CB: Cat and Mouse, -XVI-

"Wanna play a game?" she asks me, bored, seated on the single bed in the crummy hotel across from the one chair in the room where I'm lounging and watching the television. It's turned up pretty loud, to drown out the silence. And to show us where we are. The images cause a multi-colored glow to spread across the room, occasionally going dark and occasionally so bright as to be almost blinding. We tried the light, but the bulb is either broken or the plug is shorted out. So the television is partially for light, and partially because I had nothing better to do and I'm trapped in a room with her.

"Game?" I ask, turning to look at her. Her face is half dark, as she turns to look at me, and half blue from the commercial that's playing.

"You know. Cards?" she raises her voice over the noise of the television.

"I thought you'd given up gambling."

"I never said that."

"It'll make us a lot less conspicuous if you don't go out gambling."

"Look, I'm not talking about going out and gambling. I'm talking about you and me playing a game of cards."

"All right." I mute the television.

She smiles and leans over to fish a deck of cards out of her jacket. I can't keep my eyes from following the lines of her body in that barely there outfit, and she knows it. "So, what are we playing for?" she asks, slowly pulling the deck from her jacket and perching on the bed.

"I want some information out of you." The other half of that sentence is unsaid. The why. The, 'Because you won't tell me if I don't force you. Because I can't get to know you without applying just the right pressure to you and this was your idea so I'll play your game, but by my own rules, and for my own stakes.'

"Is that all?" her voice falls and she rolls her eyes, tilting her head back as she does so to reveal her neck to me. Again, my eyes are drawn to it, and the pattern glowing on it in the flickering light of the television. The room seems a little small, even for one person, and we've got the shades drawn.

"I don't think we need to play strip poker to make that sort of an advances at one another." I shift, slightly, in my seat. She knows exactly what affect she has on people. And I'm no exception.

Her cheeks color a little, but it's hard to tell because at that moment the flickering light goes to dark as the television screen goes dark with only white titles emblazoned across it. She lowered her chin, causing her hair to fall forward and obscure her face. And it's funny that she can be modest about something, when we know each other so well. But then again I guess we don't, if we did I wouldn't be playing this game with her for what I said I was.

Or that she can be modest about something when she's dressed like that. In a room, a single room, with me and nothing to do for a while but… "Fine. We'll play for information then."

She glances at me from under her bangs. The light comes back, red this time, and though I can't see her eyes from the under the shadow of the fall of her hair, I can tell there's something in her eyes that tells me she's unsure about this. She lifts her eyes properly to mine, the fall of her hair moving back from obscuring her features, and I can see her face now, a bit better. The faint blush on her cheeks is all that betrays her slight embarrassment.

But the light changes on the television again and I can't tell if I really saw a blush on her pale cheeks or if it was just a trick of the light.

"Poker."

I nod.