It should have been a foursome. Ross had suggested Atlantic City at the beginning of the summer. We were reminded via group chat twice. When it came time, the weather had turned fall, and the girls bailed. My fiancé had to work the weekend; Ross’s wife was recovering from a wedding in Marseille. “Boys’ trip,” we said. Not one eye batted. 

Ross had bleached hair but wore a natural mathematical expression. He’d look good aged, I thought. Ross had a license, which was weird. He moved his dad’s convertible smoothly, slightly over the speed limit, and with his eyes constantly forward to the road, it was easy to make him laugh with the right words. He was a terrific liar. 

I’d taken the liberty of wearing a cowboy hat I’d found in the trunk that was in the way of our vodka and other corruptions. He’d have felt safe if he had glanced back to see me leaning against the passenger door when we got gas on the Ventnor outskirts. His oval eyes would have known my vigilance if he’d seen the way the men, who would have bothered him alone, instead looked at me, looking at them, and decided not to. “What are you waiting for? Light it up.” His sunglasses tilted towards his nose. 

We arrived at Atlantic City during sundown. Cutting through the closing outlets produced recollections of the discount shops, childhood seasons of salt-water taffy, and sugar candy cigarettes. The Casino lights flicked on and off louder than the street’s wind whistle. Our convertible drove through the attendant parking service lane, to find no attendant, and then continued up the ramp and self-parked in the less than half-of-half-full garage.

Ross smirked. “Ready to get into trouble?”

The casino floor slot machines and roulette tables could be heard clamoring from the check-in desk. As our heads appeared over the top teeth of the golden escalator, we were met with empty seats radiated by their computer’s reel-spinning fruits. Women with gift shop ‘I Heart NYC’ shirts shuffled in their low-cut espadrilles. Local construction workers smoked cigarettes while drinking beer in front of overhead sports betting monitors.

On the shore boardwalk, we passed the abandoned shirt shops and henna tattoo parlors. There were signs to pet rattlesnakes. Condemned bars stood with distant memories of tequila served in slender foot-long neon colored plastic cups. Miniature umbrellas to shade cocktail fruit from beach sand, boxes of them, slouched on top of each other in alleyways. Our eyes looked up at billboards with no advertisements. A walkway to a demolished hotel was now routed into a pool of gravel. Long blown away was any safety tape to warn of hazard. Any knot of safety tape lingering on a railing, too, escaped.

Later when we returned to our hotel, we skinny-dipped in the empty pool since no lifeguard was on duty. Many of the wall-mounted lights were dead. A game of circles swam while passing a handle of rum back and forth. There were a few sly moments against the steps where we pretended nothing could happen between us. Part of the appeal in our adultery was the virginity of it. 

Dripping, holding our folded clothing in one hand and the liquor in the other, we traveled out of the spa grounds onto the empty gaming floor and passed through the crested Cesar rugs and façade of blinking vacancy. 

I savored the sight of his body long before I touched it on the balcony ledge of the room suite, peering down at the low-level buildings and in the distance, the ocean. Ross’s form cast ink-black against the distant light blue sand below the deep dark ocean next to the pitch-black skyline. 

By night’s end, I woke to see his doorframe shadow utter, “I’m going to get some ice,” with his keys audibly in hand. Once it was clear he’d left, I took the elevator down the empty hotel and walked to the beach in the bathing suit (that wasn’t wet because I didn’t wear it in the pool), an unbuttoned shirt, and the cowboy hat I’d taken from his trunk earlier. Sitting under the pier, I watched the tide crash onto the sand bar of an otherwise tractor-flattened beach. Soon I drifted off until the thumping of a small boy’s kick against a washed-up animal corpse woke me.

At a twenty-four store near the strip, across from the Manhattan-bound Greyhound stop, I bought a hard pack of cigarettes and scratched off a few losing instant lottery tickets. I carefully angled the brim of the cowboy hat, so it wouldn’t touch the cigarette stick placed behind my ear. I’d tucked the closed box in the button shirt’s breast pocket. I never smoked those cigarettes. 

As I sat on the bus bench, I had an epiphany: I’m going to learn to drive. A vision appeared of driving a black Ferrari, a vintage black Ferrari —like as if I was Sonny in a 2020s Miami Vice spin-off, cruising to a dub-step remix of Phil Collin’s “In the Air Tonight” by Bad Bunny— keeping hands focused on the wheel, on the view of the Pacific Coast endlessly at a minimum of hundred miles per hour, with the rear engine humming to the tune of soft tires and synth-pop, driving straight, always straight, never turning, without cars on the road to challenge, but a white strip of repeating painting that skipped at the same beat as the song, and even though night, I’d still have aviators on, and when the car started to overheat, I’d open the vents and let a blast of heat engulf me, drying out, and bronzing my cheeks. Like a teleporting lighting zap from New York to California, I’d pull up to the Brentwood condo of the college love that got away. I’d shut off the engine, I’d sit on the hood, and call that stupid brat who dumped me years ago to say, I’m outside.

#

On the bus ride back to New York, my fiancé texted, asking when I’d be home.

“Two hours I think.”

“You guys have fun?”

“Nah, Atlantic City is dead.”

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