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“Anagrams.”
Wes looked up at Gunn, his fingers lightly
tracing the letters one last time before he reached for his pen. “Simple letters, we’re looking at…”
he glanced back at the word in front of him, “five, plus three for the M,” he looked back up at Gunn, “possibly
the most overlooked letter, you understand,” and then back at the pad in his hand. “Triple letter score for the
G, that’s six, second triple letter score for the S, that’s three, for a total of seventeen.”
He grinned triumphantly as his pen flashed faster. “Add to that the bonus score for using all seven tiles gives a grand
total of sixty-seven,” he allowed a bit of a smug grin as he added, “not to mention the somewhat delicious synchronicity
of actually playing the word ‘anagrams’ in a game such as this one. And that would bring my score to 114 against
yours of….310.”
Wesley frowned, the pen dropping to his lap. “Well, that hardly seems correct. It’s
simple math! I couldn’t have possibly made an error…”
“Your error,” Gunn said,
reaching for his own tray, “was using three A’s in one word near the end of the game, passing the last
two times – even though we both knew you could play – so that you could go for the bingo and then making a cheap
ass move like adding an S.”
“Plurality is a legitimate strategy,” Wesley argued. “It
says so right in the…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gunn nodded, placing his tiles. “In the rules you
insisted on reading. Who the hell needs to read the rules to Scrabble?”
Wesley ignored him, reaching for the
bag of tiles and drawing. His face fell as the letters were revealed and then quickly smoothed when he saw Gunn’s knowing
grin.
“All right,” Gunn said, leaning back, “triple letter on the C, six; one point for using
one of those carefully hoarded A’s of yours; point a piece for the U and the L; five for the K;
plus a double word score. Not got the synchronicity of anagrams, but cock ain’t bad.”
Wesley choked
on his beer. “I believe that’s pronounced ‘cawl-k’.”
Gunn shook his head, slowly grinning.
“You don’t say the L.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “You ever done any
caulking, Wes?”
“Other than ‘cocking’ up this game rather badly, no,” Wes muttered, lowering
his eyes to tally the score. He smiled as he totaled. “And that’s only thirty points. Doesn’t quite match
my sixty-seven, does it?”
“Nope,” Gunn said, shaking the remaining tiles from the bag. “But
I blocked you on the triple word score, got rid of the K, used the last U so that Q you just drew ain’t
worth shit…and I’m only left with two letters.”
Wesley looked down at his tray of consonants
and then at the deflated letter bag Gunn tossed on the table, sighing. “Bugger.”
Gunn chuckled and reached
for his beer, the bottle just brushing the inside of Wesley’s thigh as he drew his arm back.
Wesley shifted away,
his eyes still on the tiles. “Stop that. I’m concentrating.”
Gunn shrugged, letting the bottle linger
for a moment longer before lifting it to his lips. “Just reminding you of the game stakes.”
“Charles,”
Wesley said as he searched his memory for an instance in which any combination QWLNNRT was a word, “at no time
did I actually agree to your proposal of, ‘loser blows the winner.’”
“No,” Gunn said,
“what I said was…”
“What you said,” Wesley interrupted, moving the tiles about as if
a word had occurred to him, “was ‘I’m bored, Cordy’s not due back for an hour, how about a blow job’?
And then I countered with, ‘Not in Cordy’s flat, how about a game,’ and then Dennis knocked the Scrabble
board out of the top of the closet.”
Gunn leaned back against the couch, his legs falling open and the beer
bottle dangling between them. “You can remember all of that, but you can’t remember how many vowels there are
in Scrabble?”
“Fifty points were worth all of those A’s,” Wesley answered, lifting the
T to play on ‘plan’ and then realizing it was blocked by Gunn’s K. He tossed the T
back down in disgust. “This game is positively asinine. Pass.”
Gunn set his beer on the floor and scooped
up his remaining two tiles. “You’re just mad ‘cause I wouldn’t let you use any of your Watcher’s
school words.”
“There are several words from demonic languages that are in current English usage,”
Wesley said hotly, his eyes narrowing as Gunn’s tiles neared the board. “Dwonken weed is as common in magic shops
as eye of newt and therefore totally homogenized into the vernacular. No different than playing ‘pizza’.”
“Yeah, well,” Gunn said, adding an E and a D to the end of ‘caulk’, “when
I can pick up dwonken on any corner in LA, I’ll let you have that one. And you can’t play ‘pizza,’
there’s only one Z.” He looked back at Wes, grinning. “Fourteen points. And I’m out.”
Wesley glared down at the game board, noting the way the C in Gunn’s winning word seemed to smile back
at him mockingly and the D seemed to swell, almost…pregnant with smug satisfaction. “Five degrees in languages,
no less than fourteen Silver Arrows won in vocabulary matches, and I’m beaten by caulk.”
“Beaten
by cock,” Gunn corrected, laughing, as he reached for Wes. “I had my mind on the stakes.”
Wesley
brushed him off, getting to his feet. “And I had mine on the words.” He swept the game board up angrily, reaching
for the box.
Gunn stood up slowly, moving up behind him. “Whoa, whoa,” he said, reaching for Wesley’s
hands, stilling them. “It’s just a game, Wes, they’re just words.”
Wesley stared back at him,
silent, and Gunn backed away, raising his hands. “All right, I promise, no more ‘caulk’ jokes, okay? You
know I get mouthy when I’m bored.”
Wesley looked away from him, back down at the tiles on the board. “But
they aren’t just words, Gunn, they…this is what I do. Finding the right words, knowing their meaning, how
to use them, and yet it seems that in the moments I need them most, I can’t find the right ones.” Wesley set the
game board on the table, rubbing his hand tiredly over his face. “Can’t make them count.”
Gunn crossed
his arms, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Wesley. “Somethin’ tells me we’re not talking about Scrabble,
anymore. Sounds like we’re gettin’ awful close to bringing up his name, again.”
Wesley looked
back at Gunn, started to speak, and then shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Now why ruin a perfectly boring day with
that? No, it’s just the game, and me acting like a right prig. Ticked off because my cleverly executed use of language
got beaten by a…”
“By a high school dropout who got a triple word score on ‘tongue’,”
Gunn finished, pulling Wesley in for a kiss.
Wesley’s lips met Gunn’s hesitantly in that brief moment the
newness of their kisses seemed to still have. Almost questioning the newness - Is this okay? Are we really doing this?
- and then quickly flaring with heat when the unspoken answer was always yes. Kisses dark and filled with promise that they
wouldn’t be the last, but light and almost comforting, as well, soothing each other in this new way that had seemed
to grow so easily out of the old.
Wesley’s hands were gripping the smooth, warm back of Gunn’s neck, his
lips and tongue fighting for dominance and finding acceptance, and then he pulled away, sighing lightly.
“Tongue.
Yes, I noticed a slight…theme in most of your word choices.” He looked at Gunn and then back down at the game
board. “Sexy.”
“Which gave me a double letter score on the X.”
“Thrust.”
Gunn
shrugged. “Only worth five, but the look on your face…”
“Swallow.”
“Which
you played off of with promise?” Gunn grinned.
“It wasn’t really a question, Charles,”
Wesley answered, his hands going to Gunn’s belt.
Gunn reached down, grabbing the hem of his shirt and pulling
it over his head. He grinned at Wesley’s questioning look and said, “Don’t want anything gettin’ in
your way.”
Wesley’s hands eased slowly down Gunn’s thighs, drawing his jeans inch by inch, denim
rasping against skin, chill bumps rising and hairs standing on end from the rough, slow slide. Wesley slid his hands back
up, palms teasing against the hairs, brushing away the chills, until they cupped the firm lower curves of Gunn’s ass.
He began to lower them back onto the couch, and then Gunn surged against him, his hands going to Wesley’s waist.
“Want
you to stroke it, English,” Gunn murmured his lips against Wesley’s throat as he whipped off the belt, tossing
it to the couch and his fingers dropped to Wesley’s fly, tugging it open. “Want your mouth full of me, your hand
full of you, and, fuck…”
Wesley’s hand wrapped around him, sliding down easy and then jerking
back up roughly, friction and then glide. And then they were falling back, Gunn’s arms draping the back of the
couch, his legs falling open and then curving back, cradling Wesley between them.
Wesley’s lips were opening
around the tip of Gunn’s cock, one hand tight around the base as the other dropped lower, closing around his own cock
and matching himself stroke for lick.
They had a second to hear the keys rattling in the lock before the bathroom
door began slamming closed and then open, closed and then open in warning and they both scrambled to their feet. Gunn managed
to get his boxers up and mostly closed, but Wesley was only able to grab the Scrabble board and hold it in front of him before
Cordy walked in.
She staggered in under the weight of several large shopping bags full of bright purple flyers bearing
the drawing of angel. Or possibly a lobster. “Guys? A little help?”
“Really can’t.”
“A bit of a problem at the moment, actually…”
Cordy dropped the bags to the floor with a
sigh, and then turned to look at them, her eyebrows arching over her sunglasses.
“Listen, Cordy,” Gunn
said, stepping forward and tripping over the jeans around his ankles and then shuffling back behind Wes. “There’s
something we need to tell…”
“Strip Scrabble!” Wesley interrupted hastily. “Boring day.
Anything to pass the time, you see, so we…”
“Yeah,” Gunn said, nodding slowly and then smirking
at Wes. “I won with caulk.”
“Cock?” Cordy asked, and then pushed her sunglasses firmly
against her nose, turning toward the bedroom and pushing the bags ahead of her. “You know what? I don’t want to
know.”
As she headed into the bedroom and Phantom Dennis closed the door helpfully behind her, Gunn turned to
Wes. “We really do need to tell her eventually.”
“I realize that,” Wesley sighed, dropping
the Scrabble board and zipping his trousers. Carefully. “I’m just searching for a better way than just blurting
it out. If she could only learn in some…organic way, rather than having to make a big announcement…”
“You
got somethin’ more organic than lettin’ her walk in you goin’ down on me?” Gunn asked, pulling
his t-shirt back over his head and reaching for his jeans. He laughed. “Guess we could challenge her to a game of Scrabble
and spell out WE ARE DOING IT and see if she catches on….”
Wesley chuckled,
bending to retrieve the scattered tiles from the floor. “We’ll tell her. We will,” he said firmly
as Gunn tilted his head, looking down at him. Wesley scooped the pieces up, dropping them back into the box. “We just…have
to find the right words.”
“Way you play, you’re not gonna find ‘em there,” Gunn said,
reaching a hand to haul Wesley back up against him and kissing him lightly on the lips. “Besides, that Strip Scrabble
thing? You really think she bought it?”
Wesley shrugged, grinning. Gunn nodded. “I figure she’s
just waitin’ on us. But she can wait,” Gunn said, his hand pressing against Wesley’s back and then slipping
lower, curving around his ass as he turned him around toward the door and guided him forward. “‘Cause I still
got my winnings to collect. Gonna show you a whole new meaning to ‘caulking gun’.”
“You’re
not letting that go any time soon, are you?” Wesley murmured.
“Not ‘til I hear you say it right,
English. Can’t say it – can’t do it.”
~End~
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