Double Blind (12 page)

“All right, Slick,” he said, his voice almost completely steady. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

It all
caught up with Ethan when Randy took him to the fountains.

He’d done well for his first time playing poker—even he had to admit that—and he could tell that Randy’s praise of his playing had not been feigned or even embellished, because he’d criticized as much as he’d approved.

“You play too long,” he’d told Ethan as they debriefed in the bar when Randy had called a halt to their part in the game at 2:00 a.m. “A lot of green players do that, but you’re better than most green players, so stop. If your hand is bad, you fold.
I know
, sometimes you fold and then find out you would have had a damn full house,” he’d said before Ethan could even frame the objection. “Hell, look at that straight I had. But you have to play the odds, Slick, and you have to play the players. Don’t go chasing fate in a card game, ever.”

“You let Kevin,” Ethan had reminded him.

Randy had shrugged and become more focused on his beer. “Kevin’s not you.” Then he’d gone on to critique eight other aspects of Ethan’s failures, but he’d peppered them with some praise too.

In short, it was clear that Randy thought Ethan had something of a talent for this.

“You need to keep your purse in mind,” Randy had said, the conversation spilling over as they left the Golden Nugget and hailed a cab to head for the Strip. “You made two hundred dollars tonight on top of money I gave you.”

“I earned some of what you gave me,” Ethan replied coolly, but he let the smile on his face creep into his voice.

Randy’s hand slid across the cab and closed over Ethan’s thigh. “Yeah, but you threw away the big purse, so don’t get too cocky, baby.”

I didn’t throw that one away,
Ethan thought, remembering the way he’d felt when he realized what Randy had done for Kevin, how it had swelled inside him when they were alone in the hall as he’d confirmed that it had been deliberately done. But he didn’t tell Randy how that had impressed him, how hard he had fallen in that moment, and as they crawled through the snarl of traffic past the glittering, flashing lights of Vegas that turned into a single, indistinguishable kaleidoscope, he promised himself that he had no intention of ever letting Randy know.

And then Randy leaned forward and told the cabbie to pull over at the curb. They got out in front of Bellagio, and Ethan saw the fountains.

He heard the music before he saw the water: soft, almost ethereal female vocals that drifted over an even more effervescent setting of strings, swelling to a crescendo as Ethan stumbled forward, lightheaded and disoriented. Then he took one step farther past the tree that had been blocking his view. He stepped up to the railing just as the music swelled again and a spray of water arced up in time to the music out of the pool below, lit as if there were a bright, blue-white fire within.

Ethan had a distant memory of the receptionist at his office in Provo telling everyone about how she’d seen the fountains at Bellagio when she’d gone to Vegas on her honeymoon, and he remembered her carrying on about them, talking about how beautiful they were, so beautiful that she’d cried. Ethan remembered writing the story off as just more sentimental, over-hyped garbage, which given that woman’s history hadn’t been so terribly unfair. But as he stood there at the rail himself, already raw from everything about the day, thrown for so many loops now that he was almost accustomed to spinning—when he saw the water shoot up toward the sky as a disembodied soprano soared and a bright white light hit every color of the spectrum at once, he could not hold himself together anymore. Emotion swelled and crested inside him with the water and the music, and he tried to let out his breath to ease the pain inside his chest, but it wasn’t enough. The next thing he knew he was clutching the railing so hard that his fingers hurt, and he was spiraling away, away, so overwhelmed by the pain and the hurt, a hurt deeper than anything he had even dreamed could exist—

—and then he was landing again, anchored by a steady, warm, and heavy hand on his arm.

“Hey—
hey
.” The hand slid up to Ethan’s shoulder and turned him away from the water. “Baby—Ethan, honey—”

And Ethan just gave up. He leaned forward against Randy’s forehead, and he wept.

Silently, though—he managed that much control at least, but he owed it to Randy because somehow the anchor of those hands, one on each of his shoulders now, gave him some kind of strength. He drew courage, too, from the heavy pressure of Randy’s forehead and the musk and whiskey scent of him. Ethan gave in to that strength, let it support and center him, and he calmed. The pain reduced to a dull ache inside him, a simple pit inside his stomach once again, not a hard, killing fire that screamed through his veins.

But it came at a cost, because the next thing Ethan knew, he was talking, whispering, his words breaking out of him in jagged chunks.

“A car,” he said, keeping his eyes shut and his forehead pressed to Randy’s. “All I have left is a car. No credit cards. No house. No job. Just the money I won and you gave me in my pocket, and a car in the parking lot of Herod’s.”

The next words felt so heavy in his chest that he didn’t think he could say them. He tried not to say them, but then his hand was fumbling in his pocket, pulling out the keys, his hand shaking as he held them out for Randy, and then he confessed the rest.

“There’s a gun,” he whispered, “under the driver’s seat.”

The music swelled again, but Ethan couldn’t hear it because it was drowned out by the screaming sound of an oncoming train inside his own head—

—and then Randy’s hands were pressing against the sides of his face, shaking as he tipped Ethan’s head back, pressing the keys into his cheek. Ethan opened his eyes enough to see Randy’s face, lit by the blue-white light of the fountains, his dark eyes no longer sharp and cunning, just wide with shock and a little bit of fear.

“Jesus Christ, Slick,” Randy whispered, and then he kissed him.

The kiss was soft, so soft, and tender, and sweet. It was the sort of kiss that, even an hour ago, Ethan wouldn’t have expected from Randy. It healed Ethan and opened him up too wide all at the same time.

They broke the kiss, both of them shaking, their noses seeking each other out, nuzzling. If other people were unnerved by the two grown men breaking down outside Bellagio, Ethan didn’t know, and he didn’t care. For the first time that evening, he let himself acknowledge how close he had come to never having this moment, and he let himself admit that every single breath he was taking now was one he hadn’t expected to take, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do next.

He shut his eyes tighter and pressed his hands hard against the sides of Randy’s neck.

“So,” Randy said after awhile, trying to force lightness into his tone. “What now, Slick?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan confessed. “But I know I don’t want to go to my car.”

Fingernails curled briefly into Ethan’s cheeks. “You aren’t fucking getting within ten feet of it.” His fingers relaxed a little. “I’m thinking we’re done with the sightseeing for tonight. You want—” He stalled, then pressed on. “You okay with coming to my place? We don’t—”

“Please,” Ethan said, quickly, before he could finish. He brushed a kiss against Randy’s eyebrow. “And we can—I mean, if you still—”

“Fuck yes,” Randy said, and Ethan laughed a little.

The music swelled again, and Ethan saw the light even through his closed eyelids, but this time it gave him ease.

They went back to the street, holding hands not just all the way to the cab, but inside as well. Ethan felt slightly awkward, as if they had stumbled into a place that was very beautiful but unfamiliar for both of them even under normal circumstances, let alone to have tumbled there in the span of a single evening. Ethan hoped that it would get easier once they were at Randy’s house.

Then Randy told the cab to pull over again, and they crossed a busy street to another hotel. Ethan looked up to see the word “Stratosphere” scrawled in neon red against the side of the building, and he also saw a tall, needle-like structure rising off to the side.

It was to this needle that Randy dragged him, taking him through the lobby of a hotel that wasn’t half as beautiful as the Golden Nugget and up an escalator to a ticket counter, pausing only to stop and get Ethan a huge strawberry daiquiri in the most ridiculously long plastic drink cup and straw combination that Ethan had ever seen. Ethan sipped it gratefully as Randy purchased them a pair of tickets and put them in the line for the elevator, and then they were going up, up, up. Ethan’s ears popped as the alcohol soothed the frayed edges of his nerves, and then the doors opened. Randy took his hand again, and they walked out of the round, window-filled room onto an open-air balcony. Las Vegas, in all its hedonistic glory, glittered below.

They stood there for a long time, just looking out at it, soaking it in.

When he was able, Ethan said, “It’s beautiful.”

Randy nodded. “I come up here when I feel a little crazy.” He paused, then added carefully, “Not that I think you’re crazy.”

“I’m not sure it’s entirely sane to sell everything you have, drive to Vegas, and spend all your money with plans to put a bullet in your brain when it’s gone,” Ethan said.

Randy shuddered and squeezed Ethan’s hand. “Don’t even say that.”

Ethan watched the lights again for awhile, his eyes lingering on the Bellagio fountains as he found them on the Strip. They were huge, even from here.

“If it helps,” Ethan said, “I don’t think I was going to go through with it. When I lost that last five dollars at roulette, I was terrified because I’d realized I didn’t want to end it, not like that, but I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.” He smiled, remembering. “Then this idiot came and started betting on me.”

Randy laughed, but without a lot of humor. “Sorry, Slick.”

This time it was Ethan who squeezed his hand. “Don’t be.”

They stood in silence again.

“I’m a little out of my element here,” Randy confessed. “I’m not normally… deep. I’m going to apologize in advance for any fuck-ups I make in my inexperience.”

Ethan’s eyes were still on the lights. It looked like the world’s largest Christmas display, and it was ten times as soothing. “It just hit me badly. I think I knew I didn’t mean as much to him as he did to me, but I didn’t want to admit it. All the signs were there in the way he arranged his life, in the double standard he had with everyone, but I loved him, and I told myself that he might be that way with other people, but he wouldn’t be like that with me. It hurt, a lot, to find out I was wrong.”