Jenna blinked and exhaled, as if she had forgotten to breathe that entire time. Once her faculties returned, she addressed the women. “We’re good. We got replacements. But thanks for the concern.”
“Speed daters?” Niko repeated.
“That’s our team name,” Jenna explained.
“Well, it’s officially, We Thought This Was Speed Dating,” Tiana clarified. “It was a joke because we had no idea it was a trivia night the first night we came, and we were just coming to have a drink after work with Kiki and Robbie, who work for Jenna. It was a random girl’s night, so we decided to put our names in and try. We didn’t know how seriously people take it.”
“Yeah, they do seem to take the game pretty seriously,” Niko observed.
"JT's Trivia Night is not a game, it's a blood sport," Jenna corrected him. "The reigning champs The Quizney Princesses—" She nodded her head toward the group of tiara-wearing women. "—haven't lost in five months. We almost beat them the last three times, and I would not be surprised if they poisoned Kiki and Robbie. They're monsters. Actual monsters. I think one of them is a medical examiner.”
"So, it’s high stakes, then." Niko stated flatly.
Tiana’s eyes flickered with a spark of humor as she chuckled, and honestly, Niko felt like he’d won the lottery. The woman was going to be his undoing.
Just when he was feeling on top of the world, the door to the bar opened and Brock Bartlett walked in with Gianna on his arm. He felt Tiana tense beside him.
“Do you want to leave?” Niko checked in.
“No.” She shook her head defiantly.
His eyes tracked them as they walked in with another couple, weaving through the tables until they reached a group, spoke to them, and the group got up and gave them their table just two tables over from Niko and Tiana. He didn’t know if Brock had prearranged the table saving, which was against the policy if what was printed on the laminate flyer was correct, or if he was just asshole enough to ask them to leave. Either way, he was an asshole.”
Niko leaned closer to Tiana and asked, “Is this a regular thing you do?”
“What?” she asked, confused.
“This trivia night, is it a regular thing?”
“Oh, yeah.” She nodded.
Brock must have known she was going to be there, and that’s why he showed up. That’s why he was doing the pub quiz.
“Okay, welcome to JT’s, my name is Shelby Dorsey, and I am your host for the evening. Tonight our teams are, You Can’t Sip With Us, The Quiz Khalifas, Let’s Get Quizzical, Bar Flies, We Thought This Was Speed Dating, Quiztopher Walkens, The Smartinis, The Quiz Lebowskis, Risky Quizness, The Drunken Know-it-Alls, The Brewsual Suspects, Tequila Mockingbirds, The Winnerz, Trivial Newton Johns, The Fellowship of the Quiz, The In-Quizitors, and the reigning champions, The Quizney Princesses!”
There was applause, and the opening round started. Shelby laid out the rules with the kind of efficiency that only came from years of crowd control: no spitting, no fighting, no name calling, no phones, and no bathroom runs during question rounds.
The first round was general knowledge. Deacon, who truly was a ringer, having graduated MIT at age twenty, wrote answers in tidy block letters on the whiteboard as the others debated whether the world’s largest desert was the Sahara or Antarctica. “It’s Antarctica,” Tiana insisted, “because desert istechnically about rainfall, not sand.” Deacon confirmed she was correct. Niko found himself smiling, the kind of smile that made the muscles at the back of his jaw ache. She was smart. Like, scary smart. And it was hot. It made him want to see just how many more ways she could surprise him tonight.
The second round was “Movie Quotes.” This was Niko’s land. He’d memorized whole scripts for fun as a kid, and he could identify a movie from a single line half the time. He leaned in, rapid-fire delivering answers while Tiana and Jenna giggled at his accuracy. Deacon scrawled down their responses, sometimes underlining them for emphasis. The table started to feel like a single organism, efficient, competitive, and more than a little smug.
They aced the second round. Jenna fist-pumped so hard she nearly knocked over her water glass, and Shelby read out the scores with a melodramatic pause before their team name, dragging out the syllables: “In the lead, with twenty out of twenty, We Thought This Was Speed Dating!” The bar responded with a chorus of playful jeers and boos. At least, he assumed they were playful. From some of the looks he was getting, he wondered if he was going to go to the parking lot and find his tires slashed.
Round four was “Science & Nature,” and Niko totally blanked on the periodic table question. He watched, helpless, as Tiana and Deacon debated the atomic number of manganese with the intensity of two nuclear physicists in a ticking time bomb scenario. Both came to the same conclusion at the end, and both were correct.
As the rounds wore on, the space between Niko and Tiana got smaller and smaller. By round five, their thighs were pressed together under the table. She didn’t pull away, and neither did he.
The penultimate round was “Sports & Games.” Niko, the pro athlete, rattled off answers on everything from Olympic record holders to the rules of curling. He caught Tiana looking at him, amused and maybe a little crushing on him. It filled him with a warmth he hadn’t known since he was a kid, back before winning had stopped feeling like a reward and started feeling like an obligation.
At the end of the round, they were tied with Brock’s team. Shelby, never one to pass up a dramatic moment, stood on her chair and announced, “We are officially in a dead heat, folks! It all comes down to the final round—Pop Culture.” The crowd whooped and hollered, some teams already drowning their sorrows in pitchers.
The questions in the final round were rapid fire, instead of one minute to answer, it was down to thirty seconds. Darth Vader is voiced by James Earl Jones. However, George Lucas also considered another person for the role. Who was it? Deacon came through with Orson Welles. WhichFriendscharacter was Courteney Cox originally asked to play? Jenna knew it was Rachel. Thankfully, Deacon had a daughter who was five, so he had the Paw Patrol and Miss Rachel questions covered, and Jenna had a teenager, so she was able to field the K-pop and social media trends.
“Okay, so our final question is in three parts with a bonus point available. These three phrases or words have become popularized from Love Island. I need you to tell me which islander originally coined them: The Ick, Fanny Flutters, and DBS and a bonus question: what does DBS stand for?”
Tiana and Jenna both leaned in and began discussing, and although they were close, they were wrong. Niko didn’t really advertise the fact that he watched Love Island. He’d started watching it with Gianna, so he knew she might know the answers as well. Thankfully, she didn’t pay attention when she watchedTV, and she tended to mix things up, and she typically did so with confidence. He’d attributed the unearned self-assurance to the family that she came from. Everything she did was perfect in their eyes.
When he saw that there were fifteen seconds left, Niko reached across and took the board. He quickly wrote the answers down. Jenna and Tiana both looked at him in complete shock as the timer went off, and Niko had to put the pen down and hand the board to Jenna, their team captain.
