the very first game our boss had ever worked on by himself as a teenager.
In the past twenty-four hours, Lucas had moved past me to become the high-scorer on the makeshift whiteboard-and-peg chart we’d devised to measure these things. I cocked my head, chewing a thumbnail, and squinted up at it. Lucas and I had been nudging and one-upping each other on that board for months. The third place holder wasn’t even close.
“You gonna let that stand? You two are so obsessed with beating each other that no one can keep up with either of you.” My coworker Joel’s snarky musing pulled me out of my quiet reverie. I glanced at him as he was pointing to Lucas’s winning score. It was temporary and we all knew it. I’d blow past him the next time I sat down to do another run on the game.
Except… except maybe I wouldn’t. Not anytime soon, anyway. As a silent way to thank him for all he’d done for me, I might let it stand. Even if he only had to miss a few lunches for the marriage license and “ceremony,” it was still a very kind thing he’d done.
Yeah, he needed me to help with the expansion, but… he probably could have done that without me.
I realized that I was smiling, a moment of tenderness tugging at my heart. In his own gruff way, he’d shown me some kindness.
With a shrug, I left Joel’s question unanswered as I drifted back to my desk, taking a few moments to do some full body stretches before I sat down. It was going to be another tedious crawl until quitting time so I had to take these chances where I could.
When I came up for air, pivoting to sink into my chair, I noticed that Lucas had entered the room. His gaze traveled from the leader board, down the length of the room lined with workstations. Most likely he was surveying who was still here and who was packing up to go.
When his eyes met mine, I sent him a tentative smile and a wink.
His neutral expression morphed into a scowl, eyes narrowing. With stiff shoulders and even stiffer bearing, he moved past my desk and grunted out a brusque “Back to work, Cranberry. If you’ve got time to daydream, you have too much idle time on your hands.”
I glared at his receding back, my own eyes narrowing as I sank into my chair. Happy wedding day to you, too, asshole.
Opening up my queue file with gritted teeth, I resolved to blast his lead out of the water as soon as possible.
Chapter 1
Lucas
Six Months Later…
There were whispers all around me. That was the first thing I noticed upon removing my headset. My eyes skimmed our corner of the Draco campus, not-so-affectionately dubbed the Den by its dwellers. It was an appropriate nickname, given that those inhabitants were the game testing department for Draco Multimedia Entertainment. Mostly the employees here looked deserving of hanging out in a place called the Den. Their dress and hygiene habits fit all too well with a place far from sunlight, in an underground habitat strewn with debris from past meals.
Rubbing my eyes to refocus them after long hours staring at the screen, I scanned the room to see if everyone was where they should be. Empty workstations lined the distant wall along the large bay windows. The team-leader’s desk, where I worked, was in the middle of the room. On the far side was a floor to ceiling scrum board covered with massive amounts of multi-colored sticky notes. This was marked into sections denoting where each task was in process toward completion: planning, in progress, complete, sidelined, escalated.
It looked like a drunk unicorn had wandered into The Den and puked a rainbow all over the wall. My eyes darted back to the cluster of people by the door—the source of the not-so-discrete whispering.
My colleagues were casting occasional glances my way as I watched them. Perhaps they were expecting me to break up their impromptu rally, but I was feeling generous. We had just come in under a nearly impossible deadline last week. It had been a long, hard push and many of them had pulled all-nighters in here to get it done.
So they were taking a little longer on their lunch break today. I didn’t sweat it when we weren’t under the gun.
During crunch time, there were no lunch breaks, no dinner breaks, no coffee breaks. Nor were there more than