Page 47 of Going Overboard

As she takes a long drink from her bright pink straw, she gives me a look that says a thousand words.

‘What?’ I say with a chuckle.

‘He’s different with you,’ she tells me, nodding over toward Brody.

I smile.

‘Yeah, I don’t know, I didn’t know him before, but he’s great,’ I reply. ‘Really great.’

‘Let’s play a game!’ Neil says, clapping his hands together loudly, saving me from the rest of the conversation. ‘They’ve got all these different boardgames. I went straight to the retro ones – they’ve got a Mr & Mrs kind of game. Perfect for us, right?’

I glance at Kelsey. Is this perfect? It sounds like a recipe for disaster.

‘Sounds great,’ she says.

Well, who am I to argue with the bride?

Brody stands up, stretching in a way that should probably be illegal. And then he beckons me over with a grin and… yeah… he’s really good at this.

‘Okay, how do we go about this?’ he asks me in hushed tones.

‘I guess, everyone knows we haven’t been together long, so we’ll lean into that,’ I tell him. ‘We’re still enjoying getting to know each other, finding out new things – we can make a whole lovey-dovey thing of that.’

‘Plus, Neil and I might be old friends, but we haven’t spent much time together lately – just socially, at weddings and stuff, so I don’t know when Nikki would have had the chance to spend time with Todd and get to know him. I’ve only met him a couple of times and I don’t feel like I know much about him…’

Which, to me at least, only serves as further proof that something must have been going on between them earlier than they let on. Neil and Brody are old friends, and Al already knows Brody too – presumably from some kind of freakishly buff man club – Nikki was never part of our friendship circle, and I’d never noticed Brody before, even if we have crossed paths. Well, I suppose when you’re happy with someone, you don’t look at your friendship circle through that lens, you’re not on thelookout for hot men – although I suppose I should have been, in hindsight.

‘What are you thinking about? You’re blushing,’ Brody says, snapping me from my thoughts.

Shit. I was just thinking that he was hot, in a roundabout way, but there’s no way he can know that, right? And no way I’m blushing, it must just be the sun. I guess some kind of psychic connection could be good for the purpose of the game – but not a thing else.

‘Nothing,’ I insist quickly. ‘Just how to win.’

‘Thinking about it, we don’t need to win, we only need to do better than Todd and Nikki. If we have to cheat, so be it.’

Well, it doesn’t seem like they were above that…

‘How do we cheat?’ I ask.

‘No idea,’ he replies. ‘But if something comes up, we lean into it.’

‘That’s not very sportsmanlike of you,’ I tease.

‘This isn’t a sport,’ he replies with a smile. ‘It’s a war.’

‘And I suppose they do say all is fair in love and war,’ I reply. ‘Let’s do it.’

We all crowd around a low table at the side of the pool. Neil explains the game to us – it sounds pretty straightforward, and not at all like something Brody and I could be good at given that we hardly know each other.

‘The pens are dry, so we’ll have to play the honesty version,’ Neil tells us. ‘We’re all adults. We can trust everyone will be truthful, right?’

Us lot? Ha.

First up it’s Kelsey and Neil, the nearly-weds, and unsurprisingly, Neil nails Kelsey’s favourite flowers – tulips.

Then Al and Kira – the newly-weds – and they kill it too. They’re still in that phase of romance where they finish eachother’s sentences and food and everything. It’s somewhere between cute and sickening – but only the latter because secretly I wish I had someone who was so in sync with me.

Next up, it’s Todd and Nikki. This ought to be good.

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