I noticed patterns before I noticed feelings.
from Chapter 21.
After that, I started seeing him more often.
That wasn’t unusual. We were moving through the same circle now. Someone was always going somewhere—a club, a set, a clan event, somebody’s sim. Most of the time when Ken messaged me, he was already with other people.
Come join us.
So I did.
We went to clubs. Listened to music. Talked in groups. I wasn’t being pulled away from everyone else or singled out for his attention. I simply became part of the group.
Nothing about it felt like flirting. And yet, he was always there. Not hovering. Not waiting. Just present.
I noticed patterns before I noticed feelings.
The invitations kept coming.
A club. A DJ set. Something happening with the clan. Sometimes nothing more complicated than a group of us standing around talking until someone suggested somewhere else to go.
Wain was often there. Arya too. For a while, the four of us became a familiar combination.
Somewhere along the way, Ken and I started talking outside those gatherings too.
Nothing dramatic.
Music. Work. Second Life. Whatever ridiculous thing had happened that night.
Ken kept showing up.
He said goodnight when he left. If he was busy, he told me. If we didn’t talk for a while, nothing terrible happened when we talked again.
I paid attention. I also didn’t entirely trust it. I’d seen this rodeo before.
People could be kind in the beginning. Attentive. Patient. They could make you believe you’d finally found someone different right up until the moment they weren’t.
I wanted Ken to be different.
I wanted very badly to believe there were still good people in the world. But wanting something to be true and trusting it were two different things.
So I watched him.
Not deliberately, exactly. I didn’t have a checklist.
He listened. He remembered things.
He didn’t suddenly become someone else when a conversation got more personal.
And the next time I saw him, he was the same person he’d been the night before.
Then the night after that.
And the night after that.
Ken continued just being Ken.
Eventually, some of those conversations followed us out of Second Life and onto Skype.
There was no ceremony to it. It’s easier to talk there sometimes.
We didn’t turn on cameras. There was no performance implied. Just text at first, then eventually voice.
I remember hesitating before that first call. Hearing someone changed things. An avatar could be anything; a voice belonged to a person.
Then Ken spoke.
And we talked.
About work. Family. Music. Peru. Wisconsin. The differences between our cultures and languages. Second Life the way people talk about somewhere they’ve both lived.
Sometimes we talked late into the night. Sometimes we didn’t.
No tally was kept.
That was the part that unsettled me most.
There was no sense that time together had to be maximized to be valid. No anxiety about gaps. No urgency to define what we were doing while we were doing it.
One evening, after we logged off, I noticed something before I understood it. And without planning to, I began telling him things.
Pieces of my real life. Things I didn’t tell everyone.
He didn’t try to fix them.
Mostly, he listened.
I still thought of us as friends.
