[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  A single second of time can make a lifetime of a difference. The second after that smile was our chance to either make something of it, or walk out of each other’s lives forever. I opened my mouth to say something – anything. But nothing came out except a croak. Trust me, it wasn’t often someone stunned me into silence. I felt the blood rush up to my face and knew I was going purple, so I jerked my head in the opposite direction, absolutely mortified. When I looked back a second later, the guy had been eaten up by the crowd making their way along the hotel lobby.

  I should have ploughed my way through everyone until I found him – that would be my style usually. I still don’t know what it was that held me back, but the few seconds of hesitation were enough to let him drift away. I continued walking, not even knowing now where I was heading. I had a vague notion that it might be towards a bar, which wasn’t altogether a bad thought.

  If you’ve ever been to Vegas, you’ll know that it takes a lot more than a spot of self-indulgent introspection to stop people approaching you. My head was hanging so low that I was practically getting carpet burn as I slouched aimlessly along, but that didn’t stop an over-enthusiastic blonde girl with a wide mouth of bright teeth getting right in my face.

  “Heeeeeey! You’re just the person we’re looking for!” She gesticulated wildly at a group of people that were wearing the same clothes as her – red T-shirt, black leather trousers, red shoes. “Everybody! I’ve found The One!” I suddenly felt like a lab animal as the group crowded around me and scrutinised me.

  A tall guy nodded and said, “Yeah, she’ll do.”

  Through my confusion, I found the head-space to be instantly insulted at his lack of enthusiasm for whatever it was I would ‘do’ for.

  “Take her over,” he said to the blonde.

  She took my elbow, and led me off.

  “Hang on a second! What’s going on? Where are you trying to take me to?”

  “A place where you’ll make lots of money. You start gambling, you lose money. You stick with me, you’ll make big bucks this evening. Sound good?”

  “And what if I have plans?”

  “Forget them. We’re saving you the hangover,” she said with a saccharine smile.

  It was an amazing smile, in fairness – she reminded me of Julia Roberts – but it wasn’t going to work on me. I curled my lip up.

  “Oh, come on!” she said. “You looked depressed as hell before I stopped you. Guy trouble, huh?”

  The lip hadn’t worked, so I gave her my special evil look reserved for family members and boyfriends, but it didn’t faze her in the slightest.

  “I thought so. Why spend the evening drinking over some man who isn’t worth it, when you could be having fun?”

  “Having fun doing what?”

  “How does hanging out in the shiniest set of wheels in this city grab ya?”

  She’d found my weakness. Now, I was interested.

  She stopped at a car that I had passed earlier on in the hotel. Yes, you read that correctly. The MGM was so big that it had show-cars dotted around the hotel for advertising purposes – brand-spanking-new cars that really made you want to be stinking rich. I could only imagine the effect they would have on the subconscious of hardened gamblers.

  “We’re doing a promotion for this particular model at the moment,” she said, turning her back to reveal the brand and make of the car on the back of her T-shirt. The price was missing, not surprisingly. “What we need, though, is an extremely gorgeous couple to help us show it off!”

  I frowned. “As you’ve already pointed out, I’m having man trouble, so I’m not a couple. I’m just a ‘cou–’.”

  “A what? Oh, I get it.” She waved dismissively. “That doesn’t matter – we’re sorting out a fantastic guy for you right now!”

  Great. All I needed now was to spend the night in the company of some loser. “No. I’m not doing this.”

  Her sugary smile vanished. She suddenly looked quite scary, far scarier than my scary look would have been. “Well, can it make you any more miserable than you already are right now?”

  She had a point. That didn’t mean I had to admit it, though.

  I was saved from having to come up with a witty retort by a protesting voice at the other side of the car. “Uh uh. Not interested.”

  “Come onnnn, sir! You’ll be well compensated for just a few hours of your time – and you just wait until you see the beautiful lady we’ve got lined up to work with you!” A shaggy-haired guy who hadn’t been part of the team that scrutinised me looked frantically around the side of the car to see if his colleagues had found anyone. He caught Julia Roberts’ eye, looked me up and down, scrunched his face as if to say ‘Can’t you find anyone better than her?’, then shrugged in acceptance.

  “I don’t care if she’s Angelina Jolie,” the voice said. “I have plans for tonight. I . . .”

  Julia dragged me over, ignoring my demands that she should release my arm if she didn’t want a whack from it.

  The protester took one look at me, and suddenly shut up fairly lively. So, for that matter, did I.

  “There was only ever one thing we would do with this twenty dollars,” my partner in crime said as we walked towards my chosen roulette table.

  I still couldn’t believe it. Out of all the hundreds of people passing through the hotel, the gorgeous man I’d spotted earlier had been picked to be the other half of the happy car couple. That had to be more than a coincidence, surely? The rest of the hotel seemed to fade away as he told me his name. Leon. I was barely able to croak out my own in reply.

  Our mission, which we were forced to accept, was to sell the dream of a supposedly beautiful, successful couple by drinking champagne, laughing loudly and making it look like we were having the time of our lives in our slinky, up-to-the-minute car, a new Lexus model. The logic of knocking back alcohol behind the wheel of a car, albeit an immobile one, was lost on me. Even if we were in Vegas, this was the land where people spat out an artery if they found their twenty-and-a-half-year-old drinking. But who was I to question the art of advertising?

  Sipping champagne and clinking my glass delicately against my beau’s, in celebration of our perfect lives, sounded like a simple task in theory, but the more I drank, the more difficult it got. Three sips in, I started gulping, which seamlessly progressed into me throwing the rest of my glass down my throat like any respectable woman would. One of Julia’s colleagues refilled it, complete with a dirty look, and I promptly knocked that one back too. What else could I do to celebrate finding Leon? Okay, you might say it wasn’t very ladylike – but to my delight, Leon was no gentleman either. He matched me drink for drink, and seemed thrilled and impressed to be in the company of someone who could keep up with him. I could see Julia and Shaggy frowning at each other as they watched us – but they needn’t have worried. By the time Leon and I started our third bottle of champagne, we were laughing so raucously that we were attracting the attention of every single person that passed – which was exactly what they wanted, wasn’t it?

  And that was when it suddenly became a great idea to get up and dance. Well, why not? All the bar staff in a pub at the centre of the MGM had to abandon whatever it was they were doing when certain songs came on, and instantly jump up on the nearest table to shake their booties. We were now technically MGM staff, so wasn’t it our duty to dance? The concert in the Grand Garden Arena had just ended, and music from the concert’s artist was being pumped all over the hotel – probably to get the concert-goers to continue the party vibe with after-drinks.

  “Woooo!” I pulled myself into an upright position. “Come on, people!” A hundred heads turned to look at me. Standing on my car seat, I flailed my arms in the air, roaring along with the song. Out of the side of my eye, I saw Leon standing up on his seat too. He threw his arm around my shoulders, and joined me in a raucous rendition of one of the artist’s biggest hits. And incredibly, a crowd started to form around us to sing along. I could see Julia runnin
g over to get us to sit down, but Shaggy stopped her, no doubt sensing an opportunity to jump up when the crowd was big enough and start his sales pitch about the car.

  It was an accident waiting to happen. We’d reached the crescendo of the song when I turned sideways on one of my heels, stumbling on top of Leon, who dropped the champagne bottle that he’d been holding to his mouth like a wino. Of course, this eejit here made a dive for it as it fell. And as I did so, I totally lost my balance and . . . stuck my other heeled foot right through the windscreen of the car.

  Everyone stopped singing.

  The T-shirt gang was frozen in horror. Not at the thought of me being maimed for life, of course – their concern was entirely for the car. Luckily for me, the shoe had taken all the impact, and I was able to slip my uninjured foot out of it. I tugged the shoe out of the glass: the heel was somewhat mangled but miraculously still attached to the shoe, if slightly wobbly. The whole scene was actually quite artistic, you know. The glass hadn’t shattered – the heel of the shoe had created a dainty little hole, and great big cracks had erupted from the centre and spread to the corners of the windscreen. It was like a sunflower, for all the world.

  Leon tried to recover the situation. “Buy a Lexus, everyone! You’ll have a smashing time!” He erupted into fits of laughter at his attempt to be witty, but unlike with the songs, nobody joined in. Even I didn’t laugh – I knew a predictable joke when I heard one – but the whole issue of almost putting my leg through the windscreen had quietened me down a bit anyway. If I’d fallen any harder, Leon’s jokes wouldn’t have been the only lame thing around here.

  If you’re one step ahead of me, you’ll probably have worked out that our employment at the MGM ended abruptly. And that was how we ended up gambling the huge sum of twenty dollars that we’d earned after the cost of damages was taken from our wages, not to mention what we gambled from our own pockets.

  Roulette was addictive. We bet on black, we bet on red. We played inside bets, we played outside bets – even though I had no idea of the lingo behind what we were doing at the time, and just nodded knowledgeably when Leon asked me if I thought we should play a corner. Our chips stacked up, then grew smaller. Before I knew it, two hours had passed. I could feel Leon’s breath on my neck every time I leaned over the roulette table. As soon as we lost all of our chips, he put his hand on the small of my back, softly and tentatively, and whispered in my ear, “Gambling is thirsty work. Do you want to go to a bar?”

  He had a full glass of drink in his hand as he said this, so I was hoping he just wanted to spend some time alone with me. I nodded, and we made our way to the bar with the table dancers. We settled in a cosy corner. A half-naked girl with an extremely flat stomach took our order, which Leon had paid for before I even had my wallet out. I didn’t argue. It felt right.

  I had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and I sucked a long sup from it through my straw. Leon watched me, then laughed. “If I hadn’t known you were Irish from your accent, I would have guessed it by the way you drink.”

  “They taught you to drink wherever it was that you grew up too, so I’m in good company.”

  “That’s what a misspent youth in Arizona does to you. Vegas drinking is tame compared to what I’m used to in the wild lands of home.” He rolled his eyes. “Nah. I’m from one of these towns where absolutely nothing ever happens. How about you?”

  “I’m from Dublin – ever been there?”

  “No, but I’m familiar with it from Fair City. My parents are Irish, you see – Mom’s from Sligo, and Dad’s from Galway – and they used to get videos of films and TV shows taped from the Irish national broadcaster and sent over years ago. I’ve seen far more begorrah films about turf and bogs than one man should see, but the early days of Fair City were also in the mix. And do you remember Glenroe? I must have seen every episode ever made of that!”

  “No way!”

  “I know. Imagine putting a young child through that in the name of culture. You Irish are cruel.” He took a slug of his drink. “And crazy, too. I couldn’t believe how fast you drank that champagne in the car.”

  “You were happy to join in my craziness. You actually drank faster than me, you know.”

  “I’m a closet crazy kid,” said the clean-cut vision beside me.

  “You don’t look it. I thought you were as straight as they came when I first saw you. But then I saw your hidden depths when you knocked back the drinks with me. The Irish influence really makes sense!”

  “I just need someone to be crazy with. Most of the women I meet are so . . . self-conscious. They don’t let themselves go the way you did tonight – and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s lovely to see a woman just be herself.” He looked down at the table, suddenly looking self-conscious himself. “And . . . I really liked what I saw.”

  I shivered. Things were just getting better and better.

  “Being with you tonight . . . it’s made me feel like I’ve come back to being myself,” he went on. “I used to be a different person, but stuff happened and . . . well, it changed me. You make me feel like I’ve just come home.”

  He smiled, shyly at first, but then it turned into a full-megawatt beam. I returned it. My heart felt like it was about to burst out of my chest. Something seriously special was happening here.

  Before I knew it, I was telling Leon stuff I never told anyone. Serious, heavy stuff. The kind of stuff that would send most men running for the hills. I knew he wouldn’t. Not him. I hadn’t even realised I was going to say anything until it had come out, but I knew as I spoke that it wasn’t a mistake to have opened my mouth.

  The next two hours felt like they’d only lasted a few seconds. Despite the buzz of the hotel and the bar, it felt like we were the only two people in the entire world. It was magical . . . but then, nature had to ruin the spell, as I suddenly realised that I needed to use the bathroom.

  I nodded in the direction of the restrooms, which were part of the hotel’s main walkway outside of the bar. “I won’t be long,” I said, reluctantly getting myself up from the comfy yet trendy couch that had been swallowing me up.

  “Take as long as you need. I’ll be waiting.” He smiled again, and something inside me exploded.

  I couldn’t stop myself from putting my hand on his shoulder as I walked past him, and squeezing it softly. He lifted his hand up to mine, took it from his shoulder and to his mouth, where he kissed it so tenderly that I instantly felt like crying with the beauty of the moment. It nearly killed me to take my hand away, but my bladder was winning the fight between body and soul.

  I had to stop myself from skipping to the bathroom. How had I been lucky enough to bump into this guy? And unlucky enough to meet him on my last night here . . . The queue was ridiculously long. I eventually got a free stall, and was just washing my hands as fast as I could in my haste to get back to Leon when I heard the wail of a fire alarm. Being Irish, I didn’t take a blind bit of notice of it. It had probably just been set off by accident.

  “Hey, you! Quick, let’s go!” An elderly lady beckoned to me as she ran towards the door.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure some drunk just fell into a wall and set off an alarm or something.” I thought of how much Leon and I had drunk, and hoped he wasn’t responsible.

  “Suit yourself. I’m outta here.”

  The lady opened the bathroom door. The smell of smoke immediately flooded in.

  “On second thoughts, wait for me!”

  The casino floor was in chaos. Black smoke had started to trickle through the hotel and people were racing towards the closest exits. I ran towards the bar to find Leon, but a harassed security guy was standing at one of the exits to the bar when I got there.

  “No entry! Proceed to the emergency exit on your left immediately!”

  “But I need to find a friend who was in there!”

  “Everyone has been evacuated to the emergency exit on your left. Now go!”

  I didn’t need to be told twice
. (Well, I had been told twice, but the first time didn’t count.) I just had to find Leon. I joined everyone else in racing towards the exit, and then coming to an abrupt standstill as we joined the increasingly panicked crowd and shuffled our way outside.

  Strangely enough, I wasn’t one bit threatened by the fire that could potentially kill us all. My big worry was losing Leon – and as soon as I got outside, I could tell that it was a very valid worry. As the second biggest hotel in the world with over 5,000 rooms, the MGM’s evacuation process had resulted in countless bodies being evicted onto the streets from every single one of the masses of exits in the hotel. The street was heaving with people, terrified people who had been separated from family members and friends. Names were being shouted up and down the street as people attempted to find others, people were pushing and shoving their way through the crowd, passers-by were stopping to see what was going on and making the crowd even bigger. I joined the second group – unpopular people who jostled their way through the crowd – and searched for Leon. He was tall, which I had hoped would be an advantage, but it really meant nothing in a crowd of this magnitude.

  The fire services arrived, and thankfully they got things under control. It hadn’t been half as bad as the black smoke had led everyone to believe – in fact, it had been a relatively small fire, and nobody had been injured. We were informed that it had started in the north wing of the hotel and that the accommodation in the south wing was unaffected, but we would need to wait outside until the clean-up operation was complete. After a few sweltering hours on the street, we were allowed back into the hotel.

  Although I had searched for Leon until I was black and blue from struggling through the crowd, I hadn’t succeeded in finding him – but now that we were allowed back into the hotel, I felt a glimmer of hope. The bar we’d been drinking in had closed in the aftermath of the fire, so I walked back towards the table we’d been gambling at earlier. Surely if he wanted to find me as much as I wanted to find him, he’d think of coming back here? It was the only card I had up my sleeveless top, so I could only pray that it would work.