Vegas Royals (Love Inc 0.50)

5

Elizabeth

SURI WRAPS HER arms around my shoulders, and I smell the cinnamon rolls burning.

“I can’t believe they’re doing this to him.” My voice is raspy.

I’ve got my head sort of pushed against her shoulder. I never cry, but right now I’m about to. When I finally compose myself, there’s a definite smoky smell in the kitchen. Suri squeezes my arm before dashing to the oven and yanking the cinnamon rolls out. They look like they’ve survived a volcanic eruption at close range.

“I’m so sorry!” She looks anguished as she stares down at the cinnamon rolls.

I can’t help laughing, because this is classic Suri—coping with a crisis via yummy foods, concert tickets, fruity daiquiris, and spa trips. I’ve been the beneficiary of her trauma response since we were kids.

“I don’t care about the rolls,” I say, unable to swallow a laugh at their horrible appearance. “It’s the thought that counts.” I smile, although my eyes have started to sting again. “Do you want to go out or something? Maybe we can break Cross free and move him here.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” she says, her voice going all high-pitched like it does when she’s really distressed. “Adam is making me fly to New York tonight. Some special occasion he won’t tell me anything about.”

My brain shifts gears immediately. “Do you think that he’s proposing?”

“I don’t know, but he better not. He knows how I feel about New York, and he can be a literary agent on the West Coast much more easily than I can run Northern California Interiors from New York! His clients are almost entirely virtual. Mine have homes.”

She bares her teeth and mimes a cat scratch, and I know things must have gotten really rough with Adam. It’s safe to say he’s not proposing.

“So the two of you are still at an impasse about where to live?”

She nods miserably, but quickly finds a smile. “Maybe he’s finally going to give in. I would so accept a Cali-shaped cupcake or...I dunno, Alcatraz earrings.”

“Alcatraz earrings.” I shake my head.

Suri grins. “A girl can hope.”

She pulls a napkin from the pocket of her apron and dabs at her eyes, and I put my arm around her. She wraps hers around me, and together we walk over to one of the windows. I’m not sure who steered us here: her or me. It’s like a game of Ouija Board; maybe we both needed a look outside.

It’s quiet inside the house, so the low whoosh of the heat through the vents down by our feet seems loud. When Suri speaks, her voice is high and shaky. “Remember when we were in seventh grade and Cross invited you to Fall Ball?”

I nod, smiling at the memory. He came to my house to ask, wearing a black leather jacket and jeans with holes. I frown next, because I remember how his parents never drove him anywhere. It was always Renault, the Carlsons’ butler.

Suri inhales, and I watch her face as she sucks her lips in and makes a thinking face. Then she drops a bomb. “Ever since then…I kind of had a secret thing for him.”

My jaw drops, and I do a quick turn of my head—like a dramatic owl—giving her my most dramatic googly eyes.

She shakes her head, blushing three shades of pink.

“How could you keep this from me?”

“I don’t know.” She smiles and shakes her head, and I know the answer before she says it.

“I guess I just met Adam and...that was that.” Her eyes tear again. “I still love my Cross.”

“Me, too.”

“I want to do something for him,” Suri says.

I do, too. In fact, I have to.

MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE of Mom that I freak out. I don’t have that many childhood memories of her being whisked away to rehab, and I think that’s mostly because she never went. Not until I was a teenager. But she was locked away from me in other ways. Always in and out of altered states, sleeping just like Cross is now.

I have too many memories of watching from the foot of her bed as one of many private nurses dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth or hooked up saline to the IV stand she stashed in her make-up room. Sometimes, when I was really little, I would cry and my dad would tell me she was just tired.

“She loves you, honey, but she’s so sleepy today.”

There were a few years there where I thought she had narcolepsy.

After Suri leaves, I grab my car keys and race to my old, powder blue Camry. I’m out of breath by the time I crank it, but that doesn’t stop me from speeding to Mom’s house—a massive, white Southern-style home with a huge wrap-around porch, situated in the rolling hills fifteen miles northwest of downtown Napa.

The gate password is the same. It’s been about a month since I’ve been here—several weeks after Cross’s accident—but I don’t see any spider webs stretched between oak trees as I fly down the arrow-straight driveway. I remind myself that a maid service is still coming; I hired them myself after Cross got hurt, mainly to check on the house so I don’t have to drop by regularly.