Chapter 10 #2
I know he’s down here before I see him, because the noise dips the way it only dips for one man in this building.
He comes through the tables in charcoal, no tie, and I watch my friends spot him one at a time.
Joss straightens. Stevie grabs Joss. Promise doesn’t move at all, she just shifts her weight, putting half an inch more of herself between him and the girls.
Crystal waves. Big, whole-arm, unembarrassed.
The owner of the most dangerous floor in Nevada gets waved at like a ship coming in, and something at the corner of his mouth comes very close to surrender.
“Ladies,” he says, arriving. “I trust the house is behaving.”
“The house keeps giving us things,” Promise says, level, looking at him the way she looks at men who tip too big too early.
“The house can afford it. Your friend overpaid for years.” He says it mild, like he’s reporting the time. “I’m settling arrears.”
He stays four minutes. I time it by feel.
He has something for each of them, the right something.
Lacey’s possessed slot machine will be looked at.
Stevie’s ice bucket is pronounced a sound investment.
Joss asks, on behalf of journalism, whether he has any single friends, which he fields with a face that never moves while his eyes go bright in a way I’d call laughing on a normal man.
Crystal he listens to. The whole report, Mike, Danny, the divorce, the hip, the trade show, and he takes it in gravely, like field intelligence.
“You should know she cried in the elevator,” Crystal adds, jerking a thumb at me.
“I did not cry.”
“Her eyes got shiny. I have witnesses.”
He looks at me over her head then, one look, nothing the room could read, and the floor of the fanciest casino in Nevada tilts maybe four degrees under my shoes.
“Don’t keep them out too late,” he tells me, which in front of my friends sounds like a boyfriend, and in the four inches between us sounds like something with teeth in it. Then he’s gone, back through his tables, the noise closing up behind him like water.
Crystal grabs my arm with both hands. “He knows my name.”
“He knows everybody’s name. It’s a professional requirement.”
“He said it like a fact he was glad about,” she says, and hugs my arm hard enough to leave marks. I let her, because she isn’t wrong. I don’t know what to do about it either.
The night’s last act isn’t gambling at all.
There’s a lounge off the floor with a band winding down, a real band, brushes on the drums, almost nobody left to hear them, and Lacey decides the empty space in front of the stage is legally a dance floor.
She’s wrong, but the band rallies for us, and then it happens, the thing I’ll keep.
My girls dance. Not work dancing. Nobody’s tipping, nobody’s watching that matters, there’s no pole, no stage light, no rent riding on it.
Just five dancers who became dancers because once, before the bills, they loved it, doing it for free, badly on purpose, Crystal spinning Stevie until they both nearly go down, Promise doing a slow elegant thing from another decade with her wine still in her hand, Joss heckling the band into one more song.
I dance too. Carefully, because of the knee, which holds.
Seven years I’ve danced for strangers’ money in a room that smells like beer, watching nothing but the clock.
Nobody has paid me one cent to be doing what I’m doing right now, and I could cry at how different it is, the same body, the same steps, a whole other thing entirely.
I spin Crystal instead of crying about it.
Her laugh goes up into the gold ceiling like it was painted for exactly that.
We end the night upstairs, all of us in white robes over our good dresses, eating room-service pancakes at two in the morning because rich people’s food is wasted on rich people.
Lacey goes down first, mid-sentence, a flute of orange juice still upright in her hand like a torch.
Joss and Stevie collapse in a heap on the enormous bed.
Promise takes the second bedroom with the dignity of a woman who has earned a door that closes.
That leaves Crystal, who fights sleep the way she fights every ending of every good thing, and finally folds sideways into the couch with her head on my leg.
“This was the best night,” she mumbles. “Top five. Maybe three.”
“What beats it?”
She’s quiet long enough that I think she’s gone. Then, “Ask me again when you marry him,” she says, and is asleep before I can tell her to shut up.
While they sleep I do my quiet work. I’ve been trading my comps into chips all night, then the chips into cash, a little here, a little there, nothing anybody would blink at. Now I ease out from under Crystal’s head and go around the room like a reverse pickpocket, feeding folded bills into purses.
Rent for Joss. The light bill for Stevie.
Lacey’s forty dollars back, plus the forty more she’d never ask for.
Promise gets hers tucked in her coat pocket, where she won’t find it until laundry day, because she’d march it straight back to me otherwise, which makes this a coward’s move, and I stand by it.
Then I stand at the glass with the Strip burning gold below and my whole loud broke family asleep behind me, in a room none of us could have afforded to look at a year ago.
The story we’re selling this city is that I belong to him. That’s the costume. Tonight, for the first time, I can’t find the seam in it, the place where the costume stops, where I start. I press my forehead to the cold window and look for it until my eyes give out.
The last thing I hear, falling asleep on the world’s most expensive couch, is Crystal talking in her sleep. Making friends with somebody in a dream.