Make Me Yours

Finally, he played.

Something leaped inside of Zoey as she saw the cards he had played. It was joy.

A king and queen.

Smiling to herself, she played her ace and king.

“Checkmate!” she exclaimed as she slammed the cards on the table.

For a long moment, the man said nothing. His eyes widened despite his best effort to appear unruffled, and he just sat there looking at the cards she had just played, as though all of it was unbelievable. Unbelievable that she had emerged victorious after the long battle.

“How is this possible?” he asked eventually, just as Zoey began to gather her chips. She could barely contain her joy.

Giggling, she replied, “I’m better than you. It’s that simple, Mr Li.”

It was what she had heard others and the waitress call him several times tonight.

“No, you are not. I had this game won. I just needed two more turns!”

“I was several steps ahead of you. I didn’t need any more turns. I won. Admit it; you finally met your better.”

“Ludicrous! I haven’t lost a game in eight years. And never to a woman.”

She smiled at this. “Well, you know what they say, Mr Li, there is always a first for everything. Thank you for this fat pay check, by the way. Do have a lovely night. I’d have offered to do this again, but tomorrow is my birthday eve, and I’d be partying with my girls until I leave this weekend. Singapore has been entirely wonderful to me. I will miss it.”

With a satisfied smile on her face, she shared another look with the waitress, and started to find her way to the cash-out stand.

Singapore had indeed been very wonderful to her. There were very few places she had visited that had made her want to come back. This place was one of them. As her thirtieth birthday approached, she had begun to think of where the girls and herself would go to celebrate. It was tradition and they had been doing it for the past four years now.

They all knew Zoey always got busy with planning the trip because it was a distraction. A distraction from the bleak thoughts that plagued her mind every time her birthday drew nigh. While it was effective, she could not deny that every now and then, the thoughts crept in slowly, and it often took great pain to chase them away.

So what if she was still unmarried? She was going to be thirty in two days, so what? So what if all she had dreamed of as a little girl was meeting the man of her dreams in high school and getting married right after college, just like her parents?

Yes, life had not panned out that way. The man she had met in high school had not been any stuff of dreams. Oh no, he had simply been an illusion of one, and she had come to see him for the nightmare he was, soon enough. He had been her first heartbreak and she had thought she would not recover from it, but she had.

And she had tried again, and again… it had taken all of four attempts to finally give up on finding the one. At twenty five, she had told herself: no more. Perhaps marriage wasn’t for her. Perhaps it would take her longer than it had taken her parents. Whichever it was, she had decided to stop letting it bother her.

As the travel-fiend that she was, she began this girls’ trip. They chose a spot, got their tickets, packed their bags and hopped on a plane to spend her entire birthday week at an exotic location. The days before her birthday eve was usually spent sightseeing, enjoying spas and meeting fine men. Her birthday eve involved partying until dawn. After the party, they usually crashed into a day-long sleep and got on a return flight the day after.

It was the perfect plan, you see, and it had worked well so far. Of course, it helped greatly that her birthday fell right in the middle of summer. July the seventeenth. That way, Carrie, who was a grade four teacher, could easily get off work and Mariah the artist, well, she travelled all the time. As for Jennifer, the business associate, she usually just took the entire month off for her annual leave. Zoey herself was one of the most successful real estate brokers in all of Colorado.

It meant that she worked on her own terms and could choose to leave whenever she wanted. It made life so much easier, in all honesty. So much. All in all, they were four friends who had been tight as peas in a pod since college. Except for Mariah – Zoey had known that girl since they were six.

This year, they had all unanimously agreed on Singapore as the location for their trip. Why? Crazy Rich Asians. Zoey had lost count of the number of times they had all seen that movie together, snuggled up in beneath their duvets with more popcorn than was healthy.

The beauty of the city displayed in that movie had begged for them to come see for themselves. So they had.

A happy sigh escaped her lips as she stepped into the grand suite all four of them were staying at. It had five rooms in total, and was one of the biggest in the hotel. It was grand – as its name implied – and spelt each letter of the word ‘elegance’.

It had been four days since they first stepped into its luxury, but the effect was yet to wear off.

The silence that welcomed her was unsurprising. The girls had all had dates tonight, just like they had for each of the past nights. Because Zoey had sworn off dating or even flirting at the very least, she had taken to the casino. The girls would be back soon and all of them would want to share details of their dates before they fell asleep.