Page 7 of Drawn Together
In case you are wondering, yes, my attraction to him went down a few notches after witnessing that.
Which leaves Fletcher just sitting there. He looks…uncomfortably tall, with his legs stretched out under the small expanse of the table, shoulders hunched over. Like Gumby or something.
The second round of questions with our winning trivia group, ‘Which is not a lot,’ goes by just as easily as the first one. When I asked earlier why they named the group that, Margot explained it was because whenever they call out points, they would say the other team name, their point count, then our team name, so it sounds like they’re saying ten points, which is not a lot.
It gets a laugh a quarter of the time.
“Do you usually not go for the board?” I turn to those at the table I find to be delightful and not, how to put it, a complete jackass. “Am I taking all the answers?”
Stephan barks a laugh and leans back on the cushion, my roommate falling back with him. “No one ever answers except Fletcher. We just come along for the happy hour and the gift cards at the end of the night.”
Noah nods. “Last time, we all got pedicures.”
“And the time before that, it was a free pottery class,” Margot adds, checking her teeth for lipstick in the reflection of a soup spoon.
“So, you guys really never answer the questions?”
“Sometimes I do,” Stephen says with a smile. “Just to make Fletcher mad.”
I temporarily allow my eyes to settle on Fletcher, and he dips his chin. “It works.”
“One time he threw popcorn at me because of it.”
“You answered the question of who was the first man on the moon with ‘Louis Armstrong.’”
“We still won.”
“Barely, and only due to me.”
The announcer taps on his microphone again, his free hand holding a fried mozzarella stick between his middle and pointer finger like a cigarette. “Alright, everyone ready for round three?”
The remaining tables cheer, including ours. Well, except for Lennon and Fletcher. The announcer flips over a new page in his binder on the bar counter and leans into the mic to ask the next question. Fletcher reaches for the board before he can even ask it, which makes my fingers reach out at the same time. It’s a dead heat, but the board is leaning on my side, so I grab it first, pulling it to my chest.
I promise, had this been anyone else at this table, I would not care about this kind of thing. Or maybe I’d care a little less. Mom used to say I have no enemies except those who I played Monopoly with. Then, it’s me against the world.
But it’s just this man, with his little scoffs at the questions that are clearly not about his manly-man literature. I feel like I owe it to feminism to prove him wrong.
“Give me the board,” he demands.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I will know the answer faster.” So long as it is a normal question, and not something like What is Stephen King's preferred toilet paper brand?
His brow lowers, brief lines of crow's feet stretching the corners of his eyes. “All you have known the answers to are useless questions about women's fiction or romance.”
My gasp is palpable. “So, women's fiction and romance are useless?”
“Not women's fiction.”
“And romance?”
He looks to the others at the table like Am I right? But they’re all suddenly very interested in the dessert menu or the venue's light fixtures.
“Do you need me to answer that?”
“What about it is useless, exactly?”
