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  Even as he turned venomous, my heart skittered up the wall of my chest. When was the last time a man had looked at me so intensely, as if he saw way more than I’d allowed him to see?

  More to the point — had I gotten Tate all wrong?

  CHAPTER 4

  Tate

  KIKI’S STORY about her father set me back on my heels.

  She couldn’t have known about my dad. Nobody did. It was the town secret — that he’d built himself a palace to get lost in, a place where no one could stop him, where he had a limitless supply of chips to toss on any given night.

  Kiki couldn’t have known.

  Didn’t make it hurt any less.

  I stared harder at her, trying to get a sense of this complex young woman before me.

  She was every shade I knew a human could be. Her hair flamed red around her shoulders, a color that looked to be natural, not out of a bottle, while her eyes were an early spring grass green, pale but defined. Her lips were pink, the lipstick slightly feathering around the edges, and her lashes were rimmed in black. The universe had used the whole palette on Kiki, even down to the white — her skin was so pale it was almost incandescent, save for the little brown freckles which covered her arms and the bridge of her nose.

  I met gorgeous girls all the time. In fact, I usually just sat back, and let them meet me. They introduced themselves everywhere I went, often with a wink or an air kiss, each with longer legs and firmer tits than the last. Categorizing them had become too easy. There were blondes with blue eyes, brunettes with brown ones, women of every race and background. All fell somewhere into a neat little pile in my head based on feature breakdown. There was no time — or point — in defining them by personality. When somebody’s in your life just long enough for a quick fuck, you don’t exactly get their résumé and family history.

  But Kiki seemed to defy grouping across the board. My mind raced, trying to place her to no avail. She was so… natural. And mad! Women were never mad at me. Or if they were, they did an excellent job hiding it. Let’s put it this way — if they were mad, I’d never cared to consider it. I just discarded that one and moved on to the next.

  Do I sound like a cad? It’s probably because I am. In fairness, it doesn’t bring me much pleasure, so it’s a rather empty transaction all around.

  For some reason, though, Kiki felt like a slug across the face, down the throat, and right into the heart. Could she be…

  No, you moron, my brain quickly corrected. You’re mad because, for one, the dad shit, but more importantly, two, because your employee is being insolent. Fix it.

  Right, right, that was the answer. Her insolence, that’s what was getting me so riled up. There was only one way to stop feeling the entire breadth of my emotional bandwidth, and that was to put Kiki back in her place.

  “You can’t talk like that,” I told her, my voice stern.

  She raised a beautiful eyebrow, confused. “Of all the shit I just said, you’re mad because I… told you the truth about my family and my history at Dazzlers? I don’t get it.”

  Okay, she made a fair point, but I couldn’t back down. It would make me look weak.

  “No, no, I — was just letting you shake that stuff out of your system. Now that you seem to have gotten out the worst of your insults, I’ll assign you a punishment accordingly.”

  Jesus, why was I talking like Jack? At least my excuse made a little bit of sense. It did, right? You can tell me if it didn’t.

  Kiki wasn’t buying it, but seemed to be done with the sparring. “Fine,” she sighed. “Just fire me.”

  “No! Ahem. I mean… no. Firing you won’t be necessary. I’ll…” I trailed off, embarrassed by both my neediness and my lack of resolve.

  “Yeah?”

  I thought for a moment, then with a smile, finished, “As punishment, you’ll do an extra shift.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Tonight. You’ll do an extra shift for the in-house show.”

  Kiki’s eyes widened and then narrowed like a camera lens adjusting for focus.

  “I’ve been working all day,” she countered. “And the show has its own servers. I don’t wanna step on anyone’s toes. At the risk of sealing my own sentence, why don’t you just have me take out the gross garbage tonight or something? It’d make more sense.”

  Well, obviously she was correct. I was just grasping at straws. Not like I’d ever done this “managing” thing before. That was Jack’s gig. My job was signing the papers and not blinking twice at quarterly reports, no matter how red-lined they were.

  I knew from my father, though, that appearing indecisive in front of an employee was a critical error. You had to take a firm stance, even if it was the wrong one, and let the cards fall where they may. In retrospect, I could see that perhaps he had just been applying his theories of gambling to business management, but it had gotten him far enough that I’d do well to follow suit.

  “I don’t have the costume for the in-house show,” she said, making one last bid for reprieve. “It’s a different outfit.”

  But I’d made up my mind. “Jack will grab you the correct one. Size, I don’t know, two?”

  Her lips pressed together, tucking her anger back inside. “Yeah.”

  “Jack, grab that.”

  My manager nodded and scampered off into the bowels of the casino, leaving me and Kiki alone. Well, if you don’t count the hundreds of other patrons encircling us, pinballing from one game to the next with such randomness that I wondered if, from an eagle’s eye view, one might deduce a pattern in their drunken wanderings.

  I offered her some clemency. “You can go home, nap, and change, after this shift.”

  “You’re talking two eight-hour shifts. A nap’s not gonna fix that.”

  I nearly apologized, then remembered my father’s lessons. Men don’t say sorry, he’d told me. They say it won’t happen again.

  “I could’ve fired you, the way you were talking back there,” I reminded her, as if expecting some kind of prize for my leniency.

  “Technically, sure. But I’m your best waitress. Only been employed a little while, but I know this place better than anyone. Definitely better than you.”

  “That’s a low bar,” I muttered. “And if I have to lose some talent to make a point, I’ll do it. Pass that on to the other waitresses. My father would have fired you in a heartbeat.”

  She tilted her head back, getting a better look at me. “Your dad doesn’t run this place anymore. You do. You can be a different kind of boss, Tate.”

  Yeah, sure, if I knew how. No, it was wiser to keep things as they were, to not raise or lower the meniscus. Stasis is the ally of business. Alluding to my father had caused the hairs on my arm to stick up straight, as if on high alert. It wasn’t like he was coming back from the dead or anything, but even mentioning him aloud felt dangerous. Could ghosts still call you a disappointment?

  “Your next shift starts in a few hours,” I said at last, my throat tightening. “I suggest you finish this one out and then go home.”

  We held each other’s gaze, and despite the hatred in her eyes, I couldn’t help but feel a teensy bit turned on. She looked at me like I was a speck of dust, unformed and incoherent. And yet, even then I felt my cock hardening, growing firmer with every second of time that lapsed between us.

  What was this minx doing to me?

  And how could I make it stop?

  Just as I was deciding whether to end the staring contest by propositioning her or walking away — there didn’t seem to be a middle ground — Jack returned with some sequined fabric flung across his arms.

  “Here,” he said, shoving it into the small space between Kiki and me. “Take your costume.”

  Kiki lifted the outfit from his hands, wrapping it in her own, without ever taking her eyes off me.

  “I’ll see you, Tate,” she said, almost like a warning.

  Jack scoffed. “Get back to work.”

  She turned on a heel, hair whip
ping behind her like a flame, and was gone, subsumed in the flickers of the floor lights.

  “You should have fired her,” Jack said immediately, with a reprimanding tsk. “People can’t talk to you like that. It’s outrageous!”

  “Oh, lay off,” I growled, full to brimming with his antics.

  “Right, sir.” his voice trembled.

  Jack’s instant turn of tone threw Kiki into sharp relief. Whereas he flattened his ears the moment I indicated annoyance, she held her ground. It was a new sensation, being questioned. The experience made me feel… strangely alive, I suppose, like the window of my life had just been pried open a touch more by insistent hands. Sure, the crack might let bugs in, but with the bugs came a cool, refreshing breeze.

  Kiki roared in my head, her image swirling around my cortex and lodging in my cerebrum. I had the unsettling feeling that it would take quite the effort to displace her.

  In an effort to move past the incident, I turned back to Jack with newfound resolve.

  “What’s next?”

  He beamed, delighted that I’d deigned to show an interest in my own casino.

  “Come with me, sir.”

  He gestured with a pudgy hand to follow him, and we began to promenade once more through the lobby, past twirling machines promising grand jackpots, restaurants with a whole host of cuisines, all of their foreign spices toned down to make the guests feel cultured, but not in any way challenged, by the food they called “ethnic.”

  Disgust surged through me. Why the fuck was I providing a safe haven for these close-minded fools? They could eat a damn spice every now and then. Worst it would do was make ‘em sweat, and lord knew they did that anyway, each slicker than the last.

  Jack was beating a fast clip through the casino, short legs whirring beneath him, vaguely reminiscent of a sitcom robot butler. I was surprised to see him move so fast, but relieved for a chance to stretch my muscles. My whole body had tightened into one loaded spring in Kiki’s presence. Come to think of it, maybe it was just that little skirt, and maybe it had been one, ah, specific muscle that had been tense.

  We came to a private, gilded elevator where a green-suited worker pressed the button for us, his gloved finger a key to a vast network that none but the chosen few ever got to see. Jack and I stepped inside the box, adorned with outlandish wallpaper and a small chandelier, and the worker joined us.

  “Which floor?”

  Jack replied, “Fortieth.”

  “What’s up there?” I asked, struggling to remember what was on the fortieth besides some offices, maybe an ice machine.

  He flicked his eyes meaningfully to the man standing next to us, but I didn’t get it.

  “Jack?”

  The elevator dinged, and we exited, Jack still striding ahead of me.

  “Jack!”

  We took a right, then another right and suddenly, I knew exactly where we were going.

  “You can’t be serious,” I groaned.

  “’Fraid so, sir.”

  “You need to warn me about these meetings so I can miss them.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m not welcome to represent you at such, ah, gatherings. Otherwise, of course, needless to say, I’d take it off your plate.”

  I waved away this assertion as Jack deposited me in front of what looked to be a large grandfather clock, the kind that were positioned throughout the hotel. I suppose my father had thought that decorating with objects that signaled wealth in the early twentieth century was classy. In point of fact, it’s likely he was just bequeathed these ideals by his own father.

  “Good luck, sir,” Jack said with a little bow — really, that was a bridge too far — and bustled away.

  With a wave of premonitory regret, I grabbed the handle of the clock’s oak frame and tugged it open. My hand clutched the dangling bronze orb, giving it a swift pull.

  A door opened within the clock, and I stepped through it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kiki

  I THREW OPEN the door hard enough that the knob bounced off the wall. The small, black, multi-layered scuff mark on the eggshell paint attested to the fact that this was not the first time I’d slammed a door, or even that door.

  How dare Tate! How dare he.

  My rage was a nimbus cloud, full to bursting, drops starting to dew and splatter on such innocent victims as, say, my wall.

  But I couldn’t help myself. Thanks to Tate and his little smirk, I was gonna be pulling a double shift for the second time this week, and in the strip show no less. Yeah, he’d conveniently foregone the use of that phrase, “strip show.” Every girl on the floor knew that’s what it was. Dazzlers could call it an “alluring acrobatic spectacle” as much as they liked. Far as I know, normal acrobatic shows don’t usually involve tits being out.

  Of course, it’s not as though he’d asked me to strip. But the costume — it would’ve been easier to just get on stage. At least that way I would make a few more tips.

  I hated him. Sure, I’d also maybe goaded him just a tiny bit. And, yes, it’s possible I still kind of wanted to fuck him senseless. Listen, it’s complicated!

  I flung my bag down on the worn sofa, storming across the dusty oatmeal carpet to my room. Said dusty carpet would have to wait. Today was supposed to be my time for doing the housework. It’d have to be put off another week, when I finally had some free time. There was no world in which Dad would do it, so that was out of the question. Oh well. A few more days of dirty dishes and floating allergens wouldn’t kill anyone.

  In theory, this would’ve been a good time to, as Tate suggested, catch a few z’s — hunker down into my pillow, wrap the sheets around me like a cocoon, and try to forget that this was my life.

  But there was no way sleep would find me, not when I was this pissed. Cruel, cruel sleep — never quite there when you want her, like a relative who gives you money when she drops in but whose schedule is off due to old age or indifference.

  Instead, I flung myself onto the bed and pulled my journal out from beneath a lumpy pillow.

  My bedroom hadn’t changed much since I was a teenager, probably because there’d been no time or money for redecorating. The moment I graduated high school, I went to work full time as a server for a restaurant downtown, where we were responsible for memorizing a three-page wine list, daily specials, and the names for a hundred types of dietary preferences and allergies. The tips were good, but there were better jobs in Vegas. Three years had flown by, I’d turned twenty-one, and six months later, here we are. Maybe the window for change had just… slipped by or shut quietly forever.

  The walls were covered in an eclectic variety of posters and prints — local bands, one-off Vegas shows, retirement home paint-by-numbers art pieces. All had been donated to me through friends or work, or picked up on the side of a street corner. I like to think it looked homey, though I’m not fooling myself — practically speaking, the decorations probably gave the room a schizophrenic air.

  The bedspread and matching pillows were cream with tiny red roses, and well over a decade out of style. A fuzzy pink lamp stood on the cheap nightstand, and one bookshelf was lined with my assigned reading from high school. I used to be a ferocious reader, but since graduation, I’d slacked on the habit, reading only when I had a few minutes here and there. For a moment, I tried to remember the last time I’d actual spent more than half an hour reading. The fact that I knew it was more than two weeks earlier added to my rage against Tate, Dazzlers, et cetera. That was part of the Washington dream — mountains and mountains of books, and the time to write cramped notes and ideas in their margins.

  With a sigh, I settled against my headboard and grabbed a pen from next to the lamp. Boy, was my diary gonna get a rant today.

  I began, “TATE IS AN ASSHOLE.”

  I pondered this for a moment, and then wrote, “And hot. But mostly, an asshole.”

  As I was gearing up for a third sentence in what was sure to be another masterpiece, there was a noise from the living ro
om, a gentle banging and grunting.

  Could Dad be home already?

  No, that wasn’t possible. He ran on a pretty strict schedule — tables ‘til five in the morning, at which time he came home and collapsed until around noon, when according to him, “the game got good again.” He ate most of his meals at the casino, if he ate at all, or heated up frozen meals I’d purchased. There wasn’t much variance to these nightly ambulations. We’d operated on roughly the same schedule since I was seventeen and Mom walked out of our lives.

  “Dad?” I called.

  No answer.

  Great. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. That had been a nice two minutes of rest. I quickly shimmied out of my uniform and into some sweats. I know it’s silly, given that my dad has seen thousands of Dazzlers cocktail waitresses over the years and has been in the casino during my shifts for the last six months, but the thought of him looking at me, in our home, wearing that tacky, revealing thing… it just turned my stomach.

  Once in my pajamas, I re-entered the living room with caution, half-expecting to find him bleeding out on the floor. I wasn’t sure what else, besides a medical emergency, could get him home this early.

  Instead, I found him sitting up in his brown leather recliner, running a nervous finger over his damp lips.

  My father had been a strong man once. He was six-three and built like a tank, wide across with bulging arms and strapping legs. He rotated through positions at Dazzlers, but usually did some version of security work. When I was young, he would occasionally come home with a black eye from some uppity kid in line for the club. His hair had gone from a dark brown to shocking white in the course of just a few years, and his eyes, once chocolate, were now so rimmed with red it was hard to see any other shades.