Truly, Madly, Like Me - Jo Watson Page 0,27

bite your leg off, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“Cujo,” he said.

“What?”

“You could have named him Cujo. It’s a book by Stephen King that became a movie.” He walked over to a shelf, pulled a DVD off and passed it to me. I stared down at the image of the massive dog jaws and nodded.

“I see.” I passed the movie back to him and then gave him a serious once-over. He was nerdy. Kind of cute though. In that glasses-wearing, floppy-haired kind of way. He was wearing an old, worn T-shirt that had a small hole at the collar and said Nirvana across it. I didn’t know what that meant at all; wasn’t that something you said during yoga? He took his glasses off and looked down at the splashes of water across the lenses. Then he lifted his T-shirt and started cleaning them. I watched intently, somewhat hypnotized by this cleaning process. When the lenses were clean, he held them up to the light and, before putting them back on, he looked at me and our eyes locked and . . .

Huh? Something about him . . . Something about those eyes made him look familiar. But then the glasses went back on and that split second of familiarity disappeared. He turned away from me and I studied him a little more. He was probably around my age, a bit older maybe. Somewhat pale, even though he lived in the middle of the desert. Not very muscular, didn’t look like he enjoyed outdoor sports . . . And then a thought hit me! A big thought!

There was no way someone like him didn’t have internet access. He looked like the kind of guy who was into playing those roleplay strategy games on his phone. He looked like the kind of guy who played Fortnite in a basement somewhere. Maybe there was Wi-Fi here after all? A secret Wi-Fi that you had to tap into. Black-market Wi-Fi. You just needed to know how, and where, and with what password. And I intended to find out.

“So, do you work here?” I asked with a smile. Maybe it was a little flirty, I don’t know. At least I hadn’t pushed my chest out (not that I needed to).

He scrutinized me for a while, and then bent down and picked the bucket up. “Looks like it,” he said. It was obviously sarcastic, or maybe that was just the Australian accent he had. Hard to tell really. I ignored whatever it was though and persisted.

“Soooo. You live here then?”

He nodded as he started mopping up the water on the floor.

“Live here long?” I asked.

“I suppose.”

“I’ve only been here for a day,” I continued.

He stopped mopping and eyed me. He reached up with one hand and scratched his head. His hair flopped about and fell into his face. It had this cute, natural wave to it, giving him a rather boyish look.

“Very quiet here,” I said, also scratching my head. I’d listened to a podcast about leadership and influencing people and it had said that mirroring people’s movements made them like you more. It didn’t seem to work, because he just looked at my hand strangely.

“I must say, I’m super bored already.” I tried another smile on him, but it didn’t seem to work. My roundabout way of questioning also seemed to be going nowhere. I might as well stop beating around the bush. I took a deep breath. “So, what’s the story around here anyway?” My tone had changed from sweet and flirty to straight-up direct.

“What do you mean?” His accent was thick, and I almost expected him to throw a “mate” on the end of the sentence. It made me think of that social media influencer, Ozzy Man, who did reviews of seemingly banal things in an Australian accent which made them hysterical. I wondered how he would review this moment, which was getting more awkward by the second as this man in front of me regarded me with a very confused look on his face.

I fiddled with the leash in my hand. “What I mean is, does this place really not have any internet?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“But there’s got to be some way of getting online, right? A way that they don’t advertise.”

He looked confused. “Advertise?”

“Yes. Like some secret internet that you can only log onto from a certain place with a secret password?”

At that he half-smiled and shook his head. “No.”

“Oh, come on!” I said a little more loudly. “There has