Nico sipped his coffee warily as Rachel glared at him from across the table. A moment earlier, she had stormed into the room carrying a slightly misshapen cardboard box, slammed it on the table, and crossed her arms as plastic game pieces spilled onto the table.
"What is this?" he asked after a moment.
The tone of his voice suggested he was only asking to humor her, which only fueled the anger that was quickly building up inside her.
"This," she said, "is Monopoly."
"And why is it here?"
"We are going to play it."
He let out a derisive snort as he placed his mug down in front of him. The look he shot Rachel was one of sardonic amusement, as if to say, do you really expect me to play that? It made her tremble with indignation so that she clenched her teeth and balled her hands up into fists to keep herself from responding.
From the moment she woke up that morning, Nico had been driving her crazy. She had walked downstairs only to find him sitting at the table, downing cup after cup of coffee, mumbling excuses about how he had never gone to bed that night. When she offered to make breakfast, he made some offhand comment about how he would rather not eat at all than eat her cooking. When she started talking about her studies, his eyes glazed over and he tuned her out. When she asked how he had been, he responded in curt, one-word answers until she gave up altogether. And worst of all, he moaned and groaned and grumbled nonstop about how bored he was until it was all she could do not to shout at him.
Of course, this was nothing new to them. Every time they spent too much time apart, their reunion was marred by their difficult temperaments. Rachel and Nico had grown so accustomed to each other, so absorbed in their happy routine, that they did not know how to be around each other after their routine was broken. When Nico had to go to camp, or Rachel had to visit her parents, or anything drove them apart from each other, they returned feeling foreign to each other, not knowing how to behave anymore. Both knew why the tension was there, but they never addressed it. It was easiest just to take it out on each other until they fell back into their routine. But three weeks without seeing each other disrupted their relationship so much that Rachel found herself wishing Nico would leave again, or at least stop smirking at her like the thought of playing a board game was the most ridiculous concept he had ever been confronted with.
"Choose a piece, di Angelo. We're playing," she told him, shoving aside everything on the table in order to unfold the game board.
Forty-five minutes later, Nico was glaring at Rachel for an entirely different reason.
"You're cheating," he said.
"Nico, nobody cheats at Monopoly."
"You do. That or you purposely chose a game you knew I would be bad at or something."
"Six year olds play this game, Nico. You can't expect anyone to be bad at it."
The tone of her voice as she smiled too sweetly at him only made Nico more certain that the odds were stacked against him. She was too confident, too smug, too satisfied with herself for him to accept defeat. Bitterness brewed in his stomach until he could practically feel his fatal flaw tugging at the back of his mind, rising slowly but surely to the surface. He hated losing, but most of all, he hated dealing with Rachel after she won. Desperately, he racked his brain for a battle-plan to pull together a victory. Then, of course, he remembered it was Monopoly and that strategy would do him no good.
"It's your turn, Nico," said Rachel. "Unless, you decided to give up?"
A dark look crossed his face and for a moment, she expected him to flip the table over and storm away, or throw some sort of tantrum. Instead, he reached across the table, twined his fingers firmly in her hair, and kissed him. She froze in confusion before giving in to him, smiling against his lips for a moment before kissing him back. In her frustration, she had forgotten how much she had missed him when he was gone. But with his hands in her hair and his lips on hers and his familiar scent so close and so known to her, it hardly seemed important to her that he had been irritable only moments ago.
That is, until she pulled away and saw his game piece in an entirely different place on the board than it had been before.
"Nico di Angelo, you filthy cheater," she said, slightly proud of how outraged she could sound when she felt so breathless.
"Nobody cheats at Monopoly, Rachel," he leaned back in his chair and grinned, and if she had ever been uncertain, she knew in that moment, exasperated as she was, that she never wanted him to leave for so long again.
