"Here, these are for you." Gabi held out a pack of cigarettes. She wore a tight leather skirt and a silky black blouse that showed more than it hid. Her makeup was dark and heavy, giving her a rebellious appearance. Her blonde, shoulder length hair was streaked with temporary red highlights. Everything about tonight's look was temporary. By day she sold tickets to various Vegas shows at the MGM casino and by night she was typically in bed by ten. Tonight, though, she wanted to party and maybe even get laid.
"I'm not holding those for you," Rachel said. "I told you not to buy them in the first place."
"I have my own." Gabi held up a second pack. It was different from the one she was offering her sister. Those had Marlboro Lights written on the side, The pack she was opening were shorter and had a picture of a camel on them.
Rachel snatched the pack of Marlboros out of her sister's hand. "You're taking this bad girl thing way too far. Smoking kills, you know." She was dressed much more conservatively than her sister. She'd refused a "bad girl" makeover and had opted for a pair of comfortable black jeans and a paisley blouse. She had spent a decent amount of time on her shoulder-length auburn hair, giving it some decent curls. Normally, she put it in a ponytail and forgot about it.
"Oh my god, for like the millionth time I am not going to start smoking." She stuck a cigarette in her mouth.
"You're not actually going to light that are you?"
"It helps with the smell. It's very smoky in there."
"What on earth are you talking about?" Rachel shook her head slowly. "Because you're surrounded by smoke you're going to breath in even more? On what planet does that make sense?"
"I'm not going to take the smoke into my lungs, just my mouth. It makes all the secondhand smoke way more tolerable. Trust me, it works."
"Yeah, I'm not doing that." Rachel tossed the pack onto the dash.
Gabi grabbed it and thrust it back into her sister's hand. "You can't leave it up there. Some drunk having a nicotine fit will break a window to steal them."
Rachel opened the glove compartment only to find it stuffed to capacity with random crap. She rolled her eyes. "Do you at least have room in your trunk?"
"Oh my god, just put them in your purse. Along with these." Gabi held up a strip of four condoms wrapped in purple plastic.
"Maybe it would be better if we went home," Rachel said as she stared at the contraceptives. "We could open a bottle of wine and watch some TV with Paige." Rachel's daughter was staying with her grandparents for the evening. Technically, Rita was Paige's step-grandmother, but had been for the last fifteen years. Despite only being the second time that Paige had met the woman, they got along pretty well. Apparently Rita intended to spend the evening teaching her granddaughter how to play MahJong.
"This will be a lot more fun than watching Gilmore Girls...again."
"You could have at least picked somewhere closer to Dad's. Why drive all the way out into the desert to a place full of smoke and bikers." Rachel pointed at the row of Harley Davidsons parked near the front entrance of the Rusty Nail tavern.
Gabi rolled her eyes. "For the thousandth time. It's about getting out of your comfort zone. It's about acting 'as if'. If a guy asks about the cigarettes you say that you're quitting and you keep them on you to test yourself. It's an act of will to have the smokes and not give into temptation. If the guy doesn't like smokers he'll like that you quit. If he does smoke he'll be impressed with your willpower. You win either way. If nothing else it can be something to talk about."
"You've given this way too much thought." Rachel considered snatching the car keys from her sister and driving back to her dad's. Not that she wanted to spend the evening with him; he'd be asleep by this time anyway. Learning Mahjong didn't hold much interest for her either, but it was better than being leered at by a bar full of bikers, or even worse, being completely ignored. "Can we at least go somewhere a little more reputable?"
"This place is perfect. It's full of red-blooded alpha types that will make you forget all about that two timing 'nice' guy that you were married to. It's good that it's far from home. That way there's no chance of running into someone from this place in the future." When she saw that her sister still wasn't convinced she continued. "You can be whoever you want in there and tomorrow you can pretend that it never happened. Personally I'm hoping to wake up next to a muscular hunk that fucked me silly all night long."
Rachel glanced at her bare left ring finger. There was still an indentation where her wedding band had lived for the last twenty years. "One drink and then we go." She dropped the cigarettes and condoms into her black leather purse.
Gabi gritted her teeth for several seconds. As her jaw unclenched she said, "One drink, but on the following condition: If someone chats you up and he's halfway interesting you have to give him an honest chance."
"Fine, whatever."
As soon as they stepped out of the car they were hit with a wall of heat. Despite the sun having set, it was still over a hundred degrees outside. She never understood why people would choose to live in a desert. It could get quite warm during the summers in her hometown of Minneapolis, but nowhere near as hot as Las Vegas, not even close. If your AC quit working in Minnesota it was annoying, not life threatening.
Once inside smoke stung her eyes and the music blaring throughout the place hurt her ears. It was the kind of music her ex-husband had called southern fried rock, neither of them having been much of a fan. A dozen pairs of eyes, all belonging to men, locked on the ladies. Several looked away quickly having decided that the new meat wasn't up to their standards or worth pissing off their significant other by pursuing, while several lingered. She certainly understood why they were looking at her sister. While Gabi was a little overweight it only seemed to enhance her looks. She was curvy and busty and still under thirty for another eleven months. Rachel was a runner and looked fit enough to run a marathon despite being 18 months shy of her fortieth birthday. Unfortunately she lacked the kind of curves that drew a most men's lustful gaze.
Most of the men looked like they were either on probation or hiding out from the law. The owners of the motorcycles out front were all sitting in a group toward the back of the bar. They all wore the same large patch on their backs; a muscular man with a jackal's head below the words, "The Lords of Chaos". There were four types of women in the place, the ones serving drinks, the ones who were with the biker gang, ones who looked like they too had just been released from prison and those who were also on the clock, but made their money on their backs. The men had the ladies outnumbered three to one.
Rachel pulled free from her sister. She trotted toward the bar, hoping to get their drinks ordered before anyone offered to buy her one and proved interesting enough that she'd have to spend time talking to him as part of her agreement. She wanted nothing more than to get out of the smoke-filled room and on her way back to her dad's place.
She kicked herself mentally for letting her sister talk her into going out in the first place. It had a lot to do with seeing her ex-husband's wedding announcement on Facebook. They'd been divorced for less than a year and the woman he was marrying wasn't even the one he'd had the affair with. This was a whole new woman, even younger than the initial homewrecker. It pained her to realize that despite promising herself otherwise, she'd married someone like her father. She'd thought that Ryan was different and he'd seem that way for most of their two decade long marriage. But he'd turned out to be exactly like her father.
Her dad had left Rachel's mom for a younger woman. When she was eight-years old he'd had an affair with a woman in Vegas, a woman nearly half his age named Amelia. Gabi was the result. Rachel had hated her half-sister for the first nine years of her life. When they finally met at Rachel's high school graduation, she'd had a hard time hating the precocious fourth grader. By that time their dad had moved on to wife number three, Yolanda. Rachel found that she had a hard time holding a grudge against a nine-year old girl who, like herself, had her family torn asunder by their father's infidelity.
The only reason she was even in Nevada was because their dad was dying and Gabi had convinced her that if he died and she hadn't at least said goodbye that she'd regret it in the years to come. So she packed up her daughter, took a week off from her job at Premier Bank and flew out to Las Vegas.
As the bartender served a large man with the Lords of Chaos patch on the back of his jacket she hoped that the place had a halfway decent chardonnay, but she feared that if they did carry wine it was probably poured from a cardboard box. She wasn't a wine snob by any means, but she had some taste. Whatever she ended up getting, she planned on drinking it quickly so she could get back on the road while the car's engine was still warm.
"Two boilermakers," Gabi shouted as the bartender handed the biker his change. She shot her sister a satisfied smile when the bartender turned and proceeded to make the drinks.
"Need a light?" a man said to Gabi. He was a couple of inches taller than her and had an average build. He reminded Rachel of the tow truck driver who'd helped her with a flat tire last year. There was another man with him, he was a little taller and quite drunk.
"You're so sweet." Gabi traced her fingers over the man's hand as he lit her cigarette.
"I'm Bill and he's Larry. What are your names?"
The drunk one stared at Rachel intently. She guessed that he was close to her age which was a whole lot closer to forty than she liked.
