"Come over."
"What needs to be done? Another contact? Or did someone finally work up the balls to sue your ass?"
"Nothing like that, just a social visit."
Kaiba read his book, leaning comfortably into the couch as he waited. He didn't get a chance to read often, and he figured that waiting for Joey was the perfect excuse to do so. If only he could concentrate on the words; instead his mind was running over his plan.
All things considered, it wasn't his most straightforward idea; there were a hundred and one more effective ways to bring things out into the open between him and Joey: dinner, romance, all-out nudity... But none of that was Kaiba's style; he preferred subtle manipulation when he could get to it, and a game was always a plus.
Kaiba looked away from his book to the Scrabble board sitting on the coffee table. He hadn't played Scrabble in years, and never with anyone but Mokuba. It wasn't one of his favorite games, but it was an okay way to kill time, and every now and then it came in handy. For instance, it was convenient as a game to play with Joey, a game to bring their fruitless flirting to an end, to get his point across...
Or so Kaiba hoped. It was a gamble, but he liked to gamble – if the stakes were worth it.
"Yugi made it to Seattle okay."
Kaiba looked up to see Joey standing in the doorway. He looked a little uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot.
"Good. Have a seat," Kaiba offered, gesturing to the chair adjacent to the corner of the couch. The chair faced the coffee table – it would make playing the game easier.
"So, exactly what sort of social activity is this?" Joey asked as he lowered himself into the seat. His gaze fell to the Scrabble board, and he groaned dramatically. "That's the most pointless game on the face of the planet," he whined.
"That's why we're going to give it a point."
Joey looked at him warily, heading tilting slightly to the left. "How?"
"Instead of randomly throwing words on the board, you need to make them link together in a sentence. The first person to finish a sentence gets a point, and the first person to reach five points wins."
"Only five?"
"It can take a long time to make a sentence," Kaiba explained. "There's a lot of thinking, exchanging tiles, changing ideas as new words come to play."
Curiosity was replaced with suspicion as Joey glared at the board. "How does this make it any more interesting than normal Scrabble?"
"With each new word the sentence changes, the inflection shifts to reflect the player. Plus the words still need to link together properly, so there are a lot of small unrelated words are thrown in there; the original sentence can be lost in those by-products."
Joey groaned again. "That's so complicated."
Kaiba shrugged and offered patronizingly, "We don't have to play if you can't handle it."
Joey glared, and Kaiba knew that he had won. "Okay, we'll play your game."
They had been at it for forty-five minutes; Kaiba had three points, and Joey had one.
"How'd you come up with this?" Joey asked as he exchanged three tiles.
Kaiba examined his letters, trying to a find a word to expand off 'tulip' with. "Mokuba and I got bored one night." Kaiba smiled to himself and added, "Mokuba was a heartbreaker by the time he was fifteen – his cell phone never stopped ringing. After a while I made him turn of the ringer while he was in the house."
"He was a Romeo when he was eleven. Girls always asked me if Yugi knew where he had gone off to."
Kaiba raised an eyebrow but didn't look away from his tiles, shuffling them in their holder. "Yugi?"
"Yea – I know Yugi, Yugi knew you, and you lived with Mokuba. It didn't make sense to me at first either; Tea had to explain it."
"Ah." Kaiba finally gave up and exchanged six of his tiles – utterly worthless things they had been. "I remember the week after his fifteenth birthday, he and his friends held a carwash – "
"What for?" It was Joey's turn, yet he was looking at Kaiba curiously.
"I was getting to that. Do you always interrupt stories?" Joey looked a little surprised, and Kaiba continued, "They came to the conclusion that there was only one cause that car washes were good for: the 'hot girls in soaked bathing suits' fund. They managed to convince a bunch of girls that they were washing cars to save the rain forest."
Joey laughed heartily. "That's terrific! Man, I wish we could have come up with something like that when we were teens..."
Kaiba chuckled a bit. "They did an expert job with manipulation."
"Were you there?"
"Yes – Mokuba begged me to go. I told him I had work to do, but my computer conveniently crashed that morning."
"Ooh," Joey snickered. "Mokuba inflicted?"
Kaiba nodded. "I grounded him for it, but ended up going anyway. That was..." Kaiba frowned, reflecting on the more personal side of that memory. He looked at Joey; the blond seemed engrossed in his memoir, ignoring the game and his turn altogether. Kaiba almost laughed – it was a ridiculous amount of attention to waste on a simple story. "Mokuba introduced me to one of his friends there."
Joey blinked. "He was fifteen?" He seemed to have caught onto the meaning and did some math on his fingers. "That means you were twenty... you kissed one of Mokuba's friends?" He sounded slightly horrified at the idea.
"He kissed me."
"Still... Isn't that kinda robbing the cradle?"
"None of Mokuba's friends were his age – he was the youngest of them all... and the smartest," Kaiba added proudly. "The friend in question was nineteen at the time."
"Why didn't it work out?"
"What makes you think there was something more than a kiss?" Kaiba countered.
It had actually been little more than something to do while there was a lull in cars to wash. It had turned out more interesting than listening to girls preach about saving the rainforest, not to mention that Mokuba had been so excited about it that he hadn't tried to coerce Kaiba to leave the house for months... Until he realized that it had been a one-time deal; then he resumed his quest to 'get big brother out of his shell.' s
"I just assumed..." Joey stopped and shrugged. "I never kissed anyone without meaning it."
"We were bored, and he looked good wet."
"Oh." Joey sounded almost sullen as he looked down at his tiles, away from Kaiba. "That sucks. Hey!" He reached for his letters, placing the word 'suck' on the board by making 'tulip' plural. "Done."
"'Tulips suck'?" Kaiba rolled his eyes. "Your depth astounds me."
"No one said I had to be deep; it's a sentence and I get a point for it," Joey protested. "I never was any good at word games."
Kaiba marked Joey's point on the score pad; they cleared the board and picked new letters. "I'm first," he announced, and immediately had a word: 'you'.
Joey was just as quick with his next word. 'Make', using a blank for the 'k'. It connected to 'you' by making the word 'um' vertically.
Um: a sound of confusion. Kaiba smirked. Fitting. His next word was 'me', made off of the 'e' in 'make'.
They both had to exchange letters twice before Joey continued the sentence with the word 'think', playing it horizontally by placing the 't' at the end of 'me' to create 'met'.
Met. It was a completely random and out-of-place word, something to confuse and muddle the meaning of what was quickly proving to be the most interesting sentence of the game. Kaiba liked those random little words – the more there were, the more interesting translating the sentence was at the end.
Technically 'You make me think' was a sentence, but before Joey could open his mouth to claim he had completed it, Kaiba placed 'about' on the board, going vertically off the 'a' in 'make'.
"Oh," Joey said; he sounded shaky. He looked over his tiles, moving them hesitantly, like he was unveiling something he didn't really want to see. After a second he closed his eyes. Kaiba resisted the urge to hurry him; anything that had Joey so worked up had to be worth the wait. Without warning Joey stood, knees jarring the coffee table; the letters jolted from their spots, but didn't move too far out of order. Not that Kaiba cared; he was too busy watching Joey escape out of two patio doors on the far wall of his living room. Kaiba blinked. That had been unexpected.
Before he approached the blond he fixed the tiles on the board. He figured he could wait, give Joey time to do whatever it was he was doing. Kaiba suspected he was smoking. But five minutes turned to fifteen, and Kaiba didn't feel like waiting. He followed, stepping out into the chilled night – onto the porch.
Joey was sitting on the steps that led down to the yard. His face was upturned towards the sky; his hair fell back from his face, and he looked pensive. "Busy?" Kaiba managed to mask the irritation he was feeling – quite a feat, really.
"Just thinking."
"About?" Déjà vu.
Joey was silent, but Kaiba wasn't deterred. After a moment, Joey spoke.
"When I was a freshman in college I dated this girl – a real knock-out – but I didn't exactly have the cash to take her out. On a stroke of genius I went to the library and skimmed some book on stargazing, just enough to be able to fake my way through it. That night I drove out to the middle of nowhere, away from all the lights, and talked about the night sky like I'd been doing it all my life." There was an endearing touch of nostalgia to Joey's voice.
Kaiba didn't know where Joey was going with that, and resigned himself to the fact that it could be a while before Joey made any sort of point at all. He sat beside Joey on the stairs, but he looked at the gate surrounding his estate. He had never been interested in the stars. "Did she know you were full of shit?"
"Nope," Joey answered. "She... Well, let's just say she was impressed."
Kaiba snorted. "Amazing."
"Yeah. It's the kind of story you tell your friends over a couple of beers or at a poker game." Joey nodded absently. "The part I never told anyone was that I actually liked it – the stargazing thing, I mean. I went back and read that book a few times. It was interesting."
"How so?"
"You see the moon?"
For the first time Kaiba looked up at the sky. "Of course."
"The halo around it means that something good is going to happen."
Kaiba hadn't realized it right away, but Joey was right – there was a ring of white light bordering the moon. He decided not to point out that there was probably a perfectly rational explanation for it. "What sort of good thing?"
Joey shrugged. "Just something good." Kaiba looked over at him, examined his profile unabashedly. After a moment Joey's gaze shifted to meet his. "How many s-tiles are there in Scrabble?" he asked softly.
"Four. Why?"
Joey shook his head, slight smile gracing his lips. "What are the odds that I'd get three of them?"
Kaiba didn't get the chance to ask why that was significant before Joey had leaned forward, lips meeting his in what turned out to be a chaste kiss. It was different than other kisses Kaiba remembered – it was hesitant, it was curious, it sent a thrill though his spine...
And it was over before it could really begin.
"Kisses," Joey whispered, as though he was afraid to speak too loudly. His face was close to Kaiba's, and his eyes were closed. "You make me think about kisses." Finally he backed away, and he looked at Kaiba like he was searching for something.
"You don't think about them otherwise?" Kaiba asked. "You have enough stories."
"Those are different; those are... well, girls. But since..." Joey's voice wavered, and he licked his lips. "Since New Years, you've been the first person to come to mind when I think about kissing."
Kaiba supposed if he ever wanted to say something romantic or meaningful, that would be his opening. "Took you long enough to do something about it. Aren't lawyers supposed to be aggressive?" Not exactly romantic, but it was about as much as Kaiba was willing to say.
"You're more complicated than any job I've ever had," Joey defended. He looked at his watch and swore under his breath. "I'd better go; Serenity has her own man at home to deal with now; can't leave her with mine for long."
They entered the living room together. "Oh," Joey said mischievously, "by the way..." He crossed to the board and played 'kisses' vertically off the 'k' in 'think'. "We're tied."
"Oh?" Kaiba pulled Joey to him by the shoulders, stealing another kiss – more as an experiment than a kiss, really. It was just to see...
The thrill was still there. Kaiba had never kissed anyone who could send that strange bolt of excitement down his spine. If he had, he probably would have kissed a lot more people. Even stranger, they were such simple kisses, yet Kaiba gotten much more intense kisses that were less exhilarating.
It all left one unanswered question: if Joey meant something every time he kissed someone, what exactly did he mean with Kaiba?
Joey seemed confused, as though he hadn't been expecting it, and he sounded a little nervous as he said, "I have to... Uh, go."
"We'll finish the game later," Kaiba said resolutely. Joey nodded.
"Bye."
Kaiba hesitated, and Joey had almost turned the corner before he replied: "Goodbye."
- notes -
I'm running out of creative ways to thank Sarasusa for beta'ing! *panic* lol, so just thanks shall suffice for the moment. :)
"That was his plan? Scrabble?!" you might demand. I'd nod. "It did it's job, right?"
lol, so maybe I led you guys on a little bit with that plan, but I liked it, and it was the plan. It was fun! XD
So I've never actually played Scrabble that way, but it sounds like fun, lol. But I fought with myself over exactly what sentence to throw in there for a while, and I must have gone through every possiblity of canine-innuendo and use of the word 'fuck' before this revealed itself. I like it. ^^
And Kaiba told a story! That was exciting! *nod*
..::review responses from previous chapter::..
ColeyCarissa, lotus re-incarnate, vegeta2J, nenya85, yami) white rain, MonKey Doki: thanks. though this story, I have decided that there aren't enough words in the english language for "thank you". ^^ So just... thanks, yo.
Leaf Zelindor: *gasp* It's been updated there too, I swear. ^^ thankies.
Tanya Maxwell: lol, then Kaiba broke a record here -- his plan worked out! XD
darkmus: ^_~ lmao! Dude, the fact that your first thought was "no more backup babysitter" made me laugh -- holy shit. XD
Kagemihari: rockin'. ^^ Yeah, I've come across stories that I didn't intend to read, and then I read a line of some odd-numbered chapter and get curious -- lol. So I'm flattered that you're here at all. :)
Angel-Belle: hey, I did, didn't I? Haha, irony. XD I could think of meaner things to call Kaiba as a boss, but things like that might get our favorite secretary fired, and we need here right now. ^^
me: really? I was in Seattle once to catch a flight, so I never saw the outside of the airport. I just sort of randomly chose a big-ish city type thing, lol. But thanks! XD
Trandy Green: *dances in joey, since has kneecaps with which to do so* I'm glad you're happy. ^_~ Lol, I'm actually kind of relieved I dont have to try and hash out Joey's emotions from his POV too -- I'd have a seizure trying to keep up with both of them! XD
elsalhir-erestar: w00t! lol! Glad you made it. XD lol, Kaiba at 30 isn't so hard -- I always thought he was older. Yugi, on the other hand -- eep! XD It's a hard one to do. Thankies!
Alexander the Grand: haha! Good thing you pointed out it was you, or I wouldn't have realized. Anyway, thanks. Haha, love the "cave with a spoon" metaphor; I'll have to remember that one. I'm glad it's working. Man, I can't sketch to save my life, so smile! XD
Lightning Sage: aww, but gloating was fun. ^^ Yes, "polite" is ONE word for it.... XD
Tadashi: aww, that was so morbid -- the world would be a sad place it Tea's boobies left it. XD Anyway, thanks -- hopefully you had as much fun here as I did.
Fire Dragon of Darkness: Yeah, I can see where the Yugi-Drama would be tedious, but it does serve a purpose in the long run. ^^;; Thanks!