celebration for the four-year-old daughter of a blackjack dealer who’d received the tip of a lifetime two weeks ago and decided to invest part of it in his daughter’s dream party. It’s possible I’m not thinking straight.
“Is he nice?”
Carlie pokes me in the stomach. “Trust me. You want fun, not nice.”
Says she. “Why can’t he be both? You guys said you could find me a bad boy with a heart of gold.”
“We lied for a good cause. It would be like winning the lottery. Don’t raise the bar impossibly high for Jack.”
“I know nice guys,” Samantha announces. Since she’s been married and divorced twice and she’s not even thirty, I’m skeptical. Her first impressions don’t seem to be borne out in the long run.
Carlie reaches for the phone. “Name one who can still make your panties wet just by walking into the room. Evie needs chemistry. Not a nap.”
See? She agrees with me. Nice guys are more endangered than the rhino these days.
Samantha looks blank. The way she stares down into the water, you’d think she’s expecting a name to float to the top.
Shit. Surely one of us knows a guy who’s both dating material and nice. Or...maybe not. Maybe finding Mr. Nice is like going to the zoo and hoping to spot a unicorn. Fuck the polar bears—we want mythical creatures.
Samantha waves her phone at me. “I’m texting Jack right now. We can go out next weekend.”
If today is Saturday, that gives me at least six nights to find my libido. It has to be here somewhere.
Samantha doesn’t look up from her phone. “And don’t tell me that you’re not free. Our clientele are three to eight years of age. They do not host birthday parties after 10:00 p.m. Ergo, you’re free and clear for drinks. There’s no excuse to not go out and have fun. Let loose and forget about your responsibilities for a few hours.”
Fun.
A simple, three-letter word.
I’d like to pretend I can’t remember the last time I had fun because I work so hard and am such an astute businesswoman.
It wouldn’t be true. I know exactly when I last cut loose, went out and had a few, did some dancing and kissed a boy. I was seventeen and in high school.
Unfortunately, I was also supposed to be at home, watching Rocker while our dad was out taking care of some “business” for his MC. Sucks to be a teenager stuck with babysitting duty when everyone else is out partying. My sneak exit through the window had been awesome up until the moment I returned and discovered our house surrounded by the blue-and-whites. Dear old dad got busted running arms, and I got busted as a deadbeat who’d put having a good time ahead of looking out for her little brother.
That was on me.
And yeah, I know that the ten years that have passed since that night should count for something. That Rocker doesn’t blame me for the six months of foster homes he’d survived before I’d turned eighteen and convinced the judge to let him live with me. Six months in which I’d turned my life around, found a job and done everything right.
Rocker and I don’t talk about our dad or that night everything changed. Once a month, we send a check to the state prison where dear old dad is serving a twenty-five-to-fifty-year sentence, and he sends back a postcard with a scrawled thanks. He also sends the occasional Christmas and birthday card. Mostly, Rocker and I pretend our childhood is a big happy blank. Nothing to write home or talk about—just something we got through on our way to being reasonably happy, productive adults.
At least, that’s what I do. I’m a business owner and halfway to a degree in finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I have a mortgage, a minuscule retirement account and enough shit that I had to rent a medium-sized U-Haul when I moved into my new house. It’s wonderful and scary at the same time—I’m so close to finally getting us out of the series of bad neighborhoods and loser streets we’ve lived on all our life and I should be celebrating. I should be able to go out on a Friday night and cut loose for the space of a song or two. And yet I’m so tired that I just want to crawl into bed and sleep instead.
“Jack says he’d love to meet you,” Samantha announces triumphantly.
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll do it.”
While Samantha texts an opus to Jack and Carlie cackles gleefully next to her, I pack us up. I need to double-check the site, too, and make sure no one’s leaving anything behind. I’m busy tying up our loose ends when I hear the small plop from the lake followed by Carlie’s giggle and Samantha’s curse. Yeah. Guess we’ll be stopping by the Apple store, too.
Rev
I’M NO SUPERHERO. Definitely no Prince Charming. Your first clue is my ride. I’m all about the Harley Davidson—not a fucking white horse in sight. The Hard Riders club president must have ignored that memo when he put me in charge of today’s mission, because the woman in front of 837 Second Street is dressed exactly like a princess, right down to the tiara. Although the diamonds have to be fake, like so many things in Vegas, the crown still sparkles in the setting sun. A disorganized mob of small girls in rainbow-colored dresses surrounds her, talking and shrieking in an ungodly racket. Fucking looks like a rainbow exploded everywhere and rained glitter.
“Goddamn,” Vik announces loud enough to be heard over the pipe’s roar as he pulls his bike into the curb. I kill my engine and follow, both of us focused on the commotion happening on the lawn of the run-down rental. The lawn isn’t much to look at—the Nevada sun has cooked the grass to a crispy brown and the place hasn’t had a paint job in decades. Two bedrooms, one bath, based on the visible square footage, but gone to seed like a hooker working the nearby Strip, still open for business even though she won’t command top dollar. The neighborhood hosts mostly working class, the usual mix of single moms and family units where cheap rentals are always in demand. The place squats on the edge of Hard Rider MC territory, and it might be time to expand our holdings. Claim this block, make it ours, put it back to rights.
I fucking love that idea.
Princess sticks out. The neighbors hanging over the chain link watching the show have dressed down for the heat because East Las Vegas in August is hotter than any armpit of hell I’ve visited as a US Navy SEAL. Today’s audience wears mainly shorts and tank tops. Princess, on the other hand, sports a puffy yellow dress made out of some kind of fluffy shit. The fabric bells out revealing a really nice pair of legs as she gets into it with...a dragon? The thing’s about ten feet tall, bright purple, and has a tail with floppy cloth spikes on it. Princess retrieves a ginormous plastic sword from somewhere and proceeds to attack. While I applaud the enthusiasm that makes her tits bounce, she doesn’t know the first thing about fighting.
Vik groans. Brother’s a fucking drama queen. “I could have taken that dragon in the first twenty seconds.”
As the dragon collapses in mock death on the crap lawn, Princess whirls, declaiming something that wins applause from her host of mini-me’s. I can’t see her face, which is a pity, because her back’s damn spectacular. Soft, honey-colored curls are piled up on top of her head, kinda pinned in place by the tiara, and the
