Page 37 of Merry Mayhem
I quickly answer the question, scrawling a word on my whiteboard without thinking. It’s just a silly game before three days of silly games. I have to stop making this a bigger deal than it is. I have to stop making it about things it’s not about.
Josh and I are going to spend some time together, sure, but it will all be very public, and a lot of it will be happening outside, so we’ll be wearing extra layers of clothes, not fewer. No bare skin. No worries about me getting distracted by his shoulders, pecs, and abs…
“Yes!” Josh laughs and holds up his hand, palm toward me, fingers spread.
I look at him with confusion. Then I look at his whiteboard. Where he wrote “both”.
I look down at my board. Where I also wrote “both”.
Oh my God.
He grabs my wrist and lifts my hand, slapping it against his in a high five.
Nora is laughing into the microphone. “That wasn’t an option!”
“But we answered the same way anyway,” Josh says with a grin. “Definitely a perfect pair!”
What was the question again? Not sex against the wall versus long, slow, teasing sex on a bed…
Oh, right, gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning.
Well…yeah, both.
Nora shakes her head and grins at the audience. “Well, I guess we know to keep an eye on those two. Rules don’t seem to matter.”
Everyone laughs, but I stifle a groan. Rulesdomatter. Especially the one aboutnotdeveloping a crush on your sister’s boyfriend.
Apparently, we don’t receive points for matching our answers in this “get to know the contestants” challenge. Weget points based on audience vote. Which is probably good. I purposefully triednotto answer the same way Josh did, and we still got three out of five matches.
However, Max and Mitchell, the brothers who had been dying to compete in Merry Mayhem since the first year and had only turned eighteen two months ago, matched on every single question. Big surprise, they’re identical twins.
Jesse and Brad, who have been married for thirty years or more, also got every match. No big shock there.
Beckett, a hometown guy who plays for our minor league hockey team, and his sister Sutton, matched on four out of five.
But the other set of twins, seventy-something-year-old Patty and Muriel Coffelt, didn’t match on a single question.
That is also not a shock.
Patty and Muriel fight about everything.Everything. Sometimes it’s a disagreement over politics, and sometimes it’s an accusation that one of them stole the other’s socks. Big, small, important, ridiculous, it doesn’t matter. Patty and Muriel's arguments are like white noise in Rebel. We’ve all just gotten used to holding onto things like lamps, paperweights, plates, and cutlery when a fight breaks out—they’ve been known to throw things, and we just try to keep the breakable and more lethal things out of reach.
Interestingly, Sam and Ashley only matched on two questions.
Not that it means anything. They’re silly holiday questions. They don’t mean anything about a real relationship.
Look at me and Josh. We’re just…
What the hell are we?
We literally just met. We’re not even friends. We’re…
Jesus, we’re future in-laws.
Maybe. I mean…
Fuck.
Anyway, it doesn’t mean anything that Sam and Ashley sucked at this challenge. But it’s interesting.
