“You’re fucking nasty, dude,” Remy remarks, pulling his sunglasses down over his eyes and sinking farther into the airport seating.
“What? I haven’t been able to pinch one off all week. Traveling and booze make me constipated as a motherfucker.”
“Ty, I’m not even remotely drunk enough to be having this conversation right now, and I can smell the booze seeping out of my pores.” Rem puts two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “So, can it with the literal shit-talk, for fuck’s sake.”
“I’m just saying,” Ty says on a whisper then, focusing his monologue at Jude, a willing listener. “It was a violent showing by my intestinal system. I didn’t know the old girl had it in her, to be honest. I thought I was going to die in the bathroom. See Ty Winslow at his eternal resting place, kind of thing.”
I step away from the group on a shake of my head and look for anything I can do that’ll be far enough out of earshot that I don’t want to puncture my own eardrums anytime soon—or admit that they’re a hell of a lot funnier than I want them to be. Just down from our gate, I spot a cluster of slot machines in the center aisle of the airport, mostly abandoned by passengers as they wait to board their impending flights.
Daisy’s bouncy curls flash through my mind like a trailer for a movie, and I move on a whim. Toward the slot machines, around the group of them in surveillance, and then finally, to take a seat at the distinctly memorable buffalo game in the middle.
I still fucking hate these things, but a smile almost cracks through the fatigue a weekend in Vegas with my three brothers has created on my face, and I find myself feeding the slot a twenty-dollar bill.
I’m credited immediately, and as any guy with balls would, I hit the max bet button and take my chances with a spin of the reels.
They’re off to the races, dinging and calculating and loading into the most random fucking line pattern in the world with buffalo and sunrises and wolves and all kinds of shit that shouldn’t have any part in real gambling. There’s no science to it. No figuring it out. No skill. It’s all blind luck based on the spin of a digital machine.
Nevertheless, something evidently good happens in my favor, the lights and sirens firing wildly into the otherwise silent cacophony of the Las Vegas airport. I can practically feel the sneers from hungover passengers, their bloodshot eyes finding me from behind the solace of their big hats and dark glasses to gift me with a glare.
That part of it, I’ll admit, gives me a little bit of joy. So much so, that I find myself nearly grinning when my brothers Ty and Jude gallop over like a couple of lost puppies on an exploratory adventure.
“What the hell? Are you playing the fucking slots?” Jude remarks, his gestures just about as grand as his jubilant words. I roll my eyes at his obvious observation and hit the button to bet again.
“Oh my God, you are,” Ty concludes, every bit of the PhD he holds clearly having been earned.
“I never thought I’d see this. This is like a unicorn. A leprechaun at the end of the rainbow. A glitter fairy in a neon forest,” Jude rambles, taking out his phone to get a picture of me.
I pay him no mind as I push the button again, the buffalo making a wholly obnoxious running in a stampede kind of sound when I hit the correct combination to win a bonus game.
“I’m putting this in my wedding scrapbook,” Jude continues, pulling his phone to his chest and hugging it like an idiot. Ty laughs, which only encourages his behavior. “In fact, I’m going to text it to Sophie now so she can add it to the rehearsal dinner slide show. This is like getting a candid shot of Bigfoot without the photo looking like you snapped it with a potato.”
A lesser man might cave to their bullshit—might snap verbally or physically by leaving—but I’m more than used to my brothers by this point in my life. For God’s sake, it’s always been like this, even when we were kids. They’re rowdy and mouthy, and if it weren’t for the distinct line of all our jaws, I’d swear I was birthed from a different set of loins. Or, at the very least, the mailman’s son.
But we are definitely blood related, that fact known by all four of us and our baby sister and muddied by the reality that our biological father peaced out on his family when we were kids.
I spin again, and another bonus round pops up. Once again, I’ve managed to double my money. I smile a little, thinking of how excited this would make Daisy and picturing the expression on her face when she realized it was even more thrilling when my tongue was spinning her reels.