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“Not again!” Tilly says, overturning her three-of-a-kind to face Joann’s straight of hearts, Michael’s flush of spades, and Keyla’s full house.
“All right, so, Tilly’s out!” Keyla snickers.
“No I’m not, I’ve got—” Tilly looks around desperately but the only item near her is their nearly empty second bottle of synthehol, most of which sits warm and bubbly in Keyla’s stomach already. Spoils are piled high by Joann both physically and metaphorically—replicator rations documented on the PADD, two bags of Tilly’s favorite chips from Earth, the extra pieces from her rock sample collection, and a case of Keyla’s contraband premium lager that is no real loss, since it’ll hardly be leaving this room anyway. Michael too has a decent smattering of items considering she arrived with only a single bottle of Vulcan wine, and though Keyla’s mostly broken even tonight she’s not too worried.
“No game?” Keyla teases. “Yes, we know.”
Tilly mock glares at her, red hair that she’s let loose for the night all a-frizz. She yanks down the zipper of her uniform, shedding the blue-and-bronze jacket among raised eyebrows and throwing it in the center of the circle before crossing her bare arms. “Forget contraband, we’re playing strip poker now.”
“You’re on,” Keyla says, sweeping up the cards to shuffle for the next round. Joann’s laughter rings out next to her so she knows she’s in. The cards flip nimbly through Keyla’s fingers as they await Michael’s reaction, and Keyla wonders if this will finally be the time Michael’s Vulcan propriety wins out—after all, Keyla’s heard a handshake is as intimate as a makeout session, to them. However, after a few moments Michael just sighs and taps the floor with her middle and index fingers as a signal to be dealt in, and Keyla crows toward the ceiling, immediately beginning to spit out cards in each of their directions. When she finishes dealing, she turns her hand over, then glares at her set of low-numbered, all-suited, non-matching cards and sure enough loses Joann’s family banana muffin recipe, written and sealed on actual paper, to Tilly at the end of the round, though none of them will have an oven to bake it in anytime in the foreseeable future.
(Keyla’s tried it once, and she’ll take how much better it tasted than the replicated version to her grave. Well, she told Joann, but then to her grave.)
Over the next hour they all steadily lose more, somehow. Keyla is ruthless, Joann is methodical, Tilly does mental calculations as easily as breathing, and Michael, of course, is logical, so they’re evenly well-matched at poker, strip or otherwise. Trinkets are stashed now that playing another round comes at the simple cost—well, simple for now, later it looks to get much more complicated—of an article of clothing, and so what if Keyla might’ve opened some of the Vulcan wine? They’re off-duty for another twelve hours.
All of them have lost their boots. Joann is down just her socks, but no further, which is a loss in Keyla’s opinion. Tilly has her undershirt and pants still, so she’s fine, if a little nervous. Keyla herself is in the same boat, and Michael—
“Are you kidding me?” Keyla demands at the same time as Tilly’s “Oh come on!” as Michael removes her black undershirt to reveal another undershirt beneath it.
Even Joann is shaking her head. “How many layers do you have, Michael?”
She lifts an eyebrow. “I was raised on Vulcan—”
“—where the temperature was often in the forties, we know,” Keyla sighs. “Starships are not that cold.”
“Says the woman raised on one.”
“Excuse me, I’m from Düsseldorf—”
“—the city of the famous Rhine Tower and the Karneval and the best altbier in the quadrant,” Joann finishes for her, a twinkle in her eye. “Remind me when your parents shipped out with you on the U.S.S. Victoria, Keyla?”
“I went back when I was sixteen,” she growls, and turns over her straight of clubs to watch Joann’s face fall. “Now let’s see some skin, Owo.”
“All right,” Joann says genially. “You know I have no shame about this—I grew up diving for abalone, and whatever you wore into the water you had to let dry.”
“Well, I don’t either,” Keyla says with a waggle of her eyebrow, blue eyes sparking with challenge. Joann’s laugh right back at her, her dimpled smile lighting up the room.
Michael leans in close to Tilly, her voice low. “Tilly, we should stop.”
“Aw, come on, it’s just getting fun—”
“Tilly, they’re both going to end up naked.”
“Yeah, and?” Tilly asks, looking between Keyla and Joann delightedly. Though she still has her jacket and undershirt, Joann foregoes the top half of her uniform to push off her pants instead, eyes never leaving Keyla’s as she reveals smooth, dark legs and the familiar faint lines of stretch marks near her hips that Keyla likes to trace in the afterglow, cuddled up together.
Not that Tilly knows that, of course, and from the looks of their glassy eyes and not-so-hushed whispers the wine’s had some effect on them as well. “It won’t be long now,” Tilly assures Michael with a wave in their direction and what is almost glee, and Michael dutifully begins dealing out the next round of cards as Keyla resists the urge to pull Joann’s soft calves—or the rest of her, really—into her lap.
Keyla knows from one look at her next hand that she’s going to lose, and, not to be outdone by Joann, sheds her pants too in recompense. She balls them up and tosses them high into the air behind her and hears the bundle fall in a heap somewhere on Joann’s bed, metal symbols clicking against the duranium wall. But then she loses the next round to Michael too, and a third to Joann, and—
“We have that thing!” Tilly says suddenly, eyes on where Keyla’s shrugged and started to unhook the clasp of her bra. It’s that or her underwear. “That thing—that thing with Lieutenant Stamets. Right, Michael?”
“Yes. Absolutely,” Michael says, already standing and dragging Tilly up with her with one iron grip on her arm. “Lieutenant Stamets is waiting.”
“At 0200 hours?” Joann asks.
Michael’s face betrays no emotion, a perfect Vulcan placidity as she drags Tilly toward the door. “We’re very late.”
“But keep playing without us!” Tilly calls right as it closes behind them.
Keyla and Joann look at each other before bursting into laughter. “They know they left their clothes in here, right?” Keyla cackles, sweeping up the rest of the cards. “And their spoils. Ooh, the Romulan ale!” Leaning forward so that her body is stretched almost parallel to the floor to reach it, she swipes it out of Michael’s pile and drops it with a triumphant flourish onto hers. She winks at Joann. “When you can’t win…”
“How very Starfleet of you,” Joann teases.
“As if this wasn’t all some elaborate setup anyway,” Keyla says. “Literally, set up. What do they think we are, clueless idiots mooning after each other for ages and only going to realize it after a shared near-death experience where we’re, like, suffocating or something and the ship has been taken over? Or that we’d need literal rainbows bursting over our heads to figure it out?” She crosses her arms. “We get through near-death experiences nearly every day!”
“So…we’re still not telling them we’re together, and have been for nine months,” Joann surmises with a fond look at Keyla.
“Hell no,” Keyla replies with an outward jut of her chin. “And miss whatever good-natured, entirely meddlesome scheme Tilly cooks up next?” She flops backward onto the ground to stare up at the ceiling, traces of alcohol still singing through her veins and absolutely no care for the fact that she’s only wearing a bra and underwear. It’s Joann, after all, and modesty is for losers—and Vulcans.
“You’re beautiful, you know,” Joann says after a moment, in that soft, quiet, assured way that she does.
Keyla turns over onto her side to grin at her, thrusting out her hip in a pose much too ridiculous to be provocative. “You know it. I’m great.”
“Really,” Joann says with a roll of her eyes, and Keyla sits up again, fully intending to kiss her. Or hear a few more compliments first. “With or without clothes on. I mean it, Keyla. Really.” Joann takes her hand from where it’s risen, a slight furrowing of her sculpted brow. Joann has the type of face that should be sculpted, really—sharp curves and definition and all those other art terms Keyla could never bring herself to give two shits about, except sculptors always seem to carve their figures to have stern, heroic visages, and Keyla likes it best when she smiles. “…Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” Keyla asks, and only realizes when Joann tugs her hand down between them that instead of rising to cup Joann’s jaw as she’d intended it had drifted towards her own, towards the implant marring the left side of her face. “Oh.”
“Beautiful,” Joann says again, kissing her knuckles and then the tips of her fingers, the touch of her lips featherlight.
Keyla shakes it off, whatever latent issues she has with her augment rendered unimportant here with Joann and soft gazes and her dimpled smile. She scoots closer to gently push Joann back against the floor, warm skin settling against warm skin as she drapes herself on top of her, elbows propping herself on either side. She hovers over her, so close their noses are almost touching and she can see every glimmer and refraction of light by the gold painted over her girlfriend’s eyelids. “You’re one to talk, Joann Owosekun.”
“Oh, am I?” she asks, twists fanning out in a dark, intricate spiderweb across the duranium alloy.
Keyla’s breath ghosts over Joann’s lips, mere millimeters from hers before she presses them together. “Yeah, you are.” Her eyes dance at her when she finally pulls back, cheeks tinged pink and breaths coming a little faster. “To the victor goes the spoils.”
“And you’re the spoils, I presume,” Joann laughs, her hands coming to rest around Keyla’s waist, thumbs stroking lines up her sides that make her shiver.
“Well, you’re the victor,” Keyla teases. She nips at her bottom lip. “Know how I can tell?”
“I have too many clothes on?” Joann suggests, shaking her head slightly at her girlfriend’s antics from where she has her pinned.
Keyla grins. “You have too many clothes on.”
“Soooo, how was your nightttt?” Tilly asks, drawing out the igh as she sets down her tray at their table the next morning and eagerly sits down. Michael is right behind her, one bowl of grain and one of a cut fruit Keyla doesn’t recognize situated for perfect weight distribution on her tray.
Joann gives her a questioning look. “You were there for most of it, Syl.”
“Yeah, but we had to leave early!” Tilly replies. “To meet Lieutenant Stamets.”
Keyla shrugs.
“Oh, it was fine.”
“Just fine?”
“We basically just went to bed after you guys left,” Keyla says.
Tilly looks frantically between them. “And—and nothing—else—?”
“Like what?” Keyla asks, feigning flummox. Her knee knocks against Joann’s under the table, bringing their hands together for a quick squeeze that is all the expression Keyla will allow herself of the laughter that threatens to bubble out of her fluttering diaphragm. Sighing, Tilly pouts into her eggs, and Keyla can see the engine already firing in her head on what is surely her next nefarious plan of action. Impromptu skinny-dipping, maybe, because Tilly is nothing if not inventive. Keyla tries to imagine Michael’s expression when she suggests that one, and has to squeeze Joann’s hand even harder.
A shadow falls over the table, and Keyla looks up into the glittering black eyes of the ex-Terran emperor turned Section 31 agent standing over them.
“…Georgiou?” Michael asks hesitantly, eying her the way a snake charmer would eye an as-yet unknown snake.
“Strip poker, and you didn’t invite me?” the woman drawls, each word coming out with a slight hiss. Keyla has no idea how she found out about the strip poker game they had played ensconced in their quarters last night, but it’s Georgiou, and no one asks how Georgiou knows any of the things she knows anymore. Her eyes meet each of theirs in turn, her chin held high with a jawline sharp enough to shatter glass, if her razor-like tongue hasn’t sliced right through it already. The slope of her angular shoulders, covered in black leather as always, rises and falls. “Your loss.”
In the second it takes Keyla to parse those two little words—is Georgiou really hitting on them?—Tilly goes as red as her hair, but the woman is already sauntering away. Her own hair swings behind her in a long black sheet as she calls, “In my universe, Stamets and Culber weren’t the only ones allowed a little fun, you know.”