Page 1 of Win My Heart

ChapterOne

BERNIE

“Take that, you donkey-sucking asshole!”I yell at the screen while I maneuverer my character around the now slumped form in front of it.

Katie giggles in my headset, and I chuckle as well.

“I love your gamer trash talk, Bern,” my friend and current teammate says.

“Well, that dude has been baiting me and causing issues since we logged in,” I defend. I don’t normally use those kinds of words and my mother would be appalled. Heck, I would be appalled if my non-gamer self-heard me right now. My mother wasn’t super supportive of me becoming a pro gamer in the first place. I love her, but she’s never come to a tournament, which is fine, but if she heard me talking like this, she’d lose her mind for sure. I don’t have time to worry about that right now though, so I shake that thought off, because I’ve got a round to win.

“SharpKitty, behind you!” I shout into the mic as someone comes up behind Katie on the screen. She turns and does some fancy kick combo and easily takes down her enemy.

I glance at the comments and see that the stream is moving quickly.

“Sharp, when this round is over, I’m jumping out.” I run my character to the nearest safe zone and start scanning the comments. My screen kicks me out into the virtual lobby, and instead of jumping back in, I take time to reply to comments. I love Twitch because I can both reply via comments and talk to viewers. These live Twitch streams are so much fun.

Katie and I met a couple years ago at aCall of Battletournament and became fast friends even though she lives in Texas, and I’m in Chicago. To make up for it we live stream once a week together as our way of hanging out.

I won’t lie, I get twice as many views when the two of us stream together. I hold back an eye roll at the thought. It makes sense. We’re both young and attractive. The gaming world is still dominated by men, so when a woman starts live streaming on Twitch, she pulls in the male viewers.

I have bots set up on my channel to kick the perverted assholes out, so that helps.

As I start talking to our viewers, I get a little excited when I realize that a lot of them are female. Katie and I work hard to make our content and steams legit and gaming related. We don’t dress up, or down, so we aren’t sending out the wrong message. A lot of girl streamers think they have to show more skin than gaming content to get views. When I started my Twitch channel a year or so ago and decided at the start that I wasn’t going to fall down that rabbit hole. It was rough at first, gaining followers, but I kept chugging along, and now it’s paid off.

Of course, having a best friend who runs a million-dollar YouTube channel pushing his followers to my channel helps a lot. At the thought of my friend Link, his username appears in the comments. He’s not interacting with me and Katie, but with other fans instead.

I smile at that and then remember I’m being recorded, so I school my features. I really do have some of the best friends out there. Half of them are my teammates, but the other half are women I know.

A few years back, my gamer friend Dex put together a pro gaming team. The original team—Dex, Link, Simon, Ben, and myself—started dominatingCall of Battleshortly after we formed. About two years ago, Link left the team to focus on his YouTube empire. His words, not mine. I’ll give it to him, though—he is one of the top paid YouTuber’s today. He even has employees.

In Link’s place, Chuck joined the team. While he’s a nice guy, he’s never been interested in hanging out with us outside of our gaming, so I don’t really consider him a good friend like I do the rest of the guys.

Our newest member, Matt, has worked hard to become immersed in the group. He’s super fun but also young. I know at twenty-five, I’m young too, but I’ve been in the pro gaming scene for years now. My other teammates are all a year older than me, but newbie Matt is only twenty-two. He’s like a puppy; he’s so excited and gung-ho about everything.

His username pops up in the stream too. Matt has only been on the team for about a month now. He replaced Ben, the most recent teammate to leave. We lost him to a kick-ass job in California and a sweet-as-hell surfer girl. Ben and I had become good friends over the years, but I always knew he would move on to bigger and better things someday. When given the chance at a dream job as a respectable game developer, he couldn’t turn it down. Not to mention it was in the same place the girl he fell in love with lived.

A moment of longing washes over me as I think about how most of my teammates have found love. Dex found Morgan at Comic-Con, of all places, and they’re going to be getting married in a few weeks. Morgan brought Gia into our lives, who turned out to be Simon’s childhood best friend, but they had lost touch and have since reconnected. It was a crazy reuniting for sure, but they were able to put their murky past behind them, and it’s probably only a matter of time before they get hitched. Then, one of my closest friends Ruby has Link wrapped around her finger. Now that’s an entertaining couple. They had that whole drive-each-other-crazy-but-want-to-rip-off-each-other’s-clothes vibe going for the longest time.

Since Ben is in Cali now, so in a way, I’m thankful for Matt. I do need to limit the amount of group outings we attend together because I suspect he may get the wrong idea. I’m not sure, but I think he may have a tiny crush on me.

Katie is talking up a storm, and realizing I dazed off for a minute, I focus on her words.

“Can I just take a minute to thank GrimHallMat and OutWittEmAll for jumping in the stream tonight?” Both Matt and Link send GIFs.

I’m laughing at their comments when another username I recognize, MeetJoeSalt, pops up. He’s a true fan of mine, and I cherish all the fans that I know are honestly here for the gaming. He’s on a lot of my streams and is always supportive. I call him a “he” because of his username, but there’s always a chance he’s really a she. The gaming world is odd like that sometimes. But my gut tells me MeetJoeSalt is a dude. I always try to interact with the fans who are supportive, the ones who don’t make sexual comments, or the ones who like to pretend I’m not as good as my male counterparts.

Screw that noise. I’m one of the bestCoBgamers there is right now, and I’m one hundred percent a gamer chick.

I take a minute to send a reply to his compliment on how I played today, and then Katie and I end our stream. We switch over to our Discord server and chat a bit.

“That was a good session today,” Katie says in my ear. Since we streamed via my channel, I’m handling the back-end stuff to get my stream saved and ready for rewatch.

“Yeah, it was. But dang, that guy was stream sniping me, and it was pissing me off. He’s been on every time I’ve playedFortnitefor the past month. It’s like he’s watching, just waiting to destroy me,” I tell her.

“I noticed. I’m glad you slaughtered him, though. You doing anything fun this weekend? I’ve got that family reunion to go to. Not looking forward to it.”

“You gonna take some of that sweet new SharpKitty swag with you? I think your Great-Aunt Sally will enjoy the tank.” I chuckle at the thought of seeing an eighty-year-old wearing Katie’s sexy new swag.

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