After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  He could hear doubt in her voice; see it clouding her eyes. ‘Well, we’ve come this far. Shouldn’t skimp on the final details.’ Leo very gently placed his hands on the curve of her waist. Jane looked up at him. He’d thought her eyes were blue, but they were green, maybe only blue in a certain light. She bit her lip like she’d been waiting all her life for him to kiss her.

  ‘You two really need to make this quick.’

  Leo turned to the man to tell him that they still had a minute on the clock and it was a pretty important minute, but Jane’s hand was on Leo’s chin so she could turn his face back towards her and it was simple enough to bend his head and kiss her.

  He was aware of the scrape of his stubble on her peony-soft skin, the firm press of her mouth on his. There was no time for it to be a good kiss or a bad kiss, but simply a kiss.

  ‘I don’t care if you are his mom, shut the fuck up! I’m marrying him, not you!’

  Jane and Leo broke apart so they could be hustled through a concealed door in the gazebo’s greenery. After a long walk down a corridor, the plush carpet designed to look as if it was strewn with red rose petals, and through another set of double doors, they were on the street.

  It was cold now because Vegas was a beautiful illusion: a glittering town hidden in the middle of the desert. The bitter, brutal heat of the day had given way to the callous chill of night. Jane crouched down and opened her suitcase to gently unwrap a Chanel jacket nestled between several layers of tissue paper.

  ‘Married in black, you’ll wish you were back,’ Leo said as she slipped it on.

  She grinned. ‘Bit too soon for the regret to kick in, darling.’ She straightened up on her perilously high spindly shoes. ‘I think it’s only fitting that we toast our union with a glass of champagne, don’t you?’

  ‘I do, but I spent all my money on cocktails and cabs and our marriage licence.’ Leo didn’t want to be that guy but he didn’t know how to be anything else. ‘Unless you…’

  ‘Not a bean. I was meant to be getting married today; I didn’t really think I’d need much cash and I don’t believe in credit cards.’

  ‘You don’t believe in them?’

  She shook her head. ‘Cash or charge every time.’

  All sorts of bells and whistles were going off in his head. He should have listened harder when she was talking about her ex. About the millions in seed capital. What else had she said? He couldn’t remember; he’d been too busy staring at her, but trying hard not to look as if he was staring. But now he remembered what she hadn’t said; she hadn’t talked about love or a broken heart, which you’d expect from someone who’d been jilted minutes before her wedding, but Leo couldn’t find it in himself to care that much when Jane was suddenly beaming at him. ‘Paying for my own drinks sets a dangerous precedent, but I desperately need a glass of champagne so we’re going to find someone who’ll buy me one. In fact, let’s make it a bottle.’

  The wedding chapel was on the main strip and she was already heading for a shimmering beacon of glass and neon in the near distance at a speed Leo wouldn’t have thought possible. He had custody of her vintage Louis Vuitton suitcase and quickly caught up with her. Oh, this one was trouble. Caps-lock trouble. The tech-genius fiancé and the venture capitalists and the guff about patent applications could all be bullshit and he might well wake up hours from now in a bathtub packed with ice and minus his kidneys. All he really knew about her was that she was going to be twenty-seven in less than two hours, unless that was a line too. She smelt sharp but sweet like blackcurrants and he really wished he could afford to get her a bottle of vintage champagne.

  ‘Darling, please don’t look like you’re having buyer’s remorse.’ Jane managed to look reproachful even as she strode with a wobbling gait. ‘I’m going to be an exemplary wife.’

  Even if she did end up taking his kidneys, she was beautiful and funny and had what his great-aunt would call gumption . ‘Are you going to make me breakfast every morning and iron my shirts and talk me up at the annual Rotary Club dinner dance?’

  She shook her head. ‘I think we can do a little better than the local Rotary Club… Why is it that building doesn’t seem to get any closer, no matter how long we keep walking?’

  ‘It’s perspective,’ Leo said and he told her about the effects of the reflection of the neighbouring buildings on the glass tiles and Jane listened, kept him talking, until they reached the monolithic temple of steel and mirrors. It was a casino with its own ecosystem: hotel, several fine-dining restaurants, two of them Michelin-starred, high-end boutiques and row upon row of slot machines flashing and whirring as people sat glassy-eyed in front of them, feeding handfuls of coins into their gaping maws from huge plastic cups.

  Jane did a slow circle, eyes narrowed. Then her nose twitched like she could actually smell the money. ‘Platinum Bar,’ she announced, grabbing Leo’s hand and dragging him towards the bank of escalators. There was a gleam in her eye that hadn’t been there before. ‘I’ll do the talking, darling. You just watch for my cues.’

  Yeah, this was going down in the annals of all the wild nights that Leo had ever known. Number one with a bullet, eclipsing even the night he’d found himself on stage in front of fifty thousand screaming fans in Tokyo to introduce his best mate from art college’s band. The aftershow had turned into the kind of drug-fuelled orgy that Leo thought only happened to members of poodle-haired cock-rock bands of the late eighties.

  Or the night he’d flirted with a French girl in the Williamsburg bar where he was working between commissions. After closing, they’d nicked two bottles of vodka, walked all the way to Central Park and talked about life, love and what made them cry. Watched the sun rise. Kissed like it was the end of the world. He’d woken up the next morning on a bench, one of New York’s finest shaking him back to bleary consciousness. The French girl had stolen all his money, except a ten-dollar bill on which she’d scrawled Je t’aimerai toujours in lipstick.

  This night was shaping up to be beyond all those other nights, and all because he’d had nothing better to do than get married to a beautiful woman because it would make a great story.

  If you didn’t have great stories, then you were living half a life.

  And the story Jane was spinning to Tom and Paula, Barbara and Hank was a tale of triumph over adversity, laughing through the tears, love over the barricades.

  ‘I can’t believe the airline lost all your luggage,’ Barbara gushed. She and her husband, tubby, silver-haired Hank who looked as if he’d been shoehorned into his tuxedo, were in Vegas with their best friends Tom and Paula to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversaries. Within five minutes, Jane had gleaned that the four of them had been best friends since high school, had even got married together – ‘that’s one of the most adorable things I’ve ever heard’ – and Tom and Hank owned a very successful chain of winter sports shops.

  Barbara and Paula, who never missed an episode of Downton Abbey , were enthralled as Jane told them Leo had been cut off by his family, who were such old money that his grandfather had been an equerry to one of the King Georges, for marrying Jane, who was a nobody. ‘My folks think that if your family aren’t listed in Burke’s Peerage , then you’re beyond the pale,’ Leo admitted cheerfully, because he was her straight man. The Ernie to Jane’s Eric. The Desi to her Lucy. ‘Love is more important than being heir to a dukedom, right?’

  The two older women sighed and even Tom looked a little misty-eyed. Barbara patted Leo’s hand. ‘It’s like something out of a novel. You nearly a duke, Jane an orphan…’

  ‘Oh, orphan is such a dramatic word. Honestly, the car crash happened years ago,’ Jane said, but then she stared off into the middle distance and held it for three long beats until a waiter approached with a huge bottle of champagne. It wasn’t a Methuselah but it might have been the next size down. A Nebuchadnezzar? ‘Oh no, you mustn’t. It’s terribly, terribly sweet of you, but really we can’t, can we, baby?’

  Leo shook hi
s head. ‘Couldn’t possibly accept this,’ he said stuffily. ‘We appreciate the gesture, but absolutely not.’

  Jane cast her eyes down, shoulders drooping ever so slightly, and sighed.

  ‘Now, you listen,’ Hank said rather forcefully. ‘We’re going to toast you two kids and you’re going to have a drink with us whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Darling, what do you think?’ Jane asked Leo as if she deferred to him in all matters, when no one had ever deferred to him in his life. She turned to Barbara. ‘He gets so proud and British.’

  Leo squirmed under their collective, condemning gaze. ‘I do. I can’t help it but I refuse to argue with my beautiful bride when the ink’s still wet on the marriage contract.’

  There were smiles and glasses of champagne all round. They even ordered another smaller bottle just before they left and insisted that Jane and Leo stay and drink it.

  ‘It’s still an awfully big bottle of champagne.’ Jane stared at it with some trepidation. ‘What on earth should we do with it all?’

  ‘Get good and drunk,’ Leo said as he poured more champagne into their glasses. ‘Sound like a plan?’

  Jane wrinkled her nose. ‘I’ve never been good and drunk. Maybe the good bit…’

  ‘I’ve definitely been drunk. I can give you pointers.’ He’d been waiting to touch her again ever since they’d sealed the deal with a kiss. Now he gently nudged her with his elbow. ‘I bet you’re a fast learner.’

  She nudged him back hard enough that he spilled half his glass over his jeans. ‘Maybe I could teach you a thing or two as well.’

  It turned out that the only things Jane could teach him were the kinds of things she must have picked up at an expensive Swiss finishing school. She knew how to address a baronet, the correct way to serve oysters and how to buy the perfect thank you gift. ‘It’s very important to include a handwritten note. Very important. I’d be absolutely no use in a plane crash but if you get invited to lunch with a baronet and he serves oysters, then I really come into my own.’

  She was slumped against him, his arm comfortably around her shoulders. ‘Being drunk is a lot more fun than being good, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Ask me that tomorrow when the hangover kicks in,’ Jane said and whatever she was, gold-digger or scam artist or even an orphaned almost-tech-wife, Leo liked her. He liked her a lot.

  But despite the amount he’d drunk, his jaw was tight and clenched. He could feel the itch starting. With difficulty, he extricated himself. ‘Just got to go and powder my nose,’ he said.

  Jane pouted. ‘Promise you won’t be long,’ she said, but she waved him off with a smile and soon Leo was resting his fogged, pounding head on cool marble tile. Then he locked himself in one of the cubicles – nothing as plebeian as urinals in here.

  He still had the little baggie he’d managed to scoop up, along with his clothes, when Melissa’s husband had come home unexpectedly. He must have had his suspicions, suspicions that were entirely founded as Leo had had his cock halfway down Melissa’s throat when they’d heard Norman clomping up the stairs and jawing on his mobile.

  He was too old to climb out of windows, shimmy down drainpipes and leap over security gates. He was also too old for chopping out lines on a spotless toilet cistern with a credit card that had been cancelled three years ago. Too old never seemed like a good enough reason to stop.

  Leo rolled up his last ten-dollar bill with the skill of a virtuoso. Two hard sniffs and he could feel the coke cut through the fog, the champagne haze. Feel the acrid, acid taste at the back of his throat which he tried to swallow away. He straightened up, shook his head twice, blinked and exhaled.

  That was a whole world of better. He felt more like himself, but sharper, smarter, funnier. Like he could go back to Jane and dazzle her with his wit and charm because what she’d had up until now was a fraction of what he’d got to offer. She might even fall in love with him.

  He ran the tip of his index finger over the white porcelain, to gather up what he’d missed. Then ran his powder-coated finger over his gums, winced at the bitter taste.

  As Leo ran a cursory eye over the cubicle, he saw something in the corner. Something orange and Leo might not believe in karma, but a one-thousand-dollar gaming chip had to be a sign that at some point in his life he must have done something good.

  4

  Leo was gone ages – long enough that a couple of men began to circle like sharks.

  Even her wedding dress and just-married glow wasn’t enough to put them off. ‘I’m just waiting for my husband to come back,’ she’d say if one of them got too close but even in her head, she got stuck on the word ‘husband’. Because Leo wasn’t the husband she’d thought she’d be married to when she’d woken up this morning.

  Also, the word ‘husband’ sounded wrong. Clunky. Unwieldy. But then she was drunk. Drunker than she’d ever been before, because before she’d only ever been the tiniest bit tipsy.

  Being drunk was quite nice; it made the huge chandeliers above her head sparkle even brighter and for a while she was content to hold up her hand to the light so her engagement ring got caught in the crossbeam and glittered as brightly as it had the first time she’d seen it. It had been displayed under a single spotlight and reflected all her hopes and dreams back at her. But the trouble with hopes and dreams was that they always —

  ‘You’ve got that sad look on your face again. Please don’t be a maudlin drunk.’

  Jane blinked up at Leo. ‘I’m not maudlin. I’m just thinking.’

  He was too tall, too loud, but then he sat down and said, ‘Thinking’s not allowed,’ in that drawly dream of a voice and he was all she had to cling to on this strange night. She had a wedding ring on her finger and a marriage certificate in her bag, but she should have been with Andrew, gliding across the floor of a ballroom at a hotel across town. Andrew’s mother, Jackie, had insisted they take ballroom lessons so they could have a choreographed first dance. With the lessons, a spreadsheet and an app Andrew had designed one Sunday afternoon so he wouldn’t have to count the beats under his breath, he’d been able to muster a passable foxtrot.

  ‘Do you foxtrot?’ she asked Leo.

  ‘I’m totally up for it if you want to go dancing.’ He smiled like he’d just thought of the funniest joke. ‘I think I’ve got my second wind.’

  ‘I wish I had. Do you think anyone would mind if I lay down and took my shoes off?’ She leaned heavily against him, but this time when he put his arm around her, his fingers beat out a restless tattoo against her upper arm.

  ‘Poor baby.’ Leo kissed her forehead. ‘We’ll sort it out later. Because right now… well, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  Jane struggled to sit up straight. ‘What kind of surprise?’

  ‘It’s in my pocket. Go on, have a feel.’

  ‘Oh, darling, if I had a dollar for every time a man asked me to root around in his pocket for my surprise, I’d be independently wealthy by now,’ she said in a prim voice.

  Leo laughed. ‘Does that mean you’ve already heard all my best lines?’

  ‘Probably.’ She held out her hand. ‘Is it the kind of surprise that you could just show me?’

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out an orange disc, which he held between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s my wedding present to you. Or… hang on? What’s the time? Happy Birthday. It’s can be your birthday present as well. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to wrap it.’

  Maybe Jane was getting her second wind too because suddenly she felt much better. ‘Well, this changes everything,’ she said but when she reached out to take the chip, Leo closed his hand around it.

  ‘Everything,’ he agreed, standing up so quickly that she almost landed face down on the sofa without him there to prop her up. He held out his other hand. ‘Double or quits, at least. Yeah?’

  She let him haul her out of the sofa’s depths so she was standing up too, which made her head swim and the room revolve around her. ‘Oh, goodness
…’

  ‘The headrush is a bitch, isn’t it? Come on. I’ve got your suitcase. Let’s go!’

  He was already striding out of the bar so she had to scamper after him. Her shoes weren’t made for scampering. ‘What do you mean, double or quits?’

  ‘Actually, we can do better than double or quits,’ Leo called over his shoulder. ‘What do you fancy? Blackjack? Craps? Roulette?’

  ‘You’re not gambling with it!’ He was heading for the escalators now with a long-limbed stride, bouncing on the balls of his feet, so there was distance between them and Jane had to screech like a wronged wife. It was a bit too soon for that.

  Leo waited for her to catch up. ‘Let’s play roulette. You think of a number and I’ll —’