I’d chosen to go as a famous nonplayer character who gave almost every newly created character his or her first quest. He was a sad, broken-down shadow of a man who pined for his lost love. He gave new players the simple request to go into the nearby meadow and brave hostile creatures in order to pick a bunch of yellow daffodils in remembrance of the woman he’d lost.
He wore his former uniform of the High Guard—complete with an old-style military coat and kilt. Maggie had tracked down someone to put the costume together for me and when I’d shown up at the party, everybody immediately knew who I was supposed to be.
“General SylvanWood!” they exclaimed. I was only missing the pointy ears. SylvanWood was an elf, but I drew the line there. I’d wear a kilt, but I wouldn’t wear pointed ears. Even my geekery had its limits.
That last party got kind of crazy in the after-hours. We had some strange competitions and games before the night devolved into a platform pulsing with mildly inebriated dancers and crowds of awkward people installed around the bar.
My kilt, unfortunately, attracted a lot of the wrong kind of attention. Even the five-years-ago me would have been uncomfortable with the flirtatious interns. I’d dealt with overly enthusiastic coworkers before, but this batch of interns from the university just down the road from Draco’s central offices seemed more obnoxious than usual. And they hardly left me alone.
The more alcohol they got in them, the less subtle they became. I finally ended up installing myself with the awkward drinkers at the corner of the bar beside Jordan, while observing the wild goings-on of my employees unwinding after many days of difficult work. As the night wore on, the crowd became less inhibited. And, after excusing herself for nearly half an hour—because I did keep track of her movements—Emilia returned and went straight to the bar, asking for a drink.
I caught her eye across the bar and she smiled at me. I didn’t take my eyes off her and she raised her brows at me in a question. I motioned for her to come to me and she laughed, downed her shot and walked off.
I seethed, my eyes following her. Blondie was trying to get my attention, wanted to know if I liked to dance. I ignored her.
Emilia waded into the crowd and began to dance in a group with some of the people in marketing. After fifteen minutes of this, I could see that she was losing her judgment, because the idiots she was dancing with had their hands all over her and she was doing nothing to discourage them.
If looks could kill, the glare I was sending those guys would have flattened them. It might have been all in good fun, but it was pissing me off. One danced in front of her, his hands on her hips, another behind her, moved up to grind on her every once in a while. Fury burned through every vein, stiffened every muscle. I closed a fist on the bar.
Jordan followed my gaze. “Down, boy. She’s just dancing.”
She was more than “just dancing” and appeared to be wasted after one shot. I’d never known her to be that much of a lightweight. I turned to the bartender and ordered my own shot of tequila.
Jordan almost fell out of his chair openmouthed when the bartender poured the drink. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you touch that stuff. A hundred bucks says you can’t down it.”
I raised my brow. It was so on. I tilted my head and knocked it back—the entire thing, before I could feel the burn. I admit that I did sputter and cough a little—but not so much that it was unmanly. At least in my mind.
But I could hardly feel the desired effect quickly enough so, with my glaring eyes never leaving Emilia’s dancing form, I ordered another one.
“Double or nothing,” I said to Jordan and he shrugged and laughed. “Making a hundred-dollar bet with a multimillionaire is pointless,” he said.
I didn’t care. I wasn’t drinking to impress him, anyway. I downed drink number four before I fumbled off my bar stool and made for the dance floor, toward Emilia and her disturbing shock of multicolored hair. She looked very little like my Emilia, this pale, white-haired imitation. But watching her dance suggestively with my assistant head of marketing was now fucking pissing me off.
The minute I joined them on the dance floor, my employees cheered and clapped loudly. Hopefully they weren’t expecting much in the way of moves. I would have been the first person to admit that I did not dance to contemporary music. In fact, I danced like ass because I’d never learned. I had done ballroom practice with my cousin Britt in junior high school. We’d learned things like the foxtrot, the triple swing and the waltz. But I’d never learned any of these dances.
And I was a computer nerd—when did I have the desire or need to dance, anyway? I did the last two years of my high-school education via independent study. While my classmates were struggling through algebra, I was designing my own artificial intelligence algorithms. And when my classmates had been trying to get lucky in the back of their parents’ cars with their virginal prom dates, I was carrying out a nice, comfortable affair with a gorgeous, experienced law student. So I never went to prom nor had I really wanted to. I’d lived far from the typical teenage life and as a side effect had no idea how the hell to dance this way.