Page 43 of Full Tilt
“I wasn’t on the streets. I followed Chett, the boyfriend my parents caught me with. He told me he wanted to marry me, so I tagged along as he followed one get-rich-quick scheme after another. I followed him here. He was running out of money, so he had this great idea I could be a model.” She made air quotes around the word. “I shut that shit down immediately.”
“Good.” My hands closed into fists, and I jammed them into my pockets.
“But once I told Chett I wasn’t going to cooperate, it was all downhill. I was underage. I couldn’t drink, gamble, or even get into an eighteen-and-up club. He got tired of me real quick. Dropped me on my ass when he met someone else. Some showgirl.”
“What did you do?”
“I hitched back to California, thinking I’d try again with my parents. Go back to school. I did really well in school, actually.”
“I believe it,” I said.
Kacey smiled gratefully. “I made it as far as Los Angeles. I was staying at the YMCA and met Lola. She was nineteen, and in the same sinking boat as me. She’d just scraped enough money together waiting tables to get a cheap studio apartment and let me crash with her. When I turned eighteen, I got a job at the same restaurant, and we spent off days busking in parks. I sang and played my guitar while Lola played drums. A few months later, we found a want ad from a gal who wanted to put a band together, and the rest is history.” She held up her hands. “And that is why, to this day, I’ve never stepped foot in a casino.”
I nodded absently, my emotions roiled into a frothy rage at the men in Kacey’s life who had failed her so fucking badly. “What happened to Chett?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” She said it calmly enough, but I’d learned by now that everything Kacey felt was revealed in her large, luminous eyes. She cared about everything, passionately.
She goes all the way up to eleven.
That thought helped to quell the anger that was chewing at my gut.
“Feel that?” Kacey asked. “That’s the night dying a slow and painful death thanks to my sob story.”
“I’m sorry I pried.”
She waved my apology away. “I don’t mind. I like talking to you. I don’t normally talk about my life. Ever. Then it gets bottled up and I do something stupid like call my parents. I get rejected, rejection makes me drink myself into a stupor, I start a riot in agreen room and next thing I know, I’m waking up on my limo driver’s couch.”
“A vicious cycle.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kacey said. “The couch part wasn’t so bad.”
A short silence descended. Despite every admonishment to keep to my schedule and not get close to this girl who was leaving in two days, I felt myself leaning in, wanting to hold up the pain she’d trusted me with. Wanting to give her something in return.
“Do you want to come to the glass studio tomorrow?” I asked. “You could see how it all works, or maybe watch me make something…”
I felt the back of my neck redden. I sounded completely arrogant and totally boring at the same time. As if I’d asked her to watch me polish my coin collection.
But then Kacey clapped her hands together. “Are you kidding? I’d love to.”
“Really?”
She used her index finger to lift one of her dark brows in an arch. “Really.”
I leaned back, laughing harder than I had in months. Rusty gears inside me creaked from lack of use, and my embarrassment faded to nothing.
“I’ve been dying to see how you make that beautiful glass,” Kacey said. “I was beginning to think it was for show, Fletcher. You ordered them from Etsy and passed them off as yours to impress the chicks.”
“I’m legit, I swear.”
Her laugh echoed across the pond and within it, I heard traces of a beautiful singing voice. She started to say something else when music filled the plaza in front of the Bellagio: the haunting flute introduction of “My Heart Will Go On.”
Kacey grabbed my arm. “Is that the Titanic song? Oh my God, it is. Why are they…?” Her words trailed away as Celine Dion’s voice rose up and the Bellagio fountains began their show.
Jets of water arced up from the pond, swaying in time. They moved gently at first, almost shyly, like couples on a first date, touching and then collapsing over the expanse of water. Blue light illuminated them from below. As the song gathered momentum, more jets rose higher and crashed harder, creating clouds of mist. The colors changed to red, to pale purple, and then silvery white. The song hit its crescendo and Kacey’s grip on my arm tightened. Her eyes grew soft, and she watched the water dance, but I could look nowhere but at her. The show was at my periphery, a backdrop to her.
The song mellowed to its final notes, and the tall jets of water were graceful arcs again, crossing each other in pairs, like dancers or lovers, then slipping beneath the surface as the song ended.
Kacey sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting that.” She looked up at me. “It was beautiful.”
