They both look taken aback, but after they exchange a nod, Harry says, “Well?” giving me an eager look.
Too eager.
“I’m supposed to believe you didn’t track me down?” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Is Nicole hiding in the shadows somewhere, watching us? If so, she’s probably going to get a martini dropped on her head.”
Tina nods as if to say she’s game.
“She might be,” he says with a shrug that seems surprisingly unconcerned given his paranoia about everyone else, “but if so, she didn’t tell me.”
Maybe the Bad Luck Club only made him immune to the creepiness of his own friends.
He has a drink too, what looks like a gimlet. He glances over his shoulder furtively, then beckons us toward the side of the deck. We follow.
“I’m here on a date,” he says. “He thinks I’m outside smoking.”
“And are you?” Tina asks. “Because those things will kill you.” She tips her head. “Or at least they do if you’re unlucky. My great-nonna was mean as a snake and she smoked half a pack a day and ate nothing but bread and pasta and sausage, and she lived to be ninety-eight.”
Harry looks flummoxed. “The chances of that happening are very low. Smoking increases your odds of an early death by a staggering percentage. Your great-grandmother was in the minority.”
“You must be fun at parties,” she says.
He seems slightly dejected by this, so I pat him on the back. “You’re clearly a nonsmoker, not to mention I don’t even think you’d be allowed to smoke out here, so why the story? If the guy’s terrible, you should have pretended to get an emergency call. There’s no denying the power of a good emergency call.”
“I was going to,” he says, glancing back. “But I panicked when I took my phone out. I fumbled with it, and he saw the screen. I didn’t even have any texts”—here he gives me an accusatory look, as if I’m to blame for that—“so I couldn’t claim I’d gotten an emergency text.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“Let me guess,” Tina says. “He was wearing a hat in every picture in his online profile, and then you showed up and, surprise, he’s bald!”
I glance at her, then at Harry’s receding hairline, and decide not to say anything.
“I wish,” Harry mutters. “No, he’s hot…too hot, almost…and he works at the Nature Center, so he has an interesting job too. Knows a lot about turtles.”
Tina gives a look as if to say different strokes for different folks. “If that’s a turn-on for you, what’s the problem?” she asks, getting into this.
“He doesn’t believe in showering,” he says with a groan. “Like, he takes a bath in the river once a week and doesn’t shower or use deodorant.”
“The French Broad River?” Tina asks in horror. “I’ve heard there’s gonorrhea in it.”
He shrugs uncomfortably. “I think it’s E. coli, actually.”
“That’s not much better,” I say, lifting my eyebrows. “If he smells so bad, why aren’t there more people out here?”
The bar isn’t huge, so it’s probably a hotbox in there. It’s uncomfortable out here, admittedly, but other than the faint scent of urine drifting up from the alleyway it doesn’t smell horrible.
“They put us at this table at the end of the hallway leading to the bathrooms. It’s behind two screens, and there’s a huge bowl of potpourri on a table next to it. I think they set it up for situations just like this one. Apparently this isn’t an isolated thing. He says he’s part of a Natural Scent movement.” His eyes get larger. “He asked me to join. He was as adamant as a vegan.”
“Why didn’t you just leave?” I ask in bafflement. “I mean, if it were me, I would clearly stay so I could write about it, because that is a fantastic story, but there’s no reason for you to suffer.”
“I told you,” he says, “I panicked!”
Tina hums in interest, then says, “You came out here for a reason, Harry. Think about it. Of all the gin joints in town, you walked into this one.”
“They don’t just serve gin,” Harry says, so literal it would make Mary proud. “There’s a diverse drink menu. That’s why I like coming here.”
“Allow me some poetic license,” she continues with another precarious wave of her martini. I have no idea what she’s about to say, but I decide to let her run with it. “You came here, we came here—it was meant to be! Your friend Cal is his own worst enemy. He admitted to Molly, off the record, that he started your little club, but he’s letting someone else take credit. He’s letting someone else skew his words and his legacy. He refuses to help himself, so you, my friend, need to help him. If you want to make a difference, you need to take a stand. You have to act!”
Harry looks like she just produced a knife from a thigh holster and said, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”
“I…do things like that,” he says pointedly.
“But you could, Harry,” I say, deciding to tag-team it with Tina, because hell, we make a good team. And even if I was ready to ditch the story a few minutes ago, I don’t really want to. Not entirely.
Who says I can’t compromise?
Well, plenty of people. But I think I see the glimmer of a good one. There’s a way I can write this story without stepping on Cal’s toes, or rather his secret, and still get the job.
“Who’s holding you back?” I say. “Cal’s not here, and if Nicole is, she’s doing an admirable job of hiding. Why don’t you at least tell me what Augusta got wrong? If nothing else, shouldn’t we set that straight?” I pause, leading up to my pièce de résistance. “If you go on the record saying that someone else started the club, then I can withhold Cal’s name and yours. We can preserve your privacy and make sure innocent readers aren’t getting messed up by her warped rules.”
Harry looks pale as a ghost, but I can tell I’m getting to him. He really doesn’t like Augusta, so I lean into that.
“Isn’t Augusta an arsonist and a liar? Do you really want someone like that to have the final word on the Bad Luck Club? Do you want her to control the fates of your fellow Bad Luckers?”
“No,” he says, his voice faint, then louder. “No!”
“Yeah, Harry, my man!” Tina says, clapping him on the back. Another splash escapes her glass, and someone else shouts up from down below.
“Oops.”
There’s a slight rapping of knuckles on the door, and then a gorgeous man with golden skin, black hair, and large brown eyes fringed with thick lashes opens it. A thick cloud of stench comes with him. Damn, it really is a shame.
“Harry?” the man says in confusion. “Weren’t you coming out here for a smoke? You’ve been gone for ages.”
Harry looks panicked. Like, panicked enough that I’m worried he might try to jump from the not-so-high balcony and pull a runner.
“Sorry,” Tina says to the guy, improvising like a champ. “We’re staging an intervention, and I’m afraid you’ll have to touch base with him at another time.”