Chapter 14 #2
That's all it is. Two seconds, a toast across a crowded bar, the game rolling on around us.
But I've hated that nickname for half my life, and tonight I said it out loud, on purpose, in front of everyone, and the man who made it feel like a weapon just watched me take it back and looked at me like I'd done something amazing.
I sit down. My face is warm. Annie is staring at me with her mouth open.
I try to ignore her, scribbling the next answer in handwriting I barely recognize as mine.
Going into the music round we're ahead of Finn's table, but not by as much as I would like.
The host asks which group's songs the musical “Mamma Mia!” is built on, which should be the easiest question in the history of this pub for one of us.
I know for a fact that Annie could answer this one in her sleep.
Except Annie isn't listening. She's turned around in her chair with her phone out, showing Evan a video of her freshmen drama class butchering Our Town, the two of them laughing like the rest of the bar doesn't exist. By the time I elbow her, the answer sheets are already collected.
Cathy wrote our answer, "the Bee Gees," followed by half a dozen question marks.
We're screwed. I know it even before the host announces the correct answer.
"ABBA," he calls into the mic, and the Bardot brothers' table erupts in triumph.
"Colton nailed it," Evan crows, thumping his brother on the shoulder. "Dude didn't even blink. Just wrote it down cold. My man!"
The eldest Bardot brother shrugs. "Tyler likes the movie," he mutters, and goes back to his beer.
Annie turns around slowly. "Oh, my God. Darce—I am so, so sorry!"
"Two seasons," I mutter. "Two undefeated seasons, Annie."
"I know! But Evan was showing me a marketing video he made for the vineyard’s open house that went viral. I got distracted."
"Uh, huh. I noticed."
She groans. "I take full responsibility, and I will fix this."
She does not fix this. We trade points with the Bardot brothers down to the wire, and the host, having the best night of his small-town hosting career, announces sudden death for the crown.
One question, answered out loud, winner takes the title.
"The category," he says, savoring every syllable, "is acronyms."
Our whole table exhales at once. Acronyms. Letters. Words. My territory. We’ve got this. Finn and his brothers are toast.
Annie grabs my arm like we've already won, and across the gap Finn watches me celebrate with a small, patient smile that should worry me a lot more than it does.
"In the sport of BASE jumping," the host reads, "the word BASE is an acronym. Name all four things it stands for."
Oh, shit. The floor drops out of my confidence. I know parachutes have straps. That's the entire list of what I know about people leaping to their simulated deaths in the so-called sport of BASE jumping.
I glance at Finn. He's not huddled with his brothers this time.
He doesn't even sit up straight, just tips his chair back on two legs, unhurried for the first time all night, and announces, "Building.
Antenna. Span. Earth." He looks directly at me, one of his annoying brows arched over those incredible green eyes.
"I've done them all. There's a bridge in Idaho I could tell you about, but my lawyer says I shouldn't. "
The bar roars. It's over. They've won.
The host declares it. The Long Shots have stolen our crown. Finn Bardot has beaten me at my own game. The smug bastard looks far too pleased with himself.
"Did someone promise something about a coronation ceremony?" he asks, sauntering up to our table along with Evan.
"It was a joke, Bardot. There is no ceremony."
I have never in my life wanted so badly to throw a coaster at a man's head.
That's not the whole truth, though, and I'm apparently done lying to myself this week.
The rest of the truth is that winning looks good on him.
His shirt has come untucked on one side, his hair has given up entirely, and his eyes come to me first, like my reaction is the only one he actually wants.
The fury and the wanting hit me at the same time, tangled together, impossible to separate.
And underneath all of it, quietly, I have to admit if we had to lose the crown, I'm glad it was to him.
"No ceremony?" he says with mock disappointment. "Damn. I was looking forward to being crowned trivia king in front of you."
In front of me. Not his brothers, not the rest of the pub, which is going wild with cheers and congratulations for the underdogs' victory. Me.
I don't know what to do with my feelings, especially when he's looking at me so intensely, so I try to deflect. "What did you do, pay someone off for that last question?"
He chuckles. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Anything to avoid admitting that I'm not as dumb as you think I am."
It’s a loaded question after Sunday, though only the two of us could know that. "I've never thought you were dumb."
He lightly shrugs it off, taking a swig of his beer. "Anyway, we won fair and square. Deal with it."
His brothers join us then, and our tables merge, chairs scraping over, pitchers migrating, nobody officially deciding anything.
Colton and Cathy discover a shared grievance about fencing contractors and settle into it like old men on a porch.
Evan works his way steadily through Jules's fries while she threatens him with a fork.
Annie asks him what a marketing director actually does all day, and then argues with every single thing he says, and he looks delighted about it.
My friends and his brothers, all folded together around one loud table like they've been doing this for years.
I sit in the middle of it with my beer and let myself feel how good it is—and how dangerous.
Because wanting Finn Bardot is one problem, and I've nearly made my peace with having it.
But this is a different wanting. This is wanting the whole picture, the normal Thursday night of it.
His brothers trading shots with my friends.
His knee a few inches from mine under a crowded table.
I know better than to want a whole picture. Whole pictures get taken away. I learned that at thirteen, the year my father left.
Finn doesn't crowd me. He just sits there beside me, warm and solid and closer than he's been since the parking lot, and when he reaches past me for the pitcher, his shoulder brushes mine, and I feel it all the way down my arm.
"Saturday," Evan announces to the table. "Open house at the vineyard. It's our spring rosé release. Music, food, wine of course. Everyone's invited." He points a stolen fry at our side of the table. "Especially the dethroned. Come drink the good Bardot wines and demand a rematch."
"We'll see," I say. "I might be busy."
"She's free," Annie says.
"I have papers to grade."
Annie widens her eyes at me before turning back to Evan. "On a Saturday she is completely free."
Which reminds me that papers in need of grading exist tonight too, and that it's a school night, and that I have been nursing the same beer for an hour because I stopped trusting myself somewhere around the minute Finn walked into the bar.
I stand, make my excuses, and take the ritual abuse for leaving early.
Hugs, coat, the pocket search for my apartment keys.
Finn stands too.
"I'll walk you home."
He says it like it's nothing. Like pass the salt. Colton doesn't even look up. Evan looks up so fast I'm surprised his neck survives it. And I stand there with my keys in my hand while everything I've been refusing to think about tonight arrives at once.
Finn's supposed to be in Manhattan or Colorado—anywhere but Mattichogue—yet he's here.
I'm supposed to hate him, and I don't. There are things I owe this man that can't be said in front of six witnesses, and there's the other thing too, the one with no polite name, the one that has been sliding up the back of my neck every single time he laughs.
It's only two blocks to my apartment. Past the bank, past the dark bakery, up the stairs beside the bookshop. I've walked it alone my whole adult life. I don't need an escort.
"Okay," I say.
It comes out before I can stop the word. Calm, casual. A teacher agreeing to a perfectly ordinary courtesy. Inside, I'm nothing of the kind, because Finn Bardot just offered to walk me home, alone, and I said yes.
Yes to him.
Yes despite the tangle of emotions and desire dancing chaotically inside me.
That one small word keeps echoing somewhere under my ribs, getting bigger, like I just agreed to a great deal more than a walk. And from the way the corner of his mouth moves, quiet, careful, nothing in it for the room, he heard it exactly that way too.
Two blocks. Alone. In the dark, with Finn Bardot.
I finish my beer standing up.