Page 62 of Own the Eights Gets Married
He hadn’t been this person in years, and neither had she.
They were adored on social media. People made damn Pinterest boards devoted to them. The online world watched them fall in love.
What would they think now?
He glanced around the group while Buck and Syd stood in the center of the gathering spot, shuffling the papers and speaking in hushed tones.
Georgie returned and tapped his arm. “It looks like the judges are going to address us,” she whispered with her shoulders back and chin raised as if she were preparing for the pageant spotlight.
He tried to muster a placating expression. She did not look like she was firing on all cylinders, and neither was he, but at least he’d gotten some rest over the past couple of nights. He needed to make sure she slept tonight. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep her up, but the minute his head hit the poorly padded tent floor, he was out like a light. It wasn’t the physical exertion that zapped his energy. He could run a marathon in his sleep. It was his nerves—this hyper-anxious state of trying to be the best that drained him by sundown.
Luckily, they only had one more night of boot camp. Then, they could get back to normal—whatever the hell that was. But it had to be better than this.
They’d cooked their can of beef stew, ate the sodium infused brown lump of food and made it through a morning couples’ hike, without another scat hide-and-seek competition, thank God. Then, they’d completed a hands-on activity where Buck and Syd taught them how to craft a bow drill to make a fire in the wilderness.
He’d completed the task on his own. He was pretty sure Georgie had been sleeping with her eyes open in some state of half-awake lucid dreaming while the boot camp leaders led the lesson. And it was pretty cool, in a caveman sort of way, to make fire without matches or flipping the switch on a gas fireplace like they did at home.
He’d followed along with the group, constructing a primitive bow using a piece of wood the length of his arm and securing a cord to each end. Next, they made a fireboard—just a flat piece of wood with a little shallow circular indentation at the end. When it was time to construct the drill piece they’d wrap around the bow’s cord to move back and forth in the fireboard’s little hole to make the actual fire, Buck had handed each couple a large knife to sharpen the end of the wood.
There was no way he was about to allow pageant zombie Georgie to handle sharp objects, so he’d whittled the end of the six-inch sturdy branch into a point. Buck then gave each pair a flat stone with a shallow circle carved into the top, similar to the fireboard’s slight hole. This socket stone, as Syd called it, was used to hold the blunt end of the drill piece in place while the sharp end fit into the fireboard’s hole. Set up and ready to go, he’d bowed away like a violinist who’d pounded fifty Red Bulls, creating friction by moving the sharpened tip of the drill rapidly in the fireboard’s opening.
It took a hell of a lot of effort, but he’d done it and made fire.
Take that, Boy Scouts!
Georgie leaned in. “I have a feeling this is the question and answer portion of the competition.”
He nodded. She was probably right. They had just filled out a pretty bizarre questionnaire, and they hadn’t done any touchy-feely couples’ activities yet. Maybe this was theDr. Phil connectwith your partnerportion of the bridal boot camp.
A wave of confidence washed over him—a welcome feeling. They could do touchy-feely.
He and Georgie were open books—or open blogs. They laid it all out on the line every day. They could do a couples’ compatibility exercise in their sleep. And with Georgie’s state of mind, that was a good thing.
“All right, couples,” Syd said, addressing the group. “Let’s have the gentlemen sit on one side of the circle and the ladies on the other.”
Jordan watched as the men migrated to the other side.
“Are you going to be okay here on your own?” he asked, getting up.
Georgie glanced around with a high-wattage smile. “Of course! I’ll be with the other contestants.”
“Georgie? Babe? Do you know where we are?” he asked, two-seconds away from snapping his fingers in front of her face to get her to come back from whatever alternate universe her insomnia-riddled mind had entered.
She shook her head, then let out a weary sigh, looking a little more like herself. “Yes, I know where we are. I meant to say boot camp participants,” she corrected, her tone more annoyed than spaced out, which under the circumstances, he’d take.
He glanced over as Brice Casey kissed Camille Pruitt on the cheek.
“I’m going to miss my plunger princess,” the man cooed.
“Not as much as I’m going to miss my Pooh Bear, Bricey,” Camille gushed.
Jordan couldn’t look away. How could these idiots be so happy?
He stroked Georgie’s cheek. “See you in a bit, babe,” he tried.
She frowned. “You’re going to be sitting across from me, Jordan. You’ll see me the entire time.”
And bam! She’d returned from beauty pageant purgatory and was back to being pissed off at him, which he deserved.
