The man on the barstool, who’d been quietly nursing his drink all evening, waited until there was no one else in the bar and suddenly asked the bartender something.

The bartender, who’d been asleep in his head, had to ask the man to repeat himself.

“Have you ever been to Vegas?” the customer said.

“Atlantic City,” the bartender allowed.

The customer shook his head. “Not the same. If you’ve ever been to both, you’d know the difference. Vegas is more about sex and how sex is related to money.”

“Really?”

“When you walk down the sidewalk, there are rows of people handing out escort ads to the men. It’s like pornography, but instead of selling you the idea of the perfect woman, they are selling you the opportunity to have sex with the perfect woman. They are actually selling you the woman in the picture. Wait. They are selling you the actual woman in the picture.”

“That makes more sense.”

“Yeah. But can you imagine that?”

The bartender shook his head. “Not at all.”

“I couldn’t either, until I was there. The place reeked of sex. Do you know that you can go to an actual brothel outside of town and fuck a prostitute legally?”

“I heard about that.”

The customer drank his drink, which was mostly melted ice by this point. “I’m a married man,” he said. “I’ve been married for seven years.”

“Any kids?”

“Two.” The customer was quiet for a second and the bartender respected his silence. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. Never. I love her. But sometimes, I just get the feeling that I’m missing out on something else. Do you know what I mean?”

The bartender nodded. “I’ve been there. You get restless for no reason sometimes.”

“Exactly. Restless. But I don’t want to fuck up my life, you know? I’ve worked hard to get to where I am. I like what I have. But I get restless.” There was a further silence. “I got restless in Vegas,” the customer said. “It’s not a good town to get restless in.”

“I imagine not.”

“I was there on business,” the customer said. “One night, I was bored and horny and I was looking at one of the handouts that I’d gotten on the Strip and I was seriously considering calling someone up. Just for an hour. Then I thought about it and just went ‘fuck it.’ I went downstairs and caught a cab out to one of the ranches in the desert.”

“What did you do?” the bartender asked quietly.

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to do,” the customer admitted. “I had a powerful urge for a blowjob, you know?”

“I’ve been there,” the bartender said with a smile.

They both laughed.

“In the end, I went in and went whole-hog. I got three girls and a jacuzzi suite for three hours. Spent seven thousand dollars.” The bartender’s eyebrows lifted but he offered no comment. “I had fun, though.”

“That’s important.”

The customer was quiet for a moment longer and, although the bartender had the feeling that there was more, he never got a chance to find out. A large group of patrons chose that moment to make their entrance and, in the confusion, the solitary customer took his leave. The bartender never saw the man again.

Over the years, the bartender told that story to friends, acquaintances and other bartenders. When he was inevitably asked for a conclusion to the story, the bartender shrugged. “There isn’t one. That’s the point. He walked in and told someone a dirty little secret that he felt bad about. It probably happens more often than you’d expect, actually.”

Sometimes, he was asked if it had ever happened to him before. In such instances, he always paused to consider before answering simply. “No.”