In Real Life (17 page)

“Wow.” This is the fourth casino I've been in so far, and they all look so different and so overwhelming. MGM doesn't seem to have a theme aside from “huge,” but it's beautiful inside, with gold accents on the wall and lion details everywhere. We pass expensive restaurant after expensive restaurant, and we linger by the menus, pointing out the dishes we would order if we had that kind of money before moving on to the next one.

According to the signs, we're almost to the front lobby when a loud
whoop
stops us in our tracks. The
whoop
s continue, fast and loud and full of excitement, until they are right on top of us.

It's a couple doing the
whoop
ing. She's wearing a skintight white sequined strapless dress that's so short, it looks more like a top, a hot pink feather boa, and the highest platform stilettos I've ever seen a real person manage to walk in. Her black hair is twisted into an updo and topped with a birdcage veil. The guy has on dark skinny jeans, a tuxedo T-shirt, and a top hat.
JUST MARRIED
is scribbled in Sharpie up his right forearm, and a beer bottle dangles from his fingers. The
whoop
ing is because he keeps smacking her on the butt with his free hand, and she seems to enjoy it immensely.

“Aww, look,” I say, elbowing Nick in the ribs. “A Vegas wedding.”

“Congratulations!” Nick shouts at them as they
whoop
by.

The groom stops and turns around, his hazy eyes searching the casino crowd until he lands on Nick and then on me. He walks back toward us and clasps his hand, the one that had previously been on his new wife's backside, on Nick's shoulder. “Thanks, man! It's awesome.” He jerks his head toward me. “You gonna marry this one? You should. Being married is the best.”

“You've been married for forty-five minutes, babe,” the bride calls from a few feet away. “You have no idea.”

“Uh,” Nick looks at his feet, his cheeks turning the color of the bride's boa. “We're … um…”

“Oh no,” I say, probably way too quickly. “We're not together. We're just friends.”

“Best friends,” Nick adds, also way too quickly.

The groom reaches his arm around Nick's shoulder and pulls him into a bro hug. “Mai and I were best friends in high school,” he says. “I dated her sister, actually. But we don't talk about that anymore. She gets mad.” He adds the last part in a stage whisper and sends an overexaggerated wink in her direction.

“Jason! Are you seriously telling this story to strangers? On our wedding night?” The bride, Mai, rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but her exasperation isn't all that convincing when paired with her enormous smile. “Come on. We need to get back to the reception.”

The groom stares at us for a second, smiles, and says, “You two want some cake? Come eat cake with us.” Still in the bro hug, he pulls Nick lightly in the direction of his wife. “We just lost some wedding gift money at the roulette table, so we need some more cake to take the edge off.”

I'm tempted to blurt out a quick no, pull Nick away from Jason, and get the heck away from these drunk strangers. But I notice the light tug from Jason made Nick's glasses slide down his face a bit, where they wobble all askew on the end of his nose, which is probably the most adorable thing I've ever seen. Even more adorable? Nick's wide-eyed expression full of
WTF is happening?
mixed with
This is the best ever!
He's enjoying everything about this bizarre encounter.

“Are you inviting randoms to our reception?” Mai says it in a way that implies Jason does this sort of thing often and that's exactly one of the things she loves about him.

“Look at them!” Jason waves his hand up and down in front of a laughing Nick, whose glasses continue to slide down his face. “They're a mini us! I have to invite them! It's like having our past selves at our own wedding! Wedding-ception!”

And it's true. Jason is a brown-haired white guy in black-framed glasses, like Nick, and Mai, while not Korean, is tiny and Asian. They do sort of look like the two of us, even though I could never pull off those shoes and that dress in public. Where did she get those boobs?

Jason takes a swig of his beer. “So, you guys coming?”

Nick and I look at each other. “You want to?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. His face is alive with excitement and adventure in a way I've only ever heard in his voice.
Get crazy with me,
he seems to be saying.
Let's be crazy together.

I raise both my eyebrows back, because I've never been able to master that one-eyebrow thing he can do, even after the hour-long tutorial he gave me in tenth grade. My instinct is to say no and get the heck out of here, and I know he knows it.

And if you asked me yesterday, I would have said I would never in a million years wander off into a Las Vegas casino with drunk strangers. But something in me changed when I got in the car and drove out here. This trip isn't just about meeting Nick; it's about breaking the rules, too. Trying new things. Sure, I didn't go on the roller coaster, but I can eat some freaking cake. Dessert isn't going to send me plummeting to my bloody death.

And something else in me changed when Nick and I ran off alone together. Making these decisions, doing these things that are so against my good-girl DNA, opened up a secret part of me. Now my desire to be involved in one of Nick's stories—like the time he and Oscar snuck into an empty pool to skateboard or the time they started a bonfire hot dog party in an empty lot—is strong. I want to gain membership into that side of his life.

And maybe this will be the place for me to tell him how I feel. What better setting than a romantic Vegas wedding?

I nod and shrug and smile at him all at the same time. “When in Vegas.”

 

CHAPTER

18

We all follow Mai's lead through the casino, and Nick shakes loose from Jason's bro hug, finally fixes his glasses, and walks close to me again.

“A Vegas wedding,” I say as we trail behind the couple. “I feel like we're in a movie or something.”

Nick shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Do you think Elvis performed the ceremony?”

“If it wasn't Elvis or a drag queen, they're doing this Vegas wedding thing all wrong. According to those movies, anyway.”

“According to those movies, though, they should have just met two hours ago, not back in high school.”

We're quiet, both of us watching Mai and Jason ahead of us, who are now holding hands and skipping through the casino back to their reception. Well, skipping as best they can, given Mai's footwear.

“You sure you're okay with this, Ghost?” Nick bumps my shoulder with his, and I bump back without thinking about it. As soon as I realize what I've done, a shiver of panic runs through me. Was that too flirty? Too familiar? Should I have done that? But then the panic ebbs a bit when I tell myself he bumped me first.

I bump him again.

“You promise they aren't going to drug us and take us out to the desert for some kind of occult sacrifice ritual?”

Nick laughs so suddenly that he snorts. “I can't promise that. But I can promise that if they try, I will gallantly come to your rescue and drag you to safety if I have to.”

“How can you drag me if you are drugged, too?”

“I will battle through the bleary haze of the drugs to save you, Ghost. That's what real friends do.”

A loud
whoop
sounds through the casino, and I see that, once again, Jason has smacked Mai on the butt. Dang, he can't keep his hands off her. This time, though, as he pulls his hand away, she snatches it back and places it firmly on her backside.

Their easy banter, their natural chemistry, and the undeniable love that passes between them make me feel warm inside. As we walk, I look at Nick and he's smiling. But he's not looking at them; he's looking at me. “They remind me of us,
”
he whispers to me, his mouth as close as it's ever been to my skin.

We follow them through the casino to a hallway full of rooms I assume are used for conventions, conferences, and weddings like Jason and Mai's. Their reception is in full swing when we walk in one of the doors. Lights string the walls, flowers decorate the tables, and guests pack the dance floor, as I would expect at any wedding. But I should have known by Jason and Mai's unconventional wedding attire that this wouldn't be a typical reception.

Instead of wearing fancy dresses and suits, their guests are all in costumes.

Loud, uncensored hip-hop blasts from the speakers, played by a DJ in a clown costume. A group of sexy Disney princesses dances in a circle. Two Elvises—or is it Elvii?—knock shot glasses together in a cheers. A guy dressed in drag hands a slice of wedding cake to someone in a full gorilla suit and a bow tie.

And Nick and I, dressed as normal as can be, stand in the doorway, mouths agape.

Nick scratches the back of his head. “Did we take a wrong turn into Halloweentown?”

“Now, this is the Vegas I was hoping to see,” I say.

“I have lived here my whole life, and I've never seen this Vegas.”

“Clearly, you are hanging out in the wrong places.”

“Here.” It's Jason, and he shoves two small paper plates at us. “Teenage Jason and Mai, you two need to have some wedding cake. It's chocolate and it's delicious. I've had three slices already, and the night isn't over yet.”

We take the cake, which seems to please him immensely. “Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go grind on my hot wife. Stay out of trouble, you two.”

I ate a piece of cake at the pizza place before Nick's show earlier, and I'm not usually a sweets person, so I'll be racking up more sugar on this trip than I've consumed in the past month. But I couldn't say no to Jason, his face glowing with love and excitement. And I followed the newlyweds here to eat some cake, after all. So I'm going to eat the dang cake.

I take one bite, and it's so sugary and oversweet that my mouth twists up as I swallow it. Taking one bite totally counts as having the cake, right?

“For you,” I say, passing my cake plate to Nick.

“You are the biggest enabler of my sweet tooth ever.” He has already swallowed his first piece, and he tosses that empty plate in the trash can behind him and greedily starts in on mine. “I can't believe I'm not morbidly obese from all the baked goods you always send me.”

“I send them to you so I don't become morbidly obese.”

As he's finishing his second piece of cake, I try to figure out what else to say to him. This isn't exactly the romantic setting I was hoping for when it came to getting honest about my feelings. I'm about to tell Nick that now that we've had the cake, we should just sneak out before Jason and Mai notice. Walking over here was crazy enough, we have a good story, and now we need to get back to our journey to Paris and the Eiffel Tower. Before the words can form in my mouth, though, Nick turns to me and says, “Wanna dance?”

I shake my head because the whole situation is so ridiculous; I know he must be joking. It looks like a Halloween party is in full swing on the dance floor. One of the Elvii is doing some break-dance moves in the middle of a circle. A sexy Elsa from
Frozen
dances on top of a chair that has been dragged onto the dance floor. Mai is piggyback on Jason's shoulders—how did she manage in that tiny dress?—and he bounces her around the dance floor to the music. Her arms are wrapped around his neck and she looks at him like the sun rises and sets behind his black-framed glasses.

Then I look up at Nick, and for the second time in the past ten minutes, he's smiling at me. That open Nick smile from all his pictures, so uninhibited and full of joy. This one has a hint of mischief, though. I can tell the loud music and the randomness of this whole encounter have put the reality of our current situation out of his mind. It's like we walked through MGM Grand and into this parallel universe full of sexy Disney characters and free cake and Nick and Hannah as best friends, just like always, with absolutely no real-world complications.

Like we walked out of reality and into our computer-text-online-phone world, where it's just the two of us and anything can happen.

He looks happy to live in that parallel universe for a little bit—and honestly, I am, too. This is what I've been wanting all night. More than telling him the truth, I've wanted to be alone with Nick and have a chance to be normal with him.

And it's not like they're playing slow songs here or anything. This is fast dancing, not cuddling set to music. Nothing wrong with that.

I smile back.

“You want to dance with me?” I cover my mouth with my hand in mock shock. “Not with Sexy Elsa?”

“Eh. I'm sure she's a nice girl, but she comes off as a little cold.”

“Wow,” I groan. “That was—”

“Ghost, just let it go.” He rests his hand on the small of my back and we walk to the dance floor.

The music pulses through the small reception room. The dance floor is crowded with costumed wedding guests, so Nick and I are standing close to each other. So close that I'm aware of every inch of him and how near he is to every inch of me. We aren't touching, but one bump from the guy in the gorilla costume behind me and we could be.

I start to move my hips to the completely wedding-inappropriate hip-hop.

“Now we really get to see who the worst dancer is,” Nick says. “We never quite determined the biggest loser during the great eleventh-grade video dance off.”

“That's because we didn't have an outside judge.”

“Because Alex couldn't be bothered to put down his video game and watch us—”

“He would have voted against you no matter what, anyway.”