The bet

Fiction, about two adults over 18. The dartboard cost eleven pounds. Neither of us has ever admitted out loud that we both wanted to lose, and neither of us ever will.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

There is a dartboard in our garage that we bought in 2019 for a party and used twice. It hangs slightly too high because Wesley put it up by eye and I said nothing at the time, which is a whole other story.

In March I lost at it deliberately and I have never told him.

Here is the problem the bet solves, and it took us four years to invent our way round to it.

I cannot ask. I have tried. I have got as far as a whole sentence twice and both times it came out of me in a strangled register that made us both laugh, and once you have laughed you cannot get back to it that evening. And Wesley cannot offer, because Wesley is constitutionally incapable of proposing something that might make me uncomfortable, which is one of the four or five reasons I married him and is also, in this specific instance, a catastrophe.

So we had a situation. Two adults, married eleven years, both of whom wanted the same Saturday evening and neither of whom could produce the sentence.

It was Wesley who said, in the car, apropos of nothing, "We should play for it."

The rules took longer to agree than most things we have ever agreed, including the wedding.

Best of three. Ordinary 501, no fancy variants, because a fancy variant would have made it obvious we were taking it seriously. Loser takes the forfeit.

Number agreed beforehand, because we had both read enough to know that deciding that afterwards is how people end up somewhere they did not intend to be. A cap on it. And a rule that either of us could call the whole thing off at any point up to and including standing in the garage with the darts in hand, no reason required, no follow-up conversation.

That last one is the bit I would put in bold if this were the kind of page that has bold. We wrote it all down in the notes app in the kitchen on a Wednesday like people planning a bathroom.

The forfeit itself was modest. The number stays with us. It is nobody's business, and it is the least interesting thing in this entire account. It was small enough that either of us could have proposed it in a sentence, on any evening, at any point in eleven years.

That is what I would want somebody reading this to notice. We did not build an elaborate mechanism because the thing we wanted was extreme. We built it because neither of us could say a short sentence out loud in our own kitchen, and a dartboard was cheaper than becoming different people.

The garage in March is roughly the temperature of a fridge.

He put the heater on. I was wearing a body warmer over a jumper, which is not the outfit anybody imagines for any of this, and we had a bottle of something open that neither of us drank more than a glass of, because we had also agreed that.

The first leg was an absolute shambles. Two double-twenty attempts that hit the wall. A dart that bounced off the wire and went under the freezer and needed a torch. He got the giggles about it and could not throw for a full minute, and I stood there with my arms folded telling him it was a disgrace, and it was, and for about ten minutes it was purely and simply two people in a cold garage being idiots.

I want that on the record, because everything written about this subject makes it sound solemn, and most of the evenings I would actually describe as successful have had a bit in the middle where somebody was under a freezer with a torch.

He won the first leg. I won the second, properly, by a mile, which surprised us both and which I was insufferable about.

And then there was a third leg, and the atmosphere in that garage changed by about fifteen degrees in the wrong direction.

Nobody said anything. He picked the darts out of the board and handed them over and did not look at me, and I noticed my hands were not steady, and I told myself it was the cold.

Now. The thing I have never told him.

I was on double eight. I have hit double eight perhaps a hundred times in that garage. It is my double. If you woke me at three in the morning and put a dart in my hand I would hit double eight.

And I looked at it, and I thought about what winning would mean, which was another six months of neither of us being able to say the sentence, and a very pleasant evening watching something on iPlayer.

I put it in the five.

Not obviously. Not into the wall. Into the five, which is right next to it, and which is exactly where a nervous person misses.

He won three darts later and there was a silence in that garage that I could have leaned on.

Then he said, "Right," in a voice that was working extremely hard to sound normal, and put the darts back in the box, and switched the heater off, and said, "In you come, then."

And that was that. We went up the two steps into the kitchen and the entire evening turned over, and I did not have to ask for a single part of it, and neither did he.

That is the whole trick. That is what a bet is for. Not chance. Deniability. Two people who both wanted something got to have it while each of them privately believed the other one had been let off the hook by the darts.

Afterwards, on the sofa, he said, "You never miss double eight."

I said, "It was freezing in there."

He said, "Mm," and left it, and put the football on, and that was the end of it and always will be. He knows. I know he knows. He knows I know he knows. And there is a version of this where we say all that out loud and I think it would cost us something we cannot easily replace.

We have played eleven times since. He has won seven. I have stopped counting how many of those were real, and I have a strong suspicion that at least two of his losses were as manufactured as mine, because there was a night in October when a man who has thrown darts since he was nineteen managed to score twenty-six with three darts and looked at the floor while he did it.

The board still hangs too high. I still have not mentioned it.

Somebody could reasonably ask why two grown adults who have been married for over a decade need a game of darts to arrange an evening they both want. I have thought about it. The honest answer is that we do not need it.

We could do it the other way. We have tried the other way, and the other way requires one of us to stand in a kitchen and say a sentence out loud, and the board cost eleven pounds and is already up.