Familiar faces swirl past—reporters, socialites, city council—as dread sinks deep in my stomach. It’s never going to be the right moment, I suppose. He’s always going to have some objection that stops me from getting out the door.
“Where did you go the other night?” Steel asks casually to me, as he waves cordially to a few onlookers.
“I...didn’t. I stayed in,” I lie automatically. I know he would disapprove of what happened that night, even if I didn’t mention Ellis. “I went to bed early.”
“Lacey, the tracker showed you left and returned to Steel Spire twice that night,” he says, sounding a little annoyed before he corrects and renews his smile for the crowd when someone calls his name out.
A hint of cold sweat creeps down the back of my neck as his words weigh uncomfortably on my mind. The tracker showed that I was that close to Steel Spire when we were under the city?
Luckily, I’m saved from having to come up with an answer as we reach our table, and Clayton releases my arm to shake hands with a number of people. Under the name card at my place setting, there’s a slip of paper with a couple lines of things I should say when I present him the award, no doubt placed by Clayton’s assistant.
“Drinks?” Steel prompts me after I melt into my chair, overwhelmed already. I’m doing my best to just sit up straight.
I nod quickly; that’s honestly the best thing I’ve heard all night. As soon as the speeches are over, I’m going back upstairs to sink into a bottle of rosé and a pile of chocolate candy wrappers, and I’ll only crawl out to change the channel between HGTV and True Crime. Until then, I can pre-game.
Steel nods to a corner of the room. “The bar’s over there. I’ll take an old fashioned.”
Oh.
I nod and pull myself to stand, leaning a little too heavily on the table. The crystalware clinks and rattles with my inelegant dismount.
I find myself drifting automatically to the bar, my legs assuming my defeat preemptively. I’ve been here, in this moment, so many times. I feel like an animal pacing the too-small bounds of my enclosure.
There’s a line at the bar, so I find myself wandering back to the hallway, where it’s quieter.
The whole process of unzipping the plastic bag my gross phone is contained within isn’t much of a deterrent from checking my messages repeatedly. Earlier, Ellis sent me a single, “Hey,” text that I’ve since replied to a number of times, but he hasn’t responded at all. I keep checking that my phone still has signal, that my volume is on, so I don’t miss his reply.
But it’s been a few hours by now. I think he might just really be done with me.
Another round of tears threatens to take over, hurdling my self-control easily. I tuck myself back against the wall for a moment. I’m honestly so agitated and off-kilter, I can’t figure out what to do with myself. My body is jittery with adrenaline and exhausted to the core.
I’m not sure how I’m going to survive the night.
“Lacey! Let’s get you set up,” an older hispanic woman dressed in plain black clothes and a headset calls out to me. I remember her running AV for previous events but not her name. I sigh, dipping my fingers into the neckline of my dress and holding the fabric off my skin for her.
“Oh, I hate these, I always forget I’ve got it on.” I sigh, unable to contain my negativity as she steps into my personal space. I’m used to this routine from my job, she has a delicate lavalier microphone to clip onto my dress’s ruched neckline.
“Tell me about it. The guy who was testing it during setup already made that mistake, took it in the bathroom with him. At least we heard him wash his hands after,” she says, and even though she rolls her eyes, there’s warmth in it.
“Happens to the best of us,” I reply with a weak laugh, and then, because she’s still standing in my personal space, I feel the need to assure her that my foul mood isn’t because she’s doing her job. “No, I just prefer handheld microphones, so I don’t have to find something to do with my hands—”
She looks up at me with the urgency of someone who deals with a lot of expensive things being dropped often. “Oh no, the award is huge, you’ll need both hands.”
I blink back at her for a second. “Oh, wow. Really?”
Even I’m struck by how profoundly insecure that looks, like some weird Freudian portrait of Clayton’s ego. I lean there for a few minutes, watching over her shoulder as Clayton shakes hands with city council members using his stupid robot glove. Why does he need all this? What happened to crusading for a better world? Was it always just about declaring himself its champion?
The AV manager pats me on the shoulder and jogs off when her hip radio buzzes with chatter, leaving me alone.
I steal a glance at Clayton, preoccupied with schmoozing, and sigh.
God, he really sucks.
It almost makes me smile, to think how loud that might have made Ellis laugh. In that moment, my heart aches, like reaching around for something familiar and finding nothing there. He would have noticed I was at least a little lackluster by now. If we were still talking.
It’s a thought I’ve been barricading myself against for a long, long time, and I’m just too tired to keep it up. It slips through my defenses, hardly the dramatic defeat I imagined it would be. I’m tired of waiting for the moment that would be best for him when we end things, and then waiting so long it never actually happens. I’ve already spent so long convincing myself that I enjoyed Clayton, that because he was supposed to be the guy who was finally good for me, I could pretend all the little disconnects between us weren’t piling up. This hasn’t been fair to me.
I keep thinking I don’t want to be here, but there isn’t anything better I would be doing right now. I don’t have an excuse to not be here, but I can’t stop thinking I’d rather be crawling through a sewer with Ellis right now.
