Jessica felt the couch cushions move a little, but she didn't look away from the screen. She couldn't, not at this level--the pieces were falling so fast now that a moment's distraction could end her game. It was probably just Luke, anyway. He wouldn't mind if she ignored him for a little while, not when he could see how far she'd gotten. He was probably impressed, in fact. She had a sudden urge to look over at him, just to see the look on his face when he realized she was had beaten his high score, but she pushed it away. She had gotten much better at shutting out distractions when she played.
When she first started, of course, practically everything was a distraction. Just catching someone walk by the screen out of the corner of her eye would cause her gaze to flicker over to them, and then by the time she looked back she had slammed down a piece in the wrong place. She learned how to recover from that kind of error, but the game was so much easier when she didn't make mistakes like that in the first place. She gradually learned how to keep her attention locked right onto the center of the screen.
It was the same thing with sounds, too. The first time she played, Jessica had to pause the game every time Luke said something so that she could form a proper response, but now she could just sort of sliver off a little part of her consciousness to answer whatever it was he was talking about while the rest of her focused intently on the game. She slammed another piece home, watching four rows vanish in an instant, and exulted for a tiny moment in pure triumph. But there was always another piece descending. She couldn't look away now.
It felt almost like a kind of meditation, in a weird way. Jessica felt so calm when she played, because everything else just faded into the background. She didn't need to think about classes, she didn't need to think about work, she didn't need to worry about anything at all. The next piece was the next piece, and all she needed to do was slot it into position. Even the score didn't really matter--she knew it had gotten high, higher than any of her previous scores and even higher than Luke's best score, but she could think about that later. She could think about everything later.
She slammed down another piece. Only two lines cleared this time, but she also opened up a troublesome little hole that had gotten covered. She pushed down a long, skinny piece into the newly-vacated space and watched in triumph as it cleared three more lines. Jessica always felt so happy when she cleared those rows. She pictured them as distractions, troubles, concerns, all of them vanishing as she slid the next piece into position. Until she was purely centered on the game, and nothing else mattered.
It was so easy to play when she felt like this. Every piece seemed to fit perfectly, every row seemed to clear away almost as soon as it built up, and Jessica felt like she could just keep going forever. Like she couldn't lose, like she couldn't even stop. Nothing mattered but the game. Luke said something to her, and she knew she responded to him, but a few seconds later she couldn't even remember what they said to each other. It probably wasn't important. Luke knew better than to try to have an important conversation with her while she was in her 'gamer trance'.
She dropped three pieces in short succession, clearing another three rows at once and earning her another one of those little starburst sensations of pure pleasure. Jessica was glad she'd remembered to put a towel down this time; it was kind of embarrassing when friends came over to visit and she had to hide the damp spot on the couch with a blanket. They probably wouldn't understand how satisfying it was to get that perfect clear, erasing four whole rows of distracting thought with a single piece.
Jessica began setting up her next clear, working swiftly and methodically. Her fingers didn't seem like they were even a part of her anymore; they moved on their own now, responding instinctively to the information she took in as her eyes locked onto the screen, and she was just a passenger in her body watching it all happen. Two rows. Gone. Three rows. Gone. One row. Gone. Four rows. Gone. It was a good thing she'd stopped wearing clothes when she played; Jessica was pretty sure after that last four-row clear that she would have needed to change when she was done.
Jessica shifted position slightly, leaning forward so that she could focus more intently on the game. Her eyes burned a little, but she had long ago learned to ignore that feeling. It felt so good to focus and concentrate like this, completely immersing herself in the flow of the pieces as they dropped and dropped and fell and slid down down down the screen, that she barely even realized she wasn't blinking. She felt Luke shifting position to sit behind her, but it didn't disrupt her concentration. Luke could do whatever he wanted to do, as long as it didn't get in the way of her game.
Jessica cleared another two rows, and her breathing quickened slightly with excitement. She didn't know what level she was on, or what her score was, but she knew intuitively that she was deep into the game now, deeper than she'd ever gone before. She felt a surge of pride, somewhere down in the space in her mind that wasn't devoted to the drifting shapes and the floating blocks and the descent that kept going faster and faster until it was almost a plummet. Every time, she got better and better at going deeper and deeper. Every time, she focused more and more. Every time, she thought less and less.
