by Jessie Cooke
“Oh damn it! Everything is so screwed up. I’m sorry about the things I said, Lizzie. I wasn’t thinking…” His voice had a nasal twang to it. He sounded like a country singer. Too bad it was probably because his nose is broken.
“Lizzie and I are going to step outside while you three clean this up and adjust your attitudes,” Cassie said.
“Three? My attitude is fine,” Jacob said, indignantly.
“I’m judging you by the company you keep,” she said. Jacob’s mouth twitched but I think he knew he shouldn’t risk a smile right then. Cassie was shooting disapproving looks at me and Lance both. I was beginning to see how she kept Jacob in line.
I was pushing myself up off the floor when Jacob looked at Lance and said, “Go clean up.” Lance just went. He didn’t even give me another glance. When he was gone Jacob turned to me and said, “What were you two idiots fighting about?”
“He gets to clean up, but I don’t? I knew he was your favorite, Dad.”
He laughed. “Shut the fuck up. What is going on?”
“It’s not really my story to tell. You heard him tell Lizzie he was sorry for what he said. Let’s just say I reacted before he saw fit to apologize.”
Jacob raised an eyebrow. I know he was wondering like Lance was what was going on with Lizzie and me. He wasn’t going to ask. That wasn’t Jacob’s style. Instead, when Lance came back out with the blood cleaned off his face and a clean shirt, he said, “I have a golf tournament to get to. Can I trust you morons will get him to the ER and get his nose looked at?” Lance and I looked at each other. His nose was swelling up fast and both of his eyes were purple.
“I can drive myself,” he said. He sounded like an insolent five-year-old…from the Deep South with that twang. I wanted to make fun of him…but my body hurt. I didn’t really want the big moose jumping on me again.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jacob told him. “Your eyes are about to swell shut.” He looked back at me, “You got this, Brock?”
“I got it.”
“You two behave…”
“Wait! What about Lizzie?”
“Cassie and I will take her with us or home…wherever she wants to go. You two clean up your mess.”
He left and Lance and I were left alone. After several seconds of silence I said, “Are you ready?”
“Yep.”
Lance and I didn’t speak too much until after they patched up his nose and released him from the ER…about five hours later. I text Lizzie once and called twice, but she wasn’t answering. I thought about just knocking on her door after I take Lance home, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea either.
“Sorry I broke your nose,” I told Lance when we got back in the car.
He shrugged. “Sorry I talked all that shit to Lizzie. I’ll apologize to her right when I get a chance. I guess I was just shocked and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry that I called you a womanizing, gay Mormon.”
He laughed, “Fuck if that isn’t the biggest oxymoron I’ve ever heard.”
I laughed too and then growing serious I said, “I really like her, Lance.”
He pointed at his face and said, “Yeah, I got that. Listen, Lizzie’s a great girl…I mean that. What happened between me and her would have never happened if we’d both been sober. I liked using showgirls as my beards…then I didn’t feel guilty because I knew that they were only looking for sex. I wouldn’t have ever taken advantage of Lizzie like that if I was in my right mind.”
“I know. But now she’s trying to deal with this pregnancy all alone because she’s worried about messing up everyone else’s lives. She has decisions to make and no one to help her to make them. I don’t know what the deal is with her Mom…”
“She’s a showgirl at the Flamingo.”
“Oh.”
“She’s also been rumored to be a call-girl.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah. You know who her father is, right?”
“Nope.”
“Seriously? Michael Saint.”
“Oh wow! How the hell did I not put that together…?” Every fight night when the girls are introduced I hear her whole name…Elizabeth Saint. Lizzie’s father is one of the most famous poker players the U.S. has ever seen. He won the World Series of Poker tournaments two years in a row. He travels all over the world and he wins a lot more often than he loses. He has also been very publicly arrested for at least three DUI’s this year that I know of and I would have never guessed he was married because he’s got a different scantily clad woman on his arm in any photo I’ve ever seen of him. Damn! Poor Lizzie.
“Anyways, I’m willing to step up…I really am. I got all that ugly shit out of my system. I’ll go talk to her tomorrow and we’ll figure out what to do together.” I nodded. I felt a little twinge of irrational jealousy in the pit of my stomach and for a second, I wished that it was my baby. I must be losing my mind. “I need a drink,” he said.
“Seriously? Is it even noon yet?”
“It’s twelve ten.”
“Still early...”
“Is your nose fucking broken and throbbing?”
Guilt, that’ll do it. “Where to?”
“Let’s bypass the usual haunts. I’m not in the mood for the reporters and nosy shits asking questions,” Lance said.
“How about that little dive we went to a few weeks ago on Freemont where they have the live band.”
“That’ll work. I think they have sandwiches too. I’m hungry.” He was mouth breathing like a guppy. I hope he’s able to eat without suffocating. I’m not giving him mouth to mouth.
I found the bar and parked the car out behind it. It was a lot less crowded than the ones we normally go to on the strip. Lance found this one last time we went out because everywhere he went lately he had to fend off attacks by reporters and fans obsessed with the fact that he’s gay. I’ve never been able to figure out why people put so much stock into who a person chooses to have sex with. Lance was Lance…an extraordinarily large dork who happened to be a good fighter.
When we walked into the dimly lit little dive there were about four guys belly up at the bar. The lone guitar player sat up on a little wooded rise, strumming his guitar and singing and looking stoned out of his mind. Amazingly, the music sounded better than some of the stuff you hear on the radio. The coin operated slot machines that adorn the bar hide most of the heavy wear but the age of the place is evident in just about everything else you see. The shelves behind the bar were filled with beer bottles and bottles of vodka, tequila and whiskey. It’s not the kind of place you can get away with ordering a wine spritzer or a Cosmo. The stools in front of it are high enough that I’d be willing to bet that more than one drunk over the years has tasted the oak floor beneath them. One of the tables is filled with what looks like a group of middle aged ladies on vacation and there’s a biker on the tiny dance floor with his old lady and a Rastafarian looking dude with a girl who barely looks legal…hopefully they’re checking I.D.’s. A couple of guys that looked like college kids sat in a booth way in the back and they kept looking at the door like they were either waiting for or hiding from someone.
I love Vegas. I love the diversity of the people. I grew up in Utah. There wasn’t much diversity in my neighborhood. Lance grew up there as well, but with his extended Mormon family, way out in the country. My mother was raised Mormon, but she converted to Catholicism before I was born. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood and my brother and I went to a Catholic school. My Dad’s religion was hard work and a bottle of Jack Daniels’ when he got home every night. They both killed him in the end I think. I was sixteen and my brother had just turned eighteen when he dropped dead of a heart attack. A few months after that, my brother graduated from high school and went off to war. My poor mother was left alone with an angry teenager that was two feet taller than her and out-weighed her by at least a hundred pounds. No ordinary woman could have handled it so well. My mother was no ordinary wom
an. The first time I got suspended for fighting she smacked me upside the back of the head with her open palm, loaded me in the car and took me to the local jail. I was terrified when we drove up. I thought she was “checking me in.” It turned out that she was friends with the lieutenant and he had arranged for a “tour” for me. They showed me the chow hall and the little exercise yard and the booking room and community showers and then they put me in one of the six by six cells alone and left me there while they went and had coffee. I was terrified. I wasn’t convinced that she was coming back for me. She did though and I didn’t get into another fight until I was a senior. By then, I’d gotten over the little scare of the visit to jail and my brother hadn’t been home for almost two years and I was still angry. That time, I got suspended again and I got the smack on the head and a personal trainer. Mom told me she wanted me to learn how to fight right so that when I ended up in prison I could defend myself. I ended up in the UFC instead. Thanks Mom.
Lance and I took a seat at one end of the bar and I ordered a beer and he ordered a Johnnie Walker Red and a turkey sandwich. I fought my urge to ask him what he planned to tell Lizzie he wanted to do about the baby. My mother used to tell me, “Mind your business, Brock. Not your circus, not your monkeys.” I was trying hard to remember that. I spun around on the stool and watched the musician. He was singing an old Journey song now and playing the guitar. He was really good. I wondered yet again what he was doing in a dive like this. It was a peaceful and pleasant dive, but a dive nonetheless.
I took my phone out of my pocket and checked it for the nine hundredth time at least. Lizzie still hadn’t text or called. I started to text her again when all hell broke loose behind me. I heard a crash and Lance and I both turned at the same time. The guys that were looking for the college boys had apparently found them. These guys looked like bad news. They both had on baggy khaki’s and long white t-shirt. A red bandana adorned the head of one of them and the other one wore an Oakland Raiders hat. The crash was one of the college kids jumping over a chair and knocking it down, trying to get away from them.
“Should we help them?” Lance asked casually, taking another bite of his sandwich.
“My hand kind of hurts.”
“My face hurts.”
“Let’s see how it goes.” It was obvious fast that the two young boys were way out of their weight class and the khaki boys weren’t screwing around. About the time I slid off my stool, the guitarist stepped off his little stage and headed over. I hadn’t realized how big the guy was until he stepped down to the floor. He was as tall as Lance, just not as broad but definitely not lacking in muscle underneath the sleeves of tattoos on his arms. He got there first and grabbed one of the khaki’s by the back of his shirt as he was about to throw a punch. He literally lifted him up with one hand and stood him down about two feet away. I grabbed the other guy and Lance came over to help me escort him out. The first guy apparently not all that bright wasn’t ready to quit. He threw a punch at the guitarist. The guy dodged the sloppily thrown punch and immediately came back with a left cross that sent the kid flying back into the wall and landing on his ass.
Lance held the door while I booted Khaki number one out. We didn’t need to convince him any further. He leg bailed without even looking over his shoulder to see if his friend was coming. Meanwhile, the kid on the floor was trying to get back on his feet and the guitarist stood in fighting stance waiting for him.
“Somebody get this crazy fuck away from me!” His swollen jaw was making him talk funny. He sounded like a three-year-old. The college boys, tougher now that they weren’t getting their asses kicked laughed at him. He scrambled up and tried to go after them again. Guitar guy swept his left leg out and knocked him back down on his ass. Returning to fighting stance, he waited. Lance and I were just having fun watching at this point. The next time khaki scrambled to his feet, he ran out the door. I think he was crying. Guitar guy looked at the college boys and said,
“You boys should probably move along too.” They didn’t wait for him to ask twice. They took off then too. Guitar guy climbed back up on his little stage, killed the drink in his glass and calmly started strumming the guitar again. I looked at Lance and said,
“Have you ever seen this guy before?”
“You mean in the octagon? No, but a lot of underground stuff goes on around the industrial district.”
Lance turned around to finish his drink. I waited until guitar guy finished his song and I went over to him. “Hey man, Brock Carter. That was some impressive fighting, and you’re a south paw too, aren’t you?”
Guitar guy grinned, took a drink, pulled his slightly greasy shoulder length hair back into an elastic band and then said, “Jagger. Thanks and yes, I’m a south paw.”
“Where do you fight?”
“Just here.”
“No, I mean professionally.”
“Just here, and at a few other bars I play at when the need arises,” he said again.
“I’ll be damned. You’re better than most of the guys in our middle-weight class right now and maybe even a heavyweight or two. What are you doing about ten a.m. tomorrow?”
“I usually get up around then.”
“How’d you like to come down to the UFC training gym and work-out with us? I’d love for my trainer to get a look at you.”
“Yeah? Sure, I guess I can do that. I don’t have to be here until noon.”
“Great!” I gave him the address and told him I’d see him there. Lance was ready by the time I finished talking to him. The alcohol wasn’t working. He wanted to go home so he could take one of the pain pills the doctor gave him.
When we got to the apartment I said, “Are you okay by yourself for a while?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Where are you going?”
I took a deep breath and said, “To see Lizzie. Your business with her is your business, but I really like her Lance. Are you cool with that?”
He nodded and then winced at the pain it caused. I felt bad. “Yeah, I’m okay with it. My head fucking hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Me too. I’ll see you later.”
“Don’t take too many pills. You already had two drinks.”
“Okay, Mom.”
7
Lizzie
After Jacob and Cassie dropped me off, I turned off my phone, turned on the music and spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon just decompressing. I took a long, hot bubble bath and I painted my toenails and I gave myself a facial. By the time I was finished with all of that, I felt a lot better. I’d just fixed myself a cup of tea when the doorbell rang. I turned down the music and looked out the peephole. I smiled and shook my head. There was a bouquet of flowers looking in at me…they were attached to a large, muscular body that looked suspiciously like Brock’s. I pulled open the door and he lowered the giant vase and ran his sexy eyes from my head to my toes. I shivered and then I remembered what I looked like.
“Hi,” I said, reaching up to try and smooth down my hair.
“Hi gorgeous,” he said, like he meant it. “These are for you.” He handed me the vase and I stuck my nose in the flowers and breathed in their fragrance.
“Come in. Thank you, they’re beautiful.”
“I tried to find something as beautiful as you, but it was impossible.”
I laughed. He was laying it on thick. “I bet you rethought that when you saw me open the door, huh?”
He shook his head, took the flowers out of my hand and sat them down on the table and then he put his hands on my waist. “Where’s your bathroom?” he asked. That was not what I was expecting.
“Last door on the left,” I said. I was surprised when he used his hands to propel me down the hall. When we got to the bathroom he stood me in front of the mirror and said,
“This is a mirror. That girl in the mirror is Elizabeth Saint. She’s beautiful. In fact, I think she might well be the most beautiful girl in all of Las Vegas…
maybe even Nevada…Hell, maybe…”
I laughed and turned around so that I was facing him. “I get it. Thank you.”
Brock pressed his forehead into mine and said, “Listen to me baby girl. You are beautiful on the outside and the inside. Someone did you a great disservice by not telling you that…your entire life. If I have to stand behind you in the mirror every morning and tell you that until you believe it, I will. You take my breath away, Lizzie…literally.”
I didn’t know why he was so fascinated with me suddenly, but right this second, I didn’t care. I brushed my lips against his jaw letting my breath linger on his face. I felt his arms go tighter around my waist and the t-shirt I was wearing being pushed up slightly. He let his warm hands rest against the bare skin on my lower back. Goose bumps sprang up wherever his hands touched. I moved my lips up to his ear and planted a soft kiss before I whispered, “Thank you, Brock. Thank you for everything.”
He leaned forward and brushed his full lips across my forehead. I closed my eyes and I felt his lips brush against the lids. Then suddenly his face was in my hair and a soft groan escaped from his chest as he said, “God, I love the way you smell.” He took a deep breath. It was sexy, like he was breathing me in. He leaned back down again, letting his lips hover just over the top of mine. “Beautiful baby girl. You’re so beautiful.” The sound of his voice and the heat of his breath caused my core to ignite. I pressed my lips to his and he pulled me in tighter. He slid his tongue in my mouth and let it glide in gentle strokes over mine. Then he grabbed a handful of my hair and my panties were instantly wet as he pushed his tongue in deeper. I moaned against his mouth and my chest cramped as the desire for this amazing man raged inside of me. I felt him reaching over to the towel bar. He pulled the towel down and sat it on the counter behind me. Then his hands went back to the bottom of my t-shirt and he pulled it up. I raised my arms, only reluctantly breaking the kiss so he could pull the shirt off me. He tossed it aside and made a sexy little noise in his throat when he saw that I wasn’t wearing a bra. His hands immediately covered my breasts and he massaged them and covered my mouth with his again. He was letting his thumbs trace around the outsides of my nipples and then run across them once they were as hard as rocks. That was giving me chills, but when he sucked my bottom lip into his mouth and held it with his lips while he licked it…I almost had a seizure.
