Enjoying the View Who: John/Shelly What: First Impressions Where: Las Vegas, Stratosphere Lounge/Lucky Day When: Present Ratings/Warnings: Mild, Some Veiled Innuendo
107 SkyLounge was an upscale bar and restaurant located on the titular 107th floor of the Stratosphere Tower that loomed imperiously and impressively over Las Vegas. A DJ worked in a booth in one corner while servers clad in monochrome black expertly weaved their way through the crowd. A long, backlit bar was the centerpiece of the lounge, boasting dozens of different kinds of liquors.
Shelly had arrived at the bar with a small gaggle of girlfriends who had quickly dispersed after honing in on some wealthy targets. She, however, was in one of her Moods and stood looking out one of the floor to ceiling windows at the city below. She was clad in a brocade Valentino dress in gold fabric with demure short sleeves, newly dyed blonde hair swept up in a retro chignon updo -- inspired by a late night Mad Men binge watch on Netflix -- and holding a gin martini in one hand.
To her left, a dark-haired man stood with arms crossed, feet at shoulder width, taking in a similar view of the city. Up here, it was all light and shadow: the orange grid of major roadways, the stark, black cut of mountains in the distance. A gold sign reminded visitors not to lean on the glass. With John, there was little danger of that. He eased as far as he dared and looked past the reflection of facial features that looked as if they’d been cut with a whittling knife. For a moment, the metallic clink of cutlery on teeth and hum of human voices dwindled down to nothing, and all he heard was glass splintering and the whistling of air. How would it be to land like that? A vampire, not beheaded or burnt, merely flattened on the bonnet of a parked car?
John shook himself out of it and looked around. His eyes settled on a blonde in a gold dress. She was a bit like a beautiful Christmas ornament. The idea of it made him smile, albeit a lazy one. He drank some of his third -- or was it fourth? -- glass of scotch.
She decided the city looked better from up there. Up close, the tourist parts were like cardboard cutout versions of a real place. And sometimes that was okay, that was what Shelly liked about it. Other times, though, it was empty. And the regular parts of Vegas were tedious and sad, flat. How could anyone real possibly live there? How did people get through their lives without pretending to be someone else?
The blonde took an obligatory drink from her glass, turning her head in time to spot the man who was obviously looking at her. She smiled softly, eyes turning from dull to interested. He was handsome, undeniably so, and she wasn’t sure if she only imagined an air of melancholy. Or maybe he was just drunk. “It’s a good view here,” Shelly commented, and she didn’t clarify if she was talking about the city or herself.
“Yes. It certainly is,” he agreed. There was an otherworldly quality to her face, one that was beautiful but strange. The longer John studied her, the more he realized it was nothing to do with any one feature, but the proportion of them. Such wide-set eyes. Such a small chin. After a moment of staring at her, John took a breath to speak of the view. “I’ve never seen it in daylight. I doubt it should be as nice. Some cities are at their best like this, don’t you think? In the dark? Some people as well.”
John put his back to the window and faced the center of the lounge where people relaxed with cocktails. He had worn a sport coat over his shirt, but the farther he got into his drinks, the more he had the urge to drape himself in the nearest chair and throw it over the back. He couldn’t remember why he’d come here. Time and again, John would start out his evenings in higher end places like this, usually with a university colleague (in Los Angeles, it would have been someone from the publishing industry). Eventually he’d grow tired of the restraint of it and leave. He’d finish his night in the back corner of a pub, gallantly adding other people’s drinks to his tab, and he’d be fortunate if a stranger didn’t puke in his lap.
She drifted closer to the stranger, slyly taking in more details as she did so. She decided immediately that he was worth her interest. “Everything looks better in the dark,” Shelly replied cheekily. “Things, rooms...people.” Her gaze dropped smoothly down to the glass in his hand.
“What are you drinking?” she asked. “It looks like you could use more of it.” Her own drink was still half-full. Shelly wasn’t looking to get inebriated, not tonight, at least. But it always helped when other people were.
John watched her approach. She did have a way of walking, didn’t she? Like a little cat. “This?” He turnt up his glass, examining the remainder of the liquid inside. “It’s a scotch,” he said, then added, “And you’re right. I could use another.” It never took much convincing with him. Once upon a time he’d thought of himself an alcoholic, only to realize he was addicted to excess itself, rather than the consumption of any particular substance. Had he been alive during the 1980s, he surely would have killed himself.
He took one step towards the bar, then halted, letting his mind drift back to the prior topic. “But not everyone, though. Some do perfectly well in the light.” It was not an accident to look her over that way. John’s eyes lingered on the cupid’s bow of her upper lip before he resumed his path, thinking that the devil really was in the details.
She smiled fully whenever she noticed him looking. “You mean me,” she said, direct and confident as she followed him to the bar. Shelly looked down at herself, then back up at him, meeting those hazel eyes. “I would agree, and then say, you don’t do so bad yourself.” The blonde placed a hand on the edge of the bar, nails painted a glittery black. They looked like shiny little obsidian beads on the white backdrop.
John’s expression gave away his surprise at her blunt nature. From the looks of things, it was a pleasant one. “You are far too generous,” he told her, full of false modesty. He emptied the rest of his glass and signaled a refill, checking first to see if she’d have another.
“My name is John. I came here with that lot,” he said, pointing out a booth full of unremarkable faces. “The tall one is the chair of my department at the university. Very pretentious. The redhead is a visiting faculty member in philosophy. As dull as it sounds. The one in the god-awful shirt is a poet. Every one of his poems mentions breasts, in one way or another.” The new glass arrived. He picked it up. “What about you?”
Shelly grinned as she visually followed his finger to the occupied booth. “My poems don’t feature breasts, unfortunately,” she answered faux-innocently, eyes widening just a smidge. University. That was interesting. She could work with a sexy professor type. The blonde patted at her hair, pretending to smooth down flyaways that didn’t really exist.
“I came here alone,” she lied smoothly, bringing the rim of the martini glass to her mouth and letting the barest amount of gin dance across her tongue. Shelly didn’t need the chance of any of her companions stealing this one away for themselves.
“Is that so?” John settled his elbows against the bar, the backward tilt of his posture a sign that finally, some of that social lubrication was making a dent in his constitution. “Either you’re very sure of yourself or you’re a rare creature.” Facing the room, John surveyed the sea of faces. “Most of the women I meet in Las Vegas travel in packs. Well, that sounds terrible,” he amended. “Hunting parties. How’s that?” He gave her a playful look. John’s eye contact spared nothing, lasting a beat longer than it should. “And we the weak lead ourselves to the slaughter, night after night, only to rise again, gather what remains of our dignity… and so on. This is autobiographical.”
She raised a delicate eyebrow. “Can’t I be both? Self-assured and rare.” Shelly pretended to stifle a laugh at his description of Las Vegas social norms. She seemed to be settling on a mash-up of coquettish and blunt, but it appeared to be working. Her own ‘pack’ had dispersed and she was only able to spot two of the people with whom she had originally arrived. The blonde returned the eye contact, taking her index finger and running it around the rim of her glass. A cheap move, but effective.
“Maybe I like to hunt alone,” she teased, glossy lips curling upward. “Maybe I’m dangerous.”
“Of course you are,” he answered simply. “Look at you.”
It had been one-hundred-and-sixty-seven years since John first laid eyes on a woman. At times, it seemed as if that’s all he ever did: stare at beguiling faces, trail after them with a watering mouth and a poem forming in his mind. The first woman he loved was an actress in London in 1891, Marguerite. She was the same as him, a vampire, and John had never known when she was playing a role and when she was teetering into madness, but there’d been moments when Marguerite treated John as if he was her protector. He’d decided he didn’t care whether or not she was fraudulent, as long as it held his attention. There had been countless since. John was familiar with all sorts of tactics, like the one being used on him now, with that perfect, black-nailed fingertip. Having an awareness of it didn’t make him mind, and if it lured her into a sense of safety to see him wrapped around her finger, that was alright, too.
“You know, I’ve been accused of being self-involved, but I did notice you didn’t give me your name,” he murmured, turning towards her.
She wasn’t immune to flattery, and her smile grew upon hearing it. Especially in that voice. “Observant,” she remarked. “It’s Michelle.” Shelly had a rotating list of names, each attached to a persona. Writing, starring, and directing her own movie. For some reason, now, she decided to stick closer to the truth. Whatever that was.
“Will you give me yours?” the blonde asked, and then her gaze strayed back to the booth full of his colleagues. “Or should I just call you Professor?”
John’s eyes widened. Was she that absorbed in herself? He leaned close and put his mouth alongside her ear as she turned away from him. “I’ve already given you my name,” he whispered, a slow, vaguely inebriated confession that he made while taking in the fragrance of her skin. The updo was a nice touch. It allowed him to think about opening his mouth on her pulse and seeing if he could feel it bumping on his tongue.
When he leaned back, it was with a warm smile. “But let’s stick with Professor. I like the way it sounds in your mouth.” The glass of scotch was drunk and set down quickly, the bottom of it landing half on and half off the cocktail napkin, a revealing little clink of a sound. The bartender was bemused, John waving off another round.
Oops. Time to recalibrate. “I know,” she answered with a light shrug of one shoulder. “I just wanted an excuse to call you that.” She took a long, bracing drink from the martini.
“Am I keeping you from your friends?” she asked, voice light and playful. “Or will you keep me company? Since I’m alone.”
John pretended to weigh the merit of two competing ideas: a night of pomp and little circumstance with three work acquaintances, or an engagement of unknown type with Michelle. For all he knew, she might be in it just to steal his wallet. At least then she’d have his name. “You know, as interesting as all that is,” he said, gesturing at the booth. “I believe I’d rather be in your company. I’ll be galant and pretend I’m doing this in your best interest. Certainly not mine.”
He straightened away from the bar. “Do you want to stay here?”
That was a good question. Shelly liked the way he talked, definitely liked the way he looked at her. And what was life without a little risk? “No, I want to see somewhere new,” she told him. Her glance would stray again to the windows, the twinkling lights hundreds of feet below.
“Have any ideas, John?”
“So you did hear. It must’ve slipped your mind.”
He caught the bartender’s attention and settled his tab, then turned towards the exit and the bank of mirrored elevators, which were staffed by an attendant and moved at a clip of twenty miles per hour. “I always have ideas. Come on. I could use a change of pace.” His hand alighted on her back, long enough that John noticed the expensive quality of the silk and polyester threading in her dress. It was no department-store purchase, not that it resembled one. The raised floral print was a sore temptation under his thumb.
Out on the street, it was easy to find a Lyft to take them northward on the boulevard, towards downtown Las Vegas. John had the driver stop outside a small venue that had been a lounge called Vanguard before it changed hands. It reopened under the name Lucky Day, a mezcal and small-batch tequila bar. A deejay played Latin music from a salvaged church pulpit while a small kitchen served up house-made chips, salsa, and guacamole. What made the place remarkable was its decor, including 15,000 LED bulbs dangling from the ceiling, which provided the bar’s only light, an assortment of neon crosses and Catholic artwork, and a series of arched mirrors built to resemble the stained glass windows of a chapel. It was a beautiful, intimate, tongue-in-cheek joke at the expense of the city of sin. It was also crowded, a world of difference from the lounge at the top of the Strat.
John stripped off his coat and hung it on a hook under the bar. He settled on a wooden stool and looked at Michelle. “Best of luck managing that stool in your dress,” he told her.
“You’d be surprised what I can manage in this dress,” she answered quickly, the words sliding off her tongue as she tried to decide where to look first. Shelly liked this place better than the lounge. She wanted to stare up at the lights until she was dizzy and blinking stars. She took the seat next to his -- settling just fine -- and smoothed down the hem of the skirt.
“Do you come here a lot?” the blonde asked curiously, dropping artifice for the moment. “It’s beautiful.”
He watched her smooth her hands over that extravagant dress. The ambient light played with the metallic nature of it, reinforcing his earlier idea that she looked like a decorative bauble. She was taller than average, and it made her legs seem as if they stretched for ages. John was aware he was beginning to be distracted.
“A few times,” he answered, letting his hands rest in his lap, a shoe on the bottom rung of the spindly stool. John looked at a grouping of votive candles around Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was nestled in an alcove behind the bar. “I have to be careful. I have a tendency to burn through things. I’ve never had much success with moderation.” He caught the attention of a bartender and ordered a drink. “Michelle, what would you like?”
Handsome, intelligent, and lack of restraint. She did enjoy that. “You can call me Shelly,” she decided, before glancing over a single-page menu on the bar. “I’ll try the Paloma,” the blonde told the bartender before setting the menu back down and turning to face John.
She felt more relaxed here. Shelly fixed her gaze on the Virgin’s statue, a neon glow in the place of heavenly light. “You know what’s always fascinated me?” she said. “The people who see religious figures in food. And how many secretly eat the tortilla with Jesus’ face or whatever.”
Shelly. It suited her.
“There’s a peculiar psychology behind that, I’m sure,” John said, crossing his arms in an unintentional mimic of the way he sat in front of a classroom. “The idea of simulacra isn’t unique to Christianity, but they tend to tie it to food more than anyone else, don’t they? Of course we’re talking about people who queue up on Sundays to consume a wafer which they believe is the body of Christ.” He shrugged. “In which case, what’s a tortilla with his portrait on it?”
A second or two passed. Then he tilted his head.. “Oh, but the secrecy. That is different. What a devious little act.” John picked up his drink.
The mention of psychology caught her interest even further and she leaned forward, chin resting on one hand. “I don’t think I asked you, unless it also slipped my mind,” she joked self-deprecatingly, “but what do you teach?” Shelly wondered if he was a faculty member at UNLV. One of her friends had just graduated from there in May.
A moment later, her drink was placed before her and she flashed the bartender a grateful smile. It was a pretty cocktail, pale orange with a salted rim and little wedge of grapefruit sticking out. It glowed under the multitude of twinkling lights like a magic potion.
He smiled at the propping of her chin. “English Literature of the Victorian Era, the Romantic Poets, and Advanced Creative Writing.” John looked into his glass before tasting the alcohol. It had a bite. “What about you, what do you do? Tell me you’re not an aspiring English major. I always neglect to ask.”
He knew he should be more careful with his identity, but that required constructing complicated lies, which he found tiresome, especially once he’d had too much to drink. In truth, John wasn’t worried about the world finding out he had sharp teeth. It was more that it was inconvenient when people began to trace his professional path from one city, and one year, to the next.
“I was, past tense, a psych major,” she answered, going with the truth once again. She looked away, bringing the rocks glass to her mouth before following up with a quiet, “And I’m currently in between endeavors.” In reality, Shelly had tried her hand at various things over the years; some modeling, some things related to her degree, but the structure left her feeling empty. She preferred to be in control. And she wasn’t about to reveal how she made most of her money.
The blonde steered the subject back to him. “Do English professors spend a lot of time in bars? I would have gotten to know mine better if he had been as interesting as you.”
Was a psych major. She was no longer in academe. Following another generous swallow of mezcal, John smiled to himself. Was he interesting? He’d grown weary of his own company seventy years prior, so it was hard to imagine anyone thinking it. “English professors, no, they’re quite dull. Writers, yes. It’s true that the pen can only exorcise so much.” The pen. He was dating himself. For all its convenience, he hated to compose anything on a glowing computer screen. He’d broken down and done it for a novel, even though he thought that convenience was the enemy of prose, but never for poetry, where a poverty of words was best. It was good to make the hand work for it.
Her head tilted slightly, and this time a small lock of hair did come loose, falling to rest against her temple. Shelly moved her hand to fix it, but then decided to leave it. “So you write,” she remarked, brown eyes lighting up. “Are you a tortured artist? I love those.” The blonde fiddled with the grapefruit garnish before letting it fall into her drink, then brought her finger to her mouth absentmindedly.
“I probably qualify.” The warmth was back in his cheeks. Vampiric circulation left much to be desired, but it did eventually deliver on its promise. Six glasses of spirits in, his shoulders began to round. John gave her a peculiar look. “You’re unusual. There’s a way about you. I keep finding myself at a different point in the conversation than I intended.”
His appraisal of her made her smile. Shelly could accept ‘unusual’. It was better than common, ordinary. A face in the crowd. “A way about me,” she repeated. “Do you like it?”
John reached up and fixed the lock of her hair. It felt soft and healthy. He wondered how long it was when Shelly took her hair down. His fingers ran along the back side of her ear. He couldn’t shake the idea that he was talking to a mirror, but he didn’t know why he had it. “I can’t look away. I’m not sure it’s the same as liking. Is it important to you, being liked?” he asked with a half smile.
She was completely still when he touched her, not objecting, but curious as she watched him closely. “Isn’t that how people survive?” she countered softly. “By being liked.” It was definitely how she survived. Her hand went up again, her fingers brushing against his briefly.
“But feel free to not look away,” Shelly added.
“Liked or feared,” he agreed, and since he’d been given permission to look at her, he kept up the study. “I keep hearing about earning people’s respect, but I haven’t a clue how that’s done.” John’s eyes sparkled with amusement at his own expense. “It all boils down to persuading people to do what you want. I am good at that.” He gave the dip in Shelly’s upper lip the laser-focused attention he’d wanted to before. What must it be like, to be so young and unfazed by his kind of direct scrutiny? “But I think I might be cheating.”
“I figured I would use fear when I’m older,” she replied breezily, but there was a hint of bitterness in her voice. “Beauty is a kind of power, but it isn’t the only power.” Shelly suddenly had the urge to press her cheek against his hand, but she remained passive. The blonde was beginning to feel like a painting. Maybe this was what the Mona Lisa felt like, hanging in the Louvre all day, people waiting in line to see her.
“Why are you cheating, John?”
“I haven't yet.”
John lowered his arm to the edge of the bar. His finger tapped the side of his glass as he considered whether to tell her more. He would love to sink his teeth into that neck, and he had gone so far as to picture tiny drops of blood beading on the golden neckline of her dress. But John had also decided Shelly was not the sort of person he wanted to bite and leave stupefied in a corner with her hem flashing too much thigh, and he was being merciful by not unleashing this kind of woman on the world as a vampire. The third alternative was death. Without being able to articulate why, he was soundly against that.
“You studied psychology,” he said, letting his knee rest alongside hers. “Did your courses teach you about Franz Anton Mesmer?”
The material of his pants brushed against her bare leg. For some reason, she pictured the thread of them leaving an impression on her skin, the way a pillow does after an impromptu nap. “Briefly,” she answered. “I don’t think I believe any of his theories, though. Why do you ask?”
John finished his drink and slipped it to the side. The shifting lights turned the cast of his skin from red to blue. “Mesmer did a poor job of explaining something very real. What humanity knows of mesmerism, and its modern understanding of hypnosis, stems from that flawed science.” John shifted toward closer to keep anyone from overhearing. “If I told you that I could stroke your hand in a certain way, have a long look into your eyes, and it would put you in a trance state— incapable of walking away — you might assume I was like any other performer in this city,” John said. “Or that I was suffering delusions. But what if neither is true? What if the only thing stopping me from trying is that I’d rather you sit with me because you wanted to?”
“If you could do that,” she began, taking those words in and processing them, proceeding as if it were entirely hypothetical, “you could get anything that you wanted.” That fascinated Shelly. “But none of it would be real.” She looked down at her drink. Was anything in her life real? Sometimes it was like floating through a dream state, and existing in the surreal landscape of fantasy and greed that was Vegas helped enforce that notion.
“I’d imagine it would become very tedious,” the blonde added quietly, thoughtfully. “And empty. The challenge is where most of the fun is, for me.”
He laughed and stroked his jaw, the noise subtle enough to go undetected in the chatter of bar patrons and music. That was exactly it: tedious. It was only to be done under dire circumstances, when he was hungry and a willing victim was nowhere to be found. He would much prefer to look into another person’s eyes and have them look back. “You’re perceptive. You know, the professor in me would say that a human, presented as an empty vessel, is far too close a metaphor to the bottle, but that doesn’t make it untrue.”
John found himself wondering about her inner world. “I don’t know what you’re in pursuit of, but I ought to become more of a challenge, if I’m to find out. I’d hate to bore you.”
Shelly’s expression flickered inscrutably for just an instant. “You haven’t bored me so far,” she offered brightly. In fact, she found herself moving closer to him, little by little. The heel of one shoe clicked against the rung of the stool. Maybe there was something to be said for magnetism. She made a mental note to brush up on old Franz later.
“Maybe I don’t know what I’m in pursuit of, either,” she admitted. “I take it moment by moment. Try to pretend it’s not all leading to one inevitable thing.” The blonde took a drink of the Paloma before elaborating. “That would be death.”
John thought she had the boredom that came with being too smart; it tended to get in the way of what ordinary people called happiness. “Better death than more of the same,” he said. It was a viewpoint he didn’t expect most mortals to share; there were few constants in their lives, which was part of the beauty of it. John wondered what sort of old man he would have been, had he gotten the opportunity to turn grey-haired and weak-boned. His sister once hypothesized that she’d saved him from a slow death by opioids and syphilis. How charming.
“At this point, I appreciate anything that doesn’t feel like a trap.”
John found that her proximity was anything but suffocating. He rested his cheek on his hand. It was a challenge not to touch her knee, which is where he’d begun to look when her shoe took up residence on his stool. John smiled. “Most people’s legs have a few scars from childhood, or a bruise from a run-in with a table, or a nick from an argument with a razor. I can’t tell if it’s a trick of the light or if yours are perfect. I’m not flattering you. You are either the most careful person I’ve ever met or you’re not real.”
Shelly looked down at her legs, tilting her head and lifting the hem of her dress up, revealing a few more inches of thigh. “Are they?” she asked, laughing. She let the skirt fall back and looked up at him.
“I’m not real,” the blonde told him, smiling. “You’ve just had too much to drink. I’m like the absinthe fairy, but for scotch.” And then, because she could, because she wanted to, she leaned in to press her lips chastely against his, tasting the alcohol there, before pulling away.
“Did that feel real?”
John held still while she kissed him. It was easier to be like a stone when no respiration was required. Within the confines of his mouth, he felt a subtle twinge but he kept his sharper teeth in check. “Yes,” he decided. “It tasted real, too, but I’ve been known to hallucinate vividly.”
He ran the back of a finger across the apple of her cheek, an affectionate gesture. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear gave him an excuse to do what he really wanted, which was to slide his fingers over the pulse point of her neck. That barely perceptible thump was everything, the cause of a genuine slip that made his pupils widen. He was quick to take his hand away.
Now she wasn’t sure which of them was drawing who in. It felt like a circular dance, something old-fashioned. It felt like courtship, Shelly was surprised to realize. Not like the usual men she met. They didn’t really ask questions beyond ‘where’ and ‘when’. She looked away, maybe a little shyly, and maybe not an act.
“What do you think should happen next?” she asked him, glancing through peripheral vision. “If this were something you were writing.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather think of it as something I’m reading,” he said. “All my favorite stories are about wanting. Even reading is a kind of wanting. I never read a book that I like in one go because there’s nothing worse than the last page. So we should go our separate ways, but not until one of us constructs a paper-thin reason to see each other again. Unless you’d rather leave it to chance.”
Shelly quite liked the former idea. She didn’t trust serendipity. And then she realized how much she did want to see him again. The blonde removed her cell phone from the glittery box clutch that hung off her shoulder on a delicate, shimmery chain. “Put your number in here,” she told him, looking up at him through her lashes. “And I’ll surprise you when you least expect it.”
He took the phone and typed in a number and John Abbott.
“I’m looking forward to it, Shelly.” He passed it back into her hand.