The Mask

DEATH on the board, he hadn’t replenished his supply of letter tiles. He drew four of the small wooden squares from the lid of the game box, put them on the rack in front of him.
    And froze.
    Oh God.
    He was on that tightrope again, teetering over a great abyss.
    “Well?” Carol asked.
    Coincidence. It had to be just coincidence.
    “Well?”
    He looked up at her.
    “What have you got?” she asked.
    Numb, he shifted his eyes to the girl.
    She was hunched over the table, as eager as Carol to hear his response, anxious to see if the macabre pattern would continue.
    Paul lowered his eyes to the row of letters on the wooden rack. The word was still there. Impossible. But it was there anyway, possible or not.
    “Paul?”
    He moved so quickly and unexpectedly that Carol and Jane jumped. He scooped up the letters on his rack and nearly flung them back into the lid of the box. He swept the five offensive words off the board before anyone could protest, and he returned those nineteen tiles to the box with all the others.
    “Paul, for heaven’s sake!”
    “We’ll start a new game,” he said. “Maybe those words didn’t bother you, but they bothered me. I’m here to relax. If I want to hear about blood and death and killing, I can switch on the news.”
    Carol said, “What word did you have?”
    “I don’t know,” he lied. “I didn’t work with the letters to see. Come on. Let’s start all over.”
    “You did have a word,” she said.
    “No.”
    “It looked to me like you did,” Jane said.
    “Open up,” Carol said.
    “All right, all right. I had a word. It was obscene. Not something a gentleman like me would use in a refined game of Scrabble, with ladies present.”
    Jane’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Really? Tell us. Don’t be stuffy.”
    “Stuffy? Have you no manners, young lady?”
    “None!”
    “Have you no modesty?”
    “Nope.”
    “Are you just a common broad?”
    “Common,” she said, nodding rapidly. “Common to the core. So tell us what word you had.”
    “Shame, shame, shame,” he said. Gradually, he cajoled them into dropping their inquiry. They started a new game. This time all the words were ordinary, and they did not come in any unsettling, related order.
    Later, in bed, he made love to Carol. He wasn’t particularly horny. He just wanted to be as close to her as he could get.
    Afterwards, when the murmured love talk finally faded into a companionable silence, she said, “What was your word?”
    “Hmmmm?” he said, pretending not to know what she meant.
    “Your obscene word in the Scrabble game. Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten what it was.”
    “Nothing important.”
    She laughed. “After everything we just did in this bed, surely you don’t think I need to be sheltered!”
    “I didn’t have an obscene word.” Which was the truth. “I didn’t really have any word at all.” Which was a lie. “It’s just that…I thought those first five words on the board were bad for Jane.”
    “Bad for her?”
    “Yes. I mean, you told me it’s quite possible she lost one or both of her parents in a fire. She might be on the brink of learning about or remembering a terrible tragedy in her recent past. Tonight she just needed to relax, to laugh a bit. How could the game have been fun for her if the words on the board started to remind her that her parents might be dead?”
    Carol turned on her side, raised herself up a bit, leaned over him, her bare breasts grazing his chest, and stared into his eyes. “is that really the only reason you were so upset?”
    “Don’t you think I was right? Did I overreact?”
    “Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. It was Creepy.” She kissed his nose. “You know why I love you so much?”
    “Because I’m such a great lover?”
    “You are, but that’s not why I love you.”
    “Because I have tight buns?”
    “Not that.”
    “Because I keep my fingernails so neat and clean?”
    “Not that.”
    “I give up.”
    “You’re so damned sensitive, so caring about other people. How typical of my Paul to worry about the Scrabble game being fun for Jane. That’s why I love you.”
    “I thought it was my hazel eyes.”
    “Nah.”
    “My classic profile.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “Or the way my third toe on my left foot lays half under the second toe.”
    “Oh, I’d forgotten about that. Hmmmmmmmm. You’re right. That’s why I love you. Not because you’re sensitive. It’s your toes that drive me wild.”
    Their teasing led to cuddling, and the cuddling led to kissing, and the kissing led to passion again. She reached her peak only a few