The Betting Pool

The office betting pool sat in the shared Google Doc, mocking me. Three hundred dollars on whether Marcus and I would finally sleep together at the company retreat. My coworkers were degenerate gamblers with too much downtime and boundary issues.

Marcus was the office fox—sharp-witted, devastatingly handsome, and entirely too aware of both facts. He'd been giving me that look all week, the one that said he knew exactly what I was thinking about him. The bull in sales had been making crude jokes about it since Tuesday, his confidence seemingly unshaken by my repeated rejections.

"You coming to the pool party?" Marcus asked, leaning against my cubicle wall, holding two orange sodas like an offering.

I hesitated. The retreat was mandatory. The pool party was not. But something in his eyes—curiosity, maybe, or just that persistent heat that had been building between us for months—made me say yes.

That night, under the harsh pool lights and the too-loud music, everything shifted. We sat on the edge of the concrete pool, legs dangling in the water, watching our coworkers get progressively drunker and stupider. The bull from sales was doing cannonballs, splashing everyone in reach.

"You know about the pool, right?" Marcus said quietly, not looking at me.

"The betting pool?" I laughed bitterly. "Of course I know. I'm the one being gambled on."

He turned to me then, and his expression softened into something almost tender. "Not what I meant." He gestured toward the silent, empty Olympic-sized pool at the far end of the complex, the one no one used because the hotel only heated the smaller one.

We ended up there, just the two of us, floating in the lukewarm darkness, the hotel's orange neon sign reflected on the water's surface. His hands found my waist underwater, and suddenly I understood why people took stupid risks for stupid reasons.

"You're going to lose me three hundred dollars," I murmured against his mouth.

He laughed, pulling me closer. "Worth every penny."

The next morning, the betting pool had a new entry. Marcus had placed five hundred dollars on us happening again. The man really was a fox, in more ways than one.