With a tentative knock on the doorjamb, I wait until he lifts a hand to wave me in without even looking. Kim Dracula’s Paparazzi is playing on his open laptop. Taking a seat in the chair beside him, I notice Parrish glance my way with surprise. He didn’t expect the knock to come from me.
I grab the abandoned controller from the arm of the chair, likely left there by Chasm before he headed home—we are technically still grounded, so school night sleepovers are a no-no, even for him.
“Mind if I join you?” I ask as Parrish pushes his headset off and gives me a long, studying sort of look. After a moment, he shrugs his shoulders like it doesn’t matter to him either way.
“Suit yourself,” he says, and I find myself grinning for the first time today. I very quickly head back into my room to grab my own headset, and then connect to the private Discord server he’s on. I immediately recognize both Chasm’s and Maxx’s voices on the other end.
“Are you guys ready to get your asses kicked?” I ask, and there’s a pregnant pause before Maxx’s confident laughter buzzes through the headset.
“Is that you, Little Sister?” Chasm asks as I look up and realize for the first time that Parrish has not one but two OLED TVs mounted to his wall. The controller I’m holding goes to a separate PS5 from the one Parrish is using. I quickly sign into my own PlayStation account and glance over at my stepbrother … and fake boyfriend? Eww. What the hell have I done?
Set up a lovely little romance novel plot, that’s what.
I wrinkle my nose and shake my head to clear the memory of Parrish’s hot mouth slanting across mine, the brilliant sweep of his tongue, the possessive heat of his hands. Good god, Dakota, get it together!
“It’s me,” I confirm as Parrish looks me over with that strange, detached aloofness he so specializes in. It’s all bullshit, of course. I’ve seen it crack into pieces more than once since I got here. I tuck my legs up in the oversized gaming chair, gathering my messy hair into a loose bun at the back of my head. I hand over the controller. “Send friend requests to yourself and your friends.”
“Maxine says hi,” X tells me, and I hear my sister cheering for me in the background. She despises playing videogames, but she’s always happy to watch a loved one play and provide moral support. “Glad you’re here,” he adds as Chasm cackles gleefully.
“Okay, I cannot fucking wait to wipe the floor with you.”
“You can try,” I warn him as Parrish hands the controller back, and the boys accept my requests.
It might only be digital friendship, as meaningless as a teardrop in a rainstorm, but it makes me feel better anyway.
Parrish creates a match and invites the rest of us in.
He puts himself and his friends on one team and leaves me with a bunch of randos on the other.
Doesn’t matter.
Within five minutes, I find Chas and blow his head off.
“Holy fucking shit, Little Sister!” he calls out as I laugh and notice Parrish peeking at my screen to get a read on my location. Knowing what he’s planning, I make my own preparations, setting up a trap for him that goes off the instant his character enters the room.
“And it’s over!” I cry out as Parrish curses and throws his remote on the floor.
Fifteen minutes in, and it’s down to me and Maxx.
“I’ll admit,” I say, crossing my legs as I mash buttons absentmindedly—still kicking ass, I might add. “Out of the three of you, I didn’t expect Maxx to be the toughest one to kill.” With my left hand, I reach out and snatch a piece from Parrish’s package of red licorice, letting it hang from my mouth as I continue searching the battlefield for Maxx’s green-skinned alien avatar. “Aren’t you big into sports?”
“My family is big into sports,” he replies easily, which isn’t exactly an answer to my question. “My sister just got a six-figure deal with some sports drink company. Her entire bike got repainted with their colors and logo.”
I keep my character hidden in the attic of an old house, peeping out the windows as I wait for Maxx to search me out. I’ve rigged the trapdoor into the room with a grenade, but that was my last one. If he wants to climb up the side of the house and into one of the four windows, I could be in trouble.
“Maxine told me you were into games,” he continues as I check my ammo and realize that I’m dangerously low on bullets. “She also said you had a pretty popular Twitch channel?”
“I ghosted it,” I reply, crouching in the corner of the room with my last remaining bullet waiting in the odd-shaped purple gun that makes up my favorite weapon in the game. “Too much attention for the kidnapping thing.”
