“Give him more than that.” She reaches into her purse for some cash. I don’t want to take it, but she’s probably right. We’ll need a little more than twenty bucks if we’re going to quietly get out of here.
I’m already lifting two fingers, easy, like a man with nothing to hide. “You keep your eyes on me, not on her. People feel it when you look at them. Don't give her the chance.”
Our server comes over, young dude, sharp-eyed, the kind who's seen everything up here and judged none of it. I lean in. “Hey, man. We had a family thing come up. I need the check fast and quiet, I need you to not say my name loud, and I need the way out that doesn't go past the window side. There's an extra hundred in it for you.”
He doesn't even blink. “Service hall's behind you, through the double doors by the host stand. It lets out by the elevators. I'll run your card and bring it low.” And because he's a pro and a romantic, “Whoever you're avoiding, good luck.”
“You're my favorite person in Nevada,” I tell him.
“Get in line,” Jasmine murmurs.
Here's where it gets good, which is to say here's where it gets stupid. Because the second our guy walks off, Wendy stands up.
Where the fuck is she going?
Oh, damn, she's headed for the bathroom, and the bathroom, of course, is on our side of the room, which means her route is about to bring her within ten feet of a table where the coach's secret daughter is having a romantic dinner by candlelight with a player.
“She's up,” Jasmine breathes. “She's up, she's coming this way, Caleb, she's”
“Menu,” I say.
“What?”
“Big menu. Up. Now. You're deciding on dessert. You're very into the dessert.”
We both lift the enormous leather menus and put them between our faces and the room, two people who have apparently never been so torn over a creme brulee in their lives, and I watch over the top edge as Wendy comes up the aisle, reading glasses still in her hair, fishing in her purse for something. Jasmine has gone so still beside me, I can't even hear her breathe.
Wendy's phone rings. She stops. Right there, a table away, she stops to dig it out, and she turns a quarter turn toward us to get the light, and for one entire century, I am certain this is it. This is the night it all comes apart over a t-bone steak, and then she says, “Hi, baby, no, we're still at dinner,” and keeps walking, phone to her ear, eyes anywhere but on the two adults hiding behind dessert menus like a couple of kids.
She's gone. Bathroom door. Swing and click.
“Up,” I say. “Now. While she's in there.”
Our guy materializes with the card folder like he's been waiting in the wings for his cue, which he has, because he's a professional and an angel. I sign without looking at the number, which is a thing I have wanted to be able to do my whole life, and turns out I do not enjoy, and I get a hand at the small of Jasmine's back.
“Let’s move.”
We of course don’t go down the main aisle, but through the double doors by the host stand, into the service hall, and through a loud ass kitchen. Jasmine flinches at the light and the noise, and I feel her start to lock up, the bad way, in the exact wrong moment to lock up.
“Eyes on me,” I say, walking backward now, holding both her hands, towing her down the hall like a tug pulling a boat out of a harbor. “Don't look at anything but me, which shouldn’t be hard. I’m ridiculously good-looking,” I jest.
“Who told you that?” she quips back, shaky, but she's looking at me, and she's moving, and that's the whole thing.
The service hall lets out by the elevators exactly like our guy promised, and the elevators open onto the casino floor, and the casino floor is the loudest, brightest, most overstimulating square acre in the entire state. Ten thousand slot machines screaming little songs. Lights for miles. People shoulder to shoulder, drunk and delighted and paying attention to absolutely nothing but their own luck.
And it’s the safest place we’ve been all night.
I watch Jasmine figure it out the same second I do. Nobody up here is looking at us. Nobody up here is looking at anything but a wheel, a card, or a screen. The chaos she has spent her whole life avoiding is, for once, a blanket we can pull right over our heads.
“Oh, wow,” she says, over the noise. “Nobody can see us. There's too much to see.”
“Welcome to the one room in America designed so nobody clocks anybody.” I lace my fingers through hers and pull her into the river of people. “Walk like you lost forty bucks and you're okay about it.”
“I don’t know how to do that. I’d never be okay with that.”
I chuckle. “Just try to blend.”
We move through the slots and the noise and the cigarette smell. We’re just two more nobodies in a sea of nobodies, and somewhere in the middle of it, surrounded by every single thing she usually can't stand, she starts to laugh.
