Page 114 of Level Up for Love

He’s had all month to work on it, I realize. It looks better than ever.

Without saying anything, I gently nudge his laptop to the side and pull my own out of my tote bag. I snap it open, click through a few prompts on my screen, and gesture for Wesley to sit.

When he does, I lean over his shoulder to navigate the cursor. When my forearm brushes his elbow, I dart a glance at him and flinch away. But Wesley doesn’t react, just sits stone-faced as my laptop screen fills with a familiar battle map.

It’s a digital re-creation of the map he used for our last session, when the party was fighting Vadrien. There are tokens for each character—party members, skeletons, and Vadrien—arranged carefully across it.

He frowns. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“It’s a digital D&D platform,” I say. “As the DM, you can build out the entire map of a battle or a city on here, and the players can navigate through it on their own. You can also do things like set up traps, add in music, and connect it directly to your video call…well, theoretically. I’ve only just started working on it. I know there are already a ton of other digital D&D platforms that work perfectly well, but this one, I—” I push past a sudden lump in my throat and continue. “I made it with you in mind. Fully customizable, based on your style and how you run your games.”

“You don’t like my maps?”

“What? No, I love them, but I know you played with Shay, Colin, and Arthur remotely before you moved to New Haven. And with Shay and Mona moving away—” I pause, but the words and maybe you, too get stuck behind my teeth. “Anyway. I thought it’d be good to have if you still want to game together.”

He nods. He scrolls for a bit, toys with clicking on the character tokens and moving them around the map. But his expression hasn’t changed, and when he turns toward me, he looks tired. Impatient.

“Spit it out, Reagan.”

“What?”

“Why did you make this?”

He turns to face me, his left arm pressed against the arm of the small wooden desk chair. My fingers flex where they still curl around the chair’s backrest.

“I don’t want to stop playing with you, Wesley. I don’t want to stop gaming with any of you. Whatever studio you go to, wherever Mona and Shay end up…I’d like us to have the option. If we want it.”

His eyes tighten. “But is that all you want to do? Just play?” His tone turns rough. “I can’t pretend that things haven’t changed, Reagan. Don’t ask me to.”

Gingerly, I take a step back from him. I wish there was another chair to sit in, or that I could drop onto his bed. But his room suddenly feels suffocating, and I can’t bear to touch any of it. It’s too intimate, and I haven’t earned that yet. So I just stand at its center, digging my toes into the rug through my socks.

“No,” I say quietly. “Not anymore.”

I clear my throat—and then release it all in a rush. “One of the first things my dad shared with me when I said I wanted to start DMing was, ‘You have to be open to the ending changing. You have to give the story room to grow—to tell itself.’ ” I rub idly at my sternum before crossing my arms over my chest, like the gesture could be enough to keep my heart from jumping right out. “For years, I took that advice very seriously, and my games were better because of it.

“But I never extended the same courtesy to you.”

I scrub at my face with my hand. “Except where my players are involved, I’m not great at navigating change. I’m not great about giving people a chance to change. And you’ve changed so much. Ever since I saw you sitting at the head of the table before that first session, the ghost of who I thought you were in college has haunted me. I didn’t want to think that you’d changed, didn’t want to admit that maybe I’d been wrong to hate you for the last six years. It was even harder to admit to myself that I’d changed, too.

“What I said back at the cabin…”

He stiffens reactively. I wince.

“Wes, it was so fucked. I’m so sorry.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you how brave I think you are and how much I admire you for it. You’ve never let anything stop you from creating. Not Hurricane, or your grandparents, or the fucking pandemic—you just keep going. You’re always making something, and it’s always incredible.

“When I turned down the offer in L.A., I never tried again. I put my games up online for a fraction of what I should’ve charged and never invested in seeing if they could actually go anywhere. And when my last D&D campaign ended…” I shake my head and look away. “I never told Mona this, but I wasn’t sure I would ever play again. I was really afraid it would fall apart if I tried. I was afraid of all of it.

“And then, joining another campaign, making these games together, doing all the things I’d thought for sure I’d left behind…

“Wesley, falling in love with you has scared the shit out of me.”

For the first time, something in his face changes. His expression cracks and then crumbles; his eyes widen, his brows lift to disappear beneath the fall of his hair, and his lips part in a small surprised “O.”

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” I continue. “I didn’t know how to carry something that suddenly felt so big and momentous and different, and—I fucked it up. I didn’t trust it. I let it go. And I’m sorry for it.”

The silence that fills the space between us feels like a tangible thing, like a weight pressing down and keeping us apart. It’s so thick that even when Wesley speaks at a whisper, it sounds like he’s yelling. “You didn’t fuck it up.”

My vision grows blurry, and I try to blink away the building tears. “Didn’t I?”

Where he’d folded his hands tightly in his lap, they now fall open, palms up, on his thighs. He lifts one toward me. “There were things I said that I also regret. But no, Reagan. You didn’t fuck it up.” The corner of his lip twitches. “Not irreversibly.”

I look out the window. It’s snowing again. I can’t bear to look at him, like staring at that bright hope for too long would blind me as surely as would staring at the sun. But gently, he circles his hand around my wrist and draws me close to him.

He’s smiling—just a little—when I finally look back at him. He glances to my laptop. “It still needs a lot of work,” he finally says.

I nod. “Yes.”

His eyes flash up to mine. “We could work on it together.”

I’m blinking rapidly, but it’s no use—the tears fall anyway, twin streams of warmth down my cheeks.

“Yes,” I say quietly, ignoring the wobble in my voice. “I’d like that.”