Chapter 5: A Bargain

Monica: Hi. I want to clear the air before next session, if you’re game. Pick a night to come by my place. I’ll make you dinner. We can talk.

I re-read the text for the four-hundredth time as I got off the elevator onto Monica’s floor of her apartment building. I’d been here exactly five times: once for each session of the campaign she’d run that I’d been a part of.

I stood outside her door at 6:47, thirteen minutes early. I was holding a bottle of wine I’d spent twenty minutes picking out, and trying to decide why I’d said yes to this.

I tried to tell myself that I was here because it was the right thing to do. The mature thing to do. Monica and I were adults who had been behaving childishly. I wanted to get along with her. This was an opportunity to clear the air, like she said.

Part of me thought that was all self-deceptive bullshit. It had been four days since the last session. Four days of replaying it in my head. The sounds Monica had made. The way she’d cum against my face, the shaking, wanton abandon as she shoved her pussy against me. The catastrophic moment where Liz’s hand found me and I just-

Abruptly, I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about as I made my entrance. I cut off the train of thought and knocked.

The door opened. Monica was barefoot, in a loose black tank top and grey joggers, her dark hair piled up in a messy clip. No makeup.

The contrast from how I usually saw her — perfectly done up, playing whatever part she’d chosen so fully that all I saw was the Night Queen, or Maye the cleric, or whatever — was so stark that it actually took me aback.

She looked like someone who hadn’t been trying to look good but had managed it anyway. It was ... irritating.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Sorry, I got here faster than I expected.” I flushed as soon as the words were out of my mouth — I waited for her to make the obvious joke I’d inadvertently teed up, some dig at my stamina.

She quirked one eyebrow, but let the comment pass. “Just get in here.”

I followed her inside.

Her apartment was small and warm and smelled like garlic and something roasting.

But what hit me first wasn’t the scents, delicious as they were — it was the stuff.

When we’d played D&D here, the place had been spotlessly clean, the table cleared for us to game on.

Right now, every surface was covered. A dressmaker’s form stood in the corner of the living room wearing what looked like half-finished leather armor, dyed a deep arterial red. Fabric bolts leaned against the wall in a dozen colors. A sewing machine sat on what was nominally a dining table, surrounded by spools of thread and scattered pins and a pattern piece pinned to something shimmery and green.

“Watch your step,” Monica said, navigating through it. “I’m mid-project. Mid-several-projects, actually. Busy time of year.”

I edged past a cardboard box overflowing with what looked like blue and grey pieces of plastic. “What’s this...?” Bemused, I picked one up, studying it.

“That’s actually going to be a costume for Fiona; she’s entering some contest at StellarCon in a month or two. She’s going as a character from that new sci-fi series. I have to cut those, though — the 3d printing service did a good job, but she wants it to show more skin than my original design. Of course.” She said it casually, already heading into the kitchen. “Thanks for bringing the wine; you can put it on the counter.”

I laughed, shaking my head, and set the bottle down to look around more carefully.

It became apparent that the clutter was actually organized chaos; each project had its own zone, its own logic.

On the wall, a corkboard was covered in reference photos, fabric swatches, and hand-drawn sketches that were genuinely, startlingly good. Technical drawings with measurements and notes in small, precise handwriting. One sketch showed a jacket with exaggerated shoulders and geometric detailing; a Post-it next to it read Act 2 - Viola - “masculine but not quite right, a kid sister wearing her brother’s clothes”

“You made this?” I asked, touching the edge of the sketch.

“That one’s for work. Twelfth Night at the Lyric. Don’t smudge it.”

I pulled my hand back. “Sorry.”

“All good.” She was opening the wine. “It just took me a while to get right.”

“It’s great, Monica.”

She glanced over, like she was checking whether I meant it.

I did.

I’d known she did this professionally, but seeing all this stuff suddenly made a lot of things from our games click in my head. All those moments in our sessions where Monica’s costumes had been exactly right, the way everyone else’s clothes had been so well fitted. Hell, even how she’d described what everyone’s character was wearing in terms that actually made you see it.

“No wonder you’re so good at the costumes,” I remarked, taking it all in. “This is your actual job.”

“Costume design? Yeah. Mostly theater. Film stuff when I can get it. The cosplay is fun but it doesn’t pay.” She poured two glasses and handed me one. “I’ve told you this already, though.”

I could hear the rebuke in the last few words. “Yeah ... it’s one thing to know you do it, and it’s another thing to see all this. When we played at your place I never saw any of this.”

“You never really seemed interested.”

That landed with a small, clean precision. She wasn’t being cruel about it. Just honest.

“You’re right,” I acknowledged. “I guess I wasn’t. Sorry.”

Monica shrugged one shoulder and took a sip of wine. “It’s fine. I’m still the new girl. Well, maybe Fiona’s newer to you all, I guess. But you have like a decade of history with everyone; I’ve only been around for, what, a year? I get it.” She checked on something in the oven that turned out to be a sheet pan of chicken thighs, glistening and herbed.

“Yeah, but I still should’ve-”

“Chris. It’s fine. I’m not fishing for an apology. I’m just saying, there’s a reason we don’t know each other that well. I invited you over to try to fix that.” She clinked her glass against mine. “So. Enough about my job. You ... write code?”

“I do.”

“For what?”

“These days I consult. Started doing payment processing, but increasingly I do stuff for crypto exchanges, backend-” I caught her expression and laughed. “I’m stopping there. I refuse to be the white guy in his 30s talking to you about crypto. Anyway, it’s boring, but pays the bills.”

“Have you ever done anything fun with it? Like games?”

“Everyone asks me that. No. Never game dev. That’s a completely different skill set, and besides, the pay is shit and the hours are terrible. The people who work on video games are either masochists or saints; it’s a wonder anyone does it.” I leaned against her counter. The kitchen was tiny; we were maybe three feet apart. “I’ve messed around with some personal projects. Nothing serious.”

“Like what?”

I grimaced. “I built a bot once that could generate random dungeon maps based on weighted probability tables. Like, it would create a whole floor plan with encounter rooms and treasure and traps, all balanced for a party of a given level.”

Monica’s eyebrows went up. “That’s actually cool.”

I shook my head. “It was like ... eight years ago. It was pretty janky.”

“Did you use it for campaigns?”

“A couple times. Mike said the dungeons felt soulless.” I smiled. “Which made sense, because they were.”

She laughed — a real one, that caught her off guard. It changed her face entirely; the sound was attractive, a little louder than I would’ve expected from her.

It dawned on me that Monica had never laughed at a joke I’d made before, not really. She’d only ever laughed at me.

The realization was discomfiting, but the silence that followed was actually more amiable than I expected; two adults, having pre-dinner drinks. Eventually, Monica said, “So you code. Got a hot take on AI?”

“Eh. The hype is overblown; at some point this whole bubble will collapse when people inevitably realize that the reliable use-cases for LLMs — no matter how powerful you make them — are cool, but narrower than we’d like. Some jobs will be replaced, but whatever comes after LLMs is probably going to be what’s really scary.” I paused. “The training data issues, copyright stuff, that sort of thing is all nightmarish and happening right now, obviously, but I don’t think it’s society-ending. Although for what you do — any kind of creative work, really — it’s got to suck.”

“It’s bad, yeah. Some of the theaters I work with are already using AI-generated concept art as a starting point and asking me to just ... execute. Like I’m a printer. A soulless one, like you said.” Something tightened around her mouth. “Anyway. That’s a whole different rant.”

We talked for a while. Really talked. She pulled the chicken out of the oven and put together a salad. We sat on her couch because the table was occupied by the sewing machine, plates balanced on our knees, and it was... easy. Way easier than I expected.

Monica was sharp and curious and opinionated in ways that had nothing to do with the combative energy I associated with her. She asked good questions. She actually listened to the answers.

At some point I was telling her about a bug I’d spent three days tracking down earlier this week — something in an asynchronous process that only manifested under specific load patterns — and she was following it, actually following it, asking the right clarifying questions.

I said, “It was like — well, you know in the last campaign, when you had that riddle at the gate to the Arcanatrix’s Sanctum? And Liz got frustrated, so instead of just stopping to think about it, she-”

I stopped short.

Liz’s name landed between us like I’d dropped my glass of wine. Monica set down her fork.

“Yeah,” she said, mildly. “I know what you mean.”

But the warmth of the last hour had shifted into something tenser. Way more charged.

We were both thinking about the same thing. We had to be.

The last session, my face between her thighs, how wet she’d been, the way she’d lost control, then Liz, Liz’s hand snaking into pants, Liz whispering-

“So,” Monica said, quietly. “What do you think she’s up to?”

I didn’t have to ask who.

“I don’t know.”