I hadn’t been sure how to take that. To be honest, even a day and a half later, I still wasn’t, but that hadn’t stopped me from doing the job.
“I’ve got her join request here,” I told Maddie. “She’s in.”
“Trey! Getcha self over here!” Littlejohn yelled from the back of the bar. “It’s almost trivia time!”
Beale nudged me in that direction with a little smile. “Go on, ringer. Wow ’em with your variety of knowledge.”
Littlejohn jumped up and wrapped his arms around me as soon as we got within hugging distance, just as Dale had done. I was pretty sure I’d been embraced more in the past week than in the last thirty-five years. It was incredibly off-putting.
Mostly.
But I hugged him back because it would have been churlish not to.
I took a seat between Dale and Lorenna at the Whispering Key table and said my hellos to Lorenna, Marius, and Juju, while Beale shook hands with people at the Cooter Key table I hadn’t met yet. I listened with half an ear to Marius chattering excitedly about some historian coming to town in a couple of months to write the history of Whispering Key and “our treasure.”
It was funny to me how proprietary the town was about it. Beale’s family (and Mason) had found the treasure, they were the ones who’d profited from it, but anytime I’d heard it mentioned, it was with a kind of pride. Like when something good happened to one resident, it happened to all of them.
It was bizarre. Cultlike. Wrong.
Buuuut I was starting to understand how Mason had been adopted into this little community so quickly… and why he’d adopted them right back.
I was profoundly grateful when the kid from the bar carried over a tray of pitchers and empty margarita glasses and set them on our table. I needed a drink rather badly.
“You can put those down right here by me, honey,” Lorenna McKetcham said with a leer, “’cause if I don’t drink my fill before Jonquil Pepper gets here, I won’t be getting any a’tall.”
The kid and I exchanged an amused look, and I offered a hand to shake. “I’m To—Trey.” Fuck, that was becoming annoying.
“Nice to meet you. I’m—”
“Heya, Silvio,” Beale said, giving the kid a friendly pat on the shoulder.
Silvio? Holy, bedazzled Britney Spears. This… this… decidedly-not-thirty-five-year-old child was Bountiful-Bootied Silvio?
It was a sign of my distractedness that I hadn’t even pondered the perky-assed implications of spending the evening at this bar, otherwise I would have dressed much more effectively.
I super casually leaned back in my chair, trying to get a look at the guy’s nether regions—solely for research purposes—but he’d already turned toward Beale with a slack-jawed, adoring expression on his tiny, probably underaged face.
“Oh, heya, Beale!” His voice was like the shrill shriek of crows as they circled their prey.
Beale glanced around the table, then shrugged at me. “No free seats. I’ll just—”
“You can come sit at the bar with me!” Crow-Baby offered. “I’d be happy to have the compan—”
“Absolutely not.” I stood, grabbed Beale’s arm, dragged him over to my chair, and shoved him down in it without conscious thought. “Plenty of room right here at the table.”
Beale looked up at me, blue eyes dancing in a way that said I know exactly what you’re thinking and I like it, which was kinda funny ’cause I hadn’t fully articulated my motivations to myself yet, and I was trying hard not to.
“But now there’s nowhere for you to sit, Trey,” Dale said, all concerned.
“Sure there is,” I insisted… then I plopped myself down on Beale’s lap.
I could feel Beale’s laughter against my back, and it was nearly as delightful as Silvio’s narrowed eyes.
“And you are?” Child of the Crows demanded.
I smiled a smile that said I would cheerfully mop the floor with his entrails which, okay, credit to Dale, actually maybe worked as a metaphor. “Trey, precious. Remember we were introduced a minute ago?”
“He’s Beale’s soul mate,” Littlejohn supplied.
“They met at a summer camp twelve years ago,” Lorenna added. “And fell in love.”
“Beale wrote letters to him afterward, every day for a year,” Maddie proclaimed, clasping her hands under her chin. “But Trey’s heartless mother intercepted them, because Beale is from Florida and Trey’s family hates Floridians.”
I blinked. This story got better and better with each retelling. Pretty sure this was a rip-off of The Notebook, but I was here for it.
“We stayed true to one another in our hearts,” I told Silvio solemnly. Then I deliberately misquoted the movie. “If he’s a plover, I’m a plover.”
Littlejohn frowned. “What’s that mean? Ain’t plovers endangered?”
“Shush, LJ. Don’t you know that shit don’t have to mean nothin’ if it sounds romantical?” Dale gave me a fond look. “And I think Trey and Beale are a great couple—”
“Oh.” I brushed some nonexistent lint off my shirt. “Well, thank you, Da—”
“—even if they are kind of a May-December pairing.”
“Uh, excuse you?” I scowled. “Jesus Christ, Dale. May-June! July at most.”
Beale tickled my waist, and I jolted. “Settle down, soul mate.”
“Payback will be swift and merciless,” I informed him with narrowed eyes.
And just like every time we’d been in public, everyone around us stopped what they were doing to heave a collective sigh at our cuteness or some shit.
Now this was actually off-putting. Me claiming Beale by planting myself like a flag on his lap was one thing, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole island watching us share fake soul mate moments… moments that felt so real, even I had to remind myself they were fake.
When Silvio offered to pull over another chair beside Beale’s so I could concentrate during trivia, I accepted.
About five minutes before the trivia started, Jonquil Pepper rushed in, all apologies, and we had to squeeze in another chair.
“Sorry I’m late, y’all, but look what I’ve got.” She pulled out a stack of bright-pink fliers printed in Comic Sans with a clip-art picture of the Golden Gate Bridge below it.
“Whispering Key Bridge Committee,” I read. I looked around the table and found Jonquil already sucking back her first margarita. “What’s this? What bridge?”
“The main bridge that connects Whispering Key to the mainland,” Marius said, as though this should be self-explanatory.
“See, maybe three years ago now—” Dale began.
“Six,” Maddie corrected.
“More like eight, I think.” Beale’s voice was soft and a little sad.
“Has it been that long?” Dale whistled low, like the passage of time was a new idea for him. “Maybe so.”
“Three to eight years ago… what?” I prompted.
“The bridge washed out in a storm,” Beale explained. “It’s not safe anymore. So now we have to come over here to Cooter Key, and take the Cooter Key Bridge to the mainland, which takes way longer—”