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Author's disclaimer: "The Sentinel" and its characters are the property of Paramount and Pet Fly. No copyright infringement is intended and I am making absolutely no money for this.

Kids Under Twelve Drink Free
by Mallory Klohn

When Jim let his eyes slip out of focus, he could almost imagine that he was inside an authentic pyramid. Sure, there was the little matter of the front desk, the doughy Midwestern salesmen in town for a convention, the continuous pings and dings from the casino, the blended smoke of a thousand cigarette brands, and the cheesy top forty music that played nonstop over the hotel's PA, but he could, he could imagine it.

Beneath it all was a cool, pervasive silence that might have accompanied great dead men and their great dead cats as they were laid to rest, their organs properly filed away in Ancient Egyptian Tupperware, their worldly goods strewn about the joint, waiting to curse some poor bastard who zigged when he should have zagged...

(Jim was more sympathetic to the plight of anthropologist types than he'd been in the old days.)

It was a stretch, granted. The kind of stretch that, for example, might have been easier to pull off after consuming several gallons of tequila. The Sentinel thing had put the kibosh on good-natured alcohol poisoning, though, so Jim had to content himself with creative squinting. It might have worked, too, if a woman in a Western-styled wedding gown hadn't chosen that moment to stroll past him with her Elvis-impersonating husband. Jim was willing to believe that Elvis wasn't really dead, but no way would the King get hitched to some crazy person with a veil sewn onto her cowboy hat.

"You're trying to ditch me," Blair accused, flinging himself down on Jim's bench.

"Why would I want to do a thing like that?" Jim said innocently.

Blair still wore one of his ubiquitous flannel shirts, but his t-shirt for the evening was a hot little number they'd picked up that morning at the Liberace Museum that said: LIBERACE TICKLED MY IVORIES. (Sure, Jim had bought it for him, but he'd never thought the guy would actually wear it.)

"You're afraid my love vibe is going to interfere with your campaign of terrorism against the cocktail waitresses," Blair informed him.

Jim just stared at him, waiting for him to crack.

While it was true that Blair's love vibe did interfere with Jim's from time to time, this was more true of places like the supermarket or the Laundromat, where nobody expected anybody to look like much of anything but somebody who really needed more avocados. Blair's love vibe was just as effective in a variety of other exciting locations, but Jim knew deep down in his soul that when all was said and done, his own love vibe would reign in Las Vegas.

He wasn't a wealthy man, but he could play one, if pressed. When Blair tried to play tycoon, he mainly looked like a wealthy man's Pretty-Boy Love Tool.

Jim preferred not to dwell on the idea that his ideal romantic playing field was WeirdTown, USA.

"Don't look at me like that," Blair said, elbowing him in the side. "There's this one who kinda looks like Melina Kanakaredes, have you seen her?"

"Sandburg," he said, rolling his eyes, "I haven't even seen Melina what's-her-pickle."

"Kanakaredes," he said faintly.

Jim watched him carefully. He was missing something, something vital and embarrassing... something that he might be able to use against Sandburg The Shameless in an argument one day, if he ever let Jim get a word in edgewise.

"What is it?" He tried to look warm and compassionate, and even though warmth and compassion were both qualities he'd have sworn were virtually undetectable in his expression, day or night, Blair fell for it.

"She's... eh... on 'Providence'." Blair looked like he was confessing to his bitter struggle against a deep and abiding love of mash films.

Jim frowned. "Is that the show with all the hugging?"

"Yeah," he said uncomfortably.

"And the puppies?"

Blair raked his hair with both hands. "Yeah, okay, I was just saying, this waitress looks like her."

How can something that's so wrong feel so right? Now was clearly the wrong time to stick it to Blair for watching Wholesome Family Programming, but that time would come. Jim would see to it himself. "And?"

"And she was giving me the eye, man."

"I hate to break it to you, Chief, but she was probably waiting for you to get greased enough to tip her a twenty."

"I think I already did," he said glumly. "I seem to remember my Mad Money being a lot more Mad this morning than it is now."

With an air of solemnity, Jim handed him a bucket of quarters.

Blair gaped down at the bucket, then up at Jim. "Aren't you going to need these?"

He was looking at Jim like he'd just handed him a holy relic, and Jim decided that he could get into being the wealthy man to Blair's Pretty-Boy Love Tool, even if there was no actual Love going on.

"There's plenty more where that came from, baby," he growled, trying it on.

"You're the best, man!" He flashed Jim a sunny grin, and then he was gone, as quickly and mysteriously as he'd come.

Jim leaned back on the bench and tried to work the kinks out of his neck. There was something vaguely sleazy about the whole thing, about feeling sweaty love for the same person you felt brotherly love for. On the surface, on a good day, it was all sort of pure and clean and good, but underneath, on a bad day, it reminded Jim of a cheesy porn rag he'd seen during a routine search once, something called 'Family Affair' that had the words "Fuck me, Daddy" on almost every page, without a trace of irony.

His reasoning was that it was all okay as long as he suffered in silence, and that had always held up for him in the past, but lately, lately... well, he'd taken Blair to Vegas, for god's sake. He couldn't have done himself a greater disservice if he'd suggested they spend the weekend camped out at the city dump. He was acting out, and he hated it. Dogs and toddlers acted out. Grown men... didn't.

With the world-weary sigh of a man who knows he's not going to see the right side of his bed for a very long time, Jim hauled himself off the bench and headed back into the casino.

The night is young, he thought, and Sandburg's gonna need more quarters.

The quarters came out of nowhere.

Blair would be sitting at the bar, at a slot machine, at the craps table, and just when he was thinking that it was either time to pack it in or try to peddle his ass, Jim would materialize beside him, hand him a fifty-pound bucket of quarters, and disappear again.

It might not have bothered Blair so much if he'd thought Jim was actually buying the quarters, but something told him that the situation was much more dire.

Blair couldn't win, but Jim, it seemed, couldn't lose.

He'd given it a lot of thought over those first giddy hours in the casino; his final answer was that Jim was definitely cheating. The only question was: how?

At first he'd thought that Jim was using his Sentinel nose to track down the machines that were just about to pay off, but then he decided that there was no way the detective could filter out the peculiar cigarette/cologne/booze fog --that no amount of showering had managed to wash out of Blair's hair that morning-- and still manage to sniff out the hot slots.

The curiosity was eating him alive. For all that Jim played up his whole moral/noble/responsible Pillar of Humanity schtick, it was very possible to Blair that Jim was secretly stalking senior citizens, waiting for them to finally give up on the French Quarters machine before he swooped down to claim the pot.

He hadn't gotten that Black Ops gig on account of his looks.

Geritol Cash. That's all this is. Some Methuselah from Minnesota is gonna buy the no-name brand of adult undergarments this month because of me. His guilt didn't stop him from accepting the buckets as they came, but it was guilt, all the same.

Blair wandered the casino until he found the Melina Kanakaredes cocktail waitress again. Then he shook out his hair, gave her his sexiest smile, and said, "Hey."

She gave him a bored look and said, "Cocktails?"

"Uh, yeah," he said, somewhat deflated. "Sam Adams?"

"Can I see some identification?"

He blinked. "You, I mean, heh-heh, you're kidding, right?"

"I'm afraid not, sir." At least she hadn't called him "young man".

"I've got, like, stubble," he said incredulously.

"My brother started shaving when he was eight," she said.

"No way." She was silent. "You know, there's a name for that, y'know, condition, like when you see people in Weekly World News who're supposed to be, like, The Long Island Teenaged Werewolf? Hypertrichosis."

The waitress was unimpressed. "Do you have some ID?"

"Yeah, yeah, hang on a minute. Jeez." Blair dug out his wallet and showed her his driver's license. She squinted at it for a very long time. "If you say that doesn't look anything like me, I'm gonna kill myself."

She stared at him stonily. "Sam Adams?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

"Listen," she said, already turning away from him, "if this happens again, ask the bartender to give you a wristband."

"Thanks."

It was safe to say that Blair would have his testicles removed at the body modification place beside the Burt Reynolds Chapel O' Love before he'd ask the bartender for a wristband, but the cocktail waitress didn't need to know that. Her love for him had dimmed somewhat as it was.

Sighing, Blair prowled the area looking for the most attractive slot machine. For reasons he didn't pretend to understand, there were a lot of them named for horrific natural disasters. Hurricane. Volcano. Typhoon. There were machines named for cherries that didn't actually feature cherries on the reels, machines named for game shows that had nothing to do with the shows themselves, and most puzzling of all, there were innocuously-named machines that nevertheless started blasting out old Village People standards, seemingly at random.

He was still mired in indecision when a motion sensor caused one machine to scream ASK THE MAGIC 8 BALL!!! at him, startling him so badly that he bumped into a middle-aged woman with pencilled-on eyebrows done in blue.

"Sorry," he mumbled. She glared at him.

The Magic 8 Ball machine was absolutely the same as nearly every other machine he'd seen that night. The only thing that distinguished it from its neighbors at all was that it had scared the crap out of Blair, whereas the others had been friendly and welcoming so long as he kept plugging money into them. He decided that it was a sign.

"Well well well," he murmured, sitting down in front of the machine. Will the Magic 8 Ball machine pay for my new muffler?

He had no special technique; sometimes he'd drop two quarters, sometimes five, sometimes one. Sometimes he'd push the button, sometimes he'd pull the arm. (Sometimes he'd swear at the machine, sometimes he'd flirt with it.) None of it really mattered, in the end. No matter what he did or what order he did it in, he lost... and lost... and lost.

On a whim, he tried a combination of three quarters and a yank on the arm, finishing up with a little flourish, and he scored his first big payoff of the night: four dollars.

"Heh-heh," he cackled, scooping his quarters out of the tray. "Decidedly sooo."

The cocktail waitress returned with his beer at the same moment that he said it, with a look on her face that said that however much she'd liked him in the past, he could win the place bankrupt now and he'd still be a loser to her.

"Thanks," he said, handing her a dollar.

When he ordered another beer later on, she carded him again.

"What the hell is that thing on your wrist?" Jim demanded.

It was big and pink and plastic, and it looked totally out of place, nestled as it was between one of Blair's leather thong bracelets and a MedicAlert bracelet that had NEUROTIC engraved on the back.

(Jim had tried to convince him that paramedics didn't have much of a sense of humor about those kinds of things, but sometimes there was just no talking to the guy.)

Blair thrust his arm behind his back, scowling. "I don't wanna talk about it."

"I'm serious," Jim insisted, dodging behind Blair to get another look at the wristband. "Did you go to an amusement park or something?"

"Jim. We've got drinking, gambling, scantily-clad babes who want to help us drink and gamble, we've got shopping, eating, singing-dancing-musical-spectaculars-- why would I leave?"

"I'm just saying. Maybe you decided to go somewhere else to watch people make the sign of the cross before they put money in the machines."

He'd seen enough of the wristband by now to know that it had some kind of writing on it, but Blair kept dancing away before he could make it out.

"People are so weird," Blair said fondly, shaking his head. "I can't say as I got into anthropology specifically to hang out in casinos and watch old ladies ask pictures of their dead beagles which slot they should play, but man..."

"Looks like you've been doing more playing than working," Jim said, nodding at Blair's hands when they flew up to describe a picture frame. His palms looked normal enough, but his fingers were black to the second knuckle.

"You gotta break a few eggs, man."

Blair didn't look particularly concerned about it, but it was breaking Jim's heart. He had a sudden, apocalyptic vision of Blair alone in their room, getting nasty black fingerprints on the television, the sheets, the ceiling...

Jim rummaged around in his pockets, dug out a tiny plastic bottle, and handed it to his friend.

He looked puzzled. "What's this?"

"Hand sanitizer."

"Oh, man," he laughed, "you have got to be kidding me."

"I know you. Somebody'll blow smoke in your face, and you'll try to rub your eyes, and the next thing I know, you're one of those guys at the bus stop with a yellow dog and a sign around his neck--"

"Jim, man, I think somebody's blowing smoke up your ass, here."

"Don't give me a hard time about it, Sandburg," he said wearily, "just use it."

"I can't."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because, it's an offense against nature." He waved the bottle at Jim as if it had a tiny skull and crossbones on the front and WE LOVE ANIMAL TESTING on the back.

"Look, I don't want to interfere with your bizarre fantasy life, Chief, but I need to eat something. You need to eat something." He gently gripped Blair's shoulders and began steering him toward the Nile Deli.

"I'm fine," Blair said breezily.

"Of course you're fine. You've been on a liquid diet since lunch. We're eating," he said firmly, "and I can't do that if you have human filth on your hands."

Blair rolled his eyes. "Go easy on the melodrama, Jim. Touched by an Angel has a quota."

He decided to try a different approach. He wasn't proud of it, and it wasn't the kind of thing that would work on somebody like Blair while he was sober, but...

"If you were really my friend, you'd do it," he said seriously.

With a look on his face that said that he was thinking back on a seminar he'd attended on how to cope with the criminally insane in crisis situations, Blair squirted hand sanitizer onto his skin and went to work on the slot scum.

Blair's hands reeked.

It wasn't an intrusive reek; he might never have noticed it at all if he hadn't inhaled at the same time that he took a sip of his beer, causing him to choke spectacularly in front of the Melina Kanakaredes cocktail waitress, who hated him now.

At first he'd tried to pin the blame for the smell on Jim's hand sanitizer, but after a while, he'd had to admit that the nature of the reek was sort of greasy and metallic, and not at all like the non-smell smell of the stuff Jim had given him. Any lingering doubts he had were banished forever when he noticed that his hands really did look kind of gross.

Jim always had to be right at the worst possible times. He couldn't be right that the corner store sold chunky peanut butter, he couldn't be right that Angelina Jolie had seven movies coming out in the fall, oh no, he had to be right that those guys in the car in front of them had assault rifles in their back seat, or that somebody was going to blow up Blair's favorite newsstand, or, yes, that after playing the slots for a while, the only people who still thought you were sexy were the kind of people who wanted you to refer to yourself as "a dirty boy".

In the words of the immortal Meatloaf, Blair would do anything for love, but he wouldn't do that.

As he stood in front of the sink in the Luxor's innocuous public bathroom, washing his hands for the eighth time that night, he allowed himself the luxury of bitterness.

He didn't know where Jim was. He never knew where Jim was. Oh, he showed up to check on Blair occasionally, but mainly he made himself scarce. It had occurred to Blair that the casino might be too much for him, but even in Las Vegas there were places you could go where you didn't have to shout over the sound of ten thousand quarters rattling into a tray.

(Blair's idea to drive out into the desert and see if Jim could sniff out the places where the Mafia had dumped its victims had been soundly rejected, sure, but he hadn't given up on non-casino-related fun entirely.)

Vegas had been Jim's idea, and the Luxor had been Jim's idea, and gambling had been Jim's idea, but Jim was nowhere to be seen. Granted, for the first six or seven hours, he'd been too entranced by the casino experience to notice if the Apocalypse came, let alone a cranky cop whose entire face had been wrinkled in disgust more or less since they'd deplaned.

But now he missed Jim. Jim would've understood Blair's fascination with the guy who was getting medieval on the machine by the bar. Jim would've enjoyed all the newlyweds at the craps table. Jim would've stood around and kept him company, in a grim, proprietorial kind of way. Jim would've been like some kind of weird, twisted, squinting arm candy, smacking Blair upside the head for good luck.

Jim would make pretty good arm candy, as long as he didn't say anything.

"You look lonely," said the man standing at the sink beside his. He was a supremely bland man, no older than thirty-five, who was perhaps a little too excited about Everybody in Khakis.

"Nah, just coming off my beer high, man," he said easily.

The other man glanced quickly around the bathroom. Apart from someone who was vomiting in one of the stalls, they were alone. "Are you-- uh-- working the casino?"

Blair snorted. "If I am, I oughta be fired. I'm, like, five hundred bucks in the hole right now."

"Maybe I could help you out with that," he said in a low voice.

"Hey-hey, you got a hot tip or something?"

The Gap Guy blushed. "I meant--" His voice dropped to a bare whisper. "I could help you out, financially, I mean, and you could help me out." The gesture he made was vague at best, but Blair got it.

"Sexually?" He squeaked.

"Yes!"

Blair was mortified. It was one thing to joke about trying to peddle his ass to cover a gambling debt, but it was quite another for someone to take him up on it. He'd been in the casino all night, his usual charming self, and nobody had given him a second look, but now that he was Depressed Hand-Washing Guy, people were offering him money for sex.

"I don't... uh, I don't..." He looked down at his forlorn little bucket. It had been nearly full when Jim had given it to him. Now he had seventy-five cents. "How much?"

"Only you could get in trouble for not being a prostitute."

"I didn't think he'd take me seriously, Jim."

He had a point. Jim had known serious people who were taken lightly and light-hearted people who were taken seriously, but Blair was some kind of weird hybrid; no matter what his intentions were, people tended to take him for the opposite unless he informed them specifically.

"You don't joke about shit like that, Sandburg; it's like telling the customs guy that you have a bomb in your suitcase. Jesus Christ, what if he'd been a cop?"

"I like to think a cop would've seen the humor in it." Blair's eye was already somewhat discolored, testament, if any be needed, that the man in the bathroom wasn't the type for madcap antics.

"Sandburg, I promise you, if some punk offered me a five-dollar blow job in a public bathroom and then told me he was kidding when I said yes, I wouldn't be laughing."

Blair stopped dead in the middle of the lobby, grinning delightedly. "You'd pay some strange man for a blow job in a public bathroom?"

"Bite me," said Jim.

Always before, Jim had thought it was sort of annoying that he could pick out Blair's heartbeat in a crowd. Sure, it could be useful when he was looking for the guy, but mainly, it was like an itch in the back of his consciousness, something that stood out but couldn't be tuned out, like a single off-key singer in a choir.

He'd been following the sound, trying to unload another bucket of quarters on Blair, when he'd heard something else that was all too familiar to him: the sound of someone shouting "You son of a bitch!" followed by the sound of a fist connecting with Blair's face.

For someone who was supposed to be such a nice guy, Blair sure got belted a lot.

"So," said Blair, rubbing his hands together eagerly, "Where are we going?"

"Home?" Jim said hopefully.

"Aw, you know you don't mean that, man," he scoffed, slapping Jim on the back. "Come on, this place is, like, cursed or something."

Jim cast one final, forlorn glance back into the hotel proper as Blair tugged him toward the exit. A casino in Ancient Egypt. Giant, mechanical, talking camels. A gift shop where you could buy personalized ceramic shot glasses. Once, he'd dismissed these things as nothing more than further tackiness in a town where people thought class was washing your t-shirt before you got married in it. Now, though, he was beginning to think he was hallucinating the whole thing, because Blair was his best friend, and Blair was clearly insane.

Five bucks and a pack of cards from the Tropicana for a blow job from Blair. It was offensive, sure, but it also made Jim feel like a prick.

No matter what he told himself about the selflessness of his plans, or not acting out, or not devaluing his friendship with Blair, deep down he knew that he was waiting for Blair to look at him, really look, and figure out what exactly was really going on. If he was better than the bathroom blow job guy, it was only because he wasn't such a fucking skinflint.

"Hey, man, how about that one?"

They'd been wandering the Strip for maybe fifteen minutes, passing the MGM Grand, the Bellagio, the Excalibur: big, seemingly reputable, presumably sort of clean places. Blair was pointing at a place called Boardwalk Casino that looked like its patrons left in body bags more often than not.

"Not without a vaccination," Jim said grimly.

"Aw, come on, Jim, everybody knows the little ones have all the big payouts."

"This is the last time I'm telling you, Sandburg: James Coburn didn't get rich playing the slots. Rich men don't make instructional videos."

Blair gave him a strange look.

"What?"

He shook his head but said nothing, just looking at Jim with that weird, unreadable expression. Then he smiled and said, "Come on, it'll be fun."

"This totally sucks!"

"I don't know," Jim said mildly. "I'm kind of enjoying myself." It was a filthy lie, of course, but that didn't matter.

Blair gave him a disgruntled look, muttered, "I'm gonna try and rustle up some drinks, man," and wandered off.

(Blair's chain was a lot easier to yank when he was drunk and giant clouds of cigarette smoke were cutting off the oxygen to his brain, Jim found.)

The Boardwalk Casino embodied everything that was bad about casinos in general. It was dirty, grimy, and seedy, it didn't appear to have any cocktail waitresses, and there wasn't a person there-- man, woman, or child-- who didn't look like they'd just gotten out of jail. It was much smaller than the Luxor, so Blair was much easier to find, but this was no consolation to Jim, whose nose had wrinkled before they'd even made it all the way through the door.

I should've brought more hand sanitizer.

If there was one thing he'd learned early in life, it was that the allure of the wrong side of the tracks faded significantly the first time someone pissed on your shoes. If it had been all about cheap booze and loose women, he might have enjoyed it more, in his youth, but Jim knew that as soon as you stepped outside the flophouse the next morning, you ran into fifteen Don't Let This Happen To You guys who made you want to go home, eat a bowl of Weetabix, and shower six or seven times.

Jim wasn't sure what had spoiled the Boardwalk Casino for Blair, but he thought it might have something to do with the guy at the James Bond "The World is Not Enough" slots who was still playing even though his nose was smashed and his shirt was covered in blood.

While he waited for Blair to come back, Jim wandered around the casino, avoiding anybody who was wearing a Western shirt or smelled too much like vanilla extract. He finally stopped at a machine on the outskirts and dropped in a quarter. Then he watched in a grim silence as a siren went off, the light atop the machine started flashing, and oceans of quarters spewed forth.

There'd been a point, what seemed like years before, when Jim had looked at one of the little notices on the slots that said the machines stopped paying out at 1,000 quarters or some approximation, and he'd wondered what the odds were that that could ever happen to anybody.

Pretty good, it turned out, at least for him.

Grimacing at the thought of what this would mean for his hands, Jim sat on the stool and started scooping out quarters while he waited for an attendant.

"No, no, no!" Blair moaned when he finally showed up, a beer in each hand, to find Jim negotiating with the attendant over just how he was going to dispose of his jackpot. "This can not be happening. You must have, like, a magnetic spleen or something."

"Chief, all I know is, I just won my own weight in quarters."

"For, like, the billionth time tonight," he said.

"Well, yeah," he said sheepishly. He wondered if Blair was going to give him the other beer or just drink it himself.

"What do you do?"

"Pardon?"

He waved Jim's beer impatiently. "When you play a machine. What do you do?"

"I sit down. I put in a quarter. I push the button."

Blair looked flummoxed.

"You know, Chief, if you're doing something else, I think I know where you're going wrong--"

"A quarter? As in one?"

"Yes..." Jim glanced toward the exit and tried to determine whether or not he could carry Blair back to the hotel, if need be.

"Which machines?"

"Uh..."

"Jim, I swear to god, man, if you're holding out on me--"

"The Elvis ones, usually," he blurted.

Ordinarily Jim would never have admitted such a thing, but strange as it seemed in a place where people drank cocktails at eight in the morning, Blair looked like he needed to know he wasn't the only weirdo in town.

"...what?"

If Jim had said he was using his quarters to pay for horsy rides at the grocery store, Blair could have looked no more surprised.

"They play 'Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love' if you win," Jim said defensively.

Blair nodded gravely. "'Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love' is important to you."

"I didn't have to tell you, you know," Jim groused. "I could've said I was playing the Jeopardy ones--"

"The Jeopardy ones suck."

He said it with bitterness, conviction, and resentment; it was Jim's personal feeling that it was time to call it a day when someone developed a festering grudge against a slot machine. "Oookaaay," he said, liberating his beer. "Drink up. We're going back to the hotel."

Blair slumped down on the stool next to Jim, sipping his beer despondently. "I don't understand it, man," he said. "I tried playing the ones that other people finally gave up on, I tried playing the ones near the entrance, I tried playing the boring ones... I mean, I had some solid tips, there."

"You do realize that that's all bullshit." Jim tried not to look at the drunk who'd just collapsed a little further down the aisle.

Blair sighed. "You don't get it, do you?"

"What?"

"Didn't you ever see 'Bull Durham'?"

Jim gave him a skeptical look. "'Bull Durham' holds the secrets to the gambling wisdom of the ages?"

"If you think you're winning because you're wearing your lucky underwear or you're only drinking Cosmopolitans or you always play the machines in the middle of a row, then you are."

"But you're not winning," he said reasonably.

Blair was silent for long seconds before he muttered, "You ain't no nice guy."

"You know that it would beee untrue, you know that I would beee a liar, if I was to say to yooou, girl we couldn't get much hiiigher..."

The TV in their room only got 22 channels, and none of them was MTV. There was no radio, either, so while Jim was in the shower, Blair amused himself by reading free escort agency magazines, singing the oldies, and seeing how long he could get away with the singing before Jim freaked out and started shouting at him from the bathroom.

"Come on, baby, light my fiiire, come on baby liiight my fire, try to set the night on fiiire..."

It wasn't the Doors version; Jim might have tolerated that. No, Blair wasn't satisfied until he knew in his heart that he'd out-Jose Feliciano'd Jose Feliciano.

"The time for hesitaaatin's through, no time to wallow iiin the mire. Try now we can ooonly looose, and our love become a fuuu--"

"Shut up, Sandburg! Jesus Christ!"

Blair snickered and turned the page. He was greeted by an intimate shot of a coked-out Asian woman in a tight, cutoff t-shirt, thong panties, and white athletic socks. The caption assured him that she was meek and submissive, having been raised in a traditional Japanese household.

"That is so wrong," he muttered, flipping the page.

Jim emerged from the bathroom while Blair was reading about the innocent farm girl who didn't want her father to know she was giving blow jobs in Las Vegas hotel rooms.

"Hey, man."

"Sandburg," he said, looking pained, "why?"

Blair peered at Jim over his shoulder. He had a towel around his waist, a towel around his neck, a towel slung over his arm, and he was using a fourth towel to dry his hair. Blair thought about saying something, but then he decided that Jim would just get dressed that much sooner, and since there wasn't anybody else around to have impure thoughts about Jim's chest, that pretty much left the job up to him.

(Blair hadn't known that real people sometimes had chests like that until the first time he'd seen Jim shirtless. He'd been dumbfounded, the foundation of many of his beliefs shaken forever. First he'd wanted to poke it somehow, just to be sure it wasn't some kind of granola hallucination, but over the years, the poking impulse had transformed into more of a stroking, caressing kind of thing. It had occurred to him to try to develop a chest like that of his own that he could poke whenever he wanted, but it just wasn't the same.)

"Aw, you looked all bent outta shape," he said, waving a hand in Jim's general direction. "I had to do something."

"You couldn't buy me one of those pyramid snow globes from the gift shop?"

Blair didn't say anything for a minute, captivated by the "lonely housewife" in the magazine who was smearing pink icing on her breasts with a Rubbermaid spatula. "Hey," he said finally, "what did you think of the lighting in there? Did it make you look sexy?"

"I don't know, Sandburg," Jim said irritably. "I don't really spend a lot of time cruising myself."

Blair looked up again. Jim had finished his hair, and seemed to be in a quandary about the fourth towel. "Oh, come on. You never once looked at yourself in the mirror and went Oh yeah."

"Maybe I don't have as much invested in masturbation as you do."

"You totally look," Blair said faintly, turning the page.

"What the hell are you reading, anyway?"

Blair held it up. "Fever Magazine," he said, growling it so it sounded like 'feevah'. "Check it out, man, you can watch this chick do the banana dance. What do you think that means?"

"I can only imagine."

He flipped the page. There were no photographs on it, just print ads. The one that leapt out at him had the headline PREGNANT AND GLOWING. "I can't believe this is legal here. You'd never get away with shit like this in Cascade."

"Sandburg, the only way you can get arrested in Las Vegas is if you kill a guy, cut off his head, and take it with you to the police station to confess. Maybe not even then."

"Oh, well, in that case, viva the exploitation, I guess." He looked over his shoulder again; Jim was bent over his suitcase. Blair thought about asking him to find his glasses, and his moisturizer, and his B-complex vitamins, but Jim wasn't in his finest mood, and Blair was still grateful just to know where he was.

The middle section of the magazine was devoted to reader mail, most of which was so poorly written that Blair had serious doubts that the contributors knew how to read. He lost track of Jim for long minutes while he mentally corrected all the spelling and grammar errors and checked for anatomical impossibilities, giggling to himself all the while.

Then he saw a line that he had a moral obligation to share with Jim, come what may:

"I see you peeking at my ass, you fucking, dirty-minded, nasty little pig."

"What the hell do you expect me to do, if you're going to lie there in your underwear, squirming all over the bed?" Jim growled. "It's right there, Sandburg. I mean, forgive me for noticing something that practically has its own carnival barker."

There was a narrow window of time when Jim could have saved himself. Maybe not entirely, but at least to some extent. That window closed on Jim, though, and it wasn't until another, more sinister window began to open that Jim realized that Blair was facing away from him and therefore could have no way of knowing whether or not Jim really was peeking at his ass.

A minute after that, Jim remembered that Blair wasn't really the type to call people fucking, dirty-minded, nasty little pigs, even if he had known Jim was peeking at his ass.

He was still dying of humiliation when Blair turned slowly to look over his shoulder at him, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed.

"It's, uh, an ad," Blair said quietly, waving 'Fever'. "This chick, she's kind of mean, and, like..." He sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed, fixing Jim with a magnetic stare. "Okay, you were peeking at my ass."

He turned away from Blair, pretending an intense interest in the fake hieroglyphics painted on the TV cabinet. "Yeah."

"It's a nice ass," Blair said philosophically.

"Yeah," he sighed.

Jim was lost. He liked to think he was at least somewhat prepared for any eventuality, but this was something he had never even considered. He'd thought about not telling Blair and he'd thought about having sex with Blair, but the part in between where he did tell Blair had always been conveniently passed over in favor of other, more exciting parts, like the part where Blair said a lot of things like, "I've never wanted anyone else, Jim," or, "Let me out of these handcuffs, Jim."

This was a situation he was utterly unprepared for, but that was okay, because as far as personalities went, Blair was Type O.

"So," he said, "have you, like, peeked in the past? I mean, are we talking about serial peeking here, or was this just, like, a swept up in the moment, Welcome to the City of Lust kinda thing?"

He turned back to Blair, but he still couldn't look him in the eye. "I might have peeked once or twice," he admitted.

"A day?"

"Is there any situation when you might think it was rude to make fun of me? Because I'd be willing to put myself in that situation, just for the novelty."

"I don't know, man," he grinned. "You're, like, eminently mockable or something."

"I am not," he said irritably.

"Sure you are. You spend eighty-five percent of your time looking all grim and humorless, and I mean, man, life is not that bleak, okay?"

"Sandburg, I swear to god, if you tell me you're going to teach me to laugh about love again, you're checking out of the hotel through that window." Their room was on the 23rd floor.

Blair stood up and crossed the room to where Jim stood. He smelled clean, and a little turned on, and he wouldn't let Jim look away again. Everything was going to be okay; that was the impression he got, drinking his fill of Blair in their hotel room. Blair's eyes were dark, and he was making fun of Jim, and somehow, everything was going to be okay.

"You hate Las Vegas," Blair said.

He was so close now that Jim wouldn't even have to reach for him; he could just sort of stumble a little and have an armful. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"But you do, right? I mean, maybe I was a little distracted before, but you do, you hate it."

Jim nodded.

"So this was, like, a gesture or something?"

"Or something."

"Jim, man, you don't have to set yourself on fire so I can look at the pretty lights, you know?"

"Oh, what, you never put yourself out to do anything for anybody?"

"Nothing with a plane ride, man."

"I just-- knew you'd like it," he said, waving a hand helplessly.

"Totally altruistic."

"Yeah."

"You don't want anything from me."

It was ridiculous. Blair stood there in his boxers, wild-haired and looking up at Jim with more promise in his eyes than Jim was even prepared to accept, and there wasn't anything Jim didn't want from him.

"When I envisioned us," Blair said, "you and me, I never really thought we'd spend a lot of time arguing first. I thought we'd just, you know..."

"Fall into bed and hash it all out in the unspoken language of love?"

"It sounds stupid when you say it like that," he admitted.

Jim grinned. "You envisioned us?"

"Sure. I mean, why not?"

"On the roof?"

He smiled. "Yeah, with the--"

"That'd be great," Jim sighed.

"Totally. And in the truck--"

"Oh, god, the truck..."

"Sure, and in bed, you know..."

"Your bed."

"Yeah. And you'd be all..."

"And you'd..."

"Yeah."

Smiling reassuringly, Blair reached out and lay a palm flat over Jim's breast. He squeezed gently, totally absorbed in the touch. When he moved his hand slightly so that he could tweak Jim's nipple, the detective fell back against the wall, sighing happily.

"Could you..."

"What?"

"Your mouth." Blair bent his head and took Jim's nipple into his mouth. "Oh, god." He got hard instantly, the throb of his cock providing a nice accompaniment to the rhythmic sucking of Blair's mouth. "Oh, man..."

"You see how this actually saying something thing can work out for you?"

"Please..." He wanted to hold Blair in place, but he also wanted to stay upright, and he couldn't trust his legs. Blair wasn't always the most reliable person, it was true, but he knew his way around a nipple. When Jim was on the verge of collapsing, Blair moved to his other nipple, and they both hit the floor.

Blair straddled his hips, yanking Jim's towel out from beneath him and flinging it into parts unknown. "I want you to know," he said, plunging his tongue into Jim's ear, "that I have everything. Lube, condoms, everything."

"That's not everything," Jim said.

"That's the everything we're working with tonight, smartass." He kissed Jim hotly, squirming against him, squirming out of his boxers. "I wanna do you," he said, deliberately thrusting his cock against Jim's. "Can I do you?"

Watching their reflection in the window while Jim rode him, Blair had occasion to think about just how much he'd underestimated his friend.

Practical, competent, reliable: these were the qualities he associated with Jim. Certainly he had a dry sense of humor and a way with ground beef, and Blair had always allowed that Jim probably had sides that Blair never saw, but never in all the time he'd known Jim had he imagined that Jim might be the kind of person who could really get into cheap sex in hotel rooms.

Which he clearly was, under the right circumstances.

"You're thinking," Jim gasped. "I hate it when you do that."

"I hate it when you start bitching when we're in the middle of something," Blair countered. "So kiss me, and I won't think, and you won't bitch--"

Jim buried his hands in Blair's hair and tugged him forward, kissing him hotly. When Blair thrust harder, Jim squeezed him more tightly; when Jim squeezed him more tightly, he thrust harder. Blair laughed weakly, snaking a hand around to stroke Jim's cock.

He bucked wildly, losing Blair's mouth for a minute before devouring it again. "Good," he gasped. "So good, oh god..."

"Do it," Blair moaned. "Come on, man, go for it."

"You first," he ground out.

Blair rolled his hips, drawing a helpless moan from Jim. "Come on," he coaxed. "Nobody's looking, you can come first if you want."

Jim snorted. "You're nuts."

"You love it," he said, thrusting faster. "Oh, Christ, Jim, you're so tight..."

Jim stiffened, throwing his head back.

"That's it," Blair gasped. "I will if you will." Jim shook his head. "Come on, man, I bet Elliot Ness used to come first."

"Fuck you," Jim moaned, coming hard. "Shit, this is your fault, you little bastard, oh..."

Blair held Jim tightly, fucking his way through Jim's orgasm, Jim's ass squeezing him perfectly.

He wanted to come, and he wanted to bring Jim off again, but it was decided for him when Jim collapsed on top of him, groaning, "God, you always have to have your own way."

Blair came inside him, giggling, while Jim sucked on his neck.

"Where did you go, anyway?"

"...mm?"

"Wake up, man. What are you, seventy-five?"

Jim rolled to his side and propped up his head. There was just enough light in the room to diffuse colors, and he looked unearthly. "I, uh, what?"

"When you left me to fend for myself in the casino, where did you go?"

"Places."

"Uh-huh. What kinds of places?"

"You know. Places."

"Nudie shows?"

"Gimme a break."

"The Mustang Ranch?"

"It's closed, Sandburg."

"No."

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since... a while ago. Jesus Christ, that's not even the point."

"What is the point?"

"The point is that you think that while you were having a relatively wholesome gambling experience, I was out living it up with the hoochies."

"Were you?"

"Go to sleep, Sandburg."

"What's the big deal? I mean, I know you didn't submit to genital piercing or something--"

"M&M World."

"Pardon?"

"I went to M&M World."

Blair was silent.

"What?"

"Tell me another time, buddy. Or don't. Either way is fine by me."

The end, goddamn it.

I know I should've mentioned this before, but I didn't want to spoil anything: the real Boardwalk Casino, while not precisely a paragon of wholesome goodness, is nowhere near as skanky as it's represented in this story, although it does feature a scary clown riding a BMW motorcycle.

Also, I'd like to thank Dawn for the blue eyebrows, Carol for the hand sanitizer, and Anne for making whatever unholy pact with Satan that she made in order to win so damn much on the slots.