“Because she’s cursed, right?” he asked. “She can’t beat him anymore because she’s changed.”
Reggie nodded, her hair brushing across her pillowcase and reminding her that she’d probably look like Sonic the Hedgehog tomorrow because she was trying to be cute.
“That’s it exactly,” she said. Her voice was a little raspy from emotion, and she cleared her throat before going on. “That’s—that’s what the show is really about. She’s bewitched so she can’t control when she falls asleep, especially in battle, and she can’t protect her people because of that. The real story is her fighting the old expectations she had for herself, and that the world had for her. Plus sisterhood. Plus friendship. Plus kissing.”
She blinked and willed herself not to embarrass herself by crying. She was a fucking rock star at keeping her emotions in check, except when she was talking about her very favorite shows, movies, or comics.
He was looking off to the side, as if thinking, then glanced back at the screen. “I see what went wrong on my first viewing. I was looking at what was happening instead of why the characters responded to what was happening in the way they did. Like, when I was a kid, our goldfish died and my brother was really sad and I told him being sad was pointless because everything died.”
“Ouch. Baby Gus was even more blunt, huh?”
“Yeah. And Dave punched me in the arm so hard I got a bruise. I was upset about that—it seemed unfair. A fish dying was logical, but punching your brother for pointing it out was not. But then my mom explained that Dave was sad, and when people are sad they don’t need facts, they need support.”
Reggie tried to imagine her mom saying something similar and failed.
“So then I went and built a casket for the fish using popsicle sticks and gave it to Dave. One of my first designs.”
“Oh my goodness.” Reggie grinned, imagining a tiny Gus with an even tinier casket, holding it up to his brother. “That’s so sweet, in a morbid way.”
“I guess.” He was writing something down on a paper, his mouth forming that familiar line of concentration. “The fish had already been flushed, though. Dave still has the casket.”
“Why do you need to know so much about this show?” she asked suddenly. Analyzing an anime was normal for her line of work, but Gus was an architect or something.
“Actually, this is somewhat related to you,” he said, looking back up at the screen. “You told me about escape rooms three years ago, and I started looking into them. I went to one eventually and solved it pretty easily, and started talking to the people who ran it. I started thinking of what kind of escape room I would make, building props and puzzles in my spare time. I work part-time designing games for home use, and I did a few rooms for a company last year. My next project is building one based on this show.”
“You’re building the escape room for Anime Con,” she said flatly. “And you have no idea what the show is about?”
Her readers had been looking forward to this aspect of the con since it had been announced. She was no fan of being locked in places she couldn’t leave of her own accord, but even she had planned on taking a pass through it, for the love of PhilRora. This was a big deal, to a lot of people. And the designer apparently had no idea what he was doing.
She patted her curls in annoyance. “Of course they’d hire some guy with no knowledge of the show. Of course.”
“Reggie?”
She realized she was muttering aloud.
“Look, I’m not mad at you, but this is so typical. SO. TYPICAL. They just hire some random dude who might have ruined everything if he hadn’t coincidentally been friends with the show’s biggest fan.”
“Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.” His brows raised, and he held up a hand. “We’re friends?”
“Well. Yeah,” she said, voice still rough with aggravation. “I’ve talked to you on the phone more than once and now we’re video chatting. That means we’re friends.”
That admission pushed her frustration to the back burner. They were friends for more reasons than that, if she counted their nightly conversations on the live stream and his voice lulling her to sleep when she needed it most.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I got so excited about the opportunity to be taken more seriously that I didn’t even consider there were people like you who could do a better job.”
“I couldn’t,” Reggie said with a sigh. “I’m great at a lot of things, but not design. I can’t build an escape room, but I can consult on one.”
She was already compiling a list of the ways this could actually work in her favor.
“I can’t afford a consultant,” Gus said. “I thought we could just watch the show and you could tell me why you think it’s cute.”
“I don’t think it’s cute, I think it’s brilliant. And also . . . I don’t need money. I’m the head of one of the biggest nerd sites on the internet. You can pay me by letting me be an official consultant on the Reject Squad Ultra escape room project, but that means we have to make sure that this escape room is perfect. I’m not linking my name to some half-assed project.”
She could feel herself sliding away from sleep, into business mode, but this was more important than a good night’s rest. Working on the Reject Squad Ultra escape room would be huge for the site. And for her.
“I don—” His words were cut off by a police siren and he shut his mouth, waiting it out. When it had finally passed he shrugged. “Sorry.”
Reggie looked up at the screen. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t do things half-assed. It’s kind of a problem I have.” He wasn’t smiling, and there was no insinuation in his tone, but the look of concentration on his face upped the sexy impact of his words by several factors. She was sure Gus was telling the truth. He probably applied that same concentration to everything he got his hands on, and Reggie wouldn’t mind finding out how those hands would feel on her.
Arrgh, cut it out!
She gathered her scattered thoughts away from the Gus’s-hands-on-her-body fantasy trying to kick into gear. “If that’s true—”
Now her words were cut off by sirens. Sirens that sounded exactly the same.
They stared at each other through the screen.
“That was a weird coincidence,” she said. “Sirens in California and here.”
Gus ran a hand through his hair. “I moved to New York a while back. I still have a California cell phone number because my grandma has it memorized and she said she doesn’t want to have to remember a new one.”
Reggie stilled. “Oh.”
“I live in Queens.” He was looking at her oddly, his eyes asking the question his mouth wasn’t.
“I . . . live in Queens,” she said. “Too.”
He was nearby—that was fucking weird, but it was also something else that wasn’t at all undesirable. Within the last two days, he’d been a curious email reply, then a disembodied voice over the phone, and then he’d been separated by the buffer of video. Now, in the silence that followed the wail of the siren that had just passed both of them, he was more real somehow. This . . . whatever she’d put into motion by emailing him was more real. He was a man, looking down at her while she was in bed. The way her tablet was angled meant his face was just above hers, as if . . . as if . . .