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Christmas
Last Year
Ethan
Whoever was doing that pounding needed to stop. They needed to stop or I might kill them. Oh God, I was going to have to kill the person flashing the searchlight in my room too. What the hell is going on?
I pried open one eyeball only to find the searchlight was just sunlight coming through a gauzy curtain and the pounding…the pounding was coming from inside my skull.
I closed my eyes. Hungover. I was hungover like I hadn’t been in years. Maybe ever.
What did I do last night?
What died in my mouth last night?
Yesterday was the last day of meetings with United Earth and they’d gone well. Really well. I remembered that. I stepped out of the building onto Bonanza Street, feeling like I wanted to celebrate. There was that dog…
Despite the risk of blindness my eyes flew open. This wasn’t my hotel room. Oh shit. Carefully, so I didn’t die of extreme dehydration, I rolled over to see a woman’s blond hair on a pink satin pillowcase next to mine. A pink satin pillowcase that matched the rest of the room decorated in pink and cream and gold.
Trixie. No. Not Trixie.
Shit. Something like that. She had that mean little dog.
Pixie? No, that would be ridiculous. No woman was named Pixie. Was the dog named Pixie?
But the blonde in bed next to me had been on Bonanza Street, too. Something happened with her dog and it got loose and was making a run for the street when I scooped it up.
And the damn thing bit me.
I looked down at my hand. There was a cut where the dog’s teeth had broken the skin.
She’d taken me for a drink to celebrate, which turned into lunch. She had to leave but we made plans to meet up again. She was going to show me the Vegas tourists never got to see.
Things got hazy after that.
God. She was beautiful, I remembered that. And easily the sexiest woman I’d ever met. And fun. The kind of fun that didn’t seem real. Not in my life. I remembered laughing. A lot.
She’d sparkled.
The fact that I couldn’t remember her name was deeply embarrassing. And not at all my style. But I did remember tequila shots, and tequila was my Achilles heel. Things went off the rails when I drank tequila.
Fuck, my brother would kill himself laughing at me. He will never know. I will take this night to my grave and die a happy man.
I just wished I could remember what happened after the tequila. I was naked under this cream velvet duvet. I lifted the edge of it and yep…she was naked too. And Jesus…her body. She was curve stacked on curve with long lean muscles in between. An athlete for sure. Despite the pounding in my brain, my body responded to hers. My body would have to be dead not to respond hers. Satin smooth skin, I remembered that. And she smelled like peaches. And we’d laughed.
And she’d done something with her tongue?
The alarm on my phone split the quiet and nearly split my skull.
Crap. My flight!
Carefully, so my brain didn’t run out of my ears and I didn’t throw up, I got out of the bed. I wasn’t in my hotel room at the Bellagio. It must be her apartment. She had one of those tables in her bedroom like women used to have in old movies. A place with a mirror and lights and trays full of creams and lotions and makeup. There was a dressing screen in the corner of the room with silky robes of all kinds and colors tossed over it. Under my feet there was a pink rug.
It was feminine and decadent and as far away from my life as I’d ever been.
I pulled on my clothes. My pants were damp from the knee down. What the hell?
And my tie had been cut in half. It was my best tie. Tom Ford in French silk, a small pattern of arrows printed on it. I loved that tie. Why would I cut it? I shoved it in my pocket.
My fist brushed against the sharp edge of a paper-type thing.
I pulled out a strip of four photos from a photo booth.
It was us, mystery girl and me. She wore a silver dress and her long blond hair up in a smooth sleek twist. In the first picture we were smiling. Real smiles. Not that I wasn’t a smiler; I walked around with my face sore from smiling all the damn time. But it was not what my mother called a Duchenne smile. She’d been big on those. Smiles that reached the eyes.
You smile all the time but none of them are real smiles, she used to say.
Whatever, stop thinking about Mom.
In the second picture we were kissing. Third really kissing and the fourth…well, that was indecent. But hot. I put the pictures back in my pocket and called an Uber. It took a second for the app to find my location.
