A game I can't lose

Checkers of Love

Have you ever played chess?

Stared at your opponent with calculated moves, afraid to give anything away?
One wrong move and the chess piece is gone; game lost and the board topples against you.

A bit similar to love.

Jordan doesn't know what love is like to be honest. All of her previous relationships have been built on lust, on a desire to fit in.
Attraction was to physical features, not heart or mind.
Even if your brain didn't appear big, if your dick was, Jordan didn't care.

Which was a problem.

Jordan was "straight" and up until now, it was a choice.

She heard her family express fears over her sexuality, her mum even contemplating moving back to Mexico in a desperate attempt for her daughter to not get "westernised."
Of course, Cristína didn't have much control over her 22-year old daughter these days.
Her kid lived across the other side of the Atlantic ocean.

Jordan was back in America though, her agent attempting to broker a deal back to the U.S, preferably somewhere like the Portland Thorns.
In the mean time though, Jordan watched a chess match unfold as she sat in a secluded corner at a bar.
The players were two old men, their age the only thing disguising their wittiness.

She didn't understand the rules of chess, why the Queen could move any place, why the Bishop could only move diagonally.
The board game bored her, and the game seemed to take hours when in reality, the chippier looking man had won within the space of two minutes.

The two guys sat afterwards, a pipe shared between them. Judging by snippet of their conversation, the two pensioners had known each other their whole life and nothing had ever torn them apart, whether one of them was an alcoholic while the other one attempted suicide, their bond remained superior to everything else.

Jordan wondered whether there was ever anything else. Was one jealous of the others popularity, the perfectness that no one could see past?
Or did he always sit there, wallowing in his mellowness and self pity?

Jordan looked at her phone. 11:04pm.
The bar was relatively empty, barring her, the chess chaps and timid people on their first date.
She was lonely, in the most populated city in the U.S.

Jordan Marceñez-Costello still wished she was innocent and as she watched the clouds of shisha rise up into the air before evaporating, wished the one person she fell for wasn't her best friend.