Chapter Thirteen
LUCY
Present
The glow of Las Vegas was a very different experience from the rooftop deck of the Lusso Resort.
Even Lucy’s suite on the penthouse floor didn’t have quite the same perspective.
Up where she and Nicky were, out in the desert air some five hundred feet up, Lucy could see the neatly marked squares of the streets branching off the Strip, exponentially dimmer than the casinos.
Beyond that, the impenetrable dark of the desert lay on the horizon.
Pitch-black and empty. It was a reminder that this freaky town was a kind of island, set apart from the rest of the world and its rules.
Set apart from reality. It was a place founded on trickery and illusion.
Nothing about it was real. Knowing this only compounded the dreamlike quality of the whole evening, drinking champagne while nestled in an oasis of potted palm trees and squishy sofas with Nicky Broome.
They had eaten dinner as the sun set over Las Vegas.
It was a show to rival any in the casinos.
The scant clouds all around them had turned shades of purple, orange, and yellow against the azure backdrop of the sky.
They’d talked about the weather, and some movies they’d both seen.
They’d brushed over politics, but decided it was too depressing.
Then tried the music business before Nicky had declared it more depressing than politics.
Now, they were lit only by the ambient glow of the millions of bulbs below them in the city and enjoying each other in silence.
There was no awkwardness at all, though.
Just peace as the traffic and frenzy of the Las Vegas Strip became a barely audible hum under the music from a portable speaker Nicky had brought along.
‘Chloe’s dad, what’s his name?’ Nicky asked, reclining against one side of the enormous sofa they shared. He looked every bit like the figment of a dream, in his jeans and white T-shirt, his feet propped up on the rattan coffee table.
‘Brandon,’ Lucy replied flatly, wiggling herself deeper into her corner of the long sofa.
‘Tell me about him.’
Lucy groaned. Childishly joked, ‘Do I have to?’
‘No,’ Nicky answered. ‘But I’d like to know.’
Right. Okay. Big-girl pants. ‘We met our senior year of college. Dated for a long time. Got married late 2001. We were in New York. And after 9/11 things felt so—’ Lucy didn’t know exactly how to say it. ‘I mean, it’s all hindsight now, you know?’
Nicky nodded.
‘I see now that things were unsettled . The world was unsettled. Everything felt so precarious. So unstable. In New York, especially. I think we were clinging on to each other for safety almost?’
‘I get it,’ Nicky said.
He couldn’t. Not really. So, she added, ‘Brandon was supposed to start a job at Cantor Fitzgerald in October of 2001. Do you remember—?’
‘Shit. Yeah, I remember.’
‘His entire department. The one he was supposed to start with was just … gone . Hundreds of people. People we knew. Guys he went to Columbia with. It was … hard.’ Hard really wasn’t the word.
It was an understatement of massive proportions, but Lucy still didn’t really have the proper words to describe it, even all these years later.
Nicky sat quietly, listening. Waiting.
Lucy went on, ‘It was the trauma really, I think. That pushed us forward. I had misgivings about him before we were engaged.’ Lucy stopped, corrected herself.
‘No, not misgivings about him. About us . About how we worked, but we just kept moving forward, but at an accelerated pace because of everything that happened.’
‘It’s understandable.’
‘Twenty-plus years later and all grown up, yeah. It is.’ Lucy took a sip of her champagne. ‘I was the one who saw it first, though. The one who realized. So, he was the one who got to be angry. It was … bitter .’
Nicky nodded his understanding.
The sweet sounds of Dave Grohl’s rhythmic guitar spilled from the speaker, just as Lucy became desperate for a change in conversation.
‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I love this song.’
Nicky’s eyes brightened. He swung his legs off the table and ticked the volume up on ‘Everlong.’
‘Some people say it’s the greatest rock love song of all time,’ Nicky said, feigning nonchalance like a champ.
Shit. Shitshitshitshit. Alarm bells went off in Lucy’s head. Retreat! Abort! She’d just opened the door on a whole line of conversation she’d been trying to avoid. Namely another, very specific, rock love song that people sometimes called the greatest of all time.
‘I agree,’ said Lucy. It was honest. But it was also a deflection. The best she could hope for in the moment.
‘ Really? ’ Nicky drawled devilishly.
‘Yep,’ Lucy said, practically licking the last drops from her champagne flute.
‘What are some others?’
Fuck. She knew what he was getting at. She could sense it in the expectation in his tone, in the sudden avid lean of his body toward her.
‘Mmmm, okay. Are we talking rock only, no ballads?’ she stalled.
‘No ballads.’
‘“Maps,”’ Lucy said.
‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs?’
Lucy nodded.
‘I can get behind that, and …’
Lucy went on, ‘“Lovesong,” “Friday, I’m In Love.”’
‘I think we can safely just add the entire catalog of pop-era Cure,’ Nicky said, pointedly.
Aaaand she’d just accidentally waded into deeper water. Memories of their night a million years ago came swelling to the surface. They were memories he clearly also had judging by the pointed flash of triumph in his eyes.
‘More?’ he asked.
‘Okay, but I’m going to need my phone for this,’ Lucy tried.
‘Be my guest.’
Lucy picked up her phone, willing her hands not to shake. She flicked open Spotify and scrolled through her playlists.
‘“Such Great Heights,”’ Lucy said, her eyes still on the phone.
‘Yeah, okay,’ Nicky replied.
‘“Supernova,”’ Lucy added.
‘Hold up,’ Nicky exclaimed. ‘You mean Liz Phair’s “Supernova”?’
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, now more defensive than anxious.
‘“Supernova” is a sex song not a love song, Lucy,’ he said firmly.
‘It is not. There’s sex. But clearly, she loves him.’
‘Uh, she says his dick’s like a volcano.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Excuse me, I think he fucks like a volcano,’ she teased.
‘Oh, yeah, that makes it less of a sex song.’ Nicky chuckled.
Lucy defended, ‘But he’s also everything to her. See, says so right here,’ she said, pointing to her phone.
‘Scroll down a bit more,’ Nicky instructed. He smiled. ‘There’s also a lot of friction. And blasting.’
‘Okay, agree to disagree on that one.’ Lucy laughed. She looked back at her phone. ‘Oh, well here’s a couple, but—’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t think you’ll accept them,’ she said, holding the phone away playfully as he scooted closer and tried to have a look.
‘Why not?’
‘Sammy Hagar,’ she said slowly.
Nicky looked to the sky, pretending to be exasperated. He looked back down at her. ‘Okay, let me guess.’
He was close now. So much closer than he’d been just a minute before. She could smell the faintest hint of his cologne or bodywash. It smelled expensive and fucking delicious.
He locked those wild green eyes of his on hers. There was a twinkle there, roguish and hungry at once. It made Lucy’s heart beat faster. The man was flat-out mouthwatering.
‘“Why Can’t This Be Love?”’ he asked. For a second, as Lucy’s heart climbed into her throat, it struck her as a question. For her. A few terrifying seconds passed before she realized that it was the title of a Van Halen song.
‘Uh-huh, that’s one of ’em,’ she breathed, breaking contact with his voodoo rock-star eyes. ‘One more.’
‘“Love Comes Walking In,”’ he said.
‘The title is actually “Love Walks In,”’ she said. ‘But yes.’ It came out breathless, an answer to the questions she felt pulsing off him. Questions she was unable to resist answering in the affirmative.
Nicky edged ever closer to her, a microscopic increment in the practical, but the sensation was something altogether different.
‘Any more?’ he asked, the words skimming across her skin in a tempting gust. ‘Maybe by someone else?’
Lucy felt her skin come alive, like a wave of sparks had shot down her arm and into her chest. Or maybe it was just a heart attack. Either way, she knew her life was about to take a turn.
‘Nope,’ she said defiantly.
‘ Lucy .’
‘What?’ she scoffed.
‘ Really? ’
‘Really.’
She resisted connecting with his damn eyes again, but in the end it was futile. Lucy had to accept the sad truth that if Nicky Broome wanted to look at her, she would be there, looking right back.
‘Hey, Lucy?’ Nicky whispered.
‘Yeah?’ she whispered back.
‘I want to kiss you.’
She breathed, ‘I thought you wanted to take things slow.’
‘I realized something last night,’ he said into the fine hairs at her temple. He inhaled as though with an objective, taking a long, deep draft of her.
She stuttered, ‘What?’
‘Twenty-eight years between kisses is really fucking slow. Mission accomplished.’
Nicky leaned forward, so close that the heat of his breath skated across Lucy’s lips and lit up every forgotten nerve between her head and her heart.
‘No,’ Lucy blurted.
She didn’t know where the instinct came from, but as soon as she uttered a refusal, Lucy felt the tension in her chest begin to unwind.
‘No?’ he repeated.
‘You were right,’ Lucy added.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ he droned.
‘You were.’
‘No, I was wrong .’
Nicky suddenly had a look of desperation about him. His brow crinkled. He shook his head. His cheeks went pink. And something about it made Lucy absolutely effervescent with delight. It tingled in her limbs, lively and potent, like a shot of tequila.
‘Slow is good,’ Lucy said. Fast is rash. Dumb. Dangerous. Always has been.
‘No, it’s not,’ he mewed.
‘But it is,’ she said firmly.
Nicky Broome’s slack-jawed despair – his dopey look of confusion and disappointment – hit Lucy like the drop in a stadium anthem. She was lighter than air. She wanted to stand up and cheer. Scream into the star-studded desert sky and float up there after it.
The grin that spread across her face couldn’t be helped because the feeling of Nicky Broome wanting her – even just a tiny fraction as much as she’d wanted him over the years – was like pure, distilled female power. She let it cascade over her. Sat in the euphoric buzz of it.
Lucy carefully placed her glass on the table. She leaned into Nicky’s heat and bussed him on the cheek with world’s most chaste peck.
Allowing herself one last glorious glance at Nicky Broome, she drank in his shock and frustration like gulps from a red Solo cup dipped in the fountain of youth.
As Lucy stood up and stepped away from Nicky Broome, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d begun the night as Lucy McManis, ho-hum college professor, and had somehow transformed into Lucy Rollins – nearly forgotten Badass Bitch.
‘Goodnight, Nicky,’ the Badass Bitch cooed.
Then, with zero fanfare and a whole lot of attitude, Lucy Rollins walked away.