wordsRated: PG
Posted: July 28, 2000
Notes:
1) This is a piece of pure nothing - it just happened one afternoon. Apologies in advance.
"Angel! If you want me to keep doing your washing - please turn out the socks!” called Cordelia from the recesses of the apartment.“Sorry,” returned Angel from the depths of the sofa.
“Do you have any idea how yichy it is to have to touch someone else’s smelly socks?” Angel could hear the nose-wrinkling distaste in Cordelia’s voice.
“No. Sorry. I’ll try to remember.”
“You’d better. I do not like playing smello sock-puppets!” the aggrieved voice continued.
“Cordelia does your laundry?” asked Wesley, incredulous.
“Well....yes,” admitted Angel and, as Wesley remained open-mouthed, he added apologetically, “I don’t have a washing machine.”
“Neither do I! I use a public pay-facility called a laundromat!”
“Right,” said Angel and hastily searched for an excuse, “I don’t have a lot of time to get to one of those.”
“Of course not. You are much too busy of an evening playing Scrabble!” Wesley plonked three tiles on the board, indignation resonant in each ‘plonk’. “Cordelia,” he called, “It’s your turn!”
“Coming.”
“How many points did you get for ‘STOP’ Wesley?” asked Angel as Wesley jotted on the score-pad.
“Six,” he replied, proudly, his attention successfully diverted from the current laundry oriented injustice.
“Hey, well-done!” Angel enthused and returned his gaze to the nonsensical jumble of letters on the little plastic rack.
“Angel, I left a little bundle of aromatic socks in there. Go turn them out the right way and put them in the machine, please,” Cordelia sank onto a large puffy cushion on the floor. She glanced up at Angel’s face as he rose, hesitantly, from the safety of the sofa. “Don’t be nervous, just lift the lid and throw them in. Nothing will jump out at you, I promise,” she soothed.
Cordelia watched Angel leave the room and turned confidentially to Wesley. “You should have seen him after he tried to use the new laundromat down on Wembley. An ab-so-lute wreck! He arrived at my door, totally shaking, bag of sodden clothes in his hand, jibbering about soap powder and unbalanced spins. When it came to using the dryer?... uh-uh, couldn’t do it. I opened the bag - soggy silk shirts and boxers in with trousers, towels and dishcloths. Not pretty.” Cordelia took a breath and peered at her seven tiles.
“Dear me. What was he doing about laundry before he brought it to you?” asked Wesley, fascinated that a man who could blithely face a poison spitting demon such as the Javiro they had killed that afternoon had quailed in front of a top loader.
“Oh, an old lady - down the street from the office. Did the lot for him, washing and ironing. Then she retired and went to live in Bellevue. Oh, great! I can use that ‘C’.”
“I put my socks in the machine, Cordelia.” Angel announced smugly and eased himself back onto the sofa.
“Great. Still got both hands? You see how easy modern life can be?” Cordelia began to lay her tiles on the board. “There you are.... ‘KINETIC’ and I get a double word score. That’s 26 points Wesley.” Cordelia plunged her hand into the tile sack and quickly withdrew six new tiles. “Coffee should be brewed - I’ll go fetch it.”
Angel and Wesley exchanged a mystified look.
“Has she been reading the dictionary again? This is the third night in a row she’s thrashed us,” protested Angel.
“Maybe Dennis is helping her with the tiles,” suggested Wesley.
“No, otherwise why would he dish up that ‘Z’ and ‘Y’ a few rounds ago?”
“True. Unless they have a system organised. I mean, have you even heard of a ‘zydeco’? What did Cordelia say it was? Some sort of dance?”
“Apparently. I think we will just have to come to terms with the fact that she can beat the crap out of us at Scrabble,” said Angel and added an ‘I’ and a ‘T’ to an ‘S’ already on the board. “Put me down for another three points will you?”
Cordelia carried a tray holding three mugs of coffee back into the living room . “Oh, Angel - I nearly forgot - whatever that stinky-sticky muck wrapped in paper was that I found in your shirt pocket? I flushed it away.”
“But - but - that was the tissue sample from the Packer demon we killed last week!” objected Angel as he stood to relieve Cordelia of the tray.
“Last week? Ewww! Gee, I can see it must have been really important! I think I might go and wash my hands - again - with disinfectant. Whose turn is it?” asked Cordelia before she turned away.
“Mine. I won’t be too long,” said Wesley as he twiddled two ‘V’s and a ‘J’ in his fingers.
“See that?” hissed Wesley, “She doesn’t even sit still between turns to frazzle her brain over possible combinations! Off doing your laundry, making coffee, washing her hands. She’ll be back in a minute when I’ve had my go and conjure up ‘pigswill’ on a triple-word scoring bingo!”
“Wesley, Scrabble is a game. Relax,” said Angel and stared encouragingly at the little squares in front of him.
If all else failed, Angel had an ‘O’ that could fit nicely beside an existing ‘T’ - assuming, of course, that neither Wesley or Cordelia pinched the letter for themselves. Angel transferred his attention to the ‘T’ on the board, gloomily possessive.
Wesley made his decision. He stretched his hand, fingers grasping one of his ‘J’s, toward Angel’s very own ‘T’. Wesley froze his arm in mid-air as a low growl rumbled from the sofa. “Pardon?”
“Nothing,” Angel cleared his throat, “Just.... ahrum... clearing my throat.”
The hand resumed it’s descent to the board, accompanied by only the faintest of rattles from Angel. A ‘J’ and an ‘E’ now sat snugly next to the ‘T’. “Ten points!” exclaimed Wesley triumphantly. “Hurry up Cordelia - we are really throwing down the challenge to you now!”
Cordelia wandered through from the kitchen with a plate of nibbles in her freshly scrubbed and sanitised hands. Resuming her seat on the cushion, she quickly scanned the tiles on her rack, shuffled a few letters and then placed them, one by one, on the board to form - “STOMACHS”.
“That’s fifteen points for the word and a bingo bonus for using all seven tiles - sixty five points all up!” Cordelia announced with satisfaction.
Wesley whooshed in disbelief.
Angel smiled softly, welcomingly, at the new ‘T’.
He was still in the game.
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Disclaimer: The characters are Joss Whedon's, Mutant Enemy's and probably a heap of other people about
whom I know nothing.
I lay no claim to ownership of the characters, I simply like to ask them out to play now and then.