Asher
The best part of medical conferences is the location.
Jocelyn and I always search for conferences that benefit us both, and only in fun locations. This year’s symposium covers
OB anesthesia . . . in Vegas.
Joss nudges me as I nod off during the Friday afternoon lecture, and I jerk awake. A couple conference-goers beside me chuckle.
I wipe my face. Damn it. Is that drool?
“This is so boring,” I whisper at her. “Can we skip out?”
Jocelyn jots down the lecturer’s last pearl of wisdom in her provided workbook. “This could save someone’s life someday.”
I pull out my phone. “But it may kill me out of sheer boredom.”
“Just look at porn or something. Forty-five more minutes.”
“Right.” I scroll through my Instagram. Must fight the droopy eyes. “Exactly what I need. A stiffy in the middle of this crowd.”
Jocelyn laughs as she scribbles another note in her workbook. The lecture room is set up in one of the hotel’s event halls,
meaning it has excessively busy carpeting and dim, romantic lighting—not conducive to staying alert.
I’ll just . . . close my eyes . . . for a second . . .
“Asher.”
I startle awake.
Joss leans close to my ear. “If you can stay awake until the end of this lecture, I’ll pay for your drinks tonight.”
I yawn. “Joke’s on you. Drinks are free if you’re gambling.”
“Then I’ll pay for a lap dance.”
Skrrrt. What? Did she just say lap dance? It snags in my brain, a jagged fingernail catching on satin.
She cocks a smug eyebrow at me. “Just kidding. Awake now?”
My flat stare only makes her laugh.
“Get a man’s hopes up only to shoot him down,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “You are not a lap dance sort of man.”
“I’m not?” Is there any other kind of man?
“You’d have her whole life story and make sure she was up-to-date on her Pap smear before the song was over.”
“HPV is no joke, Joss.”
With a snort, she returns her attention to the lecture. I continue to stare at her, narrow-eyed. She’s wrong. I am a lap dance sort of man. The couple I’ve had were . . . solidly okay.
A little awkward. Expensive. Unsatisfying.
Hold up. Does Jocelyn know me better than I do? I find this annoying. Unsurprising, but annoying.
An hour later, we’re exiting boredom hell, and I’m all smiles. I clap my hands together at the edge of the casino floor. “Change, eat, gamble? Eat, change, gamble?”
Joss looks down at her conference clothes and scrunches her face. “Let me change. I look like a librarian.”
She kind of does. The kind who gives lap dances. Not the awkward ones, either. Definitely expensive, though.
Will never say this.
Can’t even believe I thought it.
Upstairs, it takes five minutes to change into jeans and a short-sleeved button-up with tiny ducks on it. Thirty minutes later,
I’m hangry and texting her relentlessly from where I’m stationed against the wall outside her hotel room.
Are you ready?
I’m near death from starvation.
You are not this high maintenance. What’s taking so long?
Are you dead?
Would you chill?
I’m coming
Her door swings open, and—
Oh. The reason for the delay.
She’s transformed from Tempting Librarian Caterpillar to Glitzy Vegas Butterfly. Her platinum hair is a riot of soft curls.
Crystals sparkle at her ears and neck. A long-sleeved, silver-sequined minidress cinches at her waist, the tie hanging down
her thigh.
“Damn, girl,” I say. “You polish up nice.”
She frowns. “Must you make a habit of leaning on walls like that?”
I dart a pointed glance down the empty hallway. “Where else am I supposed to lean? You took for-fucking-ever.”
“Never mind.” She lifts one foot. “I’m going to regret these heels.”
A long expanse of visible leg is wrapped to her knee in silver crisscrosses. The effect is . . . distracting.
“So change,” I say.
Deep offense creases her brow. “I can’t! I look hot.”
“I know.” I look her up and down one more time. “People will wonder what you’re doing with me.”
“Obviously, they’ll assume you hired me.” She starts down the hall and throws a little wink back at me.
Felt a little flirty. Must be mistaken. Hunger has stolen my common sense.
The evening progresses, and with a belly full of some expensive buffet at the Wynn she just had to try, sound judgment returns.
Though that quickly disintegrates when we start drinking.
Intoxicated Joss is unstoppable. She flitters from one slot machine to another, pouring in money and yelling when it gives
none back. She stops at a tiny shop along the strip to buy neon-blue boozy slushies that give us both brain freeze. She tries
to call the number on the naked lady fliers doled out by every street corner sleazebag.
Can’t stop laughing.
Time speeds and lulls. Lights smear. Everything blurs together.
Everything but her.
The luster of her dress. The silvery-white of her hair. The mysterious smile on her lips. She’s like a comet among the flashing lights and glittering casinos, leaving a sparkling silver trail everywhere she goes.
I follow blindly. The world around us is filled with people. Dopamine-inducing bells. Distracting electric displays. But she’s
the most distracting of them all.
Have I ever seen her this happy? Happy Joss is magnificent.
“You’re different here,” I say in a quieter area of the Cosmopolitan.
She throws her arms in the air, smiling wide. “I’m free.”
“Free of what?”
Her smile dims to something secretive. Mysterious. “Free of everything.” She clamps both hands on my shoulders, face going
drunk-serious. “Because you . . . you’re the . . . you know . . . like in that movie where the pirates are in prison, and the dog has the key. You’re
the dog with the key.”
Hmm. Should I take offense? “I’m . . . a dog?”
“With a key!” Sounds very important, the way she says it. Must be a crucial detail.
A piece of her hair has stuck to her glossy lips, so I flick it away. “Who locked you up in the first place?”
“The angel of death,” she says in a deep, dramatic voice, cracking herself up. She sashays away in a crooked line. I can do
nothing but follow. Looks like no more alcohol for me. One of us has to be sober enough to find our hotel at the end of all
this.
She runs out of steam earlier than I’d guessed, and we wind up at Eataly, sitting at a bistro table amidst meandering guests
and other diners. She demands more wine. I demand she eat something before the alcohol shrivels her up from the inside.
We settle on a fancy cheese board and bread. She’s quite clumsy with the scooping and the bringing food to her mouth without dropping it, so I prepare individual bites for her. Must stop short of physically feeding her, though. Will if I have to. Hope it doesn’t get that far.
“This will not be pleasant to throw up later,” she slurs, dutifully chewing the bread.
“Don’t think about that.” I shove another piece of bread into her fingers.
While she eats, I distract myself with my phone, nearly spitting out a mouthful of Gorgonzola and honey when an Insta ad pops
up. “Oh, my god. This is perfect.”
She leans closer, tumbling slightly so most of her body weight lands on my arm. “What?”
I right her and hand over the phone. “I am so buying you this.”
Her head tilts at the picture—a creepy mannequin head sporting a teal scrub cap printed with little pink flowers and the phrase
Don’t Be Extra over and over. She lets out an inelegant, intoxicated snort. “You are so extra.”
Except it sounds like You er show straw and that’s how I know it’s time to leave.
“All right, baby girl. Time for bed.”
“What? No! The night is young.” She throws out her arms, nearly smacking a dude walking by in the process.
I haul her into a standing position. “The night is young, but you are wasted. Sleep it off, and we’ll try again tomorrow.”
I really should have thought through this drunken trek we made across the strip. Now I’m stuck with a half-conscious female
a million hotels away from where I need to be. People will think I’m a date rapist with atrocious planning skills.
“Joss, I need you to walk.”
She tries, bless her. She fails miserably. I catch her as she stumbles into a display of Italian bread. A couple nearby shoots her death glares.
Must not strangle strangers. Not good form.
But Joss straightens her shoulders and tries again.
Determined, inebriated woman.
“It’s these damn shoes,” she says when she stumbles again.
“It’s not the shoes. It’s your ethanol-soaked cerebellum.”
She looks up at me with the most pitiful eyes. “Help.”
In the end, I order a rideshare. It’s that or bridal-carry her two miles over crowd-thickened sidewalks. Bad enough I have
to schlep her drunk ass to her room from the car.
She leans against the wall beside her hotel door. “I think I drank too much.”
I search her purse for her hotel key. “You think? What was your first clue?”
Lip gloss. Cash. Driver’s license. Receipts. Wait, is that . . . a condom? Just to be sure, I pull it out, still too tipsy
to understand the massive mistake that is.
She catches me eyeing it and snatches it from my hand. “That’s—not yours.”
I laugh. “Definitely not mine.”
“Not meant for you, either.”
“Wasn’t thinking that.” Aha. Hotel key.
She grabs her purse as soon as I’ve got the door open. Cold, hotel-scented air wafts toward us.
“I wasn’t going to use it,” she says.
“Okay.” I motion her to go inside.
She trips into the room. “Just like to be prepared.”
“I don’t need an explanation.”
It didn’t even occur to me to bring condoms. Figured I’d be with her the whole time. But now I’m thinking I’m naive and shortsighted.
If she was planning to hook up with someone, then so could I.
But . . . I sort of hate one-night stands. Lots of work. Reward is nice when it works out, though, even if short-lived. Who doesn’t love an orgasm they didn’t give themself?
Joss lets out a dramatic hiccup, derailing that thought. “I’m not a slut. Like, I know that women can do what they want, and
fight the power, and blah, blah, but it’s still so stigma-shtig-stigmizing, you know? To be that girl who—” her arms do this
weird circular motion, like she’s weaving a spell “—sleeps around.”
She falls onto the center of the unmade king bed, fully clothed. Her librarian outfit from earlier is tossed across the end
of it while her open suitcase has thrown up in one corner of the room.
I set her purse beside the TV. “I don’t think you’re a slut.”
“And I don’t care what the rest of them think,” she slurs as if I didn’t speak. “Or . . . maybe I do a little bit.” She squeezes
her thumb and forefinger together and squints through the tiny gap. “Teensy, wittle, tiny bit.”
With a laugh, I untie the bow of one silver snake shoe. “That much, huh?”
“But you!” She flings her arms as wide as they’ll go. “I care about what you think a whole, whole lot.”
“You do?” I strip off her shoe and attack the other one. “Why?”
Her eyes fall closed. “ ’Cause you know me. And you, like, are deep in here—” she presses a hand over her heart “—where really
important people live. So if you thought bad things about me, I’d be sad.”
My next few heartbeats grow a little painful. Her unguarded expression, makeup-smeared face . . . They undo me. She never
talks about this stuff. Never.
Shouldn’t take advantage of her disinhibition, honestly, but I’m dying to know why. Why did she allow me in this coveted place when she never lets people close?
Why is she scared to love?
Why does she sleep around, then vilify herself for it? Because a person who’s 100 percent okay with their decisions doesn’t
worry if other people are judging those decisions unless they’re judging those decisions, too.
What happened to make her wall herself off from everyone?
Shoeless, she curls up on her side, and I pull the covers over her.
“I don’t think bad things about you,” I say. “Ever.”
Eyes closed, she smiles. “Good. You’re the best friend I ever had.”
“I’m going to my room to get you nausea meds, okay?”
Her smile grows. “See? This is why you’re irreplaceable.”
I pause at the end of her bed. Irreplaceable?
“Didn’t realize until it was too late,” she continues, half asleep. “Snuck inside. Got important. It’s not fair. People are
impossible to replace when lost.”
“You won’t lose me,” I say so quietly I’m not sure she even heard it.
She releases a loud exhale. “Yes, I will. I lose everyone.”