Queenpin by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

could I do? Three, four in the morning, I’d find myself driving over to Vic’s place to see what would happen. To see what I’d do. He was always waiting for me with a smile, his collar open, a drink in his hand, a quick line about how he almost had it, almost scored a big pot. How if I’d run into him a few hours before, I would’ve seen him with bills falling out of every pocket. I told him I didn’t care. I told him I didn’t care at all. I dared him to show me what I would do. He liked dares.)
    One night, he ripped my $350 faille day suit from collar to skirt hem in one long tear. Fuck me, I was in love.
    I’m yours, that’s what I told him without ever spitting out a word. He could see it on me, feel it on me. He liked to have me on the bare mattress, liked the way it rubbed me raw. I liked it. Liked the burn of it. Liked thinking of it all the next day, every time I leaned against anything, every time the strap on my brassiere pulled across it.
    It was like—it’s not a thing I like to say, but it’s the way it was, I tell you—like at mass. After kneeling so long on the warped wood floor. Some of the rabble used the flat pillows Saint Lucy’s set out. Not me.
    If you don’t feel it cracking your knees, your spine, was it really praying? Was it worth God’s time to listen?
    If you didn’t feel it on your body long after he’d left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel it.
    I didn’t know what he saw in me, I didn’t care. I was crazy about him and it made me feel tough, not soft, like she might’ve thought. I felt a hardness in my chest as I made the circuit, chin-wagging with the runners, the casino managers, the controllers. Nothing could touch me. That’s how I felt. Except when I was with her. When I was with her, it all fell to pieces and I had to set my jaw, steel my spine, build myself up new again.
    But you couldn’t just keep on losing like Vic did, could you? If anyone knew that, it was me. I saw it happen every day. I was never involved in the part of the life that was about consequences. She wasn’t either, not anymore at least. I heard, sure, I heard a lot, about the old-fashioned kneecap-busting, the gut punches, the head batterings, worse. And I saw it with the way the Tee Hee went up in flames (only to reopen, three weeks later, as the Swizzle Lounge, doing bang-up business even as I steered clear, superstitious).
    Still, I told myself I was keeping it all contained. It was organized and I had it under control. I only saw him at his place and everything that went down went down there. And I did all I could to make sure she never saw him. I knew if she saw him, she would know I’d gone for him. I felt like it was all over me, all over my face. What I didn’t realize was that you’re always on borrowed time when it comes to these things. She could have told me that, if I’d’ve listened.
    ∞◊ ∞
    It turned like this:
    It was a Friday afternoon and I ran into Vic at the Casa Mar track. I didn’t know he bothered with the showplace baby bullrings they sent me to, the kinds of places that blew a ton on their overhead for hoity-toity banners and grandstands trimmed like layer cake, all to draw society green. But there he was, and the minute I saw him, I got nervous. If I’d had half a second, I might have walked in the other direction. He was just the kind of dyed-in-the-wool day player I shouldn’t be seen with. I had to look clean. But he’d already spotted me.
    “I didn’t know you came out in daylight, little girl,” he said. As he got close, I could smell him, the bay rum and smoke and everything else. I felt things stirring in me and I had to hold on to the rail to stay standing. As much as I felt it each night when he opened the door to his apartment, I felt it ten times more here, off guard, under the sun, with people pressing against us, shouting, the energy wired through the whole place.
    “A girl’s gotta get herself some sun,” I finally