Motive, No. 4b: Ella gets tipsier.
"You can't treat me like this! I thought we were friends?"
prior episode . . . table of contents . . . next episode
The cocktail waitress vanished and the dealer laid out the flop. They watched him put the cards down on the table.
“Three kings,” Cristina said.
“Is that normal?” Ella asked.
“What’s normal?” Sidney said.
“No,” Cristina said.
“If anyone’s holding a King,” Lonnie continued…
“That’s the game,” Cristina finished.
“Hand,” Lonnie corrected, with a poisonous look.
Ella looked at Will. A wry little smile danced around his lips. He caught her looking.
“What? Why are you looking at me?”
“I feel like you have it,” Ella said. “The other King.”
He put a hand to his chest, M’accuse?
“Why would you think that?”
“For one thing, you can’t stop smiling.”
His smile took a headshot and died. All at once, he was samurai-serious, staring her down so it was almost uncomfortable.
When her own face softened, he dropped the deadpan and laughed.
“Why don’t you pay attention to your own hand? There might be a king in there, but you’d never know it. You spend all your time looking at me.”
“I’m not looking at you,” she said, defensive. “I’m reading your poker face.” She resisted the temptation to hum the old song. This was rarefied air. These were serious people. Though Lonnie was picking his nose again. She felt for the dealer, who had to touch Lonnie’s cards after this. She promised herself this was her last hand of poker. She didn’t want to get dealt Lonnie’s secondhand cards. Touch his secondhand boogers.
“You still think I have the missing King,” Will was saying. “That doesn’t say much for your poker face reading comprehension.”
Ella snorted derisive laughter. “I already know what you have,” she said. “Your eyebrows told me fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well,” Will said, “it’s convenient, then, that it’s to you, isn’t it? So quit talking about it and do something.” He nodded at her cards.
Ella picked up her cards and glanced at them by instinct, though she remembered what they were. Jack of diamonds, nine of clubs. She checked again to make sure they hadn’t changed. To make sure her mere jack hadn’t been promoted to a king while she wasn’t looking.
“Let’s go,” Lonnie said.
“You’re not even playing,” Cristina observed.
“Neither are you,” Lonnie shot back.
“None of you is playing,” Chico said. “you are both working. For me. And you are on the clock at all times. I am ordering you as your mayor and your employer to stop fighting and relax.”
Chico was starting to slur. His drink was empty. The cocktail waitress came back just in time. Chico wobbled in his chair and almost lost the cigar from his hand. He leaned towards the little Midwest trollop in the faux-romanesque uniform. Ella thought he was going to reach out and grab her boob. But he didn’t, merely leaned and leered and reached for his drink with both hands like a cigar-wielding child.
He mumbled something in Spanish that sounded condescending even though Ella couldn’t really hear it. He drained half his glass and belched his request for another.
He said, “thank you, honey.”
Ella pushed a short stack of chips into the center of the table. No whoops or whistles this time. She stayed conservative.
“Finally,” Lonnie said. Betting went around the table. Conservative wagers for now. Everybody waiting to see the rest of the cards go down. The next card out was a nine, and Ella was so excited she almost blurted to the table that she had a pair. But she remembered just in time, and thank god for that. She’d have looked like a fool. She wiped the excitement off her face and hoped no one had noticed. Though she thought she felt Sidney's eyes on her. She refused to look in that direction.
“I still feel like you have the missing King,” she told Will. “I feel like you had it when we met. Up your sleeve or something.”
“Three kings,” Will said, “Three brothers. But where is the fourth?” He laughed silently.
“Don’t play games with me,” Ella said.
“I was born for games,” said Will. He was the last one to bet, before the last card went down. He pushed a tall column of chips into the center of the table. Appreciative oohs and ahhs.
“He brings in the artillery,” Chico said.
“What is this?” said Ella. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Forcing your hand,” Will said, as he leaned back in his chair. “Now you’ll have to call if you want to stay in the game.”
“And see his cards,” Chico finished. He was already laying his own cards down on the table. “Like my friend says,” he told Ella, gesturing with a head-nod at Will, “I can’t win anything without him. If poker was politics, this would be true.” He looked melancholy into the air above Ella’s head. The agony.
But it was still Ella’s turn. She looked at the tall column of chips. She looked at her own small pile. She’d be almost all in if she called this bet. She looked at her cards, not to remember what they were but to buy herself a moment to think. All of this was starting to feel like a dream. She wondered, briefly, if she would still believe it in the morning.
“Call,” Ella said, and pushed her entire stack of chips in. “Or, raise, or whatever. I’m all in. Let’s see your cards.”
Will’s mouth jerked in a smile. “Actually,” he said, “nevermind. I fold.”
Ella felt rising anger. “You can’t…” she said. “You just forced me all in. There’s so much money on the table! You can’t just fold! I want to see your cards!”
“Tough luck, I guess,” Will said. He flung his cards down. Groans around the table.
“Shouldn’t have canceled my Netflix subscription,” Lonnie said. “It’s better than this.”
She wanted, again, to ask him what the hell his problem was, but she realized then that she was the last remaining player. The dealer smiled and nodded at her, and she laid her cards on the table, face up.
“Pair of nines,” she said. Appreciative nods around the table.
“Wonderfully played,” Chico assured her. “You are better than the professionals.” She gave him a smile that was mostly a put-off and swiveled her head to face Will.
“You won,” he said quietly, as if that was what she came here for.
“I don’t even want the money,” she said. “You guys gave me those chips anyway.”
Sidney laughed, and Lonnie laughed too when he heard it. Ella knew on some level that they were laughing at her. But they were just employees. She had direct access. Access she planned to make use of, as the rest of this evening went on.
The game was breaking up. The dealer cashing everyone out. Ella didn’t care so much about the money, but it still felt good when he took her chips, counted them almost as fast as a machine, and folded exact change in cash into her hand, down to the penny. She closed her slender hand around the money, French manicure nails, and looked at her fist.
It seemed particularly meaningless, that fistful of dollars. She looked at Will. Everyone was leaving.
“Well,” Will said. “I think your little restaurant party is over.”
“My restaurant party?” Ella said, incredulous. “You were the one who threw it.” They stood by the table, in the light of the construction lamps on the floor, ceiling like a beige sky full of halogen stars. Even the dealer was leaving, slouching long and skinny and stooped through the plastic curtain that led back out to the casino.
“Thaks again, Will,” he said. Ella was reminded of the chef.
“Either way,” Will said. “I’m pretty sure the party’s over. We’ll have to make our own party now.” Implication in his tone. But Ella wasn’t that kind of girl.
“I’m not sleeping with you,” she told him. Just so that was clear.
Will smiled, and she got the sense he hadn’t really heard her.
“Why don’t you come up to the suite. Top floor.” Phrased like a question. But frequently his questions were instructions in bad disguises.
“I’m not having sex with you,” she said.
“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he quipped, offhand, and walked out of the room. Ella waited, wondering if she should follow, or if she should stay here and make a stand. But he was rapidly vanishing, and something in Ella’s stomach told her she didn’t want to go back to her room just now. Not if Cassie was going to be there. She checked her phone. Calls, texts. All from Cassie. She didn’t want to read them. She knew already what they were going to say.
“Where are you?” in increasingly frantic words. The last text with five question marks. If Will’s questions were instructions in disguise, Cassie’s questions were barely concealed panic.
Not now, Ella thought. I can’t walk away right now. She heard plastic sheeting crinkle, and realized Will was already almost out of the room. She took off after him, jogging awkwardly in her heels, and caught the falling curtain of plastic just as Will let it go.
“You had the missing King,” she said as the rode the elevator up. A hum that was almost silence, numbers changing like the changing meaningless expressions of a floating freeform face. Golden light. Crystalline everything. Mirrored back wall to the elevator. Ella leaned against the railing, gripping it with both hands, as the elevator went up, up, up. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the floor might fall out from under her. It’d be vertigo and falling then. Only Will to catch her. Floors didn’t fall out from under him.
“Why would you think that? I folded.”
“Exactly! You wouldn’t let me see your cards.”
Will shrugged. He shook his head, gentle self-contempt. “You were so certain.”
“But you would have won. I don’t get it. All that, just to cultivate an air of mystery?”
“Maybe I won something other than money,” Will said. He leaned in the corner, hands in pockets. He’d been watching the numbers change but now he looked at Ella. “Maybe I wanted to find out who you were.”
“What does seeing my cards have to do with that?”
“It’s not your cards. It’s how you played them. You told me what I wanted to know.”
“Oh?” Ella said, all challenge. “And what was that?”
Will smiled. Some private joke he didn’t deign to share.
“You’re not very good at conversation,” Ella said. The elevator doors dinged open. The numbers didn’t go any higher. The doors opened directly on the suite. Caesar’s glory, technologically enhanced, but no less golden for all that. A design matching the poker room, but scaled down for one man. Or one royal family, judging from the size of the suite.
How many bedrooms, Ella had to wonder, as the sights and smells of the room assaulted and conquered her senses. A beserker charge of luxury. Like eating a stick of butter. It was almost too much.
Plaster statues at smaller scales held golden fronds as if waving them to cool the room. But it’s just symbolic servitude—the real air conditioner is silent and all but invisible, like all the amenities (and most of the employees) here at Caesars Palace. Machines work harder than slaves.
Black and gold and white, a color scheme reproduced throughout the room, with columns emerging from the walls and a circular ceiling punctuated with a chandelier. Couches and divans, everything filigreed ornate and wrapped in lines of gold on black Roman knottage.
Ella drew in a breath. Yeah, it was just a hotel, and she’d seen a million, but rarely had she seen them like this. This scale was not what they gave to influencers for free. This premiere backstage was reserved for those with the proper passes. Will’s and, by extension, hers. Rarefied air indeed. Only the great and their servants allowed to breathe it.
Ella exhaled, the opposite of a sigh. She was not a servant. She breathed in deep the clean air that tasted almost sweet, tasted almost golden. Will was already across the room, opening the minibar fridge in the kitchenette by the sliding glass door to the balcony. Only darkness through the window, as if it opened on the empty cosmos, somewhere out at the edge where there are barely any stars. Only the lights of Vegas reach out this far into the black. The glow just visible over the rail of the balcony, like a party going on in hell.
Ella glided to the couch, and floated down into it, and her dress swishes like a parting wisp of cloud. She took in the room, every sense on fire. Some sweet perfume hung in the air, a scent neither masculine nor feminine but aphrodesiac regardless.
When Will appeared, coming around the couch with a drink in each hand, Ella felt like she was floating again. Not just the silken softness of the upholstery. Her own room had that. The sense of otherworldiness, of the ground falling away beneath her like she was being transmitted to orbit, where without gravity the concerns of her life could not weigh her down. Vertigo, the happy kind.
Ella took the drink with a slow dreamlike hand, and moved it to her lips as if through water. Or maybe something thicker. Perhaps blood. It would be fitting, woudn’t it? The only piece of period décor missing from this milieu was the river running crimson in the pipes beneath the floor.
But we don’t live that way anymore. We’re more enlightened, and kinder. Like Will, as he crosses one leg over the other and leans toward Ella on the couch. His knees make two arrows pointed in her direction, and he sips his drink rather than gulping it. Ella too is sipping, and she can feel his eyes on her.
She’s not going to let him devour her.
Ella’s nose woke up first. At first, she didn’t move. Didn’t even think. She wasn’t yet awake enough to wonder where she was. Just the sensation of light against her eyelids. A vague sense of being, where a moment ago there was nothing. This is the true way the universe came into existence.
First there was nothing. Then, light, and with the light, the dark. Then, there was movement, the first shift of a leg sliding in the sheets. A sleepy grunt, a click in her throat. She rolled over.
When she did, her body collided softly with a lump in the bed beside her. Still essentially asleep, she found it difficult to be alarmed, or even surprised.
Like an old boat engine early in the morning, the words of her internal monologue cranked into motion. Running through the scattered pieces of last night’s thoughts. Working through the scenes and mental photographs she’d taken like dealing out cards.
Cards, the poker game. Will. The lump in the bed beside her wasn’t pillows or innocence or even Cassie like sometimes when they were drunk (and sometimes when they were sober).
Adrenalin, all at once, when she got to the part about going up to Will’s room. Her eyes shot open like a shot from a defibrillator, and she jerked in the bed, away from the lump in horror. She looked at the form beside her, mostly obscured by the thick comforter andn shhets but nonetheless recognizably a man.
But it was hard to think about Cassie, or how much trouble she’d be in. Something incredible had happened last night, something she couldn’t quite explain. She’d met the mayor of Los Angeles, for one thing, and not in some staged public setting. She found him half-drunk with his shirt unbuttoned, trying to get his two staffers—who in retrospect seemed so cute—to quit fighting like brother and sister.
He seemed endearing, a charming uncle whose antics occasionally veered into the annoying, and who probably harbored a creepy streak when his keeper Will wasn’t around to hold his leash.
Will. The marble statue in the bed beside her. She tried to remember what they’d done in the bed but the waters in her mind were murky, and she got only fleeting glimpses of the faces below the surface.
Oh, but he took her to a secret backroom poker game. He introduced her to his friends. He gave her chips to play with. She’d achieved what she’d set out to achieve. She’d got access. Jesus, maybe too close.
As she walked around inside the closet of her thoughts, and remembered where things were, the adrenalin went back in its glands and her heartrate slowed to normal. She felt tender. Especially as last night came back to her, one blurry scene at a time.
It hadn’t felt like he was hitting on her. When he’d asked her about her life, her parents, the things that mattered to her still. It had just felt like talking. Even though he was approaching her inch by inch on the couch, not like he was sneaking but like it was only natural.
Especially when he’d started talking about his daughter. Ella hadn’t known he’d had children. Some part of her had assumed he must be some sort of daywalking capitalist vampire. Without limits or needs, eternally hungering, not from biology, but from the sheer joy of voraciousness.
But no, not only did he have feelings, he had deep and complicated ones, for the college-age girl named Cadence who was his daughter.
“I love her,” he’d said, not like he was bragging the way most men are, but almost like he was ashamed. Like a wound or a crime or something you cover with a toilet lid. “It’s stupid, it’s weak, to care that much. That helplessly.” Deep lines in his forehead. What, him worry? “But I do.”
“Don’t say that,” Ella had chided, slurring, and she leaned forward to put a hand on his knee. “You’re not weak. You’re just a good man.”
Will looked at the air above Ella’s head. He chuckled, a single bitter note.
“She’s in a psych ward right now,” he said. “I tried to stop it. I called everyone I knew. Chico could do nothing. They told me, it’s only 72 hours. But they don’t know my daughter. They don’t understand her. She’s not like other girls. She never was. Maybe it was her mother…” He trailed off, frowning. Gone was the confidence of earlier in the evening. In its place, humility?
“I’ve won every battle I’ve ever fought,” he said miserably. “But with her… all my tools, all my weapons, are useless. I don’t know how to help her.”
Ella stepped right up to the plate.
“She doesn’t want you to fix her,” she said. She chuckled, mock horror, “especially not with weapons.” She closed the final remaining inch bewteen them on the couch. His dark slacks brushed against the hem of her dress, and it rode a half inch up her thigh.
“What’s she struggling with?” she asked. Then added slurringly, “if you don’t mind me asking.”
Will laughed again, more bitterness. “I wish somebody could tell me. She’s been to every doctor. Even getting them to agree on a diagnosis is difficult. She’s depressed, she’s bipolar, she’s autistic?”
“Well, what’s she like?” This was so simple. So easy.
“She has my eyes,” Will said. “She looks just like me. Everyone points it out to me.”
“You really love her, don’t you?”
“I do,” Will said. “But what does she want? She’s twenty-one, and she just took a medical withdrawal from UCLA for a ‘mental health break.’ They didn’t have that when I was in school. But I guess I can be grateful for it. When I was there, they just flunked you and sent you home.
“She’s moved back into my house. Maria has always been good at taking care of her, but she’s an adult now, a full-grown woman, whether I like it or she likes it or not. I can’t have her just existing in my house, doing nothing, terrified of the world and hiding under her bed.”
“No,” Ella said, “that’s not—I don’t think she wants that either. Did something happen at school?”
Will shook his head. “She won’t talk to me. I have to torture her to get information out of her. She said something happened with her roommate. Which makes no sense, they were best friends a month ago. Inseparable.”
Ella gave a knowing nod. “Yeah,” she said. She thought of Kayla, her best friend before Cassie. Freshman year of college. The falling out. The stolen and burned clothes. “Best friends can become best enemies really quick.”
“That’s not how things work with my friends. Loyalty means something. You don’t break trust.”
Ella wanted to say Will’s idea of friendship might be a little dead and transactional. If those were his friends downstairs, then Will Cheerslaughter didn’t have friends. Only lackeys and followers and people who owed him favors. Not that those were bad things to have.
“You’re not a college girl, Will. She’s not building housing developments and schmoozing the mayor. She doesn’t want to run the world. She’s talking about makeup and boys and shit.”
Will laughed again, again a single note, but Ella noted with pride that some of the bitterness had gone out of his voice and his face.
“You’re right,” he said. “There’s so much about her I don’t understand.”
“What… happened, though?” Ella was crushingly curious. “I mean, with the mental hospital or whatever.”
Will looked haggard. He leaned back on the couch. “She cut herself. Bad. I don’t know if she was trying to die. We didn’t find a note. She called me from the hospital and I tried to ask her what happened but it’s like she doesn’t remember. Or she’s pretending not to.” His lip quivered. Not tears, but anger.
“I’m sure she’s not pretending,” Ella said. “Or maybe she just isn’t ready to talk yet.”
“Tell me she isn’t doing this to me on purpose.”
“No,” Ella said, reassuring. She set her drink down and reached for Will’s hands. He set his own drink down on the black coffee table in front of the cream-upholstered couch on which they lay. “We’ve only talked about this for a couple minutes,” she slurred, “but I can already tell how much you care about her. I’m sure she can feel it too, the fact that you care. Even if she can’t express it right now. College is such a hard time for girls, Will.”
Will made a confused face. Ella scooted closer. Hands wrapped together now, a Gordian knot that time would only further entangle.
“Everyone expects so much of you, and you think you know who you are but you really have no idea. You get locked into things when you don’t know what you’re signing up for. There’s always so much wreckage from college.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” Cassie said. Ella came back to the present.
“Huh?” she said. Had she fallen asleep? She looked around the car. Cassie drove. Ella in the passenger seat. Her stomach roiled and her head throbbed and there were no more silken sheets, only the seatbelt burning a line of deeper nausea across the middle of her stomach.
“Why didn’t you tell me where you were going? Ella, I called you ten times. I searched the hotel. I spent most of the night wondering if I should call the police.”
That’s not on me, Ella almost said. But that would’ve been a catastrophe.
“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I thought you knew.”
“How could I have known?” Cassie yelled. Her face looked very ugly when she was angry, Ella thought. She ought to feel bad for thinking it, but she did anyway. “You just vanished with this guy who you didn’t even know, after we talked about it, Ella.”
“I just… we were just having fun, and I… forgot.”
“I am so sick of you forgetting about me, Ella! I thought we were best friends! Do you remember what that means? It doesn’t mean abandoning me with people I don’t know and making me think you’re dead…” Cassie heaved a deep dry sob, hocked it like a loogey at the middle of the steering wheel. Ella looked out the window. Beyond the guardrails of the highway, desert hills, a dead landscape, barren as Mars. Nothing but the rhythmic thwicking of telephone poles past the window. Like a dealer thwopping cards down hard on the felt.
“We just… the night got away from me,” Ella said. “We ended up at this back room poker game. They had the poker room closed but they had opened it up just for him, and—”
Cassie guffawed, pure contempt. Rolled her eyes hard enough to strain the muscles there.
“You have to make a decision, Ella,” Cassie said.
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t keep treating me like this. Do you not want to be friends anymore?”
“Why would you think that?” Ella said, genuinely alarmed. For a moment, she forgot about Will Cheerslaughter and the dream that was last night. Just for a moment.
“You said you wanted to be taken seriously,” Cassie said quietly.
“I did. I do!” Ella wanted to ask. But she also didn’t want to hear the answer.
Cassie drove with one hand while she swiped on her phone. She pointed the phone at Ella’s face.
“Do you remember posting this?” Ella’s eyes, still bleary, focused slowly. A dark sky, the balcony of Will’s room. Her own face, a stupid grin, looking drunk. Will beside her, arm around her, a slight smile on his face.
Ella was shaking her head looking at it. She could not have taken it. When had she even had time?
“What’s the problem?” she said. “It’s just a selfie.”
Cassie huffed, now not contempt but royal anger.
“I am so sick of this,” she told the windshield.
Ella’s anger flashed. “What, so if I take selfies, I’m not serious?”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying?”
“I couldn’t find you. I thought you were in trouble. I thought he kidnapped you.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Ella said. “I got to know him, Cassie. He’s nothing like what the article said.”
“I don’t want to talk about Will Cheerslaughter,” Cassie said.
“Then maybe we just shouldn’t talk,” Ella said. Cassie didn’t say anything. She held back tears. Her face wrinkled into a tight sour ball, deep discomfort, as she pressed her thumb into the button on the steering wheel and Olivia Rodrigo’s pouty resentful vocals filled the car. She sang a song about a sociopath.