“Does your person wear glasses?” the tigress asked as she stared at her side of the board with all the people still flipped up and staring at her. She had her elbows on the table as she glanced over at her friend to gauge his reaction. Kotek, Alex’s cougar friend, pushed his glasses up his snout as he looked down at his character card and took a few seconds to answer, either as a tactic to throw the tigress off or just because he wasn’t a very seasoned player of Guess Who like the tigress was.

Alex was an incredibly seasoned, almost to the point of salty, Guess Who player. It was more than a game of guessing which person on the board was the one your opponent had; it was chocked full of psychological analysis. The tigress was good at noticing the little things like how fast people breathed when they played, how many times they tapped their fingers while they waited to hear their opponent’s questions, and whether or not their voice cracked or shook when they spoke. Her super-sonic detective skills were one of the reasons why she was very good at playing the betrayal game Among Us, which she still held a winning streak within her friend group.

Kotek stared at his character card and tapped his fingers against the table three times. His eyes darted between the card and the tigress who sat across from him as he considered either telling her the truth and risk losing the game, or cheating somehow, and winning. “Uhhhhh, yes, they are wearing glasses.” Kotek didn’t want to be known as the person who cheated at a game meant for people aged six and up. Plus, the way that Alex was staring at him was intimidating, it was as if she could hear what he was thinking. Was that how she kept winning? Damned striped witch.

Alex’s continuous victory over the cougar wouldn’t have been a problem if they were playing the game without consequences, but since they were both a lot older than six, there was some alcohol involved. Three shots of pure vodka down the hatch for every wrong guess (resulting in an instant loss of the game), one shot of vodka for every question asked that doesn’t lead to any character eliminations, and three shots if the other player correctly guesses who. So far, Kotek had his character guessed by Alex once, guessed Alex’s wrong once, and had to take six shots. It was fair to say that he was a tiny bit tipsy.

“Okay… Glasses…” the tigress said with a purr as she turned her attention to the board of characters in front of her. She scanned over each and every one of them and started flipping the ones without glasses down to narrow down her search. Out of the 24 possible characters on her board, the tigress took down the 12 that weren’t wearing glasses. With only 12 characters left, the tigress leaned forward on her elbows, linked the fingers on both hands together, and placed her chin on the newly formed bridge between her hands. “Your move, cat boy,” she said with an unnecessarily sultry tone and winked at Kotek. Her lips morphed into a grin that he had seen many times before. Whether it was during her tennis matches, at the airsoft range, or when she played Mario Kart; it was the grin of a woman who had her strategy down to a tee. As pretty as Kotek often thought Alex was, that competitive grin of hers terrified him every time.

The puma boy swallowed what little saliva he had in his mouth with a loud gulp. When he saw that the tigress was already down to half of her board, he started to panic. If Alex won again, he’d be on the hook for three more shots of giggle juice. It’d take him up to nine shots, which was a LOT to down in such a short amount of time without any food or snacks in between. He stared at the 24 characters on his board and began to strategize. He needed to ask a question that would give him enough information to eliminate as many people as possible. After thinking about it for a minute, he decided to go the easy route and copied Alex’s homework. He changed it just enough to not get caught by the teacher.

“Does your person have perfect vision?” Kotek glanced over at Alex. No smile, just a blank stare at her through his thick glasses. He was a member of the blurry eyesight committee, too, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t see at all when he took them off; he could still see, it was just a little bit harder for him to see things that were further away. He did his best to analyze Alex the way that he knew she did to him, but she was hard to read. All she did was stare back at him with that same sexy, deadly, and terrifying smile. If she were a book, she had to be one in a completely different language, one that he did not understand, no matter how much he kept up with his Duolingo streak. There were no lessons for the language of a cunning tiger on any of the language learning apps. And there was absolutely no way in hell Alex was going to teach him any and lose the advantage that she had over him.

“Oh, you are so lame. Yes, my person has perfect vision.” The tigress rolled her eyes at the cougar and shook her head. She watched him like a hawk as he flicked his character tiles down one by one as if to taunt her. He took down 14 out of his 24 tiles, which made Alex panic just a little on the inside. For the first time, Kotek was in the lead and there was a high chance he could pull a win on her and leave her on the hook for three shots of vodka.

But it was Alex’s turn.

“Does your person have red hair?” the tigress asked her second elimination question. She had a lot of redheads on her side of the board, which meant if the cougar said “no”, she’d be able to narrow down her guesswork by a significant number. But he said “yes”, she was fucked, through and through.

“Yes.”

Fuck.

Out of the 12 that Alex had left on her board, only one wasn’t a redhead. Her high-risk high-reward strategy had back-fired, and Kotek was still in the lead. She angrily flipped down the only blonde person on her board and glared at the cougar. That cocky, sexy, and scary smile that was on her lips before was long gone. She did her best to mimic it, but it wasn’t the same. She was about to lose this game and she knew it.

Kotek knew it too, and once it was his turn, he decided to put all of his eggs in one basket and guessed who.

“Is your person…” The cougar paused to consider whether he really should go through with such a risky move. He wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol in his system or something else, but after just a second of consideration, he moved forward with his guess. “Maria?”

Alex stared at Kotek and her face turned pale under her orange, white, and black fur. She froze for a moment before she picked up her character card between two of her fingers and flung it toward him angrily. “Oh wow, fucking LUCKY guess.” The card zipped through the air and hit Kotek square on the nose.

The cat boy looked at Alex with a mix of excitement and confusion. He did not think that he’d get his guess right and was fully expecting to be downing three consecutive shots of vodka right then and there. After the card hit him on the nose, he managed to catch it right before it hit the table, flipped it over, and smiled wide. “NO fucking WAY! HAHAHAHAHA!!! The cougar cackled like an evil witch. He stuck his tongue out and waggled his eyebrows at her to rub it in. “Three shots, Alex, threeeeeeeeee shots.” Kotek grinned at the tiger as he slid the bottle of Stolichnaya vodka that had been at his side for most of the night over to her.

Alex caught the bottle as it slid in her direction, twisted the cap off, and poured herself a shot into her dry shot glass. With the clear, fermented rye juice filled up to the rim of the standard-sized shot glass, the tigress took in a deep breath, sighed, and knocked the shot back like it was nothing. She did the same with the second shot but squinted her eyes shut this time, and then she downed the third.

“Hooh!” She let out a refreshed sigh as she brought her empty shot glass down to the table. The glass made a loud thud and caused both Alex’s and Kotek’s ears to flicker. Alex sat there in silence for a few seconds and tapped her feet against the floor as she felt the warmth of the vodka that she had just consumed spread from her throat down to her stomach. The fur on her shoulders stood up slightly around the straps of her tank top as a shiver ran down her spine. She was a big fan of the warm feeling booze often gave once swallowed, it reminded her of another liquid that had a similar effect. If you know, you know.

The fur on Alex’s shoulders started to flatten down after around a minute or two and she turned her attention to Kotek, who was still gloating about his win. He wasn’t doing it verbally, but there was a certain look in his eyes, behind those nerdy ass spectacles of his, that just made Alex want to beat him again.

“Okay, time for round three,” Alex said with a slightly disgruntled grumble. She reached over to snatch the previous round’s character cards from Kotek and set them aside as she grabbed the deck of unused ones, shuffled it, and gave Kotek and herself one card each. She flipped all of her tiles up again, and the cougar did the same just a few seconds later. With the game set up again, Kotek got to start first as the winner of the previous game.

“Uhhhhhmmmm, does your person wear glasses?” Kotek asked.

“Oh fuck off.”

---

Alex took this game a lot more seriously than the ones before. She had underestimated Kotek’s willingness to take risks, and thus, had her board game skills reality-checked. She took more risks, some of which paid off in spades, some of which didn’t. She wasn’t the only one to take the game more seriously, though. Kotek did, too, and they both ended up downing a lot more shots of vodka than either of them really should have. Three more for Alex and four more for Kotek. It was safe to say the Guess Who duo were a lot more than tipsy; with slurred speech, hiccups, and long alcohol-induced pauses dominating their game time, it was unclear who was going to win this time around. But with the amount of giggles and laughs that echoed throughout the dining area when one of them said something that made absolutely no sense, it was clear that they were having fun.

Who knew that board games could be a lot more fun with booze involved?

“Does your person….” Alex paused as she thought of what to ask. She looked at the three remaining characters on her board. All three of them were redheads, all three of them were men, and all three of them looked like the same exact person to her. (Racism). The differences between the three were subtle, so subtle that Alex had to read into what she thought the three men would be into sexually. One of them, looked like they were into the finer things in the bedroom, which gave the tigress an idea.

“Does your person look like they would enjoy the Rusty Trombone?” The tigress asked with an attempt at a serious expression, but her lips eventually curled into a smirk. She leaned on her elbows, nestled her chin on top of her intertwined hands, and stared at the cougar with her big emerald green eyes.

Kotek considered himself pretty adept at the English language, but when the tigress mentioned “Rusty Trombone”, he found himself perplexed and dumbfounded by this new term that he had never heard of before. Sure, he knew what a trombone was and he was familiar with the oxidation of metals, but who on Earth would “enjoy” their expensive brass instrument becoming damaged? With a furrowed brow, a slightly scrunched nose, and a wrinkled forehead that rivaled Gordon Ramsay’s, he shifted his gaze from his character card to the tigress and asked; “What is a Rusty Trombone?” He narrowed his eyes after he asked, too, perfecting the look of absolute confusion.

Alex looked at Kotek with an equally confused expression, minus the Ramsay forehead, and tilted her head to the side. “What? You don’t know what a Rusty Trombone is?”