[Richie?: you get my message, buddy?]
[Richie?: you remember me, right? I was the guy who was immo 2 in valorant yea?]
[Richie?: this is owens num right, did I text the wrong number? You there bro?]
[Richie?: you there bro? Did you die is this a dead man’s phone?]
[Richie?: lemme know if your dead bro ill take you off the sign up sheet np]
[Richie?: wait if ur dead then you wouldn’t text me. Text me if you aren’t dead and if you don’t respond i’ll assume ur dead.]
Owen scrolled through the text messages after his class. The messages had come in throughout the class, buzzing away in his pocket and making him quite aggravated by the end of class. If he ever got text messages on a regular basis, he’d put his phone on do not disturb, but given the distinct lack of any sort of texts up until today, he never felt it necessary. The messages each came shortly after each other. From what he remembered of their interaction two months ago, Richie seemed like the exact type of person to text in this way.
[Owen: I was in class. Do you not have anything better to do than text at this hour-
Owen stopped typing the message to think over his choice of words. Richie had said that no response at all would imply that he was dead, taking him off of the sign up sheet. If he truly wanted to dodge the first meeting for the college’s esports team, this would be the best way to do so. Owen had to assume that Richie was being hyperbolic in assuming he was dead, but if it got him to remove Owen from the sign up sheet, it would accomplish exactly what Owen was seeking. Physical meetings, filled with numerous different college age gamers didn’t fill him with immediate excitement. Those demographics were largely comprised of men, and while that wasn’t immediately a bad thing, the type of men that joined those spheres were often the exact ones that Owen wanted to avoid. The kind of ones that Owen had made friends with on UMDK, only for them to grow increasingly strange the longer he knew them. What had started over good performance in a competitive match, turned into “wow you’re so good” and “do you want to duo up in a vc witch?” which while seemingly innocent at first, started to feel strange to Owen.
What had felt almost like a friendly bond between ULTRA MEGA DEATH KILLER teammates, started to feel almost like flirting. One sided flirting, given that Owen felt no attraction towards men. The words felt uncomfortable, predicated on misinterpretations. The niceties that the men would send didn’t feel genuine, because they all relied on the base assumption that Owen was a girl. Something which turned caustic the moment he clarified that he wasn’t a girl. “You’re such a good friend” turned into “why the fuck would you lead me on like that”, and a multitude of other disdained reprimands before they unfriended and blocked him. It hurt, but Owen couldn’t help but feel responsible. If so many people had come to the same assumption, that Witchofthew3st was some girl playing UMDK, then clearly it wasn’t so much their fault as it was his. Lying to someone was a pretty good reason for them to hate you, he thought.
Speaking of lies…
Owen made sure to knock this time before he entered his dorm room. Hearing an affirmative, “Come in!” from the other side let him open the door without fear of overstepping any more boundaries.
“Hey, Owen, how were classes?”
“Fine, slow as ever. I’m worried the people sitting next to me think I had a vibrator up my ass though.”
Aoife choked on the monster energy that she had mistakenly taken a sip of before Owen spoke. Her hand had kept any of the sugary energy drink from splattering across her gaming setup. Owen watched with a small smile as she scrambled for a stack of napkins that she kept on the very edge of her desk, most likely for any sort of spills of this nature. Wiping her hands clean of the beverage, she looked over to Owen with furrowed brows, like she was quickly having to reconstruct her own image of who she thought Owen was.
“What?!”
“My phone wouldn’t stop going off, some guy was texting me the entire fucking class because he can’t take no for an answer.”
“It happens. Some people are especially obstinate when it comes to rejection. Was he trying to meet up for a second date or…?” Aoife asked as she grabbed another napkin to wipe up the droplets that had dripped down the edges of the can. No one liked a sticky can of soda.
It was Owen’s turn to blanch in surprise. A second date? With a guy? Was that really the impression that he had given off to Aoife. He thought back to his choice of words, and suddenly making a joke about a vibrator in his ass made him realize it hadn’t sounded especially straight of him. “No! No, I’m completely straight. I like girls, y’know?” Owen hadn’t meant to sound so defensive, but with his prior experience of men hitting on him within chat rooms being so negative, it tended to be a sore spot for him.
“That’s fine. I’m not crucifying you or anything, you can relax. I’d be hella weird if I wanted to judge you for liking women. I’m one of the world’s top women enthusiasts.”
“Do they hand out awards for that?”
“If they did, I’d have sucked all of the awards in like a dykey black hole.”
Owen laughed as he set his backpack down on the floor next to his bed. The books inside rarely ever made it out of his backpack outside of classes. The homework that needed to be done was always crammed in the morning of on his computer. He always found that getting assignments done in a google doc was good enough to keep his grades up, and he could accomplish his work in a fraction of the time that most would work on it.
“I’m the Mother Teresa of cunnilingus, the bona fide Bob Ross of lesbianism the way I leave women looking like canvases of lipstick when I’m done kissing them.” Aoife gave a bow, like she was receiving a standing ovation from a non-existent crowd.
“They should get you in the White House if you have so much experience with Bush.” Owen added, figuring that he would throw his hat in the ring with a joke.
Aoife’s eyes widened as she looked to Owen with the giddiest grin known to mankind. “YES!!!” Aoife yelled out to the heavens in appreciation of his joke, as if he had just sieved through a pile of sand to reveal gold underneath. Her celebration had not ended there, she even moved towards Owen to wrap her arm around him in a brief, but tight, hug. Owen had spent too long processing that she was holding him, that by the time his brain had caught up to the current moment, she had already broken away from him.
“You get it!” Aoife took a breath as she came down from the rapid accumulation of her excitement during her expression of feminine love. “If it’s not a boyfriend though, why are you getting so many texts from him?”
“Oh. It’s just a guy that’s trying to get me to go to this meeting tomorrow.”
“Richard?”
Owen turned to Aoife with a shocked expression. It wasn’t the right name, but it was certainly close enough to cause him to pause. How did she know about the meeting? About Richie?
“Richie… how do you know that?”
“You said it was for a meeting tomorrow. I’m going to that esports meetup as well, and he was texting me a bunch earlier today to make sure I was coming. Sounded a bit like him.” Aoife shrugged and then moved towards her phone on her desk. Unlocking it quickly, she moved towards her text messages and pulled up a conversation.
[Richard: you’re making it to the meet tomorrow right?]
[Aoife: yea i’ll be there, you promised snacks though, if they aren’t there I’ll quit on the spot.]
[Richard: okie okie what kind? I have some party packs of lays products in my room.]
[Aoife: Monster energy, then as much sour candies as you can buy yea?]
[Richard: okie okie im on it.]
Owen found it amusing that Aoife had entered the wrong name on his contact. Though he supposed he didn’t have much room to criticise, he hadn’t even bothered to confirm the auto generated contact that his phone was trying to provide for him out of laziness, resulting in the phone labeling the number as “Richie?”.
“You’re going to that?”
“For the snacks, yeah. Free drinks and candy is worth an afternoon in my book. It’s a lot more appealing if you’re coming along for it though. I won’t have to awkwardly stand around in a corner all by myself. I can awkwardly stand in a corner with a dork instead.” Aoife had already sat down in her chair as she finished talking. From what it looked like, she had already launched UMDK to start playing for the evening. The thought that she had already been online made Owen want to desperately check his messages on Witchofthew3st to see if she had sent anything to him. He thought better of the urge to run to his desk, however, and decided to finish his current conversation before he checked his inbox.
“Oh. I wasn’t going.”
Aoife had put her headphones on by this point, but had kept one ear open in order to continue having a conversation with Owen. She looked utterly confused when he told her that he wasn’t going to the meeting. “Why not? You’re pretty good at games, you’re a guy, that’s like the perfect space for you.” She said, studying Owen’s expression in order to answer the very question that she had just asked allowed.
“Not my space. I don’t usually fair well with in person friendships.”
“Could have fooled me, you’ve been pretty chill so far.”
“It’s a lot easier for me to be friends with people on the internet. No faces, no voices, just the words I choose to write and the performance I have in games.”
To Owen’s surprise, Aoife had already taken off her headphones and set them back down on the desk. He was confused at why she would do such a thing. She had only put them on a few seconds ago, and already they had come back off, like Owen had said something that was worthy of undivided attention.
“Does it feel liberating?” Aoife asked, as if she was a kind of doctor that was going through a list of questions in order to reach a prognosis.
“Why do you ask?”
“You first, then I’ll answer.”
“It does.”
Aoife smiled, and gently pushed away from her desk, sitting in her chair still, but far enough back that she could look at me clearly without our conjoined desks getting in the way. “I’m asking because I was the same way. Still am, I suppose. I get what you mean though. It feels separate from yourself in a way, which some people feel makes them less of themselves online. I feel it makes me more of myself online, once you strip away all of the physical shit that people focus on.”
“Why would that be a problem for you? Your uh… physical shit seems pretty good to me.” Owen had wondered if it was the wrong thing to say for a moment. Aoife seemed to freeze entirely as she digested his words. Owen was mere moments away from taking back everything that he had just said before she responded.
“What do you mean?” Aoife asked. Her voice was calm, but Owen could tell from the expression on her face that there was an apprehension behind her voice, like she was afraid of the answer before it had even arrived. Her hands tensed in her lap. For Aoife, it felt like she was right back where she had been time and time again.
“I don’t know… I just mean… you’re a pretty girl. Your voice is kind of raspy, but it’s really cute.”
“...cute? Most people say it’s too deep.”
“I mean it’s deeper than others, sure, but I like it. Deep doesn’t mean bad, I’ve known plenty of girls like that. Only some of them bullied me.” Owen shrugged, hoping that the cautiousness that Aoife held wasn’t a sign that walls were about to start forming between the two of them. He had just called her pretty, which was probably a mistake, since he knew that she was a lesbian. Men complimenting lesbians on their appearance was usually a pretty bad thing, right?
“Thanks.” Aoife seemed to relax. Owen wondered what exactly it was that had led to that. Either way, he was thankful that he hadn’t messed up by saying the wrong thing. “You should go though. We might not be good at in person friendships, but we haven’t messed this one up yet.” Aoife flashed a reassuring smile as she pulled herself back towards her desk with her feet. Once she reached her keyboard, she lifted the headphones back onto her head, keeping one ear free like she had before.
Hadn’t messed it up yet, Owen thought. It felt like a knife was gently being pressed into his gut as he smiled back to Aoife. She thought the two of them were good friends so far, and while the thought of that filled him with a perhaps unhealthy level of saccharine joy, it made him fear the secret he kept all the more. Owen felt cruel. A kind person would not look her in the eye and smile along to what she said, knowing what he knew. He needed to say something.
When she found out that he was pretending to be her online crush while sleeping in a bed just across the room from her, all the trust that he had accumulated would be forfeit. He wasn’t just betraying her trust once, he would be doing so two-fold. A falsified friendship that held the guise of a falsified crush.
“I need to-”
“Are you hopping on, Owen? You’re still standing around when we’ve got daylight bleeding around us. You won’t get any better if you’re awkwardly standing there.”
Owen's hands shook at his sides. The way that she looked at him, the innocent and charming persona that he’d spent the past month silently fawning over while they played online matches was right before him. She looked so happy. Owen wanted to feel happy alongside her.
He moved to his computer, and pulled up the launcher for UMDK. He was still logged into Witchofthew3st at the moment. He decided that he might as well check his messages, and perhaps send one over before switching accounts in order to play with Aoife.
[Nintendo Femicom: haiiiii girlie! Lemme know when you get on, I’m waiting in a lobby for ya whenever you’re back from classes]
Owen practically melted into a smiling mess in his chair. He wasn’t even sure why the message made him so giddy, but it did. He couldn’t tell exactly why Femicom had suddenly become so much more affectionate over the past few days. Had it really been due to him leaning into her assumptions? He hadn’t even confirmed it outright, but with how much she had begun to refer to him using feminine nicknames without him correcting her once, she must have become confident that whoever he was, he was a girl. That realization seemed to spur her on quite a bit. Femicom’s messages had always been nice, but they had never been quite so sweet until now. They reminded him of the way that his previous friends suddenly became a lot nicer all of the sudden. There was always a quick surge in how kind someone was right before they confessed their feelings. Owen wondered if he was reading into it too much, or if he was correct to assume that Femicom had truly caught feelings for Witchofthew3st.
Femicom usually didn’t wait for Witch to hop on, and vice versa. The two would play their own matches until they were both online, and then they would join up in a party and play together until the early hours of the morning. The fact that she was actively waiting to even begin playing was honestly adorable to Owen. It was something so thoughtful, that it entirely changed his plans for the afternoon.
[Owen: hey richie i was in class. I’ll be there tomorrow.]
After sending the text, he started to write a response to Nintendo Femicom.
[Witchofthew3st: I’m on now, Femi! Couldn’t leave you hanging two days in a row <3]
“Hey uh, Aoife.”
“Yeah?”
“I forgot I have an assignment to work on. I don’t think I’ll be able to play tonight.”
The back of Owen’s mind screamed at him that it was a terrible idea to play as Witchofthew3st in the same room as Aoife, but no amount of nagging could overcome the joy that Owen felt when he launched the game to see his familiar pink punk girl avatar staring back at him.
“Bummer, the girl I wanted you to meet is on today. Guess you’ll have to meet up another time.” Aoife sounded a bit sad, but Owen could already tell that she wasn’t too devastated by the reveal. Especially since she was currently reading the message that he had just sent, something which he could tell by the “Read at 7:10pm” underneath his recently sent message.
“Next time.” Owen smiled as he received a lobby invite from Femicom. This was what he lived for, the two of them tearing up competitive lobbies together, without a care for anything else that happened around them. When he loaded into the lobby to see Femicom’s familiar avatar in front of him, it sent waves of relief washing throughout him. Unlike the previous day, his character was back to the much shorter height, making him need to slightly angle the camera up towards her instead of how PertinentHorse had to look down at her.
[Nintendo Femicom: ugh I missed you, you wicked little bitch. Can’t believe you left me for some homework]
[Witchofthew3st: awww, can’t even last a day without me? Maybe I was busy talking to some other girls on other games… :P]
[Nintendo Femicom: it’s sounding like I’m forming a hit list all of the sudden. What would the names of the girls happen to be, and where might they live?]
[Witchofthew3st: my god is that jealousy i’m hearing???]
[Nintendo Femicom: hush hush, ready up so we can get our giddy gooey groove on ‘kay?]
[Witchofthew3st: still trying to make that catchphrase stick?]
[Nintendo Femicom: already has, witch, it’s sweeping the nation as we speak]
Owen felt like he could breathe again. All of the chaos of the previous day had made him forget that the entire reason he was in this mess to begin with was because he didn’t want to lose this. Like Aoife and Owen had discussed earlier, it felt like he was more free in this moment than he ever was walking around Evrett’s campus.
Their first match was a tense one. If they managed to win, it would secure their rank up into Master’s 5 from Diamond 1. A loss, however, would set them back a number of games. Because of this, the two of them felt like they needed to be at their A game. Sure, it was just a rank in a virtual game, but it was a virtual game that Owen had spent all of his free time each day in, so it felt more momentous than it might have otherwise.
A game was meant for fun at the end of the day, however, and Owen was certainly anticipating the fun that he could have with Femicom in their match. Having to drag his feet and die time and time again the previous day was miserable, but being able to play to the best of his ability today would be just the reminder that he needed as to why this game had sucked up all of his spare time.
It didn’t take long at all into their match to remember exactly why this was his favorite activity. UMDK with Nintendo Femicom was a special kind of exhilarating. The two of them were like harmonized destruction whenever they played together. Two arms of the same catastrophic death machine, clearing each section of the map with a shocking degree of symbiosis despite only communicating through the text chat during respawn timers.
This competitive match was Domination. A game mode consisting of 3 capturable locations in the map, which would slowly add points to a teams total until one of the two teams reached 150 points. It was relatively simple in concept, capture and control 2 out of the 3 points in order to gain points at double the rate that the enemy team was while not overextending into all 3 points. Teams that went for all 3 points would usually stretch themselves too thin and end up losing their defensive positions, flipping the entire lead on its head and sometimes giving the match away.
The match was progressing at a slower pace than usual, both teams equally matched as they made coordinated pushes at different locations. This meant that throughout the match so far, both teams occupied one of the three locations while the third was being hard fought for. The point total was up to 80 for the enemy team, and 82 for Aoife and Owen’s team.
[Nintendo Femicom: we need A badly. If they keep focusing on contesting C with the rest of the team, we can slip behind and get two of the three points]
[Witchofthew3st: Femme Flash on A?]
[Nintendo Femicom: yea yea wait for my mark]
Femme Flash was the name of one of their coordinated attacks that they had developed a few weeks back. The name of it was Aoife’s idea, something which Owen had shrugged off at the time because the name made him smile. Many people didn’t quite understand the skill ceilings when it came to comboing some of the class abilities together. With how Aoife and Owen had developed their characters, they had slowly started to change their kits to work with one another. Given that they duo queued nearly every day, their characters kits had become so intertwined that most of their abilities had some kind of synergy.
The two of them had rushed over towards A, a dangerous choice considering it was most likely where the enemy team would be spawning, given it was their only captured point on the map. While it was a risky move leaving B, their only currently captured point, undefended, that was what it would take to pull out a victory.
With their plan already set in motion, Owen could see Femicom ping the small building that held point A as a signal that she was ready to attack. Owen immediately lunged into action, sprinting into the building while firing a number of initial shots. None of which were intended to hit anything, but were instead intended to draw the attention of any of the enemy players that were defending the point. They would know they were under attack, which was exactly what Witchofthew3st needed for the plan to work.
With the practiced precision of performing this move hundreds of times together, Owen slid directly into the center of the room, activating his [Reflective Breakdance] ability. It was not frequently used in the competitive scene, which was something Owen believed to be because people had not thought of different ways to use the ability. Once activated, Witchofthew3st would become coated with a reflective chitinous shell while spinning on the ground. The shell itself was iridescent, and would change colors fluidly depending on the type of damage that was thrown into it. Any damage that the shell soaked up during the 4 second duration would be expelled randomly in a radius around Witch, targeting nearby enemies first, if they were within the quite large radius of the ability. It was not frequently used at higher levels, because once someone activated the ability, enemies would know not to attack, and would instead wait out the [Reflective Breakdance] and shoot the target the moment it ended. It was exactly what the enemies were currently planning on doing, judging by the way that they stepped out of their cover with their weapons raised to fire the second the chitinous shell dissipated.
They were not expecting the second part of Femme Flash. The flash. [Reflective Breakdance] soaked up any damage during the duration, which was a detail that many overlooked when they read the ability. Femicom had already been charging one of her own abilities [Flash Of Penance], yet another overlooked skill that many disregarded as niche at best. It was a skill utilized on sniper rifles that took a few seconds to charge, but would unleash a devastating blast after the windup. The reason it was disregarded was due to the heavy windup for little payoff. By the time the ability was charged, you could have already shot the target once or twice. For more experienced players, a single headshot was all it would take to end a gunfight before it began. It wasn’t worth the risk, despite the payoff being fairly high. A successful hit with [Flash of Penance] would detonate the target into a blinding light, acting as a flashbang for nearby enemies and insta-killing the target. It was useful in crowds if you had the time, but its usage was largely situational. Unless you performed what Femicom had so lovingly named the Femme Flash, and fired the [Flash of Penance] into the [Reflective Breakdance], effectively duplicating the effects of the shot towards any enemies within the radius of Owen.
With the brilliant beam of light sent directly into the swirling iridescent mass of Witch, the [Flash of Penance] shattered across the shell, and launched directly at each of the nearby teammates. The enemy team had clearly invested a lot of effort into holding this point, as 3 members of the team of 6 had been left here to defend it. The players barely even had the time to process what had just happened to them before their avatars erupted into miniature supernovas within the small building, shattering the sleek architecture into a crumbling mess. Thankfully, Owen’s [Reflective Breakdance] lasted just long enough that the roof coming down on his head was no threat to him. The procedural environmental destruction of UMDK always added an extra flair to their matches. The destruction in the game functioned on a sort of timer. Each object had a different timer attached to it, usually the bigger the object the longer the timer before reconstruction. When reconstruction occurred, the object would start to rebuild itself naturally using the destroyed rubble around it, as if time was suddenly regressing to a state where it was once more pristine. Owen thought it was a neat system, but it was one that he had unfortunately never spent the time to look into the lore reasoning on why it occurred. At some point he heard people talk about it being due to the ancient technology that Machnum had managed to get their hands on, but Owen was far more interested in pink punk chaos than reading any of the lore entries.
Femicom had closed the distance towards the now destroyed building, and the now captured point A, which was no doubt sending the enemy team scrambling as Owen and Aoife’s team gained the majority.
[Nintendo Femicom: that’s my girl!!!!!!!!!]
The message was typed very quickly, judging by how Femicom stopped moving briefly once she had made it into the collapsed structure that was supposed to be point A. Owen couldn’t help but grin widely at the flawless execution of their plan, combined with the gratifying affirmation that he had done a good job.
“That’s my girl” rattled around inside of his head like the words were performing their very own reflective breakdance within his mind. The words were simple, they were only three words total, after all. Yet they felt more significant than they really should. Owen was heavily focused on why exactly the word “girl” had plastered a smile across his face that he had yet to dismiss. This couldn’t be a normal reaction to those words, he thought. He wished that now, more than ever, he had some kind of male friend that he could talk to about these feelings. It would be weird to ask Aoife, and for all he knew, it wouldn’t even help to ask a girl. This was something he needed another guy’s opinion on. Ideally, they would respond with, “eh, it’s whatever” and he could write off the feelings as just a result of Femicom flirting with him. It would make sense that it would feel good, even if the gendered nicknames didn’t line up with his identity.
The only male friends that he had recently blocked and unfriended him. Which left very few masculine presences in his life. His Dad was there, but was that a question that he could really ask his father? The only other guy that he had even talked to for longer than a minute at college was Richie. Maybe he could ask him? He sort of owed him after spamming his phone with text messages.
The rest of the match was blissfully short. Their Femme Flash on A had secured them 2 out of 3 of the objectives, and try as they might, the enemy team was unable to regain a majority for the rest of the match, making it a very easy win. A win, that resulted in a rank up, pushing the two of them into Master’s rank for the first time.
“Fuck yeah!”
“Hell yeah!”
Owen and Aoife had both risen from their seats in celebration as the brand new rank flashed across their screen in the after mission report. The two of them were now staring at one another as they stood at their desks, headphones firmly wrapped around their ears, but not sound proofed enough to where they hadn’t heard each other’s celebration.
It was an awkward few moments before either of them decided to speak. Owen was immediately trying to think of any excuse that he could muster, realizing it didn’t make any sense at all for him to be leaping from his chair in joy if he was supposed to be doing homework.
“Did you win?” Owen asked.
Aoife nodded. “Was the homework that good?”
“Uh… yeah. It was- I thought it was hard but I made a breakthrough.”
“Do you always leap up and yell HELL YEAH whenever you solve a question on your homework?”
“Yep. They call me the… question celebrator guy.”
“Uhuh. Okay. Does that mean you can hop on now, if you’re finished with your assignment?”
Owen fidgeted with his hands, mercifully blocked from view by the desk so that Aoife could not see. If he said yes, he’d be screwed. There wasn’t an easy excuse that he had for Witchofthew3st to go offline suddenly. He would need to say that he was still busy with something. Homework was not an excuse that made a lot of sense after a few hours. With how late into the night Witch and Femicom would be playing, Aoife would surely suspect that he was either unforgivingly stupid when it came to his classes, or that he was deliberately avoiding her. Avoiding her wouldn’t do well for their blossoming friendship either, but it beat being discovered here and now, he thought.
“Sorry. I told a couple friends that I would queue with them tonight on The Danger Team.” Owen spoke softly, crossing his fingers that the impulsive lie would not dig him too much further into another layer of a lie. He was worried that pretty soon he would be creating so many details about Witchofthew3st’s life and his own life that he’d be operating as some kind of ignorant mastermind over fake lives. The worst game of the Sims that he could possibly imagine.
“Damn.” Aoife seemed hurt by the response. It made sense to Owen why she would take it as a sign that he didn’t want to be around her. He’d never mentioned other friends before, they had already agreed to play together today after they finished playing last night, all of it added up to look as though he was trying to avoid her. He wasn’t, in fact he was doing all of this just so that he could spend more time with her on UMDK. But she couldn’t know that. Not unless Owen wanted to ruin everything.
“Well, I hope you have fun with your friends. We’ll be able to hang at the meeting tomorrow anyway.” Aoife seemed to instantly acclimate to the news that he’d be playing with others. It was a kind of change that made Owen wonder just how often she was given news that she didn’t want to hear, only to go along with it with a smile.
“Thanks. I hope you have fun playing with that girl tonight.” Owen offered back, hoping that it was some kind of consolation for everything else that he had said.
“I will. She’s a real treat, that one. I’ll make sure the two of you get to meet soon.”
It was a friendly gesture, but one that made Owen feel like screws were tightening all across his chest. Owen muttered under his breath as the two of them sat back down in their seats.
“Not if I can help it.”