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It was dim and crowded in the bar, and since Dane didn’t drink, I had no idea what we were doing here until I saw the chalkboard sign announcing the night’s activity.
“Oh my God, Quizzo?”
I gaped at Dane, shocked.
He shrugged his huge shoulders and looked a little sheepish. It was fucking adorable.
“Said you wanted to come with me to whatever I usually did,” he said.
“It’s great, I was just surprised! I’ve never done this before. So how do we sign up or join a team or whatever?”
“Oh, I don’t do that,” Dane said, matter-of-factly.
“Uh. No? Okay. What…do you do?”
But my question was lost in the din as Dane made his way to a small two-top in the corner, farthest from the crowd. A minute after we sat down, a bartender set a glass of water on the table in front of him.
“Hey, Huey,” she said. “Something for you, sweetie?” she asked me.
“Oh, uh, gin and tonic?”
“Coming right up.”
“They know you here.”
I couldn’t help but notice that no one else was getting table service. Dane shrugged again.
“It’s my Friday thing.”
The person running the Quizzo stepped up to the microphone and the crowd quieted. Each table was ringed by a clump of people who seemed to be a team, and they each had a printout.
I had a million questions, but I was too curious to see what Dane would do to ask any of them. He sat there, legs crossed at the ankles, watching the scene.
The bartender delivered my drink and slapped a sheet of paper in front of Dane with a wry smile and a wink.
“Are those the questions?”
He slid the paper over to me. I guessed it was an answer sheet, numbered and with a blank for each answer.
“So you participate in Quizzo unofficially?”
He nodded.
“You are so weird,” I said, and grinned at him. The corner of Dane’s mouth quirked, and he grabbed my chair and dragged it closer to him so he could talk without raising his voice.
“You can play along,” he said, indicating the answer sheet.
“You don’t wanna be on a team with me?” I asked. I gave Dane a calculated pout, but I was just glad to be here with him and see another piece of his puzzle fall into place. He dragged my chair even closer and kissed the pout off my lips.
The game began.
Dane slid a small, worn notebook out of his back pocket and flipped it open. I peeked at it and stared up at him.
“Are those…What are those?”
“Questions,” he said, verbose as ever.
I peered at the small, cramped writing, and Dane let me flip through the notebook. Each page was dated and contained a list of abbreviated questions and a row of answers marked with symbols for which I found no legend. Finally, flipping back far enough to see where the code originated, I gleaned that the symbols corresponded with whether or not Dane had known the answer, whether or not any of the teams had known the answer, and some kind of math that I decided indicated precisely how much smarter Dane was than everyone else.
“Wow,” I said.
Dane cleared his throat and scooped the book back into his lap.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean wow like Wow, you weirdo. I mean, okay, I did. But I think it’s cute!”
Dane leveled me with the flattest look I’d ever seen.
“Cute.”
I grinned at him and slung one of my legs over his massive thigh.
“Yup. You’re adorable.”
He harrumphed, but put the hand not holding a pen on my leg.
What quickly became clear was that Dane didn’t need any kind of math to calculate how much smarter he was than the other teams, because he was ridiculously smart.
I knew he watched Jeopardy! religiously, enjoyed documentaries, read things I’d never heard of, and listened to a hell of a lot of podcasts, but I hadn’t realized he knew everything.
“Holy Jesus, I’m dating a genius,” I said, when he murmured the answer to yet another question. I bit my lip when I realized I’d just said we were dating, but Dane didn’t seem to notice.
He just snorted at my characterization, but I thought he looked pleased.
“No, but seriously, how do you know everything?” I hissed.
“Don’t know everything.”
“Mm-hmm, okay.”
“These questions aren’t very hard,” he said by way of explanation. “And they reuse them sometimes. Been coming here a while.”
“Oh, so you don’t really know things, you’ve just memorized tons of facts about things? You know that’s how everyone learns things, right? By learning them?”
Dane smiled and ruffled my hair.
He watched Quizzo and I watched him. He knew every answer, writing them down before they were announced, annotating each with his code, and absently stroking the edges of his notebook. He finished his water and the waiter didn’t come back, like this pattern had been set long ago.
Dane came here every Friday night, but he didn’t speak to anyone except the bartender, didn’t play the game, and didn’t seem to interact with anyone. He knew all the trivia already.
