Boy Meets Geek by Arielle Archer Read Free Book Online Page B

of my busy schedule, though it would probably look rather pathetic to anyone who actually had a busy schedule or real responsibility instead of a full plate of video game playing every night.
    The chat window indicated he’d gone off-line. I paused for a moment, and then I added him to my watch list. He must’ve already done the same to me if he knew when I was online. That sent another thrill running through me. A man that gorgeous, a man who could write like that, a man who could make me feel this way with just a few words on the screen, and he’d obviously been interested enough to talk to me first!
    It was weird, but I was starting to feel very much like that giddy schoolgirl even when I wasn’t talking to him. Just the thought of him was enough to set me off. It was an odd feeling, but not unpleasant. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but I knew that I liked it.
    I closed out the game. Without him on there really was nobody for me to talk to at this time of day. Most of my friends didn’t start coming online until after the work day was over. As the game closed a window popped up advertising Elassa Con which was coming up very soon. I sighed as I looked at the pictures streaming past. It looked like everybody was having a hell of a time.
    I’d been to a couple of local conventions, I even had a costume I put together that was slightly scandalous since it took a fashion cue from some of the more bikini oriented outfits that the sorceresses could wear in game, but I’d never been to the big convention. The one put on by a combination of all the different parts that made up the Elassa media empire.
    People from the game were there. People from the TV miniseries were usually there. I even heard that Sean Taylor himself made appearances, although most of the people who liked Elassa were younger and I couldn’t imagine an old guy like him enjoying the convention. At least I assumed he was an old guy. I still had to go and look up his picture sometime. But not right now. I had other things to do.
    With a wistful sigh I closed out the advertisement. However nice it would’ve been to go to that convention there was no way a girl who made what I made would be able to afford a ticket out to Indianapolis. There was definitely no way I was going to be able to afford the price to get into the convention, or the price of a hotel stay. I heard those got really ridiculous as the convention got closer, and there were even a special team of moderators on the forums to make sure that scalpers didn’t go around trying to sell hotel rooms via official channels.
    No, it was definitely out of my price range.
    I needed to forget about that stuff though. I had more important things to concentrate on. Like the fact that I had to get to work. All that talk about my novel, all the anger I felt towards Ryan, all of the encouraging words I’d gotten from this mysterious guy, had put me in a mood to write. Really write. Not stuff for the game.
    I opened up my novel and got to work on it for the first time in a couple of months at least. The muse was upon me, and I was going to take advantage of the moment since I didn’t have much else to do until later in the evening when it was time to log into the game.

6: Waiting Game
     
    I went absolutely crazy in more than one way over the next couple of days. I started working on my novel at a furious pace. Words flowed from my fingers into the computer. I hadn’t written this much on one of my own projects in ages, but I felt inspired. Maybe it was showing my book to someone. Maybe it was the inspiration I’d taken from his encouragement. Whatever it was, I was writing like a maniac and I was putting out thousands of words a day which was unprecedented even before I got sucked into Tales of Elassa and spent all of my writing energy on the game.
    Conlan was driving me crazy in other ways too. Mainly by his absence. I’d only talked to him a couple of times and so it was totally weird