Nevada: High Roller (Fallout New Vegas)

Chapter 20: How Little We Know

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"You've gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me with this..."

I stared into the blank, black screen of the television in the spacious recreation room of the Lucky 38, brow furrowed harshly and eyes narrowed into slits at my reflection, while my hands tugged down at the hem of the short, black dress clinging to the curves of my body like an overly-attached lover. 

The damn thing covered my ass by just a few inches that definitely didn't feel like enough, and the V-shaped neckline of the dress fell so low that I was almost completely certain that one wrong move -- something as small as a jump or descending down a set of stairs -- would be enough to flash someone with the sight of my rack jiggling about.

               Benny wouldn't complain, I was damn sure of that. In fact, I was sure that his choosing of the dress was some tactical choice on his part to ogle me further, as if the fact he got to see me naked and fuck me on the down-low for the past three nights wasn't quite enough.

"I was just thinking that it'd stop me from stepping on it, like yesterday." Benny piped up from a few meters behind me, where he stood side-by-side with Boone. "Remember? We were sneaking into the kitchen on our cannibalistic caper and I kept treading on the skirt of that other dress?"

"I'm sure that's the only reason..." I scoffed lightly, shaking my head dismissively as I bent over slightly, turning my face to the side to peer closer into my reflection.

That bruise on my cheek beside my nose had turned a delightfully mutfruit-purple color and made no secret of its appearance. Could'a been worse, I figured -- I could'a broken my nose or something, but a bruise like that certainly drew a hell of a lot of attention. 

Not to mention, the two long, red scars stretching down from my left cheek to the middle of my neck, and that not-so-dainty red X-shaped scar on the right side of my forehead -- those things didn't stand a chance of being hidden without a mask. 

               However, from what I remembered of my brief visit through Gomorrah, the Omertas weren't the same creepy, masked-types that the White Gloves were and so, wearing a fancy little mask in their establishment would only make me stand out more.

While the scars definitely weren't subtle, I had to look on the bright side: at least Wasteland life was rough enough for everyone else, meaning that there had to be even the slimmest chance that someone with more prominent facial scars than me had walked into Gomorrah. Even if folks looked at me and saw those scars, it wasn't the end of the world.

The bruise, though, was a definite indicator that I'd been in some kind of fight. My best guess was that the brawler types were the ones that folks tended to keep their eye on in a place with gambling, where anger may quickly arise at the loss of a fortune.

Boone had insisted on applying ice to that bruise on my face when he'd seen it that morning, though it hadn't done much to reduce the color of it. Cooked up a batch of bacon for the both of us, which we had wolfed down in a good ten seconds or less, then grabbed a bag of ice from inside one of the refrigerators which, in fact, had turned out to be a freezer and not a fridge.