I have a boyfriend. I’m married.

I don’t DO boyfriends.

I don’t know how it happened, only that it did. I work in a poker room, alongside my husband, a small place where gambling men wander in and out, looking for money and rarely finding it. I work because I enjoy it, just once a week, to challenge myself out of shyness, and to keep my mind busy recognizing faces and counting money. It’s a job without being work, and the people I’ve met are a menagerie of characters.

My boyfriend? He was there all along, a quiet shadow, a man I assumed never noticed me; the faceless blonde he’d see once a week in the poker room.

He’d come, and he’d go. Sometimes he’d tease me about cheesecake. He was a steady player, good with cards and reading the table, a regular winner. He was smart, which I knew, both from his play and from a long ago conversation when we had briefly talked at a costume party (where I was Little Red Riding Hood and he showed up as himself). I had given him a nickname…I wasn’t sure he even knew mine.

And then one Monday at work, I asked for his number.

I’m not sure what I expected, or why. I just did.

A week after the exchange of numbers, his hand spent a lot of the night under my dress, as long as his cards were in the muck. There’s not been a single day since that we haven’t texted.

Our first kiss was in a parking lot, a long kiss after a quick dinner of Japanese appetizers. No need for more, we both had other things on our mind…