“That is English,” she teased.
“Then I barely speak American. Now, I’m thirsty. Are you ready to get out?”
“Sure.”
We grabbed our towels and joined the others around the table. Mark poured a fresh drink for Leah and pushed a sweat-beaded wine cooler toward me.
“Thanks.” I twisted off the top, took a long pull, and sagged into my chair.
“It’s hard work,” he said, “keeping the girls happy.”
“You can say that again.”
“Nah, it’s easy,” Trip said.
Wren raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And how’s that?”
“Ya just gotta treat ’em like a princess. Now, I dunno ’bout y’all, but I’m ready to eat some pussy.”
“Ha!” Mark raised his cup in a salute. “Nice.”
“How long did it take you to come up with that?” I chuckled.
“A while,” Trip admitted.
We all laughed.
“Well, then,” I said to Leah, “I guess you’d better tell us about the next game. What’s it called?”
“We still don’t have a name.”
“Who cares,” Trip said.
“I do,” Wren said. “We need a cool name.”
“We’re goin’ down on y’all, right? Why not call it somethin’ simple, like Eat at the Y or Muff Divin’?”
“Because most of us don’t have muffs,” Leah laughed.
“What’s the matter with Who’s Going Down?” Brooke said. “I liked that one.”
Wren shook her head. “It needs some pizzazz. Blindfold Blowjob Bingo has…” She snapped her fingers and tried to think of the right word. “Paul, you’ll know. What’s it called when words start with the same letter? Not rhyming, but…?”
Erin beat me to it. “Alliteration.”
I blinked in surprise, and she looked smug.
“Right! That’s it,” Wren continued with hardly a pause. “The name needs to rhyme or… whatever. It needs to sound good.”
“What about Guys and Girls Going Down?” Brooke said.
“Too long. It needs to be snappier.”
We suggested names, but no one came up with anything we all liked.
“I know!” Mark said at last. “Liquor Lottery.”
“Liquor?” Leah said with a frown. “What’s—?”
“No, not ‘liquor.’” Erin sat forward in excitement. “‘Licker’! As in, ‘he’s a hard licker.’”
Mark nodded.
“Ooh, I like it,” Christy said.
“Licker Lottery…,” Wren mused. “That’s good.”
Mark inclined his head. “Thank you.”
“Okay, we have a name. Brooke? You came up with the rules. You wanna tell ’em?”
“Sure, I guess. They aren’t like the guys’ game, though.”
Wren frowned. “I thought you said they were.”
“I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. I drew up matrices and everything.”
Christy’s forehead wrinkled almost comically. She leaned toward me and said in a stage whisper, “She drew what?”
“A matrix. It’s math.”
“Linear algebra,” Brooke agreed. “But in this case I wasn’t doing math. I was just using them for modeling. No, not that kind,” she said before Christy could ask. “Like, modeling a data set. So it was technically engineering.
“I thought we could use chips for the turn order,” she continued, “but the contestants and the players are random elements. Things got pretty complicated, especially when I tried to control for an equal number of turns.”
“I didn’t understand a word of that,” Christy said to me, still in a stage whisper, “but it sounded bad.”
“It was bad,” Brooke said. “Too many random elements to handle with only three colors of poker chips.”
“That’s all we have,” Leah said.
“Yeah, I know. So I had to come up with some other way to randomize. I could show you the matrices, but…” She saw our blank looks and laughed. “Never mind. Sorry, I’m a total nerd sometimes.”
“Give me a nerd any day,” Mark said. “Brains and beauty in the same package.”
“Hear, hear!” Trip agreed.
Wren huffed in exasperation. “Yeah, guys, we know. You both have a hard-on for Brooke. But will you let her finish explaining before you jump her bones?”
Brooke was already a little flustered by the guys’ attention, and Wren’s comment made it worse. Her cheeks went pink, but they looked the color of a ripe peach in the yellow light from the sodium lamp. (Sorry, I’m a color nerd. And I digress. So sue me.)
“Chill out, guys,” Erin said. “We’ll take care of you later. Trust me.”
Mark and Trip both nodded and fell silent.
“Thank you,” Erin said. “So, Brooke… you were saying…?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Take it as a compliment. The guys have good taste.”
“And it’s a big deal that you’re here,” Leah agreed.
Erin nodded. “We’re a smart and sexy bunch, if I do say so myself. I may be the ugliest—”
“Whoa, stop right there,” Leah said. “You’re beautiful and you know it, especially to me.”
“And me,” Mark said.
“Me too,” Trip agreed.
“All of us,” I finished, and the others nodded.
Leah smiled and touched Erin’s hand, and they shared an intimate smile.
“She’s right about the rest,” Mark said to Brooke. “And we’re glad you decided to join us.”
“Wow. Thanks. I… um… yeah.”
I waited for her to regain her composure before I asked, “How’d you solve the problem? With the game, I mean.”
She sat forward and focused, a true engineer. “It was simple… I removed a variable. We need to do things one at a time. First, we decide who’s the contestant. Then the players draw chips. Well, the potential players. If you draw a red chip, you’re a player. A white one, you’re a spectator.”
“Okay,” Mark laughed, “now you lost us.”
“Contestants… players… spectators?” Trip agreed. “I mean, it makes sense, but…”
“It might be easier to just show us,” I suggested.
Brooke breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
“No problem. Leah, why don’t you go first?”
“Yeah, that’s perfect,” Brooke agreed. “Here, let me have the bag of chips.”
“Where do we want to do this?” Leah said.
“I like to eat at the table,” Trip said.
“He does,” Wren agreed. “It’s probably unsanitary, but—”
“Emily Post says it’s okay—”
“Emily Post?” Christy laughed. “Not Xaviera Hollander?”
“Naughty, naughty,” Mark joked. “Someone reads Penthouse.”
They’d all had enough to drink that they were likely to keep going, so I yanked their attention back to the game.
“So… Leah’s going first,” I said, “on the table.”
“With the candlestick,” Mark snickered. Then he caught my glare. “I mean, sorry. You were saying…?”
“Right. Leah’s first. On the table. With the blindfold.”
“All right,” he said, “let’s do this. C’mon, gorgeous.”
Chairs scraped as we pushed back from the table.
“Let’s use that one,” Mark suggested, “so we don’t have to move our drinks and the pitcher.”
“Good idea,” Wren added. “But scoot ’em apart, so we have standing room for the spectators.”
We did. Then Leah spread her towel on the adjacent table and Mark helped her climb up. He tied the blindfold in place, a white one with red letters from an “I’m a Pepper” logo.
I chuckled to myself and wondered how many soft drink T-shirts had given their lives for our enjoyment. At least three. The third blindfold had been a light blue Pepsi Light shirt before it had met a pair of scissors.
Christy and I had a proper blindfold in our nightstand, although I hadn’t even thought to mention it. Brooke had one too, along with a masquerade mask.
“What’s so funny?” Christy asked quietly.
“Different lifestyles. I’ll tell you later.”