By the time he found his way back to the elevator, it was nearly 1:00 a.m. The lobby had thinned slightly but the energy remained, the slot machines and roulette tables never ceasing, always hungry. The elevator ride up was empty, save for the digital voice announcing every floor like a funeral bell.
In the corridor, he caught the sound of laughter echoing from the far end—the kind of laughter that came only from people still young enough to believe every night would end in revelation.
As he reached his room, he passed Marcus and Darren loitering outside theirs. Marcus was scrolling through his phone, face illuminated blue, while Darren was munching on a bag of chips he must have acquired from a vending machine somewhere.
“Hey,” said Marcus, voice hushed but intense. “You want to come out? Elena says there’s an after-after party at some rooftop club. Whole cast and crew are going.”
Theo considered, then shook his head. “I’m dead. Going to crash.”
Darren looked up, eyes narrowed in sympathy or skepticism; it was always hard to tell. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” Theo said, hand already on the door. “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
He let himself into the room and closed the door behind him, the sudden silence pressing against his ears. The lights were still set to the automatic “Romance” preset, casting everything in a fake gold. He turned it off and stood in the half-dark, letting his eyes adjust.
The suitcase sat half-unpacked on the luggage rack, shirts and socks arrayed in careful squares, the effort of anticipation now tinged with embarrassment. He looked at the empty bed, the mirrored closet, the skyline beyond the window—every detail suddenly unfamiliar.
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He sat on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, and scrolled through the message thread with Kristy. Each line felt heavier than before, the jokes and memes now echoes from a different person. He typed a message—“Did you make it home okay?”—but erased it before the second word. He tried again: “Sorry if I missed you.” Delete. “I hope you’re alright.” Delete.
He set the phone down, face up, watched the screen go black, then picked it up again and scrolled through her photos: a latte art smiley, a blurry shot of traffic at dusk, a selfie with her eyes closed and a caption that read, “guess who got two hours of sleep.” Each image felt curated for an audience of one, which only made the silence now feel sharper.
He lay back, staring at the ceiling, the phone on his chest. He wondered if maybe Marcus was right, if he’d been chasing a ghost—or if, worse, he’d done something to make her vanish. He replayed every conversation in his head, searching for the moment he might have screwed it up.
He imagined Kristy in another room, another city, looking at her own phone and weighing whether to reply. He pictured her at the airport, in a cab, sitting at her hotel bar, watching the entrance for a face that never appeared. For a minute, he let himself believe it was just a missed connection, a twist of fate and not of character.
He almost called her. The impulse was there, a muscle twitch away from execution. But he didn’t. He couldn’t bear the idea of hearing her voice and finding it cold, or worse, pitying.
Instead, he set the phone on the nightstand, screen down.
He closed his eyes, but the Vegas night seeped through the blackout curtains, flashing red and gold against the lids. From somewhere on the Strip, a horn blared, a siren, the faint but relentless bass of a party still going strong.
Theo let the noise wash over him. He tried to match his breathing to the rhythm of the city, to imagine himself just another cog in the endless churn, his disappointment nothing special, nothing permanent.
He stayed like that for a long time, until the lights from the outside bled into his dreams, and even there, he was still waiting for a message that never came.
