Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Louise
“You can’t use the word CUMSHOT!” Darci protests, her mouth hanging open.
I’m officially dead. I’m full-on wheezing.
I’m laughing so hard I have tears blurring my vision. Sienna has fallen sideways into me on the couch and half behind me, screaming with laughter.
“Says who?” Grandma Jude asks, completely unfazed.
“Where did you even learn that word, Mother?” my mom exclaims, her cheeks turning pink.
Grandma Jude rolls her eyes, picking up her vodka tonic and taking a drink. “Please. It’s all over in those new smutty romances Tessa brings over.”
“Mother!”
“Oh, come now, Rebecca, do you think I haven’t sucked a dick in my day? Just because everything is covered in cobwebs right now—”
Sienna and I slide off the couch onto the floor we’re laughing so hard now. Tess is laughing, too, and Darci is trying not to, but failing miserably. Our poor mom. Her face is priceless.
“You can’t use that word!” Mom insists.
“What are you, the Scrabble police?” Grandma Jude harrumphs, eyeing her daughter. When Mom doesn’t respond, Jude nods. “That’s what I thought. CUMSHOT. Fourteen points.”
“There’s no way that’s a legal word,” Mom mutters, shaking her head.
“Actually, according to Google, ‘The term “cumshot” is generally considered a valid word in Scrabble, but can be debated among players. Ultimately, the decision may depend on the group’s agreement on what constitutes a valid word in the game,” Tessa reads aloud from her phone.
She looks up from her phone screen and shrugs. “I think it should stand.”
Flat on my back on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, I swipe my fingers beneath my lower lashes, wiping the tears away. Oh my god I needed that laugh.
Everyone needs an unhinged and feral granny, I’ve decided.
Not sure I love it all the time, especially when she’s offering to find me a sugar daddy while out for brunch, but I wouldn’t change Grandma Jude for anything. There’s a reason she’s my best friend.
“Well, if we’re allowing dirty words—” Mom mumbles from above the table, and I hear the click of tiles being set down. Sienna and I scramble to climb out from under the table as peals of laughter echo above us. “BLOWJOB. Twenty-one points.”
“ORAL. Four points,” Darci says, laying down her tiles.
I jump up and head to the kitchen, grabbing the bottle of vodka Grandma Jude had brought over and the plastic shot glasses I’d picked up from the corner store on my way home tonight, because I still haven’t unpacked the last of my boxes. And I refuse to drink straight out of the bottle again.
The memory of drinking straight out of the bottle has been forever altered in my brain after sharing that tequila with Zach.
Zach, who I’m fairly certain has been avoiding me.
That familiar pang of rejection squeezes my chest all over again. Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Setting everything down on the coffee table, I pour out six shots and hand them out around the table. Mom and Darci both groan in protest, but take them anyway.
“We’re never going back to regular Scrabble, are we?” Mom asks, sighing as she looks around the table at us.
“Nope,” I say, popping the P and shaking my head. Holding my shot glass up, they follow suit. “To the induction of Dirty Word Scrabble.”
My mom tips her shot back and I laugh when she makes a face as the liquor goes down.
She’s a force to be reckoned with. Having grown up with Grandma Jude as her mom, I suppose she’s had to be. Business smart. Kind to a fault. Loyal as they come.
She and Darci have gotten closer over the last few months since Nolan passed, an unfortunate bond that isn’t fair to either of them. Widows.
Dad from a very brief battle with cancer that took him way too fast six years ago. Nolan from a widow maker heart attack while he was driving. He was only forty-five.
Both gone too soon. Both leaving families. Wives and kids.
None of it’s fair.
Shaking myself out of the melancholy thoughts, I look around the circle of women surrounding me. What a bunch of bad asses.
Fierce. Independent. Confident. Successful. Gorgeous to boot.
Pouring out another round of shots, I raise mine and wait for the others to follow suit. “To the baddest group of women I know.”
“I’ll cheers to that,” Grandma Jude says, lifting her shot glass. “My girls.”