“No, don’t eat all that you can,” I said. “There won’t be enough for the other guests.”
Silas agreed and we found our table, one way at the back and already occupied by a woman with tall feathers sprouting from the hat that covered her iron-grey, bobbed hair.
“Octavia,” I said, and she opened her mouth as she saw Silas.
He was preemptive. “Silas Stone,” he announced, and held out his hand. Due to the length of his arms, he was able to reach her across to her.
“Is that your real name?” she asked, her lip curled.
“It’s what my mother gave me,” he replied, and took his seat. “It should do me well if I ever decide to go into porn. What do you think?”
Her feathers started to quiver with the emotion she must have been feeling, but at that moment, more members of our team joined us. “We don’t see each other enough five days a week,” Munir commented under his breath.
The table was large and the floral arrangement in its center included balloons, so I wasn’t able to see Octavia during dinner. I heard her loudly lecturing Zosia about her pet, a giant monitor lizard, and also about how we were being tracked via secret transmitters attached to coins. Then she told Iker’s wife about breastfeeding, passing along a lot of tips. Some of those seemed very dubious and not science-based, and all of which were not from personal experience since she didn’t have children of her own—
Oh, no. An idea darted into my mind and made me freeze in shock. I must have also made a noise, because Silas turned to me. “You don’t like your chicken?” he asked. “I’ll have it.”
“It’s fine,” I said, my voice a little choked. When I had just thought about Octavia’s life, I had also seen a picture of my possible future: it was me with peacock feathers stuck to my head, lecturing people about relationships and children, although I didn’t have those things for myself.
“Yeah, ok,” he said, frowning. “Did the bride invite everyone from your office? Is she friends with that Octavia woman?”
“No,” Munir told him, leaning over me to answer. “No, and Octavia wasn’t going to get invited at first. She made a lot of speeches about the industrial wedding complex and how many marriages end in divorce, but then she got onto Rashelle’s registry and bought the most expensive thing they’d put on it. A hot tub,” he elaborated. “I thought you were supposed to give gifts to help the couple start off in their new life.”
“I guess they wanted to start off with bubbles. Sounds good to me,” Silas said. He had swung his arm over the back of my chair and it felt nice there. “So she bought her way in. Not a bad way to get a hot tub and I like how she handled the buffet.” Octavia had piled her plate in an impressive feat of physics.
“You don’t have to deal with her every day,” I said, but I immediately regretted it. I shouldn’t have spoken like that in front of Munir—Octavia wasn’t my boss but both of us were above him in the office hierarchy. I blamed the one-eighth part of vodka in that drink and my increasing moodiness. “Munir, I apologize for saying that and I hope you won’t repeat it.”
“Uh, yeah. I won’t,” he answered, but the atmosphere suddenly felt very awkward.
Silas saved me. “You want to dance?” he suggested. Couples had been on the floor for a while now that Rashelle and her husband had gone and then had taken turns with their parents.
“I’m pretty bad at it,” I said apologetically.
“‘She moved like a baby hippo but with an ass that made his heart go,’” Munir rapped, and hit his palm on the table to mimic the two base beats in the song, the one about me.
Both Silas and I turned to stare, and he spoke first. “What the hell did you just say?”
“I…nothing. Nothing, sorry.” Munir’s voice trembled.
“We’re going to dance,” I announced, and stood up. This song was slow and the floor was crowded, things that gave me less of an opportunity to embarrass myself.
“Nobody’s listening to that dipshit song anymore,” Silas told me. “DJs aren’t playing it and it’s over.” He held up one big hand and I took it, and he put his other on the small of my back. His long arms would have meant that we didn’t have to be too close, but my shorter ones lessened the distance between us.
“Do people still think of those lyrics when they look at me?” I asked him. “The song said I was a liar, a thief, a bad cook, a woman with poor hygiene habits…” It had expressed that last quality in a really gross way.
“No one who knows you thinks any of that.” His palm on my back pulled me even closer so that I could feel the heat of his body through his suit. “Is that why you’re so stiff?”
“No, I really am a bad dancer.”
“Nah,” he told me. “I don’t know what I’m doing either.”
But we were gliding around the floor, so at least he had rhythm.
“I’ve seen you move your hips when you swing the bat,” he noted.
“That’s not the same thing,” I said. “I’ve been accused of being way too stiff in a lot of situations. I even heard that I was frozen. Frigid.”
“I can guess who told you that load of bullshit. Was it your pretty little ex, whose intelligence is on the level of a pile of rotting leaves? Stupid asslicking clown.”
