CHAPTER 3
Sadie laid her arm
across her eyes. “Great news, kiddies,” the perky radio announced. “You didn’t
make that trip all the way from the ocean for nothing! Six inches tonight, and
a sunny 45 degrees tomorrow! Ski season has arrived!”
“Dan! Shh!”
Sadie turned up the
radio a bit more, laughing as the first strains of “Gone” came on. As if she
hadn’t heard enough NSync on the way up here. Still, though, she loved the
giggly feeling she got when she heard someone else play the music—made her
realize she wasn’t the only one out there with a taste for pop music and cute
boys. Even better, Justin’s voice drowned out the sound of her housemates’
giggling.
Then she started listening to the words, and
the smile faded.
In moments, she
yanked a sweater over her head, pulled a knit cap over her light brown curls,
and headed for the door.
“Guys?” she called to
the back of the house. No answer.
“Lizzie? Dan? I’m
heading out.” No answer.
“Don’t wait up for
me.”
A muffled giggle.
Sadie rolled her
eyes. “I’m taking the keys, guys. Have a good night.”
Ten minutes later,
she pulled onto the main strip of South Lake Tahoe—a bizarre blend of
artificial and natural beauty, all the neon and glitz of Vegas nestled in the
snow-topped mountains of California. She drove across the state line and, after
a moment’s hesitation, parked in the lot of Caesar’s. To hell with this, she
thought. Who the hell cares if I lose any money after the day I’ve had? I’m
gambling.
She stepped through
the door and laughed; she couldn’t help it. The sudden cave-like sensation, the
timeless quality of a room with no clocks, no windows, and no closing time
struck her immediately, and the clanging slot machines, shouting people and
loungey music surrounded her. Everywhere she looked provided a new distraction.
Perfect.
She cashed in $40 for
chips and decided to wander around a bit, figure out the lay of the place
before deciding what to play first. Slot machines—nah, too boring;
roulette—maybe, once or twice; poker—no way, no idea what she was doing… and
blackjack. Blackjack. That was her game. She approached the table, stack of
chips in hand, when she froze in her tracks.
At the far end of the
room was a theater—a cabaret, the type of place where Howie Mandel put on
nightly shows—and she could’ve sworn—no, she was sure…
Was that a Gucci hat?
No, her mind said, and she giggled at herself
for acting like such a damn teenie. Still, though, it could be fun to see what
the owner of the hat looked like—judging by the crowd here, and judging from
who she usually saw in hats like that, it’d probably a 70-year-old man with a
walker, a hernia, and an overdeveloped libido.
She hopped in line
for the club, flashing a smile at the bouncer, and slipped in the back. The
show had already started—a jazz trio, actually quite good—and she tapped her
foot as she scanned the room for the hat.
Too dark. Couldn’t see a damn thing.
Oh, well. She shrugged, ordered a martini from the cocktail server, kicked back, and closed her eyes. Good music.
““Here’s your chance, boys and girls,” the singer said, her throaty voice smooth and deep in a way that only a lifetime cabaret singer’s could be, stained by smoke and whiskey, mellowed by a love of the crowd. “This is what we call Stranger’s Choice. Gentleman, find the loveliest lady in the room and ask her to dance—don’t worry, honeymooners. You’ll get your girl back.”
Soft laughter rippled through the crowd as the band swung into “Strangers in the Night.” The woman didn’t sing right away, interjecting some “doo-bee-doos,” letting the crowd shuffle around a bit; she urged them on, threatening to stand there mumbling all evening if someone didn’t get their hinies onto the dance floor. Sadie smiled, watching older couples trickle on the floor, exchanging names and smiles, waving and giggling at their own spouses, tripping over their unfamiliar partners and laughing.
She sipped her martini, enjoying the show, and almost choked on a bite of olive when a voice spoke in her ear.
“Would you like to dance?”
She laughed, chewed the olive, and turned to say no thanks, she wasn’t in the mood for dancing—
She gasped.
The olive stuck in her throat.
She coughed again.
She couldn’t breathe.
She wrapped her hands around her throat. I’m choking! she mouthed.
And JC Chasez wrapped his arms around her ribcage, balled his hand up into a fist, pounded her diaphragm, and the offending olive flew neatly back into her martini glass.
Sadie sat back down, fumbling for her water, and sipped, still coughing, hiccups threatening, ribcage burning with the feel of those sinewy arms around her, and shook her head. No it wasn’t, no it wasn’t, no it wasn’t, no it wasn’t—the phrase played in her head, skipping like an old record, punctuated by hiccups. No it wasn’t, no it wasn’t.
That was not JC Chasez.
He did not just give you the Heimlich maneuver.
“Hey, you OK?” the voice said, and the hair stood up on her neck. She finished swallowing her water this time, and turned around to face him. Again.
Fuck. It was him. Her stomach dropped into her shoes.
“If you didn’t want to dance with me you could’ve just said no,” he said, a grin creeping across his face.
Oh, God, she thought. Please don’t do that. Don’t smile. Don’t smile—oh, GOD, he’s smiling. Her stomach dropped another fifteen feet.
He regarded her for a moment and cocked his head. “You sure you’re OK?”
“Oh, right, sorry,” she said. “You startled me, that’s all.”
“Well?” He gestured to the dance floor.
“Well what?” Sadie asked. Jesusmaryandfuck, he was just as goddamn beautiful in person, more, how was that possible—
“Do you want to dance? You and I look like the only people under thirty in this place, so I thought…”
Dance? She raced down a warehouse of vocabulary in her mind, searched for the word dance—sounded like a D word, right? Oh, yes, here it is, assuming she spelled it right, of course, dancing, that means to move your feet to music and didn’t she take about eighteen years of dance lessons or something?
“Do you want to wait for the next song?”
“No!” she said, and he blinked. “I mean, sorry. Must’ve been the lack of oxygen to my brain or something. Yeah. Um. OK. I’ll dance with you.”
“Well, good, then,” he said with another grin, and offered his hand. She took it and gasped. Heat unlike any she’d every felt—a humming, living kind of heat—consumed her hand, traveled up her arm, down her spine, threading through her body like tributaries of a river, and she suddenly had the sense that she could count the ridges on his palm just by touch, with her eyes closed, just by this simple act of shaking his hand, and after a moment—too long, her mind told her later—she looked up from their joined hands, and looked into that perfect face under that silly Gucci hat, and saw creased eyebrows, pursed lips, blinking eyelashes.
He looked… perplexed. Confused. Surprised.
And he was looking at their hands, too.
He lifted his eyes from their hands and gazed at her, head cocked, a little smile on his lips, and said, “I’m Josh.”
“Sadie,” she said, whispering, and he nodded. She didn’t know why he nodded, or why that seemed so appropriate, but it was. He nodded like they had some shared secret, had just closed some sort of deal. Like he’d already known her name. Like him shaking her hand was somehow…
“Right,” he said.
“Right?”
“I said ‘all right.’ Are we going to dance or what? Song’s almost over.”
“Let’s go dance, then,” she said, and, still grasping her hand, he led her to the dance floor.
| [::-::Back::-::] | [::-::Next::-::] |