Excerpt: Double Blind

Randy kept walking towards the bar, but he slowed his pace so that Roulette Man caught up with him at the edge of the last of the Triple Diamond slots. The bouncer standing near the Wizard of Oz machine cast a quick glance between Randy and his pursuer, then raised in inquiring eyebrow. Randy just smiled, then gave him a wink and a grin before wiping his face clear before his shoulder was grabbed roughly and he was turned around.

But “roughly” was a relative term with this man; even though it was clear the action was meant to communicate the tall, slight man’s anger, the dominance of the act was buried in significant sediment of Nice. He gripped Randy’s shoulder, yes, but carefully, his fury at being managed and embarrassed checked by an almost overwhelming urge to be polite and deferential, at least until he better understood the situation.

Almost overwhelming urge. Randy’s lips quirked. Well, perhaps this evening could be salvaged after all.

The stranger caught the near-smile, and his fingers tightened briefly. He leaned forward, almost dangerous for one moment after all, and Randy caught a whiff of the spice and soap that had been teasing him the whole time he’d been leaning against the rail of the table, and at this close of range it made his blood hum before his assailant shoved himself back from Randy with an angry push.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. He gestured back towards the tables with a long, elegant arm and a slight flick of his wrist . “What—why did you do that?”

The spice was still tingling Randy’s nostrils, and it mixed nicely with the sleek curve of the stranger’s jaw and the angry pulse he couldn’t quite see but could imagine beating hard in that slope where his neck was exposed by his collar, which had opened an additional button since Randy had studied it through the surveillance camera. He looked up at the man’s angry eyes—pale blue? grey?—and waggled his eyebrows. “Because you smell so good.”

He delivered the line with just the right tone and pitch, making it impossible for the man to tell if it were a tease or the truth, and then he watched, very, very carefully, to see how it was received. The flash of shock he’d been expecting, but he noted with some hope the length of it, which hung on a bit before switching over to anger, which had also been a given. But it was the moment in the turnover that Randy had been watching for between disbelief and outrage, and it gave him all he needed to know. It hadn’t exactly been arousal, which would actually have been a turn-off, if this guy were that easy or that pathetic.

But more importantly, it hadn’t been revulsion, and it hadn’t been a wall. And that meant that this flustered fellow was playing on Randy’s team. And Randy was in the game.

Randy winked at him and patted him on his shoulder, deliberately keeping both gestures confusingly neutral, leaving the potential both for this all to be either a joke or an opening act. “Come on, buddy. Let me buy you that drink.”

The man pulled back, but not as far, and not as hard. He glared at Randy. “I’m not your ‘buddy.’”

“Then give me your name,” Randy tossed back easily. When this only made the glare deepen, Randy added, “Or I could just name you, I guess. Let me buy you a drink, Mr. Black.”

That one made Mr. Black’s blood boil, and it was damn hard for Randy not to laugh at his glower. God, but yanking this one’s chain was so damn easy it was almost criminal.

Almost.

“Ethan,” he spat. “My name is Ethan.”

Randy made a mock bow, then tucked his fingers beneath Ethan’s arm and tugged him towards the bar. “Right this way, Ethan Black.”
And he tensed. “Ellison,” he snapped. “My name is Ethan Ellison.”

“Right this way, Mr. Ellison. You can tell me what an ass I am over a drink.” He glanced at Ethan. “Let’s see. Not beer. This isn’t a beer moment.”

“I don’t need a drink,” Ethan insisted, but it was a flat, compulsive refusal.

Randy decided to ignore him. “You’re not quite ready for something stupid and fruity, but that might be good for a chaser. Straight alcohol isn’t going to be your thing, though, either, so no tequila shooters. Let’s see. It’s slower than I’d like, but what about Rum and Coke? Or—no, god, how thick am I? You’re a G&T man.”

Ethan looked at him askance, trying to pull away again. “Have you been stalking me?”

“Just reading you, baby.” He noted the flinch, but not the withdraw at the endearment, then smiled briefly to himself as he ducked his head, wiping it clean as they approached the bar. “Hey, Scully. A big G&T and a double Dirty Whiskey.”

“Dirty whiskey?” Ethan repeated.

“Bailey’s and Jameson’s.” Randy slid onto a stool and gave Ethan a look of mock angst. “Are you going to tell me that’s girly?”

“Girly?” Ethan’s expression was incredulous. “That’s nothing but pure alcohol.”

“Yes, but it’s sweet and creamy, and that’s enough to damn any drink. Unless it’s served in a distended plastic bottle with a straw and suspended around one’s neck. Then it’s very manly.” Randy took his drink from Scully, sipped it, then waved impatiently at Ethan as he set his glass down. “Sit. I can’t flirt standing up, and you’re freakishly tall.”

He turned away, ostensibly looking at Scully, which as the bartender had a mug that could have been improved by a run-in with a hacksaw, this wasn’t a pleasant task. But it didn’t matter, because all his attention was on Ethan, who hadn’t sat yet, but hadn’t walked away, either. Randy stared at Scully’s greasy hair and flat, pocked expression and tipped his glass to his lips again, rubbing his thumb against the cold damp of the tumbler as he did so to bleed off some of his tension. Come on, he urged Ethan Ellison silently. I played that perfectly. This is your cue to sit, take a drink, and try to work out what exactly is going on here. Ethan hovered, though, and for a few agonizing seconds Randy thought he must have misread the man after all. The thought, while terrifying, was also stirring.

But then Ethan sank carefully onto his stool, and then he reached for his drink. He didn’t sip it, but he held onto it tightly. “What exactly is this?” he asked. “What is going on here?”

Randy gave Scully a rueful smile, but the bartender just shook his head and turned back to watching a game on the television at the other end of the bar. He stayed close, though, which meant that Billy had tipped him off as to his role in this little play.

That was when Randy realized he’d half-forgotten his actual mission with Mr. Black. Now wasn’t that interesting?

He took another sip and nudged Ethan’s drink towards him. “I’m buying you a drink. Don’t they buy people drinks in Utah?”

Ethan’s eyes went very wide, and Randy couldn’t help laughing when the man looked around the room nervously.

“You are stalking me.” Ethan kept his eyes moving, clearly looking for hidden cameras or men in sunglasses and dark suits.

“No, baby, I told you. I’m reading you.” The man still looked spooked, though, and Randy decided he’d pushed right up against the limit of being an asshole he could get away with. He leaned back on the bar and prepared to lower the veil a bit. “Utah was a guess. I just got lucky.”

Ethan was still pale and kept shaking his head. “But—how? Out of fifty states—?”

Randy rolled his eyes. “Oh, please! The list of places you aren’t from is longer than the ones you could have been.” He ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke. “You’re too uptight for Hawaii, and you don’t smile enough for California.”

Ethan flattened his lips. “That is just ridiculous. Smiling?”

“It’s a light in the face, California. An aggressive sort of friendliness, and something about the corners of the mouth. It’s different north to south, too, but you don’t have either. And you aren’t laid back enough for Pacific Northwest. You don’t have the accent or manners for the South. I know damn well you aren’t from Michigan.”

“How?” Ethan asked, clearly baffled.

“Because I am, and you always know your own.” He resumed his elimination. “Wrong accent again for east coast, and wrong demeanor. So now we’re down to West and Midwest. Most people wouldn’t be able to spot the difference, but again, you know your own, and you have the Nice, but it’s the wrong kind. Western nice is a little more distant. For all they say about cowboy chivalry, there’s more of a ‘oh, let me lay down my coat for you, I don’t mind the mud, honestly’ about the center of the country.”

Ethan looked at Randy as if he were trying to find the two-by-four he was getting hit with. “Are you making this up as you go along?”

Randy grinned. “Sort of. I mean, it’s there, but normally I don’t try to explain it. But you want to know how I got Utah. I knew you weren’t Nevada. You felt too out of town to be that local. Odds are too good you’d at least been to Reno before, if you were native, and you have a look about you like you’re convinced Vegas is about to eat you whole. And you just don’t feel like Arizona or New Mexico. So now we’re down to Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Idaho. I ruled out the last two for distance, because you’ve clearly run away from something, and traveling from that far would give you enough time to come to your senses.”

The eyes went wide again. “How—?”

Randy waved him away impatiently. “Listen, one thing at a time, okay? So. Now we’re down to three, which means I’m looking at better than a thirty percent chance. But I want better odds. So I’m making a call on Wyoming because it doesn’t feel right, and really, it’s also too far. So that’s fifty-fifty, western Colorado or pretty much anywhere in Utah. Though now that I know that one’s right, I’m willing to get cocky and say Salt Lake City. Or Provo.”

Ethan looked seriously spooked now. “I’m from American Fork, and I lived in Provo after college. But how—?”

“Frankly? You have this vaguely Mormon feel, but you also don’t. So, you grew up steeped in it but weren’t overpowered. So somewhere big enough to be diverse.”

Ethan stared a few seconds longer, then shook his head and drank his G&T. Deeply.

Randy took a drink, too, but just a sip. “I’ve been told,” he said, as he put his drink back down, “that when I read people like that, it’s scary. I take it you concur?”

“I think,” Ethan said, slowly, “if you lived in the Middle Ages, you’d have been burned at the stake.”

Randy snorted. “No. I’d have been a traveling salesman. And I never would have let it be so obvious. Unless, of course, I was trying to get someone into bed.” Ethan stiffened, and cast him a warning look. Randy shrugged. “You’re sitting now. I’m flirting out of relief.”

“I believe,” Ethan said, pausing to take another sip, “you could flirt if you were stripped naked, tied up, and dangling over a pit of snakes.”

Randy’s laugh turned into a purr of its own free will. “If you were the snake charmer, baby, I’d surely try at the very least.”

Ethan blushed, but his mouth tightened, too, and he put his drink back down. “Don’t call me baby.”

Randy hadn’t even realized that he had. “Is there an endearment you prefer?”

“My name is Ethan,” he said, sharply.

“Endearment.” Randy rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “You certainly aren’t Sunshine, and anyway, that’s taken. Black is too dismal. And you’re right, buddy isn’t you. Baby, either.” He ran his gaze up and down Ethan in a critical scan. “Slim would fit, but it’s too neutered.”

“Just call me by my name.” Ethan was sliding his thumb up and down the side of his glass, staring into the ice. He softened a little as Randy let the silence wear on. “So why did you come up to me, really? Why did you make that bet against my ring?”

“That one’s complicated,” Randy confessed. He glanced at Scully to make sure he was at least still half-listening, and he was. “I made the bet against your ring because Tyler is an ass, and even the shitty odds of roulette were tempting, though I comforted myself with the knowledge that he’d see your win as my win, too, so I still had the best of it, in a way.”

“But he was the one that suggested I take the zeroes,” Ethan said, and Randy grinned.

“And I made sure that was the way it went down, baby.” Randy caught himself this time and winced. “Sorry. I’m honestly not doing it on purpose.” He rubbed his cheek and sighed. “But no, honestly, I came up to you because of a different bet, if you must know.”

Both Ethan and Scully looked askance at him at this bald confession. Randy felt a bit taken aback himself. He hadn’t exactly meant to come that clean, and he ran his finger around the edge of his glass, buying time as he tried to figure out how to save this. Nothing came to mind, so he shrugged off the encroaching panic.

He lifted his glass in his hand as he extended an index finger to the silvered dome in the ceiling above the back of the bar. “See that? It’s camera number seventy-two. There are three hundred of them in the casino, which actually isn’t quite enough, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“This is your casino?” Ethan said.

Randy snorted. God, he wished the cameras had sound. He shook his head. “No. But I work here.”

Scully snorted and turned back to his game.

“You’re a security person?” Ethan’s voice was spiking nervously. “What—what did I do?”

“I’m not security,” Randy said quickly. “I’m a prop. But I wasn’t working earlier. I was just hanging out in Billy’s office, watching the security feed. He likes to watch some of the tables himself, and I saw you playing. Fantastically badly, I might add.”

“I don’t understand,” Ethan said. “Who’s Billy? What’s a prop?” He frowned. “What was wrong with the way I played? I was waiting for black!”

“You were waiting for fucking Godot, baby.” He drank. “Billy is Billy Herod. It’s his casino. A prop is harder to explain, but for now let’s just say that I play poker.” Randy drank again, then set the empty glass back down. “The bet is what’s important here, sweetness. I watched you play and read you, and I said I knew three things about you. Billy thinks I’m cocky, so he roped me into a bet, and to win I had to find out if I was right or wrong. And I have to be right on all three counts, just for the record. Igor here—” He jerked his head at Scully. “—is the witness.”

He paused, because he knew he had to, and he watched and waited while Ethan sputtered, indignant and hurt. In a few seconds he was going to make some outraged cry, demanding to know if that had been all this had been, just about a bet?

“Do you mean,” Ethan said, his consonants going sharp and angry, “that this whole thing, everything at the table, getting this drink, the flirting and calling me baby has all been about a bet?”

Randy sighed. Sometimes he really wished people would surprise him.

“No,” he said, deadpan. “I saw your sad face in the camera, and I fell in love. If only same-sex marriage were legal in Nevada—I’d propose to you on the spot. Of course it’s a fucking bet. The fact that you like being flirted with and that you look good when you’re pissed off is just a plus.”

“I do not enjoy being flirted with,” Ethan snapped. “Not by you.”

“Fine,” Randy shot back, getting bored. “Just take my quick survey, lover, and you can go. I say you came to Vegas—from Utah—because someone dumped you and broke your heart. They did this in part by taking a significant amount of money from you, and you came here with what was left, and you pissed away your last back there at Roulette Three, doggedly determined that if you sat there long enough, black just had to come around, because it owed you.” He leaned back against the bar, threaded his fingers behind his head and smirked. “Isn’t that right?”

He saw the truth of it in Ethan Ellison’s wide, pale eyes: the shock, the fear of exposure, and most of all, he saw the pain. It hooked the edge of Randy’s heart, which was a surprise, and he softened his expression. Ethan had been through enough. He didn’t need mocking, too.

But then there was a shift, a hardening of Ethan’s mouth, and Randy stilled as he saw something else, something troubling in Ethan’s eyes.

Triumph.

“No,” he said, quietly, but quite clearly.

Scully, who had been facing the game but had glanced at Ethan for his answer, now turned full on. Randy lowered his hands and sat up.

“Excuse me?” he said, his heart beginning to beat a little faster. No. He could not be wrong. He’d seen it, both upstairs and here, now. He was right, he knew it.

Ethan’s eyes hardened further. “I said no. You’re wrong. Yes, you were right about some of it, but not all. Yes, he took money, and yes, that was my last dollar.” His chin went up a little, and his eyes glittered as he added, “But it was me that dumped him.”

Randy stared. No. No, that was not what he had seen. But then he looked again, looked deeper, using the full force of what Billy liked to call his “freakish gift for reading people,” using the parts of it he couldn’t explain out loud even if his life depended on it, and he saw the shades he had glossed over before, what he could never have seen from the camera and what he’d been too confident and too lazy to see in real time.

What he saw was that Ethan was not lying.

Randy sank back into his chair, staring open-mouthed.

Then the rest of it hit him. He glanced at the camera, then at Scully, who couldn’t have looked more shocked if someone had thrown a glass of cold water at his face. Then he swore.

“Fuck!” He turned to Ethan, then to Scully, then to the camera again. “Fuck!”

Scully, recovering, began to laugh a very wicked laugh, the laugh of one who had been waiting a long, long time for this moment. “You better start doin’ some sit-ups, Jansen,” he said, and laughed again. “Otherwise your beer gut’s gonna hang out over them little neon shorts Billy’s gonna make you and the other twinkies wear!”

“Jesus fuck,” Randy whispered, and collapsed onto the bar, resting his head against the rail as he tried to compose himself.

“What’s going on?” he heard Ethan ask, still sounding confused, but clearly enjoying Randy’s discomfort as much as everyone else.

Scully laughed again, like a wicked Santa. “What’s going on is that Randy Jansen, who is never, ever wrong about a poker face, just read yours and lost.” He clapped Randy roughly on the shoulder, then sighed contentedly as he turned back to Ethan. “Buddy, you won’t need to pay for a drink at the River for a week, maybe a month. So what can I get you? Another G&T?”

“What about me?” Randy lifted his head. “I’m the poor bastard who has to wear the shorts.”

“You,” Scully said with no empathy at all, “still owe me for the first round.”

Randy glared at Scully as he sat up and dug into his pocket. “Here,” he said, slamming a $25 chip onto the counter. “Happy?”

“Oh, very,” Scully said, scooping it up.

“And as for you—” Randy said, turning back to Ethan, who was clearly still reeling. He stopped, not knowing how to finish this. He was still smarting from the misread, and unsettled by his sloppiness. But Ethan wasn’t gloating, wasn’t reveling in the fact that he had just done what a healthy portion of Vegas had been trying to do for years. He was just looking at Randy uneasily, waiting, steeping in more patient Nice as he watched to see what was going to happen now.

And goddamn it, but it was turning Randy on.

He swore again. The only way out was to raise the stakes, but it was a bitch to do when there was only one player in the game. So he turned back to Scully, the only player left he could beat. He slammed down another chip—a fifty this time. “You can just damn well wait to buy Slick here a drink, because I’m getting this one, too. Another dirty whiskey, and another G&T. Small T, and a big, big fucking G.”

“Slick?” Ethan repeated.

Randy curled his lip in a snarl. “You want to go back to ‘baby’?”

Ethan smiled, just a little. “Slick’s fine.”

He sat down, too, relaxing for the first time since Randy had picked him up at the roulette table, easing back on his stool, bracing with one long arm against the bar, his slender, pretty, but still very masculine hand opening casually as he laid it on the counter. Randy took in the tempting, tender and smooth flesh of his palm, and his arousal heightened as he imagined the way that skin would taste. The thumb crooked once, then twice, as if calling to him, but when Randy looked up sharply at Ethan’s face, the man was too busy and distracted watching Scully make the drinks to have done that on purpose.

Unless, of course, Randy had misread him again.

“Fuck,” he whispered, and slumped forward back onto the bar.