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
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"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.