Page 89 of No Charm Done
“Cream? Sugar? Flavor shot? We got vanilla, hazelnut, caramel, pumpkin spice—”
Elias stared at her. “What?”
“Yep, pumpkin spice is year-round now. Also got cold brew, nitro cold brew, iced coffee, frozen coffee—”
“Just. Coffee. Hot. Black.”
Elias slid into a booth and studied the small metal box bolted to the wall. It had buttons. Numbers. Song titles in a tiny illuminated display: “Ring of Fire,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Friends in Low Places.”
He stared at it. Poked one of the buttons experimentally. Nothing happened.
“Jukebox is broken.” The waitress shrugged, appearing with his coffee.
“Ah,” Elias said, like he’d known what a jukebox was all along.
She left. He sat with his coffee, which was burnt but was at least comprehensible, and watched the parking lot through the window.
Everything was wrong. The lights: too white, too much like a morgue. The people: most stared at those goddamn glowing rectangles as if hypnotized. The whole century felt wrong. But Elias was stuck in it. Alone and forever. Because he’d betrayed the only person who’d tried to help him. He took a sip of terrible coffee and tried not to think about Luna’s face when she’d left him alone with the sharks.
A burst of laughter pulled his attention to the back corner. Four men sat around a scarred table, playing cards with the commitment of people who’d rather lose money than go home.
Elias observed their bad poker faces and worse strategy. They telegraphed every hand, looked at their cards too much, at each other too little. But it was poker. And poker, at least, still made sense.
He stood, coffee in hand, and drifted over. “You boys got room for one more?”
The man in the camo cap had nicotine-stained fingers and the air of someone who’d spent his life outdoors and resented every minute. He looked Shaw up and down. “Buy-in’s twenty. You some kind of actor or somethin’?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re dressed funny. Like you’re in a play.”
“I’m from Chicago.” That wasn’t really an answer, but no one around the table pursued it.
“Huh.” Camo Cap grunted. “Well, twenty bucks gets you in. You got twenty bucks?”
Elias pulled out the stolen bills. Peeled off one. “I’ve got twenty bucks.”
They made room. The cards came around, and for the first time since Luna had portaled him to that godforsaken aquarium, something in Elias’s chest unclenched.
Cards. He understood cards.
As he luxuriated in being in a situation with rules he understood, he let the table chit-chat wash over him. Something about a cousin’s truck, the price of eggs, a college quarterback who was either the second coming or a waste of scholarship money. Elias played and listened and tried not to get too hung up on details.
“—so I told her, I said, if you’re gonna subtweet me, at least have the guts to—”
“What’s a subtweet?” Elias blurted before he could stop himself.
The youngest player—baby-faced, cocky, wearing a security badge on a lanyard—looked at him like he’d just asked what air was. “You serious?”
“I’m from Chicago,” Elias said again, like that explained everything.
“It’s when you tweet about someone without taggin’ them.”
“Ah.” He nodded as if this made perfect sense. “Of course.” Why did I even ask?!
The hand played out. Elias won, naturally, with just a pair of eights. It wasn’t that he was good, but just that everyone else was terrible. He raked in the pot and tried not to look too pleased.
Next hand. Elias won again. And again. He could see the faces of the other players begin to harden. So the fourth hand, he looked at his cards—full house, kings over tens—and deliberately folded.
