“Very illegal,” I said.
“Very illegal,” Noah agreed. “But I was eating ramen for every meal. Twenty bucks was a fortune.”
Emily was smiling now, her hand back on my thigh feeling her warmth through my jeans. I thought about the other night.
Focus.
“So I show up,” Noah continued, “and the guy running it gives me this crash course in dealing. Five minutes of ‘this is how you shuffle, don’t fuck it up, here’s the chips.’ Then he shoves me at a table and disappears.”
“And the players were insane,” I added.
“The players were insane,” Noah repeated. “There was this theater major who would only speak in Shakespeare quotes when he was bluffing. Like, full commitment. He’d look youdead in the eye and go, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’ and then go all in with pocket twos.”
Emily covered her mouth, laughing. The sound made something warm bloom in my chest.
This. I wanted this. Wanted to make her laugh. Wanted to see her happy.
“And then there was the philosophy TA,” I said. “Every hand was a metaphor for existence.”
“Oh my god, yes.” Noah shook his head. “He lost a huge pot once and spent ten minutes explaining how it proved we’re all just meat puppets in a meaningless void.”
“I would’ve walked out,” Emily said, still laughing.
“I tried,” Noah said. “But Harry kept paying me.”
“So this goes on for like six weeks,” I said. “Games getting bigger, higher stakes—“
“Way too much cigar smoke,” Noah added.
Emily’s eyebrows shot up. “Cigars? In a dorm basement?”
“Shakespeare guy brought them,” Noah said. “Said they ‘set the mood.’ The whole place smelled like a 1920s speakeasy by week three.”
“Which is how he got caught,” I said.
“Night janitor,” Noah confirmed. “Poor guy’s just trying to do his job, and he follows the cigar smoke down to the basement. Opens the door. Finds twenty college students running a gambling ring.”
Emily was fully laughing now, her hand squeezing my thigh. “What happened?”
“Janitor calls campus security. Everyone scatters. I’m still holding the deck of cards like an idiot. Harry grabs the cash box and runs. The philosophy TA stays behind to ‘engage in dialogue about institutional authority.’”
“Did you get in trouble?” Emily asked.
“Two weeks of disciplinary probation,” Noah said. “Had to write an essay about ‘making responsible choices in a university setting.’”
“And you learned your lesson,” Emily said, grinning.
Noah raised his beer. “I learned that organized crime doesn’t pay as well as people think.”
The trivia questions kept coming. We stayed in third place—never quite catching up to the team of grad students in the front or the group of townies who seemed to know every obscure fact about 80s music. But it didn’t matter. It was fun.
This was good. This was what I needed. Friends and trivia and cheap beer and zero drama.
No racing. No rivalry. None of it.
The final round ended. We finished in third place—respectable, but not victorious. The grad students celebrated their win with polite golf claps.
We settled our tab and headed out into the cool night air.
