Page 36 of What Happens in Vegas..
Mary leans into me again. “You may have just met him, but you already look at him like you love him. Go. I can stay here for Rodney to come to fix the door. He’s a nice old man. I know he’s not going to hurt me. I open tomorrow anyway, I’ll need to be up in the next six hours. It’ll be fine.”
I shake my head more. “One, you’re not going in tomorrow. I’m going to text Holly now to tell her what happened. She can get someone else to open. Two, you might think you’re okay now, but I don’t want to leave you alone.”
Lex runs a hand over his hair as he takes a seat at the small table. “I don’t mean to pry on your conversation, but I can stay here with her while he’s fixing the door and to mid-morning tomorrow if you have somewhere you need to be. I know a twenty-four-hour pizza joint near here that delivers and is extra good. And you’re welcome to use my Netflix login if you have a smart TV. I swear I won’t leave this chair except for the bathroom.” He holds a hand over his chest.
Knox gets off the phone and comes over. He looks at me. “It’s up to you girls. I trust Lex with my life, and he knows if he pulls anything at all, I would be the first one to have his balls in a vice.” Knox clamps his hand onto Lex’s shoulder.
I stare at Lex. I trust Knox. He was my dad’s best friend and he’s done more for me in the past couple of days than a lot of people have done in my entire life. If he trusts this man not to do anything to Mary, then I trust him. I also don’t get a bad vibe off Lex at all. I’ve been around a lot of men. Especially with working for the Bellagio, and you get to where you can tell the good old men from the creeps, and he seems good.
I lean over to Mary and cup my hand around my mouth to whisper in her ear. “Do you want to stay here with him? Answer me honestly. Knox is hot, but you’re my best friend.”
She looks at me. “That’s the first time you’ve called me your best friend.”
My cheeks flush.
She nods. “And I’ll sleep with a knife under my pillow.”
Knox nods. “Good choice. But I have the strictest confidence that he will be on his best behavior.”
Mary nudges me. “Go. I’ll be okay.”
I stand. I feel okay leaving her knowing she won’t be alone, and if Lex does anything we’ll know who it was.
Chapter Eighteen
Carissa
After makingMary swear that she would call me if she needed me for anything, even if it was something as small as a hug, I grab some clothes that I’ll want to change into later and head upstairs with Knox. I glance at him as we’re riding up in the elevator. “Did you guys choose to be lawyers because you could work together, or was there some other reason behind it? I mean, there are lots of careers where two friends could go into business together.”
His hand moves to my lower back and he gently rubs at it. “You know, I’m not sure. When we met around ten, we’d wanted to be rockstar’s. Have a punk band and tour the world. So I don’t think being lawyers was our first pick. I think in the end we wanted a career that could provide us with things that we didn’t have in our childhoods, like money. And there are only so many sure-fire careers that can do that. Being a surgeon is one, another is becoming an astronaut. I mean, you could be a poor lawyer, but only if you choose to be.”
The elevator dings and we step into his dark apartment. I’ve yet to see the kitchen or the three other rooms he has up here, but considering it’s the size of a large house, it’s not surprising. He pulls me over to his black L-shape sofa and has me sit. “I’m going to grab us some sandwiches that are premade, stay here. Would you like something to drink? I have wine coolers, coffee, water, and orange juice.”
After the night I’ve had? hell, week. Getting buzzed doesn’t sound half bad. “A wine cooler, please, but be warned, my tolerance is low. So don’t give me more than two unless you want me falling asleep right here.”
He chuckles as he walks off. “Noted. With the subs I have, the bread should keep you from getting too far gone.”
Not even two minutes later, he comes back with an arm full of drinks, plastic-wrapped subs and a bag of potato chips.
I take a wine cooler and sandwich from him. Pleased to see that it’s turkey. I prefer it over ham but will never turn down food if it’s offered. “Thank you. So what about the other options? You didn’t want to be a surgeon or an astronaut?”
He sits on the couch and angles his body toward me. “Well, the likelihood of me being able to work with your dad if we became surgeons was small. Oftentimes after med school, doctors go in all sorts of directions. We could’ve opened some kind of practice together, but honestly, your dad hated the sight of blood. So he pretty much said no to that right away when I brought it up. I didn’t have an issue with it, but the thought of someone’s life literally being in my hands was a bit too much pressure. As for being an astronaut, neither of us wanted to be as healthy as you need to be to even come close to making the cut. Nor did we know our family histories. They like to know that kind of thing for future possible diseases that could hit and affect your health. In the end, lawyers won out as an easy option and we could still help people in the process.”
I unwrap my sandwich. “I’ve never given a career much thought. I mean, they had those tests in school where they would ask you all sorts of things to narrow down your interests. I think at one point I came back as a chef because I’d been interested in cooking, but that’s not something I want to do now. I’ve kind of always been working since I was fifteen. I’ve always been doing something to make money. At first it was so I could eat more than once a day, then I wanted to get a bus ticket so I could take a Greyhound to Phoenix to find my mother, and then I wanted to come here. It all took money, and I didn’t have time to go through schooling to become something. I never saw it as an option.”
He frowns as he finishes chewing a bite of his sandwich. “You had to go looking for your mother? She didn’t make an effort to be in your life at all?”
I shake my head. “Nope. I think I was four when she dropped me off with my grandparents. She said she was going to be gone a week to get herself cleaned up and then she would be back for me. In my kid head I thought it meant she had to go off for a really long bath. Well, a week turned into months, which in turn, turned into years.”
I play with the gold foil of the wine cooler before opening it. Taking a sip of the sweet peach flavor is nice. “My grandparents were too old to chase after a toddler, so I then got shipped around to my aunts and uncles. Even some cousins. They kind of played a game of hot potato with my life. Every other week it was a new person. They would fight when they didn’t want to take me.”
I sigh. “I got into the party scene, started drinking at thirteen. Hanging out with kids way too old for me. I got brought home by the cops more than once, but they never did anything to look into why I was acting out. Then I got shipped off to military school. Where I stayed from ages thirteen to fifteen until I ran away. I couch surfed with kids I would meet on the street. Got odd jobs here and there. When I made enough to go find my mother, I found her in a crack den. Strung out and selling herself for not money, but more drugs. She wasn’t happy to see me.” I pause and shake my head. “After that it was more couch surfing, until I got here and finally got my life in some kind of order. That’s pretty much my life story, short and not so sweet.”
Knox reaches out to take hold of one of my hands. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I really did try to find you for years after he died, but he always called you Marshmallow when he talked about you. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember your actual first name. And Adler is fairly common, so that made it extra difficult. Tracy refused to let me see you. If I had I found you and saw how you were being treated, I would’ve made an effort to try and adopt you, or at the very least be in your life so that you wouldn’t feel alone.”
I finish a bite of the sandwich and take a pull from the wine cooler and look at him. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m glad you didn’t. Going through all that made me who I am now. And I like me now. Also, this.” I motion in the gap between us. “Would’ve never happened. Or it would’ve been one-sided on my end depending on when I met you. Meeting you now has allowed us to have an adult connection. And I can do things like this without hesitation.”
Reaching over I grab him by the collar of his shirt and pull him toward me, crashing my lips to his. His hand goes to the back of my head as his fingers curl in my hair. Our tongues swirl for a moment before I break it and return to my seat, finishing off the small cooler.
