Page 40 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
“Yeah, totally.” Wesley felt the fear in his chest release in a flutter of butterflies and exhaustion. “I’ll see you Sunday.”
5
“So it’s a date?”
“It’s not a date!” Wes curled his toes over the side of the couch’s armrest, shooting a scowl toward the little video of Kendall at the edge of his second screen. “We’re just friends.”
“Friends with benefits.”
“Not those kinds of benefits!” He lifted his controller a bit to the left as he directed his mage to form a defensive shield on that side.War Callhad been Kendall’s first choice but right now that game reminded him too much of Babcock. “To your right, there’s a—”
“Got it.” Kendall’s character glowed shortly before releasing a blast at the veiny, dragon-like monster charging her through one of the gaps in the labyrinthine coliseum. “He agreed to put his mouth on your skin.”
“That’s how vampire biteswork.”
“You said he called it a kink!” Kendall shouted at him, then whooped as her target dropped dead. “Take that, you motherfucker. God, I love this spell.”
Wes rolled his eyes. “Kinks can be non-sexually intimate, I looked it up. There’s like, whole tiny communities of people who are into certain kinky shit just for the emotional return.”
“So you’re literally giving him a piece of your body, he’s at least emotionally invested in sustaining your kink, and he’s agreed to continue this on a regular basis. Pretty sure that’s dating.”
“Also pretty sure that if he wanted to date, he would have said something by now. He’s had every opportunity.” Wesley vaulted his character onto the next monster’s back as he said it, shoving his sword through the back of the creature’s skull. It only lost a quarter of its health, which seemed a bit unreasonable considering he was spearing it through the brain. Maybe it had four brains. That, at least, would make more sense than whatever he had or didn’t have with Vincent.
“Haveyousaid anything during all these opportunities?”
“Fuck no. I already had to tell him about the whole kink business. There’s no way I’m pushing things.”
“You really like him.” They were soft words, and when Wesley glanced at Kendall’s version of the screen, her character had stopped moving. Her brows were tight in a tender way that made Wesley want to duck behind the couch for cover.
“Yes, I get it, you’re happy I have a crush again finally. The world is back in order.” He didn’t mean to sound so snippy, but the way she was acting stripped down something inside him, making him feel raw. He launched a detonating spell at the newest two enemy monsters,
Kendall’s character continued standing still as she stared at him through the feed.
“You going to help me here or not?” Wes snapped.
“No, Wes…” She set her controller down.
Wesley was pretty sure this was the first time she’d ever done that by choice in their entire five-year friendship and it terrified him; terrified him just enough that he couldn’t think of a way to redirect the conversation.
“I have seen you blow up so many potential relationships by throwing yourself into them full force until they fizzle out or combust, then spring forward after like nothing happened.”
“This is not the comfort you think it is, Kendall.” Wes grit his teeth, scowling as he tried to take down one of the monsters on his own while out maneuvering the other.
“No, hear me out.” Kendall looked at him like she was trying to cast a spell through their video chat. “You’ve never cared enough for the people you’ve dated to… to gentle your edges for them, I guess. And maybe that’s okay in a lot of ways because if someone doesn’t actually want you for all of who you are, then going too far with them just hurts you both. But you’re scared of Vincent seeing the whole you. Because youlikehim and you’re afraid of ruining things with him.”
“It’s not that,” Wesley protested, barely dodging a volley of acid breath in the game. Somewhere behind him, Kendall’s character had died but she didn’t seem to care. “It’s just that I think Vincent has been hurt before. I know he has;Ihurt him. I don’t want to accidentally hurt him again. I don’t want to ruin this.” He put the last words together slowly, his brain fitting them piece by piece beside Kendall’s assertion and finding an exact match. His hands drifting towards his lap, fingers stalled over the controls. On the screen, one of the monsters drove its horns through his character’s torso, and around lostnotification appeared. It didn’t seem terribly important suddenly. Nothing seemed terribly important, except Vincent and the way the thought of him fleeing now made Wesley’s chest feel like his game character’s, ravaged and bleeding. “Fuck.”
“It’s okay,” Kendall said gently.
“Fuck,” Wesley repeated. His eyes stung. He launched his controller into the pile on the floor. “Well, what the hell do I do about it?”
“I don’t know.” Kendall ran a hand through the short spikes of her hair as she leaned back, nearly out of view of her camera. “But you’ve got to tell him. It’s hard. I know it’s hard. God, it took me three months to ask out Leoni! And then three months after that she had to ask me whether or not we were dating. Relationships are a fucking minefield and if there were right answers then someone would have written them in a book and gotten really rich by now.”
“Pretty sure there’s lots of rich people with books on dating.”
“Yeah but they’re all straight and white and mostly wrong, so they don’t count.”
Wesley sighed, flopping his head against the top of the couch. “What if Vincent and I just keep doing the thing we’re doing now and I don’t say anything and it stays like this until we die? That’s an option, too, right?”
