Page 24 of Single Player

Silas got up, too, despite wanting to collapse into Matthew’s bed for a few hours. “I’ll probably go in to work. I didn’t finish something yesterday, and I stayed late but it’s still not done.”

“Well, don’t work too hard.”

Silas held back a snort. As if that was even an option.

Silas followed Matthew into the living room, where Zuul was asleep in her crate. “When do you want to build the wheelchair?” he asked.

“I need to talk to Caleb on Monday about using his workshop, so I’ll get in touch with you early in the week.” Matthew smiled. “Thanks for the help. You want to hang out, maybe play some games?”

Silas tried not to look too dubious, but he must not have succeeded, because Matthew rolled his eyes and laughed. “Okay, got it. Never mind, then. Another time, though I think you’d really like gaming.”

“Before I go, let me send you these files. Any CAD program should be able to open them.” Silas clicked a few buttons to export and send the files to Matthew’s email. After packing up his laptop, Silas hesitated at the door, possessed with the urge to kiss Matthew again. So he did. Matthew stiffened in surprise, but then kissed him back, sweet and gentle.

“See you later.” Silas smiled, feeling for the moment like everything was going to be all right.

Matthew smiled back, something tentative and new between them. “Yeah. Later.”

After Silas left, Matthew went to his computer and started searching for a free CAD program. There were a few, and after reading the reviews, he picked one to download. The interface was different from the program Silas had been using, but the options were the same, and after a quick skim of the manual, he opened it up and started fooling around.

This wasn’t nearly as difficult as he’d originally expected. While he couldn’t do everything he wanted, he was able to complete a few basic designs after just a little time using the program. Most significantly of all, though, he enjoyed it. This type of design work brought a sense of satisfaction akin to when he completed a project at work. He remembered designing all kinds of elaborate schematics as a child, designs for rocket ships and battleships and race cars that flew. As he got older, he would sketch his designs on graph paper, creating multilayer tree houses and snow cave systems that he would never actually build. Even if he had had snow available to build with, the building wasn’t the fun part. The fun was in the designing.

When Matthew felt he’d really gotten the hang of things, he opened up the cat wheelchair plans and made a copy to modify. He was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t actually check the time until it was already after six. Wow. He got up to stretch, his muscles cramped from the long session sitting at his desk. Normally, he got up every ninety minutes to stretch, but he had been having way too much fun designing things with CAD to stop. He left the program and heated up leftovers.

While eating, he considered the mixture of emotions he was feeling. On one hand, he was excited about the program. Learning new things was always fun. But on the other hand, he felt a quiet sense of guilt, so peripheral that it took him a few minutes even to identify it and a few more to trace it back to its cause.

He used to feel this excited about his programming work. Back before it was easy, when he had to work through all his coding problems by hand with a C++ manual, he couldn’t get enough of the subject. That passion had sustained him through all four years of college and an internship. That passion eventually got him the job at PI Games. Now he was three years into this gig and he felt more passionate about programming in CAD than he did about his day-to-day work. What did that say about him? Why was he so unwilling to throw himself into his work the way he used to?

Did he even want his job to be so all-consuming, though? Silas was passionate about his career; granted, it was a career in a very specialized field, but he was neurotic and way too uptight for his own good. It was difficult to tell how much of that was Silas’s high-stress job and how much was his perfectionism, which Matthew could see like a beacon from a distance. Like a chicken-and-egg conundrum, perhaps Silas’s uptight qualities came from his job, and perhaps he was uptight about his job because he was uptight about everything.

Well, maybe not everything, at least not anymore. Matthew smiled at the memory. Two weeks ago when they first met, he would never have thought this introvert would initiate sex so enthusiastically. That had to be good for Silas’s stress level, since keeping it all built up was a sure way to sleepless nights and general frustration. He chuckled to himself thinking of prescribing Silas sex every night in order to calm him down and help him get to sleep. Since he probably wouldn’t smoke weed, sex would likely be the next best thing for insomnia.

And it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Matthew, either.

Then again, maybe Silas would find ways to get uptight all over again. That was apparently a deep-seated part of his identity, and while some of it might be due to having a medical condition that affected his social interactions, Matthew had a suspicion this was more nurture than nature. Matthew could imagine the stress of having to live up to the expectations of parents who had died, the guilt about not being good enough for the people whose memory you were trying to honor. If he’d grown up under similar circumstances, maybe he would have ended up just like Silas. He felt bad for the guy, honestly. Not sleeping, never feeling good enough? What a terrible life.

Although to be fair, Silas was making a genuine difference in the world. He was passionate about his work and he took it seriously enough to be proud of his accomplishments. Earlier, he had defended himself to Silas, saying that he was serious, but maybe he wasn’t as serious as he could be. That was the sticking point, wasn’t it? Was he wasting his life and his talents because of some deep-seated fears of failure or fears of commitment? Maybe he was just lazy.

The thought didn’t sit well with him as he finished eating and cleaned up. Before long, he found himself back at the computer, but he didn’t return to the CAD program. Instead, he logged in remotely to his workstation and called up the information on Endgame. Programming this game would be challenging, and it seemed that he wasn’t the only person on the team procrastinating. A game that had to adapt to a player’s decisions while psychoanalyzing them? It was pretty far above his pay grade, honestly. When Will had first brought it up, Matthew had written it off as a pain in the ass, even with the psychologist who was consulting. Now that he had to turn that information into if/then statements and logic trees, he was intimidated.

But . . . also a little excited.

Maybe he’d been looking at this the wrong way. Maybe instead of seeing this task as a complicated problem taking up his time, he could throw himself into the challenge of it the way he used to.

Even with that in mind, he clicked around without real commitment for a while. It seemed so ridiculous in the abstract. His performance reviews were fine and his job was stable. There was no real reason to change. This guilt, though, was frustrating. He couldn’t believe a guy like Silas was getting to him so much.

Matthew got up from the computer, leaving the to-do list open and taunting him. Going over to where Zuul was playing with a toy mouse in her crate, he opened the door and scooped her out. She went willingly, purring as soon as he picked her up. He sat down on the floor with her and set her next to him, letting her do a bit of exploring. At first, she wobbled, but then she was off, pulling herself across the ground by her front legs with a sinuous Komodo dragonesque slither. When she turned, her back legs swept across the floor in an arc. He watched her prowl about, undeterred by her nonfunctioning lower half, until she got to the couch and decided to scale it. He plucked her off the side of the sofa as quickly as he could, detaching her tiny claws from the upholstery despite her mew of dismay. That was going to be a problem. He’d need to get her a ramp, since she was clearly going to try to get on the furniture anyway. Not to mention that she probably couldn’t safely get down once she was up there.

With her mobility issues, she couldn’t move very fast, so he had no trouble keeping ahead of her and moving her back into the center of the living room when she got too far out of range. Eventually, she gave up wandering and flopped over onto her side, stretched her front legs out like her back ones, and blinked at him owlishly. He scratched her jaw absentmindedly as he thought about the odd circumstances in his life right now. So much had changed in two weeks, and he wasn’t even sure what was next for him. He had a CAD program on his computer, an engineer on his mind, and a disabled kitten in his living room, which sounded like the start to a terribly unpopular country song. Laughing to himself, he picked Zuul up to put her back in her crate.

The best part about working on a Saturday was having the lab to himself. Silas enjoyed the solitude of Wayscorp on the weekend, when he didn’t have to wait for any of the best equipment and didn’t have to answer questions from his coworkers. After leaving Matthew’s apartment, he’d driven straight to work, letting himself past the security guard with his identification and taking the elevator all the way up to his floor. At this point, the security guard didn’t even look surprised to see him. He worked almost every weekend now, usually to get ahead. Today, though, he was here to catch up.

After his morning and afternoon with Matthew, he came into work feeling refreshed. Today he would surely be able to accomplish the tasks he’d struggled with yesterday. Granted, he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, but that didn’t matter. Work was a situation of willpower.

As he sat at his workbench, it took him several minutes to acclimate to what he was attempting to put together, and several more minutes to find all the pieces he needed to get started, but then he was back into it.

“Hey, Silas,” said a voice behind him, startling him enough that he dropped his screwdriver. He turned on his stool to see Elliot in the doorway and resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“Hello, Elliot.” He picked up his screwdriver off the ground, hoping this would be a fast visit and determined not to give it any cause to linger through needless conversation.