“Apparently I have a type—”
“You took a lamp to dinner.” He looked up, almost pouting like a kid whose favorite crayon had been used by somebody else. “I bumped into the fan while you were sleeping, and I think it moaned.”
The nightmare was still in Levi’s body. The arousal was draining out of him by degrees. And Asher Kane, who had killed his mother and choked him into eating ice cream and forced an orgasm out of him in the shower, was sitting on the other end of the couch being wounded by fictional objects.
This was Levi’s life now. He really should start keeping a list.
“Have you dated other things?” Asher scrolled the menu. “The dishwasher? A clock?” He stopped, his mouth agape. “You can date the concept of existential dread?”
“Asher, it’s not a real —”
“Have you dated existential dread?”
“Not in that game —” Levi was trying to keep a straight face, but Asher looked so genuinely bewildered he started laughing. It came out before he could stop it — short, real, surprised out of him. His hand came up to cover his mouth, but it was too late.
Asher’s head came up. “It’s not funny,” he said. But his voice had changed into a lighter register, the bother dissolving, because Levi had laughed, and the laugh was worth more than whatever he was seeing on the screen.
“It’s a little funny,” Levi chuckled from behind his hand.
Asher kept playing. He navigated the dating sim with the focus he gave everything: total, intense, and somewhat baffled by the mechanics, and he kept asking questions without looking up. “Why would someone create this? What is the point?”
It was the closest thing to normal they had ever had: just two people on a couch, one of them playing a game badly, the other one watching. It was so ordinary it felt like a lie.
Levi was content to sit in the lie a little longer anyway.
Asher eventually set the Switch down and smiled at Levi. “You should pack.”
Levi blinked. “What?”
“I called a car,” Asher said. “While you were asleep. It will be here in about an hour.”
“A car to where?”
“My house.” He said it the way he said everything, as a fact the world was going to make room for. “I have a house outside the city. It’s bigger than this.” He looked around the studio. “Youcan’t get better in a box, Levi. You need space. We both do. We need a kitchen that isn’t four feet from the bed.”
No no no…
“I didn’t agree to —”
“You should pack. Whatever you want to bring. Clothes, the Switch.” He stood up and held out his hand like he was inviting Levi to dance. “There’s a yard. Real grass. And a shower with a bench and two heads. I think you’ll like it.”
Levi sat on the couch with the pillow in his lap and the taste of a laugh still in his mouth, and Asher was telling him to pack. “What if I don’t want to go?”
“Then I’ll carry you,” Asher said with a bright smile, light, the smile he used when he knew he had already won. “You barely weigh anything.”
There is no version of this where I don’t go with him.
He almost laughed again. He didn’t have the room for it twice in one afternoon.
He got up and went to help Asher pack.
41
The Unhaunted House
Player One
Leviwasinhishouse.
