Double Blind Read online

  “If you lose, I’ll pay him for you. And you’ll pay me.” He nodded at Scully. “You’ll repeat the kiss you gave me in front of him, right here at the bar.”

  “This is going to be great.” Scully rubbed his hands together.

  “He hasn’t agreed yet,” Randy pointed out.

  Ethan looked between the two men, at Scully eager for his easy money, at Randy lounging against the rail, confident as all hell.

  Ethan gave a brittle smile. “It’s a deal, Scully.”

  Scully whooped.

  Randy nodded at Ethan’s drink. “You might want to leave that. I’d hate for you to feel you lost because I got you drunk. I’m happy to feed you too—an empty stomach makes it worse.”

  “I’ve already eaten.” Ethan picked up his drink defiantly, but then he remembered Tyler at the roulette table, insisting Ethan take the zeroes. And I made sure it went down that way, baby. Setting the alcohol down, he pushed it away. “Water please, Scully.”

  Randy’s lips quirked. “Good. It’d feel cheap, if I could lead you so easily.”

  Oh, if only Ethan could smack him. “I assume I’m obliged to be in the same room with you until midnight?”

  “It’ll be too hard for you to kiss me otherwise.”

  “Fine.” Ethan drained the water Scully set down before him. “Where are we going?”

  “A better question might be where aren’t we going?” Randy slipped his arm through Ethan’s and led him away from the bar. “Come on, baby. Let me show you my town.”

  “I’m not your baby.”

  “Come on, Slick. Let me show you my town.”

  “Stick it down his throat, Jansen,” Scully called as they departed.

  Randy’s wicked laugh reverberated up Ethan’s arm and into the center of his chest as they drifted to the exit.

  Chapter Three

  RANDY RESTED A hand against Ethan’s shoulder as they leaned against a railing. “What have you seen? What haven’t you? What would you like to see?”

  Such innocent questions. Yet Ethan stood there, unable to answer, his knuckles white as he gripped the metal bar and tried to process the hard left his life had taken.

  When Ethan had arrived in Las Vegas that morning, he’d been in a haze. After parking his car and pawning his few remaining possessions—save the ring—he’d stepped into the first casino he’d seen. He’d lost a large chunk of his savings there. Then he’d wandered around in the heat. After being overwhelmed by a pedestrian mall, he’d ended up at Herod’s. He hadn’t even made it to the Strip. He hadn’t cared. He’d been reeling, full of rage and pain and things he couldn’t name.

  Now he was back on the pedestrian mall, on Randy Jansen’s arm, riding out a thousand-dollar bet for four hours. A bet to kiss him. The lights and crowd and noise dimmed in his vision, blurring into a spinning kaleidoscope.

  It stopped abruptly as Randy’s face filled his vision, his dark gaze shooting through Ethan’s internal fog. “Hello? You still with us, Slick?”

  Ethan felt the pull between despair and—and what, he couldn’t know. Between despair and Randy, as best he could tell. What a bizarre set of poles. He gripped the rail tighter. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “We can go somewhere else. Fremont Street Experience was just the closest thing. Have you seen the Bellagio fountains at night? Even as a local, I have to tell you I never get tired of them. Or the Stratosphere tower. That you have to see.”

  “I haven’t really been anywhere,” Ethan confessed.

  Both of Randy’s eyebrows went up. “Nowhere? Only Herod’s?”

  The kaleidoscope effect returned, spinning around everything but Randy. “It doesn’t matter. Forget this. Forget all of this.”

  “Hey. Hey.” Randy caught him by the arm, and when he couldn’t turn Ethan around, he used his grip as an anchor to put himself in Ethan’s way and forced Ethan to look at him. “Are you okay?”

  No. “I’m fine.” He tried to escape again.

  Randy kept Ethan pinned in place. Ethan gave up and looked away so he didn’t have to meet Randy’s eyes, but he still felt the scrutiny.

  Randy slid his hand into Ethan’s, and when he spoke, his tone was light and careful. “Let’s start with a walk.”

  “I don’t want to take a walk.” Ethan knew he sounded surly and possibly petulant, but he didn’t care.

  “I do.” Randy led them toward the escalator, not letting go of Ethan’s hand, not even when Ethan tugged.

  “I don’t want to hold hands with you.”

  “Baby, it’s Vegas. Nobody gives a shit.”

  “I give a shit.”

  Randy’s eyes twinkled. “Tell you what—I’ll let go if you give me a kiss.”

  No one had ever infuriated Ethan this much this fast. “You’re a real jerk, you know that, right?”

  “Usually I get told I’m an asshole.” Randy put his free hand over his heart and looked at Ethan with soulful eyes. “You must really love me.”

  Rage and indignation swept up in a rush inside Ethan, and he bore down on Randy, ready to vent his spleen. Then Randy batted his eyelashes, and as if someone had waved a magic wand, the rage shifted, and suddenly Ethan was laughing.

  Randy winked. “There you go. That’s better.”

  “You are an ass.” Ethan couldn’t stop a smile, though. “Why the hell are you doing this? Are you that bored?”

  “I told you. You smell good.” But Randy kept his gaze elsewhere, and Ethan felt a tiny ripple of victory, like he’d scored a blow against a tornado.

  “I could give you the name of my cologne,” Ethan said, then remembered he wasn’t wearing any.

  “Oh, but I haven’t smelled all of you yet. It might not be the cologne. I’ll need to make a thorough inspection of all your scents before I know what’s drawing me in.”

  They stepped off the escalator, and Randy led them beneath the edge of a huge canopy. Ethan couldn’t quite tell whether it was a building or an amphitheater or something else entirely.

  Randy gestured to the sea of lights and people swarming around them, then up at the canopy overhead. “This is the Fremont Street Experience. We won’t stay for it, but they have a show every night. They turn off all the lights and do scenes on the ceiling. They make it day, make it night, make it whatever. Vegas all the way.”

  Ethan squinted, trying to see within the space ahead of them. “Is it a stage? But there are shops on the side.”

  “It’s four city blocks, baby. It’s a street with a ceiling on it.” When Ethan glared at him, Randy looked at him blankly, then laughed. “Called you baby again, did I?”

  “I have a perfectly acceptable name. You don’t need to belittle me all the time.”

  “Good God, Slick, get the stick out of your ass. Yes, your name is fine. But don’t you want to be somebody else every now and again?”

  The last few days in all their darkness and despair swept up like a heavy blanket kept at bay only by the sheer volume of lights and noise around him. “Yes. But you can’t escape who you are.”

  “Jesus. I should have poured the drink down your throat.” Randy stopped walking and let go of Ethan so he could turn to stare at him. “He really did a number on you, didn’t he? You don’t just have a rain shower over your head. You have the whole goddamn wall cloud.”

  Ethan’s throat closed, lest the emotions clawing at it escape. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Yeah, that much I’ve figured out on my own. Yet every time I stop talking or get a syllable wrong, you’re right back there, swimming in the shit. So how about we make a deal. Either we go sit somewhere, get you screaming fucking drunk, and you barf it all up, the drink and the story, or we go somewhere fun and distracting, and you don’t think about it at all. You pick, Slick. I’m game either way.”

  “Why are you doing this? All you get if you win the bet is a kiss. You must be bored. Or insane.”

  Randy’s smile turned enigmatic. “Interesting how you assume I’m bored, no
t shallow. I could just be doing this because I’m stupid and flighty, because I enjoy manipulating people, and you’re quite a puzzle to put together. But you assume I’m doing this because I’m restless.”

  Ethan faltered, self-conscious. Then he got a better look at Randy’s face and shook his head. “But you are. You’re an ass, but you’re also restless.”

  Randy tried to shutter his expression, but he couldn’t quite manage it. “Do you, Mr. Ellison, by any chance play poker?”

  “Never. Why?”

  Randy took his arm. “Come on. You don’t want shops. You don’t want the Strip, either. You want a casino.”

  “I don’t want to go to Herod’s.”

  “God no. Herod’s isn’t really a casino. It used to be, but now it’s sort of casino theater. Billy’s a dick. Worse, he’s a dick with a trust fund. Herod’s is a playground for his whim of the moment. He’s vacant and stupid, and all he wants to do is manipulate people.”

  Ethan snorted. “Unlike you.”

  Randy appeared genuinely offended. “I play with people. With them. Big fucking difference, Slick.”

  God, now he wasn’t annoyed, he was tired. “Do you have a nickname I can toss at you?”

  “Sure. Go ahead and give me one.”

  “I’d be fine with recycling one already in circulation.”

  “My CB handle is Skeet.”

  “Skeet?” Ethan wrinkled his nose. “The stuff you shoot?”

  “It’s a poker term.” Randy aimed Ethan onto the street. “Only used in home games, but it’s kind of like a straight. It ranks between three of a kind and a regular straight. Nine and five and two, and a little something in between.”

  Ethan had no idea what Randy was talking about. “Whatever Skeet is, it’s not what I had in mind for a nickname.”

  “No, you wanted something embarrassing to poke at me with. Tough luck, Slick. You’ll have to invent that yourself.” He pointed down the street. “There—see the shitload of lights ahead? That’s where we’re going, the Golden Nugget.”

  At first Ethan had no idea how he was supposed to distinguish between one shitload of lights and another, but then he saw the glittering, golden galaxy of lights at the end of their path. “This place is insane. The energy you must waste.”

  “Yeah, we’re real low on yurts around here.” Randy gestured to the panorama of decadence around them, of lights and shops and people, half of them drunk, all of them laughing and talking and soaking in the dizzy madness that was the city. “Isn’t it gorgeous? I love to go up in the Stratosphere tower to look down on it all. So much sin wrapped up in so much pretty.”

  “Hedonism.”

  Randy patted his arm. “It’s cute how you contradict everything I say, and it’s nice foreplay, but be careful how you don your monk cowl. You’ll only feel foolish later when you inevitably cut loose. Because you will, Slick. And it is going to be fucking glorious.”

  Ethan opened his mouth to argue, then deflated. “All right, I’ll admit I don’t really care about the environment, and no, I’m not a monk. But I still don’t like it.”

  “Because you’re jealous of the people who can cut loose when you can’t. You can, Slick. It’s practically bursting out of you, if you’d let it.”

  “Do you head-shrink all your friends? Or is it how you lost them all?”

  “Most of my friends aren’t as beautifully bottled as you are. They also don’t bet their last dollar on black like some dogged idiot. You’ve captured my attention.”

  “You keep bringing that up.” Ethan glared down at him. “Why is it so stupid to bet on black?”

  “Roulette sucks. There’s no way to beat it. You never, no matter what you do, have the best of it. In fact, the bit we did with your ring was the first time I’ve ever had an advantage on the wheel in my life, and I only played it at all because I didn’t give a shit about the outcome. I won no matter what.”

  “But if it had landed odd, you wouldn’t have gotten the ring.”

  “I wouldn’t have gotten it if it had landed on green, either. But I didn’t want the ring, Slick. I wanted you.”

  Those three words unraveled Ethan’s edges a little. Which, come to think of it, had probably been the real reason Randy had said them.

  “For the bet, yes. But it doesn’t explain why I was stupid to bet on black.”

  “You were stupid to play roulette. It’s the same screwy thinking that brought you to the table which had you insisting it would eventually come around to you.”

  “The law of averages—” Ethan began, but he stopped when Randy laughed and shook his head.

  “Don’t, Slick. Don’t quote that shit to me. You’re smarter than the idiots who come to Vegas because of the fucking law of averages. The law of averages is a fancy phrase that sounds like math but actually translates to wishful thinking. I will admit there is such a thing as karma, but do not talk to me about the fucking law of averages. It is not the case that if you let a scenario play out over a period of time it will work itself out. If you spin a wheel full of red and black, it is not obliged by a sense of nicety to be balanced or to rotate politely between one pole and the other.”

  “But—”

  Randy rode right over Ethan’s objection. “A roulette wheel is random. It is designed—and regularly, rigorously tested—to be random. It can be red all fucking night. It can be red once in an hour full of black. It can hit the same number six times in a row. It can do anything, because it’s random. It’s a goddamned wheel. It doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t care that some guy was a complete asshole to you, or that you won big at craps. It’s a wheel, and a ball lands in it. You can’t guess where. You can’t guess the color or the type of number. Well—you can guess. But you can’t know. You can’t even get into probability. You can’t, Slick.”

  They’d stopped walking, and people were starting to stare at them. Ethan glanced around awkwardly. “Why are you yelling at me?”

  “Because you’re better than that.” Randy stepped in close, those intense eyes boring into Ethan’s gaze. “I watched you, and it drove me nuts. You thought, ‘It’s due for black.’ It’s not due. It’s never due anything. What you were thinking, Ethan, is it owed you. You humanized the wheel. You made it the guy who should have treated you better. You decided this was the moment the world would do you right, and you rationalized it was fair to ask for special treatment, because all you wanted was five bucks. You wanted one win. You wanted to feel heard. You wanted someone to notice, so you asked black to give you a little loving. And it hurt like hell when even black let you down. For five bucks.”

  It was getting difficult for Ethan to breathe. “Stop talking.”

  Randy stepped so close Ethan couldn’t just smell him, he could taste him. “I ride you, Slick, because you’re smarter than that. Don’t fucking go to roulette, where you can’t get the best of it.”

  Ethan felt raw and turned inside out. “Where am I supposed to go then? You?”

  Randy’s grin could have corrupted a saint. “No. You go to poker, baby.”

  It wasn’t right, the way the world melted when Randy looked at him. “I don’t know how to play poker.”

  “By the end of the night, Mr. Ellison, you won’t be able to say that anymore.” Randy tucked Ethan’s hand in his and nodded across the street where the Golden Nugget stood waiting. “Get your notebook, because school is in session.”

  “SO WHAT,” RANDY asked, as he led Ethan onto the Golden Nugget’s casino floor, “do you know about poker already?”

  Ethan couldn’t reply, too busy taking in the sight before him. Randy was right—this was breathtaking. The casino was built on greed and gambling and sin, but it was the most elegant sin he’d ever seen, making him feel like a king in his palace. Lights flashed, and people shouted and laughed over the rattle and hum of slot machines all but drowning out the soft music playing overhead. Everything was posh and opulent, and every employee was slim and smiling at him, as if they were happy only bec
ause Ethan had finally arrived.

  Randy took Ethan’s chin in his hand and turned his face toward his own. “Poker. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s a game.” Ethan hesitated, feeling silly. “You bet on it.”

  “On what?”

  “On…the cards. On your…” Ethan tried to think of the word, “…hands? What you’re dealt. I swear, that’s all I know. Something about a full house and a straight and a flush and pairs. I think aces are good.”

  “Never anything wrong with an ace.” Randy tilted a glance at Ethan. “That’s the poker you know?”

  “That’s what I know.” Ethan readied himself for ridicule.

  Randy led Ethan into the rows of slots, stopping at a brightly smiling blonde girl for change before taking them to a far wall where he sat Ethan beneath a row of slots under a sign reading VIDEO POKER. Instead of putting in money, Randy sat down beside Ethan.

  “Poker is capturing the pot. You make a bet, and you try to win your money back plus the money of everyone else playing. You don’t even need cards to play it. In the River with Scully—”

  Ethan held up a hand. “What river?”

  “The Ace on the River. The bar, where we made the kiss bet. You remember how Scully kept raising his bet? He was playing poker, but he was frustrated because he didn’t have anybody else playing with him. Imagine the same game, and there was somebody else there betting just as hard in your favor, not mine. Each of them thinks they have the best of it, thinks they know the outcome. So they keep betting.”

  Ethan nodded slowly. “Okay, I think I get it. But how is this poker?”

  “Imagine Scully and his imaginary opponent, and pretend you and I are two cards. Each time the players bet, they’re tossing money between us, money they can’t get back unless they’re the one who is right or the one still standing when the game is over. They keep raising, higher and higher, and eventually they call, which means they stop and they see who’s right and who’s wrong—do you kiss me, or not—or one of them folds, which means it doesn’t matter whether or not you were ever going to kiss me, whoever gave up lost.”