The next morning I wake up and Alyna’s in my bed next to me, staring at me. She says, “Morning.”
I say, “Good morning.”
“Last night was pretty incredible.”
“Yeah.”
“I think we should see if we can relive a little of it this morning.”
I don’t know why Alyna would only suck my dick and jerk me off until last night, but apparently whatever kind of seal she had on sex has been broken. We fuck each other in a slow, controlled rhythm that makes us both cum about thirty minutes later. Then we get up, take a shower, and go into my kitchen area to look for breakfast. As we pass through the living room she notices my array of video game systems and says, “You have an Xbox 360?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have Halo 2?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you any good?”
It’s a strange challenge that excites me almost as much as the thought of her ass grinding against my crotch as I fuck her. We hurriedly eat two bowls of Fruity Pebbles and sit down to play Halo for the next few hours. Alyna’s not the best Halo player I’ve ever seen and is less than a challenge for me, but I’m legitimately impressed at the level of skill she does have, and her genuine enthusiasm for the game is beyond rare for a girl.
As we play she admits to being a minor video game junkie and attributes her interest and skill to having two brothers who constantly played video games and refused to let her play shitty girl games like Tetris or Bubble Trouble when they were growing up. I want to meet her brothers.
After we play against each other on several maps and she vows that one day she’ll beat me, we go online and get into a few team games. In each of them she hops in the driver’s seat of the warthog and I get on the turret. She’s a good driver and we do well. She says, “I love this game. I can’t wait until the next one comes out.”
I instantly remember a day that Casey agreed to play Halo with me. She played for a grand total of three minutes and complained that she didn’t understand the controls before asking me if we could play Tetris or Dance Dance Revolution, which she later forced me to buy. When I told her that I didn’t have Tetris and I didn’t want to play Dance Dance Revolution because it’s a shitty game, we ended up going to the Beverly Center and looking at couches in Crate and Barrel for three hours.
As the next game queues up and we can already hear the voices of some of the players who have entered the queue with us, I wonder if Alyna could ever spend three hours looking at couches.
I say, “What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
“Nothing.”
The game starts and she hops in a warthog on the beach. I get on the turret.
She says, “Why?”
“I don’t know, I was just wondering.”
I take out a few players with a round of machine-gun fire.
She says, “Do you want to do something with me today?”
“If you want to…I mean, I don’t want to…”
“Rush things?”
“Yeah.”
She drives up a ramp and deposits us on the opposite side of a wall, where there are three enemy players waiting, one with a power sword. She runs him over and I take out the other two with the machine gun.
She says, “I don’t want to rush things either, but if we both want to hang out with each other, then nobody’s rushing anything, right?”
She spins the warthog around and we’re staring down the sights of a guy with a rocket launcher.
I say, “I guess not.”
We both jump off the warthog just in time to see a rocket blow it apart and both of our shields go down to half. We both whip out battle rifles and deliver a few short bursts to the rocket launcher guy’s head. He goes down.
She says, “I think we should just do what feels right.”
“Me too.”
“Besides, I’m going to be out of town this weekend so we’ll have plenty of time to not see each other.”
“Where you going?”
She picks up the guy’s rocket launcher and blows up an enemy player who’s at a turret in the main base, then says, “I’m going back home. I haven’t seen my parents at all this semester and they said they’d fly me back for a weekend because they miss me so much.”
“You need a ride to the airport or anything?”
She runs out of rockets and trades her rocket launcher for a sniper rifle she finds on the ground. I slightly regret the airport offer. I don’t want her to think it means more than it does.
Alyna says, “You don’t have to do that.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’d like to do it.” I have to back up my original offer.
“Okay, then yeah, I guess I need a ride.”
She crouches behind a rock and waits for her shield to get back to full. I run over beside her and my cell phone starts ringing.
I say, “Dammit. Why do people always call right in the middle of a good game?”
She says, “Get it. I’ll protect you.” Alyna keeps playing while I answer it in the bedroom.
It’s Casey. She demands that I have coffee with her as I promised and wants to know if I was ever going to call her to set it up. I explain that I’ve been busy and ultimately schedule our coffee date for the upcoming weekend before hanging up.
When I get back I see that Alyna’s been trying to fend off enemy players from our position and my controller’s vibration is evidence of this task’s difficulty.
She says, “Who was it?”
“L.A. Times trying to sell me a newspaper subscription.”
As soon as I pick my controller back up, the vibrations are replaced with stillness and my character’s accompanying death grunt.