Page 130 of End Game

Dex lets himself be dragged backward without resistance. “You know, I thought there would be more perks to sleeping with the Dungeon master.”

“I’m sure there are,” Micah says. “But you’re not sleeping with him, and cheating isn’t one of them.”

Dex turns his head to look at Micah. “This is why you’re my favorite.”

Micah rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling when he lets go of Dex’s shirt and continues to the kitchen.

I go back to arranging minis and dice.

Really, this is normal.

Or familiar enough that normal seems like an increasingly reasonable word for it.

The party composition hasn’t changed much. Dex remains a chaos variable. Micah remains the person most likely to quietly prevent Dex from dying. Griffin will arrive with beer and make at least one decision so strategically indefensible I’ll question whether he’s ever played this game before.

The only significant difference is how many of us are sleeping together.

Not everyone—obviously. The logistics are more complicated than that.

We have spent a considerable amount of time discussing and defining exactly how complicated.

They are useful and necessary conversations.

Watching Micah follow Dex into the kitchen while threatening to hide his energy drinks if he eats any more of the food before Cami and Griffin get home, however, makes me wonder if we could have accomplished approximately seventy percent of it with a diagram.

Dex would have drawn a dick on the diagram. So perhaps not.

The front door opens a few minutes later, followed almost immediately by Cami’s voice. Griffin responds, but their voices are too low to hear them—then Cami laughs.

I glance at the time on my phone. “Campaign starts in twenty minutes.”

“Hi, Ronan!” Cami calls from the hallway.

“You’re late.”

“We’re not late if it starts in twenty minutes,” she protests.

Griffin comes around the corner first. “I told her you’d say that.”

“Because you understand how time works.”

Cami appears behind him with her laptop bag over one shoulder and her purse hanging off the other.

Most importantly, she’s smiling.

Not the polite smile she uses when she’s trying to convince someone she’s okay. Not the sharper one that precedes her saying something deliberately inappropriate. She looks excited enough that she can’t seem to decide what to do with her hands.

Griffin sets the grocery bags on the counter while Cami drops her things onto one of the empty chairs.

“Okay,” she begins, excitedly. “So Alexis might have offered me a job.”

Dex’s head appears around the kitchen doorway. “Hot, poly Corporate Barbie?”

Cami turns toward him. “First of all, yes. Second, I am absolutely telling her you called her that.”

“Please do.”

“You haven’t even met her.”