This is the sixth Loft Game story, and they should be read in order unless you don't mind dealing with unexplained references. I'm trying out Literotica's (beta) Series capability, so maybe I won't have to keep listing them. But just to be safe, the sequence of the previous episodes is:
Kermit
,
Barney
,
Elf on a Shelf
,
Hula Girl
,
Scotty
.
If you're hoping for the finale of Chips's freshman year, I'll tell you up front that I stop just short of it. This episode had already grown monstrously large with the threads I wanted to get started before she scooted back to NJ for the summer. So, perhaps think of this as Act IV in a play where everything is leading up to the denouement of Act V.
—C
─────────
"All in," Zach said.
I studied the pile nervously.
"How many?" I asked. His answer was a hundred fifty less than I had in front of me. Dead even, basically, because those six measly green chips wouldn't save me if he won, not with the blinds at one and two hundred. Absent a bolt from heaven, whoever lost this head-to-head battle was out of the game.
First out for either boys or girls.
If my pocket queens held and a girl won, Zach was in the hot seat—literally the couch behind me.
I prayed he was only high-pair with the jack on the board. He hadn't played the hand like he had something better. But it
could
be, and if so, I was the one dangling by a thread. I could be walking to the back room under the leering and jeering of a room full of people. Or far worse than a few minutes on my knees and a "Bleh!" moment ...
I didn't let my eyes stray toward Kevin. I knew the expression I'd see there: predatory and the reason I was seriously anxious. His chip stack wasn't tiny.
Zach's face held the same nerves mine did.
Or are you imagining that, Charl?
I had the low stack of all the women at that moment, courtesy of a statistically "No fuckin' way!" Logan had pulled off three hands ago. My lack of chips meant the sharks circled—girl sharks in my case because if I was dead in the water, that made them safe. It was now, or the drip of blinds would finish me.
The same thing's driving him. You hope.
The situation was so unexpected. Zach's cherub face hid a brain that was wickedly good at this game. I thought back over the weeks since I'd joined.
Logan, Brey, Logan again ... Jesus! That's more than his share of wins in ... what? ... a dozen weeks with a dozen of us playing?
Way more than his share. And the one night Victoria had crowed, "Hell yeah! Park it, babe!" and pointed the red-faced boy toward the couch, he'd been clearly tired and under the weather.
Not that a guy under the weather hadn't still been able to glue me to my seat in rapt attention. It had taken me forever to fall asleep that night as I brought myself to a couple of orgasms over a boyish face clenched from the same.
Zach was the best player of the boys, followed by Owen and Kevin. The three of them were usually the ones vying to be on top for their side, then on top overall.
As for me, I wasn't the best on the girl side. That was Carrie. But she had played the second-longest of the girls and had the advantage of four years of weekly practice. I'd had a fraction of that, but I was moving up the pack lately, rarely losing my final piece of underwear until it was down to a few of us at the table.
But Lady Luck was a goddamn bitch, and tonight Zach had seen his stack trickle away in hand after hand that just didn't fall the way the odds said they should, and mine had disappeared in the nuclear explosion of Logan's straight flush over my aces full.
I took one last look at his bland expression, trying to decide if his eyes crinkled more than usual, or was he sitting the way he normally did? In a way, it didn't matter. I was out of time.
I'm praying you're in the same boat, Zach, and that my read is right: jacks.
I sucked in a deep breath. "Call."
My breath left in a whoosh when his ace–jack hit the table, nerves exploding in a release of tension. I let myself enjoy the chagrin that crept over his face when he saw my expression and realized. It didn't need me flipping to show queen–queen. I saw his gaze go inward as he contemplated his possible fate later on.
I reminded him of his more immediate one.
"Lemme see."
He stood and let us girls whoop over the briefs coming off. We poked fun, of course, dick jokes and size jokes—none of those ridiculing, though, because break Rule #3 and you'd be history.
"I wish I could get my goodies"—Hannah's seemingly random arm gesture ended with her fingers coincidentally pointing right at Zach's groin—"to double in size anytime I wanted to."
"I'm pretty sure 'want to' doesn't apply right now," Victoria cackled. Zach's wince, the tiniest tic on a face that had been so poker moments ago, confirmed she was right. That pumped the kernel of excitement his loss planted in every girl's psyche.
"You'd need a wheelbarrow for those boobs if you did," Kevin told Hannah.
She glanced complacently down at what Barney Stinson would absolutely have described as an "ample bosom" encased in a sexy cream bra. "Maybe I meant my booty," which, of course, immediately prompted half the room to sink to lame impressions of Sir Mix-a-Lot in as many different keys as there were people.
Zach threw up his hands in "Yeah, yeah, you guys are hilarious" and slumped onto the couch.
Get comfortable. That couch doubles as a stage
, I thought with a giggle inside.
But the moment passed. Ten of the eleven of us there that night were going to be getting naked and there was a lot more game to get there. I was basically in a bikini already: the pink triangle bra I'd gotten for Christmas and a new pair of black bikini underwear I kinda liked. I contemplated my just-grown chip stack with relief and a sigh.
We'd been gunning for Nick. Oh, nothing obvious. No girls colluding in the dark corners. But everyone at the table—except maybe Nick himself—knew it. They'd seen the little smirks that flew from Victoria to Hannah to Carrie, around to Em and me, off to Brey and Logan, any time Nick's chips disappeared into someone else's stack.
Even the guys knew what those meant. Nick was the newbie in the game, the one still nervous and the only one of the boys no girl had ever sent to walk the plank. So—quite generously, I figured—we wanted to give him that opportunity.
They'd done it to me, just as subtly, and I'd found myself on my knees, Owen's cock in my mouth, knowing that a roomful of girls, including my new best friend at college, were giggling at my expense in the other room.
Oh well, maybe next time.
One by one, people lost their chips. My turn came. I pushed away the sense of frustration—
I need to win!
—and endured the "Need help with a trim there, Chips?" from Carter. It was totally unfounded. Playing Friday nights meant I was very scrupulous about how everything looked down there.
"Maybe you're the one getting trim, Carter?" Carrie suggested with a knowing leer in my direction.
"Wow, I can't believe you're volunteering as his bed-warmer right out loud in front of everyone like that," I told her with wide-eyed, totally faked amazement. She stuck out her tongue and we both grinned.
"Don't stick it out unless you're going to use it!" Carter said ... which earned him two sets of middle fingers.
It became a three-person game between Carrie, Kevin, and Logan. Logan had the biggest stack, but the other two were good.
Hannah was tense. Zach's infusion to my stack had saved me, and she'd been the first girl to go bust. Her expression was carefully blank, but I knew. And we both knew Kevin knew.
How fuckin' perfect for him!
I thought sourly. He'd taken out his anger on Victoria just two weeks prior. Presumably, he now had his sights on the other two of us he was pissed at. He could leave me as prey for next year, but Hannah was a senior and would escape in mere weeks.
But Kevin's eagerness made him too aggressive. "All in."
Carrie lunged from stolid "Check, check" to cards slapped face up with a jubilant "I call!"
I totally relished the crestfallen look on his face, despite a little bitterness that her full house held when mine hadn't. Hannah met my eyes and let out a long, quiet sigh of exhale. I read it as "Only three more weeks to get through for me. Good luck next year, Chips."
It was cold comfort to me that I now had a flash drive with my name on it in the box under the bed in the back room. The video on it would ordinarily send me into paroxysms of lust, but it would barely stave off mortification if I had to spread out on the couch and jill under his gaze.
Head to head, Carrie and Logan battled it out. I glanced over at Zach and saw the thousand-yard stare. He knew what was coming: the winner would be a girl, and that meant the boy was the loser.
It was a long fifteen minutes for him, enduring the not-so-covert looks and grins from the girls, until Carrie sighed and flipped her cards into the muck pile. "Nope. Congrats!"
Her face flushed with excitement, Logan turned her eyes to Zach and stood. "Come on."
It took a second for the words to make sense, and then the boos started.
"Oh shit, not you too!" Brey said, a pointed glare at Carrie indicating whom she meant.
"Come on, girl! It's probably our last chance. He's graduating," Em pleaded.
I felt the disappointment as much as they did. It'd been only a week since Ethan had left me in purring contentment, yet already desires were resurging. I was sex-positive, to put it mildly. From the Sunday of that shore weekend with Max, still nervous and a bit tender from losing my virginity the night before, right up until Therese broke us up, I was totally into the new world I'd discovered.
There was the hiatus named Justin where I got a little fidgety—a relationship brief enough that it never got beyond second base before I realized it was just a rebound.
But then came Christian. The dance of the talking stage, the first date ending in a kiss, those after progressively more steamy, I knew where they were headed: a Saturday evening, butterflies in my stomach, when I said, "I have a key to the Airstream." And then it was constant because we had teenage sex drives, and not ones at the bottom end of the bell curve.
So now, disappointed? Absolutely. Frustrated, yes. We'd all seen which way the tide was flowing those last few hands. We'd all anticipated Zach sprawled on the couch for us girls ... naked, oiled ... simply because Logan said, "Jerk off for us, Zach." It had gotten our heartbeats up, and nipples crinkling, and maybe the first hints of dampness between our legs.
