Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  “I didn’t,” says Simon.

  And George puts in: “Why is it that when you sit down at a poker table, people start to talk like they do in Westerns?”

  A peal of appreciative laughter around the table, Simon included. Daniel waved to Simon, still expecting an answer to his question. And there I was, waiting for a fairy tale like my own.

  But none came. Simon leaned back in his seat and said pleasantly, “I do all sorts of things, Mr. Giradeau. I dropped out of medical school and went into aid work for a while, but I discovered I don’t have the temperament to be a martyr. So then I did odd jobs in various parts of Africa, and now I do freelance consulting on setting up corporate branch offices in Third World countries. Charter work, smoothing out the banking stuff, negotiating leases, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh,” said Cahill.

  Giradeau nudged Cahill and told Simon in a sotto whisper: “You let him down. He was hoping you were a bandit.”

  “What?” asked Simon with an incredulous laugh.

  “Oh, there are rumours going around the circuit that you were a mercenary in Africa,” I explained, biting down suggestively on an olive in a toothpick. “Of course, that could be Vivian’s overactive imagination.”

  “I think I said something like I hope he’s a tiger in bed,” giggled Vivian. “How we get from that to ‘mercenary’ is somebody else’s fault! Tigers in Africa? Bandits in Africa? Like a kiddies’ game of telephone.”

  Simon looked at me as he replied, “I think present company tonight are far too interesting for the stuffy job descriptions I’ve been hearing. Each and every one of you. Except Westlake here.”

  George looked hurt. “Oh?”

  “I don’t mean it like that, mate,” said Simon quickly. “I meant you seem to be the opposite of what you are. I’d have thought a tourist resort mogul would be a far more extroverted personality.”

  Cahill gave George a supportive slap on the back. “Oh, George here is a wild man, trust us. And he’s here, isn’t he? We’ve all got to be a little mad to be doing this, don’t we?”

  “Or horny,” argued Vivian.

  Ayako, as usual, smiled but didn’t comment.

  “If you like, Cahill, I can pretend to be a mercenary tonight,” said Simon.

  “Sounds more Vivian’s fantasy,” replied Cahill. “Who knows? Maybe you have a bandolier under your shirt.”

  “He shoots first, asks questions later,” quipped Giradeau, putting on a deep movie announcer voice.

  My eyes locked with Simon’s. I tossed a chip into the pot and said: “Definitely.”

  An hour later. George, in a mood, had gone home. Cahill was upstairs with Roxanne, a soap actress and a relative newbie. A couple of other pairings of casual regulars had happened—one flown the coop, one in the guest bedroom. And that left several familiar faces around the table. Simon was down to his boxers. Daniel nude. Ayako in a camisole. Vivian with more clothes on than she probably wanted. And me naked.

  Ayako, laughing, had pointed to me instead of one of the boys last game, making me lose my knickers. There was nothing in the rules saying a girl couldn’t win and make another girl strip, or a boy versus boy—it just wasn’t that common a tactic.

  “I need you to distract Daniel,” she joked.

  But Daniel won a young blonde sculptor who had a big gallery show on, and after she gave him a hand job in the corner, they excused themselves for the night.

  New game and Ayako’s deal. She shuffled the deck, calling out like an Atlantic City pit boss, “Seven-card stud, high/ low, kings are wild in the hole.” Oh, oh, I thought. This is going to be interesting.

  Seven-card stud. Two facedown cards, four faceup, one facedown. Ayako’s deal, Ayako’s pleasure, so kings were wild in the hole. Meaning if you got one of them dealt facedown (and that only you could see in your hand), they’d be wild. Hey, it would be too discouraging if kings were wild and everyone could see them as faceup cards.

  And high/low? Helena told me this was pretty common in regular stud poker. The pot would get split between the player with the best hand and the one with the worst hand. It supposedly added spice in that more players stayed in the game longer.

  As if we needed any more spice. An interesting choice of game, I thought, and why split the pot? Unless Ayako was up to something.

  Simon had the highest faceup card, a ten of clubs, so he opened the betting. “Here we go, my darlings. What shall I open with? I’ll offer a kiss. It’s the romantic in me.”

  “A kiss?” said Ayako. “That’s real daring, Simon. But I think we ought to get right down to it. I’ll see your kiss—” Clink went the chips. “And I’ll raise you a 69. Daniel?”

  “Check.”

  Eyes fell to me, next to bet. “Check,” I said promptly.

  “Aha,” said Vivian. “Well, I’m sure you taste nice, kissing wise, Simon, but I’d rather feel you between my legs. Right here.”

  I spotted a couple of grimaces from the other players. Vivian may have had money, but there was always something coarse and predatory in her that put off the women and a few of the men. Helena said it was considered a faux pas to come out and say who you wanted and how you wanted them at the table. And yet you could be screwing one of these guys and screaming their name in front of the crowd an hour or two from play.

  “Raise you a rug burn,” said Vivian, flashing her smile. I expected to see fangs.

  Around we went. Daniel folded, and then with a poor-sport sneer, Vivian had to pack it in. It was down to Ayako, Simon and me, and now it became quite clear just who the stakes were. I got the distinct impression I was being ganged up on.

  Nope, I don’t think she was really after Simon, at least not tonight. But she could be helping him.

  The way I figured it, Simon had cooked up his little scheme to get me on my back well before the drinks were topped up. I mean, how do you share a high/low pot in strip poker? Even if he won the low hand for the pot, he could claim me, while Ayako would call in her marker on him down the line.

  If you wanted to presume innocence over her suggesting a split pot game, yeah, I guess it could be a “we both win, we’ll have each other” scenario. But knowing Simon, he would look for a silent partner for his schemes. Winner’s choice of who he took to bed.

  “I’ll hang your curtains,” said Ayako gaily, matching his bid for bondage, “and I’ll raise one juicy treat.”

  “Oh, yes?” asked Simon.

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  “F.O.D.,” she smiled.

  I wasn’t terribly impressed. For Simon, a Fuck On Demand would have been a nice refreshing pick-me-up over lunch in whatever under-the-counter business he was dealing in these days. He had little to lose, certainly no reputation at risk. I still thought he and Ayako were playing out a scene for my benefit.

  To fold now…He’d get almost as much kick out of rubbing my nose in that as taking me to bed. To hell with him, I thought. I supposedly controlled the bet, but Ayako had taken the stakes as high as they could go.

  “You in, Teresa?”

  Simon. Not giving me much chance to think.

  I smiled sweetly at Ayako and said, “Call.”

  The odds were in my favour, after all. If I won, I had Simon on my leash, not that I wanted him or expected him to keep the word of the bargain. If Ayako won, she could have him for all I cared. And well, if Simon won, there was still a 50/50 split he’d take Ayako over me. After all, he’d slept with me already. There was nothing new for him with my body, and his attitude tonight told me it was more about figuring out what I was up to and playing mind games.

  I could lay down my hand, call it a day, and let them duke it out. All I was coasting on was a straight.

  Then all my suspicions went out the window as Ayako said, “Pig.”

  Pig. There was a contingency in the game where a player could call this out and win both High and Low. They needed two different five-card hands with their seven. Simon laid down a flush, but there
was Ayako with her own flush, and that missing king. Wild card.

  And me with a straight.

  I laughed away like a fool, saying, “Alas, poor Simon! You get to be this lovely lady’s wind-up toy for the night of her choice.”

  And Ayako shot back, “Not him, beautiful. You. I want you.”

  9

  Later. She told me she had wanted me since I had walked into that townhouse apartment in Primrose Hill. And then to watch me coming as Neil fucked me senseless, it just made her toss and turn in her bed for nights on end. “You have no idea,” she informed me, smiling as if I had missed some important irony in life.

  My mind flashed back to that short instant when most of the players had got up to inspect me there as Neil had plunged in. Only Ayako had held her place, reaching out to cup my breast. Duh. You didn’t pick up on it, girl, and it was right in front of you.

  “Your nipple in my mouth,” she said. The reverential tone in her voice, it was like she was talking about ambrosia or something.

  She crossed the living room and her small, dainty hand caressed the back of my neck almost possessively, circling around to my jawline and up my cheek. “Look,” she said smiling. “I want you, and the ‘D’ does stand for ‘demand.’ But it’ll help both of us, I think, if you enjoy yourself. Have you ever thought about being with a girl?”

  I laughed self-consciously. Yes. Yes, I had. There were a couple of black female celebrities that I had thought: my God, they turn me on. But I’d assumed this was just restless, free-floating sexual energy that didn’t know where to put itself. I was discovering a lot of things about myself on this job.

  For one, it was far easier “going along” with what Ayako wanted and calling it experimentation than facing your own hidden desires and taking the initiative. To be the object of desire? To be seduced? It kind of left me off the hook. Truth is, I was up for it the longer I had to consider it. She was the “other.” We had a mutual exotic turn-on thing happening, and I don’t think I could have done it if a white chick had pulled that stunt on me back at the game.

  I’ll always remember her flat in Knightsbridge for incense, candles, Tokyo poster art in hallway alcoves I couldn’t begin to fathom. Very clean, very spare. Chic. Feminine.

  She slipped off her silk robe embroidered with a dragon, and she was my opposite in every way. I’m tall, and she was maybe, at best, five foot two. My breasts are full, my body having the right curves with a backside that’s not too much, but it’s there. Her tits had a girlish smallness to them, her ass a tiny, round peach, and though she had lovely, shapely legs, her hips were narrow, almost those of a boy. Her thatch of pubic hair had been elaborately trimmed.

  Look at her, I thought. Her delicate body was the cliché wet dream of every white guy with a Far East fetish, and what it inspired in me was an intimate revelation, that I actually desired her. She came over and sat in my lap as a child would, and I hugged her so naturally, feeling an instinctive urge to pet her and dominate her. I held her tight as we kissed, and she was a good kisser, tasting sweet in a surprising way. I expected a girl-taste to repel me. It didn’t.

  My breasts seemed to fascinate her, all the largeness and generosity of African features, and she played with my tits and fondled me as a boy would. I heard myself moan casually with pleasure, stroking the supple whiteness of that Japanese skin, and then very tentatively, very carefully, I slid my hand up her thigh and rested my fingers on her mound.

  Wet. Wet to the touch. I took my middle finger to taste some of her juice, and she flashed a smile of small neat teeth at me, wicked and catlike. In only a second, she slid off me like an oil slick, collapsing onto the floor in almost a fashion photographer’s pose, and with a confidence of taking a steering wheel she parted my legs and inserted two of her dainty fingers into my pussy. My gasp spurred her on, and she withdrew her hand and suddenly pounced on me with her mouth, small exquisite lips and the heat of her breath on my labia.

  My toes curled, and I hooked my ankles around the back of the chair with the immediacy of the pleasure. Her tongue seemed to lap with an urgent thirst at my pussy, licking me, seeking my clit, and when she found it, I let out a wail. I staggered like a drunk out of the chair, Ayako laughing and holding on to my thighs like a roughhousing child.

  “Come here,” I said huskily, and at last we made it to the bed.

  Kissing her and losing myself in her small mouth, letting her tug on my full bottom lip, and my hands roamed in lazy, curving trails along her belly and up to her breasts. I ducked my head down to suck one of her tiny nipples, with Ayako whispering in my ear, “I love your hair. I love its texture…” One of her hands ran through my curls, the other now pawing with amazed delight through my pubic hair.

  With Ayako on her side, me letting my shoulder blades hit the embrace of silk, we began to masturbate each other, and it turned into an unspoken competition to see who could make the other come. To feel her hand inside me while I simultaneously penetrated her was an incredible, even empowering turn-on. To be inside someone instead of being filled by a guy. To fill someone else.

  Short, sharp exhalations of girlish breath as she stared into my eyes and heard my own ragged breathing, and then I could feel it coming, like ripples of water, a gathering of thunderclouds. But I’ve nearly got you, honey, I almost got you there, the pad of a finger on your clit, fingers back inside you, kneading the most private, secret part of you. Ayako’s fingers pushing in and out of me, trying to get me there first, and my sweet box closed on her sopping fingers, tugging, urging her to stay in, and her eyes widened. She timber-ed onto the bed as she wailed, her knees opening out as far as they could go. I moved close enough to rest my cheek against hers, beads of her perspiration mixing with my own. I saw out of the corner of my eye, her teeth grit, the black almonds turning to closed slits.

  “Oh, fuck!…Oh, fuck, baby!” she said.

  She caressed my hair, panting after the marathon, giving me sweet little pecks on my lips like saying goodbye. And then she snuggled down and licked me until I screamed for mercy.

  Yeah, I discovered a hell of a lot about myself on this case. What I like. What I’m willing to do, and what I won’t. Ayako was a turning point for me. We barely said a word to each other when it was over. We walked hand in hand to her front door, and she kissed me goodbye like she expected we would see each other again. I smiled and actually thanked her.

  My apartment felt very still, very empty when I came home later. It felt like I hadn’t been back in ages, what with crashing at Helena’s and all the bed hopping that I was trying to call detective work. I felt the instinct to come home after making love with Ayako. Back to the haven of my private space to mull over what the episode told me about myself. What it perhaps really meant.

  Not that I didn’t do a good job of putting it off and finding other things to do. There was Vivian Mapling’s alibi to check out, for one thing, and alas, she had one. Turned out she did “design consultancy” work on custom jewellery (whatever the hell that meant) for a few of her rich and beautiful friends, and she had jetted off for a couple of days to Paris. Damn. She was far from being my favourite person at the games, and I would have liked to have pinned this on her and wrapped up the case quick. But the sadistic personal nature of how Lionel was killed persuaded me that our blackmailer was also our hands-on murderer, no second party involved.

  Until I felt duty-bound to follow up on Ayako’s background. Along with taking my pleasure, I had helped myself to something else in her apartment while she was fixing us afterglow drinks—a few key pages of banking documents, work stuff she had brought home from the office and no doubt expected to get around to later. Since they were photocopies and print-outs, I was pinning my hopes on the notion that if she discovered them missing, she might think she had forgotten them. I had maybe thirty seconds in her place while she was in the other room to decide what was and wasn’t important, and still I wound up grabbing things on the spur of the moment. Ayako handled major corporate lo
ans—this you could learn already from her business card. What made me shiver at my desk was recognising the name of a corporation I had done my best to ignore for a long time.

  Orpheocon.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Tell yourself that it’s coincidence. Come on, she works for one of the largest Japanese banks, and they’re a mega-corp with their dirty little fingers into pies all over the world. It should surprise you if her bank didn’t have a few dealings with them. Coincidence? Not that I was an expert, but Ayako seemed to do pretty hands-off third-party stuff, much of it related to equities and bonds for financial institutions in the Baltic states.

  But this is only the stuff you could get your hands on in a quick rush.

  One more lover, one more suspect…

  Trying to banish Ayako from my mind, I tried to return to my so-called “real” personal life. And I got a mild shock as I tore through my neglected post with a letter opener while flicking my right hand back and forth to my computer mouse to zip through my new emails. And I swear this actually happened. The publisher’s envelope I had dismissed as another rejection letter? I finally opened it…while clicking on a new email from my brother. “Hey, Sis” yada, yada, yada, and it turns out he took the copy of my kids’ book I gave him over to a small publisher in Argentina, and they thought it could do enormously well if I was willing for them to translate it into Spanish. On the continent of Isabel Allende and Márquez, it seemed they liked their kiddie stories with a little bit of social commentary. Wow.

  Then I looked down at the cream stationery in my hand from my latest publishing hopeful in London, and they liked it, too. One problem. They did not like Roxanne’s illustrations. Too sombre, the editor wrote, too damn dark to be perfectly blunt, and while the manuscript, she felt, managed to walk a fine line in tone, from a marketing perspective the submitted pictures would not do. And the publishing house preferred to assign its own illustrators anyway.

  So now I had a problem. I could go with Isaac’s folks way over there and perhaps get a few hundred copies sold—in Spanish—and with Roxanne’s illustrations, since they didn’t have a problem with them. Or I could let this big publisher with divisions on both sides of the Atlantic and even in Europe put out my book but perhaps depict my heroine’s refugee camp like a happy, sunny street in Balamory. It was my book, sure, but even though Roxanne dashed off her pictures as a “fun little job” and I knew her only slightly, I had sent the manuscript around as a team effort. It would be a shitty thing to do, I thought, to accept the big player’s offer and just dump her. If it were done to me, I’d think: bitch.