Page 96 of Bite Marks

My eyes lingered on the railing above. I could almost see her there, leaning over to look down at us with her hand out to ask for more tokens. Her hard hair pulled back from her face into a messy bun, a few strands framing her thin face, and intelligent blue eyes crinkled at the corners as she laughed.

“Earth to Dana?” Vi prompted, drawing my gaze to her.

I cleared the lump from my throat, forcing a smile.

Come on, Dana, get your head in the game.

“A bit dull… I like the driving sims, or maybe the shooting games?”

“Shooting,” Vi echoed with a pointed raise of her dark eyebrow that had it disappearing behind her bluntly cut bangs. “Right… Show me how it's done?”

“You got it, darling,” I said with a grin, leading her over to theTime Crisiscabinet, the red and blue handguns waiting for us invitingly.

“Do you come here a lot?” she asked, watching as I loaded the machine with coins for both of us to play.

“Used to, yeah. I like to come here when I need to clear my head. Keeps my hands busy... Sort of like boxing, but with less, you know,hitting.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

“I didn’t realize you knew Danny.”

“I didn’t realize you were Danny’s kid sister,” I returned with a shrug.

“I’ve never seen you at the gym before,” she pressed.

“Yeah, well… I haven’t been going that long.” I picked up the red gun and handed it to her before collecting the blue for myself. “But after a while, the games weren’t enough, and I needed something more physical to get the, uh… energy out.”

“Right, right…” she said vaguely, clearly torn between wanting to ask but not wanting to overstep.

I admired that about Vi. She was considerate, good at thinking about others.

Their needs. Their wants.

It made me want to give more of myself to her. Even if I wasn’t quite sure how the hell I was supposed to do that.

“Have you fired a gun before?” I asked, mostly to buy myself some time.

She shook her head, hefting the plastic model in her hands.

“A real one? No. I haven’t even seen one in person before. But these? Yeah… I’ll warn you, though—I’m fucking terrible.”

I scoffed. “Oh, come on, you can’t be that bad. We can even do a warm-up round, okay?’

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she sing-songed, raising the gun with both hands like she was preparing forwar. She pulled the trigger with an audible click, and the game started, prompting me to do the same.

I shot the screen absently, trying not to think about what Vi would look like dressed as Chun-Li… or Lara Croft.

The low-level alien monsters didn’t stand a chance against me, moving too slowly with too few health points to cause me any worry. I took them out easily, racking up point after point while the game rattled and banged. Vi, however, hadn’t been lying about her lack of skill. We were only a few minutes in before the game was asking for more tokens, alerting me that my little bartender had already run out of lives.

“Shit. I told you…” she muttered, flattening her bangs anxiously.

“Just a warm-up round, right?” I said, fishing in my bag for more coins and depositing them before setting some more onto the stand where the guns rested. “Just in case you need them, but you won't. You got this.”

“I think you’re crazy if you think I’m magically going to get any better at this,” she said sarcastically, shooting the screen to start the game again, but it wasn’t long until she continued, “Is it rude if I ask why the games stopped working for you?”

“Not really,” I said, firing on several aliens that looked like large, bloated ticks as they began to crawl on the screen, taking care of a few on Vi’s side too. “When Cherie got sick, I was just… angry,” I admitted. “She, uh, didn’t tell us for a while. Not until she absolutely had to. I think maybe we would’ve made more of an effort to spend time together if we’d known. And I felt—I don’t know. Cheated, I guess? Guilty, maybe? Still feel guilty sometimes?—”

Vi interrupted me with a loud curse, her finger pressing the trigger as quickly as she could as she desperately tried to get a lock on her alien, health meter steadily decreasing.

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