Yes, I’m nervous. Nervous about things ending. Nervous about the upcoming challenges. We’re so close. But I’m just trying to live in the moment and appreciate every moment we have in the game. This really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I doubt I’ll ever experience anything like this again.
—Nell’s Confessional, Day 14
We need to report to check-in at six in the morning. This time, we don’t oversleep.
Before we leave the cabana, Luke kisses me breathless, cupping my face possessively and awakening desire straight down to my toes. “You ready?”
I nod. Even if I’m not, we’re doing this. It’s hot and sticky, even this early in the morning, so I’m wearing the bikini—just because Luke gave it to me—and the one pair of shorts I brought. He’s just wearing his board shorts. For a moment, I wonder if it’s possible to just stay here and seal out the outside world and hibernate together.
But we’ve got a race to win. We’re determined now.
The sun is just rising as we report to the platform and see Will Wang and the other couples. “Welcome back, remaining couples! We’re now going to bring you Marriage Test Number Four! In this challenge, we’ll be finding out how well the two of you have become aligned over the past two weeks. We’re going to have couples standing back-to-back, women on one side, men on the other, wearing earphones to drown out any sound. At the count of three, we’ll begin showing you sets of two words. Your job, simply, is to shout out one or the other. These words are going to come lightning fast, so you’ll need to be quick. The couple who has the most matches at the end of the round will receive a fifteen-minute boost on their starting time. Contestants, take your places.”
I look over at Luke, and he winks at me, as if that fifteen minutes doesn’t matter in the least. It does matter, though. We’re dead last. If we want to win, we need all the help we can get.
I take my place on the wooden platform and affix the earphones to my ears. I venture a look over at Luke, who’s doing the same thing behind me. Taking a breath, I stand with my back to him, almost but not quite touching.
Until I feel his hand graze my hip, touch my elbow, and slip down my wrist, finding my own hand. He entwines his fingers with mine and squeezes.
I melt.
“Ready?” Will Wang says, raising a hand. “Set! And go!”
They weren’t kidding when they said the words were going to come fast. I barely have time to think before the screen flashes with a new one. ROMANCE/SEX, LIGHT/DARK, SWEET/SEXY, FAST/SLOW, ROUGH/SMOOTH. I shout out my answers in a jumble until my mouth goes numb. Then, suddenly, the screen goes blank, and Will Wang’s voice is piped through our ears. “Contestants, please remove your headphones and see how you and your spouse did!”
I drop his hand only to pull off the headset. When I turn around, I see the giant scoreboard. Ace and Marta matched only twelve times. Natalie and Brad, sixteen. Ivy and Cody, twenty-seven.
Luke and I? We matched fifty-six times. Out of sixty.
My eyes widen as I take it in, but he’s already hugging me. Hugging me and lifting me up off the ground, pressing me up to his bare chest in a way that makes me wish we could go back to that cabana. He buries his face in my neck and says, “That’s my girl.”
“How did we do that?” I ask, shell-shocked, as the other teams start lining up for the next leg of the race. “Are we psychic?”
He shrugs. Ace and Marta get to start out first, and then the other teams, but now we’re not so desperately far behind as we were when we left Julian. We have a good chance. As Will says, right now it’s anyone’s game.
A few minutes after Brad and Natalie leave, it’s our turn. We step onto the platform, holding hands, and get our clue from Will, who winks at us. “Are you two glued together?” he says, pointing at our joined hands.
At this point, we’ve both gotten good at ignoring his cute comments. I tear open the clue and read it.
“We have to get to the highest point on the island,” I say.
He scans the lush green foliage around us. There are a lot of hills. “Fuck. Where’s that?”