Pretend To Be Mine

by Suzie Nelson

  “You mean you kind of enjoyed getting me all naked?” Jenny asked with a seductive smile.

  “You are a true delight, ma chérie, but I’m not just talking about our lovemaking. It has been incredible to watch you at the Blackjack table and I would love to watch you play some more cards again…if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I would absolutely love that,” she replied and something about her enthusiasm suddenly made me wonder for just a second. She was taking the casinos for a ride and I wasn’t expecting her to be so open to the idea of a relative stranger watching her put the wool over the unsuspecting eyes of each dealer who had the misfortune of facing her at a Blackjack table. I decided to be slightly more careful with the brainy bombshell sitting next to me so innocently and sweetly on the rooftop of my Las Vegas casino.

  “I think this could be the start of a great adventure for both of us,” I said carefully and kissed her softly.

  “I really like the sound of that Francois, more than you will ever know,” she said and allowed me to kiss her delicious lips one more time.

  JENNY

  “Mom are you feeling okay!?”

  I almost shouted down the mobile phone in my hand in desperation. My mother sounded like she was in a tremendous amount of pain and she wasn’t even trying to hide it. That was, perhaps, the worst part of it all as my mom had always put on a brave face despite all the challenges life had thrown at her and now that she was moaning openly over the phone. I felt like my heart was being ripped out as I listened to my mother’s voice at the other end of the line.

  “I’m not feeling too great, my little angel,” my mom replied, “the headaches are getting worse every day now.”

  For just a moment I considered packing my bags and taking the first flight out of godforsaken Las Vegas to go be with my mother in Los Angeles, but I quickly realized that this would do absolutely no good whatsoever. There was nothing I could do to make her feel any better…the only chance she had was to have the operation and I still needed to win approximately $120,000 to make it possible.

  “Mommy, please just hang in there for another week or so,” I said through my tears, “I am working on something here and I will soon have enough money to pay for your operation,” I promised.

  “Okay my angel, I will take it easy…just don’t go getting yourself in trouble on account of me, you hear?”

  “You know me, mom, I’m always a good girl,” I replied and tried not to weep uncontrollably as I said goodbye to the only person in the world who’d always been there for me. I was not planning to let her down.

  Fuck the casinos and fuck every person who owned a gambling institution just to prey on poor people’s dreams of a better life; I was going to make them all pay for their hideous sins! The thought struck me that justice demanded that any man who was low enough to make money from a casino should suffer just like my mother was suffering. One of the reasons I’d decided not to study law was the fact that the justice system seemed way too slow in meeting out justice…I had something much quicker in mind.

  Francois and I were going out on the town again for another one of our team efforts and I found myself smiling through my tears as I sat on the edge of my bed crying. At least he was one little flame of hope in my life; even though he was not being totally honest with me about some things in his life. I felt like Francois was the only ally I had in my fight against the casinos and it made me feel like it wasn’t just me against the rest of the world.

  “He’s probably just protecting his privacy,” I whispered to myself and realized that I was looking for excuses to trust Francois, instead of waiting for him to prove that he was trustworthy.

  “One more week and then I’m out of here, Mr. French charmer…I hope you can show me a reason to trust you and perhaps even to…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the ‘L’ word, not even to myself. Love was way up there with world peace for me and I never even thought about the possibility of falling in love anymore.

  So what if I was thinking about Francois all the time? It wasn’t as if I had much else to think about…I realized I was trying my best to justify and explain away the emotions that were rising to the surface every now and then to whisper in my mind, “You’re falling for him; falling in love with him.”

  I fell back on my bed and took a deep breath. It seemed to me that everything was simply happening too fast and I needed to just slow down for a second. Although my card counting skills gave me an excellent chance to win every time I sat down at a Blackjack table it wasn’t a perfect science at all. If I put too much pressure on myself I might just lose everything I’d won so far and destroy any prospects of getting enough money together for my mother’s emergency operation.

  I finally relaxed a little and drifted off to sleep. I had some puzzling dreams that made no sense at all and I must have rolled around in my sleep, as I woke up an hour later on the other side of the bed and found myself gripping my pillow tightly as if it was some kind of life jacket I needed to keep me from drowning.

  “It’s all going to be okay,” I whispered softly, “Tonight I win at least another $60,000 and after that we’re just $60,000 away from survival, mommy.”

  FRANCOIS

  “Just slow down, you’re making absolutely no sense,” I used my most subdued and calming tone of voice as I listened to Peter Parkin going off at the other end of the line.

  “Just remember you owe the other shareholders in the Golden Nugget a duty of care and there are ways of getting rid of you if you put our investment at risk!”

  “I realize that, Peter, but I told you already, I took appropriate steps to safeguard the casino after I got the report from our private investigator.”

  “Then why were you seen in the presence of the card counter and why was she allowed to win $44,000 at the Golden Nugget after you were warned she was coming? Is that how you protected our interests? By taking the scamming bitch out for dinner after she’d taken us all for a $44,000 ride!?”

  I realized I had no real defense against Peter’s attack and decided to mount my own counter-offensive. “Attack is the best defense,” Vivienne often said and I now decided to follow her advice.

  “Before you go any further, there was something I wanted to ask you about Peter…the tax returns you signed off on for the last financial year,” I said and suddenly there was a deafening silence at the other end of the line.

  “It seems to me that the taxes the Golden Nugget paid were almost $3 million less than the amount that was actually due to the Government…can you explain that?” Peter didn’t answer so I pressed on, “It would seem to me you should give that $3 million owed in back taxes a bit of thought instead of worrying about a small amount of money like $44,000.”

  “Look I don’t want to get you all riled up for nothing, Francois, I just want you to run the casino in such a way that we all win,” Peter replied very carefully.

  “Now you listen to me, Peter Parkin, if you ever speak to me again the way you did earlier I will submit the financial statements of the Golden Nugget for a tax audit myself and then you can pack a toothbrush and some ass grease for your 15 years stay at San Quentin State Prison, is that clear?”

  “Yes it’s clear,” Peter replied in a quivering voice.

  “And just so you know, I am doing my own surveillance of Ms. Jenny Blake so I want no further complaints about me being seen in her presence,” I added and put the phone down without any further pleasantries.

  It had all been a total bluff, perfectly executed. I didn’t really know much about the taxes Peter had signed off on; I merely guessed that he was cheating the Government just like many of the other casinos on the Strip. My guess about the taxes had only been one part of my bluff, though. Even if Peter got difficult again in the future I would never submit the financials of the Golden Nugget for a tax audit as that would amount to absolute suicide. It would ruin the Golden Nugget and with it my chances of proving to Vivienne I was a good manager of large
fortunes.

  I knew that I had probably only bought myself a couple of days before Peter and the rest of the other shareholders would be coming at me again from a different angle. They probably had me under 24/7 surveillance now and would be informed of every single move I made, so I would have to be very careful.

  “I really hope you are worth the gamble, Jenny Blake,” I thought to myself and discovered that I had a hard-on just from thinking about her.

  “Guess that proves you are indeed worth it,” I smiled and started getting ready for another crazy night with the sexiest card counter on the Strip.

  I found myself weighing in my mind the possibility of losing the family fortune because of my infatuation with Jenny and discovered that it was a risk I was willing to take. If I ever started loving money more than life itself I would rather go back to being a musician, I thought as I splashed on some Clive Christian 1872 after shave and drew my fingers through my unruly hair.

  JENNY

  I stood in front of the mirror and found myself wondering why everything always seemed to happen so fast when the pressure was at its highest. There I was with the added pressure of my mother’s illness which was now progressively getting worse, right at the same time when I was just starting to build up a good head of steam and momentum in my gambling efforts. To top it all off, I had also gotten involved, for the first time in 5 years, in a relationship that made me feel like a woman again.

  Would it have been different if I had met Francois under different circumstances? Perhaps it would not have been the same high energy ride of passion and instant chemistry if we’d simply met at a bar somewhere; or, perhaps, it would have been even better. Who knows – all I had was the present and I was simply going to have to play along and wait for the dealer in the sky to deal me my next card in this crazy gambling dash for the finishing line while Francois cheered me on from the sideline.

  I closed the hotel door behind me and made my way down to the front entrance. I took a deep breath of fresh air and looked up at the sky. It was getting darker, but there was still some sunlight left in the day. The strange twilight of the moment seemed to extend beyond the appearance of the azure Vegas skies; it also seemed a perfect metaphor for the position I found myself in. There was no turning back now and I was determined to push ahead and win the rest of the money my mother needed for her operation, come hell or high water. I also had one foot in the water of a passionate affair with Francois already and it seemed all of my bets and efforts with him were now caught in the twilight zone of no turning back.

  “Are you ready?” Francois asked after kissing me on my lips and complimenting me on how beautiful I was.

  I looked at Francois and smiled at his question. I knew he was only making small talk, but actually, my answer to his question was far more loaded than he could ever have imagined.

  It would be easy to suggest that I was simply doing my best to get enough money together to save my mother, but the truth of it was that I was also still enjoying every second of my time at the Blackjack tables. Not only was I meeting out justice in a place where most people only ever lost their livelihood; I was also experiencing the adrenaline rush of being on the frontline of a confrontation between the gaming institutions of the world and those seeking their dreams and fortunes in games of chance where the dice were seriously loaded against them.

  People like me were the catalyst that shifted the balance back in the favor of the ordinary people and I enjoyed every second of doing it. I hated what my dad had done to us as a family with his gambling, but I’d never hated him as a person. He got caught up in a world of fake belief and lost his way, not because he was a bad person, but because he was misled and deceived. I was determined to set the record straight and sometimes wished that my old man could have been there to see me put the hurt on the casinos by taking money from them. I really think he would have enjoyed it.

  “Don’t ask me if I’m ready,” I said to Francois with a confident smile, “the real question is; are they ready for me?”

  FRANCOIS

  As I sat at the bar, watching Jenny struggling away at the Blackjack table while the Pit Boss kept a close eye on proceedings, it struck me that I’d been missing one very obvious fact which had been right there in front of me for the past two evenings. I’d been sitting all by myself, for the most part, at each of the bars in the various casinos that I’d accompanied Jenny to and in this very fact lay an obvious truth and hidden opportunity that neither I, nor the competing casino owners, had noticed.

  The bar I was sitting at, just like the one I’d been sitting at the previous evening, had attracted very few guests and was little more than a part of the casino décor. But surely, I thought, gamblers would be more likely to gamble big and have a generally more spend-thrifty demeanor after a healthy couple of drinks, wouldn’t they? I made a mental note to get some extra waiters at the Golden Nugget and to instruct them to serve all of the guests with free alcohol to help business along.

  I was feeling good about my general grip on the business of the Golden Nugget. I’d had a phone call with the private detective who’d been feeding me and the other shareholders information about Jenny Blake and had asked him to send all future intel to me directly and not to the other shareholders. He was reluctant at first, but after I’d offered to double his existing rate of payment he soon agreed that my suggestion was a wise one. This would prevent another psychotic phone call from Peter Parkin, or one of the other shareholders, about the fact that I was spending another evening or two in the company of Jenny Blake.

  The conversation I’d had with Gary Tomlin, the private investigator who was doing the surveillance on Jenny Blake, had actually been most informative. He seemed a nice enough fellow who was simply doing his job to the best of his ability; trying to keep all of the shareholders informed of his progress. I asked him to get some more personal information on Jenny’s family situation.

  I wanted to know more about her personal history and asked to be informed of any important family related issues as I knew, from experience, that the greatest pressures in life almost always emanated from one’s family. I felt a little guilty for breaching Jenny’s privacy this way, but felt like this would be the best way of finding out what all of the driving forces behind her motives were and thought it might actually improve the prospects of us developing a lasting relationship.

  I was already beyond the point of thinking about Jenny as just another fling. I’d never met a girl who excited me sexually the way she did whilst also intriguing my mind with all of her secretive ways and female attractions.

  I was looking forward to every moment I could possibly spend with Jenny Blake and I wanted to know everything there was to know about her. She was like a journey I’d embarked upon and could never draw back from now. I felt like I was on my way to discovering all of the promise and beauty she was hiding somewhere inside and I realized that she’d already become a more important quest to me than my efforts to impress Vivienne.

  “All the way, ma chérie…let’s go all the way,” I thought to myself as I took another sip of my single malt whiskey and gave Jenny an encouraging smile as she faced off once more with a Blackjack dealer and a Pit Boss standing close by.

  JENNY

  The Pit Boss just refused to move from his position. No matter how many times Francois tried to distract him, he never once shifted his attention from the Blackjack table where I was sitting. Apparently, this place had better preventative measures than the other casinos, as I was unable to do my ordinary build-up to the point where I was ready to strike the final blow.

  I was up by only about $2,000 and the evening had ‘busted’ written all over it. Clearly, the Pit Boss must have caught onto the fact that I’d been winning too easily and consistently or, even worse, someone had warned the casino that I was going to be there that evening. If word had gotten out that a card counter was working the casinos on the Strip it wouldn’t be long before my photograph was cir
culated amongst the casinos and I would have no chance whatsoever to win the rest of the money I needed.

  “Sometimes the only way around an obstacle is right through it,” one of my school teachers always used to say and I realized that I was faced with exactly that kind of obstacle. I was simply going to have to do the best I could with the Pit Boss watching; there was no way I could just walk away as I’d only gathered about $2,000 in winnings.

  I suddenly had a flashback of the time when my mother and I discovered my father’s playing cards one evening while he was out on the town looking for alcohol and whores. He’d kept the cards hidden in a trunk and with it, we discovered a half full silver flask of whiskey. My mother poured herself a small glass of whiskey and I got a glass of milkshake, despite the fact that I’d begged my mother for my own glass of the alcohol.

  “This is the devil’s liquid and I’m just having some of it to make sure your father has less to drink himself,” my mother said with a smile and took a small sip.