? ? ?
“I’ll talk to Max about the wedding stuff,” I promise Jules as she peels off her yellow and black apron. “If you pinky swear that you won’t really make me wear that god-awful penis necklace tonight!”
“Not a chance.” She laughs as she puts her arm around me and leads me out into the dining room and grabs her overnight bag from behind the bar. “You ready?”
? ? ?
“Vegas? Are you serious?” I ask as I lean my head against the leather passenger seat of Jules’ SUV an hour later, after Jules finally revealed our destination.
“Yep.” Jules nods, giving me a quick sideways glance as she merges onto the 15 freeway, the plastic penis that she stuck on the dashboard waving its approval as we speed past the tumbleweeds and shacks that sprinkle the side of the highway. “ETA two hours, thirty minutes!” she squeals, and high-fives Liam, who is sitting in the backseat sipping from his flask.
“Suite booked at the Aria? Check! Slutty outfit packed in your bag? Check! Bottle service at TAO? Check!” Jules says.
Liam chimes in, “But most importantly? Flask full of the smooth stuff to get this party started? Check!” He laughs and passes the liquor forward, me pursing my lips as I take a sip and feel the whiskey burn my throat, thinking I’m definitely getting used to the taste, and, dare I say, liking it a little.
“Do you go anywhere without that thing?” I tease.
“Not if I can help it,” he retorts.
As I watch Jules gripping the steering wheel with a permagrin on her face, I wonder why she is taking me to a place she’d always described as skanky. Anytime I had suggested a girls’ trip to Las Vegas, she’d always rolled her eyes and exclaimed, no way.
Liam’s phone buzzes and he smiles, texting back quickly with his thumbs. “Nikki says congrats and to have fun.”
“That was nice of her,” I say, and look over at Jules, wondering if she’s having the same thought I am, that I’m surprised he was in the car at all. I’d half expected him to cancel at the last minute so he could attend some swanky Hollywood party with Nikki. “How are things going with you guys?” I ask, but am only met with silence.
“Liam?”
“Huh?” he mumbles, and I look over my shoulder to find him texting with the speed and intensity of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I asked how things were going with Nikki.”
“Amazing,” he says, his eyes never leaving the screen of his phone as if he can’t bear to let even a second go by without responding. He chuckles. “She wants to make sure we aren’t being followed.”
I glance back at the empty highway. “By whom?”
“The paparazzi.”
“Really? Wow, how things have changed for you,” I say, sounding more put off by this than I intend to. Liam had been getting a lot of media attention as Nikki’s new boyfriend—having gone from my hipsterish best friend who was writing code for websites to the guy who was dating a huge TV star literally overnight. Extra had gobbled it up, wanting to know who this guy was Nikki had picked from obscurity. They’d even done a whole segment about him the other night: “28 Days with Nikki?” a tongue-in-cheek piece about how no guy had outlasted her stint in rehab.
“What’s with the tone?” he asks, finally looking up at me. I wasn’t sure I had a good answer for him, only that there was a small flutter in my chest whenever I thought about this life I’d wished for Liam. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible for sending him careening down a path he wasn’t meant to travel.
“Is your life really better now?” I question.
“Are you being serious?” he asks, his face contorted into a smirk that I wish I could wipe right off it.
“Yes, I really want to know.”
“Of course it is!” he says, as emphatically as if I’ve just asked him if he’d be interested in winning the lottery.
“Okay,” I say lightly.
“What do you mean, okay?” he challenges. “I can tell there’s more swimming around in that head of yours. Just say it. You know you want to.”
I look over at Jules again, but she only shakes her head as if she’s warning me not to answer him. But there’s something about the arrogance I swear I hear in his voice that makes me comment anyway.
“It’s just that you’ve been kind of MIA since you started seeing her,” I say, doing a mental calculation. I was sure we’d never gone more than a day without at least texting. Since he started dating Nikki, my texts would go unreturned for hours, if they were answered at all. And I hadn’t talked to him on the phone in days. “And there’s the car and the clothes. You just seem . . . different.”