Love’s Gamble

Freema had been playing poker since the age of six. She had been taught by her father who had taught himself using books. Freema had gotten a very good feel for the game from a young age, and using books as well as YouTube videos later on in her life she was able to surpass even her father in poker skills. She was very good at the game, and she was never afraid to flaunt her talent. As a result, she had become something of a legend in the underground poker circuit. Gambling was illegal in their state, but that did not stop the people of her hometown from having daily poker games where the stakes got quite high indeed.

When Freema left university, she decided that she would play poker properly and not hold back at all. As a result, she had started to save up quite a nest egg. She had about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars tucked away. She was not planning on spending any of it any time soon. She knew that she was going to have to be careful about that, she knew that unless she was extremely careful the police would start to wonder where she was getting all of this money from and would start to investigate.

She had a plan. She was going to save up enough to support herself and then she was going to run away. She didn’t know where she would go. She didn’t know what the best option would be. All she knew was that wherever she ran away to was going to be sunny, sandy and very cheap. Maybe it would be Mexico, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean. Maybe she would take a leaf out of her favorite author’s, Gregory David Roberts, book and run away to India, which fulfilled all of her requirements for a hideaway completely.

It was a good plan. She had nothing to stay behind for. She had few friends, and all of them were poker buddies who, at the end of the day, could not really be trusted with anything. Her father had died before she had gotten into college, and this had been a part of what had made her quit. She had worked so hard to get into college because it had been her father’s dying wish for her to fulfill her potential. However, she had felt like it was not worth it at the end of the day. She had realized that she could not do this, not even for her father, and she had dropped out so that she could live the life that she wanted to live.

She made her way home. It was a Saturday, which meant that tonight was going to be a big game. The spot that she gambled at was a lovely spot. It was discreet, safe was known by many people who could be trusted. The game started at seven and ended at ten on weekdays, but on Friday and Saturday nights the games would go on until four in the morning and by the end people would be walking out of there with small fortunes on occasion. She was excited. She was not in a forgiving mood today, and she was going to unleash her wrath upon her fellow players. She was confident that she was going to come away from the game with a good haul.

She got home and looked at the clock. It was a quarter to five. She could head to the spot at six and get there by half past six. People were allowed entry up to a half hour before the game actually started. However, that still meant that she had almost two hours that she had to kill before she could go to that haven, that one place where she felt like she was in control of her life.

She decided to drink before going there. Most people did not play very well after consuming alcohol. The exact opposite was true for Freema. Alcohol completely obliterated every single inhibition that she had, and it turned her into an even more confident and ruthless player. It turned her into someone that would be able to clean the table out and have room to spare for anyone that wanted to try her after that.

She made herself a whiskey on the rocks and sipped it while watching TV. Her eyes were fixed upon the glowing screen but she was not really paying attention to what was being shown there. She did not really have much interest in anything that was being shown. The only reason she was watching it now was that she did not want to be alone, and the TV being on was the closest she was going to get to not being alone.

She craved noise, if she was being honest with herself. She craved the noise of the TV, the business of what was being shown. She had no interest in the plot or characters or anything like that. She just needed something that would fill up the hours until she could go to the one place where she was home, that one place where she was not just accepted but respected, where she was not just respected but feared. She craved that power. She realized with a start that she was not all that different from Eugene, and the thought perturbed her.

After a long, long time she looked at the clock. It felt like hours had passed but it was still half past five. There was still a whole half hour to go before she could retreat into the solace of the gambling den. She decided that she had had enough.

She called Hwan.

Hwan was the only person in the world that she could actually call a friend. He was her oldest poker buddy, someone she had met gambling on the streets. The cops had busted the group of young teenagers who had been gambling out in the open like that, but Freema and Hwan had taken solace in each other and had started to gamble together ever since then. When they gambled in teams, it was always considered a given that Freema and Hwan were going to gamble together. She did not trust him. It was simply not possible to trust a gambling buddy. However, there were levels of mistrust, and she trusted him a lot more than she trusted anyone else at the gambling den.

“Hello?” came the voice from the other end. Hwan’s voice. Warm and accommodating, it belied his true nature as a highly aggressive poker player who did not have any sympathy for minnows that were just starting to learn how to play.

“Hey,” said Freema. “Where are you?”

“Same place you are,” said Hwan, his voice smiling for him through the phone. “At home, waiting for the gambling den to open.”

“I can’t wait any longer,” said Freema. “I had a rather rough day and I want to get out of the house. You want to meet for a drink before we head to the gambling den?”

“Sure,” said Hwan. “Let’s meet up at Gino’s.”

Gino’s was a bar that was frequented by pretty much every gambler in the city. It used to be a gambling den until the police discovered its existence and raided the place. However, the new gambling den opened walking distance from Gino’s in the basement of a Korean restaurant, and pretty much everybody involved decided that Gino’s would remain their favorite watering hole.

Freema had already had two whiskey’s but when she got up she was steady on her feet. The alcohol had affected her only a little, it had only brought a very mild haziness into the periphery of her brain. The core of her mind, the place where her judgments were made, remained sharp and ready for the games that she was about to play.

She left her house and realized that she was not going to be able to drive. She was drunk, even though she did not feel it she knew that the breathalyzer would say otherwise. She also did not have her license right now. She cursed her ill luck as she got onto a bus that would take her to Gino’s and then realized that it was her own fault that she would not be able to drive. She was the one that had been stupid enough to bet her own driver’s license. She needed to stop doing that. She needed to stop taking risks that were this big. There was no point in doing that. At the end of the day, it was going to end up causing a number of problems and she knew that it was going to end up getting her in some serious trouble.