Coming Swoon (Brunch Bros #4)

Chapter 4

Chapter Four

Twelve Years Ago, London

“My round,” Peter declared, tipping the final foamy dregs of his beer into his mouth. “Give me your empties, you animals.”

He climbed out of the booth and gathered the empty pint glasses, pinching the rims between his fingers so he wouldn’t drop them on his way to the bar. Quiz night was always busy in The Hare and Thistle, and the sound of broken glass followed by a resounding “Oy!” from the assembled patrons was part of the soundtrack.

“You’re a pretty barmaid, Peter,” Blair teased, his rolling Scottish accent starting to slur around the edges. Getting pissed before the start of the quiz was half the fun of quiz night.

“Up yours,” he said to hysterical laughter from the lads. It wasn’t that funny, but they’d all beaten him to the pub so who knew exactly which round they were on.

Peter put his arms above his head, glasses held tightly between his fingers, and weaved through the crowd. The Hare and Thistle was a popular pub with students, artists, and other flat broke young people because it was dirt cheap and on quiz nights they discounted the beer.

Movement at the door caught his eye. It shouldn’t have, but it did. And for the second time that day, the world stopped spinning and his vision tunneled like he was living in a movie. His heart flipped, flopped, and did a double pirouette. He watched as she squeezed through the crowd to get to the bar. Peter left his polite British heritage behind and accessed his pushy American roots to get to her.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said. It wasn’t smooth at all, but she made him stupid. He was quickly coming to terms with that.

She looked up at him, her expression transforming from bored and annoyed to startled. “Are you following me?”

Peter smiled. “No, I’m not.” He pointed to the empty pint glasses he’d just placed on the bar. “I’ve been here for ages. So maybe I should ask why you are following me ?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not. I’m bored. I saw a flier.”

He leaned against the bar. “Do you know how many pubs there are in London?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”

“Depending on how you define London, there’s between two thousand to four thousand pubs. What are the odds we’d end up in the same pub on the same night?”

“About one in four thousand?” she deadpanned.

He snapped his fingers. “Exactly. It’s fate.”

She rose up on her tiptoes to look for the barkeep, and he narrowly resisted the urge to step on the heel that had separated from the rest of her boot.

“When you find a line you really stick with it, don’tcha, buddy?” she asked, trying and failing to make eye contact with the man filling pints.

“It’s not a line,” he insisted.

“Fate doesn’t exist. This is simply a coincidence. Or you’re a really excellent stalker who guessed the plans I only made twenty minutes ago”—she looked at the empty pint glasses and frowned—“hours ago. Are you okay? That’s a lot of empty glasses.”

“These aren’t all mine. I’m here with some friends.” Peter pointed to his booth. “We do quiz night here every week. You should join us. It’s fun.”

“How do I know you’re not all blithering idiots?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. He smiled and she blushed.

“We are all blithering idiots,” he said, and put a hand on his chest. “Especially me. So really you’d be doing us a favor by joining.”

“Why would I want to join a quiz team full of admitted idiots?”

“Free beer?” Peter suggested.

She considered that while Peter finally got the attention of the barkeep.

“Can we get another round, please,” he asked, pointing to the empty glasses, “plus one more?”

“I haven’t said yes yet,” she reminded him as the barkeep left to fill up fresh pint glasses.

“I know,” he said, leaning in so they didn’t have to raise their voices above the low-level din, “but I’m an optimist. What do you have to lose?”

She regarded him with skepticism, and he held his breath. Finally she said, “My dignity.” Then the barkeep returned with their pint glasses, and she picked hers up to take a sip. “But I guess I can debase myself for an hour.”

Peter was so thrilled he could have floated away like a runaway balloon, but he didn’t want to scare her away. He carefully modulated his face into a satisfied smile and picked up three of the pints.

“Can you grab the others?” he asked.

“Are there tips at the end of this?”

“If we make it to your round, I’ll spot you a tenner.”

She picked up the pint glasses. “Sold.”

As they waited for a group to pass them, he leaned down close to her ear and said, “You do have to tell me your name, though. I can’t introduce you as This Girl I Met at the Bookshop.”

She peered up at him, and for a moment he got distracted trying to find shapes in the freckles on her nose. “Sybil.”

It fit her, in a strange, mystical way. He couldn’t imagine her as a Brittany or an Ashley. Sybil held secrets, and he wanted to discover all of them.

“My name is still Peter.” Idiot .

Sybil grinned. “Like the rabbit. I remember.”

So he was never going to live that little incident in the bookstore down, but he was okay with that. He’d been memorable. And he’d made her smile. He wanted to do more of that.

They weaved through the crowd, Peter constantly checking to make sure Sybil was still right behind him—he understood why Orpheus had to look—and made it to the booth without spilling any beer.

“Lads, this is Sybil. Sybil, these are the lads.” He put his pint glasses on the table and pointed as he named his friends. “Blair, Aarav, Lewis, and Stuart.”

There was a chorus of bewildered hellos as they sat down.

“So how do you know Peter?” Aarav, one of his flatmates, asked. “He’s never mentioned you, and he mentions everything. Literally. He’s scared that if he stops talking, he’ll stop breathing.”

“I noticed that,” Sybil said. “And we just met.”

“And he got you to go with him in under ten minutes?” Aarav let out a low whistle. “Normally it takes him hours to get a pretty girl to go anywhere with him. What did he say?”

She held up her pint glass. “Free beer.”

That got an uproarious laugh from the group. Peter slid down in his seat and considered hiding under the table.

“And technically it did take him hours. We met in a bookshop earlier.”

Lewis leaned forward. “So is that where the pretty girls hang out? Bookshops?”

“You’d have to learn to read,” Peter told him. He didn’t want Lewis moving in on Sybil because Lewis was slick. It wasn’t fair.

“I can read,” Lewis protested.

“Yeah, but you’re not going to find anyone age-appropriate in the children’s section,” Blair said, and the group erupted in laughter again.

There was a screech of feedback over the speakers, followed by the quizmaster half-heartedly apologizing over the mic. She explained the rules and format to anyone who had never participated before and kicked the evening off with a geography section.

“This desert is the driest place on Earth.”

The group hunched together.

“It’s the Sahara, right?” Stuart said, looking around the group for confirmation.

“Bugger if I know. It’s the only desert I can think of,” Blair said.

The answer—or what he hoped was the answer—appeared in Peter’s mind. “It’s the Atacama Desert in Chile.”

No one questioned his answer, and when the quizmaster gave the answer, Sybil narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously.

“I thought you said you were a blithering idiot.”

Peter draped his arm across the back of the booth and leaned in like he was going to tell her a secret. “I am. I’m completely useless outside of quizzes.”

“Head full of Snapple facts?”

“Pretty much.”

His head full of Snapple facts kept them in third place, which didn’t win them any money or free drinks, but it did win Blair the right to taunt their quiz night rivals over their fifth-place finish.

Lads’ Night Out normally dispersed after the quiz finished, but they all stayed on, buying another round to keep Sybil around. And the more cheap beer they drank, the closer Sybil sat to him, until she was leaning against him, her head occasionally resting on his shoulder.

It was Stuart who broke up the fun because he had to work in the morning. That caused the cascade of leaving excuses, so while everyone else scooted out of the booth, Peter jumped on his last chance to ask her out.

“Would you like to go out with me?”

He expected her to give him a hard time, so when she asked, “When?” he blurted out, “Right now.”

A puff of air could have blown him over when she smiled and said, “Sure.”