Play Me Real (Play Me 4)

“That wasn’t the end of it.” It’s a statement, not a question.

“No.” He shakes his head and I reach out for him again. For the first time, it occurs to me how cold he is. How much it’s taking out of him to tell his story, physically as well as emotionally. Once it registers, I burrow into him, getting as close as I can before he starts with the final piece of the story. Or at least I assume it’s final—I can’t imagine that Dylan has much farther to fall.

“By the time I’m done paying off his latest gambling debts, I’m pretty much tapped out. I have a few thousand left, barely enough to get me by to my twentieth birthday, when I get access to the next chunk of my trust fund. In a little under two years, he’d managed to burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars—and I’d let him. When I figured out that we were both responsible for what had happened—” He shakes his head. “It was a shit realization. I told him I had nothing left, told him I couldn’t do this for him again. He agreed, promised it wouldn’t happen again. The last thing I did on my way out of town was contact a Gamblers Anonymous program for him. Of course, the first suggestion they had was to get the hell out of Vegas, something Dylan seemed pathologically and emotionally unable to do.”

He grabs hold of his glass like he’s going to take another sip, but it’s empty, so he ends up rolling it between his hands instead and staring off into the distance. My insides are churning now, my head is throbbing and I’m regretting making him tell the story. Regretting that I ever heard of Dylan, ever heard of Janet. Because Sebastian doesn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve what Dylan put him through and he sure as hell doesn’t deserve the rehashing I’ve forced on him.

I want to tell him to stop before he says something I can’t ignore, can’t pretend away. Not because I think I’m going to blame him, but because I know I won’t. In this case, I know exactly who’s to blame and it isn’t Sebastian Caine, no matter what he’s been telling himself for the last decade.

Not sure what else to do, I grab his face between my hands and kiss him. Hard. “Get it over with,” I say when I finally pull away. For both of our sakes.

“I don’t hear from him for a while, but then I get a call a few days before spring break—and my twentieth birthday. He’s in trouble again, real trouble, and they’re going to kill him if he doesn’t come up with the two hundred thousand dollars he owes them.” He pauses, gets lost in his own head until sheer will alone drags him out. “I tell him I don’t have anything, tell him I’m as close to broke as I’ve ever been. But he begs. And for the first time since I’ve known Dylan, he sounds afraid. Even after he’d been beat up so badly, he’d been half-defiant, half-resigned. But in that moment, when I was standing in my dorm room in Boston and he was here, alone and in debt to people you should never owe money to, he sounded afraid.

“He begged me to help him, begged me not to let him die. And though there was a part of me that was sure I was getting played, it didn’t matter. Because if I wasn’t…if his life really was on the line, I had to do something.”

“So, what did you do?”

“What any rich boy does when he’s in trouble.” He sounds so bitter it breaks my heart. “I called my father. Explained the situation. Begged him to advance me the money on my trust fund, just for the few weeks until I turned twenty. He argued with me, but in the end he agreed. Told me it was the one and only time it was going to happen. I agreed, partly because I was desperate to get the money to Dylan and partly because I knew he was right. I couldn’t keep doing this, couldn’t keep bailing Dylan out whenever things got rough. We’d both end up on the street.”

He pushes me away now—not to be rude but because he’s filled with a nervous energy that won’t let him sit still. He starts pacing from one end of the office to the other, head bowed and hands tucked into his pockets. I’ve never seen him look so defeated.

“Something went wrong,” I prompt, when I figure out that he’s done talking. That he has nothing else to say.

He snorts. “You could say that.”

“He used the money for drugs instead of to pay off his gambling debts?” It’s the only guess I’ve got, the only thing that makes sense.

“I wish. Then I could find a way to blame him for the whole thing. No,” he says, shoving a hand through his hair. “Dylan didn’t spend the money on something else. He never got the money.”

It’s my turn to stare as I try to assimilate his words. “What do you mean? How could he not—”

“My dad refused to pay. He promised me one thing, but when Dylan came to collect the money, he got a major fuck-you instead. My dad never gave him a cent, even after he told me it was all taken care of. And the Mafia did what they’re known for. They set Dylan up as an example for everyone else who owed them money to see, and then they killed him. Left his body in a ditch next to Mobile Square,” he says bitterly, mentioning the small group of backroom card parlors and gambling houses that the mob runs about fifteen minutes off the Strip.

“I was at school—hell I was at a party—when I got the call,” Sebastian tells me. “And it wasn’t from my dad. It was from Janet, who ended up yelling and cursing and crying at my answering machine because I was out partying. Coming home to that, listening as she demanded to know why I didn’t come through, why, the only time it really mattered, I left her kid out to dry.” He picks up his glass off the table, throws it as hard as he can. It hits the wall, shatters.

And Sebastian curls in on himself, this proud, beautiful man all but staggering under the weight of loss and grief and misplaced guilt.

I’m sick. I’m literally sick—head whirling, stomach churning, body revolting—and it’s all I can do not to run to the nearest bathroom and hurl up the peanut butter sandwich I force-fed myself before coming here. Because this is bad. This is really bad. And with my past, I don’t have a clue how to fix it.

So, in the end, I do the

only thing I can. I cross to Sebastian, wrap my arms around him. And murmur, “It wasn’t your fault. I know you blame yourself, I know you want to shoulder responsibility for everything that happened, but it wasn’t your fault.”

He shakes his head, and I notice for the first time just how pale his skin is, just how dead his own eyes are. “Sebastian, listen to me. You’ve beat yourself up for ten years over this and it’s not. Your. Fault.”

He shoves away from me. Not hard enough to hurt but definitely hard enough to get me to drop my arms. To let him go. When he’s standing next to the window, staring out over the deceptive beauty of Las Vegas’s glittering lights, he says, “I was getting laid while my best friend was being murdered. How the fuck is that not my fault?”

Chapter Four

Sebastian

I keep waiting for her to walk out. For her to decide the story I’m telling is too real, too raw, too brutal for her to listen to. Because while I don’t give her the details of Dylan’s death—the catalogue of damage that to this day takes my breath away, I’m pretty sure it’s self-explanatory how I failed him. How he counted on me to take care of things, to take care of him, and I messed up.

I really messed up.

I trusted my father when I knew better. I believed him when he said he’d do what needed to be done—especially since the money was owed to Nico Valducci, the man my father had been in bed with for years. The man whose fingerprints are, to this day, all over the Atlantis and the Tuscany and every other project my father is involved in in this town.

“He could have stopped it,” I whisper when it feels like I’m going to explode if I don’t say it out loud. If I don’t give voice to the deepest, darkest kernel of my shame. “To this day, my father is business associates—friends—with the man Dylan owed money to. Even if he didn’t want to pay, he could have stopped his execution with barely a word. He didn’t do that.”