Promised me

My argument boiled down to "two hundred bucks in one evening is a lot of money", but really meant "you never spend two hundred bucks on a night out with me." My girlfriend's was "I have fun and how is it any of your business how I spend my money." And together they were the argument we had, for the length of our relationship, every time her and her friend went out to the casino.

Before we had started dating, the two of them brought me there once. Her friend, she dropped a twenty into a slot machine for me. I kept hitting the maximum bet button, watching as the total rapidly slid towards zero, pausing briefly a few times to go up a buck or two, but never once getting back to the starting twenty. After that I wandered the casino. It smelled of stale sweat, and there was a constant ringing from the slot machines. No matter where you were in the building you could always hear them, loud enough that you'd have to shout to be heard. Like in a bar. I've never been back.

In one of those arguments, she promised me she would stop going. And the next time her and her friend got together, they went to a movie instead. Except the next day she couldn't tell me who was in it or what it was about. We had an entirely different argument that night.