Coming Up For Air | ✓

5 | (sore) winners and losers

"Bumbershoot? What the hell is a bumbershoot?"

Jake looks up from where he's re-stocking the rack before him, carefully placing seven new tiles upon it. He glances pointedly out the sliding doors. "An umbrella,"

Chin pressed against the flat of her knees, Stella follows his gaze.

The rain is relentless.

Pouring, it comes down against the stone of the patio like a thousand tiny pieces of gravel. The wind's picked back up, rustling the crowns of the few trees in the garden as they sway back and forth in a blur of saturated green. The rotary drying rack whines with every breeze. Drenched, Stella's striped beach towel hangs heavy over one of the lines – it almost looks sad, abandoned, out there.

"It's also the name of a music and arts festival," Jake supplies without taking his eyes off the score-pad. "Heard it's supposed to be fun."

"Names aren't allowed."

"I said also."

"Well," Stella lets her palms come to rest over her feet, the pink fuzzy socks soft underneath her touch. "Bumbershoot is not a word."

"Feel free to look it up,"

Eyes narrowing, she surveys the scrabble board where it lies between them on the coffee table. Words such as POUR, GRAY and CLOUD take up space among the rest; she's beginning to sense a pattern here.

Reaching for the dictionary, she quickly thumbs through it, index finger pausing over the page she's looking for. Her mouth sours into a tight line, quelling the exasperated sigh building in her chest. She's going to lose. She hates losing.

She's about to slam the heavy book shut again but Jake holds up a finger to stop her.

"Well?" He prompts, kicking his legs up on the armrest of the couch. Feigning an innocent smile, he bats his eyelashes, but she doesn't miss the hint of smugness in the twitch of his lips. She could use a bumbershoot to hit him with in the head right about now. "What does it say?"

Shooting him a glare, she flickers her gaze back to the word her index finger hovers over. "Bumbershoot. Noun. An umbrella: a device you hold to protect yourself from the rain."

"So," Jake chimes, clapping his hands together. "That's – wait, is this square a double as well? Twenty-four points for me then."

"You used all seven tiles," Stella mumbles begrudgingly, taking her cup of tea into her hands, letting it warm her palms. "That's another fifty points."

"Oh," Jake happily scribbles it down. "You were right, Scrabble is fun."

Stella's positively steaming worse than her tea. "We're playing Ludo after this."

"Come on, we can't just stop after two rounds."

"We can. And we will."

Jake nods to the board. "You're up, you know."

Stella sets her cup down on the rug, scowling at the low score the next word she lays out grants her. STORM. "There,"

She flickers her eyes between her tile of letters and the board–she's definitely losing. "Now hurry up so we can be done with this goddamn game already."

"We're playing another round."

"I won the last one. You're winning this one. That's enough."

"Ever heard of the phrase 'best out of three'?"