It seemed like one of those activities people from TV shows did. People who lived glamorous single lives in metropolitan places... like San Francisco.
Not that Boston hadn’t been a city, but it was a very different sort of place.
Was I now one of those guys? The ones who drank beer with their friends and laughed about trivia questions and—well, I had to actually make the friends first, I supposed.
I’d just been so oddly sheltered as a child. Not that my parents had taken care of me especially, but everyone I knew had been one of us. A cat. We’d all been part of the same community, the same culture, grown up with all the same neighbors.
If old Mrs. Johnson down the street didn’t approve of how late you were out last night, everyone on the block would hear about it by lunchtime.
For a huge city, Boston had very much been a small town. At least, it had for me.
Now, I was sitting there drinking a beer with a coworker and his gorgeous brother.
No, really.
Dean St. James was maybe the most beautiful creature I’d ever met in my life. Like Lucas, he had dark hair and eyes, but unlike Lucas... well, there was something magnetic about him. Something intense and a little terrifying, like part of me wanted to run and hide, but also, like it was a good thing.
That was . . . weird.
He had scruff so thick it might have been classed an actual beard, and in that stylish way that seemed to imply it existed from sheer carelessness, but somehow also looked perfect, not actually scruffy like someone who didn’t have access to a razor.
Hot.
Dean St. James was hotter than the surface of the sun. That was gonna be a problem, because the last thing I needed was to be attracted to someone new while I was still dealing with Geoff’s betrayal.
I wasn’t going to be rude or anything. I’d just... deal with it. Yeah. That would work.
Small white boards and badly abused dry-erase markers were passed to every group, and everyone settled in, ordering appetizers and beers, laughing and chatting with their friends.
That was when I realized that it didn’t matter if Dean was the hottest man in the world. I wanted this more than I wanted his beautiful body. I wanted to belong with people. Wanted to have friends I could do trivia night with.
I wanted this life, and I was damned well going to get it.
That conclusion was tested when the first few questions were about some kind of sportsball, so I had zero answers.
“Who has the most homeruns in a single season on record, right now?” the woman reading the questions asked.
A guy in a sports jersey at a table across the room jeered. “With or without an asterisk?”
She shrugged.
Lucas looked at first Dean, then me, and when no answers were forthcoming, he wrote “The guy on the steroids” on the white board and held it up.
Dean scoffed. “I mean, I’m sure that’s right, but I think they want a name, Luke.”
Lucas lifted a brow at him. “You got one?”
“It’s Dean, bro. Did you hit your head?”
“Babe Ruth?” I offered, hesitant and frankly, clueless about any sports topics. “I mean, I’m pretty sure it was him at some point.”
It wasn’t right, of course, but neither Lucas nor Dean seemed disappointed I didn’t know the answer.
We got some questions right, and some egregiously wrong, and in fact, no one seemed to take it seriously enough to be offended at winning or not winning. It was... it was just fun.
“What political figure erroneously claimed to have invented the internet?” the woman asked.
“Al Gore,” I snapped out, then frowned. “But also, it wasn’t really erroneous. I mean, he was in the House back in the day, and promoted funding for the early iterations of the internet. He just didn’t do it personally, which he never claimed anyway.”
