House Rules 2: Playing House

Chapter 9

Red Valkyrie shot the food! Seth was hearing more of the video game's tinny voice in one hour of playing with Becky than he had during his entire childhood. He had purposefully bought some retro games to keep at their Los Angeles place—he didn't think the city itself would ever feel like home, but the part Becky had claimed for herself was starting to—thinking that she might find them easier to play: fewer buttons, more straightforward, and usually pretty simple. For better or worse, though, Becky could complicate the simplest matter. If nothing else, it made playing Gauntlet II far more interesting than it had been when he was a kid.

"Shit. I thought it was a ghost or . . . what am I shooting at again?" Becky leaned forward, peering at the television screen. To make the game even more interesting, Seth had suggested a strip element. It wasn't an UpUpDownDown-approved way of keeping the game even, but it worked for the two of them. He figured it was even sporting, in a way: Becky was likely to lose items of clothing first, which would distract him, making him lose in turn. She was currently only wearing a bra and panties, but since it was a hot day, she didn't mind too much.

"Anything that's not me, food, or a potion," Seth explained, pausing the game and going up to the screen to point out the game's different options. Her television was a marvel, but converting 8-bit anything to modern technology was always going to be jarring. "Or you can just keep shooting the food and dying."

Becky glared up at him as he sat back down beside her. So far he had only lost his shirt, and that was mostly to keep her from feeling too frustrated—plus if she got distracted, she would be more likely to make mistakes too. "Any hopes you ever had of me doing a Red Sonja cosplay are beyond dead now. You know that, right?"

Seth leaned over and kissed her before restarting the game. "Chain-mail bikinis are overrated. Come on. Head left. The exit's that way."

"But there's a potion over there!" Becky insisted. Since the game wasn't split-screen, she could only go so far until Seth's character, standing in place, stopped her. "There's a potion!"

"Look." Seth pointed to her status bar. "You have enough potions. Come on. Let's go to the next level already. We should be heading to the gym in half an hour." If he had been playing by himself, he would be at least ten levels ahead of where they were, but it wouldn't have been nearly as amusing.

Becky flopped back against the couch. "There's another level? How many are there?"

Seth couldn't remember for certain, but he knew the number was probably far higher than Becky had bargained for. "Not sure. Twenty more or so?" That was probably a conservative estimate, but he doubted they would get anywhere close to the end. Becky would lose the rest of her clothes or they would start making out.

When she reached behind her back and unhooked her bra, sliding it down her arms and flinging it aside, Seth thought he might get both at once. "For shooting the food," she explained, straddling his lap and kissing him.

He didn't need much coaxing to set his controller down; Becky was far more fun to play with, so much so that it took him several minutes to realize the game music was still playing, the tinny voice still making its obnoxious decrees. Blue Warrior shot the potion! Blue Warrior ate the poison! Blue Warrior ate the poison! Then the death pulse began: Blue Warrior is about to die! Seth pulled back enough to glance down and see that Becky was button-mashing his controller with her free hand. Somehow she had made his character get a ricochet power-up and his own shots were killing him. "Hey! Hey! That doesn't count!" Seth tried to take the controller from her, but ended up knocking it off the couch instead.

Becky yelped when Seth pushed her off his lap and reached for his controller, and she quickly grabbed her own before he could. "Wait! Where's my person?"