Card Sharks

by Liz Maverick

  “Oh, God. Don’t cry, Marianne. Whatever you do, don’t cry in front of all these people. You’ll never forgive yourself for being all blotchy and gross on television.” Bijoux swallowed as her friend finally stood up, still staring down at the table as the commentators took a moment to salute her play and close out the discussion of the hand.

  Suddenly Marianne pumped her fist in the air. She brushed her hair back, and Bijoux could see the look of sheer delight on her friend’s face.

  “Yes! I rock!” Playing for the cameras now, Marianne thrust her arms up in the air, Rocky-style and jumped up and down. “This was so great! This was so great!” As she mugged and played to the cameras and the audience, the remaining three guys at the table stood up to shake her hand, paying her the respect her play throughout the tournament had deserved. And as she turned back to face them all, the crowd around them rose in a standing ovation.

  Bijoux started laughing even as she couldn’t help crying a little.

  Marianne Rocky’ed all the way from the table, shrieking with glee, “I’m fourth! I’m fourth!” as a harried cameraman followed her every move.

  “We’d like to pull you for a final interview,” one of the assistants ran up and said.

  “Okay. I just need a minute. . . .” She looked at Bijoux.

  “Well, we’re going to break in, like, ten seconds. Can you come with us?”

  Marianne looked back at her friends.

  “Go on,” Bijoux said.

  Marianne headed to the interview area. Lights. Camera. Microphone thrust in face.

  “You seemed to take your loss pretty well,” the host said by way of a question. “Usually the guys going out this close to the prize look pretty trashed.”

  “It just suddenly hit me—what I’d done. I’m so excited.”

  “Yours is another one of those fairytale stories—an amateur winning a buy-in from an online tournament, and then breaking out of the Dead-Money Roundup to make her mark. A hell of a story. What does the future look like for you now, Miss Marianne?”

  Bijoux leaned over the rail. “It’s actually Machine Gun Marianne. That’s what they call her in L.A.”

  Marianne smiled gratefully, and Bijoux just knew that everything was going to be fine. Never let a man come between you and your best friend. Good advice, good policy.

  “Machine Gun Marianne,” the announcer repeated, turning to the camera and building his closing metaphor, making his voice even deeper and more dramatic, as if he were selling an audience on an upcoming action flick. “A fitting nickname on this bloodbath of a week for many of poker’s greatest. She took them down one after the next, shooting aces and kings all week until her bullets just barely ran short today. With a fourth-place finish, this newcomer has proven she can play with the big guns. Back to the table action as we take the top three to the end of what has been a very long road.”

  They cut the transmission. “Thanks. And congratulations on making it so far.” Marianne shook hands with the announcer and turned back to face Peter, Marianne, and Donny in a line—at what was essentially the end of the line.

  She exhaled loudly. “Wow.” She looked at Peter and just shook her head, obviously finding it difficult to articulate her feelings. “Wow. So, Peter—”

  “It’s okay. We both know—”

  “No, I’ve got to explain this. I mean, you see me like this and maybe you think, ‘Where did Marianne go?’ But I’m not really who you think I am. You don’t really know me. This is me,” Marianne said. She indicated her jeans and loud, fun blouse. Splashy jewelry. Outrageous makeup. Bijoux thought her friend looked terrific—a much less slutty, much more comfortable version of her own former exterior.

  Marianne exhaled, an impatient sound. “Peter, what I’m saying is that we’ve got to go get an annulment. Now. The careful, tasteful suit . . . the plain shoes . . . the subdued makeup . . . the tax accountant job and the stuff I do to convince them I’m a safe choice for partner . . . all that’s just a costume. For me. Look at Bijoux.”

  Everybody looked at Bijoux, who blanched at the unexpected attention.

  “That stuff works on her,” Marianne said, gesturing to her clothes on Bijoux’s frame. “That’s her. I mean, not the plain part . . . Oh, crap, Bij. I don’t mean it like that. You know what I mean.” She looked wildly between the three of them. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Bijoux said softly. “We’ve just been wearing the wrong clothes.”

  Marianne looked back at her, such a grateful look. “Yeah.” She looked at Peter. “And you’ve been kissing the wrong girl.”

  Peter held out his palm. Marianne stared at it for a moment, her brow furrowed; then her expression cleared. She dug into her pocket and pulled out the plastic ring, which she placed in Peter’s palm. He winked at her, then turned to Donny. With an exaggerated flourish of his arm, he presented Marianne and Donny to each other.

  Marianne stood there, blinking up at poor old Donny like an idiot.

  Donny cocked his head. “Congratulations . . . on the tournament.”

  Her face fell a bit. “Thanks,” she said nervously.

  Bijoux felt a growing horror. Donny wasn’t going to make the first move. He had way too much pride. “Do something, Marianne,” she hissed at her friend.

  Marianne took a tentative step toward Donny, one eyebrow raised in a question mark.

  Donny broke, his expression melting into a huge grin. He tried to play it cool, dropping his arms from his chest and turning his palms out to indicate that he was receptive to a hug.

  Marianne didn’t waste the gesture. She leaped into Donny’s arms and kissed him with everything she had, and Donny answered back.

  Bijoux wrapped her arms around her chest and gave herself a delighted squeeze. “Oh, my God. It’s the ending Pretty in Pink should have had. She goes with Duckie. Except Donny’s so much better-looking.”

  She turned to Peter.

  He looked down at her, then looked back up at Donny and Marianne kissing. “Bij, you remember how there was one thing I needed to tell you?”

  “Yeah.” Bijoux asked.

  “You know how you said that I was as fake as you?”

  “Yeah.” Bijoux crossed her arms over her chest. “And I meant it.”

  “Well, you’re right.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder and cradled her in close. Leaning down, he said, “The truth is that I have been faking things as much as you have. The truth is that I’m going to be filthy, stinking rich.”

  Bijoux blinked rapidly, attempting to process the validity of his statement. Suddenly, it dawned on her. “Mrs. Keegan’s fortune?”

  Peter gave her a wink. “Yeah. Why do you think I’m putting up with that damn cat?”

  “Huh. Remember back up at the room, you asked if you had a chance with me, and I said it would take a little time? Maybe these things don’t take as much time as I thought,” Bijoux said. She flashed him a wicked grin and the two of them just started to laugh.

  Donny broke away from the kiss first. Marianne looked up at him nervously. He’d been the one all along. She’d just refused to see it because he didn’t fit the parameters of what she thought she wanted.

  She pulled at her blouse, trying to explain. “What I’ve been doing—before this, I mean—that’s just not me. You know it. You know what I’m really all about. I’m not the girl who—”

  He put his finger on her lips to shut her up. “You don’t have to hide it, Mare,” he said. “Wear it on the outside, girl. Wear it on the outside.”

  Marianne looked up at him, at this guy who’d been in her life for what seemed like forever, this guy she could never let go of, even when it seemed like an impossible fit. The truth was, Donny had straightened himself out. She thought he had some growing up to do. But it wasn’t just him. It was both of them. And now that Marianne had straightened herself out, too, the fit didn’t seem so impossible anymore.

  “Donny, you know how I nagged you all
those years about being responsible and doing something with your life and developing a long-term plan?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Will you hate it if I quit my job and become a professional poker player? Will you hate it if I stop being so responsible all the time?”

  “I’ve never hated anything about you, Marianne. You make me crazy. You make me mad. But you’re my girl. You’ve always been my girl. And what the hell’s better than a girl who plays poker?”

  “A girl who plays poker and loves to watch football?”

  He shrugged dismissively. “That’s what boys are for.”

  “Okay,” Marianne said. “This is one of those times where you just gotta put it on the line. If it’s bad, then it’s bad and I lose my pride. I lose my guy. . . .”

  The corner of Donny’s mouth quirked up in a hint of a smile.

  Marianne took a deep breath. “You know that dorky expression, ‘you’re my everything’?”

  He laughed—a little uncertainly, though. “Yeah.”

  “I want everything.”

  Donny went very still. “Don’t tease me, Mare. I don’t think I can stand any more of this. Don’t get back together with me unless you mean it.”

  “Of course I mean it. You act like I’m the only one who ever said we should be apart.”

  “You were the only one who ever really believed it. I know I never said . . . what I should have said. That’s my fault. But . . .” He clutched his chest, grabbing onto his leather jacket with dramatic flair, the same old Donny, all grown-up. “I love you, Marianne. You’re one crazy girl. But you’ve always been the one for me. I swear I’d ask you to marry me if you weren’t already married,” he said as he stuck his arm around her neck and pulled her in for a kiss. “You gotta do something about that. I don’t sleep with other men’s wives.”

  She laughed and punched him in the shoulder. “I’ll get on that.”

  He looked at her, revealing a tenderness in his eyes Marianne couldn’t remember seeing—or noticing—before; then he brushed her hair away from her shoulder. Leaning down to her ear, he whispered sweetly, “Hey, Marianne, it’s Donny. Wanna—”

  “Yeah.”

  chapter twenty-four

  The sky hung like a pitch-black canvas, streaked and dotted with Strip neon as if it were one of those velvet Elvis paintings you could pick up in Tijuana. The sidewalk outside had picked up steam again at this late hour, now that dinner was over and the flip side of twenty-four/seven was about to begin. Marianne might have been drunk the last time she’d made it out of the casino, but she remembered what this looked like.

  “Where are we going?” Bijoux cried out as Marianne practically dragged her behind her.

  “Come on!”

  “Marianne, seriously. You’re supposed to be the responsible one. We’re going to miss our flight.”

  “You have to see it. It’s magic. I swear, I think it’s really magic.”

  “I didn’t bring a sweater,” Bijoux said plaintively from behind her.

  “Here.” Marianne pulled her friend up to the stone wall overlooking the lake where the Bellagio fountains waited.

  “I’m serious. We have to go. The guys already called a cab.”

  “Give it five minutes. We’ll be out of here in five minutes.” Marianne glanced at her watch and then leaned on the wall, staring over the side into the lights of Las Vegas reflecting off the water.

  Bijoux had quieted now, huddling close to Marianne for warmth, and likewise transfixed by the reflection. “Almost,” Marianne whispered.

  And then, like a blast from a cannon, the fountains shot up out of the water, the display lights switched on, and the music kicked in.

  Con te partirò. Paesi che non ho mai veduto e vissuto con te, adesso si li vivrò . . .

  Bijoux was transfixed. “Oh, Marianne! It’s fabulous.” One hand grabbed onto Marianne’s arm; the other went to her heart. “It is magic.”

  The strains of Italian opera soared higher as Bijoux suddenly opened her purse and rummaged around. She pulled out a small cosmetics bag, found her pot of eye glitter, and unscrewed the lid.

  “What are you doing?” Marianne asked.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  She did, and Bijoux dumped half the pot in her palm and the other half in her own, and Marianne saw what she was about.

  The fountains danced to the music in a pool of light. Bijoux and Marianne looked at each other, then turned to the spectacle and blew as hard as they could, as if making a wish.

  Silver glitter twinkled in the air, catching the light from all sides as the sparkles rained down over the railing into the water. Bijoux slung her arm around Marianne’s neck and, laughing together, they turned away and headed for home.