Chapter 7
7
Jeremy Bell brought some type of seafood dip to poker night. Jade was mildly allergic to shellfish, and while the stuff wasn’t deadly to her, she was more concerned with having to bow out of the game because of her swelling eye sockets than she was about the fact that she didn’t have an EpiPen on her. She’d politely asked the man to set the dip on a little coffee table farther away from the one they played cards at. But it was a hot summer night, and even with the air conditioner on, it was still so warm that the smell from the dip felt oppressive.
Lim was seated across from her in a loose-fitting, cropped button-down shirt. Her clavicle was exposed, as were the multiple small tattoos that covered both her arms. Jade was studying her fiercely, trying to figure out what her tell was. They’d been at the table for about an hour, and so far the only thing she could spot was that Lim seemed to rub her thumb over the tiny cat tattoo near her elbow every time she was about to fold. The observation was newly gained, though, and Jade needed a few more examples of it before she felt confident enough to officially declare it a tell.
Next to her, the head track-and-field coach, Mr. Byrd, cleared his throat and pulled a bit at the collar of his linen shirt. “I was at a roadside barbecue joint over in Beaufort the other day with the wife and ran into Joe Spencer.”
Joe Spencer was something of a legend in the surrounding counties. A Greenbelt native whose parents moved him to Beaufort in high school with hopes of better chances getting scouted for college ball. They’d succeeded, and he’d gone on to play for the Gamecocks, becoming the second Heisman winner in South Carolina’s history after George Rogers. A head injury during a game had resulted in a lifelong disability and stopped his chances of going pro, but it hadn’t done anything to kill his love of football. The man had spent the last twenty years coaching at one of Beaufort’s best schools while also appearing in plenty of local commercials. Jade had never met him formally, but from the way folks talked about him, she felt like she knew him personally.
“Oh yeah?” Coach Landry said, his teeth around a thick cigar. “What did the ol’ boy say?”
“Not much, but he told me about a little rumor he heard coming out of Beaufort…”
Jade had to suck down air to keep from gasping. Immediately, her head turned toward her head coach, prepared for his little secret to be spilled all over the table like poker chips. Across from her, Lim cut her eyes to Landry. He had expressed multiple times that he didn’t want anybody outside the team knowing about his impending retirement yet. She didn’t know exactly what kind of scheming he was trying to do on the low, but Jade sure as hell wasn’t about to question or needlessly step out of line—especially not now. As far as she knew, the only ones who didn’t have coach in their official title who knew were Principal Coleman and goddamn Francesca Lim.
“A rumor about what?” Bell asked what they were thinking with all the enthusiasm of someone completely clueless.
Byrd shuffled two cards in the middle of his hand, and even with her brain on high alert, Jade made note of the movement. The man was clearly nervous, and it wasn’t because of the gossip. “There’s a school up in Hampton—don’t think they’ve ever won a single state title as long as I’ve been around—well, they’ve got this kid who’s apparently just running through ’em. Spencer went up there and saw him play, said he’s a fucking monster, and the entire team’s really shaping up because of it.”
It wasn’t good news. Bigger, badder competition never was. But it wasn’t the news she’d expected to hear. She watched as Landry released a long breath, same as she did. It seemed like neither of them were ready to open that can of worms, though Jade figured her reasons were different from his.
“I’m not too worried about that,” Landry said, his eyes back on his own hand. “One person doesn’t make a team, no matter how good he is.”
Byrd shrugged, small beads of sweat dotting his temples. Jade figured he either had a hand that was about to take all their money or one that was about to make him lose all of his.
She eyed her own again. Her cards were all right, a pair of aces. It wasn’t the best luck she could have gotten, but it had the potential to win her something. She held the cards close to her chest, her eyes darting back to Lim as the excitement over Byrd’s little purposeful distraction died down.
The other woman’s face was as close to stoic as she could get it. Plump lips in a straight line. Even her posture was relaxed. She looked completely unassuming, inoffensive, and it only served to make Jade more and more annoyed as the seconds passed. She found herself unable to draw her eyes away in time, suddenly flushed with a little panic when Lim’s gaze met hers.
Jade had been riding a real high from her little bingo night antics. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes before going to bed at night, she pictured the embarrassment and fury on Lim’s face before she fell asleep. A win like that should have given her unshakable confidence, but Jade knew that there was more to be done. It was going to take more than one stumble to bring Lim down.
Lim smirked when she caught her staring. The same one she’d given her days before during their little spat on the field. It was infuriating, and it made an awful feeling settle in the bottom of her belly. Something fluttered there, flying around, then crashing against the size of her. It was so intense it made her queasy.
Then, to make it worse, Lim winked at her. The action was so smooth, Jade almost didn’t believe it had happened. Suddenly, she felt nothing but the urge to jump across the table and…
She shook her head, trying to clear it of the only image that seemed to settle in her mind. For some reason, it wasn’t a snapshot of her tackling Lim out of her chair and onto the floor. It wasn’t her scratching the other woman’s eyes out either. No, it wasn’t anything violent or hateful that popped up. Instead, it was an image of her climbing across the flimsy old poker table and pressing her mouth against Lim’s until that fucking smirk was nothing but a whisper in the wind.
Jade swallowed and bit down on her bottom lip, trying to force her body to forget the fucking motion picture playing in her head of her making out with the woman across from her.
Next to her, she heard a throat clear. Her head snapped up to see multiple pairs of eyes on her.
“You all right, Dunn?” Landry asked, one of his bushy blond eyebrows raised.
Jade squared her shoulders until her posture was nearly perfect, then glued her eyes back to her hand, where she planned to firmly keep them the rest of the night. It was one thing to be caught staring at someone—that you could blame on spacing out or something. It was another thing altogether to be caught staring multiple times.
“Just lost my train of thought there for a second,” she assured the table with a short, nervous laugh.
Jeremy Bell nodded in understanding, but Landry didn’t seem to buy it. She didn’t dare peek across the table at Lim, but she could only imagine that infuriating mouth had curved into an even more infuriating smirk. Her fingers curled around her cards, bending the card stock.
“It’s your turn to place your bet,” Landry told her.
She looked down at the table. She’d been so caught up, so distracted that she hadn’t even seen everyone else put their cards down for the river—a final round of betting that ultimately determined who won and went home with the pot.
The community cards on the table were a nine, a jack, a seven, and, thanks to the river, a pair of aces.
With the two aces in her hand, Jade was sitting on four of a kind. This was the kind of luck she’d been looking for all along, and it was definitely up there.
She took another peek around the table. Byrd still had little droplets of sweat beading at his temples, Bell looked just as clueless as he always did, and Lim’s lips were still curved in that infuriating smirk.
Her mind immediately went to probability, a lesson plan she’d be teaching her freshmen in just a few months. There were 1,326 possible hole card combinations in Texas Hold’em. Among the eight people sitting around the table—including her—that made for a lot of goddamn possibilities.
She did know that none of them had any aces, though, which was something. There were no other four-of-a-kind combinations to be had using the community cards anyway. Even if she couldn’t literally profile everyone at the table, she guessed that her chances of coming out on top were pretty high.
With one last peek at the two cards in her hand, she pushed every last chip she had sitting in front of her into the center of the table. “I’m all in.”
Almost immediately, Jeremy Bell folded, turning over his cards to reveal a pair of twos. Cody Ross was the next to go down, followed by Lionel Price, both men folding with grace. Every other man at the table followed suit until the only two left standing were her and Lim.
Now she had a reason to stare. Jade tried to wipe every thought and emotion off her face until the only thing to be seen was her slightly curled upper lip. Lim bit down on her bottom lip for a split second before she pushed all her chips into the center as well. “I’ll call,” she said.
Lim laid down two jacks, the look on her face smugger than it should have been.
Something surged through Jade then, strong enough that she had to plant her feet on the floor to keep from jumping out of her chair. This time, it wasn’t to kiss the other woman. She wanted to dance and gloat and be the sorest winner there ever was.
Instead, she silently laid her aces down. Four of a kind was always better than three, and more than that, she had the higher-ranking cards.
She’d won.
And from the looks of almost everyone at the table, she’d managed to impress with it as well. She outright grinned at Lim as she made a show of scooping up all the chips, collecting her winnings—all $400 of it.
“Well, look at that,” Landry said, and she glanced over to see a spark of pride in his eyes. This only bolstered her mood even more. “I thought for a second there you were about to lose your shit, Dunn.”
“So did I.” Byrd snorted. “But you robbed us blind instead.”
Jade shook her head in disagreement. “I didn’t rob you, I won.”
“Barely,” Lim’s low voice chimed in from across the table.
“How about you come talk shit to me after you come up with something better than two lazy-ass jacks.”
Less than an hour later, Lim practically cornered her next to her car after leaving Landry’s. It was dark out, but the lack of sun did nothing to curb the heat. The second she’d stepped outside, she’d felt like the air was sticking to her skin. She’d taken a second to shed her T-shirt in the back seat, leaving her in just a tank top. She was ready to get home and take a long, hot shower before cranking her air conditioner up high enough to damage her power bill this month.
Instead, she found herself so close to Lim that she could practically feel the other woman’s breath on her face when she spoke.
“Good game tonight,” Lim said, her hands tucked deep into the back pockets of her jeans.
“Uh,” Jade stammered. She had not been expecting a compliment. What was it with this woman reducing her to a bumbling fool all the damn time? “Yeah, I got lucky with good cards tonight.”
“I’m sure the guys were sufficiently impressed.”
Jade shrugged. “I’m not trying to impress them. I’m just throwing my weight around, letting them know that they don’t own this space, they don’t own any of these spaces.”
Lim looked at her silently for a while, so long that apprehension started to well up in the center of Jade’s chest.
“Fair enough,” Lim said finally. “You know, if you weren’t so hell-bent on hating me, we might be able to show them that together.”
“I can do it myself.”
Jade was quick to answer, almost reflexively. She hadn’t always been one of those people. The kind who stubbornly insist on never receiving help. There had been a time when she’d been an eager student, open and vulnerable. A veritable sponge who had never been afraid to raise her hand high enough to seek guidance. Then she’d decided to coach high school football and that girl had been forced to fall away. She’d hardened herself piece by piece with every new offense—each racist joke and misogynist macroaggression—until all that was left of her was a forced grit that made her too stubborn to ask for anything. Part of her was proud of that. Part of her resented it—though she acknowledged this part far less often for her own peace of mind.
Maybe this was why she resented Lim so much. The other woman didn’t seem to have nearly as much baggage as she did. In Jade’s eyes, she floated through the world unbothered, unhindered by all the expectations and by apprehension. Jade figured that the way she’d been going about it was the right way—the only way. To see Lim fall so quickly into trying to team-build with her, instead of viewing her as competition, was confusing. Had the woman been lucky enough to sidestep all the bad parts, or had she just been better at handling them? It made Jade wary.
It made her jealous.
Lim toed at a pebble, rolling it under the sole of one of her checkered Vans. Jade could practically hear the little stone being ground into dust.
“I don’t know how well that rugged individuality is going to go for you this time,” Lim said. “Especially if you get what you want. You’ll need people you can depend on, people who know your weak spots and can make up the slack.”
Jade crossed her arms over her chest tightly, immediately defensive. She didn’t appreciate being talked to like she didn’t know anything. Like she hadn’t spent the past ten years of her life preparing for this.
“You seem to think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.” She sniffed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have.” Jade took a couple of steps closer to Lim until she was in the other woman’s face. “I don’t know you, and I don’t need your advice. All I need is for you to get the fuck out of my way.”
Lim’s dark eyes found themselves on Jade’s chest for a moment before they caught hers again. The woman wasn’t smirking now. Her mouth was a straight line, and Jade could see the spot in her left cheek where her tongue was trying to press through.
She looked like she was holding back words.
Good. Because Jade didn’t want to hear them.
“You know,” Lim said, taking several steps back, looking cooler and more casual than she had any right to. “I don’t think I will. If you want to sit there and act like a little brat, I figure it’s time for me to turn the heat up on you.”
“Lim, you’re so lukewarm, I don’t think you could turn the heat up on me if you tried with everything in you.”
“Lukewarm?” Lim snorted. “Look, Jade, I know you think you’re, like, the first girl to ever look at a football or something, but you have no idea what type of shit I’ve had to eat to be here.”
Jade’s eyebrows went up to her hairline. “No idea? When Landry announced that he’d hired me for a coaching position, they called a town hall meeting. I sat there in a dusty-ass room in the commonwealth building and listened as people of this town—men and women—stood at a podium and yelled about how the boys would never listen to me, how I was ruining the sport, how I was going to drag this team to hell. To this day, every time Greenbelt loses even a game, it’s my fault in their eyes. There’s been a fire under my ass from the second I decided to do this. This thing. You. It’s nothing in comparison to all that.”
“It’s interesting… You’d think going through something like that would have made you more open to sharing the space with someone who knows how it is. I could have your back if you let me.”
“I don’t need you at my back just so you can turn around and make everything harder for me,” Jade gritted out. “I just need you gone .”
Lim shrugged. “Well, that’s too damn bad, because I’m not going anywhere. Not until Landry himself tells me to get lost.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“That fire under your feet ain’t going nowhere. You’re not going to eat me alive, Dunn. I won’t let you.”
Jade wanted to protest and spit. But she didn’t want to give Lim the satisfaction of a reaction. She’d won tonight, and she had every intention of going out on a high note. She didn’t need the last word to do that.
So she opened her car door and slid in, pulling out before she even had a chance to put on her seat belt, leaving Lim standing there. The entire drive home, she pictured the other woman still in the middle of the street, her face contorted in frustration and worry. Skin glowing in the moonlight, beautiful as ever, but with her boldness turned to dust like the pebble under her foot.
Except the image didn’t make her feel as good as she wanted. Instead, her stomach sank, and her throat constricted. The constant buzzing energy of anxiety welled in her chest, telling her that something wasn’t right. She told herself it was just good old-fashioned worry—even though she knew that was a lie.