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HI BESTIES. Trivia!Harry x Shy!Reader part 1 ((based on THIS post))

The one where Harry hosts trivia at a small town bar every Thursday and Y/N just can’t seem to shut up.

WC: 3.6K

This is part one of a patreon exclusive series — the rest will only be accessible through my patreon. You can already find part 2 up on my patreon (✿◠‿◠)

She takes a long drink. It tastes like kismet and carbonated nothingness.

“Alright, alright, alright.”

Smooth baritone into the bulbous head of a microphone, hovering millimeters from pink, plush borders of a mouth. It seeps through the meshed grill caging it like molasses slinking the gaps. The lively chatter dulls as heads turn, and then swells in eager increments.

“Alright,” he says, a set of green eyes flickering from the monitor he’s settled over a rejigged high top, and bounding sharply to whoever’s just given an overly enthusiastic cry of yes from the horde surrounding the portable four-by-eight platform.

A peal of sparse, scattered laughter. His mouth quirks.

“Very enthusiastic today. Hello to you, as well. I’m well. How are you?”

His cresting eyes bound from the glowy screen, casting light and carving shadow over the sultry features of his visage; an evenly straight slope of a nose, cheekbones feathered by long lashes, a bit of curl that traipses over his forehead.

His chin swivels to his left, somewhere closer to the platform where a woman leans over the high top — her designated team — the corners of his lips curling in response to whatever he’s said. Face alive, he nods. He tips his chin. Makes a creased face like something playful. Says something else, laughs softly, and turns back, shaking his head.

Y/N tucks the straw in and takes another slow sip.

He brings the mic back to the ruddy stain of his lips.

“Hope everyone’s having a lovely Thursday. M’Harry, I’ll be leading the trivia— as I do— so if you’re sitting there going, who is this obnoxious cock, talking into the mic the whole night? Hi, Hello. That’s me— I do trivia.”

Harry is fit.

At first, Y/N had been dubious to desert her romcom reruns and her cross-stitch project mid-way (despite the fact that her thumb now resembles a pin cushion) when her friends had swept her off into their regularly scheduled, mysteriously niche Thursday night schemes. Now, she gets it.

The destination — The Black Horse — is a fuggy little space that smells like spilt Michelob and fusty, weathered oak. There’s a no smoking sign pasted in a spare crevice of the backbar, but someone in the far right corner exhales a plume of vapor like they’ve hit their elfbar in the most clandestine manner imaginable. Shamelessly. It’s a small town — an islet in the heart of an archipelago — and she thinks she can make out her seventh grade swim team rival perched somewhere off in the front row.

The Black Horse is nothing special. It sells cheap draughts by the pitcher and parallels a barbershop in the crux of the town, two blocks off the boardwalk, which is arguably the chiseled, shiny musgravite of Treah’s core — a roaring green sea that eats away at the borders of the isle, shrouding vibrantly hued cays, glimmering under the beam of the sun. The majority of the holm’s economy is dependent on tourism (a simultaneous bane — said tourists enjoy uprooting foliage, building infrastructures, and partaking in chunks of housing buyouts), but Y/N can tell that The Black Horse has been …preserved to say the least. It’s four stone walls sewn into a plaza with three other natively owned businesses and looks like something straight out of a cinematic piece set in a rural village, planted into Treah long before Y/N had her first wiggly tooth.

The Black Horse isn’t what makes attendance worth it. It’s him—

“We’ve got a crowd tonight. If you haven’t played trivia with me here at The Black Horse before, welcome. S’a little different than your typical trivia, though, because it’s…”

The throng hollers back, as if scripted, “Dirty trivia!”

“Dirty Trivia,” Harry parrots, all cheeky dimples, “Right, Dirty Trivia. This one’s rated R, so if you’re not old enough to be here, I dunno how you got here, but this is going to be your cue to head out. Any— any children in here tonight? …No? Wonderful.”

He huffs into the mic, shaking his head and jostling his halo of curls. A jaundiced, warm beam catches on them. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but m’not even joking— a couple of weeks ago someone was sitting in here with, like, a little kid.”

It’s Harry, with the divots burrowing into his cheeks, the croon into the mic, lighting the crowd alive on an introduction.

Y/N crosses her legs. Her friend raises her eyebrows from across the teak table top and says it with her eyes. Told you so; Trivia Man is a cream dream.

“Yeah,” Harry confirms over the scattered, appalled eruption of laughter, nodding down at someone seated at a table closer to the stage, “I was, like, …shit,” he blinks back up and motions out, a slow sweep with his free hand, “Friendly reminder, this is not a form of sex ed.”

Pausing, mouth twitchy over the sown mirth, he brings the microphone back with a newfound seriousness and tacks on, nodding slowly, “…That kid won it for the whole team.”

The seam of his mouth lopsidedly spalls, “No, m’joking,” and he clears his throat. “M’gonna pass out a sheet and some little note pads for your answers,” Harry explains, “You’re gonna use one of those little notes to jot down a clever team name, do the same in that team name spot of the sheet, and then pass the note up to me.”

Pussy Posse. A pre-established moniker Y/N has had no jurisdiction over, merely perched as an addition to a settled cadre. Still, she gnaws into her cheek when she watches a friend beside her scribble in the title with a ballpoint.

“I’ll be coming around between questions to pick those answers up, have a chat, whatever. We’re all here to have fun, yes?”

She swears he sweeps her with his eyes, like a passing tide gliding the sea. Probably just the way the green in his sockets meets everyone else in the throng, but the moment it happens her molars chew in harder.

“On the topic of fun, let’s keep it nice and fair, yeah? Phones put away— no cheating— you’ll have plenty of time to check those when we have our break midway.”

It feels ignoble to eye-fuck him from behind the sheathes of her empty irises as he paces the stage — after all, this is just a wholesomely clad, virtuously upstanding guy leading trivia, but. The gears behind her skull are mottled with cerebrospinal fluid and sticky in a goop of thoughtless ogling that renders her head empty. Even when he makes his way to the bar-height table her team curls around, when his eyes linger on her — “A new face.” — Y/N just mindlessly stares.

Dirty trivia, she learns, is dirty.

It hits her when Harry quips (dare she note, mischievously), “Hoo-hoo-hoo. Starting off strong with the first one.”

He states, talc flickering from the LED display ahead to the bevy of trivia-players, “What country,” and pauses for emphasis, “has—“ pits grub at the smooth of his cheeks beside the upturned corners of a pink-bordered mouth splintering, “the highest average, in the world, for penis size?”

There’s no source of entertainment like that of trivia held, on a Thursday, on a remote islet, in a poky bar that smells like stale beer and dust-coated, chipping leather. Evidently.

“I actually don’t know this one,” Harry chimes, raising a wry shoulder, “So it’s trivia for me, as well.”

“England,” Marina stamps a blow that the teak hasn’t warranted, whisper-shouting over the staggering peals of guffaw and chatter, “He’s hung, I bet you.”

“He’s not going to fuck you for writing in England,” Beth’s chortles clash with Y/N’s scorned, “Marina.”

“That’s not even an answer,” Bee waves towards the flatscreen framed over the man’s head

Senegal, Haiti, Ecuador, and Gambia.

“Where the fuck is Gambia—”

They settle on Gambia.

Y/N watches Beth scribble it in and dot the i with an open sphere whose edges don’t meet. When Harry winds the rows of tables, plucking answer cards and making small-talk, Y/N stares into her mug ruddy-faced, brain-rotted with the insinuation of him being …hung.

“Lots of Haiti, lots of Senegal,” Harry states, mouth twitchy once he’s smoothed the cards out with his colossal, ringed paws, and looked them over.

She stares at the bob of his throat as he swallows, directing the mic back to his lips.

“Big reveal?” He pauses, as if for cataclysmic emphasis, riling the crowd enough for Y/N to note restive shoulders and juddering feet.

“Patience,” Harry says softly into the microphone, raising his eyebrows.

Y/N squishes the plush of her thighs together.

Then, with paltry warning, he reveals, “Ecuador! At,” squinting at the blue-toned LED, “—a whopping 6-point-nine-three. Solid for the average. Do we have any Ecuadorian men in the audience tonight? Anybody who’s added to that average? Congratulations. You beat us. You beat everyone.”

There’s an amalgamation of responses, some ripostes flung amongst tables, some bouts of clapping, hollering over the rows, sloshing mugs raised in triumph.

Harry’s deltoids climb in a shrug, and his head wags from side to side, “Some valiant contenders, those Ecuadorians.”

“I told you it wasn’t Gambia—“

Y/N ogles the way Harry tilts over the platform towards a table, brows kinked as if trying to pick up something audible he’d missed. In her peripherals, Marina prods into Beth’s direction with a palmful of something claret in a pellucid martini glass.

“What was that?” Harry coaxes into the microphone.

The corners of his mouth have caved up, and by the time the majority of the trivia-players sink into a piqued lull, he’s slanted over toward the table. A brunette with long, shiny hair arches up out of her seat into her directions, braced to the teak high-top with planted, elbow-locked arms.

“Where do you fall?” is undeniable the second time.

Harry blinks. His mouth paints over with a smile.

“Where do I fall?”

He blatantly bridles a sputter when he winds toward the laptop he’s set up, culls his glass of a golden, pale straw beer that’s lost its layer of foam, and takes a long drink.

Harry clears his throat. “Wouldn’t you like to know. Very forward. Take me out to dinner first.”

Y/N discovers that, despite the ubiquitously crude sexualizing, Harry is sort of like a bird. Pavo cristatus, preening with its neatly arranged plume — he likes it. The flattery. His tongue peeks out and swipes over his lips as he stares down at the screen. Little dimples pit when it tucks back in — ones he blatantly can’t contain.

He chuckles and states into the microphone, “…Below. Don’t worry about it.”

Somehow, Y/N doubts it.

Y/N plaits herself into the Thursday Fawn Sessions as a regular attendee, curling up at the same high top to ogle the same man pace a platform with a microphone to make jesting comments and ask things like, “Axillism is the act of using what strange body part during sex?”

She finds herself learning a thing or two from each session, and she finds that the emeralds seated in his sockets linger on this absolute clam shell taking up a spot in the bar and chugging fizzy water (that ogles his frame in lull every time he approaches her table), too. Pussy Posse is no good at the trivia, more often than not wheedling in second-to-last, but they find themselves much too entertained to mind.

Franks is a rather self-explanatory hot dog cart. It stands midway on the boardwalk and operates through sunny mizzles and borderline hurricane cloudbursts, when the green salt chuck is choppy. High tiding. Those are the days Y/N stands out in her jaundiced poncho, salty rain spittle beating at her cheeks, and watches the waves eat at the ipe in a nasty, wet hunger, no customers in sight.

Midsummer afternoons, though, are good. Busy. When Treah morphs industrious and bustling — tourists like Franks on the boardwalk.

It’s a slow coda for June. The sea is planate, swaying over steel supports mantled by barnacles. Gulls chortle, gliding low in the ether — it oozes yellow and something balmy like the goo of an egg yolk. She’s sold two hot dogs, tallied three joggers (one eager speedwalker), and noted one couple pushing a baby in a stroller, who offered tight-lipped smiles and veganism. She doesn’t entirely mind a slow day, because setting shop on the boardwalk means spending the day on the boardwalk. Breathing the sea until her lungs are full of salt and her eardrums reverberate the crash of the water behind her skull. She tastes it at the back of her throat — something like home as home could get.

There’s another jogger loping — a moving blip of skin color in chiaroscuro against wood paneling. In the distance. Drawing closer. She imagines him passing the cart, the soles of his trainers padding over the row of planks until he’s just another form of lines and shading, faced away. She checks her phone.

The jogger is still a good bit away. Y/N swipes open Wordle. She’s on her third attempt of elucidating something that goes blank, I, blank, E, blank (with a P that doesn’t quite fit where she’s slotted it)—

“Hi.”

Her eyes crest.

Treah is a really small town. Not in a prudishly, bible-bashing form of a pastoral village, sheathed in a bosky, wooded moat of thicket and then plains of nothingness for hundreds of miles. But it is an island enveloped by the sea from all sides, sequestered without a boat or a little plane, whose wheels bumpily kiss the asphalt of anearly comically small airport. Even the tourists lodging up in their summer homes, all the same months like annual clockwork, make reappearances. The faces are, nearly always, the same, and she sees the same faces often. It was only a (limited) matter of time before they coalesced beyond the borders skirting The Black Horse. In hindsight, Y/N didn’t envisage that she’d be wearing a baseball cap emblematized with a weenie when it happened. Or that his tits would be out and about.

“Have you got water?”

He’s panting. Casually slippery; coated in sweat that glimmers in the sun and carves the well-toned sinews of his torso, with sunglasses tucked up over his curls like a makeshift headband. He ogles expectantly with a set of jade that puts the hues of the lapping, green sea behind him to shame. A parted mouth, sculpted and cushiony, sucks in breaths from the liminal space divvying their atoms while her own become clogged, somewhere midway an esophageal prison, in limbo toward her lungs. A shaded lepidoptera scored over his tummy flutters, batting its wings in the swell and sink of his diaphragm expanding.

His shorts are teeny. Tiny, little things. Cobalt. Mirroring laurels carving alongside his V-line peek from the waistband, and a happy trail climbs to kiss his navel.

Y/N blinks. “Yes. Yeah. We do. Yes. …Is bottled okay?”

“Bottled is perfect.”

He sticks a hand into his pocket, the emeralds in his sockets flickering to her face, and away, and back. Slow-like. She traces the wisps in the sky with her eyes, heat searing up her neck and pooling in the flesh of her face. It’s a sudden, unforeseen stuffiness sweltering for such a beautiful day. Y/N recognizes her horrid blunder in his next words.

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

She should have ducked her chin, tucked the visor lower, and hoped for the best. Instead, now, she blinks, dazed and wide-eyed like a Red brocket saturated by blinding headlights.

“Oh. I’m not sure. Um. Small …town— maybe?”

“You come to, uh—“ a nudge with his chin in her direction as Y/N arduously regulates the stuttery pace of her respiration. The jitter in her digits, like a lovesick school girl. She caches them behind the cart and lets them judder. “—trivia nights. At The Black Horse, yeah? I couldn’t forget a face like yours.”

Harry grins, the way he does. Lopsided, so the left corner turns up a little higher — dimpled with a long flash of teeth. Except now, he’s slippery and half-naked.

Folie. Miscalculated gaffe in a weenie cap. She smiles all tight.

“Oh—“ again, “…Yeah.”

“Right,” Harry nods. Smiley. Lingering, looking her over. He buries an enormous hand back into his pocket then, brows creasing like he’s remembered something, and pulls out a little rectangle in cardboard paper. “Hey, actually. I’ve got this coupon here. S’what I do all the other days of the week, ah—“

He extends it out.

Harve-y a free drink, on us!

“M’a bartender over at Harvey’s. S’close to The Black Horse, if you’re in that area. Monday and Saturday mornings. Wednesday and Friday nights. If you come by, I’ll fix you up with a drink.”

It feels impolite to leave him hanging, so she swipes out at the offering, cradling it with slow fingertips.

“We can do some one on one trivia. Train you up,” Harry tacks on.

Y/N swallows. Harry is an attractive man. His allure is apodictic — a sort of conventional, objective quality that leaves her throat parched when it becomes paired with his unfaltering eye contact. She’s not a virgin, and she’s an adept swimmer, but his presence feels like viridian saltwater that’s waiting to swallow her whole. The nerves that bubble, a fizz of chagrin, remind her why exactly she enjoys fawning from a distance. Because he makes her feel nervous, and when she’s nervous, the dialogue spumes like miasmic word vomit.

He’s got a thin sheathe of sweat that glimmers in the seat of his cupid’s bow, but it’s not in a gross way. In fact, it reminds her that the rest of him, his denuded skin, is slick, because he’s been jogging along the boardwalk. It reminds her how hard it is not to openly ogle the tattoos he’s got on show. She should have called out from her weenie gig, and she should have refilled her alprazolam prescription weeks ago.

“Oh,” she tells him, slowly, face creasing, “I don’t— I don’t drink.”

Harry blinks. It’s a weird confession considering she’s a Thursday night regular at a bar that’s really only good for anything that has enough alcohol to shroud the stale taste. Still, nothing beyond open expectancy erupts along his features, and that’s worse. She feels them crawling up her throat, clambering up the back of her tongue like the words have knobby joints. They meet the backs of her teeth, waiting to spew.

“—Not because I’m a recovering alcoholic or anything, I just don’t like the way it makes me feel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Or drinking. I actually think it’s so admirable. You know? Like, to be brave… and… and a lot of times those people will attend support groups—“

Harry blinks again.

“—And they talk about it. I can’t imagine sharing something like that— not that there’s anything wrong with it! But. Um. I always get virgin cocktails at The Black Horse. Or club soda. Or juice.”

Her lips seal over. She entraps the rest behind her traitorous teeth — a drawbridge that never should’ve sunk open. Despite her overly candid, overstated explanation, Y/N doesn’t stick the coupon back out in his direction. She harbors it in her hand, blinking slowly and gnawing into her cheek.

“…S’okay. We do orange juice, too,” Harry tells her, entirely casual despite her discomfited speech, raising his brows.

There’s the curbed efforts of a bemusedly mirthy grin at the corners of his mouth, and his nonchalant bearing only makes her face hotter. She feels like she’s broiling under the shade of the awning.

“And club soda.”

“…Cool,” Y/N settles on, tightly.

“Sick.”

“…It’s, uh… two dollars,” she tells him, after a moment.

Y/N is going to go home and ram her head through a window.

“Oh,” Harry casts his gaze to the water (it has the average, entirely typical proportions of a water bottle, but in his hand, it’s nearly miniature), as if he’s forgotten the chilly source of condensation coating his palm. That he’s in arrears. He sticks his free hand into the same pocket that’d procured the coupon, “Right. I think I’ve got two dollars in here, somewhere.”

Instead, when he stretches a bill out towards her, it’s worth ten. Circumventing eye contact, Y/N reaches for the cash box tucked below and pries the lid up to delegate his change.

“Oh,” Harry echoes, raising his enormous hand in effort of halting her, “S’alright. S’yours.”

“Oh. I… can’t take tips. It’s, like. Against the code of conduct.”

“Code of conduct at a …hot dog stand?”

As if she needed to be reminded that she’s donning a silly cap with an animated frank, standing on a boardwalk that’s practically empty of prospective patrons. The ignominy scores in her tummy and surfaces in the set line of her mouth.

“…Yes.”

Harry pauses, brows kinked like he’s ruminating, and then he inhales and decides, “Well. It’s not a tip, yeah? It’s just… you break it up, put two in the box, and then put the rest in your pocket.”

“Oh. No. You— you’ve already given me the coupon—“ she argues, frenziedly waving out a mismatched wad of cash.

He raises his hands and ambles in one suavely lengthy step back. “I’m going now.”

“No!”

He’s three away that would fit five or six of her own gait when he declares, “Yes! I hope to see you for that orange juice. On the house. Have a good one.”

This is a patreon exclusive series. If you'd like to read more, part 2 is already up on my patreon! <3

#sooooo good #I imagine he's somewhat like this irl #and I would die if trivia man made fun of me and teased me #fic rec

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