All's Fair in Love and Las Vegas

Chapter Eighty-Six

        As angry and bitter as I was right now, Clay could make me smile like no one else could. Especially when he was wearing sequined pink joggers and a black tank top.

        Laura was properly horrified. "Clay, what in the blazes are you wearing?"

        "My narrator outfit. You like?" he asked, beaming and wiggling his hips a little.

        I ran up and hugged him, so relieved to see someone who I wasn't fighting with. He embraced me, whispering, "Kylie wanted to be here, but she had to work. Sorry."

        "It's okay. You're more than enough," I said, squeezing him.

        He sniffled "Aww. Don't make me cry for the best day of my life."

        I laughed and stepped away, my smile still lingering as we both faced Laura. Her lips were stuck, as if she'd permanently tasted lemon. It got worse when Clay casually walked towards her.

        "Allow me to explain!" he said in as big of a booming voice that he could muster up. "My dear, dear mother who I only have a biological connection to."

        "Excuse me?" Laura gasped, lightly touching her collarbone in shock.

        He winked at her. "It's a wonderful realization, isn't it? But yes, Laura, it is I, Clay. Your youngest offspring, your most forgotten child, yet the one with the biggest impact on your life. You may want to sit down for this one."

         "Sit down?" Clay ignored her shock and lightly pushed her into a nearby chair. He hopped up on the glass coffee table, testing its weight only after he'd stood on it. I stood nearby (on the ground) as his personal storytelling assistant.

        "ONCE UPON A TIME!" he cried loudly "There were two young adults. Grayson Answell and Jackie Langford. Strangers. Until, by wonderful, inconceivable coincidence, they arrived in the same town at the same time."

        "Barcelona," Laura said, trying to sound intelligent.

        "HA!" he yelled, mockingly pointing at her. "Wrong! It was not Barcelona, but rather Las Vegas, Nevada. Sin City."

        She looked so pale that I thought she'd lost all her blood at once. "Las Vegas?" she whispered, horrified, as if the very city left a sour taste in her mouth.

        Clay's grin was more wicked than all of Las Vegas squeezed into a jar. "Yes," he said maniacally. "Yes, so it's Las Vegas. The year is last year. A man, your son, walks into a bar. Guess what? He's massively depressed because–spoiler alert–he has the worst mother in the world. He's had so many bad dates, so many girls. So many failed loves, all of them only out for his money. Yet he has to marry by the new year, before his twenty-fifth birthday. It's tragic!"

        "He went to Vegas?" Laura was a terrible listener.

        He picked up on this and said loudly, as if talking to a half-deaf person, "YES, mother, he went to VEGAS. That was a whole paragraph ago!"

        "Oh my," she whispered faintly.

        "I agree," he said cheerfully. "But the joke isn't done, because Jackie Langford walks into a bar as well! In fact, it's the same bar! Except she's not depressed, she's here with her smoking hot best friend plus Nina!"

        "They're equally my best friends!" I hissed.

        "Well I can't just call them both smoking hot!" he said, frustrated. Laura coughed, so he was forced to continue. "So our girl Jackie walks in, and she happens to sit next to your darling son Grayson. First they talk pleasantly, but then we introduce my favorite type of juice: alcohol!"