Love’s Gamble

She knew that she had just dealt him a serious blow. Freema only worked this job because she had no other options. She knew that she was being paid far less than what she deserved, but she didn’t have a choice. This was the best paying job that she could possibly get given her circumstances.

The fact that she was quitting meant that Donovan was going to have to find someone else, and she was positive that no one was going to work for him for such sh*tty pay. She had just caused a huge problem for the asshole that had formerly been her boss, and in this moment that was all that mattered. She did not care about anything else. All she cared about was the fact that she had dealt this man a blow that would take him a long while to recover from.

She smiled at Donovan’s gormless expression and exited the building. She felt light, she felt free, but there was also a nugget of concern. She did not know what she was going to do now. She did not regret the fact that she had just quit her job. It had started to get impossible to work there, it had started to become something that was sucking out her soul and she knew that if she had worked there any longer she would have ended up going completely insane. However, she needed a way to pay the bills. She needed a way to pay rent. If she did not have a job, she was going to end up dipping into her nest egg. That meant her plans to run away would be further delayed.

The thought of running away brought back all of the confusion that had to do with Ken. She screamed. She knew that the only way she could be happy was to get away from here. This was not true, of course, but it was the way she thought about things. She felt like if she got away from this place, she would be able to start a new life, a life where she could be the type of person that she wanted to be. If she did not want to be the way she was right now, she could change that but only if she was somewhere else. This city held too much of her within itself. She knew that as long as she stayed here, she was never going to be able to be the person that she truly wanted to be. She would be trapped, forced to be the cruel and aggressive person that this place had made her.

Things were impossible. The only way she could have gotten the chance to run away would have been if she had continued her job, which meant that by the time she had enough money to run away she would probably have gone mad. She would not have been able to enjoy her escape as much as she would have otherwise.

She was trapped here. She knew that there was no escape. She briefly considered going back and begging for her job back. Maybe if she told Donovan to cut her pay he might allow her to start working for him. She then realized how crazy she was being, and realized that she would never be able to maintain happiness if she worked for that man. She realized that this was what her life had come to. She was constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

She screamed again. She wanted Ken right now. She wanted to be with him more than anything else, and this confused her. She felt like it was selfish of her to want to be with him. She felt like she was being a bad person, because if she truly loved him she would tell him about her plans to run away.

If she truly loved him, wouldn’t she no longer feel the need to run away? Or wouldn’t she want to run away with him? Did she even want to run away at all anymore? She felt so confused about everything that was going on in her life. She started to fear for all of the things that were going to happen to her if she stayed in this city. She realized that she had to get away. Staying with Ken might make her happy, but she did not feel like she deserved that happiness. She felt like she deserved to be isolated, deserved to be away from everyone that might care about her. She felt like she was a terrible person, someone who would not be able to live a happy life if it was the only option presented to her. This was not her fault, of course. This was just how life had molded her, shaped her. This was just what her existence had turned her into, what her experiences had brought out in her. If she had lived a different life, perhaps happiness would have been something that came naturally to her. Perhaps it would have been something that she was comfortable with enjoying. But this was not to be. She could not enjoy anything at all, she could not bear the thought of happiness because it filled her with guilt.

She wiped away her tears, started her car and drove home. When she got home she went into the secret place where her nest egg was hidden. She brought it out and counted the money. Two hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars and change. Not enough to run away. However, she knew that she had to do something drastic. She needed to get away now, and she knew that she could not survive on this money in this city for long. She had to do something that she had never allowed herself to do before.

There were a lot of poker rings in the city. There were things that went on that earned a lot of people a lot of money. Freema’s poker ring was the most benign of all of these poker rings. There was no violence allowed, and that meant that no real criminal went there, which in turn meant that the amount that was bet by her and her buddies paled in comparison to the enormous amounts of money that were bet in the bigger and more violent poker rings.

She had never gone there before. She knew that she was good enough to beat pretty much every single person that got in her way, but at the same time she knew that getting involved with such people was never a good idea. It would end in tears, of this fact she was well aware.

However, she knew that if she started gambling at these spots, she would be able to double her money in no time, and soon after that she could triple it. She was good enough to win big. Within a year, she would have a million dollars and that was after supporting herself for that long. She realized that she was never going to get anywhere by playing it safe. If she wanted to leave, if she wanted to live the kind of life that she was looking for, then she was going to have to go to the lengths that someone with true ambition would go to in order to acquire these things.

She took fifty thousand dollars out of the bag and placed the rest back. This was lot of money. Almost a quarter of her entire nest egg. However, she knew that she would never be able to buy into any of these places with an amount smaller than that. If she ended up losing money this time around, it was alright. It would be part of the learning experience.

Besides. She knew that she was not going to lose any money. She was the best poker player in the city without a single doubt, and she was going to be able to get her money’s worth. There was a small nugget of concern in the back of her head. She worried that she might be walking into something dangerous. But buried this concern with the rest of her sense of caution. There was no time to fear things in this manner. She was going to have to act, and act fast. She was going to have get through this somehow.