Still rubbing his head, he said, “Hey, Lori. What are you doing here?” When he dropped his hand, it was covered in blood.
She lurched forward. “I’m here for an explanation. But your head is bleeding. Let me see, please.”
He bowed down so she could look at his wound. It didn’t look too serious. She dug through her purse and found her travel pack of tissues to stop the bleeding. She pulled the whole stack out. “Why haven’t you called me? I heard Annie’s been gone almost a week since you broke up with her.” She moved his bloody hand on top of the tissues. “Keep pressure on this for a few minutes.”
Deek stood and blinked at her through his thick lenses. “I needed to come up with a story to tell you. Rachel looked at my idea on Wednesday and said I needed a Plan B. You’re a day early, and there are a few things to work out, but I think I can still show you.”
She shook her head. “Why did you go see my sister? And what story?”
Deek looked puzzled. “I never went to see your sister. I wanted to see you.”
Lori drew a deep breath for patience. It was Deek, Mr. Literal, after all. “Okay, why did you come to my house last week?”
“Oh. To apologize. But then Rachel said words mean jack, so I needed to do better than that.”
Deek stood before her with a bloody hand on top of his head, looking utterly confused and making it very difficult to stay mad at him. But she was willing to make an effort. “So you thought waiting a week, and letting me imagine you and Annie getting married at the courthouse, and sleeping in the same bed this whole time was going to be better than saying, I’m sorry? Or, oh, and guess what? Annie’s out of the picture so we can be together again? Well, that plan stank, Deek! Maybe you’d better try some of those jack words on me quick before I really lose it!”
“I didn’t know for sure you wanted me too. You never said how you felt about me. So I had to make you fall in love with me. That’s what I’ve been doing all damn week! Do you know how hard it is to do that? I’m no poet, Lori!”
He was right. She hadn’t told him that she was falling in love with him. “You’ve been writing me poems?” She was quickly getting the sense that her anger might be a little premature.
Deek winced. “I tried, but that wasn’t my forte. So I wrote you a new Pac- Man game. And if this doesn’t do the trick, I have something a little more commercial for you upstairs. I made the game extra hard because you’re so good at it. I didn’t want you to be bored.”
“You wrote me a video game? Because you didn’t want me to be bored?” That was pretty sweet of him. But she still wasn’t understanding.
He laid a hand on her back and moved her in front of the console. After he had closed the machine up, he pushed some buttons. “I wrote a lot of this on my computer back in college when I was too broke to buy that real machine upstairs. I bought this broken machine and gutted it this week, so it’s filled with brand-new electronics. The graphics are out of this world. I just modified the program. So I could tell you a story. You’ll get a little more after you beat each level. Kind of like Dungeons and Dragons married to Pac-Man.”
He pressed the main button, and a smiling Princess Lori appeared on the screen. Before she began, she asked, “So this is some sort of apology?”
“Yes. Well, no.” He lifted his free hand in frustration. “It’s my way of saying I’m in love with you, Lori. And hoping by the time you reach the end, you’ll be in love with me too.”
She studied his eyes, which were slightly bigger than normal behind his glasses. What she saw in them, sincerity, kindness, sweetness, love, all the things that were Deek, made up for his blunder of not calling her. And it gave her the courage to tell him how she felt about him.
She slipped her hands around his neck and said, “Would it ruin everything if I just told you I love you too, Deek?”
“Oh, no you don’t. I haven’t slept in a week. You’re playing this damn game!”
She laughed. “Asher’s right. You are grumpy.” She gave him a quick kiss. “But it’s kinda cute. Okay. Here goes.”
She quickly did all the tasks on the first level that would’ve been like level five on the original game. She smiled when she saw she had earned a red-soled shoe along with her points. “That’s a nice touch, Deek. And it’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to owning my own.”
He’d snuggled up behind her to watch. And to nibble on her neck a little, but he was careful not to distract her.
“Oh, it gets better than shoes. Keep going.”