Private SL: Untilt

[radicalliars]

Loker was running through the halls to the room number that Cal had sent to him. There were so many different scenarios running through his head now, worry a tinge to his thoughts. Monsters? He couldn't believe he was actually thinking that, but the more research he did into it, the more it seemed like the truth. And it wasn't as if that was

Comments

[cardsharpcal]

He can't fucking believe Loker's more concerned about a pair of pants than he is about the fact that Cal's obviously lost twenty years. He's not sure exactly how many, but to judge by his hair, long enough that it fell in his eyes if it wasn't slicked back, he's not yet twenty eight, because when he was twenty eight he got it cut short and kept it that way. This is impossible, and yet clearly, it's not, because here he is. It's not losing the years that made him get back into poker as hard as he had last night, it was just because why the hell not? They're not going to be able to go back, that much is clear enough by now. All the reasons that he'd gone legit were gone here. There was no threat of jail, no Emily to put in danger, no Gillian to disappoint, no Zoe. He's got nothing left to lose, and he can remember exactly what he lost to get to this point, and that makes him unpredictable

[radicalliars]

It is jealousy, of course. Loker sees a pair of pants on the table that certainly aren't Cal's, and his mind thinks of those deft fingers undoing buttons, and dragging them down legs to ankles, and then somehow ending up on the poker table with the rest of his stash. He's not even sure if he's really allowed to be jealous, because he still doesn't entirely know where the lines are for all of this. They have sex sometimes. They cuddle afterwards. But is this really an exclusive thing? There is just so much about this that he just doesn't know. And now, well, now he's got a twenty years younger Cal that may or may not even care about whatever thing it was that they'd had before

[cardsharpcal]

"You're jealous."

Cal's gloating. He was right, and it's obvious in the way he folds under his call of how ridiculous it was that the pants were his number one concern, how he's now unable to respond in a full sentence, how he's not looking him in the eye. It's also clear that this hasn't changed how Loker feels. He's still looking at him like he's memorizing the details, and that piece of it, the quiet, distant, stalk-your-every-move thing that Loker has cornered the market on has been disentangled from the hero worship that gets on his nerves. They're two separate things, and these days, Loker doesn't back down the way he did when he deferred to everything Cal said as though he must always be right. This place or the sex changed that, and he fights back, he's sharp, too, but he still watches him and it's the kind of watching that has ended Cal's relationships in the past, when he does it

[radicalliars]

Cal's right, of course, and Loker shifts in slight ways that's all admission at the accusations. This doesn't change how he feels, because he's always been interested in this side of Cal, in the one that got thrown out of Vegas, the one that took a Master's degree and the founding principles of the facial action coding system to conning people at gambling. Sometimes, he can't help playing to that side of Cal, and now he's somehow - impossibly - standing in front of him, and they're not really talking about it. Not like it's a problem, like it's a puzzle to solve, but that it should have been what Eli was talking about first