The Chemistry of Love(40)

“Things aren’t that bad. Tell me about the people at the party. What should I know?”

It was a good distraction, and I wondered if he had done it deliberately. “Okay, so Sanjit should be there. He’s really competitive and spends most of their D&D games yelling about the game being rigged and/or the dice being loaded. Catalina is . . . Catalina.” How could I describe my best friend in a couple of sentences? But he didn’t press me to explain. “There are some self-righteous trolls who you can just ignore. There’s Peter—he always comes. He’s really quiet, but he is scary smart. A lot of the guys there are just like him. Shy but brilliant. Dorks of a feather flocking together and all that.”

“How do you know so much if you don’t go to the parties?” he asked.

“I’ve gone to a couple.” I’d sat in the corner alone and just watched the whole night, but I’d shown up and supported my friend. “And Catalina is an ‘every detail’ kind of friend. She tells me everything about her merry band of nerds.”

“You’re making them sound a little stereotypical,” he said.

“Says the rich, charming CEO to the geeky, awkward scientist.”

“You’re so much more than a stereotype, Anna.” There was something about the way he said it—something special that pierced my heart. My pulse quickened.

Instead of responding to his declaration, I kept going as if he hadn’t spoken. “Zhen will definitely show up. Catalina’s had a crush on him for a long time. But don’t say anything about that!”

“Not a word,” he promised.

“Good. I’m pretty sure he likes Catalina, too. He has a half-ogre character that he rolled entirely to impress her. I guess you could say he’s head ogre heels.”

“Or that he’s an ogre achiever,” Marco added.

I couldn’t help but smile back and realized that I no longer felt quite so anxious. “Anyway, his half-ogre character is supposed to be part barbarian, part paladin even though everyone keeps telling him he can’t do that. He says he’s pushing boundaries, and Catalina lets him because she thinks he’s cute.”

“Two classes? That makes no sense. Their alignments alone would be all wrong. You’d have lawful good and chaotic neutral at best, and that’s not even talking about the armor. One wears plate and the other leather.” He said this without thinking, an automatic response to my statement.

“Is that right?” I gasped with delight. “That is the second nerd reference you’ve made in the last five minutes. Marco Kimball, are you a secret nerd?”

He looked uncomfortable. “We should go inside.”

“Wait, I have to know what you’re into. Like are you a Magic: The Gathering type of guy? Into Pokémon? Avatar? The Last Airbender or the blue-guys one? Or both?”

He grabbed his keys and got out of the car, slamming his door shut.

I scrambled out after him. “Star Trek? BattleBots? World of Warcraft?”

“I may have dabbled in some things when I was younger.”

“Like?” I felt almost giddy. No way would I have ever predicted this. It was too much fun to think that Marco might speak the same language as me. “Please tell me it was YA fantasy.” I would one hundred percent die if Marco was a secret Twilight fan. Hadn’t he just told me to enjoy what I enjoyed? Why wouldn’t he say what he liked?

But he didn’t answer, and my mind was totally racing with possibilities. There was something there—I just didn’t know what yet. But I was not the kind of person to leave a mystery unsolved.

We got to Catalina’s doorstep, and my mood shifted. This was it. I was about to see a bunch of people I used to work with. I wondered if it would be embarrassing—if Jerry had been bad-mouthing me since I left and everyone would stare. It had been only a few days since I’d quit—maybe it would just feel normal and I was overthinking this.

“Are you going to knock?” Marco asked.

“Give me a second.”

There was a loud popping sound—he was cracking his knuckles, and I felt it at the base of my spine.

“Could you please not?” I asked. “I really, really hate that sound. Knuckle cracking, popping, whatever it is, makes me nuts.”

“Sure.”

He waited a few moments and then said, “You really think I look terrible?” He was teasing, and I wondered if there was any real insecurity behind his ask or if he was just trying to distract me again. “I am about to meet your best friend.”

Catalina was going to love him. So much so that I might have to run interference because she probably shouldn’t date the CEO of her company. Whatever he said about nonfraternization rules, I couldn’t imagine that would be a good situation for either one of them.

And there was absolutely no jealousy involved whatsoever. At. All.

“You do look nice, but you already knew that.” Maybe he needed a little something extra. “And you really do have a nice axe. I wasn’t kidding about that earlier.” There. Good deed done for the day. Reminded the handsome man that he was handsome.

“Back at you.” He winked.

Did he really think that? Part of me was tempted to crane my head over my shoulder to see how my butt looked in these jeans to verify what he’d said. Although he’d probably just returned the compliment to be nice.