Chapter Fourteen
Oliver
“Who wants to write?” Bastian asked, pointing at the quiz sheet we’d just been handed. “Or better question, who’s got the best handwriting and isn’t going to take over?”
“Not me,” I said with a smile as I sipped my cider. “My handwriting looks like chicken scratch. There’s a reason I don’t hand write any editorial notes.”
Lane snorted. “It’s also why I could never copy your homework. I couldn’t read it.”
“Mine’s the same,” Bastian said. “I’d have made a very good doctor. Except for the whole blood and pus thing. That’s not for me.”
“I can do it,” Anders said. He slid the sheet across the table until it was in front of him, then reached inside the pocket of the jacket hung on the back of his chair and produced a slim, black pen. “But I’m not putting down any answers that are wrong.”
Bastian rolled his eyes fondly. “I’m not wrong. I’m just creative.”
“You said the capital of the US was New York.”
“Oh my God, that was one time, and I’d had like four drinks! Also, we were playing with those smartarses Soren had introduced us to, and they were so stuck up I wanted us to lose.”
“So you forgot basic geography?”
“I forgot a lot of things that night,” Bastian said cheerfully. He looked between Lane and me, giving us a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t do that tonight. We’re aiming for victory!”
I grinned and took another sip of my cider, glad I’d persuaded Lane to join me. The Sleeping Goose was crammed full of people with every table occupied by teams large and small. There was a happy hum of chatter filling the air, broken only by laughter and the occasional cheer.
I hadn’t been to a pub quiz since my uni days when my housemates and I would often go down to the student union for their weekly one—mostly because the drinks were cheap, and the prizes were free food and alcohol.
The questions there would vary depending on who was running it, and sometimes you ran the risk of the quizmaster basing everything on their degree.
“It’s just general trivia tonight, right?
” I asked as I peered at the paper in front of Anders, reading the headings.
It looked like there’d be six rounds that included history, music, film, food and drink, sport, and, randomly, flags of the world.
There weren’t any images printed on the sheet, so I assumed any flags would be supplied later to stop us getting ahead or cheating.
“Yeah,” Bastian said. “But they usually do a themed one once a month. I think the next one is a special Pride one, and the one in July is The Lord of the Rings.”
“We’ll definitely win that one,” Anders said with quiet assurance. “I wrote my master’s thesis on the novels, and I’ve seen the films more times than I can count.”
“I’d hope so. You’re a fantasy author. The Lord of the Rings is one of the foundational texts of your genre.” Bastian grinned. “You just have to hope it doesn’t clash with any events.”
“Fuck,” Anders muttered, reaching for his pint. “Oliver, can I get out of events if I promise to win the pub quiz?”
I laughed. “Not sure about that one unfortunately.”
“Bollocks.”
“When’s the Pride one?” Lane asked.
“Next week. It’s Colin’s way of closing Pride month with a bang,” Bastian said. “You’ll come with us, right?”
“Sounds good,” Lane said. “I might bring some friends too if that’s okay? Although, they can make their own team. There are six of them.”
“Oooh we can make two teams of five,” Bastian said. “Who’s the smartest of your friends? We’ll take them!”
Lane laughed. “Not sure if he’s the smartest, but Will is the most sensible. We should definitely take him.”
“Will Alex and Spencer cope on the same team?” I asked.
That sounded like a recipe for disaster.
I was still processing the fact that Lane wanted to come again.
He’d seemed a bit unsure when I’d first mentioned it, but since we’d arrived, he’d been happily chatting to Bastian and Anders like he’d known them for years.
Lane had always had this quiet, magnetic charm that pulled people in, and he always managed to make people feel like he’d known them forever. It was a skill I envied.
“Probably not,” Lane said with a shrug. “It means we’ll definitely beat them.”
“I like him,” Bastian said to me with a grin. “He can come again.”
I nodded but couldn’t find the words to say anything.
The way Bastian had just casually included Lane, in the same way Lane had done with me and his friends, made my insides flutter.
It felt like I was slipping back into the past, into the person I’d once been but armed with knowledge of the future.
Like things might be different this time.
Which was preposterous because I wasn’t meant to be staying. Getting attached to Heather Bay and making friends here was only going to end in tears.
The only problem was, I’d never been very good at putting emotional distance in things. This current situation with Lane being one example in a long list of many.
“You can both come again if you can come up with a decent quiz name,” Anders said. I groaned. Naming things wasn’t my strong suit.
“I’m terrible at team names,” Bastian said. “My track record is shockingly bad.”
“We usually just go with someone’s name and add ‘and co’ on the end,” Anders said. “So that’s what you’re up against.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” I said. “I’m terrible with titles.”
“Isn’t that part of your job?” Lane asked with a raised eyebrow and a cheeky smile that made my stomach twist.
“It’s the worst part. I hate it when Brian says we need to retitle something. The last time he did, I suggested we just start putting random words in a hat, drawing them out, and making a title from that. It was either that or throw darts at a board pinned with words.”
The other three laughed, but I’d genuinely meant it at the time.
It couldn’t have produced any worse ideas than the ones we’d been bouncing around.
Brian had a banned list of title words like darkness, rising, shadows, and knives, and I hated when all an author’s suggestions included them because I knew pain and suffering awaited me.
Brian had a point that those words were consistently overused in fantasy titles, but I’d happily have used them every time if it meant I didn’t have to sit through another meeting where we went round and round in circles.
“I’ll bring a hat next time,” Lane said. “I think we’ve got some old, branded ones in the office.”
“Perfect. Problem solved.” I grinned.
“No, we still need one for tonight,” he said. “Come on. You have to suggest something. There are no bad ideas.”
“Says you. You have not suffered through a title meeting were someone literally suggested Sad Fields for a book that involved a magical famine.”
Anders snorted. “I know that book.”
“Okay, I take it back,” Lane said, trying not to burst out laughing. “There are definitely some bad fucking ideas out there.”
“See?” I thought for a second, racking my brains for something interesting. “All I can think of are quiz-based names, but really bad ones like Agatha Quiztie.”
Lane chuckled and gave me a warm smile. “It’s not the worst team name I’ve ever heard.”
“Got any better suggestions?” I asked, turning to him. He was closer than I realised, and I found myself studying his face. It would be so easy to get lost in him if I wasn’t careful. “If not, I’ve got Quiz Marple or Quizlock Holmes.”
“Definitely not either of those,” Lane said. He picked up his glass and took a long sip. “Quizin’ on a Prayer.”
“Aren’t you a little young for a Bon Jovi reference?” Anders asked with a wry smile.
“It’s a classic! And it’s one of those songs everyone knows the words too. I think you just absorb the lyrics before you’re born. It’s the same with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”
“I agree, mostly. Except I’m five years older than ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ so that doesn’t work for anyone my age,” Anders said. “Fuck, that makes me feel old. I’m classic rock aged.”
“Don’t worry,” Bastian said, leaning across to kiss his boyfriend. I pretended not to notice the heated spark in his expression. “You’ve aged wonderfully.”
“You’re flattering me.”
“Of course. It will get me everywhere.” Bastian grinned and then pointed at the sheet. “Quizin’ on a Prayer it is, then.”
It turned out to be an apt name. Bastian hadn’t been kidding when he said Colin wrote fiendish quizzes.
I’d never been great at trivia because, while I enjoyed reading widely, I only seemed to retain snippets of information and nothing that would randomly pop up on a pub quiz.
I knew a couple of answers in the first round—history—but mostly because I remembered watching Horrible Histories both as a kid and while at uni.
My friends and I had learnt all the songs while sprawled out, hungover, across our sofa on Saturday mornings while eating Coco Pops and reheated cookies Garth had brought home from his job at Subway.
We ended up with eight out of ten for that round, which we all considered to be an excellent effort. Then came the film round, and I began to get stumped. I loved watching films, but the background details behind them were a mystery to me.
“Question five,” Colin said. He was standing in front of the bar with a microphone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. There were ten questions in each round, and so far, I hadn’t known the answer to a single one. “In what year was the first Toy Story film released in cinemas?”
“Shit,” I said. “It’s got to have been around the mid-nineties.” I tried to think about when I’d first seen it.
Bastian pursed his lips. “’97 maybe? ’98?”
“No, that’s too late,” Anders said. “I remember being a teenager when it came out, and Soren was maybe eleven or twelve? So ’94?”
“It was 1995,” Lane said without hesitation. “In the US at least. It was 1996 in the UK. It depends whether Colin wants the US or UK year.”
“I’ll put both.” Anders marked them down in his neat cursive. “Then we should get a point either way.”
“The next answer is echo,” Lane said, and I looked around because I hadn’t realised Colin had asked another question.
“What was the question?” I whispered to Lane, leaning in closer and trying to ignore the way his scent flooded my senses. He twisted his head slightly, and I could see every line on his lips.
They looked so soft, and I wanted to kiss them.
We’d spent the rest of yesterday evening watching a film, and I’d spent the whole time resisting the urge to climb into Lane’s lap and ride him. I couldn’t even remember what the film had been about.
“What’s the first word spoken in The Empire Strikes Back?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen it,” I said.
“Yes, you have,” Lane said. “We watched it together.”
I felt my stomach twist again like I’d had snakes take up permanent residence there. “Was that when we couldn’t actually get through a movie without stopping to…”
“Yeah, it probably was.”
“Then I haven’t seen it,” I said. I didn’t remember any of the films Lane and I had watched together.
We’d been teenage boys with ridiculous sex drives and very short recovery periods.
If we hadn’t been making out, we’d been jerking or sucking each other off as quietly as possible so our parents wouldn’t know what we were doing.
I didn’t know if we were ever that subtle, but nobody had ever called us out.
“We’ll have to watch it again then. See how far we get this time.”
I bit my lip to hide my smile because both of us knew getting through a whole film was a long shot at best.