Scrabble

Write about an intense game of Scrabble that takes an ugly turn for the worse.


It was the same thing every Saturday. Pop had been gone over a year, yet I still found myself lost here on the weekends with the people that knew him best. Maybe it was my way of being close to him or maybe my life was just that boring.

Benny once again spent three minutes just to end up spelling out "ME" out of his tiles. Always just one or two letters at a time. It was predictable. His favorite words were me, he, she, or his big scorer they. What was it with the pronouns?

And just like the six hundred times we'd played before June would raise herself from the chair and stare down at the board as if her bird's eye view gave her an advantage the rest of us knew nothing about. June was a competitor. She was always the first to yell if she thought a word didn't make sense. She played "YOUTH" on the board and sat back with a grin as I calculated her triple word score.

Harry was the last to play. If we didn't have a timer set he would sit there all day just staring at the board. He always held that one tile between his thumb and forefinger as if it were some unspoken rule it must be the first letter of the word he spelled. And with barely a second to spare he placed four letters on the board to spell out "TROP".

The war began.

"Harry you can't spell words that don't exist." June shouted. She set a gnarled hand on the table and shot him a look that could have melted steel.

"I can do whatever'n I wanna do!" Benny exclaimed, always the first to get caught up in the excitement of an argument that didn't involve him.

"Trop isn't a word. Ask Lucy." June pointed a finger at me.

They all stared because I was the peace keeper. And as their words became louder and about as hateful as 80 year old people can be, I suddenly wished I'd stopped coming to the home after Grandpa died.

'Settle down. Harry, do you have an E?" I asked. He looked down at his plaque but shook his head, the folds of wrinkles echoing even afterwards.

"I don't want to play an E. Trop. It's a word. Look it up. It's like tropical but it's not." The same argument everytime. Every non-word was like a word only not, when it came to Harry.

I was about to put my super savvy reasoning skills to good use when he walked in. Tall. Dark. Almost handsome. Eyes so dark green it was like looking through an old pop bottle. There was the slightest hint of dark stubble growing around his jaw. He looked dangerous and seductive in jeans that fit the curve of his behind just so. The plain white t-shirt looked almost too small against his massive frame and wide shoulders. He was barrel chested with arms rippling in muscle.

Even the smell of him was masculine and erotic. Smokey sagewood. So musky and deep that I wanted to growl at him before pouncing.

"Damn this game!" June swiped her gnarled left hand across the table, sending the board and the tiles flying through the air. Both Benny and Harry coward as the sky rained lettered tiles. He smiled over the shoulder of an orderly who directed him with a few words and hand movements. If I hadn't been stabbed in the eye with tile debris I might have gotten the courage up to ask the stranger his name before he disappeared down a hall.

As it was, wounded and looking foolish, I couldn't very well approach the sexy stranger. But I vowed I'd be back for another game of Scrabble when my feeble adversaries had calmed from the exictement of battle.