The Road to Amazing (18 page)

Everyone laughed again while Kevin and
I wrote our answers on the dry-erase boards.

"Kevin?" Otto asked. "What did Russel
say?"

"The picnic gazebo," he
said.

I flipped my board, and it
read,
Stinky picnic
gazebo
.

"Russel?" Otto said.

"The stinky picnic
gazebo," I said, and Kevin flipped his board so it read,
Picnic gazebo
.

"Public sex?" Vernie said.
"I'm
shocked
."
She turned to Min, sitting next to her. "We can only hope it was at
night."

"Yeah," I said, blushing. "It always
was."

"'Always'?" Ruby said. "You mean it
was more than once?"

"It was back in high school!" I said.
"Where else were we supposed to go?"

Kevin looked at me.
"Actually...."

I thought about it. "Oh,
right." I looked sheepishly out at the audience. "We may have been
there
since
school too. It's complicated."

Everyone howled. I was starting to see
why the show made a point to ask questions about sex: even when the
couple knows everything about each other, like Kevin and I did, it
could still be pretty entertaining.

"Thinking about your partner's total
number of sex partners," Otto went on, reading from his phone, "are
we talking single digits? Double digits? Or — God forbid! — triple
digits?"

Kevin and I both made a point to blush
and shift around awkwardly in our seats, then we turned to the
dry-erase boards.

But honestly, I knew the answer to
this too. I wrote down my answer on my board.

"So, Kevin," Otto said. "Single
digits, double digits, or have you hit a triple?"

"Hmm," he said, then he made a big
show out of counting it out on his fingers, making it seem like it
was going on and on and on, and when people realized what he was
doing, he got a good laugh.

"Single digits," he said at last. "Six
guys and three girls."

"Three
girls
?" Nate said. "Is this why I
had such a hard time getting dates when I was living with you in
college? Bloody hell! You were cock-blocking me?"

"They were all back in high school," I
pointed out, holding up my board.

Single
digits
, it read.

"And you
never
had a hard time
getting dates in college," Kevin said to Nate.

"And Russel," Otto said, "what about
you? Single, double, or triple?"

"What?" I said.

People laughed like I was making a
joke, but I wasn't. I'd honestly forgotten that I had to answer the
question too.

Here's the deal. Kevin was
an extremely sexy man, but he was also a date-before-sex,
one-on-one kinda guy. Which, frankly, was part of what made him so
sexy: when you were with him, he made you feel that he
was
really with you,
that it was all
about
you. Not like you were just a body, or another conquest, or a
notch on his nightstand. So it was no surprise to me that he'd only
ever been with five other people (the three girls didn't really
count, because he'd been closeted and had only been doing it for
appearances).

As for me, well, I was a one-on-one
kinda guy too, and I've already said how Kevin and I were
monogamous. But Kevin and I had been on-again-off-again for ten
years. Which meant that there was plenty of time in there when the
two of us were "off." In that time, I'd had a series of pointless
relationships, and I may have fired up a hookup app once or twice
(or a few more times than that).

The point is, I wasn't in
the single digits anymore. (It's not like I was in the triple
digits either! Basically, I was in the low double digits.
Exactly
how
low
is none of your damn business.)

"Double," I said to the
gathering.

There was a moment's hesitation.
Outside, the rain pitter-pattered, and something in the woods
creaked.

Then everyone started oohing and
ahhing.

"
Russel!
" Min said, but I had a
feeling she was faking it. I used to live with Min and she was no
dummy. She had to know the truth about my sex life.

Anyway, I had officially shocked my
friends — and hopefully Kevin too. Truthfully, I was kind of happy
that I still had some mystery. Maybe that meant our marriage would
be an exciting one after all.

Then Kevin flipped over his dry-erase
board.

Double
digits
, it said.

I stared at him, a bit dumbfounded.
"How—?"

He grinned like someone stoned.
"Seriously? You think you have secrets from me?"

I'd thought I did! And,
honestly, I'd sort of
hoped
I did. What did it mean that I didn't?

"Next question!" Otto said. "It's
fifty years from now, and of course you guys are still married. Are
you Fit and Fabulous? Dirty Old Men? Or Get Off My
Lawn?"

Kevin immediately started
writing on his board, but I hesitated. How
did
Kevin see us in fifty years? It
was Fit and Fabulous, right? Or maybe Dirty Old Men — in a
reclaim-the-slut-shaming-sex-negative-terminology kind of
way.

But what if it wasn't? And no matter
what he thought, what would we actually be? What if we did end up
as two grumpy old men? Making whoopie — er, fucking — at the Stinky
Picnic Gazebo had been pretty naughty, but was that the naughtiest
thing we were ever going to do?

My eyes met Min's, and she sort of
scowled at me, like she knew I was thinking about the conversation
we'd had before, my worrying about growing older and becoming
boring. She had a point: this was a stupid train of thought, even
for me. And — maybe, just maybe — it was an outright neurotic one.
It was a silly question in a stupid Bachelor Party game, made all
the more stupid by the fact that, only minutes before, I'd
literally been totally turned on watching my future husband lick
sweat off his shirtless straight best friend's torso. Why would I
think that Kevin's and my sex life would ever turn dull?

Then again, maybe it wasn't
necessarily Kevin I was worried about making our life boring. Maybe
it was me.

I'm definitely
over-thinking things again
, I
thought,
like with the
striptease
. But I should point out (again)
that these were fleeting thoughts, barely worth
mentioning

I uncapped my dry-erase pen, and sat
poised to start writing.

But before I could write a single
letter, the lights flickered once, then went completely
dark.

"Oh, no," Kevin said, and I could
already hear a note of panic in his voice. "I think the rain just
knocked the power out."

CHAPTER TEN

"We don't know it was the power," I
said, sitting there in the darkness of that house. "Maybe we just
blew a fuse."

"No," Gunnar said as I heard him
moving around in the shadows. "It's out all over the house." He
walked to the window and looked outside. "I don't see any lights at
all. Yeah, I think the power's out."

"An isolated house in the woods and
the power goes out?" Vernie said. "That's never good."

"What do you mean?" Kevin
said.

"Oh, I'm just kidding," she said. "I
meant like in the movies. I'm sure it's fine."

"Yeah," Gunnar said, "it's probably
just a line down somewhere." This was funny, though, because the
rain now sounded like it had died down a bit, like the fever
outside had broken. Still, with all the trees, power lines probably
went down all the time on Vashon Island.

"But what do we
do
?" Kevin said. "Are we
supposed to just sit here?"

The panic in his voice was more
obvious now. Which made sense: he was thinking about the wedding
tomorrow. It was one thing to move the ceremony inside because of
the rain. If there was still no power by then, could we hold the
wedding at all? It would be a challenge for the caterers, that's
for sure. And I had a vague memory of Christie saying something
about how the house was on a well. Didn't you need electricity to
draw water from a well?

"They'll get it fixed," I said. "The
wedding's not for another sixteen hours."

"How can you be so sure?" Kevin said.
"Things are different on the island. And we're not even on the
populated part of the island."

No one said anything. The fact is,
Kevin had a point. Growing up in the Seattle area, I'd been reading
all my life about people in the rural areas who lost their power
and didn't get it turned back on for days or weeks.

One by one, my friends switched on
their phones, adding light to the room — soft, colorful
glows.

I shuffled closer to Kevin and laid my
hand on his back. "It's going to be okay," I said. "I'm sure
they'll get the power back on in time."

Even now, I was determined to keep
reassuring him. But Kevin was sweaty, and it wasn't from Nate's
striptease anymore. He was so anxious the tension pulsed off his
body.

If reassuring him wasn't working,
maybe I could try to distract him, the way Ruby had distracted Min
at dinner.

I looked around the room. "I see
candles. Let's see if we can find some matches."

"I'm on it," Ruby said, heading to the
kitchen where she fumbled through some drawers. "Got 'em," she said
a second later.

She returned and started going around
the room, carefully lighting all the candles and kerosene lamps. We
all watched her in silence, like it was some kind of ritual in
church, the preparation for some ceremony. Now it sounded like the
rain outside had stopped completely, the only sound being water
dripping from the gutters — er, rain dispersal system. I guess the
weather gods had accepted the sacrifice of the island's power grid,
and they were satisfied for the time being.

Ruby kept lighting candles and lamps —
there were a lot more of them than I would have guessed. Most of
the candles were at least partially burned down. I hadn't noticed
any of this before — some detective I was! — but now I realized
that probably meant they had a lot of power outages at the Amazing
Inn. In terms of the wedding, I couldn't decide if all those
candles were a good thing or a bad one.

While Ruby lit the candles, I moved
Kevin's and my padded chairs back to the dining room
table.

Finally, the whole room was lit. It
throbbed with light, all of it flickering and glowing. It was
vibrant, but not bright, and the burning wicks hissed ever so
slightly. It felt a little like we were all in the middle of a neon
sign.

Still, no one said anything. We all
sat down again, positioning ourselves in chairs and on couches so
we were more or less in a circle now.

It was funny: we could have easily
kept going with the bachelor party, with whatever else our friends
had planned. The fact that the power was out didn't really change
anything. We'd turned down the lights before for Nate's striptease,
and Min's party-light music speaker had a battery, so we could turn
that on again if we wanted.

But the vibe in the room had changed
into something different — more subdued, more sober. Somehow the
bachelor party part of the evening was over, and we all knew it,
but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was a prelude to
something else, only the first course of a gourmet dinner. The
difference is, I don't think anyone, not even Min and Gunnar, knew
what came next.

"That was really fun before," I said
at last, meaning the bachelor party. "We really appreciate
it."

Kevin looked up. "Yeah," he said.
"Totally unexpected."

"Although I'm disappointed we didn't
play Pin the Cock on the Jock," I added.

The second the words were out of my
mouth, I remembered the room included a seventy-four year-old
woman, Vernie. But of course she laughed harder at my joke than
anyone else, and I reminded myself that I needed to stop worrying
about her, that she could more than hold her own in this
crowd.

"It was Gunnar's idea," Otto
said.

This made me smile, the idea of Gunnar
planning all this. He'd also managed to use the party to diffuse
the tension at dinner earlier — something that had been beyond
me.

"No," he said. "Everyone helped. We
did it via email."

In the silence that followed, the
candles hissed and the rain dispersal system trickled.

Talk about a different
vibe
, I thought. I glanced over at Kevin,
but he still looked anxious, worried about the wedding.

"I wasn't sure I wanted to
come this weekend," Ruby said quietly. "I didn't know what it was
going to be like. I don't know anyone except for Min. And this is
someone's
wedding
weekend. I didn't want to intrude."