Adam’s face breaks into a gigantic grin, and he turns his cue card around to reveal the answer.
“Well done!” Jonathan says, and I get a little rush of adrenaline and find myself sitting up straighter, leaning forward while I wait for the next question. “Who said ‘I love you’ first?”
I scribble Adam’s name down immediately. I mean, come on.
Jonathan waits for Tess and Chris to finish writing their answers, and then turns back to me, switching up the order. “Okay, Adam, Eleanor has jotted down her answer… Who said those three little words first?”
Adam fixes me with this put-out look, and I curl my lips in to keep from smiling. “I suppose that would be me.”
I flip my card around to reveal Adam’s name and give him a sweet smile. “Obviously.”
Next up are Danny and Tess, and of course they get it right, too—they’ve probably whipped out the story of Danny sweeping Tess into his arms after he won the big game countless times to all their friends—hell, considering they were in high school, their friends were probably all there to witness it.
Last up, Harvey answers he said it first, and Chris is immediately outraged.
“You absolutely did not!” Chris bursts, without even bothering to turn his card around.
Harvey frowns. “Yes, I did. Our first Christmas together, I—”
“You said, and I quote, ‘I love spending time with you.’ I remember, because I didn’t think anyone actually used that line in real life, but I figured maybe you werecloseto saying it, so I waited, and thenthree monthswent by and you still hadn’t said it, so on your birthdayIsaid it toyou, and you said it back.”
Harvey purses his lips. “That’s not how I remember it.”
“Shocking,” Chris mutters, loud enough for me to hear but probably not the rest of the spectators. He tosses his card aside and stares resolutely ahead until Jonathan clears his throat and moves on to the next question, which is about our partners’ guilty pleasures.
Again, I draw a complete blank. I think about how pretentious Adam can be sometimes and guess K-dramas, because it seems like the kind of thing Adam would be embarrassed to admit he likes. But when I offer up that answer, Adam gives me a bewildered look and flips his card, which reads:strip club meat.
I let out an appallingly loud snort-laugh, and cover my mouth with both hands. Jonathan doesn’t seem to know what to do with this response, so he moves on without comment. I put all of my energy into not laughing, which proves impossible the moment I meet Adam’s eye again. I look away as a fresh bout of giggles bubble up, biting the inside of my cheek andthinking about decidedly not-funny things, like… waking up in Vegas married to an almost-stranger, for example.
I’ve managed to get a handle on myself by the time Jonathan comes back to us with the next question—what my partner finds most attractive about me.
My gaze is drawn back to Adam, who meets my eye for a long, intense beat. He looks away first, and nudges his glasses up his nose in a gesture that makes me imagine what he was like when he was younger. What it would’ve been like to know him in high school, during his awkward stage, assuming he ever had one.
I’m not entirely sure when I started to find the glasses endearing, but the realization is unsettling.
It would’ve been uncomfortable to offer up something about Adam I find attractive, but the inverse is somehow even worse. Despite my certainty that Adam wanted to kiss me earlier, I have no clue what his answer will be. I’ve never caught him staring at my mouth or my tits. He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to obsess over any particular body part. In the end, I have to choosesomething, so I scribble down the feature I like best about myself.
“Her eyes,” Adam answers easily when it’s his turn.
My cheeks go hot as I turn the card around to show my matching response. Not that I’m reading anything into it—eyes are a safe, non-objectifying answer. Finding them attractive doesn’t necessarily mean he’sattractedto me, if he even meant it in the first place.
The questions keep coming, and Adam and I keep getting them right. By the time we reach the final round, it’s clear that by some miracle we actually do have a shot at winning. So ofcourse, that’s when Jonathan asks the most obnoxious question of the day.
“Eleanor, what are you most likely to nag Adam about?”
Beside me, Adam immediately starts scribbling his answer. I clench my jaw and try to move past the fact that he needed absolutely no time to think this one over.
I’m probably expected to offer an answer that’s demure and funny and relatable, but my nails are digging into my palm and I can’t stop myself from blurting out: “That actually feels like a really sexist question.”
Jonathan is taken aback. He glances at the other contestants, as if he’s hoping they’ll bail him out, but they’re all staring at me, most of them with a mixture of amusement and respect, although Danny has more of anoh, shitlook on his face, so I’m guessing his answer isn’t going to go over well with Tess.
“It’s meant to be hypothetical,” Jonathan says, in the same tone men use when they say something inappropriate at the office and then follow it up with,lighten up, it was a joke. A tone that implies it’s my fault for not having a sense of humor, and oh, buddy, I am so not in the mood for that kind of fuckery.
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to answer it.”
Jonathan huffs a humorless laugh. “No answer. All right—you’d better hope your husband shares your thoughts on this. Adam?”
Adam smirks without making eye contact with anyone and flips his card over. It reads: “That’s pretty sexist, dude.”
