He’s right that this feeling of being one breath away from combustion around her isn’t going to disappear on its own. But what if it isn’t the first scenario Andreas described? Is there actually a fifty percent chance I’m falling in love with Amalia? Is this how Dean felt when he met Karina?
Andreas heads to the showers and I stay in the locker room, trying to pull my thoughts together.
I can recognize her breathing, her sighs, every small furrow of her brow, and the way she just barely sticks her tongue out when she’s deeply concentrating on cramming as much detail as possible onto the smallest available scrap of paper.
Because every moment I haven’t been teaching has been spent, subtly or otherwise, watching her.
The way her whole face lights up the first time she catches the scent of that hot chocolate, or the way she lines up all her colored markers before a lecture starts.
The way her eyes go slightly wide when she understands how an algorithm works, and the blush that spreads across her cheeks when Mr. Eleazar, the seventy-year-old campus doorman, picks a flower from the garden and gives it to her.
And as my mind moves through every detail that makes Amalia who she is, I realize that for the first time in my life, I’m still curious about a person even after learning this much about her.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I look down and see a message from a client waiting on modified financial reports, and officially I need a few hours without her constant presence in my head.
Andreas offeredto come with me to the poker night, and we haven’t even made it through the casino door before I spot Charly.
“SeñorSilas, cognac?”
“Thank you, Charly.”
If he decides to skim from my winnings again tonight, I’ll make sure Andreas holds him still while I rearrange his jaw.
I have too many nerves and too much frustration to be diplomatic tonight.
“I’m almost tempted to leave an empty seat between us,” my best friend tells me, visibly amused.
“Afraid I can smell your bullshit?” I ask, taking a sip from my glass of De Montal.
For a club in Ciudad de México, sourcing a fifteen-year-old cognac is genuinely impressive, even by my standards.
“Be serious, Si. As wound up as you are right now, I think you’re walking out of here poorer tonight. I’m here to make sure you don’t do something stupidly insane.”
Stupidly insane, meaning the time I bet two million dollars on a single hand. Except that wasn’t insanity. That was mathematics.
I’d tracked every hand played, accounted for every card in the deck, and read the tells of two out of three players at the table. My probability of winning was 65.25%.
That’s how I went home with four million that evening.
I scan the other players at the table and immediately clock one of them rotating the watch on his wrist, while another keeps checking his phone.
They’re either playing with someone else’s money or they’re simply inexperienced. Either way, it’s fine.
Andreas has spotted their nerves too, and as the game plays out, one of them folds and walks away thirteen thousand dollars down. We’re down to me, Andreas, and a man around fifty who goes by Sergio. Sergio is wearing a fake Patek Philippe Grandmaster on his wrist.
How do I know it’s fake? I have an original at home, and it’s precisely the way the second hand moves with a faint stutter rather than gliding smoothly that gives it away.
And what does that tell me? That he wants to project the image of serious money so that amateurs are intimidated by his wealth and fold decent hands.
Andreas only has to look at my face to know I’m not backing down. We call.
Full house for me.
Andreas shakes his head as he looks at his three of a kind, a perfectly solid hand if mine had been anything weaker.
Sergio looks like he’s about to pass out next to his flush, which, similarly, would have turned him a very nice profit tonight if my cards had been worse.
“You cheated,” Sergio spits at me through his teeth, and I ignore him.
