Page 64 of Branded
Or maybe it was that they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
Still, even though I’d gotten one syllable out.
Even though I was studying their faces, my heart pounding, searching for that impatience with half my brain, while the other half braced and also tried to formulate the proper response, vacillating between the two of them.
But even as they waited, as the silence stretched, nothing crept in. No snarky undertones or disappointment or barely concealed fury.
Just two men content to sit there until I got myself together.
The tension in my body relaxed, the pencil I’d been spinning in my hands slowing down until it stopped, and I managed to reach up and set it on my desk.
“Yes,” I said. “I play it.”
A ripple of excitement. “Please, tell me that you’ve gotten the new update. What do you think of…?”
He described some of the new types of game play—being able to look through their dragon’s eyes as they flew, the new guild component and online cooperative quests, going on about them in a way that only a true fan of the game could. Which relaxed me further and I was able to chime in about my level and my guild name and the current quest.
“No way,” he breathed. “I’m not nearly ready for that. My druid is only a level sixty-four.”
I smiled. “I was lucky enough to work with one of the developers before he went off and started working on the game. He let me play a beta copy,” I admitted. “So, I was able to get a jump on some of the inner workings when the real version was released.”
His eyes went wide. “No way,” he said again.
Which had me biting back a smile, because he wasn’t all that young, maybe a year or two younger than my twenty-seven, but he was young in life, I thought. Sweet and kind and funny and…not saddled by a dark past.
Dark past?
My mother was more interested in her own life than mine, and my dad was an asshole.
A giant, insensitive asshole with a pocketful of money and an inferiority complex that meant he needed to make himself bigger and smarter and wealthier and better than everyone else.
Baggage, yeah.
But not exactly a dark past.
Or at least, I was trying to not live in the dark any longer.
A move, new friends—new nerdy friends I was actually able to talk to, even after Raph joined in on the conversation (though it was quickly evident that the widely-known prankster wasn’t into video games and had tagged along for reasons only known to himself).
So maybe less of a dark past and more of a bright future.
Yeah, I liked the sound of that.
A lot.
“Did you want to see if I could get you an invite to my guild?” I offered unexpectedly, several minutes later.
Theo’s face lit up. “You’d do that?”
I smiled. “Of course.”
“That would be epic,” he declared, showing me his youth again, and with his enthusiasm sweeping through the room, I felt very young, too. Young and light, or maybe bright and clean and…not anxious.
Myself.
I felt like myself.
First Oliver. Then Hazel and Smitty. Now Raph and Theo.
