One of the two bars was right next to this karaoke room, so I gestured to it. “Did you book a room?”
“Yeah!” Francyn said, excitement flashing like lightning across a dark sky in her voice. “I wanted to wait for more people to get here before starting. Feel free to get yourself a drink!”
“I believe I will,” I said, walking over to where the other three were talking, away from Francyn who was watching the door like she was looking for her misplaced child rather than her co-workers. Exo, Ozmo, and Cresh looked up as I approached them, interrupting their conversation with a simper. “Am I the only one who wasn’t expecting a karaoke bar?”
Exo laughed, but Ozmo was the one who answered me. “Tell me about it. I love the gesture but a regular bar would have been better than this.” They pushed their black hair out of their face so they could properly down the rest of their beer.
“She’s sweet!” Cresh said, cutting through the loud music with her voice. “At least this place is Orb owned and we don’t need to worry about being gawked at too much.”
I nodded, but slipped closer to the bar. Surprisingly, the bartender was human, and really fucking cute. But I ignored the instant attraction and ordered a Jack & Coke.
“I pegged you as a beer guy,” Exo said with a smile, bringing his own bottle to his lips as he took a swig.
Shaking my head, I scoffed. “Can’t stand the stuff. Unless it’s a sour beer or something. Otherwise, I’ll stick to drinking something that at least attempts to cover the taste of the alcohol.”
They all mumbled some semblance of agreeing with me as the bartender handed me my drink with a wink.
“Enjoy.” He said, with an undertone. An undertone that went straight to my dick.
When I gave him a long look, I smiled like an idiot. I held up my glass in mock cheers and he winked. As nice as it was to be gawked at by another man, all it did was make me think about Matty. Hopefully the alcohol could fix that, but until then, I needed to distract myself in other ways.
I joined the group again and held up my glass. “To ORBIT.”
“To ORBIT.” The three of them said together as we took a collective sip of our respective drinks.
Soon enough, the rest of the board members joined us over the half hour that passed, much to Francyn’s delight. Even Maxim had finally showed up, making sure I wasn’t the only human at this all Orb party. Once everyone had a drink in their system, Francyn bought every single one of us a shot of our choice. We stood in a misshapen circle and all took the shot together, taking me back to my Omega Epsilon Omega days in the best way.
Things were going pretty well as we filtered into the karaoke room. The most shocking thing about the room was that it housed all fourteen of us comfortably enough. Kloan sitting on Agemot’s lap helped with space, and everyone else was comfortable enough to gather close and get to know each other.
Another half hour rolled on of people conversing before the singing started. Shocking no one, Francyn kicked off the karaoke with an actually decent rendition of Celine Dion’sIt’s All Coming Back To Me Now. I wasn’t sure if the others knew it or not, but they were so damn lucky that it was the single versionand not the lengthy album version, or else we’d be having a full night of Francyn solos.
I ended up doing my usual karaoke go to, any Taylor Swift song I could get my hands on. Tonight’s selection wasSo It Goes…, a particularly sexy song that I couldn’t help but think about the cute bartender while I was singing it. The performance garnered me a few hoots and hollers from the board members, thanks to my seductive dance that was bloomed by my fourth Jack & Coke.
During Kloan and Agemot’s duet ofCloserby Halsey and The Chainsmokers, I noticed Francyn and Wrage sneaking out of the karaoke bar together. Francyn’s smile was wicked and sharp. Judging by the lazily happy look on Wrage’s stony face, I figured they’d made some type of love connection.
I envied them. As nice as it was to flirt with the idea of the bartender being into me, I wasn’t ready. Not without the liquid courage of alcohol, and I needed more of it before I was close to ready. Hell, it hadn’t even been a full twenty four hours that I’d been officially divorced.
While I left the karaoke room to order another Jack & Coke from the cute bartender, my thoughts wandered to how nice things had been when Matty and I had first gotten together. The late nights watching campy 2000’s comedies, drinking until our heads hurt, making a tour around the cities’ best restaurants. Back then it had been so easy to be together and I’d been truly happy.
I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I’d been stifling myself. What I wanted to do was play video games, read, watch horror movies, which Matty was proudly against. I shaped myself into someone that could accurately love Matty without realizing that I was diminishing myself along the way. That’s why things had seemingly changed between us out of nowhere, at least in his eyes. I’d tried explaining it to him, that I was changing back into who I was, that I hadn’t meant to be a version of myself that wasless than truthful, but he hadn’t heard it. He’d only heard that I was changing and he didn’t understand why I was doing this to us.
Sighing, I tried to stay out of my head and in the moment. The bartender handed me my drink and leaned in close to me so I could hear him over the noise of the music. The dance floor was raging at this point.
“That one’s on the house, handsome.”
As I pulled back and gave him a slight chuckle, I smiled at him. “Thank you.” I projected, and he gave me another knowing wink.
What I wouldn’t give to be in the right head space to pull this guy into the bathroom, push him down to his knees, and make him choke on my dick. But I just didn’t have it in me right now.
Squeezing a path back to the karaoke room, I noticed that more than half of the board members were gone. Cresh was singing Kesha’sHunt You Downand I stumbled over to the couch where everyone was cheering Cresh on or immersed in their own conversations.
“Where did everyone go?” I asked to anyone who would answer.
Maxim ended up being the answerer. “I think the party is winding down pretty fast. Some said they wanted to dance instead.”
I nodded. That made sense. The dance floor outside the karaoke rooms was raging, probably because now there was a DJ mixing music instead of hits blaring through a supersized speaker.
“Why don’t we take the party to the dance floor after Cresh finishes up?”
