The words he’s dropping on the board are the things people only say in 19th-century epistolary novels. QUIXOTIC for thirty-two points. ZEPHYR on a triple word score for forty-eight. BYZANTINE spanning two double word scores for what I’m pretty sure was an illegal amount of points but I was too busy staring at the board in horror to challenge it.
When he said he had an extensive vocabulary, he wasn’t exaggerating. He wasn’t even being modest—he was underselling it.
My rack of tiles is a sad, desolate place. I’ve managed CAT. MOON. TRYING. I played BEACH earlier and felt a brief, fluttering moment of pride until Leo casually added an ES to the end, stealing the points and my dignity in one fell swoop. I suddenly feel the intense, urgent need to go to a library and stay there for three years.
The wine is definitely helping with the sting of defeat. I’m on my second glass, and while I’m aware that “cool girls” in books probably swirl the liquid and talk about “notes of oak” or whatever, I’m mostly just enjoying the way it’s blurring the edges of the room.
The weird thing is how easy the talking has been. Usually, with employers, there’s a conversational boundary you don’t cross—a polite, sterile land of “Is Emma eating her peas?” and “The laundry is folded.” But with Leo, we’ve tumbled into this effortless, rapid-fire tempo that feels entirely too natural. We’ve covered the fact that Emma’s preschool teacher is apparently prepping her students for the LSATs based on their homework load, and we’ve had a near-brawl over the architectural merits of the Chrysler Building versus the Empire State. He’s a traditionalist, I’m a fan of the Art Deco gargoyles, and for a second, I forgot he was the one signing my paychecks. We even dissected the Friends versus Seinfeld debate with an intensity that bordered on the religious, and I fought so hard for the cultural superiority of Central Perk that I think I actually saw him start to concede. He tried to argue for Kramer’s physical comedy, but I shut that down with a three-minute monologue on Rachel Greene’s hair and the fundamental necessity of Phoebe Buffay.
Then Leo drops JEJUNE on a double-letter score. He starts tallying the points with this quiet, smug satisfaction that says he knows exactly how smart he is and he’s enjoying the view from the top.
I pick up a few of my useless tiles and chuck them at him.
“Hey!” He laughs, ducking a ‘J’ that bounces off his shoulder.
“That’s a fake word,” I say, trying to keep a straight face. “You’re just making up sounds now.”
“It’s a very real word, Annie.”
“Fine. Use it in a sentence.”
He leans back, his eyes dancing, a devastatingly handsome smirk spreading across his face. “Your attempts at Scrabble are jejune at best.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
He’s right. I don’t. Not even a little bit.
He takes a sip of his wine, his glass nearly as empty as mine, and watches me try to make something—anything—out of a W, an I, and a bunch of nothing.
“So Eileen wasn’t your mother,” he says, his voice losing the playful edge. “She was your…nanny?”
I shrug, the word feeling too flimsy for what she actually was. “That’s the title on the tax forms. But she basically raised me.”
“For the record,” he says, his mouth quirking into that half-smile that does funny things to my pulse, “I think her advice to be more ridiculous is hilarious, considering you’re already the most ridiculous person I know.”
I throw another tile. He catches it this time—clean, mid-air, like it was nothing.
“Eileen’s a spitfire,” I say. “And a genius.”
“Clearly.” He pauses, his gaze settling on me. It’s not the casual look of a boss anymore. It’s a researcher looking for amissing piece of history. “Why a nanny, though? Were your parents just…always working? Busy?”
“You could say that.” I finally slot my tiles into the board. WISTFUL. Twenty-four points. Not a JEJUNE, but a far cry from CAT. I’ll take it.
Leo quirks an eyebrow. “That was a good one.”
But he isn’t looking at the board. He’s staring at me, and I suddenly feel very seen and very un-blurred by the wine.
“What?” I ask, my voice sounding smaller than I intended.
“You do this thing,” he says slowly, his elbows resting on the table as he leans toward me. “Every time I bring up California or your family, you perform this incredibly graceful verbal pivot. You never actually talk about it.”
“That’s not true. I’m a very talkative person. Ask anyone.”
“Well, that part’s true,” he says, his eyes searching mine. “You’ll talk about Cori and Marcus until the sun comes up. You’ll talk about Eileen. You’ll even talk about Ernie, the showtune-singing man from the corner—”
“He has a very beautiful falsetto,” I interject.
