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Reeve would know. He lived in a hole for far too long.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, but the words fell flat even on my own ears.
“If you were fine, you’d have blown out of this town a week ago,” Reeve said, and we all knew he wasn’t wrong. “You’re putting down roots because you want your people close. Because you feel like shit. Well, we’re here. Tell us what’s going on. Let us help you stop feeling like shit.”
A big part of me didn’t want to tell them, didn’t want to admit to my little failures once again. But when Cy put an arm around me, the words just burst out, each of them tumbling over one another to try to get out first.
“So, now you see why I am in a bed, dealing with my mood. Because there is nothing I can do about this. I screwed up. I can’t fix it. So I just have to deal with the aftermath.”
“Is it written somewhere that you have to deal with it in bed?” Cyrus asked.
“I want to be here.”
“Yeah, well, give the mattress some time to miss you,” Cyrus said, reaching into his pocket, producing a small black and gold gambling chip.
“What’s this?” I asked, seeing an address on it.
“It’s an invitation. And I damn near had to promise my next child to get it. So you are going to take it, you are going to get dolled up, and you are going to go use it. Get your ass out of bed for a while. You’re not going to feel any better if you lie around endlessly.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I had to admit, the more I stayed in bed, the more I wanted to, the further away motivation got.
I thought I just needed to rest, to sort through my feelings, to come to terms with what had happened.
I guess that was the tricky thing with sadness. It let you think you could outsmart it. Then it kept pulling you deeper and deeper. Until there was no motivation left to pull yourself back out of it.
I’d seen Reeve go through it.
And the only thing that got him out was us, being there for him, demanding he try, forcing his hand at times when he couldn’t find the will to do it himself.
Slowly, surely, he got there; he started to rebuild his life.
If he could do it, with a much more horrific situation than mine, then I could do it too.
“I like gambling,” I said, running my finger over the chip, trying not to remember Fenway’s loud assertions that I was cheating when I kept beating him.
“I imagine it is even more fun when it is underground and illegal,” Cyrus observed, clearly never having been there himself, despite being part of a big criminal empire in Navesink Bank.
“I’m happy to stay here in bed.”
“Yeah, well, too fucking bad, kid,” Reeve said, shaking his head.
Reeve never pulled the big brother card, so the fact that he was doing it now was telling. All the times I’d screwed up, all the times I did things he didn’t approve of, he’d always kept his mouth shut.
He wasn’t going to let me stay in this bed.
And maybe he was right. It was toxic. Sure, it felt like there was something gouged out of me with a hot poker. But it had been weeks. Staying in bed wasn’t helping. It was time to try something else.
“Okay,” I agreed, nodding. “I’ll go gamble. Are you both coming?”
“Neither of us are coming,” Cyrus told me. “It was hard enough to get one chip. We’re connected, but, apparently, you need to be a whole other kind of connected in this town to be invited to Eamon Awan’s casino. That address on the chip will bring you to a street somewhere where one of Awan’s men will be. You and whoever else is there will be blindfolded and loaded into a stretch. They’ll drive you around, then lead you down into some basement somewhere. Then you get to take off the mask. And have a good old time. They will deliver you back to that spot later, or to your house. Or, in this case, Raven’s house.”
“How the hell did you guys find out about this?”
“Gotta love our incestuous little town,” Cyrus said. “I heard it from someone who heard about it from someone who has been there. But I have heard from reliable sources that it was safe and they had a lot of fun. We wouldn’t send you if we thought it was seedy. But we figure it is just crazy enough to pique your interest. Shaking it up might be good, y’know? I hate seeing you like this,” Cyrus said, nudging me with his shoulder.
“This isn’t you,” Reeve agreed. “I get that shit went down and you are feeling it, but don’t let it change who you are—”
