We each dished ourselves out some food, and gravitated to our seats. Link and I had our preferred spots, and Fallyn settled in an empty space distinctly away from both of us.
So much for making me fall in love. Unless she thought playing hard to get was the way to go. Spoiler alert—it wasn’t.
“How did you like your very first day ever of RinCon?” Link asked.
Fallyn glanced at me through her eyelashes, and pink spread across her cheeks. “It was good.” She shoved the food in her mouth as she spoke.
“Favorite part?” I already knew what mine was, and suspected she felt the same, given the way her blush deepened.
She took her time chewing and swallowing. “It’s hard to pick.” Her voice was a squeak.
Link nudged a bottle of soda toward her. “Too hot?”
“Something like that.” She busied herself with downing the drink and eating some more.
That told me all I needed to know. I was already winning this battle.
Which meant I could give her a little bit of a reprieve. “What’s Fallyn’s story?” I asked.
She finally met my gaze, her brows raised. “I don’t know how to answer that. What’s Elliot’s story? What’s Link’s?”
“You know our stories.” Which was total bullshit. No one but him and me knew the details. “We started at Cord, we moved to Rinslet, then AcesPlayed.” There were documentaries about the first two companies and their rises and the fall of Cord. “So what about you? Did you love video games as a kid? Did you hate them and breaking and humiliating them is your vengeance? Did they kill everyone on your home planet, and you barely escaped with your sense of vindictiveness intact?”
Fallyn’s mouth twisted and her eyes went blank. “Yes. Video games are my supervillain origin story. If I tell you the truth, is that when you tell me I don’t have a right to do what I’m doing?”
I shook my head. “I’ll tell you that right now, backstory or not.” That should be pretty obvious by now.
“We don’t gatekeep,” Link said. Always the diplomat. “I genuinely want to know, and as you’ve just seen, you don’t want us filling in the blanks. There’s a reason we’re developers and not writing the main story.”
“Which is something I appreciate about you.” Fallyn’s reply caught me off-guard. “You know what you’re good at, and you embrace it. Your artists are gifted, your story team is brilliant, and your developers…” The rest of her sentence was muffled by her shoving food in her mouth.
I tried to puzzle out the words, but I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. “Say that again? Clearly this time.”
Fallyn’s chewing looked exaggerated as she stared at me.
“I’m willing to wait.” At my feet, King sat and whined. I scratched his ears, but wouldn’t give him food. He needed to learn not to beg for table scraps.
She finally finished the bite. “Your developers are arrogant fucks who think the world revolves around them.” Her reply was meek.
I grinned. “That’s because it does. That’s why they’remydevelopers.” I wasn’t big on misplaced arrogance, but ours was founded in reality.
“That’s something I like about you, ET Howard.” Fallyn laughed.
Tension rolled through me at the nickname, but I was willing to let her finish before I said anything.
“You know exactly how good you are, and you don’t let anyone take that from you,” Fallyn said.
King whined louder. If he kept that up, I was going to cave, but once again I gave him a little attention and went back to dinner and the conversation. “I don’t know if I’ve just been insulted or not.”
She licked her lips. “Not. That was all compliment, I promise.”
“I mean, you’re right, I’m just surprised to hearyouadmit it.” I also wasn’t about to start having fun. Not with her. Not like this. She could see the mask I wore for the world, and think that I was being friendly, but she didn’t get to see the part of me that was boxed safely away.
Fallyn let out an exaggerated sigh that made her chest rise and fall and captivated me.
I tore my gaze away quickly.
King stopped whining at me, and trotted the few feet to Link’s chair, before he resumed the begging.