“Just curious.” Luke laughed, and immediately cringed, sure she could hear the note of nervous guilt in his voice. “The three of you seem to be kind of a package deal, that’s all.” Even though he wasn’t lying, exactly—she and her friends did seem to always be together—he still felt like a jerk. But if the reporter missed the paintball match, then his efforts to make sure Zach showed up would be wasted.

“She’s in the bathroom, fixing her hair.” Julia shrugged. “It looked fine to me.”

“Who cares what it looks like?” Andie rolled her eyes. “It’s about to be covered in paint in ten minutes anyways.” She surveyed the room, taking stock of the other players. “Uh-oh.”

“What’s wrong?” Julia glanced around.

“I figured out why Kat is primping.” Andie gazed across the lobby. “It looks like her pretty boy is on the opposing team.” She caught Luke’s eye. “I meant Bridget.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “You kind of let the ‘Kat’ out of the bag yesterday.” He winked.

“Punny.” Andie snorted. “Are you always this clever?”

“I have my moments.”

Andie turned to Julia. “Should we officially give up on the character name thing?”

“Probably, since I keep messing up too…” Julia fiddled with the elastic strap on her goggles. “What do you think, Luke?”

As GM, Luke would have been steadfastly against the idea. While in play, a character was expected to maintain their assigned role. But this was a different style of LARP; the personas of this game were similar enough to real people it was easy to forget they were pretending.

Which, now that he thought about it, presented a problem all its own, made the situation even more perilous. In most LARPs, the line between fantasy and reality was clearly defined—easy enough when one was pretending to be in a medieval forest or on another planet or even in a Victorian mansion. But the boundaries this rom-com world had were vague, at best. Fantasy and reality blurred.

Maybe it had been a mistake to start calling each other by their real names. If so, it was too late to go back now. And the truth of the matter was, even if they could manage to stick to the fake names, Luke didn’t want to. He liked calling Julia by her real name. Even better, he liked it when she called him by his.

Either of these realizations should have set off warning bells. Even more alarming, however, was the fact he wasn’t nearly as concerned about the dangerous shift from make-believe to reality as he knew he should be. As the GM for other LARPs, Luke had pulled more than one overzealous player back from the edge. Usually, that meant redirecting the flow of action, breaking up a staged fight before someone actually got hurt.