“You got it.” He grins, then takes my seat and settles me across his knees. He starts tapping away at the keyboard, very much in his element while also being painfully aware of me and my reactions, my judgment. This part of him is new to me, but somehow it’s so Nicholas.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
He rolls one shoulder. “Thought you might make fun of me.”
My heart sinks. “I wouldn’t have. If you’d showed me this is what you were doing, I would’ve joined you. I’d be a level ninety-one, too.”
“We’ll get you caught up in no time. Prepare yourself for an all-nighter, Naomi. This game is seriously addicting—you have no idea. I’m going to come home from work tomorrow and you’ll be at least a level twelve, I guarantee it. There’s a ton to do, aside from the quests. You can wander around the villages and get sidetracked doing a million other mini quests, racking up points. It’s an incredibly detailed, complex universe. They make it hard to get to the prophecy because there are so many distractions.”
He sets me loose with my new character and within the first five minutes, I fall through a portal and randomly find a glowing trident that makes Nicholas gasp so loud I think I’ve done something wrong. He tells me the trident is rare, and when you stab a mythical creature with it you absorb all of its powers. He begs me to stab a dragon, but I gleefully bypass one in favor of stabbing wee mushroom people who give me the ability to bounce really high, like I’m walking on the moon. Ten minutes later, Nicholas is absolutely beside himself and is trying to bribe me with a trip to Sephora if he gets to be alone with the trident for half an hour. I hunch protectively over the keyboard to keep him at bay and moon-bounce into a hot spring.
I also ignore a demigod who can duplicate treasure in favor of chasing gnomes. Gnomes are delightful! Who cares about treasure when you can give yourself a small blue hat. I am amazing at this game and not at all surprised. Nicholas drags his fingernails down his face and groans.
He accidentally minimizes the page, which flashes to his desktop. Before he can click on it again, I cry, “Wait!” and point at an icon of a Microsoft Word document titled Dear Deborah.
I raise an eyebrow at him.
“Oh. Um.” He flushes.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, you can see. It’s, ah, a bit juvenile. Or you may get a kick out of it, I don’t know.”
It’s a series of short letters sent to Deborah’s column at the Beaufort Gazette. He ends each of them with signatures like ANGRY IN WISCONSIN or FED-UP SON. One of them, I see, is mistakenly addressed to Deborah Weiner instead of Deborah Rose.
“That’s her maiden name,” he tells me, biting his thumb to keep his ear-to-ear grin from transforming into a full-fledged laugh. “I thought the typo would be funny. Works out my frustration to get back at her in this small way, and so far, she hasn’t guessed I’m behind them.”
“Good lord!” I clutch a hand to my chest. “How could you give me access to nuclear codes like this?”
Dear Deborah, my mother fails to recognize personal boundaries. I’m in my thirties. How do I tell her to cut the umbilical cord and stop calling me twenty times a day?
Dear Deborah, my mother is overbearing and steamrolls my fiancée. She digs into our business with more determination than a dumpster diver, but whenever I express this to her face, she doesn’t seem to get it. What am I going to have to do to make her get the point? Should I put it in writing?
Dear Deborah, I plan to propose to my girlfriend but I’m concerned my extremely interfering mother might attempt to hijack wedding plans. I hope she understands that this would be inappropriate, and I’m sure you’ll agree.
“Does the newspaper ever post your letters?” I ask.
“They’ve posted six of the seven I’ve sent in.”
“And your mom hasn’t made the connection?”
He shakes his head slowly from side to side, a wry smile twisting his lips. “Nope. Total cognitive dissonance in her replies. She told me to just tell my mother nicely that I don’t want her involved in my wedding plans, and the mother in question would likely say ‘Okay!’ and back off. You should have seen my face when I read it. I write these letters to get it out of my system when I’m really upset with her, but her replies just make me want to bang my head against a wall.”
“Nicholas, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. For my Christmas present, I want you to write in and tell her your father used to go to brothels.”
He clutches me close to him in reflex when he laughs. “Oh god, yes. I’m doing that for sure.”
After we reread his letters several times, finding new bits to chuckle over, we go back to Nightjar and he familiarizes me with the game. He bounces me involuntarily on his knee, which won’t stop jostling, and his fingers tighten around my waist. He’s not mindful of his body language, absorbed in his storytelling, his tips and opinions. He’s more animated than I’ve seen him in a long, long time, and he’s loving this. He loves introducing me to a game that gives him so much joy.
I smile inwardly and pay close attention to every word he says. When we next glance at the clock, it’s two thirty in the morning and I’m struck by the realization that my fiancé and I are becoming friends again.
On Friday, Nicholas is the only one scheduled to work at Rise and Smile, having done the most Nicholas thing ever: he offered to absorb his coworkers’ workloads so that they could go visit their families for the holiday weekend. (How’s that for an extra mile! I can hear him thinking very loudly in the direction of Stacy’s empty chair.) I torture him by sending gloating texts about all the treasures I’m discovering in Nightjar through sheer luck, which I can see from his account he’s never found before in spite of the one billion hours he’s played. He sends me GIFs of people with exploding heads and by five o’clock, he can’t take it anymore and leaves early. When he gets home, I jump out at him from behind a massive pile of leaves I’ve raked, scaring him so bad that he topples into a different leaf pile. He chases me and I scream as loud as I want since we have no neighbors, zipping up and down the hillside until darkness falls.
We’re covered in dirt and leaves. Nicholas’s Toothless tie is ruined. He appraises it sadly, but I give the tie a light tug and say, “We’ll get you a new one. How to Train Your Dragon 2: the sequel tie.”
He smiles down at me. My heart does a somersault, and he begins to lean in, but we’re startled away from each other by a spatter of cold white light, high beams fishtailing up the driveway.
It’s Deborah’s car.
Happy fun time disintegrates. “What’s she doing here?” I hiss, backing up into the shadow of the house. I stare at Nicholas, panic rising. “Did you invite her? I haven’t had time to clean anything. The sink is full of dishes and your mom is going to … eugh.”
“No, I didn’t invite her.” His voice is hard.
The engine shuts off and both car doors fan open like the wings of a vulture. It must really be About To Go Down if Harold was brought along as backup. Deborah oozes out of the driver’s side, slim silhouette appraising the house. Even in the dark, I can tell she’s wearing a horrible frown. She’s going to tell Nicholas he has to move. Unacceptable home for my son. Unacceptable for my grandchildren.