Summers in Vegas are miserable, the tourists coming to a realization that despite the flashy attractions and late-night games, the city sleeps in the middle of a desert where temperatures skyrocket to the high forties and fifties at the peak of the day. It’s not a humid heat that can be washed off at the day's end and concluded with the air-conditioning of a hotel room; no, it’s a dry heat that smokes heaving lungs and characterizes the high sun as an unforgiving entity, one unable to sympathize with the very human suffering of extreme temperatures. It’s the season when people stupidly crowd together because of those limited days off work, making the arid air stink with crying children at night and drunk adults in the morning. But summers in Vegas are not miserable because it’s a torture to even dip into the lukewarm waters of the pools or breathe with all the scents of nicotine in the casino lobbies, but because sometimes, the right person isn’t there, and there is no way to contact her.

Of course, given all her accomplishments and creative ingenuities, her attractive demeanour and admirable sociability...Irene Bae would have to have a flaw too. A single, almost imperceptible blip to tell the world that she too was human. So minor, so unimportant that anyone else would have laughed it off.

Irene Bae never got women’s numbers after a night together.

And this wouldn’t have been a problem at all—she didn’t want to meet most of those women again anyway—but the last time she had been with a woman was in March, and it was now early June. And for the entire time she was celibate, Irene had been unable to contact Kang Seulgi—no, Bae Seulgi—in any way. Which meant that Irene had no idea when Seulgi would be coming back after settling everything, and she wasn’t sure if nine weeks was supposed to be too short or too long for such a thing. It certainly seemed too long for her, personally.

After the whole fiasco at the airport—in which Seulgi had left with smiles and promises to come back—Irene spent all her days in Vegas, relying on video calls and teleconferences to keep her business running. They’d smiled in secret, her employees. Noticed that she was waiting for something, someone. But only two days into her remaining stay at Vegas did the entrepreneur remember that she had never asked for Seulgi’s number in her stupid excitement that Seulgi would be back: no email, no social media, nothing. And she’d tried searching for her online too; the girl must have only studied her entire life or turned everything to private, because there was no way that a person could be so nonexistent on the internet, like a figment of a pleasant dream from last night.

How long did it take for one to ‘settle’ things and prepare for a new life? It should’ve taken maybe two, maybe four weeks at most. Not nine. Nine weeks was too long, enough to get a certification, enough to get hit by a car and be in a crematorium, enough to finish an airing k-drama mini-series and then some.

Enough to realize that coming back for a random woman in another country was stupid.

The people at the airport knew Irene; she came in everyday with the first arrivals and left with the last departures, conferencing with people on her laptop and going back and forth between the little shops and her seat of the day for meals. It was good business—she had to eat and sometimes got bored, so she bought things. Snacks, magazines, random Vegas merchandise. The vendors recognized her when she popped by. The staff waved at her. Frequent flyers stared quizzically in her direction.

A few passengers tried hitting on her. Pretty woman, alone, looking bored. Perfect way to score a hot date, maybe get a green card. But Irene smiled politely, fanned her face with her left hand, and laughed silently when they left after seeing the ring on her left hand. Pretty woman, alone, looking bored. Perfect way to score a hot date, unless she was already taken. Lucky bastard, whoever caught her interest, they’d murmur.

Most of her days were spent in this way, mundane at worst, slightly amusing at best. Irene’s thoughts were crowded with crescent eyes and slender fingers as she bit her lip each time a new arrival from Korea didn’t show her the face she wanted to see. God, she missed Seulgi. She had known the woman for a little over a day, but somehow Seulgi had changed Irene’s life for better and worse.

Better because they were married and Irene loved her. Worse because Seulgi wasn’t there to make her happy.

It was