Page 61 of Own the Eights Gets Married
Jordan
“Remember, folks, no peeking! Do not look at your other half’s answers,” Buck cautioned as he walked the perimeter of the gathering area, observing the seated couples.
Jordan stared at the questionnaire in front of him, erased his answer, then chanced a look at Georgie. She didn’t even glance up as she scribbled on the form as if she’d made it her life’s work to mistreat pencils.
To say the last two days had been an unmitigated disaster was unfair to unmitigated disasters. A total and complete catastrophic shit show was more like it.
Yesterday, they’d lost the scat race, coming in dead last.
Instead of spending the night in the honeymoon yurt with real pillows and running water, they’d suffered through another night in tent hell. Well, truth be told, except for a sore back and aching neck, he hadn’t suffered as much as Georgie.
After waking this morning, he’d found her already up. Sitting cross-legged on the other side of the tent, he watched as his fiancée finished off the last of the cookie dough, then licked the casing like a vulture intent on devouring the carcass of its dead prey.
And that wasn’t the only odd thing about her.
At some point during the night, she’d taken her hair out of its bun. It hung around her shoulders in a wild chestnut mane. He sure as hell wasn’t going to mention anything about it because he had no room to criticize her.
Yes, he’d been an asshat.
Yes, he’d fallen back on his worst coping mechanisms and regained his title of Emperor of Asshattery. Georgie’s new moniker, the Sovereign of Scat, wasn’t far off the mark either.
He’d taken the scat competition too far. He’d gone full-on Marks Perfect Ten Mindset.
But it wasn’t like he didn’t have a reason.
A switch had flipped inside him when he saw Camille Pruitt and stood there helplessly as she called him Straws. All his defenses had gone up. In the blink of an eye, he was that scrawny kid again, hiding in the school bathroom, waiting for the jerks and jocks to clear out. His childhood companions of shame and humiliation hit him again like a one-two punch.
And the whole embarrassing HIIT training versus scat training debacle didn’t help either.
When the Plunger Princess and her rodent royalty fiancé, along with the rest of the boot campers, laughed at him, every insecurity multiplied, every frayed nerve bristled, and each hurt feeling from his past bubbled to the surface. And who was there to bear the brunt of it?
Georgie.
Still, he’d expected her to acclimate better to the task at hand. During the Battle of the Blogs, she’d taken charge. Even when she’d momentarily lost her mind by entering a wet T-shirt contest, she’d won the damn thing.
Why’d she go all beauty queen diva on him?
What was different now?
He stared down at the questionnaire with the wordsEngaged Couples’ Compatibility Assessmentsplashed across the top and found his answer.
Was he wrong to have proposed so soon?
Georgie was it. She was the one for him. He knew this in his heart and in his soul, but had he jumped the gun?
“Are you almost done?” Georgie asked, observing him with dark circles under her eyes.
He jotted down one last answer. “Yeah, babe, I am.”
She tossed her mass of tangled hair behind her shoulder with a deft flick of her hand, took his form, then strode over to deliver the papers to Syd and Buck.
Did she think she was in a pageant? Is this what Georgiana Jensen morphed into on zero sleep?
He looked around at the other couples in their moisture-wicking shirts and khaki all-weather hiking shorts. It was like being trapped in an L.L. Bean nightmare. He and Georgie, thinking they were headed to a fitness bridal boot camp, had opted to pack workout clothing. It wasn’t a bad call. He could easily hike and trek around the backcountry in track pants and a hoodie, while Georgie rocked yoga capris and sweatshirts. But they stood out—and not in a good way.
They garnered attention in the same way he had when he stood out as a gangly kid in middle school and high school, and likely, the way Georgie had stood out when she was competing on the beauty pageant circuit.
Freaks.
