“Fuck no,” I say strongly. “Willow, that was the best night of my life. I put the broken heart because we’re in this shitty long distance thing and I just miss you.”

She lets out a giant sigh of relief. “That makes more sense.”

“Good.” I pause and sniff the air. I smell something…burning.

Shit fuck shit. I forgot to take the pizza out of the oven. My joints unglue and I race to the oven. As soon as I pull down the oven door, dark gray smoke floods out at my face. I cough into my arm, and seconds later, the smoke detector lets out an angry wail.

“Garrison?” Willow sounds panicked.

“Burnt the pizza!” I yell over the alarm. “Call you later?”

“Yeah, go. I love you,” she says quickly.

“Love you, too.”

She hangs up, and I switch the oven off and try wafting the smoke away from the alarm with a dish towel. It’s not working. I have to find…something that will reach the alarm. Fuck you, eight-foot ceilings.

Seriously.

A knock sounds on my door. “Garrison!” my neighbor yells. “Everything okay?!”

Jared and I haven’t bumped into each other since his girlfriend’s birthday, but the fact that I haven’t deterred him either means he’s a good guy or he just really wants my connections to Loren Hale so he can score points with Ana.

I can’t tell which.

But I do open my door for him.

He glances past my shoulder.

“No problems here, man,” I tell him. “Just burnt a pizza. You can go home.” I’m about to close the door, but he puts his hand on it, stopping me with unwanted force.

I glare.

He’s still looking past me at the oven. “Shit, that looks bad. Hold on a minute and I’ll grab my broom.” He leaves quickly, and I rub at my eyes. Against better judgment—or maybe worse judgment—I don’t shut my door on him.

Jared is back in a flash and instead of passing me the broom, he walks right on into my apartment. I tense considerably. My space is my space, and I don’t remember giving him an invitation. Oh wait, that’s because I didn’t.

I cross my arms over my chest and stay near the doorway, watching as Jared jams the end of the broom up at the alarm. It takes two whacks before it stops wailing.

“These smoke detectors are ridiculously sensitive in the building,” Jared says. “Just a heads up.”

“Good to know.” I try not to sound pissed off or sarcastic or both.

Jared looks around my place like he’s on an apartment tour. “Wow, you’ve got a sweet setup.” He eyes the back wall with the desk and four monitors. Two servers. All the chords are neatly bundled and tucked at the floorboard. It took me days to put everything together and not have it look like a mess.

“You a gamer?” Jared wonders.

Probably not the kind he’s thinking of. I don’t play Call of Duty or Halo or even League of Legends. My true love is the classics on consoles like Sega and N64. But that’s not why I have the computers.