CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THEO

I pushed open the door to the cottage and stepped inside to the sound of Chloe shouting, “Fuck you, Abigail!”

Who the fuck was Abigail and what had she done to Chloe?

“That was my damn straw hat!”

I kicked off my shoes, frowning. Straw hat? What the hell was she doing in there?

“Screw you, too, Lewis! If that bush wasn’t in my way, I’d definitely have won the stupid egg hunt!”

Seriously.

What the hell was she doing?

“Stupid eggs. Stupid bushes. Stupid little stones I can’t walk over,” Chloe continued. “No, you can’t sleep. I don’t care if you’re tired. Plant the strawberries first.”

I crept towards the living room and poked my head in. She was sitting on the sofa with a laptop I’d never seen before, using the area where the trackpad was as a mousepad for a bright pink mouse.

“Oh, balls, I forgot to pet my cat.”

What the—

“Five hundred gold? What a load of shit,” she mumbled, picking up a stemless wine-glass-shaped tumbler and sipping. “Great. Now I’m out of wine.”

“Want me to get you some more?”

“Eek!” She knocked her mouse off her laptop and sent it flying to the other side of the sofa. “Where the hell did you come from?”

I chuckled at her wide-eyed expression. “The front door. Did you think I crept in through the window?”

“I didn’t hear you come in. You should have announced yourself.”

“I was going to, but I was wondering if I’d find out who Abigail is and what she’s done to you if I didn’t say anything.”

Chloe pressed her lips together. “Please pretend you didn’t hear any of that.”

“I’ll fill your cup for you.” I motioned for her to hand it to me. “And I’ll consider it.”

She groaned, passing me the insulated tumbler. “All right.”

“Don’t forget to pet your cat,” I said, grinning as I walked to the kitchen.

“Aghhhh!”

I laughed and filled her cup. I put the bottle back in the fridge and grabbed a can of beer for myself before taking both drinks back through to the living room. I leant on the back of the sofa and peered over Chloe’s shoulder at her laptop screen, frowning at the pixelated game she was happily playing.

“What are you playing?” I asked.

“Um, Stardew Valley.” She reached back and took the cup from me. “Thanks.”

“What the heck is Stardew Valley?”

“The most obsessive time suck of a game outside of The Sims franchise,” she replied without missing a beat.

“Is that what you were yelling at when I came in?”

“Um.” She coughed, before quickly dropping her left hand back to the keyboard, focusing it on the W-A-S-D keys. “Yes. There’s a festival each spring that represents Easter with an egg hunt, and if you win, you get a straw hat.”

“Right,” I said slowly. “But it sounds like you lost.”

“There’s no need to rub it in. I’m a bit salty about it. I got stuck behind a bush and Abigail beat me, the bitch.”

“You do realise you’re angry at a pixelated person, don’t you?”

She hit a button, bringing up a menu, and turned her face back to look at me. “If you think this is bad, you’ve clearly never seen Harvey playing Call of Duty.”

Actually, I had. He’d tried to get me into it during our university years, but… “That’s an excellent point. At the very least, I suppose you aren’t here swearing at real people.”

“Exactly.” She whipped her head back around and backed out of the menu, opening up her farm again. “No, come here, you stupid chicken. Let me love you.”

“This is fascinating,” I said as a little heart popped up above a white pixel chicken’s head.

“What is?”

“I never took you for a gamer.”

“I’m a hardcore gamer. If by hardcore you mean I raise pixel animals, plant pixel vegetables, and mod out all the things that piss me off, like the combat and fishing minigame.” She sighed. “That fishing minigame was made by Satan himself.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was on about. “Why would there be combat in a farming game? This looks peaceful.”

She patted the space on the sofa next to her. “I see you aren’t going to leave me alone, so I might as well adjust my mod settings and show you.”

“Show me the Satanic fishing game, too.” I walked around the sofa and sat next to her while she fiddled with a menu.

“To the mines, then,” she grumbled. “I can’t believe I’m wasting precious inventory space with food because of you.”

I fought back a smile. Of all the things I expected Chloe to do in her spare time, it wasn’t casual gaming. Honestly, sometimes I thought she might just spend her free time thinking up ways of torturing me for all the work I made her do, so this was a welcome nugget of information.

“Bubble spot!” she said excitedly, then quickly dropped her smile. “Oh. I have to do it properly.”

“Just once. I have to see that you’re bad at something to believe it.”

“I think there was a compliment in there somewhere, wasn’t there?” She laughed and equipped her pixel person’s fishing rod. The game made a little beeping noise, and she squeaked, frantically clicking her mouse as a bar popped up with a fish moving on it. “Shit, shit, shit, shi—you little bastard.”

“Did you catch it?” I asked.

“What part of all that swearing made you think I caught it?” She shot me a look that asked if I was stupid.

I knew because I’d seen it a thousand times—usually directed at stupid people, though. Being on the end of it was a new one for me.

“What do you have to do to catch it?”

“You have to keep it in the little blue bar that moves up and down. It’s almost impossible for me. I’ve tried with a trackpad, my mouse, a controller, and I even downloaded the game on my Switch just to see if it was possible, but it wasn’t.”

She had a Nintendo Switch?

I was really learning all kinds of things about her tonight.

“Can I try?”

She turned to look at me, raising her eyebrows. “You want to try?”

“Sure. It looks fun.”

“You’re a masochist.” She pushed her laptop over to me. “Go ahead. Use the right mouse button to launch the rod. Hold it to get it further in the lake. A little bar shows you how far it’s going. Click the left button when it beeps and the little exclamation mark pops up, then use the left button again to keep it within the bar. It rises when you click and falls when you don’t.”

That seemed easy enough.

I did as she said, releasing it when it was the full bar. The bobber dropped into the water with a little ‘plop,’ and I watched as it bounced along with the pixelated motion of the water until the little noise and exclamation mark happened.

I clicked, hooking the fish, and got to work on the minigame she hated so much. She said nothing while I clicked away, choosing to sip on her wine in her little tumbler. I lost the first fish, but by my fourth attempt, I’d managed to reel one in.

“See? It’s hard, right?”

“Not really,” I said. “Not once I’d gotten the hang of the mechanics, anyway.” I hooked another fish and caught it. “See?”

She stared at me for a moment before putting her tumbler down and reaching for her laptop back. “I don’t think I want to show you anything else in this game. You might ruin it for me.”

I laughed, letting her take the laptop from my thighs. “Maybe I’ll download it for myself.”

“I can’t wait to tell everyone at the office that Mr Black plays with pixel chickens in his free time.” She opened another menu and fiddled with the settings. “There. That’s better.”

“Please do tell everyone. I can’t imagine how confused they’d all be. They might think you’d gone mad.”

“I think I have gone mad. I can’t believe I just watched you fish in Stardew Valley.” She shook her head, keeping her eyes focused on the game. “You are irritatingly good at everything you do, aren’t you?”

“It’s both a blessing and a curse,” I demurred.

“Really, if you were also good at cooking, I’d think you were a robot. Thank God you’re utterly useless at just about every domestic task known to man,” she said. “It makes you much more bearable when you have faults.”

“I think you just complimented me.”

“If that’s a compliment, your bar is very low for flattery,” she replied, turning her attention back to her game. “By the way, if you tell anyone about this, I’m going to put salt in your coffee instead of that sweetener you like.”

That was quite the threat.

I also had no doubt she’d do it.

“Don’t worry,” I said, leaning in so I could see the screen a little better. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Chloe turned her head towards me, and the closeness of our faces sent a jolt through me. The tip of her nose was mere millimetres from my own, and with such close proximity, I could see every little golden fleck in her whiskey-coloured eyes.

Something sparked to life deep in my stomach; a tender warmth that spread slowly through my body, making my heart thump vigorously in my chest.

She really was beautiful.

Her cheeks were flushed with pink, and she quickly spun her head away from me. “You’re too close.”

“Sorry.” I scooted across the sofa until we were no longer within accidental touching distance and turned, reaching for the remote to turn on the TV.

I didn’t even watch TV, but I needed something… anything… to take my mind off how close we’d just been.

She’d blushed.

She was blushing, in fact. Right now.

Was she warm from the wine she’d presumably been drinking all evening, or was it because we’d been so close? Because God only knew the heat that was tickling at my skin was because of our closeness just now.

“I thought you didn’t watch TV,” she said, staring at the TV over the top of her laptop.

“I don’t, but you looked so shocked when you found out that I thought I should start.”

“As long as you don’t put on the news.” She dropped her attention back to her laptop. “I want to do my pixel farming without a dose of anxiety from the morbid over exaggerations of the national news reporters these days.”

I chuckled. “There’s the Chloe I know.”

“You say that like there are two sides of me.”

“There are. I can’t imagine you playing Stardew Valley in the office, for example. You even said yourself that you’d punish me if I told anyone you play it.”

She paused. “I don’t think I said I’d punish you.”

“Putting salt in my coffee is punishment. You said it in a roundabout way.”

“I still never explicitly said that I’d punish you.” She coughed, reaching for her wine. “And don’t put it like that in front of anyone else. They’ll get the wrong idea.”

“Well, if it’s that kind of punishment…”

She flung out her arm, balling her hand into a fist, only to freeze before making contact with me. “Pretend you didn’t see that,” she said, quickly drawing her arm back to her side. “That didn’t happen.”

“You can punch me if you want.” I rested my elbow on the arm of the sofa and propped my head up on my hand, smirking over at her. “What I said was worthy of a punch.”

“Punch-worthy or not, you’re still my boss. I can’t hit you.”

“But you can blush when I get close to you?”

Her cheeks reddened. “I did nothing of the sort!”

“And you were the one who added a sexual connotation to the notion of me being punished.”

“Other people! For. Other. People! Other people might think that’s how I meant it,” she rambled, waving her hands. “Some people might consider the thought of me punishing you something like that, that’s all.”

“What kind of people do you know that would jump to that conclusion?”

She stilled, then tilted her head slightly to the side, staring somewhere over my shoulder. “That… is a very fair question, and now I’m questioning about twenty years of friendship.”

I laughed. “It really isn’t that deep, Chloe.”

“Mm. Anyway, please get your mind out of the gutter, or I’m going to revert to calling you ‘sir’ out of office hours.”

“And here I thought we were finally friends.” I sighed, shaking my head.

“We… We’re friends?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Did you not think so?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought to put a label on our relationship past our professional one as boss and subordinate,” she replied, bringing her thumb to her mouth and biting down on her nail.

That was exactly what I suspected she’d say.

“What about now? Would you say we’re friends?” My lips tugged up on one side into a smile that almost felt sly.

Chloe opened her mouth, pausing for a moment, then tucked her hair behind her ear and dipped her chin towards her chest. “I… suppose it’s hard to deny such a thing, yes.”

“So formal.”

“Oh, leave me alone,” she muttered, glancing over at me. “I don’t think many people are friends with their boss, certainly not when their boss is… Well, you.”

“I don’t know what that means, and in the spirit of our newfound friendship, I don’t think I’ll ask,” I said.

“That’s probably for the best. I’m not responsible for what I say when I’ve had as much wine as I have.”

“In that case, do you want some more?”

She held up a hand. “I already feel like I’m going to regret this conversation when I wake up in the morning, so thanks, but no thanks.”

I chuckled, leaning back in again. “If we’re friends, then show me the combat part of this game you hate.”

“Ugh, fine.” She turned a little, tilting her screen in my direction. “Hold on. I have to get a chub for Willy.”

I opened my mouth with every intention of asking her to clarify, but quickly changed my mind.

I wasn’t even going to ask.