Chapter 1: Vegas, Baby

The lobster arrived drowning.

Butter pooled in the white bowl beneath it, gold and shining and so much of it, and Lyla did not reach for the little silver cracker they'd set beside her plate. She took the claw in both hands. Twisted. The shell gave with a wet, splintering crack and butter ran down the inside of her wrist, warm, and she watched it go and did not stop it.

She put her mouth to her own skin and licked it off.

At the table. At Carbone, inside the Aria, with eight women in bandage dresses watching her over the rims of their wine glasses.

"Oh my God," Megan breathed. "You're so bad."

Lyla sucked the meat from the claw. Sweet, salt, fat, heat. Her eyes fluttered closed on their own. "I'm on vacation."

It wasn't a defense. She hadn't meant it as one. It was just true. She had been on vacation from her whole life for thirty-one hours now, and the feeling of it sat in her chest like a second heartbeat, quick and reckless and warm.

Around her the bachelorette party picked at its collective dinner. Four salads. Two branzinos, no oil. One burrata, ordered "for the table," photographed by three separate phones and then abandoned to weep slowly on its plate while everyone talked about Pilates. The bread basket sat in the middle of all of it, untouched, radioactive.

Lyla pulled it toward her. Tore a piece from the loaf. Dragged it through the butter until it went heavy and dark and dripping, and then she ate it, and the sound that came out of her throat was low and helpless and she would have been mortified if she'd been paying attention.

She wasn't paying attention.

That was the entire point of Vegas.

⁂

Bianca was getting married in three weeks to a man named Josh who did something with cryptocurrency, and the bachelorette weekend had arrived in Lyla's inbox as a Google Doc with color-coded time blocks and a section titled EMERGENCY OUTFIT CHANGES. Lyla had read it on the plane with a kind of exhausted tenderness. That was Bianca. Best friend since freshman orientation. The person who would love her forever and never once understand her.

They were different, was the thing. They had always been different.

Bianca was tiny. Five-two, blonde in the way that cost money, so light on her feet she seemed to skim the surface of rooms rather than walk through them. Her sorority sisters were cut from the same cloth. Megan and Ashleigh and Tara and Kayla, all of them sun-kissed and sweet and running on nine hundred calories a day, all of them quietly, permanently frightened of bread.

Lyla was not frightened of bread.

She was five-six and a hundred and thirty-five pounds, most of it gathered at her hips and her chest, and she had spent her entire adult life rounding that up in her head to big. She wasn't big. She was a size six. But when the whole room was a zero, a six felt like something you confessed.

She'd made peace with it years ago. The way you make peace with a headache that never quite leaves. You stop noticing. Mostly. Until someone asks if you're all right and you realize it's been there the whole time, humming.

Tonight, though.

Tonight there was butter on her fingers and a third glass of Barolo at her elbow and the sweet, stupid electricity of not being in Van Nuys. Not in the stockroom at Madewell folding the same jeans over and over. Not on Travis's couch while Travis played a game he never paused to ask if she wanted to play too.

She ordered the tiramisu. For the table.

She ate most of it herself.

⁂

Zoe came late.

She came late because the world had not been built for a woman who looked like Zoe, and moving through it took time. Time to find the right door, the right path between tables, the right angle to slide into a booth without turning it into a performance. Zoe had been doing that math her whole life. She was very good at it. It still cost her half a minute more than it cost anyone else, and so she was late, and she did not apologize, and the first thing Lyla learned about her was this:

She walked into a room like she owned it. And the room did not argue.

She's a childhood friend of Bianca'a, or something. She's tall, five-nine or five-ten, and she is, by any honest measure, a large woman. Two hundred and eighty pounds, maybe more, if Lyla had to guess, though Lyla wouldn't guess because she's been trained by a lifetime of female friendship to never, ever estimate another woman's weight. But the number could never compare to the sheer physical presence, the way she fills the chair and then some, the way her thighs spread when she sits and her belly rests against the table's edge and her arms are thick and her chest is heavy and none of it, not a single damn inch of it, reads as anything other than deliberate, gorgeous, sexy.

Sexy?

Hard not to think that, when she's wearing a black dress that makes absolutely zero apologies or concessions. Low neckline. Tight. Every roll, every curve, every soft fold of her body on display like she got dressed in front of a mirror and said yes to all of it. Her skin was olive and luminous, her hair dark, long, and pulled over one shoulder. She had a face that would stop traffic at any size, with a sharp jaw, full lips, eyebrows that could end a man's career. She's huge, overweight, wobbly almost, but those words don't really fit: devastating, stunning, voluptuous, everything were much better descriptors.

Admiration, she told herself. She admired confident women. She admired a woman who could sit down at a table full of strangers and order a ribeye, medium-rare, a loaded baked potato, creamed spinach, and then look up at the waiter and say, "And whatever wine goes best with not giving a damn."

Lyla could shake the feeling that this girl is trouble. That this girl is dangerous. And somewhere, deep down, she knows that she...she wants, so desperately, to be that girl.