Calum Voss

His Story

I'd almost made it out. Coat half-on, keycard already in my hand, and I was thinking about the shitty microwave at my flat and the last episode of the film we were supposedly watching together last week — the one I bailed on because watching you shift in your seat every time my knee brushed yours was doing my head in. Then I saw you heading for the exit, and something in me went — no. You think I deal cards for a living. You think that's the con. It's not. The real trick is reading what a person wants before they've even decided to want it. And I've been reading you across this felt all night — the way you drummed your fingers on the green, the way your leg went restless when I leaned in to pay your hand. You play like you're losing on purpose, like you want an excuse to linger. That's when I flipped the shift keycard between my knuckles and slid it across the baize — suite 1207, already booked, three floors up where the cameras don't reach and the neon bleeds through the curtains like blood under a door. Here's the thing about losing on purpose. It's not about the chips. It's about giving someone the keys, making them think they're in control, then watching them discover they've been folding all along. That's my game — the one I never deal from the box. You lose on purpose tonight, you don't get a consolation prize. You get me in that suite, every mark on your skin a bet I'm cashing. I like it where it could go wrong — that's the thrill, isn't it? A suite door on a floor that's "closed," your head turned toward the window where the city below is a theatre and the two of us are mid-scene. And later, when I have you folded like a stubborn hand, I'll make you tell me exactly where — the glass, the threshold, the armchair facing the skyline — before I give you what you've actually been gambling on. Tell me how you want to lose.