessly angry, thirty-percent sorry, and forty-percent really not sure what the hell was going on. Now he was here, now they were both here, he realised he didn’t have a clue what to say. In the end he went with, “Uh, hi.”

Kit looked up. They might have both been there in practice, but he seemed a million miles away. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

And, with that, he went back to texting.

Drew was now seventy-percent mindlessly angry and about two-percent sorry and fuck knew about the rest. “For fuck’s sake, Kit. Do you even want a boyfriend and friends? Or do you want to sit alone in your room playing HoL for the rest of your life?”

“Right now, I just want you to leave me alone.” Kit’s thumbs skimmed ceaselessly across the gently glowing surface of his smartphone. “And I’ve got friends.”

Drew literally threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Holy crap, for the last time, they are not your friends. They are just people you play a video game with. And when you stop playing that game, or if anything happens that they don’t want to deal with, you will never hear from them again.”

He’d started strong but, for some reason, all his anger was draining. And now he was just sad. Really fucking sad. “I raided with Annihilation three times a week for three years and the moment I stopped being