Holding the dice in the moist palm of your right hand, you stand in a corner dark, the craps table nothing more than a pale illumination under a pale light in a pale backroom, and you close your hand around the dice and start shaking the bones in the hollow of your fist, fully well cognizant of the probabilities, knowing this throw must be the throw as you down another swig of cheap bourbon from the etched crystal tumbler and you puff a bummed unfiltered cigarette that paints your throat raw, and then, just before you make your throw, just before you commit it all to Fortune or the God of Probabilities or Whatever the Fuck, she appears in the pale cone of light on edge of the gaming table and, as she continues and eventually stops next to you at the table’s edge, you are aware of her lucidity at this moment and you breath in the subtle aroma of her perfume that impends your senses even above the malodor of the other player’s sweaty bodies, the same bodies you know lay odds on you, and how you are now drunk and ashamed because you promised yourself never to gamble drunk, and you look to her, look at this woman, before finally throwing and releasing the dice, watching them descend onto the craps table’s green felt and see their bounce, and when you realize you’ve hit it big, you turn to her and she, with a jutted curved hip against the table and a smooth thigh that protrudes from the generous slit of her skirt, runs her pale grey eyes to your green ones, and she comes so close to you that her woman’s scent intrudes and it’s as if you almost taste her pussy on your lips, and how, much later when you both are nude and you both take turns moving over each other’s bodies under the pulled out sheet of her bed in that rundown hotel room she once called home that when quiet came and you were both moist with sweat and cum from your frantic sex, each of you suddenly knew, suddenly it became clear, that you’d gambled on her, and she’d gambled on you, and you both gambled on your eventual life together.
And that, sometimes, there is a happily ever after.
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