“Oh, you’re not gonna have to worry about that,” a woman sitting near the bakery case tells me.
“I wouldn’t really call movie night at the park straightforward,” Sutton says, lifting a sausage link on her fork to her mouth. “It’s probably not what you’re thinking.”
Why does that not surprise me? “How so?” I ask.
“Honestly, you should just go,” Beckett says. “I think that will explain a lot about making dates with Nora unique.”
Why do I feel nervous all of a sudden? “You can’t even help me prepare?”
Beckett chuckles. “Nope. Just go.”
Sutton nods. She’s grinning. “It’s definitely very Nora.”
That also doesn’t surprise me. But I don’t have even a guess what that means.
Still, there is a tiny surge of anticipation behind the nerves. Whatever this all means, Nora will be there. I’m sure I’ll enjoy myself. And it’s a public forum, with the woman I’m supposedly dating. That means I will definitely need to kiss her.
I look out over the room. “Great, I can't wait. How many of you will be there?”
Hands shoot up all over the room. Wow.
“Great.”
“Tell us something about yourself,” a woman says. She is sitting at the table near the window where Harley was sitting yesterday. He’s there again today, and the third of my kidnappers is sitting with him. By the process of elimination, this is Leo.
Okay, I’m getting another chance at this. “Anything specific?” I ask.
“Just something interesting,” she says. She’s got her long gray hair in two braids and is wearing a blue-and-green plaid shirt with jeans.
Everyone turns from looking at her to looking back at me as if they’re watching a tennis match. “But you don’t even like me.”
“We’re mad at you,” Leo says. “That’s not the same thing as not liking you.”
“We don’t know you well enough to not like you,” Bruce says. “Yet.”
Okay, I think quickly. “I had the most hat tricks in the league last season.”
“Boo!”
I think the firstboocomes from Brewser this time, but several people join in again.
Great.
“We don’t need to know about hockey,” someone calls.
“We can look all the hockey stuff up,” someone else adds.
“Yeah, I already knew that,” a guy near the bookcase says.
I guess that’s true. “Okay, I am from a small island nation called Cara. It’s the island south of the Faroe Islands?—”
“Boo!”
The boo-ing is louder and even more people join in this time.
I hold my hands up in surrender. “That’s not about hockey.”
“We all know about that. From the article,” the guy by the bookcase calls.
