The One You're With

"Here, these are for you." Gabi held out a pack of cigarettes. She wore a tight leather skirt and a silky black blouse that showed more than it hid. Her makeup was dark and heavy, giving her a rebellious appearance. Her blonde, shoulder length hair was streaked with temporary red highlights. Everything about tonight's look was temporary. By day she sold tickets to various Vegas shows at the MGM casino and by night she was typically in bed by ten. Tonight, though, she wanted to party and maybe even get laid.

"I'm not holding those for you," Rachel said. "I told you not to buy them in the first place."

"I have my own." Gabi held up a second pack. It was different from the one she was offering her sister. Those had Marlboro Lights written on the side, The pack she was opening were shorter and had a picture of a camel on them.

Rachel snatched the pack of Marlboros out of her sister's hand. "You're taking this bad girl thing way too far. Smoking kills, you know." She was dressed much more conservatively than her sister. She'd refused a "bad girl" makeover and had opted for a pair of comfortable black jeans and a paisley blouse. She had spent a decent amount of time on her shoulder-length auburn hair, giving it some decent curls. Normally, she put it in a ponytail and forgot about it.

"Oh my god, for like the millionth time I am not going to start smoking." She stuck a cigarette in her mouth.

"You're not actually going to light that are you?"

"It helps with the smell. It's very smoky in there."

"What on earth are you talking about?" Rachel shook her head slowly. "Because you're surrounded by smoke you're going to breath in even more? On what planet does that make sense?"

"I'm not going to take the smoke into my lungs, just my mouth. It makes all the secondhand smoke way more tolerable. Trust me, it works."

"Yeah, I'm not doing that." Rachel tossed the pack onto the dash.

Gabi grabbed it and thrust it back into her sister's hand. "You can't leave it up there. Some drunk having a nicotine fit will break a window to steal them."

Rachel opened the glove compartment only to find it stuffed to capacity with random crap. She rolled her eyes. "Do you at least have room in your trunk?"

"Oh my god, just put them in your purse. Along with these." Gabi held up a strip of four condoms wrapped in purple plastic.

"Maybe it would be better if we went home," Rachel said as she stared at the contraceptives. "We could open a bottle of wine and watch some TV with Paige." Rachel's daughter was staying with her grandparents for the evening. Technically, Rita was Paige's step-grandmother, but had been for the last fifteen years. Despite only being the second time that Paige had met the woman, they got along pretty well. Apparently Rita intended to spend the evening teaching her granddaughter how to play MahJong.

"This will be a lot more fun than watching Gilmore Girls...again."

"You could have at least picked somewhere closer to Dad's. Why drive all the way out into the desert to a place full of smoke and bikers." Rachel pointed at the row of Harley Davidsons parked near the front entrance of the Rusty Nail tavern.

Gabi rolled her eyes. "For the thousandth time. It's about getting out of your comfort zone. It's about acting 'as if'. If a guy asks about the cigarettes you say that you're quitting and you keep them on you to test yourself. It's an act of will to have the smokes and not give into temptation. If the guy doesn't like smokers he'll like that you quit. If he does smoke he'll be impressed with your willpower. You win either way. If nothing else it can be something to talk about."

"You've given this way too much thought." Rachel considered snatching the car keys from her sister and driving back to her dad's. Not that she wanted to spend the evening with him; he'd be asleep by this time anyway. Learning Mahjong didn't hold much interest for her either, but it was better than being leered at by a bar full of bikers, or even worse, being completely ignored. "Can we at least go somewhere a little more reputable?"

"This place is perfect. It's full of red-blooded alpha types that will make you forget all about that two timing 'nice' guy that you were married to. It's good that it's far from home. That way there's no chance of running into someone from this place in the future." When she saw that her sister still wasn't convinced she continued. "You can be whoever you want in there and tomorrow you can pretend that it never happened. Personally I'm hoping to wake up next to a muscular hunk that fucked me silly all night long."

Rachel glanced at her bare left ring finger. There was still an indentation where her wedding band had lived for the last twenty years. "One drink and then we go." She dropped the cigarettes and condoms into her black leather purse.

Gabi gritted her teeth for several seconds. As her jaw unclenched she said, "One drink, but on the following condition: If someone chats you up and he's halfway interesting you have to give him an honest chance."

"Fine, whatever."

As soon as they stepped out of the car they were hit with a wall of heat. Despite the sun having set, it was still over a hundred degrees outside. She never understood why people would choose to live in a desert. It could get quite warm during the summers in her hometown of Minneapolis, but nowhere near as hot as Las Vegas, not even close. If your AC quit working in Minnesota it was annoying, not life threatening.

Once inside smoke stung her eyes and the music blaring throughout the place hurt her ears. It was the kind of music her ex-husband had called southern fried rock, neither of them having been much of a fan. A dozen pairs of eyes, all belonging to men, locked on the ladies. Several looked away quickly having decided that the new meat wasn't up to their standards or worth pissing off their significant other by pursuing, while several lingered. She certainly understood why they were looking at her sister. While Gabi was a little overweight it only seemed to enhance her looks. She was curvy and busty and still under thirty for another eleven months. Rachel was a runner and looked fit enough to run a marathon despite being 18 months shy of her fortieth birthday. Unfortunately she lacked the kind of curves that drew a most men's lustful gaze.

Most of the men looked like they were either on probation or hiding out from the law. The owners of the motorcycles out front were all sitting in a group toward the back of the bar. They all wore the same large patch on their backs; a muscular man with a jackal's head below the words, "The Lords of Chaos". There were four types of women in the place, the ones serving drinks, the ones who were with the biker gang, ones who looked like they too had just been released from prison and those who were also on the clock, but made their money on their backs. The men had the ladies outnumbered three to one.

Rachel pulled free from her sister. She trotted toward the bar, hoping to get their drinks ordered before anyone offered to buy her one and proved interesting enough that she'd have to spend time talking to him as part of her agreement. She wanted nothing more than to get out of the smoke-filled room and on her way back to her dad's place.

She kicked herself mentally for letting her sister talk her into going out in the first place. It had a lot to do with seeing her ex-husband's wedding announcement on Facebook. They'd been divorced for less than a year and the woman he was marrying wasn't even the one he'd had the affair with. This was a whole new woman, even younger than the initial homewrecker. It pained her to realize that despite promising herself otherwise, she'd married someone like her father. She'd thought that Ryan was different and he'd seem that way for most of their two decade long marriage. But he'd turned out to be exactly like her father.

Her dad had left Rachel's mom for a younger woman. When she was eight-years old he'd had an affair with a woman in Vegas, a woman nearly half his age named Amelia. Gabi was the result. Rachel had hated her half-sister for the first nine years of her life. When they finally met at Rachel's high school graduation, she'd had a hard time hating the precocious fourth grader. By that time their dad had moved on to wife number three, Yolanda. Rachel found that she had a hard time holding a grudge against a nine-year old girl who, like herself, had her family torn asunder by their father's infidelity.

The only reason she was even in Nevada was because their dad was dying and Gabi had convinced her that if he died and she hadn't at least said goodbye that she'd regret it in the years to come. So she packed up her daughter, took a week off from her job at Premier Bank and flew out to Las Vegas.

As the bartender served a large man with the Lords of Chaos patch on the back of his jacket she hoped that the place had a halfway decent chardonnay, but she feared that if they did carry wine it was probably poured from a cardboard box. She wasn't a wine snob by any means, but she had some taste. Whatever she ended up getting, she planned on drinking it quickly so she could get back on the road while the car's engine was still warm.

"Two boilermakers," Gabi shouted as the bartender handed the biker his change. She shot her sister a satisfied smile when the bartender turned and proceeded to make the drinks.

"Need a light?" a man said to Gabi. He was a couple of inches taller than her and had an average build. He reminded Rachel of the tow truck driver who'd helped her with a flat tire last year. There was another man with him, he was a little taller and quite drunk.

"You're so sweet." Gabi traced her fingers over the man's hand as he lit her cigarette.

"I'm Bill and he's Larry. What are your names?"

The drunk one stared at Rachel intently. She guessed that he was close to her age which was a whole lot closer to forty than she liked.

"Thanks, Bill," Gabi said as she blew out a bit of un-inhaled smoke. "I'm Gabi and this is my sister, Rachel."

Rachel really didn't want Larry or anyone else in the bar to know her name, but now wasn't the time to chastise her sister. The bartender returned a few seconds later with their drinks. He looked between Rachel and Gabi. There was no way that Rachel was going to pay. If Gabi wanted boilermakers she could darn well pay for them herself.

"Seventeen fifty, ladies," the bartender said.

Gabi flashed Bill a smile.

Bill slapped a twenty on the bar. "We got you covered. We have a table; want to share it with us?"

"My sister just got divorced and she needs a sympathetic ear right now, but after we have a few drinks I'm sure that we'll both be ready to party." Gabi picked up her drink and took a sip "Yummy, thank you."

"We're sitting at the table next to the restroom," Larry said. "Let us know if you need anything."

"Will do. Toodles." Gabi waved bye-bye at them and then led her sister to one of the few free tables in the corner.

The wall behind their table was covered with a variety of playbills from bands that Rachel had never heard of before, names like The Pile Drivers, Manic Pixie Dream Slut, Blood Feud and Death Naught, which she found strange since she didn't see a stage in the place. The other wall was dedicated to a wide assortment of hubcaps, some looking like they were from classic cars of the fifties and others that looked so new that they might have been pulled from vehicles still parked out front.

The table itself was clear of debris, but hardly clean. The surface looked like years of spilled drinks, dirt and general grime had formed into a revolting veneer.

"That's not very nice. Bill is not your type and his friend is already three sheets to the wind," Rachel said as they sat.

"Shh. Those two will keep us in free drinks all night if we play it right."

"I don't find either of them interesting so once I finish this we'll be leaving." Rachel sniffed her drink before taking a small sip. She did little to hide her disgust. She wasn't a big fan of whiskey or beer and especially not the two of them combined.

"There are lots of fish in this pond. Give it an honest chance." Gabi tapped her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray in the center of the table. It was remarkably clean, but looked like most people just used the tavern's floor as an ashtray, which probably hadn't been swept in over a month.

"Why did you order us these drinks, why not some wine?" Rachel tried to take a larger gulp of her drink, but the taste made it difficult to do without gagging. As she set her glass down she wondered if she'd be able to lift it again or if the glass would bond with the tacky surface of the table. On the bright side, if the glass became stuck to the table she could hardly be expected to finish it.

"I was hoping a boilermaker would slow you down. You could probably finish off a glass of wine in a couple of minutes, even the vinegar they serve here."

Gabi nursed her boilermaker too, but seemed to enjoy it far more than her sister. She slowly smoked the cigarette as well, taking a tiny drag every minute or so and then letting the cigarette smolder in the ashtray in the meantime. Rachel found it more than a little annoying. Smoke was everywhere and it made it hard to breathe. Having a cigarette burning a few feet from her face only made it worse. That her sister was only pretending to smoke was just salt in the wound.

They didn't talk much. Rachel wasn't in the mood, she just wanted to finish her drink and leave; they could talk on the way home. Gabi was too busy checking out all the men in the bar to offer up much in the way of conversation. After about ten minutes, Gabi announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Rachel offered to join her, but was refused.

"Some guys like their prey isolated before they're willing to pounce," Gabi said as she slung her purse over her shoulder.

As her sister wound her way through the crowd to get to the lavatory, Rachel scanned the room, checking out the men. She couldn't imagine dating anyone who frequented a dive bar like the Rusty Nail. Certainly not the bikers who looked like they showered about as often as they had their hair cut. Not the ex-cons or those who were certainly criminals, but had somehow evaded prison so far. The others were either blue-collar workers or way too young or old for her. She wanted a civilized man who was well read, enjoyed the arts and could hold a conversation about world events. Not that her sister's idea of having a one night stand with a man who knew how to rock a woman's world was wholly unpleasant. She just wasn't ready to be with another man, not yet. Maybe in another six months or so. She was relieved and also a little disappointed that no one tried to pounce on her while her sister was away.

When Gabi exited the bathroom Bill spotted her and leapt to his feet. They were too far away for Rachel to hear the conversation, but the expressions on their faces told her everything. Gabi was smiling as she talked to Bill which meant that she was still stringing him along, hoping he'd buy another round of drinks in case they stayed after finishing their first. His smile diminished as she spoke, but didn't fade entirely which meant that he thought he still had a chance. He sat back down and Gabi resumed her journey back to her own table.

Before she took more than ten steps a man appeared at her side. Rachel had watched her sister the entire time and one second the guy wasn't there and the next he was standing right next to her, close enough that his face was only a few inches from her ear, his mouth moving rapidly. Gabi froze, her face slack, eyes staring straight ahead. She stood so absolutely still, that It was like time had stopped for her.

Rachel was sure the man hadn't been in the tavern earlier; she would have noticed him for sure. He was entirely out-of-place. He was in his fifties and looked like he'd just come from a banker convention. She should know, she was the Director of Loan Originations at a regional bank in Minnesota and this guy was dressed just like all the other men in senior management.

The man spoke to Gabi for several seconds. When his lips stopped moving she came back to life, like someone had hit the play button. His eyes followed her with a keen interest as she made a quick 180 and then walked straight to Bill's table. A smile formed on the man's face that was at least 70% sneer.

For a moment Rachel wondered why Gabi had decided to sit at Bill's table, but then remembered that he was the reason they were here. Gabi had met him through Tinder and this was their first date. Rachel had come along for moral support in case the date turned out to be a bust. She shook her head, wondering where that new memory had come from. What was in that boilermaker? Gabi didn't know Bill through Tinder; she didn't know him at all.

The man in the suit jacket and tie whipped around, his eyes locking on Rachel. The sneer had changed to a scowl. He glared at Rachel for several seconds before his expression changed once again, this time a mix of curiosity and joy. He winked at her and then vanished.

Rachel didn't know what freaked her out more, a middle aged man appearing and disappearing in plain sight, the lack of reaction from anyone else in the vicinity or the warring memories of her sister and the man named Bill. She knew which memories were real, just as she knew that if she were to push her drink off the table that it would fall to the floor and not hover in place or rise to the ceiling. Yet, Gabi acted in a manner in line with the new memories. At the moment she was laughing at something Bill had said, her hand laying gently on his forearm, a sure sign that she was into him. What the fuck was going on?

"I hate teases."

"What?" Rachel spun around in her chair. The banker was visible again and standing next to her table. Her head felt like it was filled with marshmallows. Nothing was making sense.

"You heard me, but more importantly you have the sight." He smiled like he was greeting an old friend.

"How did you do that?" After a moment she realized that she didn't care how the man could make himself disappear. "What did you do to my sister? Why do I think that she's on a date with Bill? You did that, didn't you?" Rachel forced herself to stay calm. Shouting or cursing rarely solved anything, other than making yourself look foolish.

"You think your sister is on a date because she is. Like I said, I hate it when people tease others, especially for something as trivial as a free beverage." The man plopped down in the chair that Gabi had sat in.

Rachel noticed that her sister's boilermaker was gone. She looked over at Bill's table to see the drink sitting in front of Gabi, still a little over half full. She recalled making a plan on the way over to the Rusty Nail. Gabi would have one drink with him. If his real self didn't match up to his online profile or if he was an obnoxious loser, she would drink quickly and then they'd go back to their dad's place and watch Gilmore Girls with Paige. If she liked him then she'd take her time and eventually send her sister a text and then Rachel would drive home alone. Of course none of that was real. Gabi hadn't met Bill on Tinder. She'd met him a few minutes ago when he'd offered to light her cigarette. Was she going insane?

"You're not insane and it is very much real," the man said. "I'm Terrance and I didn't like how your sister was leading Bill along. If she's going to let him buy her drinks she should at least talk to him for a few minutes, don't you think?"

"How? How do you know her name? What did you say to her just then?"

"The simplest answer is that I can change what you refer to as reality. A better question would be why do you remember that your sister didn't have a date with Bill. The answer to that would be that you have the sight, as I mentioned earlier. He waved a hand over the table. A tall glass filled with a thick reddish liquid appeared on the table in front of him. She hoped that it was a Bloody Mary and not actual blood. "You were even able to see me, which is no small thing when I don't wish to be seen. I'm impressed and that's why we're talking. Now, I have to decide what to do with you."