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A trail of fire spreads out across the floor toward the discarded parachute pants.
Do you know how flammable polyester is?
Very.
‘Shit!’ Leslie grabs the ice bucket off the bar, the clang of her ring against the metal bucket acting like a bell before a fight. Mike freezes, looking up from the lights dancing across the coffee table and floor – and right into the fireman’s reflective crotch.
Whose scream will give me nightmares until I die.
‘Ahhh!’ Turning this way and that, the stripper tries dislodging Mike, who has jumped, claws out, and attached himself to the glittering thong and, from the man’s screams, the skin under it. ‘My dick!’
The song changes to Nelly’s ‘It’s Getting Hot in Here’.
George, behind me, mutters, ‘Seriously?’
Leslie tosses the melted ice, in her haste getting more of it on us than she does the fire.
But the cold water trickling down my body and into my shoes kicks my brain into gear. ‘Someone grab the bedspread!’
George jumps, but races to the bedroom. Bell and Liz dance around the stripper, trying to reach Mike without getting clobbered by the stripper’s flailing arms.
I run to the sink and yank on the extendable faucet, thankful we’re in a suite with all the amenities.
‘Got it!’ George runs back in the room, the duvet trailing behind him like a bridal train.
I hose him. Well, him and the blanket. And it’s a testament to how freaked out he is that he doesn’t complain about water damage to his suit.
‘Cover the flames.’ I drop the faucet spray and grab the wet blanket, tugging it and George toward the fire. In seconds the heavy, king-size duvet is spread out and without telling them to, Mrs. Moore and Leslie upend the water on top.
Bell yanks Mike off the fireman.
George turns on the lights.
Liz cuts the music.
The cop stripper makes a run for it in his G-string, his butt cheeks jiggling with each stride, a few bills floating to the floor in his wake.
And in the eerily silent aftermath, only the sound of our panting breath and the soft whimpering sobs of the fireman can be heard.
Then the smoke alarm goes off.
8
THOMAS
Vegas is costing me more than a wedding at Westminster Abbey.
A six-foot Bette Midler drag queen saunters down the sidewalk behind me belting ‘Wind Beneath my Wings’, forcing me to step closer to the group of hotel evacuees or risk being smeared with body glitter and pink feathers from her boa.
The Vegas equivalent of being tarred and feathered.
Chase is somewhere in the crowd with his fiancée, probably trying to ascertain the exact details of what the fuck happened.
Because I knew, we knew, as soon as the fire alarm sounded causing my skull to nearly split in two from the pain axing through it with each shrill blast, that the bachelorette party was the cause.
‘Thomas dear—’ my mother weaves toward me, unsteady on her two-inch kitten heels ‘—what happened?’ Her hand, a place where the few wrinkles she’s allowed to show her age reside, cups the side of my face.
The long, seemingly unending day must be getting to me. Because at the touch of my mother’s soft skin against my five o’clock shadow, it becomes necessary for me to blink. Repeatedly.
