The Almost Sisters(51)

I remembered his voice as deep, but not this deep. Maybe this was his bedtime voice, a bit scratchy, full of sleepy gravel. It made an invitation to play a board game sound a little dirty. I’d also forgotten how soft-spoken he was. In the bar I’d had to lean in to hear him, which had put us close, then closer, until I’d taken him up to my room to get as close as possible. Twice. Now I was already leaning toward the screen like a dork, as if this could help me hear him better. I sat back and turned his volume up.

“I haven’t played this since I was a kid,” I told him.

“Me neither,” he said, but I immediately got an invite, so he clearly knew the program.

“I smell a ringer,” I said, accepting. “How’d you know how to set the game up?”

“I may have . . . um, logged on early to learn how. Smooth, huh?”

“Very smooth,” I said. “Especially the part where you just told me.”

He laughed but didn’t answer. I stared at my letters in a silence that felt more awkward the longer it went on. I’d drawn bad tiles: B F F D R Y N. No vowels, unless I wanted to count that wishy-washy Y. Luckily, he had to play the opening word. Maybe he was quiet because he had bad tiles, too. Still he’d been easier to “talk” to when we hadn’t actually been talking.

PHONE appeared in the center of the board, a word long enough to get him to the double-word square. As soon as it was played, he said, “So when are you going to come back through Atlanta?”

Pretty bold. Maybe the awkwardness was all on my side?

Well, I knew things he didn’t know.

“Why do you care?” I said, and it came out coy. Maybe even saucy. God, I hoped not saucy. Saucy was like flirting plus.

“You were the best first date I’d had in years,” he answered, so straightforward that it paused my breath.

“Oh, that was a date?” I said at last. I could hear I’d overcorrected on the saucy factor. Now I sounded prim and fusty.

“Maybe not at the start. It sure . . . ended like one.” So soft. I turned his volume up again, trying to stop the feeling that he was whispering into my ear.

“My first dates don’t end like that,” I said, even more prim.

“Well, come back to Atlanta. I’d like to see how you end second ones.” So damn flirty.

“God, you talk like such a player,” I told him.

“Not at all! G-g-g—” He was so surprised he got stuck on the G. He paused, then said, “Mm, see? Taking to pretty women makes me nervous.”

“Nice save, feminist,” I told him, and he laughed, unquelled by my starch.

“I like it when you talk to me like you’re a . . . schoolmarm.” That made me grin. I’d forgotten this, too, the odd cadence of his conversation. He took pauses in midsentence, as if waiting for the exact right word to come, and most of the time it was not the word I’d been expecting.

I looked at my tiles, and every word that I could make seemed dirty. I didn’t want to lay down BODY, much less BOFF. BROOD was out of the freaking question. “Brood,” as a word, was even more pregnant than I was. I finally played BENDY, and the second I hit the play button, I realized “bendy” sounded sexy, too.

“You didn’t strike me as the nervous type at FanCon,” I said, to cover my embarrassment.

“Well, you know. I’d had a couple beers, and I never th— I didn’t come up to you to make a move. I only wanted a picture for my Facebook feed.”

I said, “You understand that’s exactly what a player would say?”

He chuckled, pausing to play the word YOUNG off my Y, then said, “Is it? Well, full—revelation. I’ve had three serious girlfriends. And one was in high school, so I don’t think she counts. I’m not mmm . . .” He hummed to a stop for a second. Then he said, “You’re really easy to talk to.” It was sweet, and maybe even true. I swallowed, awkward again, and busied myself laying tiles. He seemed to feel it, because he instantly lightened the mood. “Did you just bingo? Now who’s the ringer?”

I laughed, because I had, playing OFFERING down to his G, and it was on a double-word square to boot. “Suck on that!”

“Oh, girl, you’re gonna smoke me!” he said, but cheerful about it. I liked it that he didn’t have that boring, e-peen gamer thing about losing to a woman.

By the second game, though, our board looked like it was being played by third-graders with small vocabs and no regard for strategy. We took huge pauses between turns, then set down easy things like BATCH and MEAT and RANK and CAT. Placing tiles was only a way to keep our hands busy while we talked and talked and talked.

I liked how he spoke about his family. They sounded like a close-knit bunch. He was especially tight with his father, whom he described as an “old-school nerd,” and his middle sister, Vonda, who had beaten breast cancer last year. They gathered every Christmas, and all spent their summer vacations together at a rented beach house in Savannah. It was after 1:00 a.m. before my pregnant body started signaling that it was going to sleep, very soon, whether I wanted to or not.

“Yeah. I’m tired, too,” he told me. A pause, and then he said, quiet, “I gotta work Monday. I can’t be up late before a day full of surgery. I’m off Thursday. You want to mmm . . . return Wednesday night and . . . word-Zerg me again?”