Chapter 15 #3
We fall into a rhythm that is terrifyingly easy.
He takes out the trash while I wipe down the rest of the counters.
We move around each other with the practiced choreography of people who have been doing this for years, rather than months.
It’s the ‘excuse me’ and the ‘just behind you’ of two people who are suddenly, acutely aware of where the other one is in space.
By the time the floor is swept and the counters are reflective enough, the apartment looks like the party never happened. The cat-mermaid’s glittery reign has been suppressed for now.
I head toward the hallway, looking for a clean towel to dry my hands, and tug open a door that definitely isn’t the linen closet.
Instead, I find a graveyard of board games—including Monopoly, Clue, Jenga, Sorry!
and a deck of Uno cards held together by a rubber band.
At the bottom is a Scrabble box, the corners worn down to the grey cardboard.
I walk back to the kitchen where Leo’s trying to get a stubborn streak of frosting off the kitchen table. I hold up the box, the tiles rattling inside. “Want to play?”
Leo looks up, his hands pausing mid-wipe. “You don’t want to do that, Annie.”
“And why not?”
“Because I have an extensive vocabulary and a competitive streak that has been known to end friendships. It’s not going to end well for your ego.”
“Oh, I’m terrified,” I say, already marching the box to the kitchen table. “I suppose I’ll just have to suffer through the crushing weight of your intellectual superiority.”
He laughs. “Don’t say I didn’t give you a fair warning.”
I pivot toward the cabinet and grab the first bottle of red wine I see—something with a label in a language I can’t pronounce. “I’m definitely going to need an anesthetic for this.”
“Again with the hostile takeover of my kitchen,” he says, but he’s smiling.
“At least grab the good stuff.” He reaches past me, his arm brushing mine for a heartbeat that feels entirely too long, and pulls a different bottle from the dark recesses of the cabinet.
It’s a Bordeaux, older, the label yellowed at the edges.
“I didn’t know Scrabble was a black-tie affair,” I say, watching him work the corkscrew with an efficiency that is, frankly, rude.
“The Scrabble isn’t,” he says, meeting my eyes as the cork pops with a satisfying thwack. “But watching me systematically destroy you deserves a vintage.”
“That is a lot of big talk from a man who just admitted he’s a secret Alanis Morissette superfan.”
He pauses, pouring the deep red liquid into two glasses, and gives me a look that is far too charming with it being past midnight. “Touché, Annie. Touché.”
* * *
Twenty minutes in and I can already tell Leo’s going to thoroughly kick my ass.
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 a missing 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.
“I’m sure he does,” Leo smirks. “But I have no idea about your life before you landed in New York. You’ve mentioned Stanford.
You’ve mentioned you’re an only child. You mentioned the engagement.
” He pauses, his gaze softening. “But other than that, there’s nothing.
I don’t know about your family, or your friends back home, or the real reason you’re here. ”
I take a long, slow sip of my wine, letting the tartness of it sit on my tongue.
I knew this was coming. I’ve been building a wall out of witty anecdotes and sarcastic diversions for weeks, but Leo Roussos is apparently an expert at finding the loose bricks. I wish I could have just left the past in a sealed box at the bottom of the East River, but Leo notices everything.
I don’t want him to look at me differently when he knows who my parents are.
When he realizes how poorly I’ve treated them since I left.
I don’t want to address the guilt that sits in the pit of my stomach every single day—this heavy, acidic thing that reminds me that despite my parents being absent, despite them being more interested in their careers than in me, they gave me everything.
They gave me dressage lessons at an equestrian center in Malibu where Olympic riders trained.
Tennis lessons with a coach who’d worked with Andre Agassi.
French tutors who came to the house three times a week.
Spanish tutors after that. Summers in the south of France, late springs in Italy, winters in Aspen.
Holidays in Ireland, with Eileen. I had a credit card with no limit and a Stanford tuition that was paid before I even moved into the dorms. It was a life most people would kill for. They gave me everything.
And yet, they never actually gave me them.
I look down at the Scrabble board and I realize that sometimes, the most expensive things are the ones that leave you the poorest.
“You’re sad.”
He doesn’t ask it. He doesn’t frame it with a sympathetic tilt of the head or a tentative upward inflection. He just states it, like he’s reading a weather report or identifying a specific type of sedimentary rock.
I huff out a laugh. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”