Together we looked out at this strange city where the play of shadow and light was more pronounced than in any other until finally he said, “There has to be more to life than survival.”
There hadn’t been for me, I conceded, not for a long while. But with Ben standing close, knowing about my past and not flinching, I began to think there might be. I raised my eyes to find him gazing at me. Not just gazing, but seeing.
How long had it been since I’d been truly seen?
And the look on his face was so soft and clear it was practically translucent. Probably, I thought, a good reflection of my own. Just then, I would have loved to frame that face with my camera lens. Capture that moment, and him, forever. God, what a beautiful man.
I froze suddenly. “Please don’t tell me I said that aloud.”
Ben straightened, grinning wickedly. “You did. You said I was beautiful.”
Embarrassed, I turned away, but his hand, wide and firm and warm, grasped my shoulder. He turned me toward him again and held all of me there; body, eyes, and mind.
“If I’m beautiful,” he said, thumbs tickling against the inside of my elbows, “then you’re the most stunning woman I’ve ever seen.”
I ducked my head automatically, though my pulse points hummed. “My sister’s stunning,” I said, “I’m strong.”
“You’re stunning and strong,” he murmured, and moved in closer.
I lifted my head and leaned into him. It felt natural, and my pulse throbbed. “Go on.”
His lips quirked up at one side as he drew me against him. “You’re stunning and strong, Joanna Archer, and you’re about to be kissed.”
And I knew exactly what he would taste like. Ambrosia. The breaking of a fast. Water, pure, clean, and spring-clear after a ten-year drought. All the relevant clichés applied.
How masochistic, I thought, sighing as his mouth molded to mine. Instantly back in love with a man I’d spent a decade trying to get over. Anyone have a dull razor blade? Cat-o’-nine-tails? Old, rusty nails?
Yet this was also a first. The first taste of a man whose lips and arms and body touched the expected places in unexpected ways. The first hint of underlying passion, like touching a battery to the tip of my tongue, that metallic zap of pure power just aching to course over into me. The glory of a man whose flesh and cellular structure spoke to my own but, biology and chemistry and pheromones aside, one who just felt fucking great wrapped around me.
“Jo-Jo?” Ben finally said, breaking away.
“Hmm?” I still hadn’t opened my eyes. It’d been so long. Why hadn’t I known I needed this, wanted it—had been missing it—for so damned long?
“You’re groping a senior officer.”
I smiled against his shirt and moved my hand. “Gonna put it in your statement?”
“Gonna ask you for a date.” He pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “You never say no, right?”
I pulled back and peered into his face. “I object to the implication. I say no to some things.”
“Gonna say no to me?”
“No.”
He smiled, lifted a hand to my face and caressed it, his touch impossibly gentle. I wasn’t used to being handled gently. In truth, I wasn’t used to being handled at all. Certainly not by a man who could be both as hard as granite and as soft as a feather. So much new to discover here, I thought, lifting my head to kiss the hollow of his neck.
“Your cheek is bruised,” he murmured, voice hoarse.
I leaned into him, offering up that cheek for feathery kisses and pointed attentions. All wit and sarcasm and guarded inhibitions fled—in Ben’s embrace I wasn’t an heir to the Archer family empire, as so many others saw me, or a wounded warrior bent on vengeance, as Ben had claimed with such certainty. I also wasn’t a woman fighting for normalcy—fighting, but losing—which in fact was how I saw myself. I was just a woman. So often that was all a woman wanted to be.
“I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me again,” he murmured. His heart cracked through that voice.
Startled, I stared up at this man, so unflinching and honest and whole, and saw—for the briefest moment—the boy who hadn’t had the strength or experience to be any of those things.
“I didn’t either,” I admitted.
“But you’ll go on a date with me?”
I nodded.
“Tomorrow night?” he asked urgently, as if to make up for lost time.
I nodded again.
“So, what’s changed?”
I shrugged. “Now I have seen you.”
And that was it. Life sometimes flips on you like that. One minute you’re looking at your reflection in the water, not entirely sure you like what you see, and the next minute you’re upside down, submerged in a world where even familiar things look new. I put a hand to Ben’s cheek just as he’d done to mine and softly said good-bye. It was a fragile and new beginning between us, and like a new parent cradling life, we were both being gentle with it.
But I smiled as I left Valhalla. Of all the qualities Ben had attributed to me earlier, he’d forgotten flexibility. I’d grown up as well, and had learned to adapt to the situation and to the moment because I’d had to. That’s how I could rebound from being attacked to being kissed in the same night. If I hadn’t possessed the ability to roll with the punches, I might as well have died facedown on the scorching desert floor.
Exactly as I’d been left to do over a decade ago.
But here, on the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday, I decided I was ready to look at my world anew. Perhaps Ben was right, I thought, his kiss still fresh upon my lips. Survival was all well and good, as was the elusive search for normalcy. But maybe neither was enough anymore.
3
It was midnight as I made my way home, exactly twenty-four hours before my next birthday, and the nightly bacchanal that was Las Vegas was in full swing, a strange cross-culture of midwestern hedonism and foreign bafflement. The Strip was a neon necklace strung from one end of the valley to the other, like gaudy costume jewelry dressing up the desert night, and despite the sharp November air, every street, walkway, and aerial tram was packed with tourists. Their gazes were wide-eyed and expectant, like they expected someone to drop money in their lap at any given moment.
I bundled into my wrap, then my car, and gassed it past Bellagio and Caesar’s before hurtling over the wash that flooded the Imperial Palace’s parking garage every monsoon season. Lowering my window halfway, I allowed the cool air to bite at my cheeks and ruffle my hair. Even if my mind hadn’t been buzzing with thoughts of Ben, or images of Ajax writhing on the floor—and then, again, more thoughts of Ben—I’d have been wide-awake. Vegas came alive at night, and so did I.
I’d often thought how boring it’d be to grow up in a place where everyone was the same…until I realized that everyone really was, essentially, the same. They watched the same television shows, ate at McDonald’s, had their coffee at Starbucks, and hopped the same airplanes to return to whatever state or country they thought made them different. While they were here, however, no matter what color, shape, or accent they sported, they wanted identical things. To be entertained. To get lucky. And to be allowed to dream, just for a while, that anything was possible. Despite its checkered past and dubious press, Vegas spoke to people of hope. And hope, as they say, makes fools of us all.
I left all that frantic hope behind me and turned onto an asphalt-slung back road only the cops, locals, and well-tipped cabbies knew about. Within five minutes I was coasting along Charleston Boulevard, the glitter of the Strip replaced by littered alleys and underpasses, where the unlucky huddled in wary groups rather than optimistic ones. These were the people tired of playing the fool, and the dichotomy between these two faces of Vegas was not lost on me.