by Rosa Foxxe
“It'll be fine,” Steve said hurriedly, like he'd seen panic on her face and was trying to quell her fear. “All I'm guessing is that the guy wasn't from this country, although he's form a western country.”
Tyra nodded. She didn't see how that was so relevant.
“Why does that matter, though?” she asked.
“It just makes the whole contest thing less weird, especially if he's French, Spanish, or Italian,” Steve said. “Listen, I know that I may be born and bred from around here, but I've traveled my fair share. Hell, the company used to send me around the world just to keep me happy. Then I realized I was happier here than gallivanting around the globe. But now the home office wants to keep trotting me around the east coast like that's cool or something. I don't even like the east coast.” Steve realized he was going off on a tangent and leaned forward in his chair.
“But what I'm getting at is: To other people not of this nation the whole game show thing isn't really that creepy. It's more harmless than anything. But I don't mean games show, I mean whatever contest you entered into. Whatever. It doesn't matter what it was exactly. I'm just saying that to the guy, he just wanted to see if he could get a pretty lady to come out to him.”
Tyra's eyes strayed back out to the storm coming in.
“I didn't even think about that beyond just a little bit of thought about how the thing was kind of a scam. I guess I was too happy to be going out there,” she said. “But why wouldn't he just run the same kind of thing on social media?”
“It has to do with making things harder so people don't waste your time,” Steve said. “It's like with grant money: the longer and more tedious the application the more money at stake. If he'd put it on Facebook everyone would have applied, and then been like, 'Eww, a casino,' or whatever else because they weren't actually looking to go to Vegas and have fun for a weekend.
Which, in a very roundabout way, brings me to what I think. I think it's great that you got laid and had a blast. I think that's what's supposed to happen. How weird would it have been if you didn't sleep with him? I guess it wouldn't have been that weird, really. But at the same time it would have been a huge let down, wouldn't it?”
Tyra nodded her head.
“I'd probably have regretted it,” she said.
“Well there you go,” Steve said. “And I'm with you on that. Now, as far as what other people think, well, they are going to be jealous. Although there will be some people like myself who just think it was all pretty normal, really. I know that you and he probably want to keep a little bit taboo in your heads, and maybe it was a little bit racy, but at the same time I think it was normal. So as far as people think, I think that they'll probably think that you are a very beautiful woman who knows what she wants and how to get it, but also knows how to just have fun.”
“I don't know if I like the sound of all that, Steve,” she said. “It sounds like people will think I'm some kind of floozy.”
“Let's be real, Tyra,” Steve said with a tone of finality. “Most people, and by most I mean like ninety percent, are never even going to know that this happened unless you tell them.”
“That's true,” Tyra said.
The conversation was winding down and the storm outside was rolling in. Whenever a storm darkened the sky Steve like to sit alone in his office and either work or pretend to work while he read a romance novel. It was one of the things that made Tyra really like Steve, the way he knew how to keep things in a good humor. Life was serious enough without people always trying to make it even more serious, however which way they could think of at that moment.
“Don't worry about it,” Steve said. “Seriously, I wouldn't put another thought into what anyone else thinks about it. At all. It isn't going to do any good anyway.”
Tyra nodded and stood to leave.
“And Tyra,” Steve said. “Don't over-think things. Some things are like cotton candy—they are just fun!”
*
Tyra found that not telling people was a lot harder than she'd anticipated. Not that she told people, she kept it to herself, it was just that such a story seemed like it needed to be told. It didn't seem fair to just leave it deep inside of her. She really wanted to tell people and realized quickly how few real friends she had. She pretty much had just one girlfriend to tell and that was it. So she confided in that one friend over Martinis. She had to tell someone, she decided. It was just killing her not to. And who wouldn't tell someone, after such a great time?
“Has he called or texted you since?” Roxanne asked.
Roxanne was about the only other person in Tyra's life who managed to stay a constant, besides Steve. She'd met Roxanne through bicycling, something they both enjoyed very much when the weather allowed it. Recently, with the seasons teetering between the brink of fall and winter, things hadn't quite been as simple as getting on their bikes and taking off around town like they didn't have a care in the world.
And since neither of them were really hardcore riders, they didn’t ride in the snow. Neither of them had to ride like some people just had to; although both knew the pleasure people felt when they saw the pavement flying by underneath them. What they both needed right now was to get drunk, and Tyra could feel Roxanne was feeling a little naughty and would either want to talk about her weekend or pick up guys. Maybe both.
“No calls or texts,” Tyra answered. “And honestly we didn't really exchange any information.”
Roxanne gasped. This somehow upset her delicate sensibilities, while the different guy she took home every weekend didn't.
“Oh, so what, you're going to judge me because of it?” Tyra asked.
“Nothing like that,” Roxanne said. “I'm just being dramatic, a good listener.”
“You don't need to be dramatic. This whole thing has enough of that in spades. But no, we didn't exchange any information. I know where he works, you know what I mean?”
They both laughed.
The talk about Tyra's weekend died off as both women scoped out the bar around them. They were at a hip little bar called The Lift. It was an alright place to drink if one wanted to see other bar goers, just very few of them. The place wasn't big enough to hold even one hundred people but still managed to be fun and engaging, way more so than the surrounding establishments. It was pretty much the place that Tyra and Roxanne went to drink when they wanted to drink alone and not have to worry about other people intruding on their conversation or listening in.
It was also good for watching boys who were there to impress hip girls, and although Tyra and her friend were excluded from being “hip” by most peoples' definition, they were still young attractive females.
“Oh my goodness,” Roxanne said. “Look at that one there.”
She pointed with her chin across the bar at a group of frat boys, the leader of which had taken off his dress shirt and now had bulging muscles straining against his undershirt.
“You should take him home, girl,” Tyra said.
Roxanne was a bombshell blonde, with big tits and an even bigger ass. She wasn't the kind of girl who just picked boys up from the bar, though. She liked a certain kind of boy, the bad boy type that still managed to be intellectual, somehow. Those kinds were the hardest to come by, of course, especially around Des Moines, Iowa.
Around Des Moines the bad boys had been too busy huffing glue to be concerned with trying to keep their heads on straight enough to retain some culture. Or so Roxanne and Tyra would tell each other often, but not tonight. Tonight, Roxanne really seemed like she wanted to take someone home. Tyra wondered if it had something to do with her trip to Vegas.
“I don't know if I can,” Roxanne said. “He's so drunk! Look at him! Even though he's cute I don't think it makes up for that amount of drunk. It's just too much.”
“Maybe you're right,” Tyra said. “You'd hate to find out that he's too drunk to fuck after you get home. Which will probably be the case considering he just poured half a beer on his crotch and hasn't even felt it yet.”
&
nbsp; “Oh my God, you're right!” Roxanne said. “Holy fucking shit he did spill on his crotch! It looks like he's wet his pants!”
They both had a pretty good chuckle at his expense. Nights like this were why the two girls were such close friends, they could bond over the trivial things that made them laugh behind their beers.
“Not to turn tonight to be completely about me,” Tyra said. “But do you think he'll call me? Or whatever. He could very well text me or email me. None of my information is hard to track down at all.”
“Oh, baby,” Roxanne said. “The guy is probably just busy. What did you say he did? Ran a fucking casino, for crying out loud? That sounds like some pretty serious shit, if you don't mind me saying. I've never dated a guy that's run anything, much less an entire casino.”
“Didn't you date that one guy who ran his own pizzeria?” Tyra asked. “That guy was nice, and his pizza was good!”
“Speaking of which,” Roxanne said leaning in close toward Tyra, “guess who’s been hitting me up lately? And I lurked his Instagram and he's lost a bunch of weight. But it also makes me wonder if he didn't just come off of some bad break up. You know how people seek validation after a split, not just from the ex but from everyone else.”
“You mean how everyone discovers the gym right after they get dumped?” Tyra said. “Yeah, that shit is so annoying. More power to people who want to get in shape, but can we please skip the come to Jesus social media posts? It's the God damn gym, for crying out loud.”
They kept chatting and Roxanne revealed that her pizza-making heartthrob and she had actually been sending each other various communiques for a few months’ time now. It was just that Roxanne was lonely enough to want to spend some time with him. He was a nice guy, she was the first to admit, and she couldn't ever figure out why things didn't click with him.
“It's like I don't want to be happy, you know? As much as I'll go on and on talking about how I want to be happy, really, I don't want to be happy. Really, I want to keep looking and looking for the perfect guy until I find him. And for the single moment, before I cross the bar and realize that he just spilled a cup of beer on his cock, everything in the world will sparkle with possibilities. And that's what I really want, just the world to be right for a single moment. I'm not sure what that says about me, though, that it takes some drunk frat boy loser to spill his beer on his crotch for me to realize that my real dreams should probably rest a little bit higher than the fly of some college jock.”
Sometimes Roxanne got a little dark of thought when she was drunk, and that usually signaled that not only would she not be taking anyone home, but that she would be going home herself shortly. Tyra drove Roxanne home, glad that she'd only had a couple as she listened to her slur her words as she said the same thing over and over about guys, and about how lonely she was. By the time Tyra dropped her friend off the cold words about men and love had rattled her badly.
Who was she to think that anything between her and some stranger in Las Vegas was ever going to work out? Who did she think she was, anyway?
Those questions wafted through her mind on the voice of her mother, the same voice that could uplift her spirits with a word or dash them with a murmur. Tyra's mother always wondered why Tyra didn't call all that often, preferring to write lengthy letters. It was because on the page there was no room for her mother's voice, there was only her own.
But on the phone her mother could interject. But it wasn't that her mother was a bad person, or that she put Tyra down, or made Tyra feel stupid about her life choices—it wasn't anything like that. It was just that when Tyra heard her mother's voice and thought about how it sounded when she was a child and how someday she would never hear her mother's voice again, she nearly staggered under the enormity of what it was to be a mother, and what it meant to be a daughter.
Both things were taken too lightly by her peers, and Tyra often times wondered what would happen to all the glib, cynical women who ate up Sex in the City but wouldn't give real love a chance when their mothers passed away. What would they write on their mother's headstones?
“Jesus, when did I get so negative?” Tyra said to herself as she pulled into her driveway.
It must have been the way Roxanne had gotten all down on life. She did that sometimes. But when she did it was usually warranted. There was something about the way the hot frat boy had turned out to be just another wasted jock that had seemed a little bit allegorical, especially for Roxanne. She was always chasing after the guy of her dreams only to find out he was a douche bag, and when the guy turned out to be good, even great, she always ran away.
Was that what was happening with her and Vinnie? Had he found someone great and in doing so found what he needed to run from? Tyra didn't know for certain, and realized that she might never know at all as she got out of her car and headed into her apartment complex.
Chapter5
Tyra found a voice mail on her cell the next day after work. It was Gizmo. He wanted her to come to his office. When she said she'd see him there shortly, he hurried to tell her that he was at a different office from last time. Tyra copied and pasted the address from the text message into an online search engine and found that the new office wasn't that far from the old one.
When she walked in, she found the new office much like the last. Something told her that whoever was putting Gizmo up in these offices was renting the entire place just so the Gizmo had a place to work completely away from prying eyes. From what she remembered, Gizmo had been a nice guy, but that didn't mean that nice guys didn't do bad things, weren't capable of doing horrible things. In fact, Tyra knew that it was just the opposite. That the nicest people, or the seemingly nicest people, were oftentimes the ones doing the most nefarious things out of sight and mind.
“Well, hello!” Gizmo said when Tyra entered his office. “You're just the person I wanted to see! I guess that's why I texted you and told you that I wanted to see you. Funny how that works.”
Tyra had a seat. Gizmo’s new office was a lot like the last, except this time the context was different because she'd seen the last office to compare it to. This office seemed less minimalist than just plain stark—it wasn't so much that Gizmo didn't need or want material things as it was that Gizmo knew he'd only be in the office for a month or so, maybe less, so why hang anything on the walls at all?
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Tyra asked.
“Well you see, Vinnie really likes you. And I'm not going to lie, I didn't expect that to happen at all. He's just not that way with women most of the time, you know what I'm saying? He's not an asshole or anything, it's just that he really isn't into the whole relationship thing. Most of the time. But this time might be different, so hopefully you are into that.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing too crazy, just that he wants to see you again and enjoy your company. I guess that is pretty crazy to hear from him. He also said that you had a good head on your shoulders and he admired your mind because of its empathy? I have no fucking idea what that's all about, but maybe you do. There was probably some deep conversation you guys had.”
“Oh. I guess we did have a couple.”
“Do you remember what you wrote down on your application? You probably don't. I remember you looking pretty drunk from the pictures, not that you didn't look good, though. You just looked wasted. But I wasn't privy to what you wrote down.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a little questionnaire that you evidently don't remember filling out. It wasn't important or anything like that, but it showed Vinnie that you had a good head on your shoulders from the start. It's just strange to hear him repeat the head on the shoulders thing. And actually a little creepy when you think about heads just resting on shoulders. I mean, what if they fell off!?”
Tyra chuckled with Gizmo at this. She eyed his desk, looking for anything that might betray what he really did for Vinnie. She was starting to think there was something going on beside
s just an effort being made at privacy. Why go to all this trouble to hide what was going on? In all reality no one cared. No one cared that Tyra had flown across the country to Las Vegas and fucked some guy that she barely knew because he was hot and nice and owned a casino. And certainly no one in Las Vegas would care that Vinnie was running a strange dating game. That was, unless something else was going on entirely.
“What about Vinnie's family overseas?” Tyra asked.
Gizmo stopped what he was doing, rifling through papers in one of his desk drawers, and squinted at Tyra.
“What about the family?”
Tyra felt the room go cold around her.
“I was just wondering what they thought of me? Do they know about me?” she said.
Gizmo gave her a strange look before going back to what he'd been doing.
“I'm not sure if he's told the family. I doubt it, though. But it really isn't my place to think that far into Vinnie's affairs. There isn't any real point in me thinking about what Vinnie does or what the family does because they do what they want and I do what they say. And when I keep things simple like that, then life is simple and I just go about doing my job and everyone is happy.”