“Okay, I admit it. I can whittle. But I’m really more of a blowing shit up kind of guy.”
She just shakes her head at this and gives me an exasperated look, like that’s exactly what she expected.
My girl is a light packer, so it only takes her a few minutes to get the entire contents of her suitcase out and into drawers. It’s only once she’s zipping the suitcase back up and sliding it into the closet that she seems to notice the elephant in the room.
Or rather, the king-size bed in the room. Her gaze falls on it and she freezes.
“Oh.” She draws out that single syllable, like she’s framing an entire legal argument in her mind. “Only one bed. I had requested doubles.”
“Sure,” I say. “That would’ve been fine, when you were here with Trevor, your gay best friend from high school, but I asked the skipper to change it to a room with a kingsize bed. That’s more believable for a fake boyfriend scenario.”
“I suppose,” she says slowly and doubtfully.
She still hasn’t dragged her gaze away from that bed. I watch while she swallows, then worries her lip between her teeth.
I nearly groan in response.
I don’t want to be presumptuous here, but I hope to hell she’s imagining the two of us in that bed, doing all of those same unspeakable things that I was imagining just a few minutes ago.
I wait until her gaze darts back to mine, her cheeks suddenly pink, before I smile reassuringly and say, “Don’t worry. I’m happy to sleep on the floor.”
“Hmm.”
I can’t tell if that humming noise she makes is of disapproval or annoyance. Hoping to work my way back into her good graces, I unzip my bag and pull out my secret weapon.
She gasps when she sees it. “Travel Scrabble?”
I grin and unfold the board onto the small table by the windows. “If you want to go back to the palapa, I noticed they have a full-sized board there we could play on.”
She wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Have you have ever played Scrabble with a room full of lawyers? It’s the worst.”
“It can’t be worse than playing with your family,” I tease. The first time I spent leave at her family’s house in Saddle Creek, they collectively kicked my ass in Scrabble. After that, Cassie suggested she and I play Words with Friends to get me up to speed.
“Okay, true,” she concedes. “My family is pretty bad. But the problem with lawyers is they take all the fun out of it because they’re sticklers for the rules. No proper names. No foreign words.”
“No cheating,” I counter.
She waggles her hand in that’s-iffy gesture. “No creativity.” Then she turns to me, beaming. “But this is brilliant. Because now we can play in peace without having them loom over us being critical.”
“Oh, is that how it would’ve gone down?”
“Yes. You do not know how bad it is playing scrabble with a bunch of lawyers.”
“I’ve been playing words with friends with a lawyer for a year now and I think it’s pretty great, honestly. Highlight of my week.”
“Um, that’s not resounding praise, though, is it?”
“It isn’t?”
“No. Don’t forget, my brother is in your team. Now, obviously, I don’t know many details, but I know you've been through some pretty bad shit.”
“Your point?”
“Just that it shouldn’t be too hard to make the cut into the list of best parts of your week.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, sometimes shit is bad. But there are always good things, too. I’ve seen some amazing things too. I’ve been to places most people never go.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she quips, making a dismissive wafting gesture with her hand. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain….”
