Page 14 of Always

Gwen looked as startled to see Blaine as Anika had been. After a short bout of whispering between the sisters, it became clear that Hannah had invited him, and Gwen wasn’t entirely pleased about it.

Blaine came strolling in with a huge smile and an abundant bouquet of lilies for Gwen. Gwen thanked him for the flowers but abandoned them at an empty table. It was Anika that rescued them, propping them up in a jug of ice water.

Blaine was full of stories about a recent tour to the border of Syria.

“We built this hospital,” he said, “really it was just a big tent, but we had all kinds of people coming through, sometimes a line out the door. You’d be amazed what people come in about, not just injuries from mines and awful stuff like that, but funny things too, like this fellow, he only had about half his teeth left in his head, but one of his molars—"

They never found out what amusing things could befall a molar, because Blaine saw that Gwen wasn’t listening to him at all. She was trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between Hannah and James about a recent concert they both had attended.

Anika saw Blaine frown at James, examining the handsome stranger who had entrenched himself in Gwen’s circle while he was absent.

Anika hurried to introduce them.

“Blain, this is James,” she said. “He’s been volunteering at the Red Line.”

“Nice to meet you,” James said, shaking Blaine’s hand. “How long have you been back state-side?”

“Just a couple of weeks,” Blaine said cautiously, glancing between James and the two girls. “What’s your line of work?”

He looked like he hoped the answer would be “dog-walker” or “accountant”—something unimpressive, or at least mundane.

“He founded Altarian!” Hannah said, scornful at Blaine’s ignorance.

“James...Dawson?” Blaine asked weakly.

“Guilty,” James said, with no real embarrassment.

“Well...that’s something,” Blaine said.

“Hey,” James joked to break the silence. “I think I pulled a filling out last week. Can I come visit you?”

“Not unless you want to enlist,” Blaine replied with a surly expression.

As the party progressed, it quickly became clear to the abandoned beau that both Gwen and Hannah were besotted with James, and nobody besides Calvin seemed particularly interested in Blaine.

“So what happened with the molar?” Calvin asked, but Blaine was watching Gwen and Hannah shooting darts across the room with James. Gwen missed the board entirely, and James patted her on the shoulder in a way all too familiar for Blaine’s liking.

“Did they give you a gun even though you’re just a dentist?” Calvin asked. Blaine ignored him completely, draining his pint of beer and stalking off to the bar for another.

When it was time for quizzing, they divided pretty evenly along workplace lines: two teams from the school friends, one from the nurses, and then Gwen, Hannah, James, Calvin, Joselyn, and Anika at their own table. Blaine tried to join their group, but Gwen said, “Sorry, only six to a team.” He was relegated to the nurses instead.

Joselyn suggested “Trivia Newton John” as their team name, which they all liked, but then James offered “Whiskeypedia” and that won the vote. The work friends went with “Risky Quizness” and “Les Quizerables” respectively. The nurses chose “Pinky and the Brains,” on account of Blaine’s pink shirt. He tried to laugh while also looking annoyed.

Anika and James had participated in more than a few quiz nights in their NYU days, besides all the episodes of Jeopardy they’d watched together. She thought he must be remembering the same thing but didn’t want to look over at him.

As the MC started firing questions at them all, Anika saw that James was just as good at coming up with the answers as he’d always been. Anika was even a little better, since she’d spent so much time reading in recent years.

As in the old days, James was quick to answer anything related to business, technology, baseball, or 80s music. The nurses hit the buzzer on all things biology-related, and seemed suitably impressed with some of Blaine’s answers in the same arena, which cheered him up a little. One of Gwen’s old school friends seemed bizarrely versed on topics Biblical and political, while Anika’s humanities education came in handy on questions relating to literature, psychology, history, and even astronomy—which she’d taken twice as an elective.

Hannah failed to answer much of anything outside a few pop-culture questions. She looked frustrated and started drinking some of Gwen’s shots. Gwen aced almost the entire music-history category—outside of a few questions James stole relating to Duran Duran and George Michael—so she took her shots in celebration rather than anger.

As the game went on, Anika was swept up in the excitement, her competitive spirit rising in a way it hadn’t done in years. The smell of spilled beer, the moans of the teams that had whiffed questions and the cheers of those who had answered correctly—they were all highly familiar sensations that vividly brought back her college days, how happy she’d been then.

Looking across the table at James, she didn’t see his fancy clothes and the physique he’d built through hours at the gym. Instead, she saw the same brilliant smile she had known before, the way he grimaced a little when he was thinking hard, and the way he ran his palm over his face when he got something wrong.

Both James and Anika were film buffs, and more than once they slapped each other’ s hands on the buzzer as they tried to ring in simultaneously to answer, “Which actress was the first to win a Caesar in 2015?” and, “In what year was the original Jurassic Park film released?”

As they both tried again to answer, “What was the name of Elvis Presley’s first film?” James’s warm hand rested for just a moment over hers and he smiled at her in a way that made Anika flushed and throbbing all the way down to her toes.

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