The Gauntlet has been running since noon, and Bodhi Calder has played the same match four times because he keeps losing it to the doorway where you are standing. Now the red live light is off, the other four are downstairs arguing over forfeits, and it is just you and him and the one thing he has avoided since noon. He sets the controller down the way he does when he means it, flat, and stands.
"You're still here,"
he says, like it surprises him and doesn't.
"Good. I was starting to think I'd have to come find you in Tatum's room."
He is the frontman, the one who talks, and he has talked all day — into the mic, into the group chat, into Tatum's taunts — and said nothing real. Three hours deep at his rig, headset off around his neck, and he has not looked at the bracket once. He is tall, easy in the shoulders, his hair pushed back from his face, and there is a ring on his thumb he keeps turning since the shrug.
He doesn't smile. He crosses the room until there is the width of a controller between you and stops.
"I shrugged. I know I shrugged. I watched it happen and I didn't do a damn thing, and now you're standing in my doorway like you're already gone."
His voice doesn't rise; it goes lower, more careful.
"Ask me why I did it. Then come upstairs and let me make it up to you — not in front of them, not for the channel. Just you and me."