the casino urgently. No matter where I looked, only strange faces met mine.
I couldn’t believe that I lost him again.
Like, again-again.
There was no sense keeping myself up another handful of hours searching for him like a sad dog from trashcan to trashcan in pursuit of a bone. I took the elevator back up to my room. My container of noodles went right into the mini-fridge, and I fell onto the bed. Duncan was passed out already with his laptop open next to him and a set of white earbuds shoved in his ears.
I shut my eyes to put an end to my day.
Then I proceeded to toss and turn all night.
That was my punishment for being single too long: obsessing over any young thing I encountered. Suddenly I wondered where he was from. I was curious if he had any friends. I wondered if his voice was as sexy as he looked. I reimagined over and over a scenario in my head of the two of us meeting—what he might say, what I might say back, what we might do. They weren’t even sexual, my scenarios. They were more emotional, full of the ripe excitement of first meeting someone, of the frantic pit-pat in my chest, of the sweat on my palms when I’d reach to take his hand, of the look in his eyes when I’d tell him I had feelings for him.
I hoped I wasn’t the only idiot who tortured himself this way every time he saw a beautiful guy he wished he could have.
Then went to his hotel room—alone—and sulked in his bed.
Then cursed every missed opportunity and chance he might have had to interact with him, no matter how big or small it was.
Then agonized the entire night, dreaming of all that could have happened.
Good night, James McKinney, you big unlucky loser.
* * *
We spent the next day at the Talisman, which was a lavish casino decorated with what I took to be Egyptian hieroglyphics, exotic art pieces, and beautiful flora. Regrettably, it looked tacky and offputting during daylight hours.
And even as we gabbed about our Friday night and Duncan nursed a headache, I still sat there at our table with my eyes scanning the casino, like my guy was just going to show up around the corner at any point. Somehow, I figured he was only there for one night—maybe on vacation with some buddies he had ditched halfway through the night. Sunday would come around before I knew it, I’d be headed home, and I’d never see him again.
If Lady Luck was really a thing, I was certain that Lonely Loser was her bitchy gay brother, and he was damned determined not to let me enjoy the rest of my weekend.
That night was a blur of slot machines, sweet unassuming cocktails, and no sexy young men in sight—and yes, I looked. After every sip of my drink, after every joke Quinton blurted out over the smoke of Lewis’s cigarettes, after every frustrated smack of Duncan’s palm against the table when he lost, I twisted my neck left, craned my neck right, and saw no sign of him.
He was gone. My brain knew it, but my heart wouldn’t listen.
After wasting even more of our hard-earned money at every table in the four casinos—and winning nothing—everyone still somehow managed to look like we had fun as we dragged our half-drunken asses back to our adjoining rooms and ate pizza until two in the morning. Quinton fell asleep on the floor with a pizza box in his lap. Lewis’s night ended with him sprawled over the wrong bed on his stomach, snoring. Trusty Duncan slept propped up by all the pillows from both his bed and mine and his mouth hanging open, the TV remote resting in his palm.
And I couldn’t be farther from asleep. Instead, I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows staring down at the street and counting my last hours of freedom as they dwindled. Seven stories up, I felt so weirdly detached from the masses of people still ambling about on a Saturday night. Well, two in the morning, more accurately. It looked like a fairly substantial amount of people, to be fair. Come tomorrow, we’d be packing our bags and driving home with mild headaches and an impending nightmare of what miserable work would find us Monday. I was sure the others were already fast dreaming of our next adventure to the casinos.
But it wouldn’t be for two more weeks. Fourteen days of