Levitating Las Vegas Read online

  He nodded. “I did.”

  “But that’s not all she was.” Holly was jealous of this strange girl who’d lived in the same house with Elijah and had still preferred to move in with her boyfriend. How could this be? How could any chick prefer any guy to Elijah? The girl must have found out about Elijah’s MAD somehow.

  Color crept into Elijah’s face until he was blushing almost as red as his shirt. He explained haltingly, “That’s really all she was. I’ve never had a girlfriend. Because of the MAD. I guess I don’t want to drag somebody into that. I don’t want her to have to take care of me. You know what I mean?”

  In answer, Holly slid her hand onto his knee. She knew exactly what he meant, and she wished she could simultaneously share her pain with him, and take his away.

  But the instant her fingertips touched his jeans, the motion transformed into something else entirely. Heat shot into her own face as she realized he would probably mistake her touch for a come-on, and that this was okay with her.

  She said quietly, “I didn’t want to break our dates in ninth grade. My mom made me. I was hoping that came across in the way I wrote the text.”

  He looked down at her hand on his knee and shook his head. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, as if she had hurt him very, very badly when she broke their date. Almost as badly as it had hurt her.

  She was probably reading him wrong, or he was having some horrible side effect of Mentafixol withdrawal.

  He sniffed, opened his eyes, and raised his head. “It’s just as well,” he told her with a wan smile. “I came down with MAD that night.”

  “Me too!” she exclaimed.

  He widened his eyes at her.

  She hunched lower in the bus seat, as if that made her voice softer. “What does that mean?” she squeaked.

  His brow furrowed. “Well, we’re probably about the same age.”

  “My birthday’s at the end of July.”

  “See, mine’s July twenty-first. And when this shit went down, we were fourteen years old, which is about when people get MAD if they’re going to get it. It was waiting inside both of us. My mom told me all we needed was a strong emotion to let it out.”

  “You were my strong emotion,” Holly said woodenly. She was full of so much emotion now, so much anger at her parents for keeping her away from Elijah, that she could hardly feel anything at all, as if her soul were squashed flat under the weight of their betrayal.

  Elijah didn’t know that, though, or want to know. She was having a conversation with him about their doomed puppy love, not confessing the darkest secrets of her insanity. Suddenly she felt uncharacteristically self-conscious in her sequined bikini. Bikini and crazy did not mix.

  But when she looked over at him, he was watching her face, not her cleavage.

  “I mean,” she said, “when my parents said I couldn’t go out with you, that’s what triggered my MAD.”

  “When I got your text breaking it off, that’s what triggered mine.”

  They shared a long look. Holly gazed into Elijah’s eyes and imagined seven years were passing between them, an entire young adulthood of what could have been. His solid knee under her fingertips turned to fire.

  Still watching her, he leaned back against the seat, breaking the spell. “So, you’re off work tomorrow night?” he asked off-handedly.

  “Right.” She tried to sound nonchalant herself, rather than elated that he was feeling around for a way they could see each other again. “There’s no magic on Monday. How’d you know?”

  Elijah shrugged. “The billboard over Interstate 15.”

  “That billboard is the bane of my existence.” She realized how this sounded. “Not that I care you know what my day off is. I mean, not that I mind.”

  Unlike Rob, who would have insulted her at this point, Elijah actually helped her out of the conversational hole she was digging for herself. “Big plans for your day off?”

  “Small plans. I make the rounds of the other casinos to see their shows. Ha, exactly what I invited you to seven years ago.” She knew she shouldn’t pursue their friendship. Two people off their medication for MAD were surely more than twice as dangerous as one. But she felt a connection with him, and she simply couldn’t let it end. “Would you like to go with me? Tomorrow? To see some magic?”

  “I’m off tomorrow, too,” he said. “I’m going out of town.”

  “Oh” was all she said, sheepishly. The darkness in his voice advised her not to ask where he was going.

  “But thank you,” he said. “It’s very nice of you to ask.”

  “Sure,” she said faintly, wishing he would follow that up with one sentence more, an invitation to take her out the day after. He didn’t. Her too-vivid imagination had led her to believe he might still be interested in her after all these years. He wasn’t. As casually as possible, she removed her hand from his knee and settled it in her own lap.

  She empathized just a little with Rob, who liked her more than she liked him, and didn’t want to take no for an answer. She thought about reaching over, sliding both hands into Elijah’s hair, and kissing him.

  He touched his lip.

  Her startled heart kicked into overdrive, then checked itself and powered down. The spell was broken now. The newness had worn off. They weren’t surrounded by Glitterati’s pumping music and blinking lights and transvestites, and she realized he wasn’t touching his lip because she was thinking about kissing him. Instead, the reverse was true. She was thinking about kissing him because he kept touching his lip. She should buy him some lip balm.

  He snapped her out of her thoughts by asking, “We’re coming up on your stop, right?”

  She checked the nearest street sign out the window in the dark. “We are.” She wondered how he knew where she lived. He must have come across her address in the employee directory. At any rate, he wanted to get rid of her, and she didn’t blame him. People with MAD shouldn’t hang out together. Slipping her arm through the strap of her purse, she said, “I meant to ask you how you’re doing without . . . you know.”

  “So far so good.” He met her gaze head-on, but something in his tone let her know he was far gone, and it wasn’t good. However, if he wouldn’t tell her about it, she couldn’t help him. She couldn’t help him anyway, she realized. Not without her own prescription refilled. And it was time she let go of her fantasies about Elijah and got off this bus.

  In anticipation of her stop, she scooted to the edge of the seat. “You know what? You never answered my question. Your house is in the other direction. What are you doing on my bus?”

  He looked slowly and deliberately around the bus: at the woman muttering to herself in the very back, a middle-aged couple talking excitedly about their winnings a few seats ahead of them, a dealer and a waitress in uniform near the front. Finally he leaned close to her—so close to her shoulder that awareness rushed across her all over again—and whispered, “I’m kidnapping you.”

  They stared at each other for what seemed like a long time while the air between them vibrated with shared energy. Holly had the slightest suspicion that Elijah was serious, and that he was crazy. She didn’t want to be kidnapped by a crazy Elijah. Neither should she want to be pretend kidnapped by a sane Elijah. Almost against her will, she found herself saying, “That sounds like fun.”

  Just as in Glitterati three nights before, his pupils dilated, expanding to the very edges of his intense green irises before bouncing back ever so slightly.

  Her body stiffened with shock at a movement from the bulging pocket of his jeans, where he’d slipped his hand.

  “No, Holly,” he said gently, “I’m serious. Don’t move, don’t scream, but I have a gun, and it’s pointed at you.”

  9

  Her panic whirled so vividly in his mind that he grew afraid of panicking himself, abandoning the gun, and dashing from the bus. He had to keep a grip on himself and whatever sanity he had left, for his sake and for hers.

  “Do what I say and you won’t get
hurt,” he whispered, because that’s what people said when they were kidnapping somebody. He spread one hand on her bare thigh to exercise more control over her, and also to convince the other passengers, should they glance in Elijah and Holly’s direction, that they were a couple, and that it wasn’t strange for him to keep close to her with his hand in his pocket.

  Then he wished he hadn’t touched her, because her thoughts only intensified in his head. She shivered like a frightened rabbit as she tried to puzzle out whether he was crazy or she was crazy, and whether both of them being crazy would make one sane person. And whether he was going to kill her.

  He took a breath to say, I told you I’m not going to hurt you—what do you take me for? Just before he said this, he remembered that he’d borrowed Shane’s gun to threaten her. It was important for her to suspect he might hurt her. That’s what the gun was for, stupid!

  Instead of discussing the situation with her and getting himself in more trouble, he gripped her thigh harder and squinted out the window. There was her street sign, and the bus brakes squealed. “Get off in front of me, slowly,” he murmured into her ear, a perfect, petite ear with one tiny beauty mark on the lobe. His breath swayed the sparkling rhinestones of her long earring.

  He stood and let her edge past him. He cringed as she went over his words in her mind. Get off in front of me, slowly. He meant the bus, right? Or was he asking her to masturbate? She took a few slow steps in her high heels, half expecting him to order her to shove her hands down her panties right then and there.

  Elijah couldn’t very well whisper another order in her ear. All he could do was wait for her to figure it out and keep moving forward. This was his luck. Of all the tortures, he had to believe he was able to read a beautiful girl’s dirty mind.

  Finally she proceeded up the bus aisle and down the steps, her visible shaking accentuated by the trembling of the baubles on her bikini bottoms. Elijah glanced around, but the other passengers and the driver didn’t seem to take undue notice of him and Holly. Gorgeous, scantily clad girls pursued by dangerously unbalanced losers with guns in their jeans pockets were a dime a dozen in Vegas, apparently.

  Standing above her, he wasn’t in a position to help her off the bus, but he watched her for signs she was tottering in her heels. He would have jumped forward to keep her from falling in that case. But Holly was a showgirl, never wavering on her feet, keeping her balance without touching the handrail despite the blind fear Elijah felt coming off her in waves. She hopped down the stairs and then half turned on the sidewalk, waiting for instructions.

  Elijah watched the bus roar up the street, careen around the corner, and disappear behind the palm trees. A café faced the main road at the edge of the quiet neighborhood, with Holly’s apartment complex a block down. The café was closed at ten thirty at night, and it had no surveillance cameras in back. He’d checked. No witnesses. “Walk behind the building,” he ordered her.

  She obeyed. As she clacked across the parking lot in her heels, her hairdo bobbed. Holly fashioned her thick brown hair in many different ways. After she’d broken her prom date with him, the highlight of Elijah’s sad excuse for a high school life had been to get to class before her so he could watch her walk in and see what she’d done to her hair that morning. Currently the top section puffed in a bouffant bun while the lower half was gathered into a curly ponytail that swayed against her back and occasionally caught in the sequins on the straps of her top. It was very retro, and as they approached Shane’s Catalina, Elijah had the feeling they’d stepped out of a 1960s gangster movie. The only thing that didn’t fit in was Elijah. He needed a tux like Shane’s work costume, yet he was schlepping along in jeans and a UNLV LACROSSE T-shirt, as usual. He couldn’t even commit a felony in style.

  Holly didn’t care. She was terrified, bouncing between sympathy for him because he was sick and horror at what this might mean for both of them. In her mind they were both dead already, facedown in the puddles of this parking lot, rainbows of gasoline floating around their heads. Glancing around curiously, Elijah didn’t see any puddles. It hadn’t rained since May. But he told himself that whatever her mind conjured, it was good for his plan if it kept her afraid.

  Suddenly she snapped out of her visions of death and stopped short a few feet from the car. “This is Shane’s car,” she cried. Now Shane lay facedown in the puddles in her mind.

  “I stole it.” Elijah had planned to say this—not because it had occurred to him she might think he’d murdered Shane, but because she might be less likely to try to escape if she thought the police were already after Elijah and would be coming to rescue her shortly. In reality Elijah had asked Shane if he could borrow his car and his gun to kidnap Holly Starr and drive to Colorado to get their medicine. Shane had said, “Sure,” and had given Elijah a crash course in driving and gun safety.

  Careful to keep one hand in his pocket with the gun pointed away from Holly—Shane had made him promise to keep the bullets in the glove compartment, but he’d said an unloaded gun should be treated like a loaded one just in case—Elijah unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. The door was long and heavy like the car and seemed to open for days. Finally he stepped back and nodded to the interior. “Get in.”

  Without moving her head, she scanned the half circle of parking lot in front of her with her eyes. Elijah saw what she saw and thought what she was thinking: if she ran now, he might shoot her. Her chances for escape would be better later. So she eased into the car, ducking her head to prevent her bouffant hairdo from hitting the roof.

  He slammed her door and hurried around the car, concentrating carefully on her to make sure she didn’t change her mind and bolt. He slid into the driver’s seat and said, “Lock your door.” If she wanted to bail, at least she would have to think about pulling up the old-fashioned button first. Elijah would have warning and could grab her before she did it.

  She put out one shaking hand, perfectly manicured in pink, and locked the door.

  He bit his lip as power surged through him. He’d been tingling ever since the Mentafixol began to wear off, and the tingles intensified the more he delved into someone’s mind. But he couldn’t let MAD take him over completely. He was a nice person with a hereditary mental disorder. No matter what happened now, it was crucial that he remember his one task, to get that medicine.

  For him, and for Holly.

  He took a deep breath and squeezed the steering wheel. “Get out your cell phone.”

  She dug through her purse.

  “Text Kaylee,” he said. “Tell her you’re spending the night with me, like you’re happy about it. Be convincing.”

  Holly’s heart beat violently. She was scared to death. But she’d felt close to him on the bus, and she didn’t want to let go of the hope that the Elijah she liked so much was still inside him somewhere. She touched the keypad with her thumb. The screen lit, illuminating her beautiful face, her false lashes casting long shadows as she closed her eyes and said a little prayer. Then her thumbs moved.

  Spending the night with Elijah Brown. We started talking about the night at Glitterati and it just sort of happened.

  Elijah leaned close to watch her enter the characters. She smelled like oleander. He removed his hands from the steering wheel and balled them into fists, cutting his fingernails into his palms to keep himself from touching her. “Squee,” he said.

  Squee! Catch u tomorrow morning.

  “We won’t be back tomorrow morning,” Elijah said. “Put ‘later.’ ”

  Holly backspaced over “tomorrow morning,” panic rising with every keystroke. Elijah couldn’t stand much more of this without putting his hands on her, MAD or no MAD. But the more turned on he got, the closer she moved to tears. As she typed “later,” she was thinking of the few mornings Kaylee and she had walked to this very café, and the many mornings she’d come here alone because Kaylee was almost always working. When Kaylee came, she read the newspaper. Holly brought racy romance novels. She wa
nted a do-over of those mornings now. This time, instead of ordering coffee with skim milk and artificial sweetener, listening to her mom’s voice in her head demanding that she count calories, she would splurge for the chocolate muffin she’d dreamed about the entire year she’d lived in this neighborhood. What would it matter that her corpse carried a few extra pounds? Would this be bad for publicity for her dad’s show? Surely they wouldn’t have an open casket at her funeral, or bury her in this godforsaken bikini? She didn’t want to die without a muffin.

  Elijah’s stomach growled, and he swallowed. “Fasten your seat belt.” He cranked the huge engine.

  “Do you know how to drive?” Holly asked in a small voice. “I never learned how to drive. It’s dangerous to drive on Mentafixol.”

  “Well, I’m off Mentafixol.”

  “You are way off Mentafixol,” she whispered, hoping she wouldn’t be as crazy as he was in a few hours, when her own last pill had worn off.

  “It ought to be perfectly safe.” He put the gearshift in first, pressed down on the gas, and let up on the clutch, as he had seen Shane do a million times.

  The car lurched forward and stalled. Elijah extended his arm just in time to prevent Holly from hitting the dashboard. His hand touched her breast, and she felt it. Elijah felt it times two: the shape of her breast under his hand, and also what she felt. Awareness, pleasure, horror, guilt. He snatched his hand away.

  She crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Safe?” she squeaked.

  “Definitely, as long as we’re not moving.” He started the engine again, pressed down on the gas, and let up on the clutch more slowly this time. The car lurched but kept rolling, and he maneuvered it onto the main road. For Vegas, the traffic wasn’t too bad at the late hour. But as he cruised this straight, easy road, it was all he could do to focus on keeping the car in his lane. Each time he passed a car going in the opposite direction, he could hear the thoughts of the drivers and passengers.