by Prince, DD
I jolted in surprise. There was an awkward silence where he was looking at my reflection in the mirror, then he put the toothbrush back in his mouth and resumed but I could see his eyes on the chain in my hand in the reflection.
“I, uh, Mexico,” I said, motioning to the case it had been in.
He gave me a swift nod, “Put it on for me.”
I fumbled and fastened it around his neck as he finished brushing his teeth. He was looking at me weirdly in the mirror. After it was finally fastened I plugged in my curling iron and flicked it on and left the bathroom.
As he came out, I started, “Breakfast got cold. Should I---”
He shook his head, “I gotta run. Boys are next door if you need them. Stay here. I’ll be a couple hours and then we’ll go do something.”
I nodded.
He took my face in both hands and caressed it, looking deeply into my eyes. I chewed my cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I nodded but wondered if he was referring to being sorry about earlier or just now. He was still being a dick.
He kissed me on the forehead and then on the lips. His lips lingered, looking for mine to respond, I guess. I tried. But I don’t think it was too convincing. He backed up and stared at me for a minute and then he shook his head slowly, “Fuck, Tia. What are you doing to me?”
I frowned. How was his hangover and / or his temper tantrum my fault?
He pulled me against him and held me tight, almost too tight. Then he backed up, shook his head at me, grabbed his phone and then left through the adjoining room. I was relieved to be alone. When I woke up today I had no desire to sit in this hotel room all day while the whole city, it seemed, was having fun. But now? I hoped he was busy and stayed busy.
He’d been off, mood wise, with me frequently since we got back from the farm. He was broody, temperamental. Actually it’d started at the hospital, I think. I hated it. I hated that I had to walk on eggshells. Was this going to be my life from now on?
He picked me up about 2.5 hours later. His eyes were sparkling and he seemed like he was in a good mood, “The rest of the day is ours,” he told me.
He took me by the hand into the adjoining room and told the guys, who were sitting there playing cards with poker playing on the TV, “Free time, boys. I’m going to show my girl Sin City. Just have your cells on. I’ll have an errand for you in a few hours so I’ll text about it.”
They both looked elated. I guess they were both itching for a real card game and some time out of their hotel room.
Tommy
When I picked her up she was timid with me. I couldn’t exactly blame her for that after the way I’d been that morning but right now I didn’t want timid, I wanted to show her some fun and erase what’d happened that morning.
It’d been a few hours since we left the room. We got lunch at an outdoor café and then I asked her what she wanted to do and she wanted to walk. So we let the Bentley that the hotel had given us go and we walked, and walked. I took her to a jewelry store and told her to pick out a new pair of earrings. She didn’t want to. I insisted. She chose a simple pair of princess cut diamond studs. They looked beautiful on her. I suggested we look at wedding bands, too. The jeweler suggested an eternity band that would complement her engagement ring nicely and she liked it so I bought it and told Tia to pick something for me. She was really wary about it, so much so that it made me feel like she was having second thoughts. I guess I was probably doing this to make her forget about the way I’d acted this morning as well as to move forward with the wedding plans, too.
After a long time she chose for me. She made a really nice choice, actually. It was a twisted gold and black band, the two colors woven together in a Celtic knot pattern. It made me think of her and I. Light and dark, wrapped around one another.
“I love it,” I whispered in her ear, “It’s perfect. It makes me think of us.” She nuzzled into me and smiled shyly, her expression showing me that she and I had similar opinions about the design.
I arranged for the rings to be sent home but Tia put the earrings on before we left the store. She was still quiet and a little bit timid and it was getting to me. I needed to snap her out of it.
Tia
I guessed he was trying to make up for that morning. I wasn’t trying to not let him off the hook or anything but I just felt, I don’t know, sad. I didn’t know if he was being honest about the lipstick on his collar and I didn’t know what else was on his mind that’d made him so awful earlier. I didn’t know how to fake it. And he told me he didn’t want me to be fake when it was just him and I, anyways. But him buying me jewelry and acting the way he was acting felt fake to me. I wished we were back at the hay loft.
Tommy Ferrano was light and dark, like the colors in the wedding band I’d picked for him. He thought the light and dark represented us but to me, it represented him. Woven together the light and dark was who he was. I wondered if I’d be able to take the dark, though; I wanted the light to win out over it. But it looked like it’d be both I’d have to live with. Unless I found a way out.
I needed a restroom. As we were walking through a mall-like area in between two hotels I told him so and he said he did as well and once we found bathrooms he said he would meet me right outside the door afterwards.
Outside the door afterwards, he wasn’t there. It felt weird as I’d found myself totally alone and with no eyes on me, no security guards around, I suddenly felt the urge to run. I wanted to take off and disappear into the crowd.
If I did take off, what would happen? My father clearly hadn’t been honest with me and so did that mean they wouldn’t have killed him if I hadn’t cooperated? I knew, for a fact, that they didn’t hesitate to kill their enemies so Dad probably would be in danger. But did he even deserve my consideration after selling me out when I had escaped from Tommy? I didn’t know. But where would I go? What would I do?
No. I wasn’t going to do it. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d promised to be faithful, he’d said he was sorry about this morning, and he was trying to make his miserable mood up to me. I’d been weighing the good and the bad and right now the scales were still tipping in his favor. And if he was starting to trust me to be alone, without security, maybe it meant that it’d evolve to where I’d have enough freedom that if I ever did need to run, I could do it then. I didn’t want to run. I just wanted him to always be who he’d been in many of the moments when he’d been sweet to me. I could handle the hotness in the games we played, too, I liked the hotness, but this morning? Not hotness.
I didn’t know what was keeping him. It’d been at least 10-15 minutes. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted him with:
“Did you fall in? LOL”
5 more minutes. 10 more minutes. No reply to my text and no sign of Tommy.
A man went in and then came out of the bathroom, an older grandfatherly-looking man,
“Excuse me? My I’m wondering if my fiancé is alright. He went in kind of a long time ago and hasn’t come out. He’s quite tall, brown hair, wearing a green t-shirt and dark jean shorts?”
“Bathroom’s empty,” the man said, shrugging.
I’m sure I must’ve looked shocked, “Thank you,” I said. I leaned against the wall and dialed Tommy’s phone number. It just rang.
I looked back at the text message. It was iMessage and it now said the earlier message had been read, just a moment before.
Where are you? I texted.
It was read immediately.
I waited to see the little dots showing me he was typing. It showed nothing after the read notification.
I looked around me. There were people walking everywhere. I sat there for another few minutes and finally I felt like I had to do something. So I called him again. It rang and rang. Then I called Dario. His was the only other number in my contacts.
“Yeah?” he answered on the first ring.
“Dario, it’s Tia.”
“Hey-ya Tia Tyson
!” he answered enthusiastically and it sounded like he was smiling through the phone, which was weird because he’d gone from angry brother to this other person, still pretty intense, but now nice to me.
“Um, Hi, sorry to bug you but I don’t know what to make of this.”
“What’s that?” he sounded like he was in a restaurant or something like that; there was a lot of background noise.
“Um, I can’t find your brother. I went to the ladies room, he went to the men’s room, and I’ve been waiting outside the door for a long time, like almost half an hour. Someone told me the washroom is empty, he’s not there. I don’t know what to do.”
“Where’s security?”
“Tommy let them go have time to themselves.”
“Shit,” Dario said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Okay, someone said the washroom was empty?”
“Yep.”
“Go in the washroom and check every stall, make sure he’s not passed out or something,” he told me, “Keep me on the line.” Then I heard him shout in the background to someone, “Gimme your phone.”
I walked into the mens’ room and followed his directions. I pushed every door open and there was no one there. I could hear Dario’s voice muffled as he probably had his hand over his phone while, I imagined, calling Nino and James on someone else’s phone, “Tia where are you?”
“The Mandalay, in the shopping part between the hotels. The bathroom’s definitely empty.”
“Go to the concierge’s desk in the Luxor and tell them you need security immediately and then put me on the phone with the concierge. Get out of that fucking washroom in case someone’s behind this. Now. Keep me on the phone as you make your way to the front. Tell me if anything looks suspicious. The guys are on their way.”
What now? I couldn’t wrap my head around this. Was this life, my life from now on, going to entail one drama after another? Had Tommy been kidnapped or something? I prayed there was a logical explanation for this.
** ** **
The fact that the concierge didn’t even make a weird face when I told him I needed immediate security and then passed my phone to him was beyond wonky to me. I guess in Vegas they are accustomed to weird requests.
My phone got passed back to me and Dario said, “I’ve got people on it. Don’t stress. I’m sending someone to pick you up.”
I thanked him. I was taken to an office and offered refreshments and then I sat there, fidgeting with the water bottle I’d been given, until Tommy walked in. I was shocked and relieved to see him. I jumped up and threw my arms around him, “Thank God. Are you okay? What happened?”
He gave me a little smile and a big squeeze, momentarily lifting me off my feet, “We’ll talk after. Let’s go.”
Tommy
Flying colors. She’d passed again. The way she’d handled that was just about perfect. She could’ve hocked the engagement ring and the earrings to get out of here, get away from me. She had at least $250 in her purse, too, as I’d given her pocket money for tips. The jewelry would’ve given her enough money to get gone and possibly even stay gone if she was smart about it. She could also have handled things the wrong way, called the cops and reported me missing and involved them or something stupid like that.
But she didn’t. I saw her mind working from a security booth; I knew it’d crossed her mind to run. It was almost like I could see the thought bubbles above her head. I could see it in her body language as she chewed her lip, chewed her cheek, looked around herself, blew her hair out of her eyes like she was faced with a dilemma. But she did the right thing. The exact right thing. She called someone she knew I trusted and got advice.
There was only one problem. I needed her to misbehave. I needed her to misbehave so I had a reason to punish her. I was about to crack. Yeah, it was good to see she could handle an emergency but why I probably really ran this test today was because I knew there would be fall out. I needed fall out.
When she’d put my necklace on me that morning it had floored me, made the reason for my mood swings and my needs so clear to me, and it hadn’t even done much good to wear it. I was tired, yeah, hadn’t had a lot of sleep in the past few nights but I was craving confirmation and release. Confirmation that she was really mine and fear that she really wasn’t. And sexual release. I was fucking exhausted but had all this unused bottled-up sexual energy. Last night didn’t help, either, when Ben Goldberg, the real estate developer I’d met with to talk about a new club here in Vegas, lined up some of his girls for us. I could’ve taken that redhead in the red leather dress wearing the bondage collar and grabbed the collar and fucked her up against the wall roughly but I didn’t want her. I’d stared at her, thinking about that collar on my Tia.
But the desire I had to be ice cream shop guy for her was overshadowing things. It was fucking with my head. That, the sheer fucking exhaustion, and the million things goin’ through my head… so I got loaded, feeling sorry for myself instead, which was something I didn’t do. I needed a release, to get back to feeling in control again.
Our limo was out front waiting for us. She got in and then I told the driver to just drive for a while, so we could figure out where we were going next. I closed the privacy glass.
“What happened to you?” She was wide-eyed and had her palm against her heart, like she was filled with relief, relief that I was okay.
I ignored the piercing sensation in my chest at that and I took a deep breath, “I wanted to see what’d happen if something happened to me in a place like this without my security around. You handled it beautifully. If, God forbid, there’s a next time don’t stand around like a sitting duck for an hour, though.”
Her mouth dropped open and I started to feel guilty. But I pushed it back.
“If you haven’t figured it out already, being with me means you have to think on your feet and think in a certain way. I thought I’d have to coach you on all of this stuff, so you’d know how to handle things, but it’s like you were made for this life. Good job, baby girl.”
Her fingertips shot up to her temples and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, holding it in for a long time before exhaling. Her mouth was still wide open. I waited. She kept her eyes closed and massaged her temples and then her mouth shut, shut tight. I could see her working her jaw muscles by clenching her teeth.
“Tia?”
“Mm.”
“You alright?” I leaned over and put my hand on her knee.
She recoiled right against the car door, as far away from me as she could get.
“I’ll just give you a minute, shall I?” I suggested and snickered.
Her eyes were still closed but she was shaking her head slowly and I could see she was working up toward a royal fucking fit.
Tia
“How many more times are you gonna do this?” I finally asked, eyes closed. There was throbbing in my head. I had a tension headache coming on, a whopper of one!
“As many as I feel I need to,” he said softly, his voice laced with warning, “As many as I think I need to put my mind at ease.”
“Put your mind at ease about me not running away?”
“That, and about you being equipped to deal with emergencies. This was probably more about emergencies.”
I guffawed.
“You got a problem with that?” his tone of voice grated on my nerves. I should just open the car door and walk the fuck away from him.
“Was that roughing me up this morning part of the test? Piss me off by being a total prick and then leave me alone to see if I run away?” I finally met his eyes with mine.
“That was just me,” he said softly with a shrug. He looked so arrogant, so unapologetic.
And that was worse because that meant that on top of everything else, every frightened and helpless emotion he’d just put me through, that he really was an abusive asshole.
The car stopped at a red light and then I did what was probably the stupidest thing I’ve done since meeting h
im. I thrust the door open and I got out of the limo and stormed off between other waiting cars and then down the street in the opposite direction.
An instant after I did I caught the view of someone running, from the corner of my eye. It was Nino. He’d gotten out of a small smart car behind our limo and he was on his phone, talking while he was following me. Figured. The whole thing was staged; I was probably never alone at all.
I shot Nino a dirty look over my shoulder and I kept right on walking. My pocket dinged. I kept walking, but faster, more determined Then I was through a revolving door, Nino not ten feet behind me, and inside of a casino, I didn’t know which one, and I was storming down the trippy-looking butt-ugly carpet and because I’d ignored it the first time, my pocket dinged again. I ignored it again. Suddenly I felt fingers grip my arm at my bicep. My heart hit the bottom of my stomach.
“Read your text,” Nino told me. He was not smiling.
I shrugged him off and thrust my hand in my pocket and pulled the phone out to read the text from Tommy,
“Fine, cool off. Nino will keep you safe. Be back at the suite in half an hour. I’ll be waiting.”
I responded to his text without hesitating,
“FUCK YOU!”
The read receipt popped instantly and I turned the phone off and then thrust the phone back in my pocket. My heart sank but that sensation was below the surface of my anger, which was bigger than my fear or my common sense right now, so I resumed walking and Nino followed right along behind me. After a few minutes I was beyond annoyed with him walking right behind me and I needed to lose him. I just needed five damn minutes by myself, totally by myself.
I saw a blonde woman in a skimpy outfit carrying a tray of drinks and I saw a drunk-looking middle-aged Asian guy approaching her so I suddenly took off running past him, sort of bumped him, and he knocked her drinks all over the place. This happened like it was carefully rehearsed choreography, right in front of Nino and I was off…half walking half running hoping casino security wouldn’t think I was suspicious and try to stop me, zig zagging through rows of slot machines and then card tables and roulette wheels. I finally got the nerve to glance back and there was no sign of him.