Page 43 of Going All In

There’s something I’m not seeing. I pace back and forth. If I keep this up much longer, Cam will have a hole in his living room carpet.

“Dude. Talk to her.” Cam started ignoring me after about half an hour of pacing and complaining. He’s got the TV on now and is flipping through streaming options.

“I have, man. If there’s one thing I do well, it’s talk. Put that undergrad psychology degree to work and all that. But there’s something she hasn’t told me. I don’t know what it is, but whatever her hang-up or past is, it’s keeping us apart.”

It’s been over twenty-four hours since I took the train back to Philly from my mom’s house. Holly stayed behind to do something with wedding dresses with my mom and sisters. I can only imagine the conversations they had in my absence.

“She seemed into you all day on Thanksgiving,” Cam points out.

I shrug, dropping onto the couch next to him. “She was, or at least it seemed like it. We actually talked after everyone went to bed.” I don’t need to tell him everything. “She almost said something on the train, too. About bringing someone to the wedding who won’t do something. But then she clammed up, wouldn’t tell me what she was talking about.”

Cam scratches his chin. “She has a roommate, right? Are they close?”

“Inseparable, from what Holly’s told me.” I haven’t spent much time with JJ, but I feel like I almost know her from all the stories Holly tells.

“Think she’d tell you?”

I let out a sigh and reach for the bowl of pretzels on the coffee table. “Maybe. I don’t want to go behind Holly’s back. But I get this sense that she’s hurting somehow. I just want to fix it.”

* * *

I shuffle the cards, folding them into a bridge that snaps them together with an oddly pleasing noise. I then cut the deck and deal out two cards to each of us.

Blake picks up his cards, studying them. “How was everyone’s Thanksgiving?”

This is his favorite tactic. Get people talking about something other than the game. It distracts them, and he can usually read the inflection in their voices to get a sense of how strong their hand is.

I shrug as I look at my hand. “It was fine.” My jaw tightens a bit. I’ve gotten good at knowing exactly what I’m showing on my face, and this time I’ll let it slide. Because I’m looking at a great set of cards—king and ace, both spades—but my mind is on Holly.

Miller tosses chips into the center. “I had Chinese food.”

“You should have come out to the Main Line with us. We had Maddox’s mom’s turkey. It was fucking amazing.” Cam folds, placing his cards face-down on the table.

“Yeah? How’s your sister?” Blake asks. He adds his chips to the pile.

I try to kick him under the table, but he’s too far away. “Off limits, asshole. To all of you.” Addie was eleven when I left for college. In my mind, she’s still eleven, or close to it. It’s a tough mindset to change.

We keep playing, dealing out cards and studying the hands. My head isn’t in the game, and it’s killing me to lose to these guys. This is the one place I can separate everything else from what’s going on in front of me. If I play like this, I may as well drop out of the Vegas tournament I have coming up soon.

A buzzing from my pocket distracts me even further, and when I pull it out and see a text from Holly, any illusion that I was paying attention to the game vanishes.

I fold, placing my cards on the table, and stand. “I have to take this.”

Cam raises his eyebrows in interest, but he doesn’t say anything.

Holly

Can we talk?

I call her, and she answers on the third ring. I know she was holding her phone, so it makes me wonder why she wasn’t ready to answer as soon as I called.

“Hi, Maddox,” she says, a slight waver to her voice. “Am I interrupting something?”

She could interrupt every poker game I play for all I care if she needs something. “Not at all. Just playing poker with the guys. How was the dress fitting with my mom?”

Her voice relaxes as she starts to fill me in about the dress and the veil my mom chose. There’s genuine happiness there.

She fits in so well with my family.

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