And yes, I understand that if I were to stay in Las Vegas I wouldn’t have the hotel suite, or the BMW, or the expense account, forever. I would, however, have the chance to look back at my life and say that I did something kind of awesome. Something that didn't involve filing, or ordering sandwiches, or Rob Dorfman. But really, I was just kicking the idea around.
I pulled into the Marriott and parked the car, pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head as I walked toward the entrance. I felt as if I was being watched. I scanned the windows of the restaurant and sure enough, there was Nick already seated at a table and drinking a beer. He didn't take his eyes off of me as I walked. Had he really told Kara that he was in love with me? I felt a flutter in my stomach as I remembered all the times he had hugged me goodnight after a night out after work, and all the nights I had cried myself to sleep after he had gotten married. I thought about all of the flirting that had led up to this very moment. We had just been joking around, hadn't we?
But then Nick left his wife and snuck off to Vegas, and, in the most tragic case of bad timing ever, decided that he wanted to be with me. Maybe a month ago I would have been game for whatever this entailed, but I was a changed woman now. I had higher standards and self respect. But Nick hadn't changed. Oh no. Nick looked the same and he probably smelled the same. That famous crooked smile he was giving me as I walked towards his table was definitely the same. His hair looked as if he had been surfing all day, even though I knew he had only been lounging around in my hotel room, the lazy bastard. Maybe he had been lounging around in my bed. My heart beat a little faster.
You’re a fickle, spineless idiot, Tessa Golden.
I told the voice in my head to shut up as I sat down at the table. Nick had already ordered me a glass of wine and we locked eyes as he handed it to me. My old friend, the one who had gotten me through many a bad day, and who had my artwork lined up along his windowsill, had finally come for me. The one thing that home had that Vegas didn’t, was Nick. And right then, despite all my rationalizations, I knew I was a goner.
***
With a glass of wine rushing to my head, I tried to tell Nick that he needed to go home. I told him that I was mad at him for lying to me and that he was messing everything up by being here. I told him that the things I said in those text messages had been a mistake. But everything that I said just sounded like a joke. My words were weak and unconvincing, and so he went right ahead and ordered me another glass. The next thing I knew, we were taking the elevator back up to my suite, and then we were over by my bed, and then Nick was running his hands through my hair the way I always imagined he would.
In my mind this moment was years in the making and I looked into his eyes waiting for him to tell me that he too had been longing for it ever since the day we'd met. But Nick didn't speak. Instead he just unbuttoned my shirt. I decided to take the initiative and whispered something similar into his ear. I paused to allow him to say the same in return, but he still didn't say a word. Instead he slipped my shirt down over my shoulders. I wanted desperately for him to say that seeing me each day at the office was torture, or that he was sorry for having made me wait all these years. But he didn't say any of those things, and with each passing minute my fantasy of what this moment would be like started to collapse in on itself.
That's when I noticed the red plastic Monopoly hotel laying under the nightstand and the sight of it brought everything to a screeching halt. My cell phone started ringing from across the room and I pushed Nick away as I ran to get it. He pulled me back and told me to ignore it.
"I can't ignore it!" I protested. "It's probably Kendra. It could be important."
"More important than this?" Nick grabbed my hand and ran it down -
“No, Nick, stop it! This isn’t right. I have to get the phone.” I wrenched my arm out of his grip and grabbed the phone from my purse. It was Kendra.
"Hey, what's up?" I said, breathless.
"Tessa, oh thank God. I need you to get back here right away." She sounded frantic, almost as if she had been crying. "The filing deadline for Reno is tomorrow! Tomorrow Tessa! How could I have forgotten this?"
Actually, Kendra had been forgetting a lot of things lately - deadlines, meetings, personal hygiene. I am not saying that she stopped showering or anything, but she was losing her ability to look great no matter what had happened the night before. Sometimes her hair looked as if she hadn’t bothered to comb it, and one day she came into the office wearing sweats. Not even stylish sweats, just plain old Hanes. And from time to time, I noticed the smell of alcohol on her, even if we hadn’t gone out together the night before.
"Calm down, Ken. I'll be right there and we'll figure it out together, ok?" I scurried around the room collecting my items of clothing as I spoke.
"Ok," she squeaked, and hung up.
“I’m sorry, Nick. I have to get back to work. There's a Jiggly Kitty crisis going down.” I pulled my shirt back on and buttoned it up with shaking hands.
“So you’re just going to leave me here like this?” asked Nick. He zipped up and leaned back on the bed on his elbows.
“This was a bad idea, I don’t even know what I was thinking.” I was suddenly very angry at myself for what I'd almost let happen. “Look, if you’re going to stay here, you should probably get your own room. Flamhauser isn’t going to be happy if they find out I have a houseguest.”
Sure Tessa, blame it on the company. Don’t tell him that it’s you who doesn’t want him here. You wouldn’t want to hurt the adulterer’s feelings. I told the voice in my head that I didn't have time for its crap right now, and drove a little crazily through the streets of Las Vegas.
I raced into work and felt a twinge of guilt when I passed by Chris and Dan’s office. There was Chris, sitting innocently at his desk, none the wiser to what I had almost done. At the sound of my footsteps he turned his head and glanced over his shoulder. I smiled, but he seemed to look right through me and then turned back to his computer. I turned around to see if maybe somebody else was behind me - somebody Chris didn't want to talk to, like Roberta - but it was just me.
I shook off the slight pit that was forming in my stomach and continued into Kendra’s office. There she was on the floor, surrounded by paperwork and plans, her hair in a messy pile on the top of her head fastened by a plastic clip I haven’t seen the likes of since 1987. Her appearance had deteriorated since I’d seen her that morning. She looked up at me with red, mascara-smudged, eyes - a classic nutcase.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get this done by tomorrow morning. I really messed up this time.”
I sat down on the floor next to her and looked around. There were all kinds of redlined applications, zoning rules & regulations with sticky notes on them, and several empty cups of coffee. “Don’t worry, we’ll get this done. I’m not going anywhere until we do,” I said. “But first, I need to thank you for Mocha Fresco. Nobody's ever done anything that nice for me before.”
Kendra just shook her head and shrugged. “You deserve a chance to get out of here. Just because my life turned out to be shit, doesn’t mean yours has to.” She stabbed at one of the applications with her red pen. “There’s still hope for you.”
“There’s hope for both of us,” I said. “You don’t have to self-destruct just because you hit a few bumps." I collected a few empty coffee cups off the floor and placed them in the trash. "Look, Ken, I think maybe we should take it easy with the drinking. I mean, what will Tom say if he finds out you had to join AA after spending three months with me?”
I meant it as a joke, but I didn't get any reaction. Kendra simply handed me some applications and told me that if I really wanted to help her I would start typing. Of course, when hasn’t typing meaningless drivel about parking space dimensions and maximum pole heights solved all the problems of the world? I headed sullenly back to my office, resolving to pick the issue up again at a better time, when I ran smack into Chris. We literally collided
in the hallway and yet he still managed to ignore me. This time it was too much. I chased him for a few steps and put my hand on his arm until he turned around and looked at me.
“What the heck's wrong with you?” I asked.
"Nothing," he said.
"Nothing?"
"Yeah, I'm just busy."
"Too busy to even say 'excuse me' when you just ran over me back there?" I asked. "Come on, what's wrong?"
"Fine." Chris rolled his eyes. "Tell me who the guy is."
My heart stopped. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I stopped by your hotel during lunch to leave something for you at the front desk."
"You did?" I squeaked.
"Yeah. I'm not surprised you didn't see me though, you seemed pretty occupied with that guy. Holding hands...drinking wine...that was quite the errand Kendra must've sent you out on."
“Oh, that guy,” I said lamely, running my hand through my hair. I wasn’t prepared for this. “He’s just a friend from home, he uh, he flew in unexpectedly. We were just having lunch.” Sure Tessa, that’s it. The 3,000 miles cross-country lunch date. Who wouldn’t buy that?
“Right," said Chris. "Strange though, because that was at noon, and now it's after three o'clock. And, um, you missed a few buttons." I looked down with horror to see the bottom two buttons of my shirt hanging wide open. Chris smacked the rolled set of plans he was holding against a bookcase and took off down the hall.
“Oh God, Chris. No! It’s not like that!” I said, buttoning up. “He’s just a friend who’s having some problems with his wife. He’s confused, but he’s going back home!”
“So he's already on a plane, is that what you’re telling me?” asked Chris.
“Well, not exactly. Come here.” I pulled him aside into an empty conference room. “But he'll be gone soon, and in the meantime he’s getting his own room.”
“His own room!" said Chris. "Well that makes me feel so much better! Look, Tessa, if you were seeing somebody back home you should've just told me." He stormed out of the conference room and back to his office.
“Hey,” I said, following him. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, it’s not like you and I are dating or anything! We just hung out a few times!" What the hell was I even talking about? Of course we did more than just hang out. But sometimes there's no shutting me up.
“You’re right about that,” said Chris. “We are definitely not dating.”
I should have just left at that point, but like I said, sometimes I just don't know when to shut up.
“What were you dropping off for me anyway?” I asked.
Chris banged something into his keyboard, staring straight ahead and refusing to look at me. “You’re kidding me right?” he asked.
I stood there stupidly in his doorway for a few seconds before I noticed the dozen yellow roses peeking out of his trash can. If I felt any worse than I did at that moment I probably would've just thrown myself out the window.
“Oh,” I said. I looked over at Dan for help, but his back was to me and he was pretending not to have heard anything. I went back to my office and shut the door.
Chris was right, after all. I was kidding him, I was kidding Nick, and I was kidding myself. I was trying to have everything, when in reality I didn't know what the hell I wanted. I felt sick as all my thoughts of staying in Vegas started to go up in smoke - and even sicker at the thought of returning to Massachusetts as nothing but a home-wrecking, loser, secretary.
- 20 -
"I can't believe you dragged me here."
I shook my head as we passed under a poster for Thunder From Down Under - the resident male strip show at The Excalibur hotel. Twelve chiseled, long-haired, somewhat orange-skinned men, standing in a row wearing nothing but black boy-shorts that looked like the bottom half of my Victoria's Secret pajamas.
Kendra whistled. "Hey, what better way to get your mind off your man troubles than with a bunch of hot naked men?"
"They don't actually get naked, do they?" I asked in horror. I wasn't exactly sure what Kendra was into, but I certainly did not need to see that stuff flopping around.
"No, no," said Kendra, a tad disappointed. "Not naked. But it's totally hands-on." She winked at me and handed our tickets to the doorman.
"Oh dear lord."
I cringed as the host led us to our front row seats - this was a lot to stomach on a Tuesday night. I don't know what it is about hulking, gyrating, beefcakes that tends to turn me off, but I do know that I'm in the minority. While we waited for the show to begin, a documentary played showing what the dancers do in their free time on the ranch. You know, the ranch that they all live on together half naked. The men were riding horses shirtless. Some were riding pantless.
The woman seated next to me just about lost her mind when two of the men started rinsing off a horse. I sunk down a little further in my seat and prayed that she didn't try to talk to me. I mean, this was just her reaction to a movie. What the hell would her reaction be when the real live men came out? I did not have to wait long to find out. Before I knew it, Kendra was screaming along with the rest of the lunatics, and a man in a blue spandex thong came crawling on all fours down our table.
"Hey!" I yelled, as he knocked over my nine dollar beer with his knees. I looked across the table at Kendra, but her and all the other horn-dog women were too busy grabbing at the guy's body to even notice how he had just massacred our drinks. When he reached the end of the table he stood up, grabbed another woman's beer, and poured it down his chest, signaling the beginning of a thrust-off with the stripper at the next table.
I tolerated another four atrocious dance numbers before sneaking out to use the ladies room. Maybe there's something wrong with me, I thought as I sat on the toilet, folding and re-folding a square of toilet paper. How come everybody else loves this shit? All those oiled-up, sweaty, men did for me was make my chest tighten as I thought about Chris. Not because they reminded me of him in any shape or form, God no. Those guys could toss Chris around like a bale of hay. No, it was just the opposite. All the screaming and thrusting made me long for a cozy night of Monopoly. Screw it.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Chris's number, though I had no idea what I would say to him if he answered. Maybe I would just beg him to come rescue me again. But, not surprisingly, it rang four times and went to voicemail. I fought the impulse to dial him again, and headed sadly back into the theater where It's Raining Men was practically blowing the doors off.
"I got you something!" screamed Kendra, as I slid into my seat. She pointed to the deathly black Jaeger shot waiting for me on the table.
"Nobody kicked it over yet?" I shouted back.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Whoooo!" she screamed, holding her own shot high into the air as one of the dancers back-flipped off the stage. "It's raining men!"
Hallelujah. I rolled my eyes and downed my shot.
***
I was holed up in my studio at Mocha Fresco on Friday afternoon, surrounded by warm sunshine streaming through the skylights and the smell of coffee. Kendra could not have picked a better week for my studio time to begin because in the current state of my life, I was enjoying having some quiet time to myself. Chris still hadn't spoken to me all week, even going so far as to enlist Roberta as his assistant. I wanted to laugh whenever I saw her in his doorway asking a million stupid questions, but then I remembered why she was there and there was really nothing funny about it.
I couldn’t blame him for being angry with me. Every time I tried to tell Nick to go back home, I felt guilty as hell. I mean, he had left his wife after some stupid text messages that I started, and now I was going to tell him it was all a mistake? Then there was another part of me - a small, sick, twisted, part of me, that believed if I sent Nick away, I might be left with nobody.
Nobody.
And so I sat, thoughtfully cutting, and gluing, and analyzing my sad state
of affairs. Honestly, I haven't even seen all that much of Nick over the past week. Tuesday night I went to the strip show and told him I had to work late. I snuck into my room smelling like a bottle of men's cologne from the 1990's and went straight to sleep. Wednesday night Kendra and I took him out to dinner and to see the pirate show at Treasure Island (where I totally by accident may have made out with him for like five seconds). And Thursday night he said that he "had plans." I know that one of those "plans" involved going to The Jiggly Kitty because I found a receipt for it in his hotel room.
But I decided not to ask questions. Who was I to say anything? Unlike Thunder from Down Under, the girls at The Jiggly Kitty at least stay up on stage and out of reach. I was dying, however, to ask him what he needed a receipt for - was he planning to get reimbursed? Oh the look on Margaret Sherman's face.
I washed the glue off my hands and walked out into the coffee shop for a latte. I stopped short when I saw Nick already seated at the bar and talking with Holly. She giggled and leaned in toward him, tucking a piece of hot pink hair behind her ear. She was flirting of course, who could blame her? That part didn't bother me. That was nothing. But then, she pretended to drop his change onto the counter, and he playfully reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. She clenched the coins in her hand and he wrestled them out of her grip, both of them laughing hysterically. Now that, that was something.
“Small latte, please,” I interrupted, sliding into the seat next to Nick.
“Let me know if I can get you anything else." Holly gave him a wink before she headed off to make my drink. I rolled my eyes.
“I didn’t know you were coming here," I said. "What have you been up to today?”
Nick swiveled around on his bar stool to face me and leaned back, stretching. His shirt rose up a little revealing a tanned stomach from a week of lounging by the hotel pool. “Not much,” he said. “Went to check out the view from the Stratosphere. Had lunch.”
“By yourself?”
What Stays in Vegas Page 13
