Page 48 of Playing for Keeps in Starr's Fall
Maggie had to bite her tongue to keep from pointing out that Ben hadn’t mentioned those rather salient details during their discussion. In any case, she should have winkled them out, and even if she hadn’t, she should have asked Zach about it before launching into her tirade.
“Why did you get so mad at him?” Ben complained. “He had nothing to do with it. I mean, notreally.”
“Well, like I said, I was in a temper,” Maggie replied, although already she suspected that the reason was a bit more complex than that. If she were being entirely, and uncomfortably, honest with herself—and not necessarily with her son in this moment—some scared part of her had been looking for a reason to back away from Zach. As lovely as their kiss had been, it had also terrified her. And not just the kiss, but the intensity of her own feelings. She’d needed an excuse to escape, and the whole meme episode had unfortunately provided it. “I’m trying to make it right,” she told Ben. “I apologized to him?—”
Ben straightened, then leaned forward in his chair. “You saw him?”
“No,” Maggie admitted, “I messaged him.”
Her son rolled his eyes. “You know that’s not the same thing. You told me that all the time when I wanted to be homeschooled. ‘Nothing beats face-to-face communication,’” he mimicked in a falsetto that was definitely not how she sounded. At least she hoped not.
“And yet I let you do school online,” Maggie reminded him. “But I was right. Face-to-face is always better.” She was really shoveling in the humble pie today. Should she approach Zach directly? The thought made her insides fizz with anxiety and a tiny, treacherous bit of excitement. It had been over an hour since he’d seen her message, and he still hadn’t replied. What did that mean? She didn’t want to second-guess him, but it was hard not to. Hard not to fear the worst, that he just wasn’t interested anymore.
“So are you going to talk to him?” Ben pressed.
“Yes, I will,” Maggie agreed, with some reluctance. That was sure to be an awkward and uncomfortable conversation, but it was one she knew she needed to have. “Now, since Zach isn’t playing RainQuest with you at the moment, what about teaching me how to play?”
Ben stared at her in disbelief. “You?”
“Why not?” Ben had asked her to learn before, but Maggie had always been reluctant. Now she knew she wanted to share in something that her son loved. “I’m meant to be running this boardgame café, after all,” she reminded him. “I need to know how these games work for when you’re not there. RainQuest is a boardgame as well as an online one, right? We stock it downstairs?”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed cautiously, “but I didn’t think it was your thing.”
“Well, it isn’t,” Maggie admitted with a smile, “but it’s yours, and that makes me want to know how to play it.”
Ben swiveled around to face the computer. “Well, it’s pretty complicated,” he warned her, “but I guess I can teach you the basics.”
Maggie smiled at his dubious tone, knowing already that she would find the basics challenging enough. She pulled out a chair and drew it next to Ben before settling down. “Okay,” she told him. “Show me.”
Ben started taking her through the fundamentals of the game, and after ten minutes, Maggie’s brain hurt.
“So you have to choose a class, species, and occupation for your character, and all those things affect your… stats?” she clarified, trying to keep track of all the different options.
A smile tugged at Ben’s mouth as he rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Mom, I covered that ages ago. Keep up.”
“Sorry…” Zach had told her what species she would be, she recalled, and she’d forgotten to look them up. What had they been? She racked her brain trying to remember, and then she saw it on the screen and pointed. “Ben, what’s an… aasimar?”
“An aasimar? Why?”
“I’ve just never heard of it before.”
“It’s a planetouched humanoid descended from a celestial,” he read off the screen, before clicking on the icon so Maggie could read the description.
Aasimar grew up cautious around others, sometimes misunderstood. With an inherent bent toward empathy for others, they can be easily hurt. They will openly strike at evil, but never if it endangers an innocent.
She swallowed hard. That all felt weirdly revealing, like Zach had seen something in her she hadn’t even meant to show him. Was she easily hurt?
“And a shadar-kai?” she asked, recalling the other option Zach had given her.
Ben clicked on the relevant icon, and Maggie read the description.
Shadar-kai were originally trapped in the Shadowfell by the Raven Queen, unwilling to enter the Fortress of Memories. While they are hardier than other elves, thanks to the Raven Queen’s curse they can be mournful, yet they also have strong magical abilities to resist evil and ultimately they can do much good.
Wow. Zach had really understood her and her grief in a way she was only beginning to understand herself. She felt both strangely vulnerable and also touched that he’d seen so much and found a gentle way to tell her. He’d wanted to know what she’d thought, she remembered. She wished she’d looked up the descriptions earlier. Maybe then she would have understood that Zach had far more depth to him than she’d so unkindly assumed, back when she’d confronted him and hurled all those hurtful things like burning arrows.
She checked her phone again; still no message.
“Mom?” Ben broke into her thoughts. “We’re moving on now, okay?”
