Page 55 of How We Play the Game
She had sighed, rested her head on his shoulder (which, by the way, top five physical contact moment EVER), and grumbled into his shirt. “I guess. So now we’rerealdating for clout? That’s …”
“Convenient,” Ivan admitted.
“I was going to say ‘worse,’” Zora corrected. “But sure.”
After slipping back into the dorm along with the massive rush of fellow students, they wound up on the couch. The only light in the common room was coming from the illuminated menu screen forSuper Smash Bros., which they would eventually play that night—now that they’d mastered working as a team, they could get right back to destroying each other.Just not right then. There was more to talk about, and more important questions to ask.
“How did we not figure this out sooner?” Zora whined, quiet despite them having the dorm to themselves for the rest of the night.
“We’re dumb,” Ivan reasoned, his words partially muffled on account of his lips being pressed against Zora’s long, beautifully brown neck. “We’re so, so dumb.”
“The dumbest,” she’d agreed. “Kiss right above my collarbone.”
“And you’rebossy,” was one of the many words he’d said against her skin that night.
Ahem. But Ivan digressed. It was so much easier to maintain their romance hustle when it wasn’t a hustle at all. The chemistry between himself and Zora hadn’t necessarily changed, but the whole vibe of their #content was totally different when they weren’t wasting time fighting the metaphorical moonlight. They played better as well, with the Wizz-Algorithm skyrocketing both of them up in the ranks. In short, absolutely everything was coming up Ivan. At the end of August, Ivan looked forward to Zora taking her rightful place as Brian’s mentee, while he happily ascended to the captaincy of the New YorkGuardians League Onlineteam. Where his team would compete against Emilia and Jake, to whom he and Zora would continue to be compared, which would be bad because Ivan knew Emilia deserved a very wide berth when it came to him.
Nope. That was a tomorrow problem. Today, Ivan had leverage, ideas, and he had Zora.
“We need to talk,” Brian said within seconds of Zora closing the door behind her, leaving Brian and Ivan alone.
Well, that was never a good sign. Nevertheless, Ivan’s optimism refused to wane. The fact that Brian had asked Zora to join them on their walk to his office was a positive sign that things were going the way he’d hoped. Captaincy for him, and a mentorship for Zora, if they continued playing their cards right.
And assuming Brian Juno wasn’t about to do something wack, like right now.
Brian had a rolling table set up in front of his usual leather recliner and was hunched forward in his seat to tap at the keyboard of a Wizzard-branded laptop.
“You shouldn’t sit like that,” Ivan advised, eager to defuse the unusual tension in the room. “Terrible for your back.”
“I tell you what to do.” Brian’s voice was flat. Uncompromising. “Not the other way around.”
Ivan held his hands up. “Sorry, sheesh. Just looking out for your spine.”
“Look out for yourself,” Brian said, still short and cold. Ivan felt a sharp twinge behind his stomach. If everything was going as well as he thought, why did it feel like Ivan was about to get in trouble?
His answer came when Brian turned his laptop screen around. “Care to explain?”
Ivan squinted at the screen, his eyes not totally adjusted to the darkness from the brightly lit main hall, and made an informed guess: this was the backend of the summer academy members’ social accounts, which were technically owned by Wizzard. Brian had pulled out some data andauto-visualized it in a chart that showed some line or other trending slowly down.
“Explain what?” Ivan asked.
“Explain why you and Zora’s metrics have been trending toward the toilet since the first week of July.”
“They are?” It was news to Ivan. “But our rankings have barely dipped.”
“And then there’s this.” Brian clicked around and pulled up another window, this one with comments on Ivan’s latest stream.
> Is anyone else kind of over Zivan?
> I miss when they kinda sniped at each other
> Booooooring.
> Are Zora and Ivan bad at science? Because they’re failing chemistry
“That last one’s clever,” Ivan flattered sarcastically.
“The problem,” Brian began, in a tone that suggested Ivan must have failed more than just chemistry, “is that we’re in the last week of this program and things need to start heating up, not cooling down.”
