Chapter 14
Chapter 14: The Night Before
The bar was quieter than she expected.
The ceremony crowd had dispersed into the hotel restaurants and the event spaces on the upper floors, the specific redistribution of a large gathering after its centre has dissolved. The lobby bar had four tables occupied, the bartender doing the considered work of the late evening, the music at exactly the register of a place that understood what it was doing.
The same bar as Thursday. The same table in the corner, which they'd found by instinct.
"One congratulatory drink," she said.
"One congratulatory drink," he agreed.
The bartender came. They ordered without discussion — she knew what she wanted, he ordered without performing it — and the drinks arrived. She turned hers in her hands. He looked at the bar.
"Signal was going to win," he said. "I want you to know that I think that."
"It didn't."
"Undertow won on the movement system and the emotional architecture, which are — those are the externally readable ones. Signal won on the thing that's harder to name. The message mechanic. The way the game feels when you're in it." He looked at her. "It was going to win in a different room. Or a different year. It will."
"I'm aware," she said. "And I'm not—" She paused. "I'm not managing a loss. I know the work is good. I'm sitting with it." She looked at her drink. "I also genuinely think Undertow deserved it. I played it last night."
He looked at her.
"At one in the morning," she said. "I downloaded it. I had the demo from PAX but I'd never—" She stopped. "I'd been not playing it. For deliberate reasons that I'm not going to pretend weren't deliberate."
"And?"
"And Connor was right about the second act." She looked up. "And you were right to keep the ending. The quiet morning, the two of them, the beginning-of-a-thing. It's the right ending."
He held this. The particular quality of someone hearing something they'd cared about for two years named correctly.
"Thank you," he said.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." He turned his glass. "That's the thing about you. I always know when you mean it."
She looked at him. The bar light was the same low warm tone as Thursday, the same as the restaurant five years ago, the same as a hotel room with a bridge visible through the curtains. Something about this specific quality of light, she thought, was becoming its own geography — a place she'd been before, that she was in again.
"Tell me what you said to your team tonight," she said. "After the award. What it felt like."
He told her. Connor had cried, which Connor would insist had not happened and which had absolutely happened. The rest of the team had been on a call — they'd streamed the ceremony — and the noise from the call when the name was announced had been, he said, slightly overwhelming in the specific way of a thing you've been working toward for years and didn't fully let yourself believe was possible. His voice when he described it had the particular warmth of a person who remembered exactly how much the work had cost and what it meant that it had landed.
She watched his face. She thought about what Fiona had apparently said — she wouldn't know this for weeks, but she would learn it — you know what matters more than winning. She thought about what she had said to herself this morning, sitting in the early light: the something was real.
"I want to say something," she said.
"Okay."
"I've been—" She paused. She was a practical person. Practical people were honest about the landscape; that was the whole point of the disposition. "I've been in this city the whole five years. I've been here the whole time. And I built two games that were — adjacent to what happened — and I told myself they weren't, and they were, and I'm—" She stopped. "I'm not good at this part."
"I know."
"I'm good at making things," she said. "I'm good at building the structure and putting the right things in the right places. The actual saying of the thing." She looked at him. "I'm telling you I didn't stop either. For the record. I built your number into a game. I'm aware of what that means."
He was very still.
"I'm also—" She breathed. "I'm also telling you that I don't know what I want from tonight. Specifically. I know what I'm not interested in, which is a conversation with a tidy conclusion about well, we both know now, let's be professional and kind and move on." She looked at him. "I'm not interested in that."
He looked at her steadily. "Neither am I."
"No," she said. She turned her glass once more. "What are you interested in?"
He looked at her with the full attention. Not the managed version. The one she'd first seen at a restaurant table when he'd said tell me you felt it too in every possible way except out loud, and she'd said order the wine and meant yes, all of it.
"You," he said. "I've been interested in you for five years. I'm not confused about it anymore." He paused. "What do you want, Nisha?"
She looked at him. She thought about parallel selves and the messages that crossed between them and the specific courage of the version of herself who stopped running and stood in the place.
"I want to find out if it's still what I thought it was," she said. "That night. Whether that holds up."
He was watching her with an expression she'd been trying not to look at directly all week — the warmth and the attention and the specific quality of this matters, you matter, I'm here that she'd recognised the first night and had been trying to manage the recognition of ever since.
"I think it does," he said. "But I'd like to find out too."
She picked up her drink and finished it. She set the glass down. She stood.
"Come on," she said.
His room was on the same floor as hers, which she found out when they got in the elevator and he pressed five and she pressed five and they looked at each other and she almost laughed — the specific absurdity of it, two people who had been not-finding each other for five years ending up separated by half a corridor.
"That's going to be a Priya observation," she said.
"Connor too," he said. "Both of them will find this extremely significant."
"It's not significant. It's a hotel."
"It's extremely significant."
She did laugh then — the real kind, the one that arrived without her planning it — and he looked at her with the expression that meant he was pleased with himself for the laugh, which she remembered, which she had remembered for five years, which she was done pretending she hadn't.
The elevator opened. They walked down the corridor.
At his room he found his keycard without drama and the door opened and she walked in, and the room was a hotel room with a window and the waterfront visible through it, the September night and the dark lake beyond, and she stood in the middle of it and felt the specific, complete quality of: here. This. Again.
"Nisha," he said.
She turned.
He crossed the room in three steps and kissed her, and the five years of distance and misunderstanding collapsed into the specific, real, present weight of him — the warmth of it, the same deliberate attention as before but with something new in it, something that had spent five years arriving at this.
She kissed him back with everything she'd been not-carrying.
It was different and the same. Different because five years had happened — she was not the woman who'd said order the wine and found out, and he was not the man who'd waited at a coffee shop until he couldn't anymore. Same because the thing underneath it was the same thing that had been in the first kiss, in the restaurant and the bar and the hotel room with the bridge light, the specific quality of two people who fit together in a way that they'd both felt and neither of them had been prepared for.
He pulled back and looked at her. She looked back at him.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
"Still yes?"
"Still yes," she said. "Considerably more yes than before, if you want the full inventory."
"The full inventory," he said, "would be very welcome."
She had thought, somewhere in the abstract consideration of this possibility, that it would feel urgent — five years and a misunderstanding and the specific charge of a week of managed proximity. And it did have that, the urgency, the particular force of two people who had been wanting this for longer than they'd allowed themselves to say.
But he was slow.
Not hesitant — not the performance of not rushing, not strategic patience. Just: present. The same way he'd been the first time. His hands on her face, her jaw, her waist, with the complete attention of someone who was in this fully and not anywhere else. He kissed her like he had time for it, like the time was the point.
She let herself be in it. She was not, tonight, trying to be practical. She was not managing the distance between what she felt and what she said. She was in the room, with him, and she had spent five years being careful about this and she was done with careful.
She pulled his jacket from his shoulders and he said her name, low and certain, and she thought: yes, that's the thing, that's the exact quality of it, and she stopped thinking at all.
Later — much later, the kind of later that was beginning to approach tomorrow — she lay on her back in the dark with his arm across her and the waterfront visible through the curtain she'd pulled half-open, the lake black and silver in the September night.
"Well," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"That answers the question."
"Which question."
"Whether it holds up." She stared at the ceiling. "It holds up."
He made a sound that was mostly laughter. She felt it against her side. "Considerably," he said.
"Don't be smug."
"I'm not being smug. I'm being—" He paused. "I'm very happy. That's different from smug."
She looked at the ceiling. She thought: very happy. She turned the phrase over with the attention she usually gave to design problems and found, to her own genuine surprise, that it applied to her too.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"I'm — also that." She paused. "I'm also working out what comes after this."
"Tonight?"
"In general." She looked at the ceiling. "You're in Vancouver."
"I am."
"I'm here."
"I know." He was quiet for a moment. "I've been thinking about that."
"Since when."
"Since approximately March," he said. "When the TIGF shortlist came out."
She turned her head to look at him. He was on his side, facing her, with the open expression she'd been trying not to look at directly all week. "That's months of thinking," she said.
"I've had five years of wanting to think about it," he said. "March gave me a reason to think practically."
"And what did you think?"
"I thought—" He paused. "I thought that Bright Fault Games has been a remote studio for two years. We moved to partial remote during the pandemic and it turned out better — the work is better, the team is better. Connor lives in Victoria now, which is not Vancouver. I have an apartment in Vancouver that I like but don't love." He looked at her. "I thought a lot of things."
Nisha held this. She thought about the Still Water Games studio space near Kensington Market and the apartment she'd had for three years and the city she'd grown up adjacent to and come back to and built a life in. She thought about Priya. She thought about a game that was still in early structure.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
"I know."
"I like Toronto."
"I like Toronto," he said. "I've been here four times. I've been looking for a reason to come more often."
She turned back to the ceiling. She felt the warmth of his arm across her and the specific weight of a thing that was real and was going to require things from her and which she was — she was going to say fine with and corrected herself: which she wanted.
"You'd need an extremely convincing reason to move your whole life," she said.
"I have one," he said.
"That's fast."
"It's not fast," he said. "It's five years." He paused. "I'm not asking you for anything tonight, Nisha. I'm not— I know what tonight is and what it isn't. I'm just telling you that I have been thinking about the practical shape of this since March, and the practical shape is not as difficult as it might look."
She looked at him. He looked back at her with the same steadiness he'd had all evening, all week, all — apparently — five years. The patience that was constitutive, not performed. The warmth.
"Ask me in the morning," she said. "When I've slept."
"Okay," he said.
"I'm serious. I need sleep to be practical."
"I know." He moved his arm slightly, settling. "Sleep. I'll be here."
She looked at the ceiling. She thought about I'll be here and what it had cost each of them, in different ways, that he hadn't been able to say it five years ago. She thought about notes and digits and the specific, small, random accidents that had bent two parallel lines away from each other and sent them running for half a decade.
She thought about a game about someone trying to reach someone.
"The glitch," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Nothing." She paused. "It's something Priya says. About — mistakes that can be fixed. If you find them." She turned on her side, toward him. "We found it."
He looked at her. "We did," he said. "Very late."
"Better late," she said.
"Yes," he said. "Considerably better."
She closed her eyes. She felt his arm come around her, solid and warm, the same way he'd oriented toward her the first night — not demanding, just: here. Still here.
She slept.