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“You know, when I first met you, I never pegged you as the cheating type,” The words are said with heat and frustration.
Eyebrows rise, “You can’t tell me you’re surprised, given the situation.”
An aggravated growl releases from Peter’s throat. “So what, I was supposed to expect it?”
Madeline shrugs, “Sorry I didn’t live up to your expectations.” But it’s said breezily and with little conviction.
Peter’s eyes turn to slits. “You realize I’ll never trust you after this.”
Her eyes are untroubled as she shrugs again, movements dripping with disregard. “Not really my problem, is it bugboy? Not if it gets me what I want.”
His eyes close as he takes in a breath. He opens his eyes to look at her intently. “I really didn’t want to do this, but you leave me no choice…”
He drops a Wild +4 card on the pile.
“Red.”
She scoffs and promptly drops her own Wild +4 card.
“Green.” **
Peter’s head shakes vehemently, “No. No. You can’t do that. You can’t just skip drawing 4 by stacking another Wild +4!”
She folds her arms across her chest, careful to keep her plethora of cards from view.
“They’re called ‘house rules’ and yes, I can,” she says matter-of-factly, waiting for him to draw his 8 cards.
He stubbornly glares at the pile of cards.
“Well we’re not playing with ‘house rules’. We’re playing with the ‘rule rules’, and you can’t do that.” He folds his own arms in defense.
Her sigh is put upon as she and leans forward in her chair.
“You asked me to choose the game. I chose UNO. You agreed. My choice, my rules.”
He looks at her with a stubborn frown. “I didn’t agree to this.” He declares with a pout.
She rolls her eyes hard and abruptly stands, chair scraping the floor sharply as she throws her cards on the table. "Ugh, fine.”
Peter rises quickly in alarm.
“Hey! Where are you going? I- I- What about the game?”
She heads into her bedroom, her voice trailing behind her.
“Pfft yeah, no. I’m not playing UNO with you ever again.”
Peter feels shame roll through him. It had been his idea to spend their day together playing board games, even raiding his stash at May’s to make sure they had a good range of choices. Each game always started off well, but eventually an argument would crop up. Both of them just had different ideas of how the game should be played. He’s so glad he didn’t bring Monopoly. He didn’t mean to get so worked up about a game of all things but she just… didn’t play right. Argh. Not that it mattered anyway after this. They had already gone through most of the games he’d brought.
Jenga (okay so maybe that hadn’t been fair with his knowledge of physics and engineering)
Sorry (*shudders* never again, what a disaster, he was genuinely worried for their relationship for a moment. and he's pretty sure she wasn't really sorry anyway.)
Connect4 (boring)
Checkers (he couldn't remember how to play and didn't trust she was telling him the actual rules, she was sneaky like that, as he'd recently discovered.)
And now UNO was out.
So much for a fun date night. This was more tense than some of his patrols.
He sighs and starts collecting the deck, putting it back in the box and throwing it onto the pile of the other abandoned games. He grabs their empty dinner plates and glasses from the table and takes them over to the sink, before sinking onto the couch, letting his head loll back against the cushion. He can hear her shuffling around in her room but he’s not really paying too close attention, instead focusing on not mentally beating himself up at this spectacular failure of a date. They’ve been working on his self-esteem.
He hears a loud thump followed closely by her answering grunts. His head perks up.
“Mads? You alright?”
A muffled voice responds. “Yeah.
His eyebrows knit together. “What’re you doing?”
Just as he’s about to rise from the couch, she enters the living room.
“Well since all your game choices suck-“
Peter scoffs and interjects, “Well if someone played right-“
“ANYWAYS…” she interrupts pointedly, “it falls to me, as usual, to save the day.”
A laughing smile blooms across his face at her clear choice of words and his eyebrow lifts in question. Madeline holds out a box towards Peter. As he goes to reach for it, she continues speaking.
“It was buried in my closet, and normally I wouldn’t go through all the effort of digging it out, but this night clearly needed to be rescued.” A knowing smirk the only acknowledgement of her phrasing.
He reads the box and his smile gets impossibly wide.
TWISTER
God, she’s so perfect. He looks up at her, challenge and promise in his gaze.
“My hero,” he says lowly, not even trying to hide the heat in his voice.
Her smug grin and answering challenge and promise in her own gaze tells him that this night definitely just got better.