Page 32 of One More Time
‘Right in this room?’ she teased.
‘I mean, I hope every once in a while, you’ll let me in. But I’ll crash with Mike and those guys. Or I have a buddy, Travis, who has a place in Bethany.’
‘Really?’ Lucy asked, like she was shocked or something.
‘Really,’ he replied, with the kind of certainty that can only be delivered by the very young.
Lucy shifted in his arms and wrapped her long, bare legs around him. She rested her arms on his shoulders and pressed their chests together.
‘Okay,’ she breathed, before canting her hips to press her heat against his growing erection.
‘Good,’ Nicky said against her lips. ‘Now, about this accomplished fingering …’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LUCY
Present
The glow of Las Vegas was a very different experience from the rooftop deck of the Lusso Resort. Even Lucy’s suite on the penthouse floor didn’t have quite the same perspective. Up where she and Nicky were, out in the desert air some five hundred feet up, Lucy could see the neatly marked squares of the streets branching off the Strip, exponentially dimmer than the casinos. Beyond that, the impenetrable dark of the desert lay on the horizon. Pitch-black and empty. It was a reminder that this freaky town was a kind of island, set apart from the rest of the world and its rules. Set apart from reality. It was a place founded on trickery and illusion. Nothing about it was real. Knowing this only compounded the dreamlike quality of the whole evening, drinking champagne while nestled in an oasis of potted palm trees and squishy sofas with Nicky Broome.
They had eaten dinner as the sun set over Las Vegas. It was a show to rival any in the casinos. The scant clouds all around them had turned shades of purple, orange, and yellow against the azure backdrop of the sky. They’d talked about the weather, and some movies they’d both seen. They’d brushed over politics, but decided it was too depressing. Then tried the music business before Nicky had declared it more depressing than politics.
Now, they were lit only by the ambient glow of the millions of bulbs below them in the city and enjoying each other in silence. There was no awkwardness at all, though. Just peace as the traffic and frenzy of the Las Vegas Strip became a barely audible hum under the music from a portable speaker Nicky had brought along.
‘Chloe’s dad, what’s his name?’ Nicky asked, reclining against one side of the enormous sofa they shared. He looked every bit like the figment of a dream, in his jeans and white T-shirt, his feet propped up on the rattan coffee table.
‘Brandon,’ Lucy replied flatly, wiggling herself deeper into her corner of the long sofa.
‘Tell me about him.’
Lucy groaned. Childishly joked, ‘Do I have to?’
‘No,’ Nicky answered. ‘But I’d like to know.’
Right. Okay. Big-girl pants. ‘We met our senior year of college. Dated for a long time. Got married late 2001. We were in New York. And after 9/11 things felt so—’ Lucy didn’t know exactly how to say it. ‘I mean, it’s all hindsight now, you know?’
Nicky nodded.
‘I see now that things wereunsettled. The world was unsettled. Everything felt so precarious. So unstable. In New York, especially. I think we were clinging on to each other for safety almost?’
‘I get it,’ Nicky said.
He couldn’t. Not really. So, she added, ‘Brandon was supposed to start a job at Cantor Fitzgerald in October of 2001. Do you remember—?’
‘Shit. Yeah, I remember.’
‘His entire department. The one he was supposed to start with was just …gone. Hundreds of people. People we knew. Guys he went to Columbia with. It was … hard.’ Hard really wasn’t the word. It was an understatement of massive proportions, but Lucy still didn’t really have the proper words to describe it, even all these years later.
Nicky sat quietly, listening. Waiting.
Lucy went on, ‘It was the trauma really, I think. That pushed us forward. I had misgivings about him before we were engaged.’ Lucy stopped, corrected herself. ‘No, not misgivings about him. Aboutus. About how we worked, but we just kept moving forward, but at an accelerated pace because of everything that happened.’
‘It’s understandable.’
‘Twenty-plus years later and all grown up, yeah. It is.’ Lucy took a sip of her champagne. ‘I was the one who saw it first, though. The one who realized. So, he was the one who got to be angry. It was …bitter.’
Nicky nodded his understanding.
