Vampires In Vegas

by Samantha Snow

  She hated to throw up, had ever since she was little. She knew that almost everyone said that, but it was doubly true for her. She was almost pathological about it. Which was why she was surprised it had taken her as long as it did to remember the events of last night.

  “No! Oh, my god, no.”

  The humiliation was hot, swift, and complete. Much of the events of the evening before were lost to her, or blurry at best, but the idea of throwing up now had brought back the memory of throwing up on the beautiful man’s shoes. He had rescued her from some weirdos who were...what? What had they been trying to do to her? She couldn’t quite get to that part, but she didn’t need to be a genius to know that it wouldn’t have been good.

  This GQ model looking guy had swept in to help her, and she had thanked him by puking on his shoes. His shoes that were probably more expensive than a month’s rent at her apartment. She had known that Vegas wasn’t going to be good for her, but she hadn’t ever thought that she would behave like such a fool.

  It was just that she had wanted so badly to fit in, and the champagne had made her feel so much at ease. At least at first. The problem was that she had no experience with drinking, and nobody around her felt inclined to babysit her while she figured the concept out. Not that they should have had to. It wasn’t like she was a baby.

  So for an undetermined amount of time, Ella just lay there. Her only saving grace at that point was the blackout curtains she had been so in love with the day before. If she hadn’t had those, if she had been forced to actually see the bright Vegas sun bouncing off of all of the shiny buildings, she thought it would have put her over the edge.

  The only way to suffer through feeling like this was to do it in a cool, dark place. It helped with the physical symptoms a little bit, but it couldn’t help with the psychological ones. The longer she lay there, the more bits and pieces of her conversation with the beautiful man (whose name she couldn’t remember to save her life) came back to her, unwanted as they were.

  She clapped her hands over her face, wishing she could wipe it all away. When that didn’t work, she resolved to do something. She sat up slowly, testing the waters to see if her stomach would turn against her for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. When it didn’t, she pulled herself to a standing position.

  She needed to get into the shower, and then she was pretty sure she was heading home. She missed her little apartment, missed her home. She couldn’t keep up with a city like this one. She wasn’t flashy, wasn’t worldly. She was pretty sure she wasn’t cut out for Vegas, and the best thing she could do was just head on out. It wasn’t until after her shower (another thing that helped, but didn’t get rid of the banging hangover she was caught in the grips of) that she saw the note that had been slipped under her door. The moment she saw it her heart began to pound loudly in her chest.

  Was it from him? The model perfect man who had tried to take care of her last night? Or what if it was even worse than that? What if she had done something really stupid, or even worse illegal, and now the hotel wanted her to pay for it. She was a smart saver, but any significant kind of damage would be well out of her price range. She had no doubt about that. When she opened the note with visibly trembling hands, she sighed in exasperation relief.

  It was from Jen, only from Jen. She should have guessed that, but after the strange series of events from the night before her thoughts were running wild. She read the note from Jen once, twice, and then sighed again, this one a sigh of defeat. The message for her was short and to the point.

  “Ella,

  Where the hell did you go last night? I saw you with the champagne. Bet you feel like shit today. Don’t even think about skipping town. This is still MY weekend. Meet for brunch by the pool. Hair of the dog will be waiting.”

  Was there any point to trying to fight this? She in no way felt like going down to brunch and could already anticipate the ways in which Pamela, Kristy, and probably even Jen would try and embarrass her further. The thing was, though, this was still Jen’s weekend. The whole reason she had come had been for her friend, and leaving would cause a big problem.

  Part of her was pretty sure it was selfish, too, to bail on Jen’s weekend just because she didn’t know how to drink. If the tables were turned, Ella knew she would be hurt. She would have to stay. She slipped into a little sundress and went down to face the music.

  * * *

  “See? I told you you’d feel better by tonight! You should always listen to me, from now on.”

  “Ha, should I?”

  “You definitely should. I’ll make all of your life choices and I bet we’ll have a hell of a lot more fun. I know you will.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for all of that, but you were right. I feel a lot better than I did this morning.”

  “Good. Because we don’t have forever here, and I want us to enjoy it! I mean, come on. Did you think you’d ever be going to a masquerade party? How lucky was it that Tao happened to have that on the weekend we were here? It’s like they knew we were coming!”

  Ella couldn’t help herself from laughing. Jen had worked hard to convince her to stay in Vegas. She had pleaded, cajoled, guilt tripped, whatever it took. In the end, Ella had caved. Of course she had. Some of it had corresponded to the hangover beginning to subside. In the morning, when she had gone to the pool for brunch, she had been pretty sure she was going to die.

  Intellectually, she knew that wasn’t the case, but it most certainly felt like she was dying and the shower only helped to alleviate that a little bit. She appeared before her friends and frienemies with large, dark sunglasses that reminded her a little of something Audrey Hepburn would wear. Her hair was pinned up in a messy bun on top of her head and she wore yoga pants and a white men’s undershirt. She could have looked worse, but she could also have looked much, much better.

  “Oh my god. You’re a mess!”

  “Seriously, Ella, you’re looking pretty rough. Sit down, have a mimosa.”

  Ella felt her gorge rise at the mention of alcohol, and the smell of the large amounts of food didn’t help. She sat, though, mostly because she was too tired to argue against the idea. Plus, this was an arena that Jen, and she suspected Kristy and Pamela as well, had far more experience in than her. She knew for a fact that Jen had suffered through her share of hangovers, and if anyone was going to help her make it out of hers alive, it was Jen.

  And this was a situation in which she was more than willing to follow whatever anecdotal advice these girls had to offer. She really was that desperate. They fed her greasy potatoes and eggs with spicy chorizo and cheese. They had also forced her to drink down two and a half mimosas. That she had protested, but only meekly, and she had been quickly overpowered. It was probably a good thing, too, because it was when she had started to feel a little bit better.

  They spent the rest of the day laying out by the pool (something she had actually never done before) and swimming, and they even convinced her to drink a pina colada. By the time they decided it was time to get ready to go out for the evening, she was feeling like herself again, if still a little more tired than she was used to.

  It might have been because she was tired that they had such an easy time getting her all dolled up again, this time in an eggplant purple dress and gold strappy heels. They left her hair down, pinning it up on one side in a style Jen said was reminiscent of Veronica Lake. Ella didn’t know anything about that, but she did like the look.

  She really hadn’t known that she could look that fancy, and seeing it two nights in a row was a kind of a revelation. Vegas was the last place in the world where she had expected to learn that there was more to her than she had believed, but that was exactly what seemed to be happening. Maybe she really had put herself into a box. That box had been comforting at one time, necessary even, but maybe that wasn’t true anymore.

  Instead, the box had been stifling her, holding her back without her even realizing it. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing
for her to loosen up every now and then. She knew she would never be like Jen and the other girls, and that was alright. She didn’t even want to be like them. But she was starting to wonder if being herself had to be quite as conservative and...well, rigid as it had been thus far.

  She thought that maybe it didn’t. It was armed with these thoughts that she had walked through the doors of the Tao bar with her arm linked through Jen’s, with Kristy and Pamela squealing and talking excitedly behind them. Due to the masquerade theme, there were people in bright, happy colors all over the place. About half of them were wearing masks, which only added to the excitement of the whole thing.

  Jen dragged her to the bar and ordered them both something called a Moscow mule. Ella looked at it doubtfully, remembering how poorly things had gone for her the previous evening, causing Jen to laugh good naturedly.

  “Come on, Ella. It won’t be like last night. Besides, this drink is made with ginger beer. It actually helps to settle your stomach.”

  “Right, but the alcohol doesn’t.”

  “You’ll be fine! Seriously, last night was a good lesson. And I bet you feel all of the way back to normal now, too.”

  “Pretty much,” Ella responded doubtfully, hardly sure what normal was at this point.

  “It’s because we’re still young. From what I’ve heard, once you hit thirty, the hangovers start to get way worse. So, we’ve still got five years. Might as well live it up, right?”

  “Um, maybe.”

  Still on the fence, she took a sip. She had to hand it to Jen, it was pretty delicious. And she was almost surely right. There was no harm in having a good time, as long as she didn’t let herself get totally out of control. There were only two things about the night before that still really bothered her. One of them was the memory of throwing up on the hot guy’s shoes. That one still made her cringe and want to sink into the floor every time she thought about it.

  Also, it seemed terribly unfair that in a night with so many memory gaps, that was one of the things she had to remember so clearly. That one wasn’t as bad as the other thing that was bothering her, though. The second thing was a real problem, one that made her insides go cold every time it wormed its way into the forefront of her mind.

  It was the way those two awful men had cornered her and then muscled her off down the hallway. It had been so easy for them! They had just grabbed her and taken her off without any trouble at all. It made her furious that she hadn’t fought back, and it terrified her at the same time. If that guy hadn’t shown up to rescue her, where would she be now? Was she really so incapable of taking care of herself?

  Somehow, despite how nervous and cautious a person she had always been, she hadn’t ever really realized how vulnerable she was. Now, she felt exposed, exposed in a way she had never felt before. It was a sudden awareness of how much danger there could be in the world, and how small and insignificant she was when stacked up against it.

  “I must say, you’re looking much healthier this evening than last I saw you. I’m glad to see it.”

  Ella jumped, giving a little yelp of surprise. She had been totally lost in her own thoughts and the intrusion of another person was a bit of a shock. It was even more so because she hadn’t realized that none of the girls she had come with were still anywhere close, and because she had been thinking such dark thoughts.

  When she jumped, she spilled some of the drink down the front of her dress and then immediately set to the task of trying to wipe it back up again. She only stopped when another hand, a strong, cold hand she did not recognize, reached out with a handkerchief and did the job for her. Maybe it was the use of a handkerchief in these modern times that startled Ella into looking up, and when she did she was even more surprised than ever.

  “Oh my god! It’s you!”

  “I suppose it is,” the gorgeous guy from the night before said with an indulgent, if somewhat aloof smile, “at least the last time I checked it was me. I apologize about your dress. That’s two dresses in as many nights forced to suffer spills. No girl’s wardrobe should be subjected to a thing like that.”

  Two? She almost asked him what he was talking about before she remembered all over again the humiliating incident in the hallway outside of her door the night before. She had been doing her best to flirt with him, which was ludicrous when you took into account the fact that he looked like a movie star and she was a drunken buffoon, when she had instead pitched forward and thrown up all over the floor and him as well.

  She hadn’t considered it before, but of course she had gotten sick on her (or Jen’s) dress as well. It made sense. It made sense, and realizing just what a hot mess she had been the last time she had seen this guy made her want to turn around and run the other way, just like Cinderella.

  Only with her, she would leave no slipper with which to be tracked, and there would be no proposal at the end of the entire affair. Honestly, she was surprised he was even talking to her to begin with. She would have gladly hidden her face and pretended she didn’t recognize him, if only he’d do the same.

  But for some reason, he appeared to have made the choice to do the exact opposite. He had been in Tao, just like her and what looked like half of Vegas, and instead of walking the other direction he had come up to speak to her. She had no idea why, but she did know that she couldn’t just ignore him.

  Being rude to him on top of vomiting on his feet would be utterly and completely unforgivable. As badly as she wanted to avoid whatever weird confrontation this was, she knew she couldn’t do it. She had to face the music, so to speak, if nothing else in order to thank him for coming to her rescue.

  “Right,” she spoke more to the floor than to him, but it was the best she could manage at the moment, “the dress from last night. I’m so, so sorry about that. You went out of your way to help me, at least I think you did, and I repaid you by getting sick everywhere.”

  “Please, absolutely no need to apologize.”

  “God, but there is! You were just trying to be a good Samaritan, and I was definitely more trouble than I was worth.”

  “Would it make you feel any better if I told you that I was in no way trying to be a good Samaritan?”

  “Yeah, right-”

  “Would it make you feel better if you knew that I intervened out of purely selfish motives? That I did it because I wanted you for myself?”

  “Wait, what? I don’t understand.”

  “I know, I’m not making a lot of sense, but it’s simple, really. I was watching you. I’d been watching you from the moment you and those loud, giggling girls came onto the scene, and I didn’t like the idea of you leaving without my saying hello. That’s the only reason I saw those two beasts harassing you to begin with. Because I followed you.”

  “But why? Why would you want to say hello to me? I’m nobody.”

  The man (Reagan! She remembered the name suddenly, and then couldn’t imagine how she could have forgotten it to begin with) smiled, but it was a sad smile. Ella’s last statement echoed between them as loudly as a gunshot would have. She hadn’t meant to say it. It sounded so raw, so brutally honest.

  She was nobody. That was what she had believed about herself for a long, long time, but she had only that day become fully aware of that fact. She hated it. She had always thought she just didn’t care about the same things as other girls did, but now she knew she had been selling herself short. And why? Because she was different. Because she didn’t look or act like the other girls she knew. What a stupid reason. What a waste of time, to feel like that for so long.

  “You see it, don’t you?”

  “See what?”

  “Don’t do that, Ella. Don’t pretend that you don’t understand me when you do. It’s beneath you.”

  “How do you-”

  “Know your name? You told me last night. I must tell you, the fact that you aren’t a frequent imbiber is something I quite like. There’s something endearing about it, something unlike so many young women of your gener
ation.”

  Ella stared at him, trying to figure out whether or not he was for real. She decided that he was, but that did nothing to alleviate her curiosity. Far from it, actually. She was more hooked now than ever before. Something about him was completely different from the other men she had met.

  The way he spoke, the way he held himself; and then there was the way he spoke about “her” generation, as if he were decades older than her instead of maybe a handful of years. She didn’t think he noticed how different he was either, which only made him that much more intriguing.

  She could feel her hesitance and embarrassment fading, replaced by more and more of her curiosity. When he took her drink from her hand and set it aside, filling that hand with his own instead, she felt her heart begin to pound. What she didn’t do was ask herself why she was letting him take such liberties and whether or not it was safe to allow him to do so.

  There was no question. Whatever it was he wanted, she was going to do. She wasn’t drunk and it was completely unlike her, but that didn’t change the fact that it was true. This Reagan was, without a doubt, the most interesting thing that had happened to her in … maybe ever. He smiled at her again, and again she got the strangest feeling that he could hear what she was thinking, or at least feel it somehow. That alone should have concerned her, but it didn’t. At the moment, it seemed that nothing could.