Single Player (13 page)

He stared up at the ceiling. Wow. After a few moments, when he had composed himself, he propped himself up onto his elbows, feeling sluggish and lazy and sated. Matthew was sitting up next to him, a devilish expression on his face. “So how was that?”

“Incredible.” Silas flopped right back down on the pillows. Unlike last time, when he'd started to freak out immediately after sex, this time he felt more at peace. Best of all, it was a few minutes before he started to think about work again. Yeah, Matthew might make him lose control, but at least he gave Silas something to think about other than his job. He might be just the kind of harmless distraction Silas needed.

“I love listening to you swear.” Matthew grinned, leaning in to press a kiss to Silas's neck. “It's so hot. I love knowing I'm doing that to you.”

Silas felt his face warm again, and it was silly to blush after sex, but it wasn't like he could control it. “Sometimes it just comes out.”

“Maybe you wouldn't be so uptight if you swore a little more.” Matthew leaned his head on one hand.

“I'm not uptight.” As soon as he'd said it, Silas paused. “Okay, yes, I'm a little uptight. But it's normal. I'm under a lot of pressure at work.” He sighed. “Never mind. It's no use explaining.”

“Hey, would you quit that?” Matthew sat up all the way. “I might make games for a living, but it's still a serious job.”

“It's not that your job isn't serious, but you don't seem particularly serious about it.” Silas had never seen Matthew stressed out about any of his projects.

“I'm serious, okay?” Matthew's tone indicated Silas had clearly touched a nerve. Silas was too sluggish after his orgasm to deal with Matthew's indignation.

“Okay, sorry.” He yawned mightily. “Wow, I could sleep right now.”

“You won't sleep tonight if you take a nap now.” Matthew swung his legs off the bed and got up, then started pulling on his clothing.

“I'm not going to sleep tonight anyway.” Silas winced when he thought of another sleepless night. “I haven't been sleeping much this week.”

“What's up for you tomorrow?” Matthew asked.

Silas got up, too, despite wanting to collapse into Matthew's bed for a few hours. “I'll probably go in to work. I didn't finish something yesterday, and I stayed late but it's still not done.”

“Well, don't work too hard.”

Silas held back a snort. As if that was even an option.

Silas followed Matthew into the living room, where Zuul was asleep in her crate. “When do you want to build the wheelchair?” he asked.

“I need to talk to Caleb on Monday about using his workshop, so I'll get in touch with you early in the week.” Matthew smiled. “Thanks for the help. You want to hang out, maybe play some games?”

Silas tried not to look too dubious, but he must not have succeeded, because Matthew rolled his eyes and laughed. “Okay, got it. Never mind, then. Another time, though I think you'd really like gaming.”

“Before I go, let me send you these files. Any CAD program should be able to open them.” Silas clicked a few buttons to export and send the files to Matthew's email. After packing up his laptop, Silas hesitated at the door, possessed with the urge to kiss Matthew again. So he did. Matthew stiffened in surprise, but then kissed him back, sweet and gentle.

“See you later.” Silas smiled, feeling for the moment like everything was going to be all right.

Matthew smiled back, something tentative and new between them. “Yeah. Later.”

After Silas left, Matthew
went to his computer and started searching for a free CAD program. There were a few, and after reading the reviews, he picked one to download. The interface was different from the program Silas had been using, but the options were the same, and after a quick skim of the manual, he opened it up and started fooling around.

This wasn't nearly as difficult as he'd originally expected. While he couldn't do everything he wanted, he was able to complete a few basic designs after just a little time using the program. Most significantly of all, though, he enjoyed it. This type of design work brought a sense of satisfaction akin to when he completed a project at work. He remembered designing all kinds of elaborate schematics as a child, designs for rocket ships and battleships and race cars that flew. As he got older, he would sketch his designs on graph paper, creating multilayer tree houses and snow cave systems that he would never actually build. Even if he had had snow available to build with, the building wasn't the fun part. The fun was in the designing.

When Matthew felt he'd really gotten the hang of things, he opened up the cat wheelchair plans and made a copy to modify. He was so engrossed in his work that he didn't actually check the time until it was already after six. Wow. He got up to stretch, his muscles cramped from the long session sitting at his desk. Normally, he got up every ninety minutes to stretch, but he had been having way too much fun designing things with CAD to stop. He left the program and heated up leftovers.

While eating, he considered the mixture of emotions he was feeling. On one hand, he was excited about the program. Learning new things was always fun. But on the other hand, he felt a quiet sense of guilt, so peripheral that it took him a few minutes even to identify it and a few more to trace it back to its cause.

He used to feel this excited about his programming work. Back before it was easy, when he had to work through all his coding problems by hand with a C++ manual, he couldn't get enough of the subject. That passion had sustained him through all four years of college and an internship. That passion eventually got him the job at PI Games. Now he was three years into this gig and he felt more passionate about programming in CAD than he did about his day-to-day work. What did that say about him? Why was he so unwilling to throw himself into his work the way he used to?

Did he even want his job to be so all-consuming, though? Silas was passionate about his career; granted, it was a career in a very specialized field, but he was neurotic and way too uptight for his own good. It was difficult to tell how much of that was Silas's high-stress job and how much was his perfectionism, which Matthew could see like a beacon from a distance. Like a chicken-and-egg conundrum, perhaps Silas's uptight qualities came from his job, and perhaps he was uptight about his job because he was uptight about everything.

Well, maybe not everything, at least not anymore. Matthew smiled at the memory. Two weeks ago when they first met, he would never have thought this introvert would initiate sex so enthusiastically. That had to be good for Silas's stress level, since keeping it all built up was a sure way to sleepless nights and general frustration. He chuckled to himself thinking of prescribing Silas sex every night in order to calm him down and help him get to sleep. Since he probably wouldn't smoke weed, sex would likely be the next best thing for insomnia.

And it wouldn't be the worst thing for Matthew, either.

Then again, maybe Silas would find ways to get uptight all over again. That was apparently a deep-seated part of his identity, and while some of it might be due to having a medical condition that affected his social interactions, Matthew had a suspicion this was more nurture than nature. Matthew could imagine the stress of having to live up to the expectations of parents who had died, the guilt about not being good enough for the people whose memory you were trying to honor. If he'd grown up under similar circumstances, maybe he would have ended up just like Silas. He felt bad for the guy, honestly. Not sleeping, never feeling good enough? What a terrible life.

Although to be fair, Silas was making a genuine difference in the world. He was passionate about his work and he took it seriously enough to be proud of his accomplishments. Earlier, he had defended himself to Silas, saying that he was serious, but maybe he wasn't as serious as he could be. That was the sticking point, wasn't it? Was he wasting his life and his talents because of some deep-seated fears of failure or fears of commitment? Maybe he was just lazy.

The thought didn't sit well with him as he finished eating and cleaned up. Before long, he found himself back at the computer, but he didn't return to the CAD program. Instead, he logged in remotely to his workstation and called up the information on
Endgame.
Programming this game would be challenging, and it seemed that he wasn't the only person on the team procrastinating. A game that had to adapt to a player's decisions while psychoanalyzing them? It was pretty far above his pay grade, honestly. When Will had first brought it up, Matthew had written it off as a pain in the ass, even with the psychologist who was consulting. Now that he had to turn that information into if/then statements and logic trees, he was intimidated.

But . . . also a little excited.

Maybe he'd been looking at this the wrong way. Maybe instead of seeing this task as a complicated problem taking up his time, he could throw himself into the challenge of it the way he used to.

Even with that in mind, he clicked around without real commitment for a while. It seemed so ridiculous in the abstract. His performance reviews were fine and his job was stable. There was no
real
reason to change. This guilt, though, was frustrating. He couldn't believe a guy like Silas was getting to him so much.

Matthew got up from the computer, leaving the to-do list open and taunting him. Going over to where Zuul was playing with a toy mouse in her crate, he opened the door and scooped her out. She went willingly, purring as soon as he picked her up. He sat down on the floor with her and set her next to him, letting her do a bit of exploring. At first, she wobbled, but then she was off, pulling herself across the ground by her front legs with a sinuous Komodo dragonesque slither. When she turned, her back legs swept across the floor in an arc. He watched her prowl about, undeterred by her nonfunctioning lower half, until she got to the couch and decided to scale it. He plucked her off the side of the sofa as quickly as he could, detaching her tiny claws from the upholstery despite her mew of dismay. That was going to be a problem. He'd need to get her a ramp, since she was clearly going to try to get on the furniture anyway. Not to mention that she probably couldn't safely get down once she was up there.

With her mobility issues, she couldn't move very fast, so he had no trouble keeping ahead of her and moving her back into the center of the living room when she got too far out of range. Eventually, she gave up wandering and flopped over onto her side, stretched her front legs out like her back ones, and blinked at him owlishly. He scratched her jaw absentmindedly as he thought about the odd circumstances in his life right now. So much had changed in two weeks, and he wasn't even sure what was next for him. He had a CAD program on his computer, an engineer on his mind, and a disabled kitten in his living room, which sounded like the start to a terribly unpopular country song. Laughing to himself, he picked Zuul up to put her back in her crate.

The best part about
working on a Saturday was having the lab to himself. Silas enjoyed the solitude of Wayscorp on the weekend, when he didn't have to wait for any of the best equipment and didn't have to answer questions from his coworkers. After leaving Matthew's apartment, he'd driven straight to work, letting himself past the security guard with his identification and taking the elevator all the way up to his floor. At this point, the security guard didn't even look surprised to see him. He worked almost every weekend now, usually to get ahead. Today, though, he was here to catch up.

After his morning and afternoon with Matthew, he came into work feeling refreshed. Today he would surely be able to accomplish the tasks he'd struggled with yesterday. Granted, he didn't get a lot of sleep last night, but that didn't matter. Work was a situation of willpower.

As he sat at his workbench, it took him several minutes to acclimate to what he was attempting to put together, and several more minutes to find all the pieces he needed to get started, but then he was back into it.

“Hey, Silas,” said a voice behind him, startling him enough that he dropped his screwdriver. He turned on his stool to see Elliot in the doorway and resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“Hello, Elliot.” He picked up his screwdriver off the ground, hoping this would be a fast visit and determined not to give it any cause to linger through needless conversation.

“What brings you in on a weekend?” Elliot stepped into the lab, and darn it, this was not going to be a short visit, was it?

“I didn't finish this yesterday and wanted to get it done.” Silas held up the part he was assembling. He forced himself to reciprocate the question. “What about you?”

“I left my iPad here yesterday by accident.” Elliot held up the tablet. His expression turned to concern. “You know, the building access logs show that you've been working here every weekend.”

Silas thought back, then nodded. “That seems right. Is that a problem? I'm on salary, so it's not like I'm asking for overtime.”

“It's not a problem, per se, except that I'm worried about you burning out.” Elliot took a seat on the stool next to Silas. “You work long enough hours during the week as it is.”

Silas took a breath to calm himself, surprised by the anger Elliot's words evoked. He wasn't usually quick to anger. Annoyance, yes, mild irritation, but not outright anger. “I'm fine,” he said, knowing he sounded terse and not really caring at the moment. “Are you forbidding me from coming in?”

Elliot sighed heavily. “It's not about forbidding you, Silas. It's about your usefulness to the company. We don't want you working yourself to death, especially someone with such a promising future here.”

Those were the kinds of things people said to new employees who didn't understand their limits, and it grated on Silas to hear Elliot treating him like an intern. “I said I'm fine,” he practically shouted at Elliot. “Are we finished here?”

Elliot visibly recoiled, momentarily speechless. Silas regretted his outburst immediately, knowing it was unprofessional. “I'm sorry, Elliot,” he said quickly. He didn't want to admit any weakness, especially to someone who was presuming weakness, but he probably should confess what was going on with him. “I shouldn't have said that. I haven't been sleeping well lately, and I'm not feeling as on point as usual. That was unprofessional of me.”

Elliot nodded slowly, his look of concern not fading. “You should go home, Silas. This will all still be here on Monday, you know.”

Silas looked down at his workstation. He felt another wave of anger, which took him by surprise. Maybe that was a sign that he should in fact get away from this. Appeasing Elliot would also probably keep him from filing a report of concern about Silas's behavior. “Maybe you're right. I'll head out in an hour.” When Elliot didn't look appeased, he added, “I promise.”

Elliot nodded. “All right. Get some rest.” He left Silas in peace.

Silas spent the next hour too incensed over his and Elliot's encounter to really get anything of use done, which just frustrated him even further. The whole drive home, Silas was unreasonably angry, to a degree that surprised him. He understood annoyance, but the anger felt new and uncomfortable. This wasn't the kind of person he normally was. He wasn't a guy who got really upset about anything, except maybe when there were engineering problems that seemed to defy logic, but he seldom got mad at people and never at his superiors. He understood his role in the chain and didn't mind it. He had a large degree of creative autonomy in his work, so this felt like the first infringement upon that autonomy, and it chafed. Not to mention that now he had nothing at all to do for the rest of the weekend. He couldn't very well head back into the office tomorrow knowing Elliot was keeping tabs on his comings and goings.

His mind went automatically to Matthew, who was probably already playing some ridiculous computer game at home on the couch in his underwear, an image that made Silas smile and relaxed some of the tension from his body. But no, he'd just seen Matthew earlier today and shouldn't rush things.

He wasn't even sure he wanted company. There was something appealing about a quiet evening at home with a good book and solitude. Almost as though the universe was listening to his thoughts, he heard his phone buzz with a text message. It was probably Dee, since no one else texted him. When he pulled into the driveway of his house, he checked Dee's message.
Dinner?
she asked.

Silas considered. On one hand, he could always order something here and have a quiet evening at home. On the other hand, he hadn't seen Dee in a couple of weeks, really since her birthday party and the night he'd met Matthew, and he did enjoy her company. Plus, if he neglected her for too long, she had a tendency to show up at his house and demand to know that he wasn't dead. He always gave her a hard time about intruding on his personal life, but it wasn't like he really
minded,
not deep down. With no family, sometimes it felt nice knowing someone cared about him.

Sure.
He sent the reply and pocketed the phone while he waited for more information. She'd texted him a few times throughout the past couple weeks, so he had a sense of the fact that she was doing fine, but none of the details. After this many years, Dee knew he hated talking on the phone, even to people he liked, so she just texted and only short updates. Since she hadn't texted very much, he had a sense that she had something new happening in her life, and was genuinely interested in hearing more about it. Plus, she might make him feel better about work.

Silas walked in, set his bag down on the sofa, and paced the house like he did every time he got home and felt restless. It didn't take Dee long to write back with the time she was picking him up (twenty minutes) and where she wanted to take him (“this new Mexican restaurant I discovered”). While he waited to get picked up, he sat down on the couch and listened to the silence. Normally, he liked it. He'd never enjoyed having background noise at home, unlike some people who preferred to keep the television on or music playing. Dee had been like that, and during the brief stint when they'd lived together, he'd almost gone mad with the never-ending noise. But now, with the stillness the only noise except the central air customary to any house in Florida, he felt something else seep into the gap where the noise usually was.

He felt lonely.

What the heck? He couldn't be lonely. The sensation must be something else. He examined it more closely, studying the way his stomach felt, the hollowed-out sensation inside his core, and no, this was loneliness. How strange. He was a solitary creature by nature, preferring the solitude of the lab, and he wasn't the type of guy to get lonely. Honestly, he missed hanging out with Matthew, and that surprised and even disturbed him a little. He seldom sought out someone's company, and the fact that he wished Matthew were here right now meant something had shifted inside him. He wasn't sure he liked it. To get away from the silence of the house, he went outside to wait for Dee on the front step in the late-afternoon heat.

Dee looked over at him in surprise when he got into the car. “Look at you, all ready to go.” She raised her eyebrows. “I'm honestly surprised you answered my text. I thought you were probably at work. And now you're ready for me outside? Usually I have to let myself in and pry you away from the computer.”

“I should never have given you that key,” Silas said without malice.

“I told you, it's important that someone else has a key.” She started to back out of the driveway. “What if you lock yourself out?”

“I would never lock myself out.” He rolled his eyes.

“Okay, then. What if you have a heart attack and keel over in the middle of the floor from working too hard? Someone has to find your body before the feral cats get here.” She shifted into drive and headed for the highway.

Silas scoffed. “There are no feral cats around here.” Then he thought about Matthew finding Zuul in the parking lot. “Well, not many.” Would cats really eat him? It was an unpleasant thought.

“Fine, then who will let you out of your self-bondage predicament when it all goes wrong?” She gave him a knowing glance.

“I don't do self-bondage. Watch the road, please.” Silas felt embarrassed, even though he really
didn't
do self-bondage, because of the way Dee addressed his sex life. Normally those comments just breezed right past him, but now that he actually
had
a sex life—sort of—he felt more sensitive to them.

“I'm just teasing you, Silas. You remember teasing, right? It's when two people make humorous comments that poke fun at each other's foibles?” She smiled, her expression probably intended to reassure him.

“I understand teasing.” First Matthew, now Dee. Was everyone going to accuse him of being a dull human being? He didn't usually mind when Dee did it, but he felt extra sensitive after Matthew's comments. “What have you been up to lately? I haven't heard from you a lot.”

“Yeah, I met someone.” Dee's teasing smile changed to something softer. “He's amazing. We met at my party, actually.”

Silas remembered. “Oh, was he the one hanging off your face at the end of the night?”

“That's the one.” Dee made a gun sign with her hand and fired it at him, not looking away from the road as she pulled onto the highway. “His name's Francis. Which is totally unfortunate, but whatever.” She sighed, a dreamy sort of lovesick sigh that Silas hoped he never emitted himself. “I'm falling head over heels for him.”

“Already? It's early for that. You've only known the guy for a couple of weeks.” As he said it, he felt a pang of guilt, because wasn't he starting to fall for Matthew?

Wow, where did
that
come from?

“A couple of weeks is long enough to know a lot of things, Silas Benson.” Dee used her Mom voice on him, which still shocked Silas whenever it happened. “What about you? What have you been up to?”

She hadn't heard anything about Matthew, and now Silas felt acutely aware that he had to tell her, even though she was going to lose her mind and get way too over the top about it. “I met someone at your party, too. I've seen him a couple of times since then.” He tried to force nonchalance into his voice.

Dee's head whipped around to look at him. “Silas, are you telling me that you've been dating someone and this is the first I hear of it?”

“I've been busy.” His defense sounded weak. “Watch the road. You're going to get us killed.”

As expected, she didn't relent. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“We haven't talked. Anyway, it's nothing serious.” Just sex, he wanted to add, but he wasn't sure if that would increase or decrease the invasiveness of her questions. Whatever was happening between him and Matthew wasn't just sex, though, and he couldn't exactly define what it was. He didn't want to define what it was.

“Is he cute? Do I know him?” Dee did that thing where she asked multiple questions at once, as if impatient for the traditional give-and-take of conversation.

Silas answered them all in order. “Yes, sort of.”

“Oh my god—is it the bartender?” Dee let go of the wheel to clap. “I knew it. I thought he was perfect for you.”

Silas rolled his eyes. “All you knew was that he was good-looking and tended bar. Unless you're claiming magical psychic abilities now.”

“Nope, not psychic, but I do have a feeling about these things.” Dee smiled.

She held off the questions for the rest of the drive, but he was sure she'd start up again later once they got settled at dinner. They ended up at a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town, a little mom-and-pop place by the looks of it, one that Silas had never even driven by or seen before. “What's this?” he asked, even though the sign out front clearly said La Casita, with a color scheme and font choice that indicated a Mexican restaurant.