He appears two minutes later with two beers he liberated from somewhere. We sit on a bench on the strip and watch the chaos of Vegas pass by. Drunk tourists. Bachelorette parties. Street performers. The whole ridiculous circus of a city built on the premise that you can outrun your problems if the lights are bright enough.
“Couldn’t do it,” I say after a while.
“The brunette?”
“Yeah.”
He nods, drinks his beer, and doesn’t push.
“She was right there. She was beautiful and she wanted me. But I felt nothing.” I stare at the beer bottle in my hands. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you.”
“Something is wrong. Because the old me would have gone back to that room without a second thought.”
“The old you didn’t know what real felt like.” He says it simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the easiest diagnosis in the world. “Now you do. And everything else feels fake.”
I take a long pull of beer and let that settle in my chest where it sits like a stone.
“She spoke to me the other day,” Evan says after a minute.
I look at him. “Who?”
“Collette. After practice. She wanted to know why you won’t talk to her.” He pauses. “She knows you blocked her.”
My jaw tightens. “What did you say?”
“The truth, that you’re hurt, that she broke you. That if she can’t give you what you want, she needs to leave you alone.” He takes a sip. “She asked me if she made a mistake.”
The world goes very still. “What did you say?”
“I told her to figure that out before she goes near you again.”
Evan’s a good friend. I stare at the strip, all those lights blurring together. She asked if she made a mistake. That means she’s not sure. That means somewhere underneath all the reasons she said no, there’s a part of her that wanted to say yes.Don’t do that. Don’t give yourself hope. She said no. She meant no.
“Don’t read into it,” Evan warns because he can read my mind.
“I’m not,” I snap back.
“You are. I can see it on your face.” He finishes his beer. “She hurt you. That’s real. Whatever she’s feeling right now doesn’t change that.”
He’s right. It doesn’t change anything. She said no. I need to accept that. I need to move on. I need to figure out how to be in the same room as her without wanting to either hold her or scream at her, and right now I can’t do either, so I’m choosing nothing.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I say.
“Yeah.”
We walk along the strip in silence. Vegas blazes around us, all that noise and light and excess, and I’ve never felt emptier. I think about Collette in that black dress on the dance floor. I think about the look on her face when she saw the bunnies pressed against me. I think about what Evan said. I get to my room, close the door, and stand in the dark for a long moment. The shower is hot, and I stay in it too long, letting the water beat down on my shoulders, trying to wash the night off me.The brunette’s perfume, the blonde’s hand on my thigh.All of it.None of it matters.None of them matter.
I climb into bed and close my eyes, and there she is in that fucking sinful black dress. The way it clung to her hips when she moved on that dance floor. Her head tipped back, throat exposed, laughing, arms above her head, body rolling to the bass. The way the lights caught her skin. The way she looked at me across the club, and I saw everything she’s trying to hide behind those hazel eyes.
Don’t.
My hand slides under the sheets.You shouldn’t.Because I’m weak and she’s the only thing that makes me feel anything anymore. I think about her in that dress. I think about peeling it off her shoulders the way I’ve imagined a hundred times. I think about her back against a wall, her legs around my waist, those hazel eyes looking up at me, her mouth open, my name on her lips. I think about the sounds she’d make, the ones I’ve only heard in my imagination, but I know, I fucking know, they’d be better than anything I’ve dreamed up. I think about her body underneath mine, warm and soft and finally, finally mine.
It doesn’t take long. It never does when it’s her. I come hard, her name stuck behind my teeth, biting down on it because saying it out loud in an empty hotel room would be the saddest thing I’ve ever done.
I clean up, stare at the ceiling, and hate myself a little. This is what you’ve become. Jerking off alone in a Vegas hotel room, thinking about a woman who doesn’t want you. I roll over and press my face into the pillow and wait for sleep to take me somewhere I don’t have to think about hazel eyes and black dresses.