“I bet one garment,” Emily said. She was still wearing her top and bra, and she tapped her cards on the floor, looking more than a little smug.
“One garment,” Will said, and gave a grin that made Hannah’s stomach flutter. He only had one garment to lose, so there was no possibility of him raising the stakes.
“Hannah?”
“One,” Hannah said, but her mouth was thick and dry, and she had to take a gulp of champagne before repeating, more clearly. “One garment.” There was no point in folding. If she did, she would have to take off her bra. And the rules were that the person with the weakest hand had to strip. Maybe, maybe Will was bluffing.
“Ryan?”
“Tw—” Ryan said wickedly, looking at Emily’s shirt and his own jeans, and then he laughed. “Just kidding. One garment.”
“Okay,” April said, “let’s see ’em, folks. Emily?”
“Three of a kind,” Emily said. She laid them out with a kind of laconic triumph—three fives. It was a good hand. Better than Hannah’s. “Beat that,” she said to Ryan.
“Well, I hate to disappoint, but… flush,” Ryan said. He gave Emily a flashing grin and laid out five diamonds.
“You fucker,” Emily said equably, but she didn’t look too worried. In strip poker it didn’t really matter who won. What mattered was who lost. Only the loser would have to strip, and three fives was still a pretty good hand, particularly given she still had her top to lose.
It was down to Hannah and Will.
Hannah looked across the circle at him. He was leaning back against the legs of the armchair, long bare legs stretched out across the circle, his arms folded across his naked chest. He was smiling, and she knew that he must have a good hand, and that he could see the desperation in her eyes. She felt her heart thumping in her chest, so hard that when she looked down at her hand she could actually see the lace trim of her bra trembling. Could she do it? Was she really going to get naked in front of this room of complete strangers?
“Hannah?” April said, with that purring little note in her voice.
Hannah swallowed. She put down one three… then another…
And then Will let his cards drop, facedown.
“I’m out,” he said with a wry smile. “I guess I’ll be removing these.” He looked down at his boxers, his expression comically dismayed. You could have heard a pin drop.
“Hokay.” It was Emily who stood up, breaking the tension. “Well, that’s quite enough of that as far as I’m concerned. I have no desire to see anyone’s meat and two veg.”
She stood up, stretching unselfconsciously so that her shirt rode up, exposing an unexpected flash of Bart Simpson underpants, and then reached for her leather miniskirt.
“What?” April said, sounding aggrieved. “You must be joking! It’s barely even midnight.”
“It’s two a.m.,” Emily said, waving her phone. “And I want to be conscious for the Master’s induction speech tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Ryan stood up too and pulled his football shirt on over his head. “I’m with her. Wanna walk me back to Cloade’s?” he asked Emily, who shrugged but followed him to the door.
“Ugh, you’re such party poopers,” April grumbled. But she seemed to accept defeat and began gathering up the cards as Hugh started hunting around for his socks and phone.
“I guess I’ll call it a day too,” Hannah said, rather diffidently. She stood up and reached for her top, holding it against herself like a protective shield. “Night, everyone.” April didn’t respond, she just shrugged, rather sulkily.
It was Will who looked up. “Night, Hannah.”
“Yes, good night, Hannah,” Hugh said rather awkwardly. “And thank you, April, I had a great time.”
April snorted at that.
“Like fuck you did. You looked like I was pulling out your nipple hairs one by one.”
Hugh flushed, as if he didn’t quite know what to say.
“Are you coming, Will?” he asked, after a short pause.
“In a sec,” Will said. He was buckling his jeans. “You head over. I won’t be long.”
“Night, April,” Hannah said. There was a slightly pleading note in her voice which she instantly despised but did not know how to change. She picked up the cards nearest her and held them out.
April took them. “Night,” she said, rather crossly, shoving them into the pack, and Hannah turned and walked into her room.
As her bedroom door closed behind her, Hannah allowed herself a shuddering sigh of relief, thankful that she hadn’t had to be the one to take a stand and incur April’s wrath, and equally grateful that Emily had stepped in before someone lost their last layer.
Now, as she stood there, her head spinning a little from the champagne she had drunk, she had the strangest feeling—almost as if she were surveying herself from a distance, marveling at the fact that she—Hannah Jones—had found herself surrounded by these exotic, clever, glamorous creatures. For a moment she had a piercing flashback to Dodsworth—to the kids who hung around the off-license in the town square, trying to buy cider with fake IDs and smoking Marlboro Lights behind the bus station. Maybe there were kids at their school who drank champagne and played strip poker, but if they existed, they weren’t part of the crowd Hannah hung around with. She had never been one of the girls who went to parties, applied mascara in the school bathroom, or had their boyfriends pick them up at the end of the day in a car. The closest Hannah had come to breaking the rules was deliberately failing to return a school library book she needed for her exams.
And now here she was. At one of the most sought-after colleges in Oxford. Surrounded by people she would barely have had the courage to say hello to, were it not for her luck in finding April.
As she stood there, peeling off her underwear and shoving her arms into the kimono she used as a makeshift dressing gown, she felt a sudden wash of… not gratitude, exactly. But a kind of wonder at the miracle of what had just happened. She was here. At Oxford. Sharing a room with a girl so infinitely cool and glamorous that she might have stepped out of the pages of a magazine.
She, Hannah, could reinvent herself here. Okay, she wasn’t as spiky or witty as Emily, or as cheeky and sarcastic as Ryan. But she could be someone else. Someone new. Maybe… and here she swallowed, a shiver of longing running across her bare skin beneath the kimono. Maybe she could even be a girl that someone like Will would look twice at.
Will.
Will, who had sat across the circle from her, watching her, with that slow, lazy smile.
Will, who had stayed back at the end of the night, when he could have returned to Cloade’s with his friend Hugh.
Will, who—and then Hannah paused, with a sudden, clear picture of the cards she had picked up at the end of the evening. She had turned them faceup at she passed them to April, and now she realized something—the cards weren’t her hand. There had been five of them—a single ten, and four queens. Four of a kind.
Not just a good hand, but the winning one.
Not her hand. But Will’s.
Hannah took a step towards the door, and stopped, her hand on the knob, trying to figure it out.
Will had saved her. He had taken the hit himself, rather than force her to take off her clothes. But why? Was he just being nice? Was it pity for her obvious desperation? Or was it—she remembered his eyes meeting hers, the little prickle that had passed between them—was it something more?
Whichever it was, it might not be too late to find out.
Will had hung back. And perhaps he had done so for a reason.
Hannah licked her lips, pushed her long hair behind her ears. The mirror on the back of the door showed a girl with a wide, full mouth, huge dark eyes dilated with terror, cheeks flushed with excitement.
Please don’t be gone, she whispered under her breath. Please don’t be gone.