Didn't Stay in Vegas Read online

  “What, too soon?” I said, bopping her on the head with our marriage certificate.

  I thought about not telling our friends about the whole marriage fiasco, but that didn’t last when we walked back into the suite we’d been staying in.

  “So, we got married,” I said, unfurling the certificate. Emma sighed beside me. They’d been lounging around in the common area, drinking mimosas, but at my announcement, they all stood up and rushed over.

  “You did what now?” Lara, the bride-to-be asked.

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it yet, but yes, we apparently left you all last night and got married,” Emma said, glaring at me for a moment.

  “We didn’t agree not to talk about it. I mean, I couldn’t keep something like this to myself and you know that.” I could definitely keep my mouth shut when it came to protecting people, or telling white lies, but this wasn’t the kind of thing I could hold in for long. Plus, Nova probably would have said something to her girlfriend Sammi, and then Sammi would have told. Sammi wasn’t the best one with secrets, that was for sure, bless her.

  “You got married?” Willa cried, putting down her glass and reaching for the certificate. “Like, married, married? With vows and everything?” I looked at Emma and then shrugged.

  “I guess? I mean, I don’t remember anything beyond going to the bar after the magic show.” I reached and searched within my mind, but everything got hazy. I’d had a lot to drink. Shots upon shots upon mixed drinks. I’d decided that I was going to live it up this weekend, and that had seriously backfired.

  “Yeah, we had a lot of drinks. I’m hurting today for sure,” Lara said, even though her brown eyes were clear and her hair was perfect.

  “So what, you just get it annulled, right? I’m sure you can probably do that online,” Sammi said, leaning against Nova.

  “I guess,” I said. “We’ll deal with that later.” I was suddenly very tired.

  “We’ll deal with it later,” Emma said in a quiet voice. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She shook her head and then smiled, but it didn’t seem genuine. “We still have one day and one night left, so I say we keep celebrating Lara, since that’s what we’re here to do.” She picked up a glass and filled it with orange juice and champagne before handing it to me and then making another for herself.

  “To Lara,” she said, raising her glass. We all raised ours and toasted.

  “To Lara!”

  After consuming several mimosas, we headed to the spa in the hotel for hot stone massages, facials, and pedicures. It was the perfect way to end the weekend that had been filled with gambling, dancing, drinking, and just being fools before we had to go back to our regular lives with jobs and bills and responsibilities. It was also a hell of a detox.

  “Hey,” Emma said, as we got our pedicures. She’d been pretty damn quiet the whole day. Emma was my best friend and, for the first time ever, I was at a loss for what to say.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning closer to her as the nail tech scrubbed the bottoms of my feet. It tickled just enough to be distracting.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “About this whole marriage thing?” I shrugged one shoulder. Bits and pieces had started to come back to me. I couldn’t remember how we’d gotten separated from the group, but I did recall us stumbling into a shop and buying the gowns. At least I had that, and I had one more thing: the swelling feeling of joy as I looked into her eyes and said the vows the justice performing the ceremony told me to repeat. That feeling had crept back and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “Yeah, why?” I asked, my voice a little choked. I was going to blame it on the tech going to town on my heels.

  “Just checking. I mean, I still can’t remember how it happened, but it will be okay, right? We should probably not tell anyone else about it though.” I agreed on that. I could just picture the particular way a frown would flip my mother’s normally smiling mouth upside down, and the exact tone of the sigh my father would let out. Reckless Callyn, at it again. Foolish Callyn. Always getting herself into one situation or another. To be fair, I could (usually) get myself out of the scrapes I go into without too much damage. Most of the time.

  “Yeah, I don’t think my parents would be excited about this one. And I’m definitely not telling Dani,” I said. Perfect Dani, my older sister who was the prettiest, smartest, most perfect daughter to ever live, according to my parents. No, I wasn’t bitter about it at all.

  “No, I’m not telling mine either. They’re not so happy with me right now about the whole job-quitting thing.” Emma had left her job in finance to go back to school and get her vet tech degree. It was something she’d always wanted to do, but had caved to parental pressure about making money for years.

  Well, she’d made decent money, but she was so miserable that something had to give. I was so fucking proud of her for standing her ground and doing what she wanted. Since she was an only child, her parent’s expectations had sat atop her shoulders and nearly crushed her spirit for most of her life.

  “Let them be mad. It’s not their life.” She sighed and rested her head back on the massage chair, closing her eyes.

  “I know that they want me secure financially because they never were. But I think I can make a little less money and be a lot happier, and they can’t seem to get that.” No, they never would. My parents were just happy that I had a full-time job and was living (with roommates) on my own.

  “They’ll see. When you graduate and start working, they’ll see.” I hoped they would. I hoped they could put aside their own desires and support their only daughter.

  “I looked up annulments. We can file everything online. It might cost a little bit, but I’ll take care of it,” she said. I cringed because Emma took care of a lot of things when it came to money. I didn’t want to feel ashamed that she used to make more than I did and had saved a ton, but I couldn’t stop when she always whipped out her card to pay for lunch or the movies when we went out.

  “We can split it,” I said. “Or is that you admitting that the marriage was your idea?” That was what I wanted to know, even if it meant that I’d been the instigator. I usually was.

  “Who was the one who convinced me to get a cherry tattoo on my ass?” she asked, leaning close so no one could overhear. I stifled a laugh.

  “I got one too. And no one forced you to get it, Emma,” I said. It had been a silly best friend thing we’d done before we’d graduated college. It was cute as hell and my parents still didn’t know about it.

  “And who was the one who almost got us arrested?”

  “Which time?” I said with a grin. Emma tried to suppress a smile and failed. “My point is, when it comes to which one of us is more likely to say ‘hey, let’s get married in Vegas,’ it’s you.”

  “But maybe that’s why it’s you. Because you’re assuming it’s me and you should never assume.” I wagged my finger at her and she grabbed it and bit it lightly before giving it back to me. My heart thumped at the thought of my finger in her mouth. What a weird thought.

  We finished our pedicures, Emma getting a soft gray on her nails and me with a wild red with rhinestones on my big toes.

  “Those are going to chip off in about five seconds,” Emma said as I wiggled my toes and admired them.

  “I don’t care. They’re fun.”

  We headed to lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel, watching shows about terrible people buying houses, ordering too much room service, and procrastinating on packing up our shit.

  My mom sent me a message and I said that we were still in Vegas but coming back to Boston that night. I had to work tomorrow because I only had so many vacation days and I’d used them all for this trip. C’est la vie. I needed a new job. I’d already been looking and was hoping I would have some interviews soon. Mom would flip if she knew I was leaving my “stable” job doing customer service at a hotel for something else. She was always after me to apply for promotions, but I would rather let rab
id squirrels slowly devour me alive than work another year at the hotel.

  “When’s our flight?” I called out, as I shoved the pile of my discarded clothes in my suitcase and then crammed the lid shut, sitting on it to get the zipper to close. I had folded and rolled everything to get it in there before the trip, but I wasn’t going to do that now since I was just going to dump everything in the washer when I got back.

  “Hurry up, Callyn!” was the response from everyone who was already standing at the hotel suite door with their meticulously packed suitcases. Whatever, we’d get there in time.

  I rolled my suitcase out and saw everyone breathe a sigh of relief.

  “Let me do one last check,” I said. I’d left more than one item behind in a hotel room in my life. I rushed around the room as my friends tried not to be too annoyed. They should know me by now.

  “Did you get it?” Emma asked, as I scanned the couch for any clothing item I might have strewn on it.

  “Get what?” I asked, pushing the pillows aside.

  “The marriage certificate? You had it last.” Holy shit, I’d forgotten about that for all of ten minutes. Marriage certificate.

  “Right. I think I had it in the room.” I dashed into the bedroom where I’d been spending my time. It had last been on the dresser? The desk? Something like that. I didn’t see anything. I tore through the room and then came out to the living room and then tried the bathroom.

  “I can’t find it!” I yelled after I’d checked the tub.

  “Yeah, that’s because I have it,” Emma called back to me.

  “What?” I shrieked and ran out to the main part of the suite. Emma was there, smirking and holding the marriage certificate in her hand. “Didn’t want to lose it.” I narrowed my eyes slowly and held my hand out for it.

  “No way. I’m keeping this safe.” She went to the desk in the room and found a folder in one drawer, slid the certificate inside it, and then put that in the front pocket of her suitcase.

  “There. Now we won’t lose it.”

  “I wouldn’t have lost it,” I said, but there was definitely a chance I might have. I lost a lot of things; it was my nature.

  “I know,” Emma said, her voice softening. “But you know what a control freak I am.” That was Emma’s nature, and I was used to it by now.

  “Can we go, please?” Lara said, staring at her phone. “The van will be here in one minute.” We all hustled ourselves to the elevator and then out to the front of the hotel.

  “Holy hell,” I said, instantly breaking out in a sweat. Boston could get hot, but not like this.

  We all piled into the van and made our way to the airport. Thanks to Emma’s meticulous planning, we were there in plenty of time to get through the security line and be at our gate and chill for a whole hour before our flight started boarding.

  “I’m tired as fuck,” I said, resting my head on Emma’s shoulder. I planned on crashing out and sleeping the whole way home. Emma shifted beside me.

  “Stay still,” I whined. Her shoulder was the perfect height for me to lean on. There were so many reasons we worked as best friends.

  “Sorry, my shoulder is sore.” I picked my head up and looked at her.

  “Did you hurt it? Do you want me to rub it for you?” I wiggled my fingers. One of my many talents was a damn good deep tissue massage. If I didn’t hate making small talk and seeing random strangers naked, I might have gone into massage therapy.

  “No, it’s fine,” she said, leaning away from me. She was being weird again, and it worried me. Emma didn’t hide things from me, ever. Emma knew the deepest darkest corners of my soul, and I knew hers.

  “You okay?” I asked, hoping she would cave and tell me that she’d started her period early (we were on the same cycle and I wasn’t due for another few days), or that she was having stomach cramps from the airport sushi she insisted on buying earlier. Something told me it was neither of those things.

  “Yeah, just tired,” she said. “Thinking about a lot.”

  “You mean the fact that we got married and now we have to sort that out?” I asked. She winced just a little when I mentioned the getting married.

  “No, I’d completely forgotten about that,” she said in a deadpan voice.

  “This is one thing that isn’t going to stay in Vegas,” I said with a sigh. I hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to sort out. I hadn’t looked up what it would require to annul the thing because I was scared of the cost, and the amount of hoops we’d have to jump through. There was a girl at work who was in law school, so my plan was to ask her to look it up and explain the legal jargon to me so I could understand it. And that was if Emma didn’t figure it out before me. I had the feeling she would. Emma was always on top of things, unlike me. I wanted to show her that I could handle this, for once.

  “I’m going to hear that joke a lot, aren’t I?” she said, meeting my eyes. Hers were sometimes blue, sometimes green. Right now they were shading toward green with the harsh airport light.

  “Yes, for the rest of our lives. You know you’re stuck with me.” She’d been stuck with me since the third grade when I had tackled a boy making fun of her on the first day of school. She was new in town and I couldn’t take my eyes off her pretty dark hair and blue-green eyes. I hadn’t even known her name yet, but that boy was a jerk to a lot of girls and I hadn’t wanted him to hurt the girl with the beautiful ponytail. That was all it took for us to bond for life.

  Emma knew me better than I knew myself, and vice versa. We’d been physically apart for a few years there for college (she ended up going to her parent’s choice of school instead of her own), but we never lost touch. Even if we hadn’t talked for weeks, we picked up right where we’d left off, as if we’d just taken a pause in the middle of one lifelong conversation.

  “Forever,” she whispered, so low that I could barely hear it.

  We made it back from Vegas in one piece, but a little worse for wear. The next day at work was totally brutal. There had been a convention that weekend and we’d had a glitch with the computer system, so people had gotten charged double for their rooms. I was in tears before ten in the morning, and not just because I was exhausted.

  “Do you need to take ten and cry in the bathroom?” my coworker Linda asked, with a sympathetic smile. I’d been wiping my eyes while listening to a particularly nasty woman berate me on the phone.

  “Yup,” I said, getting up and wiping my nose with a tissue. I kept a full box on my desk for days like this.

  “I’ll cover you,” Linda said. She was about my mom’s age and I think, now that her daughter lived in Florida, she had adopted me as a surrogate daughter.

  I got done with my crying fit, splashed some water on my face, and went back to my desk. I had to get the fuck away from this place. Jessika, my law-school coworker, had called in sick, so I couldn’t ask her about the annulment, which I’d been wanting to do. This Monday was doing its best to mess with me.

  Somehow I made it through the rest of the day and, instead of going to my apartment and dealing with one or both of my roommates, I sent a message to Emma and said that I’d stop and grab wings, cheesy garlic bread, and sodas if she would let me hang out in her apartment for a little while. Emma lived alone, and being with her was the next best thing to being alone. There was always someone or several someones at my place and it was hard to deal with sometimes.

  She agreed and said that she’d throw something in the oven for dessert. I wrote back asking what it was, but she just replied that I would find out when I got there. Emma always surprised me with sweets. It had started when we were kids and she’d have cookies or cakes or some other sweet thing in her lunchbox every day. It was my job to guess what the item was and then she’d always pull out an extra for me. She would let me guess until I got it right, even giving me hints so I wouldn’t have to wait too long. It never occurred to me that she had to sneak extras for me every day because her mom wasn’t the one putting in the extra desserts. Emma had alw
ays had my back, even then.

  Once we’d gotten older, she’d kept up the game when I would come over for dinner, making all kinds of things from crepes with homemade jam to lemon tarts to macarons to mini cheesecakes with multiple layers that were so perfect, they could have been sold in a patisserie. She was a dessert genius, but it was a hobby that she didn’t want to monetize because hey, when you took a passion and made it a job, you sucked a lot of the fun out of it. If I were talented at anything, I’d probably feel the same way.

  I started sending Emma guesses immediately. I kept a running list of what she’d made me before since she didn’t make the same thing twice within a short time span.

  Emma buzzed me into the apartment and the scent of warm chocolate hit me in the face as I opened her door. I never bothered to knock when I came over.

  “Brownies?” I yelled out.

  “Nope,” she called from the kitchen. If Emma ever made anything as common as brownies, they’d be baked with expensive chocolate and layered with marzipan or something. I didn’t even know what marzipan was, but it sounded like something that rich people would eat.

  “Chocolate,” I said to myself, scanning my list. “Hmm.” I set the bag of wings, garlic bread, and sodas on the counter as she peered into the oven. I tried to see over her shoulder, but she quickly moved and blocked my view before slamming the oven door and spinning around to face me, using her body as a shield between me and the baking dessert.

  “I don’t think so. You don’t get it until you guess right.” I huffed before grabbing a stool and sitting at the little kitchen island that was just big enough for two.

  I decided to do what any self-respecting woman with a smartphone would do: I looked up and named every single kind of chocolate dessert I could find.

  “Nope,” Emma said, digging into the bag of food and yanking out the box of wings. If I didn’t hurry up and guess the dessert right then. I was going to lose out on the wings.

  “Mousse? Cupcakes? Chocolate Cream pie?”