Saving Ever After (Ever After #4) by Stephanie Hoffman McManus Page B

incredulously. “I almost never lose at that game.” I couldn’t even
remember the last time I lost. I was good. Video games were my thing, besides
drumming. All of the guys played, but none of them played as much as I did.
    “I had to have something
to do every time my mother grounded me to my room. And she grounded me a lot,”
she said with a playful smirk and amused twinkle in her eye.
    “Well shit, do you play
any other games?”
    “Bring on whatever
you’ve got,” she challenged, but before I could swap games, the timer on the
oven beeped.
    “When we’re done eating,
you’re going down,” I told her.
    “Like I said, bring it.”
    She was a competitive
little shit, but so was I. I didn’t even let her make it through her second
slice of pizza before I was telling her to put it down and pick up her
controller. I was determined to redeem myself.
    She just chuckled, took
another bite and then set her plate on the coffee table and confidently
snatched the controller back up.
    There was a reason she
was so confident.
    It didn’t matter what
game I put in, she kicked my ass. Just when I’d think I had the upper hand,
she’d come out of nowhere and blow my damn mind, and usually my head off. For
every match or round I won, she won three, and I think sometimes she was
actually taking it easy on me to spare my ego.
    “How the hell did you
just do that?” I asked her at one point when she seemed to transport from one
part of the game to another.
    She grinned and chewed
her lips like she had a secret she was debating letting me in on. “There’s a
glitch in the game, kind of like secret section or another dimension right on
top of the game. It basically allows you to ghost through parts of the game
before it spits you back out. That’s why you didn’t see me coming.”
    “Shit, how did you figure
that out?” I asked. I’d been playing this game for months now since it came out
and hadn’t discovered it.
    She just grinned and
shrugged. “I just stumbled across it.” I doubted that. It had to be hard to
find if not everyone knew about it. “You ready to give up and admit defeat?”
She asked.
    “Not happening,” I said.
    Eventually I got so
tired of her kicking my ass at every game we played, that I switched it over so
that we were on the same team. A couple hours must have passed of us just
sitting there in front of the Tv, and not once did she complain about my
competitiveness, or ask if we could turn it off. Her own competitive streak
matched mine, and she was funny as hell when she really got into the game. Some
of the comments she made had me busting up laughing. It felt more like I was
playing with Ace or Spade than an eighteen year old girl. I never would have
expected that gaming fell into her interests between shopping and partying.
    “Damn, you can’t tell
Jaxyn I said this, but you’re my new favorite girl to game with,” I admitted
when I was finally ready to call it quits. She was lethal, and she made our
team unstoppable.
    She smiled and looked
over at me, “Jax plays?”
    “Not really. She tries,
but mostly we use her as a distraction,” I laughed and Mia looked confused, but
I didn’t bother explaining. I just shut down the console and flipped it back to
regular TV. She snatched the remote from me and started scrolling through the
guide, landing on an old episode of The Walking Dead. Again she surprised me,
and my expression must have showed it.
    “What? I like Daryl,”
she said.
    “Let me guess, you cried
like a baby when they killed Beth?”
    “No . . . okay, maybe a
little, but that was so sad.”
    I just laughed, “That’s
the show.”
    “Yeah, it’s really damn
depressing, but I just can’t quit watching.”
    “Me too, although, Katrina
doesn’t like it, so I usually make sure I’m here on Sunday nights.”
    “Zombies aren’t her
thing?” She asked, trying to come across more disinterested than she really
was. It was the reminder I needed that Mia wasn’t one