by Cassie Cole
*
There was no sensation like watching a man come.
I was a visual person. Some women liked to have their lover close to them, covering their body, hair to hair and navel to navel and skin to skin. That was alright, but I liked putting enough distance between me and my lover so I could see them. Admire their body in action. Watch them fucking me.
And when they came… Oh man. Watching a man climax, his facial muscles contorting involuntarily and their eyes squeezing shut, was almost enough by itself to bring me to my own orgasm.
“So what kind of a name is Sage?”
I snorted in bed next to him. We’d decided the bed was better for cuddling than the couch. “What kind of a name is Bryce?”
“The normal kind. But Sage sounds like a stripper name. Is that why you were late for your shift tonight?”
I turned toward him in anger, but he was struggling not to laugh. Just a joke. I gave him a playful shove and settled back into the pillow.
“Sage is my real name,” I said. “It’s on my birth certificate and everything. Mom was a hippie type and wanted to name me something creative. She thought it would make me stand out.”
“She’s not wrong,” he said. “And your dad didn’t mind?”
“He didn’t have a say because he wasn’t around.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
“Yeah, but still.” He slipped a hand underneath my neck and moved to pull me toward him, but I resisted. I felt him freeze on the bed as if he’d done something wrong.
“I can understand not dating,” he said. “But don’t tell me you don’t cuddle either!”
“I like cuddling,” I began. “But I also like food. And I worked a double shift at the Volga today, with my second job squeezed in between. So if I don’t get something to eat in the next few minutes I might literally die.”
He laughed and pushed up to one elbow to look at me. “Food sounds suspiciously like a date.” His face was very close to mine so that neither of us had to talk above a throaty whisper. It lended an intimate tone to our good-natured teasing.
“Food doesn’t count.”
“Well maybe food is against my silly rules about interacting with members of the opposite sex,” he teased. “Perhaps I’ll let you, how did you phrase it? Literally die?”
“Then you’d have a dead girl in your bed to deal with. Not to mention the clean up, and then talking to the cops. I doubt they’d believe that foul play wasn’t involved. It’d be much easier for your life to just feed me.”
Bryce let out a deep sigh. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. But only because I don’t like talking to cops.” He slipped out of bed and then crossed the carpet completely nude, giving me a tastier view of his body. He was tan and muscular all over, and he had the cutest butt I’d ever seen that I almost wanted to skip the food and pounce on him again so I could take a bite out of his cheek.
“Be a darling and fetch my dress?” I called.
I heard him laugh. “So I have to do the nude catwalk but you’re exempt?”
“Only if you’re a gentleman.”
“Unfortunately for you,” he said, poking his head in the doorway, “I’m a feminist. I believe in perfect equality among men and women. I’d hate to reinforce the patriarchy power dynamic by fetching your clothes.”
“Oh come on!”
He gave me a boyish grin and disappeared into the kitchen.
I felt all smiley sitting in his comfy bed, stranded nude. I wasn’t that shy, and we’d just had sex, but there was something a little more intimate about casual nudity than passionate nudity. I definitely wasn’t at that point with the blackjack dealer I’d known a whole two hours.
But an idea came to me.
“Oh, you think you’re clever,” Bryce said as he saw me come out of the bedroom. I held my arms out and did a twirl in one of his blue dress shirts, which just barely covered my lady parts.
“I like this much better than my dress,” I said as I went to retrieve my panties, taking care to bend over in a way that didn’t show him anything. “Thank goodness you believe I’m a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man to bring me my clothes.”
“Hrmph,” he said while fiddling by the stove.
“You accused me of stripping on the side,” I said, “but are you sure you’re not a Chippendale?” He had put his tight boxers back on but nothing else.
“You’re funny,” he said as an answer.
“What’s on the menu?” I asked, wrapping my arms around his waist and plastering my body against his back. He was nice and warm. “And more importantly, how long until it’s ready?”
“You’re getting a taste of my homemade carbonara,” he said while spooning out cold pasta from a glass dish. “I make it from scratch.”
“You know from scratch means from, like, the most basic ingredients, right?” I said.
He moved a hand around and slapped me on the ass. “I made this from scratch on Monday.”
“Doesn’t count if it’s reheated!”
He put down the spoon and began to walk away. “Alright, if you want me to make it from scratch I’ll bust out my pasta maker. It’ll take four hours, but you seem to know what you want…”
“No!” I quickly said. “I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what she wants and was only joking.”
He gave me a sly smile. “So reheated pasta is acceptable?”
“Yes please.”
“Alright then,” he said, returning to the pan on the stove. “Just to be clear, me cooking you food doesn’t make this a date, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Because you were going to reheat that pasta for dinner regardless. I’m just tagging along.”
“Is that how that works?”
“Yep. I don’t make the rules.”
“Rules are rules.” He dumped the pasta into the heated pan and added a little bit of water, stirring it around while it hissed. “So. Why don’t you date?” He paused, then turned around to face me. “All joking aside, if you’re not comfortable answering it’s cool. I don’t want to be pushy.”
I gave him a quick peck on the lips. “I appreciate you saying that. But it’s okay. I stopped dating a year ago because I don’t have any time.”
“Everyone says that, but if you meet the right person, you find time,” he said. “Not that that’s me, of course. Just saying.”
“It’s different,” I said. “I’ve tried dating guys before, and it ends up getting in the way of what is important to me.”
“You mean serving watered-down drinks to assholes in a gaudy casino? I can see why you wouldn’t want anything to interfere with such an important life goal.”
I pinched him on the bottom, which made him yelp. “Obviously I don’t want to be a waitress forever. I meant that dating gets in the way of my dreams.”
“Which are?”
I paused. Dreams were a fragile thing. When I was on stage I felt strong and empowered, but outside of that I didn’t like talking about how I wanted to be a singer. At least not until I really made it big. Until then, my dreams were vulnerable.
“I moonlight as an astronaut,” I said instead. “I take rides with Elon Musk at SpaceX three nights a week. Nice guy, very dry humor. As you can imagine that doesn’t leave much time for anything else.”
“Well shoot, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of an aspiring astronaut,” Bryce said. “But I totally understand what you mean. Dating can be time consuming. You have to sacrifice some things in your life. I work two jobs, so I don’t get much time for dating either.”
“Let me guess: you work as an astronaut for Virgin Galactic? Or Blue Origin?”
He laughed, which made his entire back rumble against my chest. “Actually I’m a poker player.”
“That’s a hobby, not a job.”
“Not the way I do it. I’m not rich, but I make some good side bread. Enough to live by myself.” He used the wooden stirring spoon to gesture around th
e apartment.
“That’s actually really cool,” I said.
“I started back in college, playing online. I got really good at it. It’s just sort of my thing.” He twisted to look at me, a sparkle of enthusiasm in his crystal blue eyes. “I used to game the system by creating a second account and sitting at the same online table as my main account. I would use that to manipulate the wagers on the table. Push people to bet more, or force weak hands out when my own wasn’t strong. I cleaned house.”
“Sounds like cheating.”
He turned back to the food and shrugged. “It kind of was. But it helped me pay the tuition.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d gone to college,” I said. Then, before he could ask me why I didn’t, I asked, “What did you get your degree in?”
He paused for a moment before saying, “I studied statistics.”
“What’s with the hesitation?”
“Well, I studied statistics… But I never got my degree. I stopped going to class and got expelled.”
“Because you were playing poker all the time?”
“Yep,” he said, drawing out the word into three syllables. “I was kind of addicted for a while. Literally playing poker on the computer 20 hours a day. It, uhh, got pretty bad. I stopped showering, went weeks at a time without doing laundry. I ended up going to counseling for gambling addiction.”
“Wow,” I said, giving him an extra strong squeeze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of it. So you decided to get away from all temptation by… Moving to Las Vegas?”
He laughed again, that wonderful rumble. “I learned how to moderate my habits. I balance things out by exercising, getting at least eight hours of sleep a night. Believe it or not, moving out here helped limit my addiction.”
“Is that so?”
He lifted the pan from the stove and began spooning pasta onto plates. “When I played online poker, I could join multiple tables at once. Sometimes I’d have five or six games going at the same time. Now I only play poker in person, which puts a limit on what I can do. There’s only one of me; I sit down at a poker table and focus just on that game.”
“That makes sense,” I admitted. “So you don’t pay other players to sit at the same poker table with you and manipulate the game? No secret hand signals, winks and finger taps?”
“Nope! Vegas is good at catching that sort of trickery. I play legitimately.” He handed me a plate of steaming pasta.
“This smells amazing. You don’t mind if I just eat it with my hands, right? I’m too hungry for a fork.”
“That would severely limit your attractiveness,” Bryce said.
“Good thing I already got you in bed, then.” I accepted a fork and we sat at his kitchen table to eat. After one bite I couldn’t stop myself from moaning. “Holy moly, this is incredible!”
“I told you I make it from scratch.”
“I can tell. Consider me sufficiently impressed.” Even reheated, the sauce was creamy and the bits of bacon were perfectly crunchy. “I saw that there’s a poker tournament at the Volga in a few weeks.”
“They actually have tournaments in the poker room every Friday and Saturday,” Bryce said. “But you probably mean the Volga Diamond Poker Classic.”
I shrugged. “I guess? Whichever one they’ve been advertising.”
“Yep, that’s the one. There’s a $1 million grand prize.”
I almost dropped my fork. “$1 million?!?!”
“Yep. Winner take all.”
“Shoot, I might join and try my hand.”
“Well,” he said, “the buy-in is $10,000.”
“Oh. Holy moly. Guess I won’t be trying my hand.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to enter that unless you really know what you’re doing. Poker is as much skill as it is luck. I’ll be happy just to make it to the final table.”
I was too hungry to wait until my mouth was empty, so I spoke around my pasta. “You have $10,000 to blow on an entry?”
He laughed. “They give out entries for winning some of the smaller tournaments leading up to the big one. I’ll get in that way.”
“You seem pretty confident.”
“Just being honest.” He stirred pasta with his fork. “The bigger problem is they usually don’t let casino employees into these tournaments.”
I waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, I asked, “Then what’s your plan? Wear a hat and fake mustache?”
He fixed me with those piercing eyes and half a smile. “That’s not a bad idea. But I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy. They’ll waive the rule for me.”
“That’s pretty neat.”
“It is,” he said. “Only problem is it means owing a favor to the Russians. Lord knows what unsavory things they might ask me to do.”
“What do you mean? What kind of unsavory things?”
He stared at me. “You don’t know?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t have asked.”
He put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin, then placed it carefully on the table. “Vladimir Yegorovich, the man who owns the casino, is Russian mafia. One of the oligarch billionaires from Moscow.”
“Oh, holy moly.”
“He was one of Putin’s underlings for years after the Soviet Union collapsed. He was wanted by Interpol for orchestrating the deaths of some journalists in Europe. Then he came here and opened up this casino.”
“How’d he get away with that?” I asked.
“Hell if I know. Corruption in Interpol, probably. Those guys take a lot of bribes.”
“And those are the kinds of people you want to owe a favor?” I asked, incredulous.
“If it means a seat at the poker tournament, yeah. Yegorovich himself is a big poker player. He joins every tournament. I’d love to make it to the final table and beat him. Rub it in his corrupt face.”
“And then get dragged into the alley and murdered?” I asked.
He smirked. “There’s always that possibility, sure. But the Volga Diamond Poker Classic will have a lot of media attention. That should shield me from any retaliation.”
“Seems like a lot of risk.”
“A lot of risk for a lot of reward. With $1 million I’d run off to a small tropical island and spend the rest of my life sipping on fruity drinks.”
“That sounds wonderful.” I shivered; his apartment wasn’t cold, but my legs were chilly wearing only one of Bryce’s dress shirts. A tropical beach sounded fantastic right about now. I finished my last bite of pasta and said, “I’m gunna go crawl back under your covers and pretend it’s a tropical beach. Come keep me warm.”
He rose and took the plates. “I can make ocean noises if it’ll help set the scene.” He demonstrated, making a whooshing, whirling sound with his lips pressed tight together.
We laughed together and fell back in bed.
4
Bryce
That wasn’t how I expected the night to go.
Honest. I wasn’t trying to take Sage home when I chatted her up at the casino. All I wanted was to take her out for a drink and food, get to know her some more. Find out if she was the right woman I was looking for.
Turns out she was. But now that we’d slept together…
My alarm went off at 8:00am, which was early for Vegas workers like us. I turned it off and saw that I had a flurry of text messages from Xander. I’d promised to update him last night but had forgotten.
Sage groaned and grumbled until I rolled over and spooned her.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I whispered into her dark hair.
Half asleep, she mumbled, “You probably say that to all the girls.”
“Only the beautiful ones. Which you happen to be. I’m getting up and going to the gym. You’re welcome to stay here, but I’ll be gone for two hours.”
“Or you could stay in bed with me.” She cuddled her ass back into my crotch, a wonderful warmth against my growing hard-on. A little more of this and I’d be tempted to skip the gym
entirely.
But then she said, “Mind dropping me off at my apartment?”
“I’d be happy to,” I said, giving her a kiss before I hopped out of bed. As I got dressed part of me was sad that she didn’t tempt me more with morning sex.
She lived on the other side of the strip, but I had time to kill this morning so I didn’t mind going out of my way. And honestly I was enjoying the extra time with her in the car. She took immediate control of the radio station and found a station playing something upbeat and fast, and then she sang loudly in the car while playfully shaking my arm to try to get me to join in.
Sage was a lot of fun. I wished we didn’t have to part ways here.
“No goodbye kiss,” I said when I stopped in front of her apartment. I put a fake serious face on. “A goodbye kiss makes it a date.”
But then she leaned across the seat and grabbed me by my workout shirt and pulled my lips to hers, kissing me long and warm.
“I make the rules,” she said.
“Fair enough.”
She flashed me a smile, then disappeared inside the building. I sat in my car for several long moments before driving on.
Shit. She was too much fun. I wasn’t sure if it was going to make what happened next easier or harder.
My phone buzzed when I was halfway to the gym. It was Xander again:
Xander: Dude, did you get hit by a bus or something? I’m starting to worry.
I called him instead of texting. He picked up on the first ring. “Hey, sorry for not responding sooner.”
“You’d better be sorry!” he practically shouted into the phone. His southern accent was especially prominent when he was angry. “Well? What’d you find?”
“I think she’s the one,” I said. “I think we found our girl for the job.”
5
Sage
Parting truly was sweet sorrow.
The moment I was inside my apartment lobby I turned and peered out the window like a teenage girl who’d just been dropped off after a date. Bryce stayed in the car for almost a full minute before driving away.
