How was that possible?
Her brain hurt and she hadn’t had one glass of wine or a drop of alcohol.
Round four was sports, and it went by in a blur. The final round was rapid-fire pop culture, only thirty seconds to answer instead of one minute. Jenna pulled herself together to focus. This was her last trivia night and if she was ever going to de-crown those Quizney bitches, this was her chance.
Jenna was able to cover the Friends, K-Pop, and Social Media trend questions thanks to Blake. Deacon covered Star Wars, Paw Patrol, and Miss Rachel because, right, he had a now, she would be five. Actually, she knew he had a five-year-old named Tabitha who had long curly brown hair, big blue eyes and was adorable.
“Okay, so our final question is in three parts with a bonus point available. These three phrases or words have become popularized onLove 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?” Shelby read out.
Jenna leaned into Tiana and threw out a few LI names because she didn’t watch Love Island since seeing young hot people fall in love made her sad, although from what she’d heard, not that many of them fell in love. Tiana didn’t seem to know either. They wrote down what they thought, but Niko grabbed the board, erased it, and wrote different answers on the board, then handed it back to Jenna. She stared down at the answers, which were as good as the ones they’d come up with.
Shelby read out the answers. “Okay, this is it, we have The Ick, which was coined by Olivia Attwood.”
Jenna looked down at the board. It was right. She glanced back at Tiana, who was giving Niko heart eyes.Yeah, Jenna had a feeling that relationship wasn’t going to be “fake” for very long, if it ever really was.
“Fanny Flutters was coined by Maura Higgins.”
Jenna smiled at Tiana, whose face lit up. He was two for two.
“And DBS was created by Wes Nelson, and it stands for the Do Bits Society.”
Jenna stood, holding her board up with all the correct answers in triumph. They won. She won. The last night of Trivia Night they’d won.
“And we have our winners. For the first time insix months, We Thought This Was Speed Dating is our new Quiz Night Champion!”
The room erupted in applause. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tiana hug Niko and then he kissed her. She was still cheering and clapping thinking, the kiss would be just that, a kiss. Oh no, it was not that. It was a burn-the-house-down, ovary tingling, get someone pregnant kiss. Cat calls and whistles came from around the room.
“Get a room!”
“Turn on the sprinklers!”
“Hose ‘em down!”
Finally, Niko pulled away and rested his forehead on Tiana’s as he practically growled, “Let’s go home.”
Tiana nodded. Niko didn’t waste a second, he picked up her purse and jacket. Looked at Deacon, “Thanks for stepping in,” then Jenna, “Nice meeting you, Jenna,” and they were gone.
His arm was around Tiana’s back and they practically floated out of that room. When they did, Jenna noticed Tiana’s ex was sitting three tables away.
Oh shit. That’s what that show was about. Had Brock Bartlett been there the entire time? Of course he had. Jenna hadn’t even noticed that her best friend’s asshole ex was atthe bar because she’d been too busy freaking out over D, er, Deacon St. Claire.
“Jenna?”
Hearing him say her name was such a… it spread through her like a shot of whiskey. Tingles from her head to her toe. She closed her eyes and let herself marinate in the sensation…just for a moment… because she knew when she opened them it was back to reality, and the reality was, D was Deacon St. Claire and she was leaving.
13
Deacon could not believe it.He was looking at Jen, and not just in the hazy realm of memory or one of his nightly fever dreams, but right there, right now, live and in full color, like the universe had finally decided to hand him back the thing he’d wanted most. He had spent every day and most nights haunted by her, by the memory of her voice, the echo of her laugh, the impossible glow that filled the room when she entered. He’d nursed the ache of her absence with a stubbornness bordering on masochism. But there she was, in the flesh, the living, breathing answer to a question he’d been carrying in his chest since the last time he saw her.
She was real. She existed. He blinked. She didn’t vanish. She was close enough that, if he leaned forward, he could find out if her hair still smelled faintly of coconut.
For so long he was sure he must have built the mystery woman he’d spent the best night of his life with into something she wasn’t. His memory of her was practically legend at this point. Mythical. But he hadn’t. Not only had he not embellished her, she was more striking than hismemory. Or over the past year and a half, she’d become more beautiful.
It was strange, seeing her like this. Witnessing her as someone who existed outside the frame of their one night together. The way she discreetly let the girl on the date at the table next to them know she had nacho cheese on her chin, the way she said “thank you” to Libby, the server, and meant it, and the way she listened with her whole body to Margo, who she asked about her husband’s surgery, chin in her hand, gaze unwavering. It was exactly the same woman who’d knocked the wind out of him when he first saw her at Cillian’s bar, beautiful, glowing under the neon lights so calm and composed as she’d kneed an asshole frat boy in the balls with such precision that Deacon was both terrified and awed. The same woman who, when her lying, cheating husband came to the bar and gaslit her, stared him down with a look that was all ice and pity. The same woman who, nerves visible in every movement, rolled the dice and went home with a stranger, trusting Deacon with her body, and her story, then ran away before the sun came up, leaving him with a memory and a question mark.
He’d heard, of course, about a Jenna in Hope Falls. Jenna, who owned The Beauty Spot. He didn’t listen to much of the town gossip—he avoided it, really, not out of principle but out of habit—but he’d heard she was a single mom, that she had a daughter in high school, Blake, that she was the kind of person you could call at 2 a.m. and she’d show up, no questions asked. That was it. The sum total of what he knew about her, she was loved, she was a mother, and she was a business owner.
Now as he stood in front of her, the world condensed into the stretch of scarred tabletop and the space between two people who had once fit so perfectly together. The trivia was over, Niko and Tiana were gone, and they wereleft staring at one another, the kind of stare that felt like falling.
