“You’re talking to the wrong girls, then,” Lucy quipped.
“Paige was telling me about your synchro team. Sounds hardcore,” Nathan said, glancing at Lucy again before giving me a sideways look.
“Don’t get her started on it,” Millie advised him. “She could talk for hours about the university championships.”
“Well, as much as I’d love to hear that,” Nathan said, taking his hand out of his pocket, “I’m supposed to be joining in some kind of card game.” He was holding the deck of cards in his hand and he waggled them to prove his point.
“Not with Wesley?” Millie asked, full of scorn.
“Why not? Do you think he’ll try to hit on me?” Nathan asked, giving me another look. I laughed more than the joke deserved.
“Suit yourself,” Millie said.
“Paige, you in?” Nathan asked, turning to face me for the first time.
“Yes,” I told him, fully aware that I had just turned Wesley down not two minutes ago. But now I knew Nathan wanted to play, things were completely different. Fuck, he was so hot. Hot in the way that made you want to blow his mind by being a complete slut for him, because you knew he’d never say a word to anyone. The filthy things I could do for him… do to him…
“Babe, are you okay?” Lucy asked, fixing me with a look of concern. “You keep zoning out.”
“Oh, yeah, no I’m fine,” I said, quickly, to cover up.
“We’ll see you back in the room?” Millie said, as Nathan took a step in my direction.
“Yeah, will do,” I told her, turning so I could walk with Nathan. Did he know I fancied him? I was doing a terrible job of hiding it, but guys were usually so dense about these things.
“I didn’t know you were into skiing,” Nathan said to me as we walked back towards the bar.
“I’m not, really. I just wanted to come on the trip,” I explained. Did that make me sound slutty? After all, the only reason to go on the trip was to have sex, unless you actually liked skiing.
“Oh, right.”
“What about you? Do you like skiing?”
“Yeah, my parents taught me when I was about five and we’ve been every year since,” he told me.
“That’s so cool,” I enthused. “I’ve always sorta wanted to learn.”
“I can teach you a bit this week. If you like.”
Personal skiing lessons from hot Nathan. Yes.
Falling on my arse on slippery snow, strapped to giant planks in front of hot Nathan. No.
I hedged. “Maybe.”
The other people Wesley had dragged into his card game were mostly either too drunk to really know what they’d agreed to, or got easily distracted by other conversations. Two girls I didn’t recognise, who were the only other women there, disappeared within two minutes because of a text one of them got, and I was really only hanging around to flirt with Nathan. He hadn’t even dealt the first hand when a couple of lads dropped out to go back to the bar, which only left Nathan, Wesley and I, and Wesley at least had the sense to know when he was third wheeling.
“Well, now it feels like going up to my room to get these was pointless,” Nathan lamented, shuffling the cards absent-mindedly.
“We can still play,” I insisted, doing my best to smile cutely at him.
He noticed, and smiled. “Oh, yeah? Do you know how to play poker?”
I shook my head. “Can you teach me?”
“I think so. It’s not that complicated, when you know how. The complicated part is all the betting.”
With a deft hand, he dealt out ten cards, split into two rows of five. “This is my hand,” he said, pointing to the ones nearest him. “And this is yours.”
“Why are they face-up?” I asked, looking at my row of five.
“Just so I can teach you, at first. Okay, so, there are three main types of hands you’re trying to get using your five. Straights, which are a run of cards in number sequence, like two-three-four-five-six or nine-ten-jack-queen-king. Flushes, which are five cards all of the same suit. And then there’s four-of-a-kind, three-of-a-kind, and a pair. You can also get two pairs, and a full house is three-of-a-kind plus a pair. With me so far?”
I nodded. “So you already have a pair, right?”
“A pair of kings, yeah. My other cards don’t really make anything useful, so I’m going to hold onto my two kings and discard the other three, to see what I get.” He put his three cards to one side and drew three more. “There, now I have a pair of twos, too. That’s two pairs.”
“And I’ve got… nothing?” My cards were a jumble of numbers and suits.
“Well, you’ve got three clubs. You could discard the other two, and hope to draw two more clubs for a flush.”
I gave him the two cards and he dealt me two more. “Nope, both diamonds,” I said.
“Yeah, but now you have a pair of fours,” he pointed out. “My two pair is a higher hand, since it’s harder to make, so I would win that hand.”
“I get it. Is a flush higher than two pairs?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry too much for now.” He scooped up all the cards and, after a brisk shuffle, dealt them back out. I looked at him: absorbed in the process of moving the cards around, and lit by the soft bar lights, I thought he was even more good-looking than ever. His eyes suddenly flicked over to me and we made eye contact, and we both laughed, nervously.
“Okay,” he said, trying not to sound flustered. “Now you’ve got four hearts, so you should definitely try and get a flush.”
We exchanged my only non-heart card for a new one. “Spade,” I said, examining it.
“I’ve got a pair of nines, so if I discard three… still just a pair of nines. It beats your hand, which is just a queen-high, since you haven’t got any pairs or anything.”
“This is harder than it looks,” I said, trying to elicit sympathy.
“Don’t worry, it’s all luck, really. The skill is in knowing when to bet and when to fold. Ready to try without the cards face-up?”
As much as I was enjoying this crash course in poker hands, I was more interested in Nathan himself. “How about we play best of three?” I suggested. “Winner gets to choose a dare.”
Nathan looked at me, and I kept my gaze steady in return. There was a very clear implication, which he picked up.
“No way. Decide the dare first, then we compete. Loser has to do it.”
There was a bit of steely determination in him that I hadn’t encountered before: in our biology classes, he’d always been kind and accommodating. I liked him even more for it.
Casting my mind around the hotel, I tried to think of something challenging but not cliché. “How about… the loser has to jump off the high dive.”
Nathan scoffed. “What are we, eight?”
“Alright, then. Loser has to jump off the high dive, naked.”
I have no idea what made me say it. It just came to me in a little bubble of annoyance when he made his dismissive comment.
He eyed me, not sure whether to smile. Clearly he had the advantage here, but there was always a chance…
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
I smiled. “I’m trusting you not to cheat, though.”
“I won’t,” he said, grinning as he dealt the cards out.
In the first hand, I forgot that the cards all needed to be the same suit for a flush. I thought they just had to be all-red or all-black. But the second time, he dealt me three sixes straight away, and my three-of-a-kind beat his pair. It was the first one I’d won and I celebrated while he sat back and smiled, tossing his losing cards across the table theatrically.