“Well, tomorrow you’ll have to see how many you get right.” It’s nothing but a shameless plea.“Come over and spend more time with me.”Sure, I’ll be busy announcing the quiz, but I’m thinking—wondering—if I can convince him to invest a little in Mudford-upon-Hooke, show him that people here don’t hate him, maybe he’ll stay.
He’s already shaking his head. “I can’t . . . no. I just . . .” He puffs out a breath.
I don’t harass him for his reason. I change the subject instead. “And if the picture round crosses over with a different category—like for instance, this week it’s the geography round too—we’ll have a wild-card round.”
“Wild card,” he repeats.
“Yep, you know, like when you’ve tried all the standard options and they don’t quite work, so you’ve gotta try something new. Something completely unique.” I realise I’m explaining a concept he already understands, and that he’s probably thinking of the other day when I called him a wild card.
He tilts his head to the side and regards me, like an animal trying to work out if the noises coming from my orifice are friendly and will equate to treats, or if I’m going to start yelling and grabbing him. He doesn’t say anything, and I need to fill the silence.
“This week’s wild card is an anagram round. You’ve got to guess ten different types of flightless birds from a jumble of letters.”
Mathias laughs, then instantly slaps a hand over his mouth, muting himself. It’s likely because the kids are asleep upstairs and he’s trying to be quiet, but Iwish he wouldn’t hide his mirth. “I couldn’t even name ten kinds.” He turns back to the laptop, then back to me. “Well, you got chickens—”
“Chickens are not on there. Technically, they’re just shit flyers, not flightless.”
“See! This is why I love pub quizzes! Because you learn all manner of useless information.”
What I want to do is sit here all night and chat absolute bollocks with him whilst finding new ways to make him smile. I want to gaze into his brown eyes—made into deep pools of chocolate under the soft glow of the lamps—and trace the lines of his face. I want to breathe in the scent of him, of his soap and shampoo and washing powder. He smells clean. Inviting.
“What do we have to do here, then?” I ask, pointing at the screen to distract my thoughts. It’s a vast expanse of blackness with some brightly coloured stripes. It means nothing to me.
“You tell me what songs you want and I’ll cut you out a twenty second clip and put it into a playlist, so all you have to do tomorrow night is press play and next.”
“That easy?”
“Yup.”
“That’s impressive. What a handy piece of kit,” I say.
Mathias turns to me and beams. He’s blindingly beautiful when he smiles, like looking directly at the sun—it kinda hurts, and burns itself into your retinas, but once you look at him, even after you look away you won’t see anything else for a long while. A moment later, he schools his features into something more neutral and redirects his gaze to the laptop.
“Will it work on my computer?” I ask, to stop my thoughts from tumbling into the internal“what made Mathias smile like that, and how can I recreate it?”discourse.
“Can it connect to the pub’s sound system?” he says.
“Hmmm, probably not.”
“Does it have Bluetooth?”
“Ah, yeah, no. It doesn’t.”
“It’s not a problem. I’ll lend you my laptop. I’ll come over tomorrow after media day and set it all up for you.”
I hear the subtext in his words.“But I’m not staying.”
“Thank you.” As subtly as I can, I scoot the chair closer to him. “Question. How do you get the songs? We pay about four hundred pounds a year for a music license, but Daze streams it all.”
Mathias sighs. “Okay, you can’t tell anyone this, but I’m one of those people who still buys their songs. I have . . . a pretty extensive collection, and if I don’t have it, I can just purchase it.”
“I’ll give you the money.”
He cocks his head to the side and narrows his eyes at me.
“What?” I ask. I’m confused as fuck, but Mathias continues to stare at me like I have a scarab beetle crawling out of my nose.
“You don’t think I’m weird because I buy music rather than stream?” He hesitates more with each word.
