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“There you are,” Vince said, noticing me coming across the parking lot. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Home to take a shower. I didn’t want to smell like sweat and motor oil over dinner,” I grumbled.
“Somebody’s hangry,” Vince commented.
“He deserves it for keeping us waiting,” Edwin, one of the mechanics from the complex, grumbled.
“They won’t seat us because we weren’t all here,” Merry explained, then gestured at the door to the restaurant. “But now that we are, let’s go in and get a table. Baby on board, here. We need food.”
Quentin leaned down and kissed her cheek, cuddling her close for a second.
“All right. We’ll get you something to eat. I can’t have my baby starving. Either one of my babies,” he said.
We headed into the restaurant, and the hostess quickly brought us into the back to a large table that could accommodate all of us. The conversations picked back up as we sat down, and I tried to get into them, trying to push away my funk and have fun with the team. But I couldn’t shake the feeling. I sat there brooding, watching the rest of them as they laughed and joked, knowing there should have been another person at the table.
The waitress came by with our drinks while we searched the menus, and by the time she came back, I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to eat. Everything listed on the glossy pages ran together, and nothing looked good.
“Darren?” Quentin’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and I looked up at him. “Get it together. What do you want to eat?”
I looked up and saw the waitress standing beside me, looking at me with expectation, her pencil poised above the pad in her hand. I had no idea how long she had been there, but the rest of the table was staring at me. Fortunately, it was far from the first time I’d eaten at that restaurant, so I had a good idea of what they served. I said the first thing that came to mind and handed over my menu.
“What’s with you tonight?” Vince asked. “You look like the poster child for a whiny country song.”
They kept prodding at me for a while, but eventually I was sullen enough they left me alone. I didn’t even feel guilty about it. It was okay for me to not want to joke around every so often. The more they pushed me, the less likely I was to want to talk to them. Before the food even got there, I was starting to wish I hadn’t come, either. Usually I enjoyed the get-togethers before and after races, but I just wasn’t feeling it that night.
Which was why I was less than pleased when Merry got up and came to the end of the table to sit at one of the empty seats beside me. Everybody else seemed to have essentially forgotten about me, but she plopped right down and looked at me like she thought she was going to be the one who would break through my resistance. But before I got a chance to tell her I wanted to be left alone, she waved her glass of seltzer at me like a white flag.
“Not here to bother you. I get wanting space. Trust me, I’ve been there. But, we’re family. So, I’m just going to sit here, and you brood and if anybody comes to try to mess with you, I’ll tell them you’re keeping the cranky pregnant lady company.”
She grinned at me, and I managed to make a sound somewhere between a huff and a short laugh. We sat that way for another few minutes before the food came, then dove into our dinners. She was halfway through the heaping plate of pasta in front of her when she leaned to the side to press her shoulder to mine but didn’t look at me.
“If you did happen to not want to brood, we could talk. It doesn’t have to be about anything or anyone in particular,” she said.
I stayed quiet for a few seconds longer, then nodded.
“How is the hype for the tailgate event before the race tomorrow?” I asked.
In her role as the social media consultant for the company, Merry had made a tremendous difference in the visibility of the company. We were already popular before she came along, but after she did her magic, our fan base grew, and the money and opportunities were rolling in. She was amazing. I was pretty sure everything she was doing, including planning the parties she organized before each race, went far above and beyond the duties of most people in that type of position. But it was all her idea, and she did it very well.
“Pretty intense,” she admitted. “People started talking about it after the last race, and I’ve been getting a lot of messages about buying tickets.”
