Page 15 of Now You See Him
Joey slid a glass of pale-yellow beer in front of her. “Want to start a tab?”
“Add it to mine,” Derrick said.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly?—”
“Are you with someone?” Derrick asked as he looked over her shoulder. “Your fiancé?”
Tina shook her head. “He’s in New York for work this week.”
“Then join us. Meet some of the locals.”
“Oh, ah. Okay, I guess. Why not?” Her whole goal was to speak to him in the first place. It was fate that in a large brewery like this, he’d come up to her within moments of her arrival.
Derrick picked up her beer for her and stepped aside so she could slide off the stool. He was being so nice, she thought as she followed him silently through the crowd to a series of high-top tables along the far wall. Would he be this nice to her when she asked him if he remembered that he’d fucked her on the concrete floor of the basement? If she asked him how his brother died in the house that he’d once owned?
“Here we are,” he said, putting her beer on a high-top table in front of a man with a shaved head and a thick red beard. He sat next to a pretty blond who was obviously pregnant and nursing a club soda. “Jackson, Penny, this is Tina. She just moved to town.”
“Hi, nice to meet you,” Tina said, extending her hand.
Both Jackson and Penny shook it, and their warm welcomes were encouraging as she sat at the table.
“Where did you move from?” Jackson asked as she took her first sip of beer.
“New York.”
“Definitely a change of pace,” Penny said. “How are you liking our sleepy town?”
“It’s definitely sleepy,” she said with a laugh. “But I am actually loving it. I’m a morning person, and just sitting out on my porch watching the morning fog, or in the sunroom during the day has been…amazing. I’ve never had space before, since I was raised in the city, and having it now is like being on vacation every day.”
“Wait until the dead of winter,” Jackson said with a laugh. “Hold on to that feeling.”
There was a loud boom, then screech from a microphone turning on, and Tina twisted in her chair, her knees bumpingDerrick’s briefly, as she tried to see the woman who stood on the raised stage in front of the room. “Is everyone ready for the Iron Fist Trivia Night?”
Cheers echoed across the brewery.
Derrick pushed cardstock paper in front of her, and a short half pencil. “Here you go,” he said. “Since it’s your first time, you can write down the answers for our team. We log our responses, and the one with the most points wins.”
“How do they know we’re not cheating?” Tina asked.
“Honor system,” Penny said with a smile.
“And they go pretty fast with some pretty intense questions, so it’s not easy to research some of this stuff,” Jackson added. “You either know it or you don’t.”
Tina felt a competitive spark, a brief distraction from the dreams and thoughts that had been plaguing her for days. “Okay,” she said as she picked up the pencil.
“How do you feel about horror movies, novels, and things that go bump in the night?”
She jerked in her seat. “Ah, why do you ask?”
He tapped the card in front of her. “Because that’s the theme for tonight.”
Since she’d spent the last week dabbling in some “research,” she felt pretty good about it, but so much for distracting herself from her current haunting predicament.
“I’m more ready than you could possibly imagine.”
He gave her a puzzled look, but the trivia MC for the night started round one.
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