Women are complicated for me.

“Duh,” you might say. Or, “Join the club!” Or, “Dudes are complicated too!” And yeah, I know it’s a cliche to think women are complicated, and I know guys have plenty of our own quirks that women don’t always understand, but when I say women are complicated for me, it’s the “for me” part I want to stress. Women aren’t actually that complicated—at least not anymore so than any other human, and of course we’re all ridiculously complicated in our own idiosyncratic ways—but my experiences with women have left me with some very unique perspectives and complicated feelings about the opposite gender that I have trouble sorting out for myself.

For the first twelve years of my life, as a bookish, only child, the only woman I ever gave two figs about was my mom. I hadn’t yet developed the keen biological interest in girls that makes those internet pop-up ads so fascinating to your average, heterosexual guy surfing the mid-90s interwebs, and the girls I knew at school didn’t have anything in common with my science-and-fantasy-flavored interests, but I thought my mom was incredible. She’d chosen to be a homemaker when she’d moved with my father back to his tiny hometown to raise a family together, but she was also so much more than that—a lover of stories and games, with a Masters degree in world history and a sharp, witty intellect sufficient to match my father quip for quip. He may have taught me to love the idea of knights and fantasy battles, but it was my mother who could open her mouth and weave a vivid tapestry of snapping pennants, stomping hooves, blades flashing in the heat of the afternoon, and a rich medieval court dressed in brocaded silks, ermine furs, and glittering mail. She saw the world as a beautiful, wonderful place full of potential, and it breaks my heart that Brianna had to grow up robbed of such an amazing woman in her life. On warm spring days, standing in our backyard where she used to sun-dry our sheets on a dancing clothes-line, a memory of her soft, brown curls and her vivacious green eyes will sometimes come to me, and it’s almost like she’s still with us. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d spent more time talking to her and getting to know her.

But of course, I didn’t. Like most children, as soon as I hit my teens, I became far too self-involved to want anything to do with my mother anymore. Suddenly I had been catapulted by nature into the awkward discomfort of puberty, with all of its attendant embarrassments. My new baby sister was keeping my parents busy, and meanwhile I had discovered that girls could be very interesting to me whether or not they cared about the books I read and the games I played. The internet teased me with impossibly hot pornographic vixens day and night, and I was desperate for some real action. But since I’d never bothered talking to any girl but my mom before, I didn’t quite know what to do with them—I’d try to strike up conversations based on what I’d read in books, and I’d wind up shot down or terribly tongue-tied as they called me “weird” or just giggled at me. Women were this foreign, inscrutable and impossibly desirable “other” for me, I had no chill and no game. Not gonna lie: it was a tough time for me. Looking back, there are even moments where girls were absolutely into me and I was just too dense to realize.

It wasn’t until my junior year that I managed to wrangle myself a girlfriend. Her name was Amanda Miller, we had nothing in common except a mutual physical attraction, and the peak of our relationship was a sweaty, groping tangle of fumbled bra clasps and third-base shenanigans in the backseat of her car on a hot summer night. We dated for three weeks before she broke my heart by dumping me for a senior because she thought I was a little too clingy and geeky. I spent the next two months afterward hiding out in Mark’s basement, blubbering about how I was neither clingy nor geeky, writing bad poetry about my undying love for Amanda on LiveJournal, and naming jRPG party characters after her. So yeah, she was pretty right about that. Girls were a foreign country, and I was a stranger in a strange land, navigating without a map.

Then, my parents’ accident blew up my whole world. For several years afterward, it was just me and Brianna on our own with no room for anyone else. I was devastated, seeing a therapist regularly while I learned to care for my baby sister, and I suddenly found myself in this weird father-figure role, raising a girl-child when I didn’t know the first thing about women. How on Earth was I supposed to raise a girl when I could barely talk to girls, I wondered? But then something magical happened: As Brianna grew into her personality and I got to know all of her goofy, lovable quirks, I started seeing women less as some kind of infinitely desirable sex-object and more as actual, whole people. I grew up a lot in a very short time, and shockingly, I learned to relax around women. My raging teen hormones leveled off, and I somehow developed some chill.

Despite my new, chill-tastic superpowers, I was celibate. I already mentioned that raising a cute little sister was like catnip for plenty of women who put themselves in my path, but I wasn’t ready to deal with the work of building a relationship with anyone when Bri was my main responsibility. Plus, most of the women I met in our small community were kind of boring to me. I’d come full circle—it was so much effort to make time and energy for dating, that I didn’t want to do it unless it was for someone truly remarkable, who shared or at least understood my passions and interests. Someone as smart and fun and cool as my mom had seemed to my dad. I’d never met anyone like that before. I’d hoped to meet women like that when I went away to college. So it goes.

Then I met Renee. I was twenty-three and had just started working as a junior analyst. Renee was two years older than me; a buxom, sandy-haired woman with intelligent grey eyes who worked in the marketing department and always seemed to be smiling at me. She had just weathered a nasty divorce and had been assigned to partner with me on a project that required us to work late together several nights per week. Brianna would go to a friend’s house, and I’d stay at work with Renee and fret over marketing slides until seven or eight PM. On our first night of working together, our legs brushed twice beneath the table. The hair on my neck stood up both times, and I couldn’t help but sneak glances down her low-cut shirt and think dirty thoughts about her whenever she’d bend over the table to point at some graph or chart. I told myself I was being inappropriate and forced myself to behave professionally, but on our seventh night together, she stood behind me, laid her fingertips on my shoulder, and whispered that she wanted to fuck me, if I wanted that.

I didn’t tell her it was my first time. I just took her, there on the office conference table in a locked room with no windows, and the two of us moved together until I experienced a glorious, shuddering release. Then she showed me what to do with my fingers to bring her to the same heights of ecstasy, which I did happily. Afterward, as I gazed at her shyly, she told me that she liked me, but that this was just for fun. Nothing serious. She wasn’t looking for anything serious. It was perfect. We carried on a secret tryst for four heavenly months, and then it ended. She got promoted to a new job, across the country. When we had our tearful goodbye at the airport, I bit my tongue and didn’t ask her if she’d write. I knew she wouldn’t lie to me, and I could already see the answer in her eyes.

After Renee, there was no one else. No one important, anyway. I’ve never really dated as an adult, nor do I know what you’re supposed to do romantically with a woman when she doesn’t whisper “take me.” Talking to girls is easier than it used to be, and I don’t put women on a pedestal like I used to, but I’m still hopelessly awkward when a conversation veers romantic. Given my rough, winding road with members of the opposite sex, you can see why I’d have some complicated feelings about them. I have a simple rule that helps me out, these days: I avoid the issue! As long as I keep things strictly professional with women, everything goes really smoothly.

Haley the mage did not seem to appreciate the value of keeping things strictly professional.

“You’re hot,” she told me, two seconds after I caught up to her breakneck speed-walking pace in the orc tunnel.

“Excuse me?” I replied, not quite sure I had heard her correctly.

“Your avatar.” She gestured at me with the two-handed maple staff she was currently using as a walking stick. “It’s attractive. You did a good job with it.”

“Uh, thanks… it’s mostly default settings,” I mumbled, totally caught off guard by this turn of conversation. I had tons of questions for this chick, none of which involved talking about how attractive either of our avatars were. “Could we talk ab—”

“Most guys don’t have very good aesthetics for male bodies. They make the arms too bulky or the faces look weird, but you did a good job.” Haley narrowed her eyes at me. “You are a guy, right?”

“Uh, yeah. I am. Yes. In real life, I mean. Are you?”

“A guy?”

I blushed. “Er no… I mean, are you a girl? In real life?”

“I believe you. Know why? Only a guy would get this flustered over this conversation. Anyway, yes, yes I am. Haley in here, Haley out there, older sister to three fucking ah-dor-able little brothers who were absolute monsters until they grew up and left home, and younger sister to a golden boy dipshit fuckwit named Troy who can do no wrong in my parents eyes and continues to aggravate me to this very day.”

“You had four brothers growing up?”

“Fucking madhouse, right? Believe me, I know. But I probably wouldn’t be half as awesome as I am today if they hadn’t put me through hell. What about you? Just the one lost sister?”

“Yeah. Brianna. Brianna is my sister, I mean. She was on a date—”

“ A date? Why were you looking for her while she was on a date?”

“Well she was past her curfew…”

Haley snorted. “Jeez, over-protective much?”

“Look, it’s complicated. Sort of. I’m her guardian.” Right about now I was really starting to wish we would bump into an orc or something to put me out of the misery of this conversation that I didn’t want to be having with a stranger, but unlike the goblin-tunnels I’d been in earlier, no convenient battles presented themselves. We just walked and walked past rows of torches down a long, twisting hallway, occasionally ascending steps. “Why are we talking about our families anyway? Shouldn’t we be discussing strategy or something?”

“I’m getting to know you, Michael Peters,” Haley replied. “That is my strategy. I want to know what kind of dude the game stuck me with here, so I can decide if you’re going to stab me in the back at the first opportunity. So far you seem all right. A guy raising his sister can’t be that bad.”

“Uh… thanks,” I said for the second time, completely at a loss for words. This chick really rambled, but her forthright directness was sort of refreshing, in a way.

“Anyway,” she continued, “Sure, we can talk game strategy. You bash them in the face, and I’ll batter them with my Frost Bolt and Arcane Missiles. I can regain mana at twice my regeneration rate either in or out of combat by using Meditate, and I chose a class specialty of Evoker to give my direct damage spells an extra 50% oomph.”

“You got to choose a specialty? I didn’t get that option.”

She shrugged. “It’s probably a mage class thing. You?”

“I can heal. Smite for a 3-second stun.” I waved my sword around. “I have this sharp, pointy thing. Nothing fancy, yet, but it gets the job done.”

“Yeah, it seemed to cleave through those orcs pretty well. You have some nice moves.”

I stood up a little straighter at the compliment. “You too.”

She winked. “I told you I’m the best mage you’ll ever meet. I always play mages, and I’ve been breathing MMORPGs since I was a little girl. I know what I’m doing.”

I was about to grill her some more on her gaming history when I noticed a break in the tunnel up ahead. “Hey, what’s that?”

The next flight of stairs up appeared to have a shaft of golden light illuminating it. Haley and I shared an excited glance.

“The exit?”

“Must be. Let’s check it out.”

We broke into a loping jog and ascended the sunny staircase in a matter of seconds, bursting out of the dank dungeon tunnel and onto the edge of a wide, flat area of dusty dirt with scattered patches of scraggly grass. The space was maybe 150 square meters, with a handful of ramshackle wooden buildings in the center, and it was hemmed in on four sides by enormous, mossy walls that stretched so high into the azure sky I had to crane my neck back to see the top of them. To our left and right were more square holes in the ground like the one we’d emerged from, and four large stone doors stood centered at the base of each massive wall. But most interesting of all was the bustling group of people gathering beside the largest of the wooden buildings, milling in front of a four-foot tall marble platform with an unlit brazier on either side.

I rested my hand on the pommel of my sword and glanced at Haley. “NPCs, you think?”

She squinted at the group. There were less than twenty people present, and some of the stragglers were still walking to join the others. “Too far for my HUD to tell. I don’t think so, actually. Look at how some of them are sort of awkwardly waving at each other. Those must be players.”

“Hmm.” Players were a big unknown. Were these friends or foes? They definitely seemed to be friendly to each other, but that didn’t mean they’d welcome Haley and me.

A flash of blue at the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I noticed my HUD had updated: “Instruction: Join your cohort.”

I could see that Haley had received the same directive, and she raised her eyebrow at me. “What do you think?” she asked, absentmindedly twirling her staff with her right hand.

I shrugged. “The game obviously could have killed us if it wanted to. I guess we follow instructions until it makes more sense not to. Just stay on your toes, and stick close to me, okay? If this turns into some kind of Hunger Games bullshit, we’re fighting back to back and retreating toward this tunnel.”

She nodded, and then smiled wryly. “If this were the hunger games, does that make you my dashing love interest?”

I blushed. “What? No. Why would you say that? I just met you.”

“Come on. You can tell me. Are you more of a sensitive Peeta type or a manly Gale type?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“Ooh, or you might be more of a bad boy Finnick type. You know he gets pimped out by the president, right?”

“I didn’t read those books,” I said flatly.

“You didn’t see the movies?”

I sighed. I had seen the movies. But I wasn’t playing this weird girl’s stupid game.

“Come on,” I growled, and stalked forward stiffly, toward the assembled group. “We’re wasting time.”

“Oh, relax.” Haley kept pace with me easily, laughing into her hand. “I’m just teasing you. Your plan is a good one. Has anyone ever told you you’re fucking cute when you’re flustered?”

“You’re the worst. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“My brothers. All the time.”

“Well, they’re right.”

“Sure, but at least I’m fun. All business when there’s orcs, all party when there’s not.”

“All party?”

“I’m having fun. Aren’t you?”

“I’ll have fun when I know my sister isn’t lying in a pool of her own blood somewhere.”

The comment was a little harsh, and I knew it as soon as I said it. Haley stopped in her tracks and dropped her eyes as the conversation died. I paused and turned back to her.

“Look, Haley… I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“No. That’s fair. I wasn’t thinking.” All her teasing playfulness from a moment before was gone, and her voice was tight and quiet. “Come on. They’re waiting for us.”

As she brushed past me, I glanced up and saw that Haley was right. We were the two remaining figures in the clearing who hadn’t joined the assembly at the platform, and most of them had turned to stare our way.

I tightened my fist on the hilt of my sheathed sword, took a deep breath, and followed Haley across the patchy grass.