Chapter 70: Storytime
The apartment sweltered. Too hot. Too stale. Too small. How could I have ever wanted the landlord to turn the furnace on?
How could I have ever wanted Lena to tell me the truth?
I made myself meet her eyes. Hers were tight at the edges, like her mouth, pulled into a line.
I forced myself to say, “Okay.”
Lena looked down at my hand. She reached for it, but hesitated. “It is, huh?”
No. “I don’t know.”
“I liked you,” Lena said. “I still like you! But this is storytime. Okay?”
“Okay,” I repeated.
“This is before I moved in. I liked you, like, friend-liked you. And you were cute and we started online dating and you were really cute and I got curious enough to fool around with you in the calls, so I was like, hey, I liked you, like, boyfriend-liked you. And you seemed to like me!” She’d closed her eyes while she spoke. I didn’t know how to parse her expression. “So that was new.”
“New?” I raised an eyebrow. “No way. You’re adorable.”
She shifted in her chair. Uncomfortable with praise? With praise from me? Or with my choice of praise?
Or just with how she’d sat down? I hadn’t really given her the chance to perch gargoyle-style the way she liked to when she sat at her computer.
Whatever bothered her, she resettled herself and pushed on. “Apparently, some people find my personality abrasive.”
“Unthinkable,” I said.
She chuckled. “Being honest, I dunno if anybody was interested. I wasn’t very... approachable. I’ve told you about school, yeah?”
“You went to a...” I wracked my brain but the word wouldn’t come. “I know this is wrong but I’m going to say Monte Carlo school.”
My word choice got a little laugh from her so I considered it successful, if not accurate. “Montessori. For elementary. Where I learned, honestly, a lot. Also, got away with saying as little as possible to other kids.”
“Aren’t those schools supposed to be about collaborative learning?”
“And I collaborated the shit out of a team of myself, a couple of teachers I liked, and the squirrels I watched out the window.”
I laughed; she didn’t. “Come on,” I said. “There’s no way it was that bad.”
“It was great! My grades were good and nobody bugged me. But there wasn’t a school like that for middle school and up. I, uh, didn’t acclimate to standard school life.”
“So your parents pulled you out and homeschooled you. You’ve told me that.”
“I told you it went just like that, huh?” She tried to snap her fingers, but she’d never learned how. Her smile got real thin. “You don’t get it, Cam. You were a nerd, for whatever that means anymore, so you’re thinking you do, but you don’t. Skinny and six foot and you hung out with people who played Magic and Pokemon? I was skinnier and didn’t hit five foot till I turned nineteen, and I didn’t hang out with anyone. My parents didn’t pull me out to homeschool me, they pulled me out to save my life.”
“But you’re so –”
“Pushy? Bitchy?”
“I was going,” I said, “to say ‘confident.’”
She snorted.
“You’re saying you’re not?”
“In-game? Hell yes. Out?” She tried to shrug but her shoulders ended up sinking instead. “You know the one thing I learned in normal school? That if the teachers hate you ‘cause you’re ‘disruptive,’ and you’re the scrawniest person in the whole school? You learn to strike first, ‘cause you sure as hell won’t get the chance to strike back.”
“I don’t believe it’s just a defense mechanism,” I said. “You love a good fight.”
“You can believe what you want,” Lena snapped. “Hell. Maybe you’re right! Now. But if you are it’s ‘cause I’ve been faking it so long I really did make it. When we met I was scared shitless of so much as turning on voice comms.”
How long had Ashbird and I chatted in text before I first heard the ring of a Discord call from her? Months, even after we started spending every night swapping links and joking. Weeks, even after our meme swaps had been banished to our own private room.
I rubbed my thumb on the back of her hand. She let me.
After a moment, she shook her head. “And that was for games and online. I did college online, so after that I moved out of my folks’ house to prove to them I could make it in the world. The first thing I did was shut out as much of the world as I could.”
“So that’s what you meant,” I murmured.
“Huh?”
“When we went to your old place, you said it ‘made sense’ the fire would be in the hallway but not inside your apartment. It wasn’t that your Realm was on fire. It was that you made a moat of fire to keep people away from your Realm. Metaphorically.”
She nodded. “I didn’t plan on it, but... yeah.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. It just clicked for me what you meant.”
“It’s cool. And you’re right. Hell, that’s why I backed Third Eye so hard. I needed something to shock me out of how I was living. How I wasn’t living. That place was my world.” She shook her head. “What else did I have? Friends? You mean delivery boys? And a boyfriend? For some reason I never asked the delivery boys out.”
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“In fairness,” I said, “that would’ve put them in a pretty uncomfortable position.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t hit on people who are paid to talk to you. I know.” She sighed. “Maybe hit on somebody, though, sometime. My folks were pretty worried for a while that I wouldn’t find anybody. Remember when you asked me if I was aro?”
“When I tried to ask you out, you mean?”
“If you want to call it that. How was I supposed to know what ‘Do you want to be seeing anybody?’ meant?”
“I’m pretty sure it made sense in context. The last thing I’d asked was if you were seeing anybody.”
“Nope. Totally mystifying.” She shook her head. “Anyway, it was actually the second time I got asked that. Like a year before you and me started going out – online, I mean – Dad sent me a link to an aro-ace website and told me how getting out and meeting people didn’t have to mean a romantic relationship, how he and mom would support me no matter what.”
I knew I shouldn’t laugh, for a number of reasons, but I sort of snorted trying not to. “That’s extremely sweet and extremely your dad. Um. Are you saying he was right?”
“What? No. God. That would simplify shit. And complicate a bunch of other shit, I’m sure. Everybody’s got issues. No, I didn’t have time for relationships. Hadda stay in my grindset.” She thought about it for a moment. “People didn’t say grindset yet back then, did they?”
“Are people who say grindset unironically really people, even now?”
“You ask the tough questions.” Lena’s smile drained away. Flatly, she finished, “I was just awkward.”
“If somebody thought so,” I said, “they didn’t get what they were missing.”
“You’ll say that, but...” She let go of my hand and melted into her chair. “Ugh.”
I waited.
“We’re dating for a year.” She took a deep breath. Storytime again. “We haven’t met up yet IRL but you’re talking about getting dinner and a movie and we’re both local and I’m thinking it’s not so scary after all. And financials? My parents spotted me five grand ‘for emergencies’ when I moved out and I’ve burned it on Third Eye because I’ve got everything I need except the confidence to leave my apartment. Who needs savings? I’ve got a work-from-home job. It’s tech support, so it’s kinda miserable, but since I started talking to you, I’m doing phone as well as chat and that isn’t the reason it’s miserable, you know? Talking’s not so bad. And I’ve got a salary, health benefits. Health benefits! Can you imagine?”
“I can’t.” Who could? “You lost your job, too?”
“My job stopped being a thing,” she said. “I guess my boss’s boss’s boss owned two companies and cheated on the other one’s taxes. So all of us at mine got made redundant.”
Something else she’d never told me. “That really sucks.”
“It did,” she said. “So suddenly I’m here with an apartment I can’t afford a quarter of, savings I can’t get back, and if there’s any work it’s Out There where I’ve been hiding from. I’ve got option one. Sensible person option. Move back halfway across the country, find out if you want to keep doing long-distance, and admit to Mom and Dad I screwed up. You know what they’d say?”
“‘It’s so brave of you to start over, honey.’” I tried to put on an accent that reminded me of her dad, but he came from the same part of the midwest as newscasters are trained to. My voice just sounded excessively practiced. “‘You’re welcome to stay at home for as long as you need.’”
She gave a miserable nod. “How could I disappoint people like that?”
“Nobody could.” It sank in that if Lena was slowly, awkwardly, finally breaking up with me, that meant I’d probably never repeat my trip to her parents’. It was a small pain but an extra one.
“Right?” Her voice picked up speed. “So I’m looking for option two. The harebrained scheme! My internet boyfriend. Who I’ve never actually met IRL. I’ll ask him if we can move in together!”
“We’d met,” I said. “We caught the Solo matinee and got lunch. And hadn’t you come to a board game night with me?”
“Yeah. And I’d paid rent with my credit card for two months before and after. I was way out of work by then. C’mon, Cam. You’ve watched better heist movies than Solo. You can’t pull off a scheme without digging yourself in deeper first.”
“Jesus, Lena.” I gripped her hands. “I had no idea.”
“I convinced you, huh?” She grimaced. “I was being a shitheel but at least I was good at it.”
“I thought you were just excited.” I squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them. “Dammit. If you’d just told me what was happening I’d have let you room with me for as long as you wanted. You didn’t have to throw yourself at me.”
“What, were we gonna go to opposite wings of our palace and cyber?” She nodded around the apartment. “We barely have multiple rooms. When I moved in we literally had one bed!”
“And I literally said I’d sleep on the couch!”
“Yeah.” Her voice went soft and kind of distant and I didn’t understand why. “You were a pearl.”
I hadn’t slept on the couch. Lena’s insistence.
“So,” I said, “I guess that must have been terrifying.”
“What? You being a pearl?”
“You going from barely leaving your own apartment to living and sleeping with your internet boyfriend.”
“I guess it should’ve been,” she said, “but it never really felt like it. I went from running on adrenaline from my scheme to being treated like a goddamn queen. The only thing scaring me was you finding out what I’d pulled.”
“Pulled? You delighted me!” I squeezed her hands. “And you would’ve, less then but way more after, if you’d told me.”
“Bullshit!” Lena jerked away from my touch. “I scammed you! You loved me and I scammed you!”
“I slept with you when you were under duress!”
She blinked. “Wait. Is that what you kept trying to apologize for?”
“Oh for –!” I exhaled. “Yes!”
“Oh.” She scratched the back of her neck. “I guess I see how you’d see it that way.”
Ever since she told me about blowing her savings on Third Eye I’d been trying not to see it any which way, because no other came to mind. Add her losing her job to the pile? Add how she’d trapped herself in that apartment? I couldn’t begin to justify trying to think of something else. “It was that way.”
“I don’t agree, but if I say ‘apology accepted,’” she asked, “can we stop talking about this?”
Yes! “No.”
Her shoulders sank. “You suck.”
“Let’s finish this, Lena,” I said. “No schemes, no bullshit. We’ll be honest and then we’ll figure out how to make things work.”
“They won’t work,” she said.
“They will. We’ll make them. If you can stand being my roommate then it’ll be like it has been but without all this crap hanging over us. If not, we can talk to our friends about a place for one or both of us to crash.”
“If I can stand –!” She shook her head. “You think I want to leave? What the hell, Cameron?”
“You lost me.”
She gave an angry nod. “No shit!”
I stared. “Is the gag that I’m supposed to repeat ‘you lost me?’”
“There’s no gag!” She pushed her chair away. “I don’t know if it’s your guilt complex, or if you’re just bored, or if it’s you, or if it’s me. If it’s me, fair enough. But fucking say it!”
She surged to her feet and turned away, fists balled, shoulders shaking.
Jumping up to fold her into a hug was probably a terrible idea. I did it anyway. I thought she might shove me away. Instead she turned and buried her face in my chest.
I whispered, “Lena, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her gaze snapped up. “I’m talking about you breaking up with me!”