Disclaimer: I don't own roswell, any more than I own any casinos in Vegas
Category: Kyle POV, Lamptrimmer, some other CCs maybe.
Rating: Teen or mature, teen for this part
Summary: A year after VLV, the gang goes back to Las Vegas for spring break, and Kyle finds himself falling for an old flame all over again.
Author's Note: My response to killjoy's "They did WHAT in vegas?" challenge.
"Yeah, Vegas baby!" I shouted out as we drived across the state line.
"We're not at Vegas yet, Valenti," Michael Guerin groused sourly at me.
"Yeah, but at least we're in Nevada now," I pointed out.
"He's got a point," Maria DeLuca said dryly. Michael shot her a frustrated look. "Come on, honey. This Vegas thing was your idea in the first place. Aren't you excited that it was such a hit we're doing it all over again??"
"Yeah, I guess so," Michael admitted after a moment. "Though I think I'd have appreciated a slightly smaller party... yet again." He glared at me as if suggesting that I, particularly, wasn't exactly welcome. I shrugged. I'd been invited along fairly both times, even if Michael didn't himself approve. "And I suppose I kind of miss going in style last time."
"Well, if you hadn't been so insistent on blowing the tainted money all at once last time, then maybe we'd have had a little left over for plane tickets and a nice hotel room. Or you could've got your rich sister to foot the bill. But no on both counts, so we're pretty much stuck with the usual spring break funds." Michael turned his glare back at me... he was getting pretty good at that, but I had some practice in shrugging it off by now.
"So, Kyle," Maria said brightly, obviously trying to change to a subject that wouldn't keep personally offending her steady squeeze so often. "How have things been going between you and Miss Tess Harding lately?"
"Umm... not too badly," I admitted, a little puzzled by the question. "Things are still tight for space chez V, but I think I've been a little less grouchy since Dad was able to get the fouton, and the weather's been nice enough that when I'm just sick and tired of waking up in the living room I can go and camp out in a tent in the back yard sometimes."
Maria stared back through the rearview mirror at me, (which Michael was probably going to adjust in a second, because it wasn't set up where he could actually use it to look behind the Jetta,) and shook her head, brownish-red curls flying everywhere. "No, I'm not talking about that. Things *between* you and Tess." The fact that stressing the word 'between' didn't help clarify things must have shown pretty obviously on my face.
"I'm talking about... well, I've seen the way she's been looking at you lately, Valenti. Are you telling me that you haven't no-- okay, well, since you're a guy, I guess it's entirely possible that you could be clueless about something so obvious." Maria sighed. "She's crushing on you big-time, Kyle. Maybe even something that's deep enough that it can't be fairly called a 'crush.'"
I shook my head. "That's crazy. Whatever happened between Tess and I is long over." A stream of memories flashed through my mind... the way that she looked the first moment I saw her in her junior prom dress. Driving her home AFTER the junior prom, and kissing on the sofa. The two of us taking a picnic lunch out into Frazier woods, talking for hourse, and making out again among the trees. A fancy, romantic dinner at that new Mexican restaurant on the west side of town. And... the look on Tess' face when I told her that I didn't think things were working out between us, parked in the driveway.
"Yeah, why did you dump her ass, anyway?" Michael asked. "Never really cared before, but I kinduv got the vibe that you really liked her."
"I *did* really like her," I said, wondering if it would be fair to say that 'I do still.' But, whether or not that addition was true, it definitely wasn't something I would want to admit to these people. "That... was part of the problem. I... I liked her more than I thought she'd ever feel the same about me." That sentence was grammatically monstrous enough to make Mrs Lewis shriek and threaten to hold me back from graduation a year, but I didn't worry about it right now. "She was good at going through the motions, but deep down I was starting to see that she still held this huge flame for Evans... for Max, I mean. And... well, I guess deep down I just couldn't deal with the idea of playing second fiddle - of being the one that she was with because he didn't want her."
"Yeah..." Maria had an oddly pensive note in her voice... (I couldn't still see her, because Michael had indeed adjusted the mirror,) and definitely shot a momentary look over at him in the driver's seat. "I... I guess I can see how that would be hard... though maybe if you hadn't rejected her, it wouldn't have been that long before she forgot about Max and really fell in love with you."
"Ehh." I wasn't so sure about that. "The thing is... without any offense meant to Liz, and Max too I guess because he's made no secret about how much he wants her and won't settle for anyone else... but Tess really *deserves* to have true love with the guy she's been dreaming of. She's been through so much... going through her childhood with a creepy-ass alien killer operative as the only other person really in her life... struggled with her demons and blossomed as this incredibly caring, generous, sweet young lady in the best sense of the words..."
"Hey, Kyle!!" I looked up at Maria. "What... what if I were to tell you that Tess has, over the past few weeks, found that she's been forgetting about Max Evans in a way that she never believed was really possible? What if she had a new stud-muffin of her dreams, and I was talking to him right now??"
"Well, I'm kind of spoken for," Michael interrupted.
"Quiet." And Maria slapped his shoulder, not too hard. "You may be able to hear what I'm saying, but I'm not talking *to* you. Got it?"
"To answer the question... I'd ask how you could possibly know this," I said suspiciously. "Tess isn't exactly in the habit of sharing that sort of thing with you." Though... I suppose it was just possible that Tess might have confided in Isabel, and Isabel might have told Liz adn Maria...
"She told me, alright! Umm... we were, uhh, She was still at the Crashdown a few days ago when it was time for me to start closing, and we started talking."
"Hmm." That didn't seem like a terribly likely scenario. More likely, Maria was just trying to fix Tess and I up for her own reasons. On the other hand... well, hanging out with Tess didn't seem like that bad an idea... better than trying to be a third wheel to one of the real couples, and if something happened to start up and we messed around - well, there wasn't much harm in that, was there?? It wasn't like she wasn't a phenomenally gorgeous and sexy girl in addition to all of that stuff about her character I was ranting about a while ago. Just the thought of her lips against mine, in a relatively simple and chaste kiss, made my heart beat fast and my skin flush hot.
"How do you figure the others are doing?" I asked. Nobody wanted to be too crowded on this road trip, so we were driving in three different cars... Max and Liz together in the Jeep, Tess with Alex and Isabel, and, well, obviously you can tell who I'd ended up hitching a ride with. It would probably have saved some gas money if we'd crammed into two cars, but - well, we didn't.
"Umm, I think Alex was ahead of me," Michael pointed out. "Max and Liz are probably twenty miles behind, or so. Hard to tell."
"Wouldn't surprise me if they pulled off to the shoulder of the road again," Maria replied with a soft giggle. After several seasons' worth of 'on-again and off-again,' Max and Liz were on again, and lost no chance for a public (or less than public, one would assume,) display of affection. I haven't really been keeping close enough track to tell what the last breakup and reconciliation was about... frankly, I never pay that much attention to them, so sorry if you really want to know. Tough tooty.
"Oh, hey, Las Vegas city limits in three miles!" Maria exclaimed, seeing a sign. "I didn't realize we were that close when we crossed the state line."
"Yeah, Vegas is pretty close to where Nevada, Arizona, and California all come together..." Michael told her.
_________
Didn't take long for us to find our hotel. As Michael had hinted, Isabel's party had arrived first and checked in. It wasn't a fancy casino hotel on the strip, but wasn't quite a fleabag motel either, just a fairly plain and clean Ho-jos with plenty of parking around. It had been agreed beforehand that I'd share a room with Alex, which was fine by me - he's a pretty cool guy, though I realized that he'd probably want to spend a lot of time with Isabel. And Isabel's roommate, of course - was Tess. Yet another little thing that seemed to be pushing us both together for this trip, though there wasn't really any other way to arrange it to avoid that it seemed. Max/Michael and Liz/Maria were both rooming together as well, so that they could just switch rooms, either way, and be together as couples. (Well, not with Max and Liz switching, so that Liz ended up with Michael and Max with Maria, obviously. But Max and Liz could be in either the guys's room or the girl's room, and Michael/Maria would be in the other.)
I stepped into the door of Isabel's room and watched quietly as Tess unpacked some of her stuff into the dresser, not saying anything, just looking and wondering about what Maria had said. If she was right, if Tess *was* feeling the love for me without exception or reservation, if she'd left the stubborn obsession with Max behind, then what about me? Did I still have feelings for Tess like I did last year around this time? I'd been treating her as a sister... at first because it was the easiest way of dealing with sharing space with her after the breakup, and then it had become a force of habit. Did I still have the kind of passion that you really shouldn't have for a blood sister, waiting underneath those surface behavior patterns?
Last year around this time...
Another vivid memory flash hit me. I know an alien club's first Vegas trip, April of 2001. The formal banquet that Maria had arranged on the last night. When Michael had called Maria up to the stage to sing, Tess had pulled me off to the dance floor. I remember every detail so clearly: the way the temporarily straight locks of blonde hair framed her face, the pink and purple print gown that she wore and how it seemed to flow around her curves as she walked. The slight trace of a spicy perfume that I could only catch a good whiff of when I held her close in my arms...
"Kyle?" The soft voice saying my name dragged me out of reverie, and I realized that Tess had noticed me, and was staring in a vaguely curious fashion. "Is something wrong?"
Something melted my heart at that instant. Yeah, there was no way I could lie to myself about that. Tess could still make my heart thump as much as ever. "Umm, no, nothing wrong. Just wondering what you want to do first."
Tess cocked her head pensively at me for a second, then stood up and stretched, which nearly made me groan out loud - the way the different parts of her body moved and took turns emphasizing themselves in that simple gesture took my breath away. She was wearing a silky long-sleeved blouse, colored a lightish green, and a darker green skirt that was made out of some fabric that was a bit stretchy and more shiny, stretching down nearly to her knees. May not sound like the kind of outfit that can drive a teenage boy especially mad with lust, but I would counter with two points. One, have you SEEN Tess? (Actually, I guess you very probably have.) This is the only girl I've ever seen who can literally take your breath away in her baggiest sweats... or at least she does that to me. Secondly, there was the tightness factor. Both of the major items in this outfit, though not revealing notable amounts of skin, (well, some calf-and-knee skin, which is nothing to sneeze at, but no longer considered particularly risque or anything.) Um, well anyway, the blouse was just taut enough around her torso to deliciously emphasize her ches... aw, what the heck, I'll say it straight out. It showed off her rack, heheh. And similarly, the skirt clung to thighs and hips and all kinds of other luscious stuff, leaving few doubts about the shape of what was underneath.
Her hair was styled today in a couple of long, soft waves that fell past her shoulders, and little crystals exactly the same shade as her eyes shone from the tips of her ears. "Umm, well, I was hoping to spend a bit of time at the tables... see if this fake ID works any better than the corny one that Guerin gave me last time."
I smiled at that. Yeah, last time when Michael had turned all of our driver's licenses to make us all 21, he'd also put corny in-joke names on them... I'd been Harvey Wallbanger and Tess was Pina Colada. Of course, it was hard to say if the cheeky names had anything to do with the fact that Liz and Tess hadn't been able to get past the casino guards and been stuck together in the kids' arcade. That was maybe the first time that the two of them, rivals for Max's heart, had been thrown together without any of the rest around to keep the peace, but apparently nothing very dramatic happened either in terms of a catfight or with the two of them opening up and coming to terms.
This time, however we'd all taken more care with the fake IDs, and decided that since nobody in Las Vegas knew us by our real names, there was no reason that our fakes had to have fake names on them.
"Cool," I said. "What's your game? Blackjack? Craps? Don't tell me you wanna play the damn slots. Tess, they're the worst sucker deal in the whole casino. For every dollar you put into a slot machine, seventy cents goes straight to the owner. All the payoffs are covered by the other thirty."
"Yeah, but the usual probabilities don't have to apply to me," Tess replied, stepping close to the door - close to me - and smiling sweetly. "I can get those thirty cents from a hundred other suckers, so what do I care how much the house keeps? Anyway, I don't want to start with the slots anyway. Thought I'd try my luck with the big wheel - roulette!"
"Alright," I said, smiling, and finding out that I enjoyed being so close to Tess. I could smell her perfume again - something kind of flowery and vaguely sweet. "Well, still, don't go nuts. You don't have much mad money to lose."
She stepped closer to me again. "Who said anything about losing??"
"Umm, yeah, sory, I keep forgetting," I admitted. Most people, even professional cheats, who think that they can win at the casino every time they need to are seriously deluded. I'm not so sure about alien hybrids. "Just... do me a favor. If the pit boss tells you to leave the casino, then just go quietly, and don't start a fight whatever you do."
For a second Tess seemed confused by this remark. Then: "Oh, yeah... Michael getting Max thrown in jail last time. Well, you won't have that problem if you stick with me, junior. I don' want no trouble," she drawled.
Actually I had been more worried about Tess herself getting thrown into jail... hadn't quite thought of myself paying the price for her acting out. But I certainly wasn't about to leave her anytime soon if she wanted to stick close to me.
"Okay, which casino do you want to try first?"
Tess looked down from my face for a moment, looking surprised. "Whichever we can get to first - they're all the same to me baby. But aren't you gonna change before we go?"
I looked down at my clothes... just casual stuff for travelling in really, bleached jeans with a few carefully ripped tears in them, and a loose baggy t-shirt. Nothing wrong with them, but I didn't see the harm in dressing up for gambling a little. Taking a nice hot shower would be good too. "Sure. See you in a few."
----------
"Eighteen, red eighteen a winner."
I smiled and collected the take. After a little careful experimenting, Tess and I had sort of settled on a two-person system at the roulette wheel. It apparently took a lot of focused concentration for her to control the little roulette ball with any accuracy, and if she did that, and placed big bets and collected her own winnings, it would look more than a little suspicious. So I was placing big bets, and Tess was spotting them and making sure that I won... in fact, she was doing all too well at that. I had a pile of casino chips in my carry bucket that represented a slightly staggering amount of money, and the put boss was starting to look a little suspiciously at me.
Okay, so what would be least suspicious at this point? Just walk away from the table? No, that didn't quite seem like the thing to do. How about betting a large bet, twice or three times what I'd bet last time, (which was still only a small fraction of what I'd WON,) and losing. But... but for that plan to work, I'd need to be able to signal to Tess that she shouldn't bias the throw... or in fact, to be safe, that she should bias it away from whatever I was betting on. And we hadn't done much with signals, because anything that the people with the security cameras could spot would just about SCREAM that we were collaborating somehow, and probably cheating. Hmm...
Well, with a bit of daring and a 'less is more' approach, I put my money down on the 'first twelve' spot, and then looked up to catch Tess' eyes with my own. Such a little thing, making eye contact with another person - something that was happening probably to hundreds of other people in the casino at this moment, but since we'd been avoiding looking at each other, it was hopefully a signal that was hard to miss. Now, the meaning of the signal might be harder for Tess to guess offhand, but since she'd have played such a big bet to win if I *hadn't* signalled her, hopefully the opposite made sense as a signal. She nodded, just slightly, a motion that probably nobody else would have even noticed, and we both watched the wheel as it started to spin. The ball danced around and around and gradually came to slow down around one sector of the wheel. It bounced past red twelve, and then red three, coming to a short stretch that was entirely free of 'first twelve' spots... was it about to reverse and head for red three? No.
"Zero!" A lot of people groaned, because the zero and the double-zero spot pretty much that nobody wins if they didn't specifically bet on those spots, or a few other special bets. I watched my own chips disappear without any particular remorse, of course, and an odd, familiar voice seemed to come from just behind my shoulder.
"Darnit, I didn't mean to do that to them."
I turned around, startled, but nobody was there. Startled for another reason, because the voice had definitely been Tess', and she was nowhere near close enough to speak so casually. If she had spoken loudly enough for me to hear her over the background noise, a lot of other people should be turning to look at her, and they weren't. And then it hit me. Tess could use her powers to make people see things or hear things that weren't completely real. That meant that she could make me hear her, and me alone, even when she wasn't close enough to me. It was a perfect way for her to send messages to me under the radar of casino security... as long as I didn't freak out like I nearly just did. And - was there some way for her powers to pick up secret messages from me in any similar way?
Well, I didn't want to hang around here any longer. We had more than enough money in my bucket to go out for a really fancy dinner together... assuming that she'd like to. I headed away from the roulette tables without catching Tess' eye, hoping that she would follow and not try to keep playing that table alone. As I was cashing out most of my chips, I caught sight of that wavy blond hair and her shades of green outfit, sitting at a slot machine briefly. About a minute after I walked out the front doors, she followed.
"Come on, what's the deal?" she asked. "You don't want to play any more?" And this was accompanied by the killer pout, the one that only Tess knows how to do which always seems to melt my knees into jelly.
"Umm, err..." I mumbled, my composure rattled for a moment. "Not - not right now. We can go back to the tables in a bit. Right now I'm hungry. How about dinner?" I showed her the wad of bills that I'd gotten from the bucket of chips, and ran my thumb along the edge to flash each denomination for a fraction of second like an animation flip book. "Someplace fancy."
Tess grinned at the thought. "I think I know just the place."
She led me carefully across the street, along the sidewalk through the busy crowds for about a block and a half, into a magnificently tall building, and up the express elevator to the very top, where a mayter D (how do you spell that, anyway??) in a goddamn tuxedo told her that without a reservation, we'd be waiting for over half an hour, but probably not more than forty minutes, for a table two to open up. Tess turned to me. "What d'you think?"
"Well, as much as I generally hate to eat somewhere that the staff dress so much nicer than me," I said, loud enough for tuxedo boy to hear, "this seems good, and I don't particularly mind the wait I guess. Is there a bar where we can hang out until our name comes up??"
The maitre (that's better, right?) looked at me a little severely. "There is indeed. Do you by chance have proof of majority?"
"Come on," Tess insisted. I think that she was worried about someone once again seeing through her fake ID. "We don't have to drink booze, we're just looking for someplace to hang out until we can have dinner."
"Actually, I wouldn't mind a beer," I put in. "And yes, I've got my ID." He put out his hand, and I shrugged, took out my fake, and gave it to him. He peered at it for a second, then nodded slightly.
"And the lady? You don't have to show it to me, but..." He didn't finish the sentence. Tess sighed, dug into her purse, and handed him the little plastic sleeve. "Thank you, Miss Harding. The bar entrance is through there." He pointed back at an angle, close to the door that we'd come in through from the elevator lobby. The bar was dark, crowded, and pretty full of cigarette smoke. We managed to nab two seats at the bar before anyone else could, and I had my beer while Tess ordered a mineral water.
"Are we having fun yet!" I said, partly because the it was the only thing I could think of to say that didn't seem entirely out of place somewhere so crowded.
"More than you'd think!" Tess replied, and in a motion that seemed utterly casual, and yet had an electrifying effect on both my body and mind, she dropped her left hand to rest it on the outside of my right leg, maybe one third of the way up-thigh from my knee. She smiled dazzlingly straight into my eyes.
"Umm..." Should I respond to this directly? Asking what she meant by it seemed entirely the wrong tack to take. I decided to serve it back about as subtly as she had sent it out. "Glad to hear it!" And I wrapped my arm around her shoulders in a gesture that could have been just friendly, or more. There was a twinkle in her eyes as I touched her, I'm sure that there was. And then I lifted up my bottle of beer and somebody bumped into me from behind, and I had to let go of her and grab at the bar to keep myself from falling half off the stool.
I'm not sure what we talked about for most of the time that we waited in the bar... it doesn't really seem like it was even fifteen minutes, let alone more than half an hour. I do remember doing a Michael impersonation for her, (being careful not to mention anything too alien-sensitive,) which got her started doing riffs off Maria and Isabel. We stayed off Max and Liz by some sort of unspoken understanding, realizing that there was a loaded topic hidden there. I wanted to talk about graduation and where we'd be going for university afterwards... but it didn't seem smart, considering that I was sitting drinking a beer in a fancy bar with a fake ID, to advertise the fact that we were both still in high school.
Eventually Tess' name was called and the maitre D led us to our table... which was a great one, right next to the window so that we could look out and see the lights of the city fading into the desert night, headlights on the highway and everything else there was to be seen, which wasn't much. The actual restaurant was much less crowded than the bar, only a few other tables about and seperated with those wood dividers that are actually pretty good at muffling sounds. So, after pondering the menu for a little bit, I lowered my voice and asked the question that I'd been wondering about. "Is... is there any way for you to use your powers to detect something that casino security couldn't? Some signal that I'm trying to send to you??"
She blinked and thought about it. "Well, let's thing about that," she whispered back, and her soft voice somehow sent a thrill up my spine even though what we were talking about was completely practical. "I could probably detect something that was going on underneath your clothes if I tried... like if you were pointing out a certain number of fingers in your pocket. But someone with a good security camera would probably be able to tell that something odd was going on there, even if he or she might not be able to see the exact message you were sending." I nodded, wondering what else Tess might have tried to detect underneath my clothes. I mean, heck, if I had a power like that... but if I thought about that for too long, something might happen under MY clothes that you wouldn't need alien powers to detect.
"What's most private from the security cameras is your own mind, of course... but I've never tried to read people's minds, even the surface layers. Isabel can do a very little bit of that... actually working with deeper layers, extrapolating from her dreamwalking powers." I nodded. "Even with that, it'd be hard for you to send a deliberate message that she can pick up, simply because you're not generally aware of your subconscious mind. I can be aware of your mind when I try to mindwarp you... I have to, in order to know where I'm sendng stuff, but I don't get any more information from that contact, just the fact that there's a conscious mind inside your noggin."
The waiter came up at that point, and we ordered drinks and said that we needed a bit longer to decide, and actually made up our minds once the waiter had left. I couldn't resist the lure of a fantastically expensive sirloin steak with garlic mashed potatoes and garden vegetables, and Tess settled on fettucine rosee with spicy grilled chicken strips. Then she turned back to me and grinned. "Try to feel an emotion without showing it visibly."
"Umm, okay." I paused for a moment, and without deliberately selecting it, let all the passion and lust that I'd ever felt for Tess well up inside me. Lust is an emotion, right? She stared at me, then blushed slightly. "Desire... love, right?"
"Pretty much, yeah," I admitted. "Was using different words - passion and lust, but they amount to pretty much the same thing, yeah?" Tess nodded. "How did you tell??"
"Emotional reactions are chemical," she pointed out. "Chemicals in the brain, in the blood stream. Just molecules in particular shapes. And... and I guess I can sense those molecules, if I try hard enough."
My jaw dropped open and I stared. "All right, are you ready to order now?" I was stunned speechless enough that Tess, still blushing, ordered the main dishes for both of us, though I was able to recover in enough time to say that I'd like a glass of white wine with my dinner. If... if her powers had grown so much, that she could detect molecules so deep inside of me - was there anything that could possibly be hidden from that sort of power? Alright, people's minds are more complicated than molecules, I could see how that was possible. But everything else in the world surrounding her was just molecules...
Turning away from that subject, I turned to something else that had been nagging at me. "You... you've been flirting with me ever since I showed up at the hotel," I noticed out loud.
"Well... duh, yes," she admitted. "I think that comment actually qualifies you for a position as one of the truly great masters of the obvious."
I ignored the gentle tease, except for smiling slightly at it. "Any chance that, on that cliche and hackneyed scale from one to ten, or zero to ten whatever, that you'd be willing to indicate how serious you are about it, or do I have to figure that out the old fashioned way?"
"Hmmm." Tess pondered that question weightily. "Well... I don't have anything in particular against telling you, but then again, making you find out another way sounds fun too." She giggled sexily. "Maybe you need to figure out 'a way of making me talk'?"
Oh, man, she's so gorgeous when she smiles like that. If we were sitting next to each other, I'd try to kiss her, but this was a tiny booth, the two of us facing each other, and there just didn't seem to be any way of doing that without climbing out, which somehow seemed like it was being way too obvious. But I reached out to take her hand in mine, stroking her first finger with my thumb softly in that way that I remembered figuring out she liked, on that picnic hike we took. She smiled, but shook her head slightly.
Okay, patience, grasshopper. If you want to keep your cool, then you're going to have to relax and let this play out a bit more slowly. Maybe as soon as we finished dinner and stood up, I could stand close and give her an opportunity to kiss me, see if she took it. If she didn't... I'd have to decide if I wanted to try making the first move and kissing her myself. We started talking softly about other stuff, about a few shows that she was interested in going to see, about the strategy in blackjack and the odds in craps, (mostly me talking about those, though she seemed quite interested to listen, if not to actually play either game.) And she brought up, with a certain deliberate-ness I think, how she'd been eating alone in the Crashdown last week and saw Max and Liz heading out for a date, and thought about me. Was that a subtle signal? A confirmation that she wanted me and not Evans?? It was hard to say, from the way that she talked about it, but the general tone was encouraging at least.
Our food arrived, and it was delicious, and we didn't talk about much, except that she puppy-dog-eyed me into letting her have a little bit of my steak, and that got us chatting for a few minutes about barbecuing... a few cookouts that we'd had in the backyard last summer, and Tess saying that we should do it again this summer. Once most of my plate was clean, I softly reminded her that we'd probably both be spending a lot of the summer getting ready for college, though that wouldn't take enough time that a little grilling was impossible.
"Better not be." She sighed. "I feel so bummed about the notion that it looks like we're not going to be going to the same place." Right... if Tess was suddenly embracing feelings for me, I could understand how that would be a sore point. Dad and I been so excited about me getting a letter of acceptance and athletic scholarship at USC that we'd sent back a confirmation, and the small required deposit, right away. But Tess hadn't been accepted at the one place that she'd applied to in the Los Angeles area. I didn't know what to say about that.
Tess started talking about her college choices... she hadn't made up her mind yet, and had acceptance letters from schools in Albuquerque, Dallas, Arizona, Salt Lake City, and Oklahoma on her short list. I'd forgotten about my plans by the time we finished dessert, (chocolate sundae and a slice of chocolate cake with tabasco drizzled on it - you should be able to figure out who had what,) paid the bill in cash, and stood up - but that didn't matter. Tess stepped close to me and her lips touched mine with an electrical rush. "So, whatcha wanna do now, sweet thing?" she whispered softly. "Back to the tables somewhere? Take in a show?"
I grinned... the kiss had been amazing, through brief and simple, and it was becoming pretty clear that Tess was definitely wanting to mess around at some point on our trip. I loved the idea, of course. But I wasn't quite about to be the first one to suggest we find someplace that we could have privacy. "Yeah, I've had enough of the casinos for now I think. Let's see what there is here for shows." We took the elevator back down to the ground floor, and wandered through the front lobby, which had posters for all of our options.
"Hmm... the tallest, limberest dancing girls in Nevada?" I read. Tess shook her head immediately and dragged me away from that sign.
"Carrot top?" she hazarded.
"Eww... no no NO!!" I couldn't help sticking out my tongue for a moment out of sheer disgust. "Sorry, but I cannot STAND him."
We couldn't agree on any of the music headliners either, so settled on something that neither of us knew what to expect from enough to complain - a kind of music and comedy variety thing. I enjoyed it. There was some pretty funny improv stuff, and a sketch series that seemed like a sitcom that never made it onto TV - the staff of a small wedding chapel and the wacky shenanigans they get into bailing each other out of gambling problems and dealing with the relationship problems of would-be clients. Most of the songs seemed to actually mention Vegas in the title - What happens in vegas stays in vegas, and a kind of sweet tune about going to Vegas to take the plunge and get married. (Maybe I liked it because the girl singing was cute - a tall brunette with long curly hair and pale, creamy skin, But anyway.)
It was getting pretty late by the time we got out of that show, but Tess was a dynamo of energy, leading me to the roulette tables in this casino. And no matter how many emotions I *sent* to her, she wouldn't let up, her disembodied voice insisting that I place more and larger bets. We got the velvet glove out of that casino after winning about three thousand dollars, and Tess just went right over to the one next to the casino we started in. Before she went in I managed to pull her back long enough to talk for a moment. "Why... why is it important that we win so much?"
She smiled. "Well... it's kind of a surprise." She weighed the question back and forth, and then her willpower lost. "I... I want to get us our own room, here in one of these fancy places right on the strip."
I thought about that, and grinned. "Sounds great... better than having to room with Alex, even if that was just theoretically. We'll have to go back there to get some things, though."
"Yeah. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Come on!!"
I put my first big bet down on number seven. May the seventh - Tess' birthday, at least on her fake birth certificate. According to that, she'd be nineteen in just a few months.
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"Alright," Tess said, once we'd put our bags in the new hotel room at the Emerald Edge. We'd slipped back into the old hotel seperately, but Tess, going first, said that nobody had seen her. Of course, when I heard that, I realized it meant that Alex had Isabel over in my room, and I knew that that could be awkward. Fortunately, they weren't really doing stuff, just sitting up, talking, and drinking some kind of fancy bottle juice with hotel machine ice. I said that I just needed my bag and I'd be out of their hair, and Alex nodded. Presumably he thought that I'd be staying in Tess room here in the same hotel with everybody else, but I really liked her idea better.
"Yeah, it's just great," I said, and wrapped my arms around her. She was eager, and yet far from compliant... she wanted this, but definitely had her own notions about how this was going to play out. For a little while, at least, our brains were going down parallel tracks - deep, passionate kisses, drinking thirstily from between each other's passionate lips... a little cliche necking and wandering hands. When I tried to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, though, she pulled away slightly, and smiled at me teasingly.
"I... I still feel so hyper," she admitted. "I want to do something a bit different than just making out with you here. Is - is that okay?"
"Umm... I dunno," I admitted. "Depends on what you've got in mind."
"Want to go take a swim?" she sing-songed. "There's an indoor pool in the hotel. Sounds like fun to me."
"Hmm... That has possibilities." I admitted. "Umm... what kind of a bathing suit did you bring?"
Tess laughed loudly. "Ohh... now why would you possibly be curious about that? Wondering, maybe, if it's a revealing outfit??" I did a half-shrug and half-nod... I had seen Tess Harding wearing a bikini swimsuit exactly once, near the end of last summer, after we'd already broken up, and only the briefest of glimpses... but it was quite an incredible sight. She flounced off to one of her suitcases, rummaged through it a bit, and emerged with two little bits of flimsy white cloth. "Hmm, I guess these probably count as revealing, wouldn't you?"
I literally couldn't speak for several seconds. Not just that what she had shown me was skimpy -- though it was, but also: white. Did *all* white stuff get transparent when it was wet, or only certain things? Would Tess have tested a swimsuit for something like that before packing it? And if she hadn't... did I really want to let her wear something that was potentially THAT exposive to a pool that was at least semi-public? Both from the perspective of 'did I want to let her do something that she would probably find embarassing,' and 'did I want to take the chance of someone ELSE seeing her that way??'
Suddenly Tess burst out laughing. "Ohh, the look on your face Kyle - I would LOVE to know what you were thinking! This isn't actually made for wearing into the water. Though you may get to see me wearing it a bit later, if you play your cards right." Suddenly I realized that it was some kind of lingerie. "Here's the real swimsuit." The bundle of fabric that she tossed into my arms was scarcely any bigger, but a vibrant red in color. I held up the trangle-style top, trying to picture how it would look on Tess... I don't generally think of her as a lady in red, but couldn't argue with the mental picture.
"Okay, if the lady wants to go swimming, we go swimming," I agreed. Was there any kind of a doubt?
There were only two other people in the entire pool room, (and it was a BIG pool, maybe forty yards long, so just shy of Olympic length, and fifteen wide.) They were another couple, and were obviously determined to pretend that they didn't notice us, hoping that we'd extend the same courtesy. So Tess and I slipped into the very shallow end, dunked our heads under, and started to playfully wrestle around, loosening up and getting comfortable with each other. Tess looked just as hot and sexy in the red string bikini as I could ever have dreamed or hoped, and she seemed to like the way I was filling out my black boxer trunks, and the way the rest of me just filled out by itself without any kind of concealment at all. I've been doing my best to stay in shape, though I'm not playing as many organized sports as I did back in sophomore year... of course, football team is nothing to sneer at, but it doesn't really keep you in shape well from just playing football. (That's why football players have to exercise in other ways just to get themselves ready to play.)
Just when I was winning with the rassling, of course, Tess started to kiss me again. Maybe I was expecting that to happen - couldn't say why else I was rassling so hard. (It was a nice reward for victory, if you want to look at it that way.) She looked very different just from getting her hair wet, as girls with curly or wavy hair usually do - the water straightens everything as it drenches, making the strands stick to each other and cling to skin. She looked a lot more natural that way, less... less carefully arranged and made up just so, (which probably had to do with it too, I don't think she'd worn waterproof makeup today,) but certainly not less lovely. When the kiss broke, she lay back on the water, letting herself float, and I let my fingers run softly along the back of her left thigh. "I... I think I'm falling in love with you all over again," I blurted out. I hadn't realized that before I heard the words, and yet there was an undeniable truth in them. "Are... are you, do you..."
"I - I never stopped loving you, Kyle," Tess admitted. "For so long, I was silently torn between two loves... or two desires at least - not going to get into whether what I felt for... for *him* was really love, an obsession, an infatuation..." She sighed. "Part of me is ready to move on, Kyle... Max isn't holding me back any more, I'm certain of that." She sighed. "But... but I'm not sure how much I want to get my hopes up for a relationship that has only so long before we go off to school in different states."
"We could try to make it work long distance," I said, letting my fingers move up and softly stroke the skin of her back - without much enthusiasm. The words I said, I mean - I was quite enthusiastic about the stroking.
"Yeah, but... that's hard enough even for people who've had a year or longer together to work things out and get themselves into a good place to spend that much time away from each other," Tess pointed out. "We'd probably just be coming OUT of the honeymoon phase when we get seperated, if we get together now, and that seems like a recipe for disaster. You're going to be running into a lot of cute, california beach bunny cheerleaders at the post-game parties or whatever, and I'll probably have guys hitting on me too, and... and I'm not sure how good either of us would be at withstanding temptation with the other person not being close enough to see every day."
Hmm... I wasn't sure I agreed about that... I'm a stand-up guy, don't think I'm easily led astray by a pretty face... or a sweet pair of tits or whatever. And Tess is pretty true and loyal herself. (Tess Trueheart... wasn't she Dick Tracy's girlfriend??) But things were STILL likely to get strained in a situation like that, even if there was no actual cheating happening. That much made sense. Except... "You really think that our honeymoon phase would last five or six months?"
She smiled. "I'm... I'm not sure, that just kinda came out." She stood up again. "Maybe - maybe we should just enjoy this vacation for what it is, and not worry about long-term commitment until afterwards?? Assuming that it would even be a question then."
I thought abou that. My reactions seemed to be swerving back and forth like a drunk driver weaving all over the road. I'd thought that I could just 'mess around' with Tess and keep thing casual, when she kissed be at the restaurant... but I hadn't reckoned on my heart. Still... it might hurt to really fall in love with Tess and not have things work out, but I'd been through that once already (I think) and survived. Maybe letting our impulses lead the way would bring us to an answer that our heads wouldn't be able to figure out beforehand. "Alright, I'm up for it." I leaned in, kissed her, and then poked her soft and squeezable ass, making her shriek into my mouth and around my lips.
"Oops," I admitted after a moment. "Shouldn't have done that." Pointed over to the deep end, where the other couple were apparently chasing each other or something. Hopefully we hadn't disturbed them much. "How about this?" And I kissed her again, my tongue working its way past her full, supple lips... and my fingers tried to work their way under the small patch of red fabric covering the fullest tip of her breast. However, the straps and the suit top in general was tighter than I expected, and instead of slipping underneath, what I managed to do was push both triangles up so that they were resting on the upper slopes of her breasts. She looked down, (even though she couldn't actually see much in mid-kiss,) and both of us started laughing helplessly.
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We stayed up late that night talking, and slept late. There was more kissing and fooling around once we got back to the hotel room, but nothing particularly sexy - which means that nobody really got their rocks off courtesy of the other. (Not that I didn't try.) Since there were two rooms, we slept seperately that night, showered together when we woke up, and went to a late lunch buffet for breakfast. Tess got me into a poker game for relatively small stakes... she wanted to figure out if she could mindwarp someone into thinking that they had a worthless card, or a better card. It was around this point that I realized there was a more useful aspect to her mindwarp talent than she'd let on... if she could change what other people were seeing, she could also TELL what they were seeing in order to make a change - which meant that she could tell what everybody else at the table was holding. She was giving me some running commentary on this, in fact, without seeming to realize that it was an edge that just about any draw poker player would kill for.
I was wondering if the other couples would be upset that we'd run off, that we hadn't checked in or anything... but nobody had laid out ground rules for that sort of thing, and for all we knew, maybe Michael and Maria or Liz and Max had snuck off and gotten their own room too. Okay, probably not Liz and Max, I don't think that Liz would jump too impulsively on something like that, but she's surprised me about things like that before. After the poker we spent a little time at one of the craps tables, and here Tess didn't really need to use me to plant false bets, it turned out. She could make her own bets and try to bias the dice while someone else was shooting... was doing okay at that. Seemed to take a perverse pleasure in fixing things so that the poor sap who was throwing the dice lost as often as possible. Once I dragged her away from the craps table, we got a few beverages, (she had a sprite and I had a coke, both ridiculously expensive and in tiny little glasses that probably didn't even hold an measured cup of soda. And then Tess talked me into going to listen to this R&B singer, a big, dark-skinned guy with a remarkably deep (and yet tuneful) voice.
After the fourth song, Tess picked up her glass, took a swallow, and then an odd expression crossed her face. (I was looking at her at the time it happened, for no particular reason other than that I was enjoying looking at her.) "Huh. Tastes kinda.... funny... ohhh."
"What... what is it?"
"I - I don't think this was my ddringk." With a flash I realized that this was true - Tess' own glass, slightly less full than the one she held in her hand, was sitting in the cupholder in front of her and to her right - between her seat and mine. Mine was to my right. She must have picked up a glass from the cupholder to her left... I think that a thirty-something or fortyish woman had been there and then wandered off. And she left her drink, which I took out of her hands and sniffed carefully. This looked identical to her sprite, but wasn't quite the same... sprite and vodka? Or maybe a white rum??
Exactly what the spirit was didn't really matter. The point was... it was alcohol, probably a bit less alcohol than Max had taken the night of the Blind date valentine contest... but that had been enough to get Max acting extremely out of character, almost blab his secret to his worst rival, (who was, at the time, yours truly,) and use his powers with hardly any care for being caught. About the only thing that saved him from disaster was that he'd spent most of the night in fairly isolated streets and balconies.
I was stuck with Tess in the heart of the busiest, crowdedest, wildest tourist destination in the entire country. And another thing flashed through my mind... Max had gotten very affectionate, from what Liz told me about the part of that evening he was with her.
What was I in for??
TO BE CONTINUED...
