“But everyone forgives me anyway because I’m so hot.” He grins. Caleb’s words hurl back at him: You’re the most narcissistic, arrogant best friend a man can ever have.
He seizes her breasts and rocks himself so hard against her that the crate inches forward. And forward. His fingers and thumbs scissor and tweak her nipples until she’s crying out so loud that he’s certain someone will walk into the stockroom to see what the commotion is all about.
He makes sure she comes several times before he allows his own pleasure to spill over. It’s a rule he has. Always make sure the woman is pleasured before he is. Her screams punctuate the room and the blood is roaring too furiously in his own ears for him to hear her properly.
Panting, he withdraws his cock and peels off the condom. The blonde is strewn over the crate like a rag doll, too fatigued to pick herself up. He zips his pants and buttons up his shirt again, not saying anything.
She stirs. Her skirt is still hiked up to her waist and her bare buttocks and pussy glisten with her juices.
“I’ll give you my number,” she says. “Call me and we can do this again.”
“Thanks but no thanks. I don’t do encores.” He’s aware that he sounds awfully blunt, but in his experience, it’s kinder to let them down brutally and fast rather than to prolong something he knows he’s not going to reciprocate.
She hesitates a long time as she slowly staggers to her feet to dress. “Yeah, they said that about you too, but I refused to believe it.” She does not meet his eyes.
He knows what she’s thinking. He’s not clueless. They said that about you but I refused to believe it … because I thought I’d be the one to change you … the one that you’d fuck more than once.
He finishes dressing. “I’ve gotta go.”
He turns to the door without saying goodbye. He doesn’t look back either. There’s no point when you’re never going to see them again.
*
Caleb is no longer in the pool room, but the brunettes are still at the bar. The short-haired one eyes him speculatively.
“Had a good time?” Sarcasm drips off her tongue.
“Better than the one you had with your friend.” He grins.
She gets down from her barstool and saunters towards him. She fingers his shirt buttons. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Brian Morton.”
“Oh yeah? All good, I hope.” He slips into his easy smile, and he can tell that she’s bedazzled. In fact, the eyes of every woman in the room are on him.
“They say you are best lay this side of Chicago. I haven’t had the chance to experience it myself. So … if you have enough strength left in that body of yours, maybe you and I go back to my apartment and – ”
She lets the suggestion linger.
“Maybe later. I’ve got to find my friend.”
He bends down to kiss her full on the lips – a lavishly sexual kiss that leaves no room in the imagination for what he has in mind. The brunette gasps when their lips part.
Brian smiles and leaves her standing there by the bar.
“Later,” he promises. He doesn’t miss a beat as he turns to walk out of the room.
In the next room, a poker game is going on. Spying Caleb, he goes in.
“What’re doing, Cal?” he asks.
“Sssssh.”
Caleb is at a table of five players. The dealer deals two cards facedown to each player. Brian sits back to watch. They are playing the Texas Hold’em variant of poker, with the dealer exposing five community cards which can be used by the players for the best five card combination utilizing two of their own cards.
It’s the final round of betting. The fifth community card, called the river card, has been dealt.
“Raise,” Caleb says, pushing two hundred dollars to the pile of money in the center of the table.
The man to his left sneaks a look at his two facedown cards. He grimaces.
“Fold,” he says.
“Fold,” says another man.
Caleb is left playing against a thin black man with a sparse moustache. The black man has a tic in his left eye, Brian observes. He wonders how that tic figures in bluffing.
“Call,” the black man says, pushing two hundred dollars as well into the pile.
“All right, showdown please,” the dealer says.
The black man reveals his cards. The dealer takes them to arrange them in the best five card combination out of the seven.
“Full house,” he says.
“Damn.” Caleb throws in his cards. The dealer grabs them.
“Two aces.”
Caleb is crestfallen. Brian watches as the black man seizes the entire pot of money on the table. His mind is churning.
He has just found a way to give Caleb his mother’s mortgage money.