Page 16 of Balance

I’d already told myself that Troye wouldn’t be on the same flight, but I was still bitterly disappointed when the plane pulled away from the gate without him. But now that I found him, I could plan to reunite with him.

I still wanted him to consult, but I also still wanted him. The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to learn. The minute the plane was in the air and I could get my laptop out, I did.

The first video I watched was a clip from a recent stream. He was talking about the reason for his hiatus. A wedding—no, not his wedding. This got a wild reaction from the chat, and I watched the comments scroll by on the side of the screen. Troye was good at keeping up with the flow of conversation while playing his game, a dungeon crawler type game that he was beta testing.

The next video I watched was Troye playing a cozy cat cafe game. The chat in this video was just as kind as the chat in the first video. When someone did pop up with something shitty to say, Troy quietly booted them. No acknowledgement, no fanfare, just a quiet ban. They weren’t even worth mentioning.

After a few videos, it became clear that Troye had regulars, and he knew things about them. He asked NiftyKnight if he got his welding ticket and when he said yes, Troye looked genuinely happy for him. Chat exploded with people congratulating NiftyKnight. Another user popped in and Troye’s face lit up.

This user—TeenyFae27—had been missing in action for a while it seemed because everyone started asking where they’d been. Where they’d been, as it happened, was having a baby. Chat blew up again with a sea of well wishes, and Troye looked like he was over the moon for her.

Each video of his I watched showed me how much he loved his fans. How much he loved what he did. Sure, some of them came around because he’d do things for his fans if he saw fit. Like the way he’d found TeenyFae27’s baby registry and had allegedly bought everything on the list, prompting her to flood chat with hearts and crying emojis.

What struck me the most was that none of this seemed like it was a performance. I’d met Troye and though I barely knew him, it would’ve been easy to spot if he was faking it for the camera.

He was as genuine as he appeared. He was kind and caring, and sometimes he was awkward even on camera, just like he’d been in the hotel room. Even streaming, when his chat got too nice to him, he tended to ignore their compliments and change the subject to something else.

The more I learned about Troye, the more I knew he was the perfect person to help me craft that game. He was thoughtful and considerate, and he had a wealth of knowledge about games from a player’s point of view.

Not only was he perfect for the project, but I had a hard time convincing myself that he wasn’t perfect for me. Though he lacked experience in areas that I did not, like spanking, that wasn’t a bad thing. At all. I didn’t mind being someone’s first foray into something spicier.

But I wanted more than Troye’s firsts. Time would tell if finding him proved to be the easy part—or the hard part. I had a feeling Troye was going to give me a run for my money.

CHAPTER 9

TROYE

My luggage still hadn’t been located by the time I got home, at which point I decided that it was probably lost forever. Or it would tour the world for a couple of decades before finding its way back to me. Or some poor unfortunate soul would buy it at one of those lost luggage auctions thinking they’d struck gold, but in reality it was just my one and only suit and a handful of graphic tees.

Not that I had many occasions to wear a suit. I mostly hung around in my apartment and streamed. I’d probably have stayed like that 24/7 if not for my friend Charlie pretending to have crisis after crisis that he needed me to come help with. But they were never as bad as he made them out to be over text. After the third time I’d asked him what the deal was, I said if he just wanted to hang out that bad, all he had to do was ask.

It turned out that he had asked, and I’d always found a reason to say no. So he started manufacturing crises because I never said no when someone needed help. That was another problem he told me I should work on.

I didn’t see it as a problem, though. I liked helping people, but Charlie said that he hated watching people take advantage of me. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that the people I helped wanted to be my friends. They didn’t. They wanted me to buy shit off their baby registry and pay their phone bill so it didn’t get turned off. And the little kid in me that grew up with dirty clothes and shoes that were always too small or falling apart, or both, wanted to help people.

It used to make me feel a lot better than it did lately, though, and I thought that was because I started to realize that this kind of help felt hollow. I knew from experience that a lot of people who needed help would never ask for it. A lot of people who needed help were like the foster kids Matthew helped.

I’d given up on trying to stop thinking about him. It was all I did now, ever since I walked out of that hotel room and hid like a coward. I might not regret helping people even when they were just using me, but I sure as hell wished I hadn’t left him.

Theoretically, I could find him if I really wanted to. The head office for Gemstone Games was downtown. He had expressed interest in working with me as a consultant on his game. But anyone could do that. My brain wasn’t special, even though he’d kind of made me feel like maybe it was.

After making sure to brush the breakfast out of my teeth, I padded over to my computer and got everything up and running. I’d promised my fans a marathon stream to make up for going dark over the weekend.

The minute I went live, viewers poured in, and my chat lit up like a firework. FuzzFace, my mod, a super fan from way back, was here today to make sure chat behaved.

“Hey, FuzzFace. Nice to see you.” I watched their response on the screen while I tried to decide what game to play. I had more of that dungeon crawler beta to get through for the devs, so I decided on that one. My fans were getting a kick out of it. It was kind of camp and didn’t take anything serious, and some of the bosses were hilarious but hard to beat. So far, we were having a good time with it.

I used to try to mod chat myself, but once my channel picked up more followers, it became impossible pretty quickly. FuzzFace was the obvious choice for my first mod because they were always in the chat sticking up for me. Once I gave them mod powers, chat smoothed out a lot. FuzzFace didn’t tolerate any shit. They still didn’t. Not even from me.

FuzzFace

You look well rested for a man who spent the night in an airport.

“It was a hotel. Should I go left or right here? Did I go left last time? Do we remember?” I glanced at the chat to see what the consensus was. “Okay, looks like I’m going right.”

I’d made it a whole ten seconds without thinking about Matthew and the spanking and the fact that my ass was still a bit tender, but in a good way. Did I unlock a new kink? No. Definitely not. I bet once the ache faded away, I’d never think about it again.

Okay, well, that was a lie. A big, fat, stupid, delusional lie. Matthew was in the marrow of my bones now. He was part of my DNA. I shifted around, and the pants I’d stolen from him were another reminder that it was real. That I didn’t just have this elaborate dream. Matthew Kincaid was a real person. And I’d met him. We’d had an amazing, confusing as hell night together.