“I tried to take a light-handed approach at first. I assured him that as a rule, unless our partner happens to be a trans man, we faggots are rarely pussy-whipped.” Niles shrugged. “He didn’t find it as amusing as I did. Which was why I had to bring the hammer down and give him his warning.”
Niles sounded unhappy about that, which probably had as much to do with the fact that Niles hated confrontation as it did with however this Bolment guy had responded. Jordan laid an arm around his shoulders.
“How did he take it?” Rosie asked. She must have picked up on Niles’s discomfort because her smile gentled.
Niles cleared his throat again. “We’re now back to searching for a new off-tank.”
“Oh, brother.” Rosie sighed. “Ah well, it was clear he overstated his qualifications to begin with. He was one of the first to die on the Recollector, because he didn’t have a clue about the mechanics.”
“Unlike those of us who knew damn well what taking that AOE nuke was going to do to us if we didn’t get out of line of sight, but stuck around to heal your ass anyway,” Niles muttered, taking a swig of his beer.
“Sore loser!” Rosie taunted.
“It was a fucking wipe!” He leaned forward, growing more animated. “You were down to five percent health when the Recollector went down.”
“Well, that’s why I’m the boss.” Rosie grinned and took another lusty drink.
Niles narrowed his eyes at her. “You could work on being a more gracious winner.”
“Relax, bro.” Jordan drew his tense body in close. “You’re just cranky because Anthony called again.”
“Now, see, I knew you should come out tonight. A breakup is definitely cause to go to a bar with friends and get hammered.” Rosie smiled over the mouth of her bottle. “And hey, I finally got the two of you to go to a club together.”
“This time only.” Jordan shook his head with a small smile, tipping back his own beer.
“Okay, I don’t get that!” She looked back and forth between Niles and Jordan, nearly pouting. “What the hell do the two of you have against going out together? You do everything else together. You even work for the same company!”
Niles caught Jordan’s eye and then turned his head, jerking it in a subtle nod toward a guy who had been cruising them since Niles had walked up to the bar. “That’s why.”
Rosie gave him a puzzled frown. “What, because someone is checking you out?”
“No, because someone is checking us out.” Niles sighed. “We can’t go out together without every guy in the place assuming we’re a package deal here to fulfill his twin fantasy. And we don’t do that.”
“Anymore.” Jordan buried a smirk behind his beer. After a bad breakup in college, Niles had had a brief slutty period, and they had quite a few fun memories from that time.
Rosie’s eyebrows shot up, and she took a long swig of her beer. “Sorry, I need a moment alone with that mental image.”
Niles snorted and leaned his head on Jordan’s shoulder. He wondered—not for the first time—what exactly was troubling Niles. Something was going on he wasn’t talking about. Jordan could just tell. And it wasn’t that Niles was heartbroken over the breakup with Anthony, that much he knew. Niles had already admitted the chemistry between the two of them hadn’t been working for quite a while. Jordan suspected he simply didn’t want to have to start the search for a relationship all over again. Jordan was perfectly happy taking home a different guy every night, but with their thirty-second birthday looming, Niles was over the singles thing and counted himself among the ranks of the husband hunters.
“Careful, Rosie, you’re bordering on becoming a stereotype.” Jordan grinned at her, and Rosena shrugged.
“Come on, a pair of you, both gay. How often do you see that?”
“It’s more common than you think.” Niles took a slow drink of his beer, comfortably pressed against Jordan’s side as she looked askance at him. Jordan let himself enjoy the fact that Niles was unwinding a bit. “I’m serious. If you’re a gay identical twin, there’s something like a fifty-two percent chance that your twin is gay too. It’s one of the strongest arguments there is for a genetic component to sexual orientation.”
“I bet it’s actually higher,” Jordan mused. “I bet whatever method they used to calculate that fifty-two percent figure doesn’t take into consideration the twins whose siblings might be in the closet.”
“That’s a good point.” Rosie hummed thoughtfully as Niles’s pants pocket vibrated against Jordan’s thigh. “Though, I imagine when the person who’s pretty much literally your other half comes out, it’d make it a bit easier for the second twin to come out, no?”
“It definitely did for me.” Niles set his beer down and dug in his pocket for his phone. He glanced at the text and rolled his eyes, stretching to stuff it back into his pocket, but Jordan snagged it from his hand first.
“Another one?” He frowned. No matter how many times Niles assured him that harassing messages were part and parcel of what he and Rosie were trying to accomplish at Third Wave, nothing was going to make him feel better about the fact that strangers were saying vile, threatening things to his brother.
Niles shrugged, smiling wryly. “Well, what did we expect after that ‘petition’ to take me off the writing staff before the Q&A yesterday? It’s not like it’s news to us that I’m considered a blight on gaming culture, what with me spreading my faggy influence all over the games.”
Rosie grimaced at the mention of the petition. “I guess you have to admire their chutzpah, however misguided.”
Niles grinned and saluted her with his beer. “I especially liked the assertion that we were ‘forcing’ the same-sex romance on the player by writing Gairi so that he flirts unless and until you tell him you’re not interested.”
Jordan scrolled through the texts on Niles’s phone, anger beginning to sizzle in his gut. “Fuck, is there anything these guys won’t say?”
Niles shrugged and grabbed it back. “You become inured to it after so many times of being told you should drink bleach and jump off an overpass into heavy traffic while fellating yourself.”
Rosie snorted into her beer. “That’s more inventive than having your body type and ethnicity disparaged while being told to get back to the kitchen before you make gamers into pussies and succeed in having all female characters dressed in nuns’ habits.”
Jordan looked up to catch her rueful smile. With her broad shoulders, thick waist, large breasts, and wide hips—she was a good forty or so pounds over the near-anorexic “ideal”—Rosie was a prime target for cruel remarks concerning her appearance. Even though she seemed to be completely happy with her body, and was as outspoken against body shaming as she was on every other issue, the constant barrage had to be hurtful. “I don’t think inventive is a word that belongs in the same sentence with these dickwads.” Niles’s phone vibrated again almost the moment he’d stuffed it back in his pocket. He ignored it, grabbing his beer instead.
“How often do they do that?” Jordan demanded, gesturing to the outline of the phone beneath the denim.
“Do what?”
Another vibration. Jordan resisted the urge to jerk the phone back out himself and see what they were saying to his brother now. “Actually threaten you?”
“That wasn’t a threat.”
“‘Get fucked with a chainsaw, you worthless cunt,’ isn’t a threat?”
“Probably not in the legal sense. Not unless the person in question is saying, ‘I’m going to fuck you with a chainsaw’—”
“I’ve got a few thousand of those in my files, if you want to compare,” Rosie muttered.
“—That would be a threat. This is just . . . some basement-dwelling trogg using his mom’s computer to talk like a big man about a game he bought with his dad’s credit card.”
Rosie gave him a censuring look. “Niles. Seriously? You, of all people, stereotyping gamers?”
“Sorry.” Niles gave her an apologetic smile. Jordan understood
all too well. As Third Wave’s marketing director—and a staunch nongamer—he’d been the target more than once of a lecture about the truth behind gamer demographics, but it really was all too easy to assume this sort of behavior was the province of kids, given how immature it was.
He wasn’t going to let the two of them divert him, however. “How many of these do you receive in a day?” Jordan demanded. “And don’t try to parse semantics of what does and doesn’t constitute a threat.”
Rosie shrugged and answered for Niles. Jordan knew no matter how vile the abuse and harassment heaped on his brother, it was nothing to what Rosie was regularly inundated with. “Depends on the day. If we’ve recently released news or done an interview that pisses someone off, it could be hundreds. If it’s a slow news day, maybe only a few. This week will be interesting, because you know that video of my response to that petition is going up on YouTube. There will be another wave of rape and death threats for me, threats of violence and homophobic slurs for Niles. Same old, same old. They’re persistent but not particularly original.”
“Have you thought about hiring security staff for Third Wave?” Jordan leaned toward Rosie, bracing his elbows on his spread knees. Unlike the two of them, Jordan wasn’t going to accept that such treatment was the cost of doing business.
Maybe it was because he had more of an outsider’s point of view on the whole issue. He hadn’t come on as Third Wave’s marketing director until after the furor over Phoenix Force 2 had died down, and Niles hadn’t ever been particularly candid about the harassment until Jordan had been in a position to witness it firsthand. “And I don’t mean those rent-a-cops who patrol the building at night to keep someone from stealing the equipment or the guy at the front desk trying to prevent industrial espionage. I mean a security team whose job it is to track down the source of threats like this and analyze them to make sure they’re not coming from legitimate crazies.”
“‘Crazies.’ Nice ableist language, there.” Rosie gave him a brief censuring look, and Jordan dipped his head apologetically. “Want me to hire bodyguards while I’m at it?” she asked with a roll of her eyes.
“Relax, Jordie.” Niles pulled on Jordan’s shoulder, urging him to recline against the back of the sofa again. “Finish your beer, go dance, pick up someone to take home tonight. You’re making too big a deal of this.”
He scowled at Niles. “My brother is being threatened. Pardon me if I take that seriously. I want to know who these people are and take legal action until they back the fuck off.”
“Last I checked, freedom of speech was still a thing, even when it comes to hate speech,” Rosie offered with a wry smile.
“Last I checked, harassment wasn’t protected by the First Amendment.”
“True, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of these guys, and we can’t track them all down and file complaints against them.” Rosie sighed and patted his knee. “Look, I’m the first to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on unacceptable behavior, but we have to be careful here. Too much of a reaction will just egg them on. They’re attention whores. The worst thing you can do is let these guys think they’ve had an impact. I’ve gone on record supporting Niles and made it clear that Third Wave values him. There’s nothing else to do. Shrug them off. Go dance. I’ll get us a fresh round of beers.”
“Hi, everyone!”
Niles startled under Jordan’s arm at the voice behind them, and Rosie laughed in delighted surprise. Jordan turned to see the writing staff intern—what was his name? Paul? Peter?—standing there.
“Hello, Patrick! How are you tonight?” Rosie asked with a smile.
“I’m doing good!” The intern licked his lips, his eyes darting around the club nervously. His smile looked eager and yet a little forced. “Thanks for inviting me, Mr. Riv—er, Niles.”
“My pleasure. Seemed like you could use an evening out when I bumped into you back at the con today. Did you ditch your stepbrother and his friends?” Niles asked carefully, and from the way Patrick’s face shuttered and the avid light went out of his eyes, Jordan could tell Niles knew something Jordan didn’t about the dynamics the intern had with his family. In fact, judging from Niles’s solicitous demeanor, Jordan would bet Niles bumping into Patrick and extending an invitation to come out for the evening was no accident. He certainly hadn’t had a work-related reason to return to the convention that afternoon.
“They, um, they don’t know I’m here.” Patrick rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the floor. Ah. Okay. The kid wasn’t out yet. Sympathy warmed Jordan’s regard of the guy. “I didn’t want to hang with them again after yesterday. They don’t— I mean, I-I haven’t—”
Niles reached over the back of the sofa to lay a sympathetic hand on Patrick’s arm, bringing his stammering to a halt. “It’s okay, Patrick. We get it.”
Rosie smiled softly. “You’re fine here. Don’t worry. I assume you’re twenty-one, since you got through the door?” Patrick nodded quickly, watching her with attention that suggested he thought he was still on the job and talking to his boss. Rosie dug in her pocket and came up with a folded bill. “Here. Go buy yourself a beer, then come back, and we’ll dance for a bit. Okay?”
Patrick nodded again, his eyes wide as he took the bill. “Yes, ma’am.” He scurried off before Rosie could suggest he call her anything else.
Niles, Jordan, and Rosie all settled back with identical indulgent smiles and sighed nearly in unison. The wistful Ahh, kids these days was unspoken, but the sentiment hung in the air. Silence settled among them as Rosie scanned the club.
Niles’s pocket vibrated again, and he groaned quietly, but not quietly enough that Jordan couldn’t hear it, as he dug for his phone.
Go suck that Candylandia dyke’s dick and quit fagging up our games, Jordan read over his brother’s shoulder.
Niles sighed. From what Jordan understood, the trolls were always looking for clever ways to get in a dig about Rosie’s weight and/or sexuality. Which was interesting because no one—including he and Niles—knew exactly what her sexuality was. Rosie liked it that way, because then she could take people to task for making assumptions.
“Hey.” Jordan looked up when Rosie spoke, and she tipped her head, nodding off to the side. “Over there at the cluster of tables by the door. Be subtle.”
Niles peeked first and then groaned again. Affecting a casual glance around the club, Jordan looked too, noting a pair of guys not much older than Patrick, neither of whom was dressed remotely as though they’d come to the club with the intention of attracting company. In fact, their clothing screamed Straight dude so loudly that everyone in the club was giving them the side eye. One of the guys kept gazing around with an expression of distaste, while the other was typing something into his phone.
A moment later, Niles’s pocket buzzed.
Jordan’s brow furrowed and he glanced at Rosie, confused. She snorted. “It’s our petitioners. Well, two of them, at least. They actually came into a gay club?”
Yeah, they came into a gay club to pursue and harass his brother. Jordan gritted his teeth. “What the fuck?”
“Want to bet they think they’re supersleuths or some shit, trying to get dirt on me? Maybe hoping to catch me getting sucked off in an alley?” Niles sighed and shook his head, looking—to Jordan’s mind—more amused than he should be.
They discreetly monitored the guys for another moment, until the timing between the one using his phone and the arrival of harassing texts was irrefutable. Setting his jaw, Jordan rose and began to unbutton his shirt. “That’s it. I’m going to handle this.”
Rosie grabbed her own phone and followed, leaving Niles to scramble after them.
With his shirt hanging wide open, his skin damp with sweat from the heat generated by the sheer crush of people, Jordan sauntered up to the pair and draped an arm around each of their shoulders, pulling them in intimately close, not letting them jerk away. He pasted his best barracuda smile in place, the one Niles said meant he was about to eat
someone alive. “Hey, guys, having a good time?” A second later, the flash of Rosie’s phone camera lit them up as they stood there with identical expressions of panic on their faces.
He plucked the phone out of the texting guy’s hand and began scanning through it while Niles shook his head at them.
“You know how many federal and state communications laws you’re in violation of with these?” Jordan asked conversationally, shoving the phone back at the guy. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t, either, but I imagine it’s enough to face some pretty hefty fines. Maybe even time in prison.”
Rosie looked up from admiring the picture on her phone, her grin positively evil. “This is going to look great splashed all over the Third Wave fan forums. Homophobe petitioners party with Third Wave staff in gay bar. Thanks to that petition, we even have their usernames, so I can tag them in the caption.”
The two young men scrabbled to get away, rushing out of the club like it was on fire, and Jordan looked over to see Patrick coming up behind Niles, who was watching them with a bemused expression.
“What’s going on?” Patrick asked.
Rosie patted his shoulder. “Just handling some trolls. Come on, I want to dance. Niles, Jordie, you guys in?”
“Nah.” Jordan tossed his shirt to Niles and looked around the crowd. “I think I’m going to take my brother’s advice and find someone to take home tonight. Catch you later.”
He felt someone’s eyes on him as he melted into the crowd, probably the intern watching him with that puppy-dog look Jordan sometimes caught the kid giving him. He’d be okay with Niles and Rosie, though. Better than with him. He wouldn’t touch Patrick even if he wasn’t an intern with Third Wave. Jordan didn’t do closeted guys, or guys so inexperienced that the new-car smell hadn’t even faded yet. And right now, Jordan had some anger he needed to burn off.
“You all right?” Niles glanced over at the tipsy intern in his passenger seat. Patrick still swayed a little unsteadily, but his babble had faded away and his demeanor grew more sober the closer they got to his house.
Player vs Player Page 3