Poker

I’m dealt a seven and a jack, suited, and call the ten dollar bet that Natalie is so shamelessly bluffing with. “I dunno what his problem is, really. He just gets so political when he’s mad at me,” she says. Samantha folds, but I don’t think she had anything anyway. Drew folds too. “You can see him like looking around the apartment for anything really viable to be mad at me about, because he knows his position is ridiculous, so he turns on the news and starts shouting about the war,” Natalie continues. Anna looks to me and folds, letting me take the fall if I’m wrong. “I don’t want to fuck him when he’s like that. It’s so that he’s the only one who gets to be angry.”

“We’re not allowed to be angry,” I finish for her, waiting for the flop.

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” she says and stands up to lean across the table to deal. A seven, an ace and a five, the five and ace in diamonds, like both my cards. “We get pissed and we’re imagining things, being overdramatic or something, but they get pissed off and they’re being strong men, reacting to some real injustice, right? And we’re just supposed to cry until we feel better.”

“Because we can’t fix an imaginary problem,” Drew says, stirring her vodka-tonic with her pinkie. “So we just get all sad until we realize that there was never anything wrong in the first place.”

“It’s fucking frustrating!” Natalie says. She stares at the cards in front of her for a while and steels herself, throws in another ten dollars. “Why can’t I be a lesbian?”

“Really!” Drew says.

“Yeah, girls are nice!” Samantha says.

“But they don’t have dicks,” Anna says. “And I’m afraid I need dick.”

I put in ten dollars, look at Natalie and decide to raise her. She gets a crestfallen look in the side of her mouth.

“Yeah,” she says, “I think I do too.”

“Anyone ever gone there?” Samantha asks, leaning back in her chair. “Drewwww?”

Natalie puts another ten in the pot and quickly deals the turn. A seven of clubs.

“Well, I made out with that girl in the back of Berlin that one time, remember?” Drew says, scratching an itch on the back of her head.

“Mmmhmm. Anna?” She shakes her head no. Natalie looks up at me and throws in fifteen. Shit. Maybe she’s got sevens. “Isabel?” Sam asks.

“Yes,” I answer, calling Natalie.

“Really?”

“It’s not that weird.”

“I don’t believe you,” Natalie says, genuinely shocked. Her cards begin to shake in her hands. She puts them down.

“Anna, have I fucked a girl?” I ask.

Anna is the authority on all things Isabel since she’s known me since I was ten.

“Yep. You were together for like a year, weren’t you?”

“Nine months.”

“What’s it like!” Samantha asks, slamming the front two legs of her chair down and leaning over the table. Natalie winces, but listens carefully.

“Softer, I guess. Everything is softer. The skin, the hair, the lips.” I catch Natalie looking at my lips. She’s got the remainder of the deck in hand, her long fingers over the top card, but she doesn’t pull it.

“And when you say fucked, you mean….” Sam asks.

I pull my hair behind my ears and put my cards down. “Strapon. Both of us. And of course we licked each other’s pussies and all that.”

“I heard that’s better with a girl,” Drew says, grinning.

I gave a non-committal side to side head motion. “It can be. At least she was more willing than half the guys I’ve been with.” Natalie’s got the card out and holds it face down in the center of the table. She’s breathing deeply, in shock no doubt, but doesn’t say anything.

“Is it easier to go down on a girl than a guy?” Sam asks.

“You know how your jaw gets sore?” Sam, Drew and Anna nod. “That’s your tongue. But it tastes completely different and it’s very, very wet.”

The word “wet” hangs in the air for a few seconds before Natalie turns the river over. It’s a three of diamonds. Natalie, with a seven and a jack in her hand, has lost.

“I’m getting another drink,” she says.

I follow her into my kitchen, leaving the others to talk about me, which they’re entitled to now. She turns at the counter and gently presses her glass onto it. She jumps a little when she sees me behind her, then smiles apologetically.

“How could you tell I was bluffing?” she asks me.

“Sit up a little when you’re bluffing. It makes it look like you’ve got a great hand and you can’t wait to win. I’m sorry if the conversation got a little weird in there for you. Sam gets a little overexcited when she thinks she knows how to drink.”

“That’s all?” Natalie asks. “Just how I was sitting?”

“Anyway, you’re clearly uncomfortable about it, and I just want you to know that it’s not that big of a deal.”

“Do I sit up when I’ve got a good hand?”

“Yeah. Everyone does.”

She stares at my shoulder for a little while and I take her glass to the fridge. I fill it up with ice cubes and hand her the empty tray. She takes it to the sink and refills it, her breasts rearranging themselves as she turns the tray in the stream.

“And,” I continue, “you get an itch on the side of your face, here….” I swipe the pad of my forefinger on her upper cheekbone. “And you keep scratching it.” An explosion of laughter comes from the dining room. The girls have changed the subject. I hope. Natalie puts her glass down and goes into the bathroom. I’ve really freaked her out now. She will come out and tell me she’s lost enough money and go home forever. I pour myself another drink, watching her ice turn to water at the edges.

There’s another roar in the dining room, I head toward it, what I’m hoping is a sweet smile on my face. A hand pops out of the bathroom, grabs my arm and pulls me in.

Natalie stands before me in the orange light of the bathroom, her lips open and hopeful, her eyes wide, brown, full of flawless mascara, eyeliner mudding in the corners. It seems so sudden to me, something that some part of me had noticed and discarded before I could consider it, that Natalie was on the no-kiss list, and it seemed impossible to remove her from it. She saw my surprise, though not disgust, and leaned into me. An intake of air and there they are, girl lips, sticky and forceless, something I’d forgotten. I turn into her, pressing her into the sink, her breasts against mine, hers large and heavy, mine small and tight, making room for each other. She has one hand on the back of my arm and holds me there, just a suggestion to my elbow. I pull back anyhow, wiping my mouth in my palm.

“Is this what you want?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

Without returning to her mouth, my hand drops on her shoulder, falls slowly down, curves around her breast and curls up again. Her eyelids drop and flutter. I go down, under her shirt and come up again, under her bra, coming up to put her nipple between fore- and index fingers. Her mouth opens and her bottom lip twitches. I raise her shirt to her armpits and go around the back, undoing her bra quick in a pinch. I pull the bra up and stare at them for a moment. She wonders what I’m doing and opens her eyes, sees me and closes them. I flick her nipple with my tongue and blow on it. It stiffens and points at me. I do it again with the other. She shivers.

“Sam never asked if you’d done this before. Have you?”

“No.”

I take her nipple between my lips and suck it into submission. It sharpens, fights. “That feels good,’ she says, just under what wave form would penetrate the door.

And this is what I want. Dropping to my knees, lifting her long skirt to her hips is what I want. The triangle, entirely empty of cock, trimmed to the quick, the swollen pussy lips and the gift between them, also swollen, pink flesh shyly peeking out. My mouth waters thinking about it, this slung focus that I haven’t seen in years. My hands turn to fists, rolling her skirt in them, and I press her hips back over the sink, her abashed deference, rolling back kindly. I put her heels on my shoulders and dive in.

“Oh my God,” she says, her clit speaking for her now. “Oh my God.” My tongue swipes along her folds, dipping in when it can, flicking like she was soft serve. My body responds in amused tickles. It lights like a puddle of 151.

My fingers enter her, first one, then two, then three and turn up, looking for a g-spot, if there is one. I fuck her with them, this girl who only known men, and hasn’t really known sex either, hasn’t turned that brown part of her soul to bright green. I’m digging the vibration in her, the way she jolts forward the second my tongue makes contact with her clit and I pause so I can feel it again. Her right hand goes up to her breast and pinches the nipple gently as I did. Her mouth hangs open, careful, measured breaths in and out.

I pull my tongue in for a moment and watch her, my third-wheel thumb taking over for a while.

“Has anyone ever made you come before?” I ask her, because I’m sure of the answer.

“No.”

“Have you ever come before?”

She doesn’t answer, but grits her teeth for a moment. I kiss her knee.

“You’re going to now,” I tell her. “Just relax and concentrate on your clit.”

I split her pussy lips between the forefinger and thumb of my other hand and start to lick her in earnest. Her thighs shake and occasionally batter my head, but I keep a steady pace, continuing to fuck her with my other hand. My tongue gets sore, but I don’t stop. She moans, louder and louder, no question in my mind that the other three girls are listening now, but I don’t stop. The low, square heels on her sandals dig into my shoulders, but I don’t stop.

“Isabel, please,” she whimpers, leaving no question as to who is servicing whom to the other three, “pleeeease.” Her heels press in hard suddenly and I have to press back against my toes to keep her from pushing me away. “Oh God, God, God, Guh!” and she falls completely apart, spasming all over the sink as I slowly, unrelentingly, lick it out of her. She comes for about a minute. It’s only when her hands push against the top of my head that I let up. I sit on my heels and look up at her darkly.

“Your face is all wet,” she whispers, laughing. She is gorgeous, I notice for the first time.

“Are you okay?” I ask, taking her fingers in mine.

“Hell yeah. You?”

“You think it’s just my face that’s wet?”

She is overwhelmed by a fit of embarrassed giggles. I stand up and kiss them out of her.

“We should go back out there,” she says in my ear. She stands up, adjusts her hair in the mirror and goes first. I wipe my face in a washcloth, put her panties in the cabinet under the sink, quell a smile and go back to the table. The three girls stare back and forth between the two of us.

“Drew, it’s your deal, hon,” I say.