Chapter 2
“Hi, Kyle.” He gave him his best smile. “How are you?”
Kyle rolled his eyes, and Nix’s heart beat harder. “Phoenix. You are like your name suggests, aren’t you?”
“Huh?” Nix lost himself in Kyle’s cornflower blue eyes.
“You’re never put to rest; you keep popping up over and over again.”
Nix frowned, then he shrugged. “So how have you been?”
“Since we saw each other in the office earlier? Good.” He looked away from Nix and focused on his phone. Nix did too, but he didn’t recognize the app he had open. PictaBook. It had a light background and a purple camera with a pile of books next to the name.
“What are you looking at?”
Kyle glanced up from the screen with raised eyebrows, his tone condescending. “Books. I know you’ve never owned one, but they’re this neat little invention of words strung together to create a different world you get to take part in.”
His words stung, but Nix tried not to let it show. “So it’s like Facebook but for books?” How lame!
Kyle sneered. “More like Instagram, but yes, it’s all about books.”
“Cool.”
Kyle snorted and Nix looked at the screen again, trying to see his username but only seeing a profile picture of a naked man hiding his privates underneath a book. “Nice picture, but that’s not you.”
Kyle sighed. “Was there anything you wanted, Nix?”
“Yeah, you know…” He rolled his shoulder. “Would you like to grab a beer sometime?”
The slow blink didn’t bode well. “I don’t know how to tell you this so you understand. I’ll try to use simple words. You’re hot, and you’re an okay lay, but, honey, you’re dumb as a doornail. I don’t do stupid for more than one night, okay?”
Nix had a hard time breathing, let alone finding his voice.
“Nix, is a burger fine?” Logan called from a table across the pub. He was talking to a waitress and held a menu in his hand.
Nix glanced at Kyle, who had his nose pressed against the screen of his phone again, and walked toward Logan. “Burger’s fine.” Though he’d lost his appetite.
When he sat, the waitress smiled and hurried off toward the kitchen. Logan looked at him for a long time. “What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Nix. Your shiny ego is crackling.”
“He said I was dumb as a doornail, and he doesn’t do stupid for more than one night.”
“Fuck him, he doesn’t know you. If he thinks you’re stupid, let him believe you are, and move on.”
“I am dumb, and he used a condescending honeyto explain it to me.”
Logan’s lips thinned and the frown that had meant someone would get beat up when they’d been kids, made an appearance. “You’re not stupid, Phoenix. Don’t listen to him.”
Nix nodded, then he grabbed his phone from his pocket. “I’m going to show him.”
“No dick pics in the pub!”
Nix snorted a laugh, making Logan grin. “He was on this app, a book app.”
“Nix, you don’t read.”
“No, but I can pretend I do.”
Logan grimaced. “Talking books when you haven’t read the book is usually a bad idea.”
“No, you don’t have to have read the book. Look.” He showed Logan the app.
Logan grabbed the phone. “A picture says more than a thousand words. Recommend books using pictures and hashtags to tell us what you liked and didn’t like about it. This sounds like one crappy app.”
“I know! But Kyle was spellbound by it.”
Logan sighed. “It says sign up for free.” He pointed at the sign-up fields.
Nix grabbed the phone. “I can do pictures and hashtags.” Reading might not be his thing, but pictures he could do.
“I have a feeling this will go horribly wrong.” Logan smiled and nodded as the waitress put a beer in front of him.
“Nonsense. I’m not going to be rude to him. I’m going to say I’m reading the same books he is, and then we can talk about them.”
“Yeah, there’s a catch, right there.”
Nix stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“He’ll be reading the books and therefore know what they’re about.”
“Yeah…but I can find a summary online. Or you can read the book and tell me what it’s about.” He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but Logan had helped him a lot in school, reading his homework aloud to him, helping him understand the questions he had to answer, and so on.
“Not going to happen. I’m too tired to sit and read when I get home in the evening. Plus, you have no idea what kind of books he reads. I might read the occasional book, but unless there’s a dead body, I’m not interested.”
“Right.” Nix nodded, squinting at the screen as he went through the sign-up process. 2
Jules Rose took a sip of his red wine and scrolled through his PictaBook feed. There were several new books, and he made a note of checking if they’d be available to order for the library where he worked. Not all books were, especially not in niche genres.