Double Blind by Heidi Cullinan

and become more focused on his beer. “Kevin’s not you.” Then he’d gone on to critique eight other aspects of Ethan’s failures, but he’d peppered them with some praise too.
     
    In short, it was clear that Randy thought Ethan had something of a talent for this.
     
    “You need to keep your purse in mind,” Randy had said, the conversation spilling over as they left the Golden Nugget and hailed a cab to head for the Strip. “You made two hundred dollars tonight on top of money I gave you.”
     
    “I earned some of what you gave me,” Ethan replied coolly, but he let the smile on his face creep into his voice.
     
    Randy’s hand slid across the cab and closed over Ethan’s thigh. “Yeah, but you threw away the big purse, so don’t get too cocky, baby.”
     
    I didn’t throw that one away, Ethan thought, remembering the way he’d felt when he realized what Randy had done for Kevin, how it had swelled inside him when they were alone in the hall as he’d confirmed that it had been deliberately done. But he didn’t tell Randy how that had impressed him, how hard he had fallen in that moment, and as they crawled through the snarl of traffic past the glittering, flashing lights of Vegas that turned into a single, indistinguishable kaleidoscope, he promised himself that he had no intention of ever letting Randy know.
     
    And then Randy leaned forward and told the cabbie to pull over at the curb. They got out in front of Bellagio, and Ethan saw the fountains.
     
    He heard the music before he saw the water: soft, almost ethereal female vocals that drifted over an even more effervescent setting of strings, swelling to a crescendo as Ethan stumbled forward, lightheaded and disoriented. Then he took one step farther past the tree that had been blocking his view. He stepped up to the railing just as the music swelled again and a spray of water arced up in time to the music out of the pool below, lit as if there were a bright, blue-white fire within.
     
    Ethan had a distant memory of the receptionist at his office in Provo telling everyone about how she’d seen the fountains at Bellagio when she’d gone to Vegas on her honeymoon, and he remembered her carrying on about them, talking about how beautiful they were, so beautiful that she’d cried. Ethan remembered writing the story off as just more sentimental, over-hyped garbage, which given that woman’s history hadn’t been so terribly unfair. But as he stood there at the rail himself, already raw from everything about the day, thrown for so many loops now that he was almost accustomed to spinning—when he saw the water shoot up toward the sky as a disembodied soprano soared and a bright white light hit every color of the spectrum at once, he could not hold himself together anymore. Emotion swelled and crested inside him with the water and the music, and he tried to let out his breath to ease the pain inside his chest, but it wasn’t enough. The next thing he knew he was clutching the railing so hard that his fingers hurt, and he was spiraling away, away, so overwhelmed by the pain and the hurt, a hurt deeper than anything he had even dreamed could exist—
     
    —and then he was landing again, anchored by a steady, warm, and heavy hand on his arm.
     
    “Hey— hey .” The hand slid up to Ethan’s shoulder and turned him away from the water. “Baby—Ethan, honey—”
     
    And Ethan just gave up. He leaned forward against Randy’s forehead, and he wept.
     
    Silently, though—he managed that much control at least, but he owed it to Randy because somehow the anchor of those hands, one on each of his shoulders now, gave him some kind of strength. He drew courage, too, from the heavy pressure of Randy’s forehead and the musk and whiskey scent of him. Ethan gave in to that strength, let it support and center him, and he calmed. The pain reduced to a dull ache inside him, a simple pit inside his stomach once again, not a hard, killing fire that