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“Why don’t you take Zach and Jay down to the Strip tonight. Maybe see if Michelle wants to go, too. And, uh, Christian, you too.”
After a beat, looking like he was trying to figure out Pop’s play, Eight Ball said, “Chris, no. I want you at the motel, making sure the rooms are right.”
“Okay, Prez,” Christian answered.
Eight Ball seemed to have figured Pop’s idea out. Lyra could only stand there and stare.
Another thing her father never did was plan her social calendar. She couldn’t work out what his game was—until she saw it. Pop was trying to get rid of the young guys. He didn’t know them, Christian was only a prospect, Zach and Jay were too young for him to respect as patches in an MC, and he apparently had something serious he wanted to talk about with the older Bulls.
He was normally completely forthright, and she would have expected him to simply say what he wanted straight out, but there was something going on tonight between her dad and the Bulls—and maybe Reed, too? Something that had him trying to be diplomatic.
She glanced over at Zach and his brother, both of whom wore similar expressions of confusion and dawning suspicion. When Zach met her eyes, though, his expression softened.
“Um, yeah. Sure,” she said, looking at Zach. “If you want?”
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~oOo~
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Laughlin was like Vegasif you bought it on Wish: definitely cheaper, recognizably similar and obviously nothing like it. Hotel-casino combos, lots of neon, palm trees and swimming pools, just like in Vegas. But everything considerably smaller, far fewer interesting people, mainly C-and D-list entertainment. Just generally duller in every way. But Laughlin was on the bank of the Colorado River, so they had the Riverwalk, which was nice. They’d had a riverboat casino, but the Colorado Belle had closed down not too long ago.
The Jessup boys didn’t seem to mind at all that Laughlin was the Wish version of Vegas. As Lyra drove down South Casino Drive, Zach and Jay gazed out the windows of her car, watching the lights go by.
“I thought you two came to Laughlin a lot,” Michelle said from behind Lyra.
When they’d picked her up, there had been a moment of weirdness about who was going to sit where. Michelle was used to riding shotgun, and Lyra felt a little strange about the composition of their group being a bit too much like a double date, so she would have probably preferred—or told herself she preferred—her friend to sit up front and the guys in back.
But she drove a ten-year-old Nissan Cube, which had great headroom but not wonderful legroom, and the brothers were pretty tall. Zach was noticeably bigger than Jay and almost as tall as Reed; Lyra guessed he was probably six-two or six-three.
So Zach sat up front with her, and Jay sat back with Michelle, and maybe they were on a double date.
“We do,” Jay said, “but we’re usually hanging around a bunch of crabby old bikers. Two hot chicks makes the whole thing shiny and new.” He hooked his arm over Michelle’s shoulders.
She shrugged him off at once. Jay was going to have to workmuchharder to be allowed to get that close to Lyra’s friend.
In just the few hours of their acquaintance, Lyra thought she’d figured out the Jessup boys pretty well, and she was glad she’d managed to snag the good one. They were both good looking, and there was enough similarity in their features and mannerisms to see the family link in them. They had some similarities of personality as well: Both extroverts, quick to smile, quick to start a conversation, quick to laugh, quick to tell a joke. Both flirts. But Jay was a smartass without the finely tuned sensor to know when a smartass comment was welcome and when it was not.
Zach flirted by trying to get to know Lyra—asking about books, chatting about cooking and offering help, throwing out aSchitt’s Creekquote to see if she could pick it up. Which, obviously, she could.
Jay, on the other hand, flirted by giving shit and pushing boundaries.
The group dynamic had fallen out the right way, though. The pairs worked the best way they could. Zach had definitely piqued Lyra’s interest, just by being himself. Michelle liked a project. She would put Jay through his paces before she decided whether he was trainable.
She’d have to decide pretty quick; the guys were in town only for the night. The Bulls were going to spend the night at the Days Inn south of the Strip. They planned to be on the road in the morning, headed back to Tulsa.
With a few drunken exceptions, Lyra wasn’t usually a one-night-stand kind of woman, but she thought she might make an exception, drunken or otherwise, for the very appealing biker riding shotgun in her car his brother had called a ‘nerdy chick mobile.’
“Hey, what about the Aquarius?” Jay asked as they passed that big, animated blue neon sign. “I love that one.”
Michelle made a loud, disgusted groan.
Laughing, Lyra translated. “Michelle’s a blackjack dealer there. You’re lucky she’ll go to any casino on her off time. Definitely not the one she works at. Dealers can’t gamble where they work.”
In the rearview, Lyra saw Jay lean close to Michelle and say something too quietly to traverse the distance from back to front. Whatever he said, though, made her friend roll her eyes and push him away.
He was going to have to bring his A game, and so far he was not.
