Page 95 of Merry Mayhem
Merry Mayhem will be over.
Josh will go back to Autre.
And I will start working on getting over him.
Sure. That seems simple enough.
“Sure.”
We skate to center ice and join Max and Mitchell. They grin with excitement.
“Mitchell, you guys will be green, Josh and Thea, you’re red,” Nora instructs.
This event is more or less like billiards on ice.
Kind of.
Peppermint Puck-A-Palooza is basically a game that Nora made up. Of course. Nora is the mastermind behind everything Parks and Rec does, but when it comes to hockey, she’s even more over-the-top. She might’ve had some help from Andi or Everly, maybe even Beckett, but Puck-A-Palooza is basically what would happen if hockey and billiards got together and had a baby. And the baby had hockey pucks ten times the usual size, and there were seven pucks for each team—so fourteen pucks on the ice at once—plus two white pucks that we’re supposed to use to hit the pucks into the nets.
Oh, and we’re using giant plastic candy canes instead of hockey sticks.
But sure, it’s just like hockey. And billiards.
“Get ready, get set, go!” Nora shouts.
There’s no confetti canon for this event since the confetti would make skating over the ice very difficult, and I can tell that bothers Nora a little bit. She really likes her confetti canon.
There’s also no puck drop like in hockey. We just all skate off and start trying to hit a white puck into our colored pucks.
Beckett and Sutton played earlier, along with Sam and Ashley. Beckett scored more points than anyone ever has for this event, as should be expected of a semi-pro hockey player, I suppose.
The team here in Rebel is only an FPHL league team, so minorminorleague. Still, he gets a paycheck for playing hockey, so that puts him ahead of anyone who does it just for fun. A little anyway.
Truthfully, our team sucks, and they’re having trouble putting butts in the seats. If our resident billionaire—my cousin, Dane—didn’t own the hockey rink and keep it running, the rink would’ve been shut down a long time ago, and the team would be long gone.
I let Josh take the first couple of shots, and he does get a puck into the net, but I’m no slouch on the ice. Sure, it might be unusual for a Louisiana girl to know how to ice skate, but we’ve had the ice rink here for a few years, and Ruth wanted to take lessons, so I did it with her. I can skate, and I actually love hockey, so I skate after the white puck that Josh just sent sailing. I send one of our red pucks into a side net, and Josh skates over to give me a high five.
“Good job,” he says with a grin.
“Thanks. You, too.” I glance behind him. “Max and Mitchell both play youth hockey, by the way.”
Josh grimaces. “Dammit.”
I laugh. “Technically, we’re still competing against all of the other teams. It’s all about how many times we can put the puck in the net in fifteen minutes. Just focus on that.”
“It’s actually really hard to focus on anything. I want to kiss you so badly.”
My eyes widen. “Josh, stop it.”
“Nobody can hear what I’m saying out here.”
“Still, you can’t say stuff like that. It’s way too hard for me not to react, and we can’t do anything about it anyway.”
“I talked to Violet. Did you two talk?”
No, we didn’t. On purpose. “Can we discuss this after?”
“Will you discuss it with me after? Or will you disappear?”
