“Really?”
“Sorry, I was just teasing you. I’ll say soda.”
“No, I mean… you’re really going to drink less?”
“Yeah, Emmy. Really.” He saw the stark relief on her face and felt like the lowest kind of asshole. “Jesus, look at you.I don’t know if I can apologize enough for what I put you through.”
Emmy turned the cart toward the checkout area, her hands trembling a little. “I put you through worse, so we’re even.”
*
It was perfect weather for a picnic. Emmy assumed that it was some kind of rule of nature that when two people in a romance novel went on a picnic, the weather would cooperate. Unless, she supposed, those two people needed a reason to kiss passionately—then it would rain so they would have to rush to the car and make out, soaking wet, while the rain drumming on the roof provided appropriate mood and ambience. But she and Will had already gotten the passionate kiss part out of the way, so the sun was shining. A few puffy white clouds drifted over them, borne by the gentle breeze. They found a quiet little patch of grass, spread out the blanket Will had snagged from a pile of clean laundry, and made sandwiches. They drank lukewarm soda/pop and ate two dozen varieties of candy while they played board games.
“Oh my God, I lost my E!”
“What?”
Emmy began searching the blanket, her lap, under her feet. “I had an E! I was going to put ‘pearl’ on that double word score. Where’d it go?”
“Hold on, I got you.” Will pulled out his keys, found Gordon. He turned the little flashlight on and shined it around where Emmy was sitting.
“There you are!” She scooped the tile up from where it had been hiding, obscured by the shadow of her tile tray. “I must have bumped my letters at some point. I didn’t even see it run away.”
Will put his keys back in his pocket. “I don’t know why I helped you when you’re kicking my ass. I should’ve made you take a lost letter penalty.”
“Too late now. Take that!” She put her E, A, R, and L down, using the P from his previous play: CLAP. “Fourteen points for me.”
“No one likes a sore winner.”
“Don’t sulk. You beat me at Battleship.”
“Only because you clustered three of your boats in one corner,” Will pointed out.
“It worked for a while.”
Will tallied her points, then fiddled with his letters. “I’d kill for a T or an S right now.”
“Want to trade? I’d give you an A and an S for a D or a G.”
“That’s not allowed, is it?”
Emmy shrugged. “That’s how we always did it.”
She hadn’t meant to bring up her family’s house rules, but it had come out before she’d thought better of it. Now she couldn’t help but remember all the times she had spent days exactly like this one with them. How she and May had joked that Japanese Scrabble would be way too easy since a ton of words were only one or two characters long.
“When did the Scrabble picnic tradition start?” Will asked.
“I don’t even remember. We liked to play board games as a family. I think we were all feeling cooped up after aparticularly long winter, and my mom just kind of suggested the idea out of the blue. It was the first warm day we’d seen in a long time. May and I helped my dad make bento boxes, and we packed up the car and drove to the park.”
“Sounds fun. I’d like to meet them.”
“You will,” she said with conviction. “You absolutely will.”
“I believe you.”
She wasn’t sure if he did, but she appreciated him saying it. He wanted her to feel better, and she did when he agreed to trade his G for her A and S. Even when he used the tiles she’d given him to earn a good chunk of points by playing FLAYS and using the S to simultaneously turn PEARL into PEARLS.
“What would you name a landscaping company if you had one?” he asked suddenly.
