A Beginner's Guide to the American West ✓

chapter twenty-one

"With what?" I ask. He pulls out a bag from down the side of his bed and empties it onto his bed. A bottle of vodka and two litres of Coke; a twelve-pack of Budweiser and a bottle of wine; a pack of cards. I grin, and it turns into a laugh. "Oh, shit. Wow."

"What'd I tell you, huh? We're bringing Vegas to our bedroom tonight," he says. "Vodka Coke?"

"Yes. Please."

He fills two of the hotel glasses and passes me one, and holds his up to toast. When I clink my glass against his, he says, "Cheers. Here's to us having the night of our lives in a Vegas hotel."

"Cheers," I say with a laugh, swigging a generous sip of my drink. The vodka to Coke ratio is a little closer than I'm used to but it goes down easily and the alcohol warms me from the inside out. I take another sip and cradle the glass in both hands.

"I don't know if we should be starting with the vodka," Arjun says, pursing his lips and drinking anyway.

"We should," I tell him. "Liquor before beer, you're in the clear. Beer before liquor, you'll be sicker." My dad has drilled that adage into me and I've yet to have the kind of monstrous hangover my friends have told me about. But, then again, I tend to stick to beer.

"I stand corrected." He drops onto his bed and throws me a plastic bag that came out of Young-mi's alcohol stash. "She told me you asked her for something," he says.

I definitely didn't. It's with caution that I peer inside the plastic drugstore bag, and try to dampen the flames in my cheeks. She's bought me a pack of condoms and a fucking bottle of lube, and I spy a note that says, in big spider-like letters, JUST IN CASE! SAFETY FIRST! 

Ok, so she definitely knows about my crush. Which means everybody probably knows. I've spent way more time with Arjun than I've spent with her, so he must know. He has to. 

I stuff the bag into my backpack and mumble, "Um, yeah, just some meds."

I'm gonna kill her tomorrow.

Arjun holds up his glass. "Hopefully nothing that will be rendered useless by a night of drinking."

Quite the opposite, I think. "Nope, I'm all good."

"In that case, let's begin."

*

I'm so fucking bad at card games, but my embarrassment has turned to hilarity. We started out with a harmless game of snap, which Arjun won with ease. Every time I slapped down my hand to snap a six and a nine, his laugh set me off, and I stopped caring about the jumble of numbers when it was worth fucking up just to hear his laugh. It turns out that when you turn snap into a drinking game, and you have a major problem with numbers, you end up drinking quite a bit.

I'm on my fourth vodka Coke already and my limbs are loose, my hands clumsier than usual. I'm not so far gone as to forget myself and who I'm with and where I am, but I can feel the strings of my filter slowly untying themselves as Arjun shuffles the cards.

"Ok, you know Blackjack?" he asks as he deftly organises the deck, cards fluttering between his fingers like the butterflies in my stomach – good ones this time.

"Nope." I sip my drink and almost spill the whole thing down my front. "Does it involve counting?"

I know by his grin that it does, long before he says, "Yeah, just a bit."

I give him an elaborate shrug. "Who cares. Let's play."

He deals me two cards face down, the same for him. He turns over one – an eight – and I turn over a ten. His second is a two. My second is a four.