TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER
Dena and Oscar were ecstatic about Kacey coming back in town and insisted on doing something special to welcome her to Vegas. I smelled an ulterior motive, but I was touched they wanted to bring her into our regular Monday hangouts.
“Kacey’s coming out with us tonight,” I told Theo on the phone. “A welcome dinner. You should bring Sally.”
“Holly,” Theo corrected.
Holly Daniels was his on-again, off-again girlfriend.
Or the closest thing he’d had to a girlfriend in his life.
A petite woman with a loud laugh and short, dark hair, she’d been one of Theo’s customers at Vegas Ink .
I teased him that Holly had only wanted one tiny tattoo but had kept coming back until she’d won Theo over.
Every time I saw her two full sleeves of tattoos along her arms, I had to bury a laugh.
“So, it’s a couples thing?” Theo said.
“No. Well…” My hand wandered up to my collar and the top of my scar, where I could still feel Kacey’s kiss. One little brush of her lips branded on my skin and in my mind. I kept coming back to it.
“Hello?”
I snapped to. “No, it’s not a couples thing. It’s a friend thing. Bring Holly, bring someone else or bring no one. It’s up to you.”
“Where we going?”
“Kacey wants to go to dinner and a casino. I thought the MGM Grand would be good to—”
“You can’t go to a casino and be around all that smoke. Doesn’t she know that?”
“She does,” I said, “but it was my idea. She’s never been to a casino, and the MGM has excellent ventilation. I researched it.”
He grumbled something incoherent.
“Come on, bro. Oscar and Dena are down. It’ll be fun. Something different.”
“Different,” Theo said. “Christ, you have it bad.”
“I’m being optimistic,” I said with a grin. “Come on, Teddy.”
A pause. “Where we eating?”
“Your favorite, the New Orleans Fish House,” I said. “All the spicy-as-hell crawdads you can eat. Eight o’clock.”
That won him over. Or maybe he wanted to watch over me like a damn mother hen all night, but he agreed to go.
I told Kacey I’d pick her up at 7:45. She opened her door wearing an oversize, off-the-shoulder blouse in some kind of shimmery material.
It slipped over her skin like molten silver, leaving one shoulder bare, and hung to her thighs where a short black skirt peeked out.
But it was the black stockings she wore just above her knee that drained the blood from my brain.
She’d piled her hair onto her head and secured with some kind of clip or band with a large silk black rose over her right ear.
Her striking features were done up in dark, cat’s-eyes makeup and bright red lips.
A cloud of her perfume—her favorite and the one she kept in the bottle I had made for her—wafted through me.
I was so busy staring at her that I hadn’t noticed she was staring at me.
“Wow, Fletcher,” she said. “You…you clean up nice.”
I’d put on a dark gray suit with a bright blue tie that may or may not have been the same color as Kacey’s eyes.
“You look…” I trailed off, staring, because no words ex isted.
She smiled and moved in to straighten my tie. “Thank you.”
When we arrived at Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House, the hostess led us through the amber-colored elegance of the restaurant to the table where Dena, Oscar, Theo and Holly were seated.
Kacey, of course, hugged Dena and Oscar off the bat, and they hugged her back, telling her how much they’d heard about her, and that time there was no mistaking her blush.
She glowed with happiness under the light of Dena and Oscar’s warm welcome and I never thought I’d loved my friends more.
“Don’t you look handsome,” she said to Theo, smoothing the collar of his dress shirt. “Hi, I’m Kacey,” she said to Holly, whose full sleeves of tattoos were on display in a sleeveless blouse. I buried a smile while Kacey held Holly’s hands to admire the ink.
“Wow, amazing.” She turned to Theo. “Yours?”
He nodded, shrugged.
By the time we finished our appetizers, any qualms I’d had about Kacey fitting in were gone. She and Holly talked tattoos, and even got Theo to roll up a sleeve to compare ink, before Kacey fell into a conversation with Dena about poetry and songwriting.
Oscar leaned in from my left. “Are you going to eat or stare at Kacey all night?”
No point in denying it. I didn’t even try. “I’m going to stare at her all night.”
Oscar grinned and chucked me on the arm. “You do that.”
At dessert, Oscar steered the conversation toward camping in a hairpin turn of a topic change, and asked Kacey if she’d ever been.
“Never,” she said. “I’m not much of a nature person, except for the beach. Where are you camping?”
“Great Basin National Park.”
“It’s quite stunning,” Dena said. “It’s a little bit of everything—desert, forest, lake. You’d love it.”
“You should come with,” Oscar said.
“You should,” Dena said. She turned to Holly. “You too. Then there’d be six of us.”
“I’m in,” Holly said, while from behind her shoulder Theo stared daggers at Dena.
“It sounds great,” Kacey said, then turned to me. “What do you think? Would you… like the company?”
Maybe I was supposed to be guarded or wary, but I was just happy. Tonight, I’m trying it Dena’s way. Be happy. Be normal. A part of the circle, not alone in the center.
“I would love the company.”
Kacey’s cheeks reddened prettily, and she turned back to Oscar. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Don’t thank me until you’ve crapped in the woods and heard mountain lions outside your tent. This is your initiation, kid.”
“Bring it,” Kacey laughed.
And her smile was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.