Re: Balcony
The door (what door there was, it was flimsy and the glass in it rattled with each heave of the bass) juddered on its hinges as someone thin and young and wearing something far too skimpy for the balcony stumbled onto it. Russ had been leaned, elbows balanced atop the iron rail and his thoughts if not entirely gone, then at least pleasantly adrift but he jerked, with the momentary and instant awareness of people who are used to the possibilities of being caught off guard. A second's assessment then, from beneath heavy-lidded eyes by the dull, reddish light of a cigarette end and the electric backdrop of Vegas itself. "Whoa there." His arm came out, as if to steady her but he leaned a little more heavily in his own corner and he settled once again.
"If you say so, beautiful," Russ's voice was easy, it was a rolling sound, all edges rubbed off and slow as molasses. He drew on the cigarette, methodical and unthinking and he looked her over with the calm and confident enjoyment of doing so. "Seems like a hell of a crowd."
He'd looked initially for the goldilock-bright head of Sam herself, sifting through the crowd that heaved and throbbed in beat with the music past the windows, if only to tip a bottle her way and take in all that sharp, catty anger for a minute to remind himself to look a little more carefully other times. He'd even spent a half-minute trying to pick out the model supposedly at the epicenter of the madness. But too many people and the balcony, for all its smallness was a pitch he'd set up on.