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I turned around and shuffled closer to Alex and hid my face in his chest, breathing in the clean smell of the bedsheets and Alex’s soap.
He was woken up by this and noticed my distress, wrapping his arms around me tighter. “Don’t tell me you checked your phone first thing after you woke up,” he murmured in a low, raspy, sleepy voice.
I nodded into his chest.
“We’ll have to change that. That’s the worst way to start your day,” he murmured.
I nodded again and some time later we drifted off to sleep again.
“Trolls are just miserable people looking for attention,” Alex said with such confidence, as if it was a universal truth, and to him maybe it was.
We were in the kitchen just finishing breakfast, although it was already past noon.
“I know, but it’s still hard,” I countered.
“I’ve been dealing with this for years, Em, and let me tell you it never gets easier. You just need to learn to ignore it. Focus on thepositive comments and the people who support you. And if you can’t do that, then focus on me,” he smirked. “I can be a very pleasant distraction.”
I rolled my eyes and playfully elbowed him as he was waiting for the coffee machine to heat up.
Later that day Alex had to start his stream. He had to make up the hours from the stream he had skipped yesterday so he could watch my own last night. Which meant that when it came time for me to start my stream that evening I was on my own.
My anxiety was a knot in my stomach but I started the stream, focused on playing the game and tried my best to talk to the chat. After a while, I received an in-game text from Alex.
Alex
Want to join me for a game or two?
I smiled, and shuffled in my chair before typing back.
You’re not in Challenger yet.
I was teasing him and the chat caught on to it. Then the chat messages caught my eye. They were filled with emotes with Alex’s likeness and some rare ones had hearts in them.
Alex
I know you hate playing normals but playing alone sucks after spending a month playing with you.
He didn’t even wait for me to respond before sending me a team invite.
I accepted it, of course, and we connected through the in-game voice chat.
“We didn’t spend a month playing together, I was playing and you were coaching, that is hardly playing together,” was the first thing I said to him.
“Well, I quite enjoyed our last game together, despite our disagreements. Would you consider playing a few wind-down games with me?” He said over the voice chat.
“Chat, should I play with him? Ones in the chat if I should humour him,” I asked and looked over to my second monitor. The chat filled with the number one and was scrolling faster than usual. “Alright, chat says yes,” I relented.
Alex immediately queued us up for a game. We started talking about what characters we wanted to play and then I asked Alex how his hand was faring.
“Better than I thought it would. Honestly just switching to a vertical mouse has helped a lot with the pressure in my wrist,” he said. “Finding a wired one with decent gaming latency was a pain, but it was worth it.”
We proceeded to play a few games and I actually felt really good about it. We were back to playing off of each other and ribbing each other about clumsy plays. It was nice to hear his voice in my headset and know I wasn’t just talking to a screen. He truly was a great player and now that he was getting back into the groove, I could see the skill gap between myself and him, even though he was not playing at his best.
After the stream ended, Alex came over to my room with a big grin on his face. “We. Did. Great!”
“You know what I was thinking the whole time on stream?” Iasked. He shook his head and came closer to lean on my chair. “About the convention. I guess you were talking about it on stream, because I kept getting messages in chat about it.”
“Ah, yeah. I told them I would be attending. Have you changed your mind about going?” He narrowed his eyes on me.
