by KD Robichaux
After we all have the appropriate numbers, he then takes out a deck of cards and begins shuffling them. His hands are almost hypnotizing as he halves them, holds each stack in-between his thumbs and ring fingers while pressing the center with his middle ones before sliding the mixed edges together. He repeats the process over and over, alternating between a simple shuffle and bridging at the end, creating an arc with the cards as they fly together with a sound that’s almost soothing, mesmerizing.
I finally snap out of my stupor as he hits one of the edges of the deck against the table loudly, making sure they’re smooth across before he deals them out. We each get two cards that are face-down, and then in the middle of the glass, he deals one face-down, and three face-up, placing the rest of the deck to the side. We pick up our hands, being careful not to let either of us see what we have, and glance back and forth between the cards we’re holding and the ones in the center of the table.
“Okay, Kayla, check, bet, or fold?” Jason asks, reminding me that since I’m sitting to the dealer’s left, I have to make the first move.
“I’m going to check,” I state, because I don’t have anything between my hand and the cards on the table that would make even a pair.
“I bet five,” Gavin says, throwing one of his red chips onto the pile of white ones we anteed. He leans back in this chair, rocking on its springs and taking on a bored expression as he plucks his bottom lip with his fingers.
Jason takes a red chip from behind his hands resting on the table and throws it on the pile, looking up at me and asking, “Bet or fold?”
“I fold,” I reply, and put my cards face-down on the burned ones in the middle.
“Pussy,” Gavin teases, but I don’t bite. I’m watching the two of them closely to see if either of them has a ‘tell’, which would let me know what to look for in the future to detect if they’re bluffing.
Jason nods once, burns a card, and then places one face-up at the end of the other three showing. Gavin leans forward to look at the card, and then looks at the ones in his hand. He glances up at Jason before taking two reds off his stack and tossing them on the growing bet, and leans back to pluck at his lip again.
Jason reaches behind him to scratch the back of his head before betting a blue of his own. “I’ll see your ten, and raise you ten more,” he tells him, raising one of his perfect, masculine eyebrows in challenge.
I’m studying them closely, but I can’t tell if any of their movements are just unconscious fidgeting, or if they’re signs that would give them away. Gavin sighs and looks between the cards, and then decides to meet Jason’s bet, throwing in two more of his red chips.
“Pot is good,” Jason says, and then burns a card before dealing the last one of this round. Again, Gavin leans forward to take a good look before deciding to bet his last two reds. He doesn’t relax this time, instead placing the cards in his hand down on the table to await what the dealer will do.
Jason grins, and then bets another one of his greens. “Come on now, fucker. Gotta pay to play,” he taunts his friend.
“Fuck,” Gavin growls, and then puts in one of his greens before taking back the two reds he’d put in previously. “Turn ‘em over. Whatchu got?”
“I have a pair of twos. You?” Jason asks.
“I ain’t got jack-shit,” Gavin huffs out with a laugh.
“Dude, this is why you always have to buy in like five times every time we play. You’ve got no game!” Jason shakes his head, scooping all the chips he won to his side of the table and then gathering up all the cards to shuffle for the next hand.
I reach behind me to my purse hanging on the back of my chair and pull my pack of cigarettes out. Jason reaches over to the boombox sitting against the wall of windows and grabs the ashtray on top of it, placing it on the table for us all to use. We’re outside, but we’ll still need somewhere to put our butts, and after the few weeks I’ve been spending with these guys, I know we’ll have to dump it a few times before the night is over. We all light up before Jason deals the next hand, and just like when he was playing pool, I find him incredibly sexy as his cigarette hangs out the side of his mouth while his hands are otherwise occupied.
We play for a while, each of us winning a couple of times, me doing a happy dance each time I manage to beat them. Gavin’s had to ‘buy-in’ a couple of times, paying Jason with a few cigarettes, since we aren’t playing for money. Jason’s chip stacks and mine are both quite large, him having a bit of a lead on mine because of the huge pot he just won off Gavin.
He deals out the cards, and when I lift mine up to see what I got, I consciously keep my face unreactive as I discover I’m holding a pair of sevens. I look down at the cards displayed on the table, and see there is another seven sitting between a queen and a two. My face stays completely devoid of emotion, but inside I’m jumping up and down and shaking my ass like a crazy person. I light myself another cigarette and then pull off two white chips to toss in the center with our antes. I want to start small so I don’t scare them away from betting, but I also don’t want them to bet too much and make me chicken out, since I’m still new at this game and not too great at spotting other hands like straights and flushes. I had learned my lesson a few times tonight, thinking I had won with a three-of-a-kind, only to find out I had lost a large sum of my chips to a full house.
Gavin meets my bet, and Jason does the same, burning the next card and flipping over another. It’s a ten of spades, and I dramatically sit up straight in my chair, wiggling a little to make them think I’m excited over the card that was just shown. I pick up a few of my red chips and toss them in the middle. “I bet fifteen,” I say perkily, and look over to Gavin.
He lifts his eyebrow at me and then looks down at the cards on the table. “You got a pair of tens, do ya?” He calls my bet, and then adds twenty, making me evil-cackle inside my head. I look at Jason, who is staring me down. My breath catches a little at being the center of his attention, but I force myself to concentrate on the game. He meets Gavin’s twenty, and then waits to see if I’ll put in the chips to call the pot square. I do, and what happens next absolutely blows my mind.
Jason burns a card, and then turns over the last one of this round.
It’s the fourth and final seven of the deck.
I’ve got a four-of-a-kind.
I’ve won the fucking game.
I make myself pout, wanting them to think I’ve only got a pair of tens. There are two sevens on the table, so if I didn’t have the other pair, I’d have to worry that either one of the guys had one, giving them three-of-a-kind, which both of them are thinking at this very moment. With them believing I have the tens, I play off my newbie status and place my bet. “I have four of these blues, which look kinda silly between these tall stacks of whites and reds, so I’m gonna go ahead and get rid of them,” I say cutely, tossing them in the center.
“You know that’s forty bucks, right?” Gavin asks.
“Yep,” I reply, popping the ‘p’ before taking a drag off my cigarette and then ashing it on the ground.
He shrugs and meets my bet. Jason, however, studies me closely. I try my best not to fidget under his dark stare, and I hide my nerves by giving him a wide grin and asking, “Ya folding?”
He cocks that sexy brow up at me and shakes his head. “Fuck, no. You may have a pair of tens, but there’s a pair of sevens on the table. Have you thought maybe I have one of the other sevens, or maybe I have a queen? So many ways you could lose this hand, baby girl,” he says in that delicious Texan drawl.
My panties immediately become wet. He called me baby girl. I can’t even come up with a snarky reply, because those two words are bouncing around my brain like Forest Gump’s game of solitaire ping-pong.
“I’m all in,” he says, and I barely hear the bet through his Matthew McConaughey sounding-induced stupor he’s put me in.
“I’m sorry, what?” I ask, shaking my head to clear it.
“I’m. All. In,” he states slowl
y, punctuating each word with a slide of a pile of his chips to the center of the table. His cockiness both turns me on and causes me to fully come out of my fog.
“Fuck,” I groan, keeping up my act. I’ve got him. I’ve won the game. He has a few more chips than me, so even when I take the pile, he’ll still have a few left over, but there’s no way he’ll come back from such a hard hit.
“I call,” I say, and look over at Gavin. He’s three sheets to the wind and couldn’t care less right now. He also goes all in and flips over his cards.
He’s got nothing. Shocker.
“Okay, baby girl, let’s see that ten,” Jason says, watching me closely. Whether it’s because he noticed my reaction to the last time he called me the pet name or because he’s really interested to see my cards, I don’t know, but this time, I’m too excited to respond to the endearment.
I flip over one of my sevens.
I watch the confused look come over Jason’s face, his dark brows lowering over those gorgeous chocolate eyes.
And then the final nail in his coffin.
I turn over my second seven, lean back in my chair to flirtatiously take a drag off my cigarette, and then blow the smoke across the table into his face. I bite my bottom lip to keep from giving him a shit-eating grin as he shifts his eyes between my face and my cards. He’s completely befuddled.
“Well, hot damn!” Gavin shouts loudly. “She fucking got our asses!”
That breaks what little control over the gurgling excitement inside me, and I finally allow my face to split into a smile that hurts it’s so wide. I watch as Jason glances between his hand, all the cards on the table, and up to my beaming grin, and then hop up from my chair and do a silly victory dance as he throws his two cards down on top of the pile. I’m in the middle of doing ‘The Running Man’ when I see him shake his head and start divvying up the chips. He has just a couple of small stacks of the little circles of clay left when he slides my winnings to my side of the round, glass table.
Eventually, I end up losing all my chips, Jason slowly winning them back hand after hand, but I will never forget my epic win with four of a kind
February 11, 2005
Over the past almost two weeks, I’ve spent at least four days a week over at the Robichauxs’ house. It’s been a mix of poker nights and playing pool, not just at Legends, but at a couple of other pool halls too. We’ve had a barbeque, a movie night, I’ve gotten drunk off my ass again and spent the night on Jason’s couch—after playing another fun round of twenty questions, of course—and they also somehow talked me into going to a strip club. That was…interesting.
If I hadn’t known Gavin was not the guy for me before, I definitely would’ve then; seeing the creepy, hypnotized look on his face while he watched the gyrating bodies of the cracked-out looking strippers would have clued me in.
Jason had taken it upon himself to be my bodyguard for the night. The men at the tables and lounging on the couches scattered around the club thought it was amazing for a pretty college-aged chick to be in the audience, not up on stage hanging from a pole, and seemed to think I was fair game, a steady line of horny men dropping by our table to offer me a drink, or to chat me up, or one who blatantly asked me to join him at his truck to fuck—his words, not mine. This dude almost got a fist to the face from my apparent knight in shining armor. After that, Jason took me by the hand, pulled me along with him as we made our way through the tables of men in various stages of drunkenness, and reached Gavin, who was standing over by one of the small podiums with a stripper who was currently upside down on a pole.
He didn’t acknowledge Jason’s existence, even when Jason shoved him on the shoulder, as his empty eyes followed the girl’s saggy, stretch-marked covered tits as they slid down on either sides of the pole. After another attempt at gaining Gavin’s attention to no avail, Jason gave up, growling, “We’re leaving. I’m taking Kayla with me. I don’t know if Adam is leaving or not, but since we all drove separately, it doesn’t fucking matter. Deuces.”
He turned abruptly, tugging me along with him once again. I looked back once, only to see Gavin’s face being buried between the stripper’s unfortunate-looking funbags as she pulled his head to her by the back of his hair.
Also, last week, I had the pleasure of playing witness to Jason meeting someone off Plenty of Fish. Before she showed up at Legends, Jason said he’d only been talking to her for about three days over messages on the site, and this would be his first time seeing her in person. When she arrived, the full-figured blonde wrapped herself around him like he was her long-lost lover, and I had to fight the urge not to wrap my hand around her hair and slam her face as hard as I could on the wooden edge of a pool table.
After a couple games of pool, I looked over and she was playfully poking him in the ribs. It took all I had to talk myself out of snapping a pool stick in half over my knee and poking her with the jagged end. A couple of drinks later, she sat beside him and crossed her leg over his, and I allowed myself to imagine crisscrossing my legs around her neck and choking her out with a scissor lock.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a very fun night for me, but after watching her crowd him on their side of the booth at IHOP while he was trying to eat and he looked up at me and gave me a ‘kill me, please’ look, I knew this heifer didn’t stand a chance. After our late-night meal, he gave her a one-armed hug and sent her packing with no invitation back to his place.
Tonight, though, I have a date with a woman. Not just any woman, one feisty-ass woman who barely reaches five-feet tall and likes to drive her BMW convertible at an obscene speed. Mrs. Robichaux was tickled pink when I asked her if she’d like to go with me after we saw a commercial on TV one night for the movie Hitch, starring Will Smith. I knew the guys wouldn’t want to see it, and the look of relief on Mr. Robichaux’s face when he heard me make the offer to his wife told me he was happy he wouldn’t have to be dragged along to see the chick flick either.
When I arrived at their house tonight, I was surprised to see the tiny silver car in their driveway. They usually kept it in the garage behind their house. When I walked into their living room after hearing Mr. Robichaux yell from his recliner, “Come in!” Mrs. Robichaux was coming out of their bedroom, putting the backing on her earring.
“Look at you, lady!” I cried, and she did a little circle for me to see her pretty outfit consisting of a three-quarter-sleeved shirt with a brightly colored abstract pattern and black dress pants. It had been deemed ‘girls’ night’ after we made the plans, so I dressed up too. I was wearing flared white pants and a black lace top with a hot pink cami underneath.
After grabbing her purse off the couch, she leaned over her husband and gave him a big kiss on the lips, purposely leaving as much lipstick on his face as possible. Obviously used to her antics, all he said was, “Y’all have fun watching your shit-flick,” before moving his attention back on his game of solitaire on his laptop.
She started simultaneously tickling and pinching him all over his legs, belly, and arms, saying, “I’ll show you shit-flick!”
“Quit, woman,” he said in an unaffected voice.
“I’ll get your appendages!” she yelled playfully, pinching the inside of his thigh. This made me burst out laughing; having heard and seen this routine a couple of times since meeting them, it still made me grin like a fool watching them flirt with each other, even after being married for more than thirty years.
So here we are now, me gripping the door handle like my life depends on it as Mrs. Robichaux zips in between cars and semis on 45 South going a hundred and twenty miles an hour, switching gears like a racecar driver and laughing at my look of absolute terror. Her behavior surprises the hell out of me. She is one of the top dogs at NASA, in charge of everything that gets put on the space shuttle before it’s launched. She’s anally organized, always in control, and as I peel myself from the leather seat and contain the sudden urge to kiss the ground beneath my feet, I ask her, “What the hell was that?!�
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Laughing, she admits, “That’s my fun. I always have to be so serious all the time at work, and I got my fast little toy to help me let off some steam.”
I nod, my legs feeling shaky after holding myself so tense the entire drive to the movie theater. Mrs. Robichaux is so excited to be out on our girl date that she buys practically everything at the concession stand. She tells me to order whatever I want, but when I only order a hot dog and a Sprite, she scoffs and prompts, “And what as your side?”
“Um, nachos?” I ask.
She nods. “And what for dessert?”
“Uh…chocolate-covered almonds?”
“Good girl,” she says, and then turns her expectant gaze on the acne-covered teenaged boy behind the register.
After she orders everything under the sun, they have to put all our candy in a large popcorn bag and balance our food and drinks in carriers. I’m so glad I didn’t attempt to wear heels, because I know for a fact I would have bit it, falling flat on my ass and ended up covered in relish and nacho cheese. That would’ve smelled lovely.
When we find two seats together in the stadium-style rows of cushioned chairs, I carefully lower my ass into one and maneuver our drinks into the cup holders in the armrests. We distribute all our goodies between the two of us and settle in for the movie.
“Thanks for suggesting this, Kayla. This has been a lot of fun, and we haven’t even watched the movie yet,” she says with a grin.
“Thank you for all the food and for coming with me. My mom and I go to our dollar theater all the time back home, probably about once every two weeks. Thanks for filling in for her. I miss her like crazy.”
“I think of it this way. If Jason were going to a semester of school in another state, and he made a friend, I would want the friend’s family to take him in and take care of him like he was their own. It’s a pretty scary adventure you’re on, having never lived anywhere but the town you grew up in. It would be the same for Jason. When we adopted him—“