Mac waited in the car, like he always did. Not because he wouldn’t have stood next to me here on the edge of the desert, but because I wouldn’t let him. The “fix” was mine and mine alone. My old man had made sure of that nearly twenty years ago.
My soul was an oil spill, but that didn’t mean I had to pollute anyone else’s along with it.
“Please. I have a daughter. She’ll have no one.”
I grabbed Billy’s shirt, a stained white undershirt that threatened to rip at the collar, and thrust him back on his heels. Pebbles tumbled into the abyss, echoing through the canyon.
“Better she learn the truth about this shitty world sooner rather than later.”
“Any more stops,or back to the airfield?” Mac steered off a few exits before the airport, knowing I’d want a moment to decide. “The jet’s on standby.”
I swallowed. The hole in the pit of my stomach was proving a little harder to banish tonight than usual. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined a young girl. Maybe she had brown hair, just like her dad. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, when someone came to tell her what happened to her dad, she would beg in the same way he had before I’d left him in the desert to die.
Fuck. I needed a drink. Or a pill. Or five. Whatever it took to get Billy Richards’s fucking face out of my head.
As we stopped at a red light, a group of women crossed the street in front of us, laughing and stumbling like awkward flamingos in high heels and tight dresses—one of them was literally wearing hot pink feathers. They looked like a bachelorette party, a pack of hens out for trouble the way millions were in Vegas every year.
One, however, stuck out. A pretty little nymph with chestnut-colored hair, swathed in a green dress that clung to her olive-toned body. She and her friends approached a club on the corner and got in line for entry. There she turned, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
Those eyes. Bright green, the color of polished sea glass. Guileless and wide, like the succulents that lined the highways in the southwest and burst into a flush of color each spring. She smiled at one of her friends, and I slapped a palm over my chest, wondering for a moment if my heart had literally stopped working. The rhythm was doing something funny. Speeding up. Then not beating at all.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
Even on a street corner that was decorated with lights, attractions, and more moving pieces than Times fucking Square, that smile was a beacon through the chaos. Or maybe a siren beckoning me to the true depths a man could sink to in this pit of sin.
Whichever it was, I wasn’t sure I cared.
I watched the group disappear through the entrance like maidens entering the labyrinth’s first turn.
“Actually,” I heard myself say, “I’d like my daily dose of oblivion.”
Mac pulled the Rover to the curb. “How long?”
“Until I forget what I look like in the mirror.”
2
A MAENAD’S TALE
LANEY
TWELVE HOURS EARLIER
“Delaney Fisher. I don’t care if we haven’t seen each other naked since we were four and took bubble baths in your mom’s pink tub. If you don’t get out of the bathroom and show me that dress, I’m coming in after you.”
Still gazing doubtfully into the bathroom mirror of what had to be the smallest hotel room in Las Vegas, I rolled my eyes. “Megs, you are such a liar. For one, you still bust into my apartment at all hours of the day and night, so you’ve seen me naked at least twice this year alone. But I doubt your bridesmaids want the privilege. Or the rest of the city, which is what’s going to happen if I actually wear this dress in public.”
On the other side of the bathroom door, my best friend huffed. “That’s what you think. No one in this room or the rest of Vegas is going to care if they see your cooch, so get out of there and show us the damn dress.”
I turned back and forth in the mirror one last time. The truth was, I was a little embarrassed for anyone to see me, much lessmy best friend who had been trying to “slutty up” my look since we had entered puberty. Megan and her sorority sisters-cum-bridesmaids had taken one look at the clothes I’d brought for the weekend, immediately pooled their own wardrobes together, and shoved me into the bathroom with the group favorite to change into.
Considering the fact that the dress was about two sizes smaller than my best friend and had clearly been hemmed for my five-foot-two frame, I was starting to suspect the whole thing was a setup. Megan had never intended to let me wear any of my own clothes on our last night in Vegas. She had been saving this audacious frock for the moment I couldn’t say no.
Okay, so I wasn’t a Vegas kind of girl. Or a green dress kind of girl. More specifically, I wasn’t athis-green-dress kind of girl. Chunky cardigans, carpenter jeans, and a great pair of boots? Loved them. Stocked them. Sold them in the little shop my family owned in Seattle.
There wasn’t a green dress in the place.
“Laney!” Megan shouted in a voice that was already quaking from an extra glass of champagne. “I’m the bride, it’smybachelorette party, and the bride demands that you at least show us all the dress before you wimp out of wearing it.”
