Zach laid flat, shirtless, under the gentle waft of the ceiling fan. He was still coming down from what could only be described from the way his whole body fizzed as a first date, and somewhere beyond that, the relentless dry heat of Las Vegas. The desert city, the birthplace of Zach Winthrop’s beating heart. The French doors to his balcony leaned ajar, the sounds and smells of the hotel a hundred floors beneath him rose up, danced, floated around his room. He drifted between states of consciousness, allowing his senses to be overtaken; his eyes fell closed and peeled open, his phone arrhythmically spasmed for attention under his crooked elbow. He dutifully ignored it. He had fallen victim, yet again and as so many others often did, to his own whim. His impulses, his suffocating, wailing desires. For all his confidence that morning, the bravado of delivering that ostentatious assortment to her room, the entitlement of requesting her presence, all the grinning nerve he gloated within the grand walls of Caesar’s Palace, now he just felt a little bewildered and crazy. Out of therapy for years now, he’d forgotten the intricacies of exactly how he’d once been coached to get a handle on his runaway vagaries when it came to Alex. Life felt impossibly big in her orbit, whether that bigness was sparkling or a black hole, and he had a tendency (or so his therapist had told him) to become consumed by the things she made him feel. To run after those feelings, try to lasso them in grand and occasionally destructive, ridiculous ways.
The problem was, had been, his neglect to ensure those around him, namely Alex, were willing passengers to his speeding freight train. And maybe he had come on a little strong, but hadn’t she responded to it? Wasn’t the truth of the matter that, no matter what, they’d always meet each other where they were? Perhaps what his former therapist, and everybody else, failed to understand was their equivocal kinship. Because when it felt impossible that they both endured, they did. Again and again. Until the world went dark. Until, sometimes, they even skyrocketed out the other side of it. They had to; a twin flame without its other half is only ash. While Alex had protested to his dinner reservation at first, her bitten-lip reservations seemed to revolve primarily around the optics of his proposition. What if people were to see them? What if word were to get around, or worse, get back to Kylie, Andrew? Of course, he knew that was a risk. But that morning, in the car on his way to meet her, it had simply been a risk he was willing to ignore. She hadn’t seemed off-put by her own unwillingness to join him. In fact, when she stipulated her lone condition, there had been a starriness to her eyes that made him shiver. So, ultimately, who gave a fuck? He’d been advised once, many times, to pause before he ran down the forest-thickened path he chose for himself. And hadn’t he? Hadn’t he done his due diligence, laying there and staring at the ceiling, feeling the madness rising in him? Wondering what the hell he was doing? And he still wanted to run down it. So, fuck it, whatever. He wanted what he fucking wanted. And she might just want him back.
He showered quickly, changed into the outfit he and Alex had selected at the mall. He’d let her take the lead, watching her features grow serious as she contemplated his options, yielding to the pleasure he felt being dressed by her. He spent much of his life resisting the women around him and their urges to bend his appearance to their will, but with Alex, it was a luxury. She was, always had been, vulnerable to his appearance–he’d long suspected this was in part due to his style. Even after therapising herself into oblivion, that rebellious organ sitting under her heart like a satin cushion had grown resolute and full at a young age. It couldn’t be cut out. So, she didn’t try to change him, but instead she catered to the him that already existed. Elevated him. He evaluated his reflection now, ran his hands over his head, and felt satisfied with the man blinking back at him. Dabbing cologne to his pulse points, he made his way to the gilded elevator outside his room, chancing a look at his phone. Many from work; Amanda, his creative director, his publicist, one of his producers. Andrew. His lip quivered. He opened the text. Hi Zach. Heard about the ‘emergency’ in Vegas. You’re covered here ‘til Monday but there’s a lot we need to finalize next week ahead of album submission—the assistants are filling your diary up as we speak. Have a great time, but not too great... Need you at your best. – A. Zach blinked at it, then up at his reflection. He almost locked it, put it away. But he hesitated. He thought of Alex in that dress, thought of her five years ago on that balcony. Thought of her in a matter of minutes, sitting across from him at the restaurant. His gut snake-twisted and he almost smiled. You’re the boss, boss, he typed in return, hit send. Then the elevator dinged, and the doors slid open.
The air outside had cooled, slipping into early evening. Zach leaned against the car door, waiting, eyes flitting over every patron that exited the hotel in search of her. He needn’t have bothered. When she did emerge, it was as imposing as passing sirens. His head was not the only one to turn. Clipped to her body was the little blue dress from Dior, wet like scales, slick to her figure. Her legs spilled out of the sequined hem like all hell. He inhaled, chest inflating, reinvigorated. Of course he hadn’t been crazy. Look at her. A magic sense of something seemed to swell under her feet as she walked, getting tangled in the waves chasing one another down her back as they floated up to meet her. It moved like music in the air, coalesced with the promise of a blue desert at pre-dusk. And ringing atop it all in high harmony was her smile, a little smug and entirely omnipresent, knowing everything there was to know. She was more dangerous in his hands than a loaded gun. He laughed at her question, rhetorical but he couldn’t help jumping in, “ecstatic.” Zach was not allowed the pleasure of opening her door, as the driver leapt into action, then hurried around the car to open his door, too. Zach thanked him and sank into the leather beside her. The car smelled new. Felt it, too. Before they could even pull away from the entrance, she produced a wrapped chocolate chip cookie from her purse and presented it proudly to him. He laughed immediately, honestly. “Maybe it’s both,” he chimed, eyeing her as she took a second bite. He plucked it from her fingers, dropped it into the door compartment, and looked at her. “Don’t ruin your appetite. Your stalker wants you hungry.”
They rode the rest of the car journey in a similar manner—easy back and forth, quipping at and ribbing one another until he was practically squirming in his seat. Every other sentence he had to bite down on his cheeks to stop from telling her how astonishing she looked, how he couldn’t fucking believe someone could look like that. How he couldn’t believe she looked like that to accompany him to dinner. If this morning was, in effect, their first date, this felt a lot like their second. Though Zach had built an entire, globally successful career around riding nerves like a high, he was still shocked at how on-edge she actually made him. After all this time, how did she do it? But it wasn’t the same as it had been, back then. This wasn’t a practiced routine. It was a different game entirely, and moreover, he didn’t know how to win this time. Every step he took was erratic and impulsive, a desperate venture to shoot for the pot of gold at the end, but ultimately, he was shooting blind. All he had to rely on was that every now and then, he saw it in her, too. A glint in her Bambi eyes, a shiver in her lip, a stuttering as she came back to her senses. It was more than enough to sink his teeth into.
They pulled up to the restaurant he’d called to reserve that morning, used his name to acquire the private booth he’d intended to take her to five years ago. After that first night, they didn’t leave the hotel room much. Thus, that romantic evening meal that lived in his head had turned into room service in reality. Inside the restaurant, everything was plush, red velvet, darkened chandeliers and the smell of smoky vanilla. They were greeted at the entrance by a waistcoated host, shown to their table through a dense atmosphere of jazz music and soft chatter. Zach did little to hide his appearance. His head was held proud as he walked a step behind Alex, not touching her but on her tail like a well-trained guard dog. The sight of her from this angle almost forced some kind of instinctive, low noise from his throat. But instead, when she turned to him to take her seat, he just smiled. Like he had everything under control. Like he, too, knew all the answers. Like he had his own leash between his teeth. They were left alone with the menu and wine list, but Zach didn’t touch them yet. He looked across at her under this light and saw Jesus behind his eyes. The right edge of his bottom lip was pulled between his teeth, and he almost laughed. “I heard about this place when I was eighteen,” he said, without realizing he was going to say it. Okay, fuck it. We can do that, he thought. “Someone told me it was the fanciest, most romantic restaurant in the world. And back then my brain couldn’t even comprehend somewhere classier than Las Vegas, so it became, essentially, a bucket list item for me.” And he’d never once considered asking another woman along with him. No one but her. His hand went for the wine menu, fingers sliding down the leather bindings. “I tried to get here, once. Didn’t quite make it,” Zach kissed his teeth, looking at her with unrestrained delight, his mind sent back all those years for a flash. “So, thanks for letting me kidnap you. Gotta celebrate being chosen by the chosen ones somehow.”
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