Her eyes widened. “Oh no, that’s not a good idea.” Not if she actually wanted him to like her back in any way.
And she did. Another kind of peace settled over her, at that admission to herself.
“Why not?”
“Dev . . .” Jia sighed and placed the bag on the couch. “I’m the youngest of five overachieving kids. How competitive do you want to think my family made me, when it came to board games?”
His eyes smiled, even if his lips didn’t. “I can handle it.”
“That’s what you think. And then when you’re crying and I flip the table and accuse you of cheating and someone’s holding another person’s clump of hair, then you’ll be sorry.”
“Is that what life with sisters is like?”
“Oh yes.” She crossed over to the table and picked up a french fry. “It actually made it really hard for me to learn how to interact with other people, having sisters. Because you can’t really go from I’m going to kill you to Want some ice cream? with anyone else in your life.”
His low chuckle filled the room, strumming the hairs on her arms. “I’ll take your word for it. I suppose I shouldn’t ask if you want to put stakes on it?”
Her competitive side clapped its hands in glee. “What kind of stakes are we talking about?”
He glanced at her from under his eyelashes. “If I win, I’d like to see the rest of your texts with my brother and cousin.”
Oof. Those were high stakes. Which gave her more incentive to win. “And if I win . . .” You take off your shirt. “I get to go leave a dozen bad reviews on your doofus cousin’s latest movie.”
His lips twitched. “I’m surprised you haven’t already. Is there a game that you don’t take too seriously?”
She perused the shelf skeptically. “We can try Scrabble. Monopoly and Life turn me into a capitalistic fiend.”
“I SWEAR, I can make this into a word.” Jia perused the board carefully. She had two letters left, and she was only ten points away from beating Dev.
Turns out, she wasn’t less competitive at Scrabble. Which was why she’d been staring at the game board for over fifteen minutes on her last turn. She would get those ten points, damn it. She leaned forward, dangerously close to toppling off the couch, where she sat cross-legged.
“I’m sure you can,” Dev said patiently.
She placed the two letters around another. “Is that a word?”
Dev raised a thick eyebrow at her. He sat on the floor facing her, leaning back on his hands. “Is it?”
She shot him a narrow glance, trying to gauge how close he was to calling her on the word. Damn it. If he challenged her and consulted the dictionary on the shelf and she lost, she’d lose the game. She’d already lost three turns in this game by making up words. She was still pretty sore xop wasn’t in the Scrabble dictionary. “This is my first language, and your second, damn it. How are you beating me?”
“English is one of our national languages. Besides, I went to British schools. You went to American ones.” He shrugged, like that should explain things.
“Please don’t assert the colonizer’s supremacy here,” she grumbled. “I’ll make this into a word, darn it.”
After another fifteen minutes of silence, Dev stirred. “You know, if you’d made this word stick, instead of sticks, you could have used the s over here. With what you have, that’s fifteen points.”
“It is,” she muttered, frustrated with herself for not seeing that. She’d gone for short-term satisfaction over long-term gain! Story of her life, her sisters would chide her.
Dev sighed. Then he placed his finger on the s and slid it over to her. She glanced at him. “What are you doing?”
“Let’s say that’s what you did.”
“But that’s cheating!”
“It’s your own letter. Please, I insist.”
Jia’s desire to win at all costs outweighed her reticence. “Okay.” Triumphantly, she placed the letters and raised her arms in victory. “I win!”
Dev gave her an indulgent look. “Not bad.”
She lowered her arms and snatched up a cold fry from the remnants of their dinner. “You knew I’d be here all night looking for a word, didn’t you?”
“Very much so. I couldn’t take sitting on the floor any longer. I’m too old to not have back support.”
She grabbed her phone and pulled up her texts with the Liar Formerly Known as Dev and handed it to him. “Fair’s fair.”
He took the phone automatically, but didn’t look at it. “But you won.”
“We both know I didn’t.” She fiddled with a thread coming loose on her hem.
He gave her a long look, then stared at the phone. After a pregnant pause, he offered it back to her. “I changed my mind. I’d rather learn about you like this, in person. Delete those texts, keep them for yourself, I don’t care.”
Her lips parted, and she accepted his offering. How did he have this uncanny knack to always know what to say? She stuffed another fry into her mouth, so she could have something to do.
He came to his feet and stretched.
She nearly choked on the fry, almost reliving the unfortunate roti choking of days past. She’d changed into the sweats, and she’d cinched the hoodie he’d brought her around her face. That meant she probably looked about as attractive as a child in footie pajamas.
Dev, though, still looked annoyingly good. He’d bought the same gray sweatpants for himself that he’d bought for her, and they looked different on him. When he stretched his arms up, his shirt rode up to display a one-inch slice of belly.
Jia swallowed the fry. “Is it warm in here?”
He lowered his arms. “I’m fine. I can open a window.”
“No, never mind.” Because then she’d be cold when she got into bed alone. Speaking of . . . “We should sleep. Our car’ll be ready to go early in the morning.”
“Right.” Neither of them moved.
“Do you want to use the . . . ?” She gestured to the bathroom.
“Sure.”
While he was gone, she pulled out the sofa bed and made it up. He stopped when he came out. “You didn’t have to do that.”
She fluffed the pillow and placed it on the bed. “I didn’t know how many beds you’ve made in your life, Mr. Actor,” she tried to tease, but she was mildly out of breath, because he’d turned slightly, and the curve of his butt was . . . noice.
Sexual attraction wasn’t something she felt a lot of—she’d determined long ago that she needed to have a strong bond to someone first before she got all torn up about wanting to sleep with them, and her schedule hadn’t lent itself to strong emotional bonds. So she figured she must be getting really bonded to Dev, because those gray sweatpants were getting sexier by the second.
It was the Scrabble, damn it.
Jia averted her eyes. She needed to stop thinking about his sweatpants because then she’d think about his shirt and then she’d think about his arms and then she’d think about the torso those arms were attached to and then his stomach and then back to his legs . . .
Jianna, control yourself.