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by the attention. He didn't want to hit on girls. He wanted to get drunk and figure out if there was any way he could avoid his looming fate. But he hadn't dated anyone in over a year, and some urges - and some women - refused to be ignored.
"What're you working on there?" she asked.
"Oh, just doodling you know," he said as he looked down at the page. He'd sketched the outline of a hydra-like monster with five heads and ten tentacles. Four of the heads were laughing as the tentacles strangled the fifth. "I'm a...I'm a comic book artist."
Was that true? Was he no longer a videogame designer then, just like that?
"Really? Very cool."
"Thanks"
"But tell me something," she said as she came over and claimed the bar stool next to his. She smelled like soap and shampoo, clean and fresh. "Are you really a comic book artist or are you, like, a comic book artist in waiting?"
"What?"
"You know, you meet guys all the time in bars or Starbucks or wherever who carry around their notebooks and sketchpads and say they're writers or artists. But really they're waiters or clerks or something." She paused to put a reassuring hand on his forearm. Her touch was warm and the feel of her flesh gave him a little internal twitch of arousal. "Not that there's anything wrong with that or anything. I'm all kinds of things in my head that I'm not actually in real life."
"No, no, I'm the real deal. I'm even published. Hell, I used to even get paid decent money for doing it."
"But not anymore?"
"Well no. I've moved up in the world, or at least my paycheck has."
"Sold out huh?"
"Sold out, yeah. I left comics a few years ago and helped start a computer game company. I've been the lead designer on a game called Metropolis 2.0." He rubbed the tattoo on his arm, the company logo as he had designed it. Back in his apartment, Paul still had that first sketchbook from five years back when he'd scribbled those early doodles. Doodles tha