The Hothead

by Myra Scott

  “I hope you have a good backup plan to explain yourself,” Zane said, almost starting to laugh at how ridiculous my statement must have sounded to him.

  I felt my cheeks burn at being called out by Zane of all people, but I pressed on, determined.

  “I know the money seems great right now, but we need to look at what’s happening on a smaller scale and think about what it means for the big picture.” I picked up my drink and started pacing the room, first gesturing to Mick.

  “Mick doesn’t have to tell you again what our problems with staffing have been. We can’t keep up with the number of people we have to hire. We just hire anyone who walks in the doors without a chance to vet them or even get proper background checks done. That’s why two out of every three people we hire gets fired in their first two weeks.”

  “And that problem is going to solve itself, if we have enough patience,” Zane said, trying to keep his voice calm, but the idea of splitting with La Torre was fighting words, and I knew it. He was digging his heels in already.

  “Patience is one thing,” I said, “but how many sexual harassment charges are we going to have to deal with before then? Are we going to survive that? How long before something really serious happens because we’re hiring so liberally?”

  “That’s part of your jobs,” Zane said firmly, and at that, Mick quirked an eyebrow.

  “Actually, he has a point, Zane,” Mick said. “My issues with staffing haven’t really gone down. I just got back from dealing with another sexual harassment charge before this very meeting.”

  “Cutting the flow of guests is the last possible solution to this, though,” Zane said, getting more tense with each passing moment.

  “Don’t you see what this is doing to us in the long run, though?” I pointed out. “The more we lower our quality of hires and just hope that some of them turn out okay, the worse overall quality is going to get. We’re lowering the bar more and more as we try to rake in the profits of the sudden uptick in foot traffic.”

  Mick nodded in agreement with me, and I felt a quiet jolt of pride knowing that he sympathized with my point. There was still some hesitation in his body language, which worried me, but I could only hope for so much from him.

  “And then there are the security issues,” I added, nodding to Bart, who tossed back the last of his whisky. “Bart, I know security has been stretched way too thin since the nightclub opened.”

  “You did say we’d be able to handle the overflow,” Bart said to Zane, “but I haven’t seen hide or hair of any actual measures to make that happen. I need some time to train up new security guards, and I ain’t got that. I don’t even have a new security system installed like you promised.”

  “This is all a lot to ask in a short amount of time,” Zane said, looking like he was becoming aware that the room was turning against him. I felt a gut-wrenching pang of guilt when I realized he was starting to get cornered, but I wasn’t about to back down. One thought about Diego brought that anger back to the front of my mind. “We’re still in the first year of the partnership, and believe me, La Torre is having its own share of growing pains as well.”

  “And there’s another part of the problem,” I said, unable to hold it back. “You’re getting so interested in La Torre’s business that an outsider would hardly realize we aren’t the same company.”

  “If Zane and Diego ever decide to get married, we will be,” Mick pointed out. He meant it as a casual remark, but I felt my blood boiling, and I couldn’t keep it from showing.

  “Well as far as I know,” I snapped, “that isn’t on the table, and we need to make business decisions as if we’re in this together, just the four of us, like it always has been.”

  Even Zane wasn’t blind to the anger in my voice, and I knew I have to dial it back a little. I took a long drink of the tequila cocktail while I gathered my thoughts, but Bart spoke up for me.

  “I gotta say, Zane, I’m with Gage on this one,” his gruff voice came to my rescue. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the new figures we’ve been pulling down, but I swear, all it takes is for one of my guards to call in sick, and the whole night is guaranteed to be a nightmare.”

  “Then you need to get someone to handle the scheduling better,” Zane said, defensive, and Bart had to hold himself back from snapping back at Zane.

  “What we need,” I said, swallowing the cool alcohol, “is a total overhaul of the security systems we have in place.” I gestured back to Mick. “You know that brawl Mick got dragged into a while back, the one that nearly landed us in the middle of a lawsuit with some punk college kids? The shitty security camera footage saved us from getting prosecuted, but it also meant we couldn’t press charges against any of the kids who started the fight.”

  Mick frowned at the reminder, but Bart gave a solid nod. “He’s right. And if we’d had enough staff working the floor that night, the fight might not have even gotten so bad that any of that was necessary.”

  “We did everything we could,” Zane protested, putting his hands on his hips and furrowing his eyebrow. “We’ve been over this.”

  “Everything we could wasn’t enough, Zane,” I pressed. “What we need is to back off all this acting like we’re the biggest casino on the Strip. We can’t handle it. Until we can, we’re just putting more guests at risk and lowering our standards for no good reason but some quick money grab that’s going to get eaten up by lawsuits if we can’t prevent things like what happened with Mick.”

  “Enough of this!” Zane said in a raised voice that surprised all of us. He glared, drumming his fingers on his hip before speaking further. “I don’t know what all this is really about, but you’ve all been perfectly happy working with La Torre up until now. This is nothing but good for business. I refuse to break relations with Diego. We’re just going to have to find a way to make this work for all of us. I shouldn’t have to remind you,” he added with a glare to me and Mick, “that before this partnership, we were hemorrhaging money, thanks to La Torre. As partners, we’re both much better off. We just need to learn to adapt.”

  “But we can’t adapt if we get overloaded and burn out,” Bart argued. “Look, Zane, Gage is right on the money here—we should back off just enough to give us time to cool off a little. Get some more guards in now that we know what kind of foot traffic to prepare for. Give me time to get those guards trained. Hell, Gage could probably use some help with the pit bosses, too,” he said, and I nodded.

  “You don’t know how many different workers down in the casino have gotten fired in the last month,” I said. “This is unsustainable.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s unsustainable,” Mick said, and I shot him a glare. I thought he was on my side, but I might have underestimated how cautious he could be. “I agree that we need some breathing room, but cutting ties with La Torre…I’m not so sure. It’s been really, really good for us lately, and we can’t afford to go back to pre-partnership profits.”

  “Exactly,” Zane said triumphantly.

  “But,” Mick said with a cautionary glance to Zane, “I’m not saying I’m against the idea, either. Gage has a good point about my lawsuit. Money is good, but Gage is right, if we can’t manage a casino that keeps up with its traffic, it’s going to come back and bite us in the ass before we have time to pick up the pace.”

  Mick looked around, realizing that all of us were watching him as if he was the deciding vote in all this. He stood up and shook his head. “Look, I need time to think about this. I’m going to run some numbers in my office, and we can have another meeting about this soon.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Zane said, exasperated, but with my second drink finished, I crossed my arms and held my ground, and Bart gave me an affirmative nod.

  “But these are some issues we can’t let lie,” Bart said. “I’m sticking by Gage here, I want some concrete plans for change, and I want to
see them in action.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen as long as we’re just letting the casino fall into chaos while we have meetings and drink tequila,” Zane said, shooting me a glare that made me want to throw my glass at him. “Let’s get back downstairs, the night is still young. We’ll talk about this again.”

  With that, Zane swept out of the room at a brisk pace, and we all exchanged looks before Mick got up and followed him.

  “That could’ve gone better,” Bart grumbled, standing up and heading over to the bar for another drink. “But thanks for bringing that up.” He poured himself a glass as I nodded silently, taking a few steps in his direction but not making eye contact.

  Bart was gruff, but he had a way of reading people, and the way he was looking at me just then told me he had an idea of why I called this meeting. “Just be sure you know what you’re asking from Zane, Gage,” he said, giving me a stern eye.

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I hear you,” I said with a rueful sigh. “But regardless, we both know the simple facts. Something’s got to change.”

  “I’ll drink to that, brother,” he said, pouring me my own glass of whisky.

  We clinked our glasses together and drank, for different reasons.

  It was going to be a long week.

  CHAPTER THREE - DEVIN

  It had been one hell of a long day. The life of a blackjack dealer was such a mixed bag. There were moments of pure glamor and luxury, when maybe I would get a celebrity at my table. Or maybe an especially lucky customer would celebrate his winnings with a bottle of champagne and start generously tipping everyone around him; including me, the man at whose table he scooped up his bundle of chips. Sometimes, I would get the honor of providing someone’s first win ever, and to me, there was not much in this world more exciting than getting to witness a gambler being born. It was fun to see the glimmer of delight in someone’s eyes as they stumble into their winnings, jaw dropped and hands clapping excitedly.

  Of course, the flip side of that was having to see someone’s addiction spiral out of control. Watching helplessly as a man comes and sits down in front of me, betting down to his last cent and losing it all because he just couldn’t walk away from the blackjack table.

  And that’s the worst part. I can’t tell him to leave. I can’t coach him to walk out of this casino, go home, and salvage whatever might still be left of his marriage and finances. I was here to provide entertainment and a quick-dealing pair of hands. I was here to smile politely. My customers would beg me to tell them if they were performing well, beg me to help them cheat or let something slide. Although it went against every fraction of my nature to say no—since I’m a bit of a people pleaser—I had to put my foot down. I had to tell them no. As much as I wanted one of my customers to be a big winner, especially since the big winners tended to tip generously, it wasn’t up to me. It was up to chance. Just like every other game here at Sentry. The beauty of the casino wasn’t to win, it was to get big, strong, independent, self-absorbed people to set aside their type-A attitudes just for a while. To hand over their fate to Lady Luck and see what she had in store for them. That was my job: to be an agent, a subordinate to my boss, Lady Luck.

  Of course, none of my actual bosses looked much like Lady Luck. This casino was run by a small group of men, all of whom had apparently been close friends for years. They roamed around through the casino like a sexy wolf pack, always talking in hushed voices, arguing, debating, laughing. If this were high school, they would have been a clique. And I, a lowly blackjack dealer, was definitely not part of the clique.

  However, I really wished that I was. Not because of some high-school holdover desire to be part of the popular kids’ crew, but because one of the guys in the group had captivated my interest for what felt like forever now.

  Gage. He was the one my mind wandered back to every time I was alone, every time I felt lonely and frisky. He was gorgeous to look at, tall and slender with a shock of cropped ginger hair, hazel eyes that seemed to change colors to suit the weather, a devilish smile, and an adorable smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. Usually, he was dressed pretty smartly, his arms covered up with long sleeves. He was a snappy dresser, but he was less formal in his demeanor than some of his colleagues, I noticed. No matter how elegant his ensemble was or how professional he was in his business dealings around the casino, there remained something very boyish and all-American about him. He looked like the kind of guy who would star in a 1950s Americana movie about baseball. He was exactly the kind of guy I never expected to have a crush on.

  Back in high school, when I first started to realize that I wasn’t interested in girls the way my friends were. My very first crush ever was on the drum major of the school marching band. I was a part of the band myself, as I’d been playing the drums since I was ten years old. I was head of the drumline, and the reason I practiced so obsessively was out of some misguided desire to impress my drum major. At first, of course, my dumb ass didn’t realize that I was in love with him. I misinterpreted my infatuation as simple admiration, a desire to make him think I was cool. I thought maybe if I played the drums well enough, he would be impressed by my skills. His name was Ricky Perez, and I used to lie awake in bed staring up at the ceiling, just dreaming about the day he would put down his conductor’s baton and applaud for me, calling me out in front of the whole band as the best, the most talented, the most dedicated.

  That was the extent of my desires for the longest time. I was stupid, still trying to convince myself that my feelings for Ricky were admiration and that my feelings for the cheerleaders who danced and shimmied in front of us at football games were in any way remotely attractive to me. It was odd because I could almost convince myself that I felt an attraction to one of them… until I realized that the only reason I found her interesting was because she was dating Ricky. When I finally put two and two together, during my senior year, it was like the whole world turned upside down on me.

  Suddenly, it all made sense. I did, in fact, love playing the drums. But it wasn’t that love which drove me to practice until the wee hours of the morning in our thankfully noise-proofed shed out back. It was my budding love for Ricky the drum major.

  He was barely taller than me, with dark eyes, dark hair, and copper-colored skin. He had moved to our little town in Connecticut during freshman year from El Salvador. He spoke perfect English, but with a light accent which drove me absolutely wild. I was drawn to him at first because he was attractive, of course, but also because he was so different from all the other guys at school. We were all so… well, so Connecticut. Clean-cut, pale skin, perfectly bland, and American. Ricky was, to put it less delicately, exotic to me.

  Of course, when I finally worked up the courage to ask him out in senior year, he turned me down. He wrinkled his nose at me and told me to leave him alone, that he wasn’t even slightly gay. I should have seen that coming, and it stung like hell, but to my relief, he never told my secret to anyone.

  I graduated high school still technically in the closet, and I attended prom with one of my friends, a girl who was woefully in love with me. What a tangled-up mess of hormonal teenage emotions. But luckily, when I left Connecticut for college, I left my old regrets and shame behind. I built up a wonderful group of supportive friends; I began studying to become a psychiatrist since I had always been a sounding board for my friends and family; and I followed in my father’s footsteps to learn classical guitar along with the drums. My father had been a fairly well-known Connecticut local musician. In fact, it was actually at one of his early shows that he met my mother who was a bartender at the small hole-in-the-wall club he was playing at. They briefly toured New England together, with my father playing guitar and my mother singing. Sometimes, they still get recognized today.

  So, music ran in my family. And I actually used my guitar as a method of coming out to my parents. One day, when I was home visitin
g my family during Thanksgiving break, I gathered my parents and older brother into the living room and played them a song I wrote about how I was finally going to live the life I wanted to live. I had been so damn nervous, trembling from head to toe, my voice shaking with more than just vibrato. Not only was this the first time I had ever even broached the subject of being gay with my parents, but it was the first time I had played them a song I wrote myself.

  When it was done, I had stared at them expectantly, nervously. I had expected them to get angry or upset. My mom did actually cry, but she quickly clarified that she was only crying out of happiness for me. As it turned out, they had guessed that I might be gay all along. It was a beautiful bonding moment. Now everyone in my life who truly mattered knew my truth, and I didn’t have to hide anymore.

  After that, I was so excited that I went a little wild. I dated around constantly, moving from one guy to the next like I was trying to rack up points in some game. I didn’t sleep with most of them, since I was still shy about my body at the time. But I kissed a lot of frogs. I tried on lots of different hats. And that was how I spent all my college years, refusing to be tied down. As far as I was concerned, I had already spent too much time alone, in hiding. Now it was my chance to get out there and gain new experiences, meet new people. I didn’t slow down for even a second, and my future looked bright, as well. That is, until I ran out of funding.

  My father fell ill and much of my college funds were re-appropriated for hospital bills. I didn’t blame my parents for why I couldn’t finish my degree. It wasn’t like my dad got sick on purpose, after all. So, I put my psychiatry degree on hold and moved out west, looking for a fresh start.

  I ended up here, at the Sentry Casino, where I met Gage Taylor for the first time. And from the moment I first saw him, I was weak in the knees. He was the one who helped train me for the position. Of course, I had already gotten a quick casino academy certification for blackjack on a whim back in college. I was always looking to broaden my horizons. But admittedly, I played a little dumb just to get Gage to stick around and show me the ropes. Ever since then, I had been hooked. He was different from anyone I had ever been with before, and when we first met, I had assumed he was straight. But lo and behold, a month into my time here, it dawned on me that Gage had a crush on Zane Anderson, the CEO of the casino.