Game of Hearts

by Jerry Cole

  He was in his suite, and he was cold. He didn’t have to go to the arena that day, though he was sure that Syn was going to show up to collect him pretty soon. He wasn’t really supposed to be hiding in his suite at all; this was his profession and he was, at the very least, expected to make an appearance. He just wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to cope with seeing Bjorn, probably looking all normal, as though nothing had happened. If Bjorn could pretend that nothing had happened—and really, what had happened? They had cuddled a bit? Bjorn had fallen asleep?—then Mickey wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to cope. But maybe if Bjorn pretended nothing happened, it would make Mickey snap out of it. He decided that he was going to do that as he slowly got out of bed and stretched, but as he thought it through, the idea became worse and worse. He had already tried to get Bjorn out of his system, and it hadn’t worked. In fact, it had completely backfired. Mickey sighed. He obviously couldn’t be trusted around Bjorn.

  When Bjorn had fallen asleep, Mickey had contemplated waking him up and telling him to go back to his room. He hadn’t done that, though. Instead, he had snuggled up a little closer to Bjorn, putting his hand over Bjorn’s heart and listening to it. It crossed his mind, for a split second, that this intimacy was weird, that he barely knew this person. But he was there, and he was so close to Mickey that he couldn’t help himself. He had to check that he was real. He had to check that he was there, and that this was a thing that was actually happening to him. He wasn’t sure when he had decided to close his eyes, but he knew it had been a terrible idea. Because the moment he had closed his eyes, he had fallen asleep, holding Bjorn. They had slept together on that uncomfortable bench. It felt like a marshmallow cloud, though, like the most comfortable bench that Mickey had ever lay on. They had woken up at the crack of dawn, or at least, Mickey had, when people had started to leave the hotel. The crew had to get to the arena before anyone else did, because they had to set things up for the day and check that all the machines were working. They weren’t quiet, either, and when one of them had gone to the garden for the morning smoke, Mickey and Bjorn had been caught. Mickey didn’t care—he thought it may have been a cute story to tell their family one day. That was, until he had finally completely woken up and realized who had fallen asleep in his arms. Bjorn and him hadn’t even kissed, and Mickey was already planning on cute stories to tell his little nieces. It made no sense whatsoever.

  How Bjorn had reacted when he had woken up had made everything even worse. He looked around, seemingly confused as he woke up to the morning fog, Mickey’s arms still around him. Then he had practically jumped up—leapt, really—away from him, and he had glared at Mickey. He had actually glared at him, as though he hadn’t been the one that had put his head on Mickey’s chest in the first place.

  As though Mickey had forced him to be there. Mickey hadn’t forced him to be there; he had just spoken to him. Bjorn had done everything he wanted to do, out of his own volition, and Mickey had let him. Though it hurt. It hurt him a lot, now that he thought about, that he couldn’t just tilt Bjorn’s chin up and give him a kiss on the mouth, which he had wanted to do since the moment they met.

  Bjorn had made sure, by being perfectly sweet and vulnerable and honest, that he stayed just out of reach of Mickey. That he punished Mickey just by being around him.

  He walked toward the bathroom and opened the creaking door. The hotel had been recently refurbished, and that was visible in the fixtures, even in the furniture. They had forgotten to do the doors, though. They looked like something out of a cheap motel and were completely incongruous with the new, ultra-modern look that they were obviously trying to create. He was about to open his mouth and look at his throat to check for strep when he heard someone knock on the door to his room.

  He had barely opened the door when Syn barged in, saying nothing at all until he was standing right next to Mickey’s bed. He was holding his phone in his hand and looking at Mickey, as though he was supposed to know what was on the screen without Syn bothering to share. Mickey watched him for a few seconds until he closed the door and walked slowly to where Syn was now sitting, still looking at his phone and opening and closing his mouth every few seconds.

  He cocked his head, furrowing his brow. Syn was one of the only people in the world that Mickey allowed to see him before he was ready, before his hair was done and before he had grabbed one of his carefully picked outfits. He still felt a little self-conscious when he wasn’t ready, though, even around someone that he knew as well as Syn. And he definitely wasn’t ready right then; he hadn’t even brushed his teeth. He wouldn’t have minded so much if the emergency that was happening within Syn’s phone had already been shared, but Syn just keep darting his gaze between the phone and Mickey’s face, until Mickey was impatiently tapping his foot on the floor and raising his eyebrows.

  Mickey opened his mouth to ask him what the fuck was going on, but before he managed to get anything out of his mouth, Syn looked at him, raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Okay, before I get into this,” Syn said. “I just want to say that personally, I think this is like, super cute.”

  “Uh, okay?”

  “I understand why you haven’t told the team, like. It’s a proper clusterfuck. You know, at least competition-wise. Mickey’s personal-life-wise, I think it’s adorable, and I really want you to introduce me.”

  “Syn,” Mickey said, cocking his head. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, that’s cute,” Syn replied, his small smile turning into a grin. “Look, I totally get it that you have to play coy with everyone else here, including the rest of the team. But I’m me. Since when are you shy around me?”

  “No, Syn, I’m not being shy,” Mickey replied, crossing his arms over his chest. “I just genuinely, legitimately have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Wait,” Syn said, a horrified looking suddenly appearing on his face. “Are you telling me that it wasn’t you who posted this picture?”

  “Mate, which picture?” Mickey said, a little more sharply than he intended to. He always appreciated Syn, but he was tired of being spoken to in riddles. He couldn’t even begin to crack what Syn was talking about then.

  “Mickey,” Syn said, pocketing his phone and letting him see nothing. “Do you have your phone on you?”

  “I—I mean, it’s charging,” Mickey said, glancing at it. His phone was on the nightstand, where he had left it after turning it off. Before he had gone for those beers. Before he had decided that standing in front of Bjorn’s door was a great idea. He guessed that part of him knew that if Syn had called him, if anyone had called him, it would have been an excuse for him not to go through with it. And he wanted to go through with it, he really did. That was the reason he had left his phone there in the first place. He wasn’t sure what Syn could be talking about, unless it was something that had happened the night before. Could it have been—it was the only thing that made sense, but it scared Mickey far too much to think about.

  “Oh, dear God,” he said, his eyes widening. Syn watched him, saying nothing, his lips a straight line. Mickey waited impatiently as the logo of his phone’s manufacturing company came up on the screen, the little circle going around and around forever. The moment that his phone finally loaded, the notifications started to come in. Mickey still wasn’t sure what was going on, because he couldn’t check what was happening, his phone was so overwhelmed. It couldn’t stop one vibrating ring tone before the other one started, and it kept going like that for so long and so quickly that his hand was starting to get tired. He turned to face his friend, his mouth agape. “Syn, what the fuck is going on?”

  Syn fished his phone out of the pocket he had stuck it in, maddeningly slowly. Then he moved his finger across the screen as he swiped to unlock it. He held up the phone so that Mickey could see the picture, but he hadn’t handed it to him. There was a photo of Bjorn and him, one that could only have been taken the night before. Bjorn was on Mickey
’s chest, his eyes closed. Mickey’s head was buried in Bjorn’s hair, his eyes were also closed and his grip was firmly around Bjorn, holding him so close that it almost looked uncomfortable. As if that wasn’t enough, a filter had been applied and a heart-shaped surrounded the already embarrassing picture. Inside the filter, there were big block letters.

  The message was simple enough, but Mickey had to read it a few times in order to be able to understand the white words over the pink background.

  Atlanta + Allegiance 4eva.

  That was all it said. Below it, there were comments. From the way that they kept scrolling down, Mickey could tell that comments were now constantly pouring in. Some were very sweet, at least from what he could see with the lightning speed that they were moving at. Some were calling him names, which he was pretty used to. He let them roll off his shoulders until one caught his eye: Aww, cutest couple in e-sports.

  It was gone from the screen so quickly that Mickey barely even had time to process it. At first, he felt a warm feeling spread from his chest to his fingertips, the words on the screen oddly, weirdly soothing. As the feeling subsided, Syn sitting there but saying absolutely nothing, Mickey started to panic. This was way bigger than he had anticipated. Without even getting into Bjorn’s feelings, there was a real chance that his team was now in trouble because Mickey had acted so carelessly.

  “Shit,” he finally said, softly, more to himself than to Syn. “We have a problem, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Syn replied, looking right at him. “We do.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Bjorn was holding his head in his hands as his teammates berated him. Not that they didn’t have a good reason. The photograph of Mickey and him lying down on the bench together—sleeping, sleeping together—had spread like wildfire. It would have been okay if it was a joke, if it was something they had done themselves, but it looked as though they had gone out of their way to keep secrets from everyone else. There was no way that anyone believed AlphaChew was there on merit anymore. The moment that Bjorn started associating with the best player there like that, all his credibility had gone out the window. He hadn’t intended for that to happen. He hadn’t intended for anything to happen; he hadn’t intended to talk to Mickey again, at least not in a capacity that wasn’t platonic, professional or both. All that he had wanted to do had been to get some candy. He had just wanted to go to a vending machine, and then the moment he had seen Mickey stand there in front of him, he had gotten stupid. He wasn’t stupid—at least, he didn’t think he was. But Mickey, being around Mickey, it did something to his brain. It made him forget how important other things were. Mickey hadn’t even done anything wrong; he had just been there, and he had been so gorgeous. Bjorn wanted to shake his head, check himself. Remind himself that he didn’t get to think of other men like that, that he had never thought of other men like that. But when it came to Mickey, everything that he knew about everything else stopped being valid. It started being about Mickey. About the way that Mickey made Bjorn feel. He forgot everything that he had worked so hard to achieve, instead focusing on him. He was reaping the consequences of that now, as Carl, Carpenter, and Pink took turns to rip him a new one. Not that he didn’t deserve it; he knew that he deserved it. Their team was up and coming. They had been the underdogs and it had been a huge surprise when they had won. E-sports news sites had started covering them, the commentators had done an entire feature on them, and Pink had dragged them to more interviews than Bjorn was comfortable with.

  That had been fine, because it had been something that they had managed to achieve. Now it looked like they were taking advantage of a prior relationship, one that they all knew didn’t exist. While that didn’t affect the tournament very much, at least not when it came to World of Heroes itself, it affected the fans that AlphaChew may have made. That was a big deal, because fans were the only way that a team as new as them could stay in the game. They might get some sponsorship deals after this, but only if the fans were still on their side. The easiest way to make sure that wouldn’t happen was by betraying their trust and, according to his teammates’ incessant yammering, that was exactly what Bjorn had done. They weren’t alone. A lot of internet comments, emails, private Twitter messages and some very public ones were telling him the same thing. No one seemed to care about the fact that they had been cuddling, and it would have been okay if it had been a joke, but the fact that it looked the way it did, that was terrible.

  He was sure that his teammates were trying to come up with a solution, somewhere in between all the shouting and asking him what the fuck he could have been thinking, but that wasn’t what his mind was on. This couldn’t have been something that Mickey did on purpose, right? There was no way that Mickey could have known what was going to happen between them. Then again, Mickey was Atlanta. He was a legend in the e-sports world. He could probably do anything that he wanted to do, and it was obvious that Bjorn wasn’t out of that purview. Mickey had wanted Bjorn, he had wanted him that first night that they had been together, and he had gotten him. One way or another, that was exactly what he had done. Now Mickey was probably up in his suite, laughing with the rest of his team, while Bjorn was having to field every question that they all threw at him. And the list of questions seemed to be long and endless.

  He watched Carl move from one side of the room to another, his arms crossed over his chest and his gaze firmly on the floor. Bjorn swallowed. He hated that Carl couldn’t even look at him as he asked him questions. “So, just to get this straight, nothing else happened?”

  “No,” Bjorn said, probably for the fifteenth time. “I told you. That was—that was it.”

  “So you guys didn’t have sex or anything,” Carl said. Bjorn looked around, at Carpenter and Pink, wondering if they could provide a little help. But they said nothing, Pink sticking his hands in his pockets and Carpenter staring directly into his phone and at little else, even when it was obvious that Bjorn was looking right at him.

  Bjorn shook his head, slowly. “No,” he said. “No, we didn’t have sex or anything. I told you, it wasn’t anything like that.”

  Carl nodded, this time looking right at Bjorn. “Right, it wasn’t anything like that. Except for the fact that you were literally cuddling with him, as though that was a normal thing people just do. Okay, newsflash, Al. Are you ready?”

  Bjorn didn’t say anything, he just watched Carl.

  “You don’t cuddle people like this unless you’re in a relationship with them or super drunk,” Carl said, gesturing toward the phone he was holding on his other hand. Bjorn wanted to smile. He wanted to ask him if he thought that he had already forgotten the picture of the two of them together, when he hadn’t forgotten it. It was burned into his brain the same way the entire night had been burned into his brain. As far as Bjorn was concerned, it wasn’t a night that he was going to be able to forget for the rest of his life. He just wished that not everyone else felt the same way.

  “I wasn’t,” Bjorn said, when he realized that Carl was waiting for him to answer. “I wasn’t drunk or anything like that. I had just gone to get some candy and he was there and…”

  “Yes?” Carl replied, impatiently, holding his hands out by his sides. His phone dangled and Bjorn wondered if he was going to drop it on the carpeted floor. He would have been grateful for it. He would have been grateful for any distraction, anything that took the focus off him. He never liked people paying attention to him. If he hadn’t been so stupid, if he had just been a little more careful. If he had just stayed away from Mickey.

  “I don’t know,” Bjorn replied. It wasn’t a great answer, but at least it was a truthful one, and that was all that he could really provide them. “I don’t know, he was there, in front of our room and I just—”

  “What?”

  “I guess I thought it’d be cool to hang out with him,” Bjorn said quietly. It would be more than cool to hang out with him, and he wasn’t thinking about just hanging out. He had literally hugged him the
moment that he had had seen Mickey, and it wasn’t a friendly hug. At least, not as far as Bjorn was concerned. Now that he was thinking about it, now that he could think about it, he could see that his hug had been far more than friendly. It had expressed some crazy, inner, secret desire. Their initial conversation had woken up something that lay dormant in him, something that Bjorn didn’t quite know how to think about. While Mickey seemed to understand it, Bjorn didn’t. That scared him. He wasn’t sure if the fact that he was frightened was a good thing.

  He looked at Carl, whose gaze was on his face, assessing him quizzically. But Bjorn had no answers, even if he wished he did, and he knew for a fact that Carl wouldn’t want to help him out when it came to coming to a conclusion. Pink might have been more amicable to it if things hadn’t happened the way they had; in fact, Bjorn was almost sure of it. Then again, Pink had asked him to hold off on anything, and Bjorn had said that he would. Not that there had been anything to hold off, Bjorn had told him. He almost wanted to laugh at how stupid he had been. There was definitely something there, and now he would give almost anything to figure out what it was.

  “But you did more than hang out with him,” Carpenter finally said. “You don’t hang out with any of us like this.” Then Carpenter looked between Pink and Carl, furrowing his brow. “Right?”

  “Right,” Bjorn said. He finally rose to his feet and moved to where they were all standing. He was trying to make himself seem bigger. He wanted to act like he was in charge of the situation, even though he probably felt far more clueless than any of them did. Before he could say anything, though, Carpenter was right in front of his face.

  He looked down before he spoke. “Honestly, I’m less upset about this and more upset about the fact that you kept something like this from us.”

  “Wait, wha—”