by L A Tavares
She sits and throws ideas at me and I list each sentiment in the columns they belong to, but in the end, we end up exactly where we started—a confused version of Kelly that has plenty of options but not enough confidence in any route to choose it definitively.
Even with the purple lipstick words crossing her perfect reflection, she uses the mirror to get ready for work and leaves for her shift.
The Rock Room has been busier than ever and as a result, Kelly doesn’t find her way home very often. I’m alone with no obligation and no responsibilities which for me, tends to be a lethal combination.
Especially since there are multiple unanswered texts from Isabella on my phone. For weeks I’ve ignored them. There were times when I considered blocking her altogether, but I can’t. I never was strong enough to commit to fully cutting her off, which, effectively would have shut down the portal to my worst vice. And now her most recent tactic is sending pictures of the ever-growing money piles and the smoky penthouse I’ve grown so fond of.
My stomach turns and tightens, but I can’t explain why. I’m not hungry. The pressure seeps into my chest, making it harder to breathe. I inhale deeply, trying to expand the walls of my lungs, and sweat beads at my brow. I’m not sick. I’m tempted, which is worse. I remember how bad the withdrawal got the first and only time I ever tried to give up cigarettes. This is similar, and I now understand that I have an addictive personality in more ways than one. There’s a lingering invite to the Penthouse, and I want to go. The part of me that knows I shouldn’t go is overshadowed by the part of me that doesn’t care what happens next. It’s only one time. This could be my last game.
A loud knock at the door interrupts my reeling thoughts but I don’t get up. I don’t call out to the person on the other side of the door. I inhale deeply again through my nose and let the breath out. As I do, the door opens. I whip my head around, making the room spin, to see who it is.
“You okay, man?” Xander says, his voice filled with concern. “I knocked. You didn’t answer.”
“What the hell are you doing here, Xander?” I snap at him, wiping my forehead on my sleeve.
“Picking you up? We’re supposed to go do that video blog interview about Stasia’s tracks. Cooper and the guys are outside.”
I forgot all about that. Truthfully, I don’t even remember committing to it. Important things have been slipping through the cracks lately. I can’t concentrate. I can’t stay organized.
“So, are you ready?” Skepticism leaves his voice sounding unlike himself. “Or do you need a few more minutes?”
“I’m not going.” My voice is so quiet that I’m not sure if I said the words aloud or if he heard them at all.
“You’re…what?” He steps in through the doorway, taking cautious steps across the room until he’s only a few feet from me. “What the hell is going on, Blake?”
“I said I’m not going!” I yell, standing up and pushing past him, my shoulder hitting his on my way out the door.
He heard me that time.
* * * *
Then
There are about fifty rooms in Rina Amell’s house and Kelly isn’t in any of them. Half-naked couples scream profanities at me as I whip open doors looking for her. I feel my luck starting to fade. She’s gone.
I find the kitchen, fill a cup with liquor from the counter and chug it, refilling it and drinking that too. I rip off my tie and toss it to the counter. There was a chance for her and me—a real chance—and I blew it.
Well, Xander blew it for me.
He sits in the living room in his tux with his sunglasses on, a crowd of people around him and Rina sitting on his lap.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” He says in a casual tone as I approach.
“You ruined everything.” My voice is a low growl. “I didn’t even want to come tonight.”
“Then you shouldn’t have.” Xander slurs his speech. Rina moves her legs off him, and he stands, straightening out his tux. He loses his balance for a moment but regains it.
“All I ever wanted to do was help you—set you up with a pretty girl and get you to prom—”
“I don’t need your help.” My face grows to a hot red while my jaw is pained from clenching it.
“Now I don’t think that’s true.” The smell of liquor pours off his words. “You’d be sleeping on a fucking park bench if it wasn’t for me.”
I hit his chest before he even finishes the sentence. He flies backward, tumbling into a table that falls on its side, spilling mixed contents over the hardwood floors. He gets to his feet and springs toward me. Our bodies collide hard as he tackles me to the ground and throws a hard punch that causes my nose to bleed, the crimson flowing across my lips and into my mouth, leaving a gruesome metallic taste.
Dom pulls him off me then I’m standing too, with Julian’s assistance.
Xander breaks free of Julian’s grasp and steps toward me, but I get one last connection in. My knuckles crack against Xander’s jaw.
“Let’s go,” Julian says as he grabs my arm and drags me out of Rina’s house. “You can crash with me tonight.”
When we arrive at Julian’s, I wash up the best I can in the bathroom sink. The water runs over my hands and I analyze them, unsure if the blood they’re covered in is mine or Xander’s. I stare at myself in the mirror for a long while, replaying the night in my head. I hardly recognize the person looking back at me. I splash some water on my face and take a few deep breaths before joining Julian in his room.
The leather gaming chair I sit in rocks back and forth as Julian and I pound our thumbs into controllers and play the game on the big screen TV in his room. Our tuxes are still on, though mine is torn in a few places and dried blood decorates the once-white sections. Debbie is going to kill Xander and I. Both of our tuxes are rentals.
Footsteps echo up the stairs, getting closer and closer to the door, but neither Julian nor I flinch.
Xander leans into the doorframe, his tux in worse shape than mine. “You should put some ice on that.” I can tell by the soreness when I scrunch my nose that the swelling is getting worse instead of better.
Julian pauses the game and stands, leaving the room. “I’ll give you two a minute.”
I remain in the gaming chair on the floor, not looking at him and refusing to speak first.
He steps forward, turning to sit on the edge of Julian’s bed.
“I didn’t mean it.” His voice is so small, so quiet that it must be borrowed from someone else. Xander is loud. Everything about him is loud except for the sentence he just uttered.
“What happened tonight, Blake?” He slides down the foot of the bed until he’s sitting next to me on the floor. “If you wanted to go to prom with Kelly, why didn’t you just say yes when she tried to ask you?”
I just shake my head, not wanting to tell him what’s going on in the depths of my thoughts.
“I’m not leaving until you talk, Mathews. You’ve been dodging my questions for years, and I’ve allowed that because I thought that’s what you needed. But you have to talk to someone, man. You have people. You don’t have to do everything alone all the time.”
He has given me space. He’s never pried too much. I’ll give him credit there. He doesn’t push, but is always available to listen on the rare occasions I do reveal any part of my past.
“You weren’t wrong.” I adjust my position so I’m facing him. “Tonight, when you said I would have nowhere else to go, it was true.”
“Blake, I shouldn’t have said that. I was drinking and angry and stupid—”
“No, just shut up for a second.” He quiets and lets me talk. “I like Kelly. I don’t think that’s a secret at this point, but I’m…I’m not good enough for her, Xander. Can you imagine what people would say about her if she started hanging out with me? She was the prom queen. I couldn’t even afford to rent a tie for tonight, never mind a tux if it weren’t for your mother. I am the charity case already, and when Kelly started talking about prom, I
couldn’t picture myself standing next to her and feeling like I belonged there. I don’t. I don’t really belong anywhere.”
He looks at me long and hard. I can see it in his eyes and the way he parts his lips. I know something is coming, something good, something so Xander Varro that it will break through my walls and have a forever impact on the way I feel about myself. That’s what he does. He writes intricate songs, creates lyrics and unfolds beautiful sentiments, even when no one asked him to.
“Blake”—he places his hand on my shoulder—“you are the biggest fucking idiot I know.”
I’m speechless in a confusion I can’t recover from. That is not what I expected—not that he’s wrong. I do the only thing I can think of and return the blow.
“You call geography ‘map-ology’, but I’m the idiot?”
He laughs and nods, appreciating the joke.
“Blake, Kelly likes you. She doesn’t give a damn where you came from or how you got here or how much of a disaster your mother is. She wanted to go to prom with you because you make her laugh and make her feel seen.”
I nod, knowing that at the end of the night that this wasn’t Xander’s fault at all. I was hiding when I said I wasn’t going to prom. I fear getting close to her—to anyone, really.
“What do I do now?”
“Ask her out. Find her, be up front with her. But, if she says yes, plan on scheduling for a date in the way distant future.”
I arch my brow and tilt my head. “Why?”
“When mom sees what we did to these tuxes, we’re going to be grounded until we die.”
* * * *
Now
The ice clinks against the glass as I rotate my cup, swirling the amber liquid around the crystal edges. A gentleman who goes by the name of JX sits under the gun, two positions to my left. He doubles the bet. Victor raises the stakes once more, and the two players to his left fold. I hold a pair in the hole, hoping to strengthen that hand with cards from the community cards. It’s a good start, one of the best I’ve had in a while, so I roll with it. I raise.
Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s skill, but everyone says you can’t beat Victor—yet here I sit with his money filling my pockets.
I’m on a roll. It’s a high I don’t want to come down from. The cards in the hands I’m dealt are so perfect that they couldn’t be better if the deck was stacked. I’ve lost track of time and money at this point, but I have no intention of quitting while I’m ahead.
Another hand is dealt, and the outcome is positive—for me, at least. The same can’t be said for Victor, JX and the other players.
Toward the end of the hand with only one community card remaining, Victor and I take turns staring the other down and raising the bets.
“I’m tired of losing money to you tonight, kid. Let’s make it interesting before we call it a night.”
He’s scared to play. I like that he’s scared to play. I feel on top of the world and I love the view from up here.
“How much money are you willing to lose tonight, son?” Victor asks. I weigh my options.
“What did you have in mind?”
“I say, double or nothing.” He scratches his chin. “I win this hand, and I’ll take back all of the winnings you have over there. You win, I’ll double what I’ve already lost.”
“Child’s play.” Confidence courses through my veins. “Give me a number with a few more zeroes behind it.”
Victor waves Isabella over to his side of the table and she leans forward, listening closely to his hushed words. She walks around toward me, her heels clicking against the floor as she nears. She leans in and whispers his offer in my ear.
My heart pounds in my chest. The thing is, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I don’t waste time trying to talk myself out of it.
“You have that kind of money, Mathews?” Victor asks, flicking a flame to life with his Colibri lighter and running it across the end of a cigar.
“Don’t you worry about me,” I say. “I have it and I intend on keeping it where it is.” I think just for one second about how long it took me to build up that dream account. Where I was when I started it, how empty it looked when I opened it and how I promised myself it would never be empty again.
The thing is, I’m better at breaking promises than I am at playing poker. He flips his card and suddenly I’m eighteen years old again, starting anew, without even two dimes to rub together.
* * * *
The cushions of the sofa have morphed into a new shape—a permanent crease where my ass has been for the last… I don’t even know how long.
I can’t move. I can barely breathe. All I can do is sit there, feeling only inches tall and trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
Thinking back on it all hurts. The loss, the game, the winnings prior, losing my cool on Xander and forgetting important dates and times because of the distraction this game provides. It’s the worst kind of pain. I think of solutions, ways to rebuild the fund and ideas to recuperate. My first thought—keep gambling and win it back. I’ve done it before.
Kelly flies through the door with a large smile across her face. At least one of us is having a good night. She grabs my hand and pulls me to our room.
No ‘hello’. No ‘how was your night.’ Nothing.
She drags her hands down the mirror, ruining the pro-con list we created. She turns to me and her eyes are the brightest I have ever seen them.
“Ethan is selling The Rock Room.” She takes my hands in her lipstick-stained fingers.
“This…is good news?” I ask, unsure where she is going with this.
She looks away, nervous to say what’s on her mind and holding back. She takes a deep breath, and in those seconds where she questions her words, I figure out what she wants.
“I want to buy it.”
She confirms my intuition.
“You…want to buy it.” The weight on my chest increases exponentially.
“I know it’s a lot.” She talks in a fast-paced way where her words bump into each other as she spits them out. “But we could do it, Blake! We could own The Rock Room. I already know how to run it and it’s already so successful that I feel like we can’t lose. It’s a sure thing, Blake, a safe bet.”
Sharp pains pierce in my stomach as she talks. Nothing is a sure thing, especially in my hands. There are no safe bets.
“I know how hard you worked to save up that money in the account you showed me, and at the end of the day it’s your money, so it’s your call. You called it the ‘dream’ account, Blake. Don’t you see it? You were going to be the rock star and I was going to be the CEO. This was the dream.”
I step away from her. My words, my actions and my calls have crushed Kelly in the past but nothing I have ever done before could hurt her in the way I’m about to.
“Blake?” she whispers. The excitement fades from her voice. I turn toward her, my face twisted into a sorrowful frown. “Oh…Blake…you didn’t.”
My stomach turns. I’m going to be sick. The thing I find the most disturbing is not that I lost a hefty chunk of everything I have worked for and not that I can’t be the one to make her dream come true. It’s that she assumed before I said the words that I had drained that account on a bad bet and she was right.
* * * *
Kelly and I haven’t spoken in days. She’s made it abundantly clear that it’s not about the money—that the money in that account was mine to do what I wanted, when I pleased. She was mad about the lying, the gambling and the inability to say no or to determine when enough was enough. She was mad that I couldn’t see a bad idea when it was right in front of me.
I’m still doing fine. My main account is certainly not hurting, but I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is to lose it. The reality is that I had room to make mistakes before, until I made the biggest one of all time. Now I have no buffer.
My caloric intake over the days since Kelly left is composed of mostly coffee and beer. Empty cups and bottles scatter the floor arou
nd me as I lean against the couch. I came down here looking for the remote, didn’t find it and never made it back up to the couch.
There’s a knock at the door that I don’t get excited about. It’s not Kelly. She wouldn’t knock. Otherwise, I don’t really care to see who’s on the other side.
Stasia opens the door and enters my house, kicking an old pizza box out of her way as she enters.
“Are you kidding me?” She looks around the apartment. Though I can’t see her, I know the expression she’s wearing is an even mix of surprise and disgust. She makes her way over to me, crossing her legs and sitting on the floor across from me. “You missed my video interview.”
I nod my head, knowing that I have a long list of apologizes ahead. Kelly, Stasia, the band—the list goes on.
“How’d it go?” I ask, unsure if I want to know the answer.
“It wasn’t the same without you.” Her eyes are kind, understanding. “So”—she twiddles her thumbs, dancing around the question—“what the hell happened?”
I give Stasia the details of my crash and burn.
“Can you go back to him? The guy you lost to? Talk him into giving you your money back?”
“Yeah, sure. He’s super understanding. I’m sure I’ll get all of my money back and make it out alive in one piece.” I roll my eyes. I know she’s trying to help, but there really isn’t a solution to this riddle.
“My father was gambling through my entire childhood. He probably still is. He always said that ‘there’s always something better than money.’ You just have to figure out what this guy wants in exchange for what you lost.”
“Probably a kidney, Stasia. These tables are no joke. I’m going to walk out of there a complete joke if I walk out of there at all. They’ll probably break my kneecaps for asking.”
“You’ve watched too many movies.” She pushes her hair off her face. “Regardless, I don’t see you coming up with anything better that doesn’t involve gambling.”