“Oh, scream.” Billy had seen the girl shaking out her hands in the back of the line. Hand shakers were either criers or screamers, or both.
The blood curdling sound that flew from her mouth when she got within a foot of Ricco meant Billy was now up by eighty dollars.
He could feel Maxi tense beside him. She was one of the most competitive people that he knew and he knew Olympic-level athletes.
The next girl stepped up. He called cry, Ace and Maxi both called scream.
The girl burst into tears before screaming uncontrollably.
Glancing down at Maxi’s grin, he knew she’d thought she’d won or at least tied.
Leaning over he whispered against her ear, “I don’t know why you’re smiling, I won.”
Her head whipped around and through a tight smile, without moving her lips she said, “No you didn’t, she screamed.”
“She cried first, which means I won,” Billy explained.
Apparently, she didn’t want to take him at his word because she spun towards Ace who nodded in agreement. With reluctant resignation Maxi conceded the victory with a snipped, “Fine.”
She was only able to play two more rounds, both of which she lost, before her phone started lighting up and demanding her attention. Billy watched her as she handled whatever crises she was dealing with and tried to silence the little voice in the back of his head that kept bringing up the word he’d managed to keep out of his vocabulary for nearly thirty years. The word that he considered a verb not a noun. The word he never thought he’d utter in a romantic sense. The word that now belonged to Maxi.
Love.