The Cupid Touch

The Cupid Touch Chapter 3 - How to Make Merry

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I went a little crazy over that dinner. I managed to partition my mind off neatly, so that the only things I thought about were work and looking totally perfect. Coldly perfect, in fact. I don't know whether it was a subconscious manifestation of my desire to keep everyone at a distance, but the dress I found was an ice-blue, full-length gown which made me look the part of the ice queen. 

And then I added to it, making myself icier with a cascading crystal necklace with wires so thin you couldn't see them - it looked like my skin was sparkling - and crystals twisted into my hair, which I piled up and secured rigidly. I matched the colour of the dress with a palette of breathtakingly expensive Dior colours that ranged from dark blue right up to shining, glittering white and spent most of an hour applying them in a smooth blend from dark inside my eye to pale white above and outside it. The only dark features were my eyeliner and my mascara. 

The overall effect was about as warm and approachable as most people thought I was. In fact, if I had blonde hair instead of brown, and then ventured outside in a snowstorm, I might have actually vanished. The thought was both funny and slightly scary; scary because for a milisecond, it actually sounded tempting.

"You need to get a grip," my reflection told me. I believed it. It looked like it meant business. I settled for picking up my purse in a grip like a vice and holding it like that the whole way into the waiting cab.

The whole place shone. I've always been regretful that MIT is largely modern, with very obviously Architecturally Designed buildings with weird angles thrown around the place. When I was in High School, I dreamed about a neo-gothic campus with huge trees; and then when it came to it, I chose the place that was going to give me the best chance of getting hired by NASA. Which was still pretty small, all told, but I've always believed it's better to aim high and fail spectacularly.

The newly-completed Manners Building had something about it, though. Maybe it was knowing that it had come in at twice the budget it was supposed to, or the fact that it was made almost entirely of glass. And maybe the dark blue evening with stars just appearing added something. But for just a minute, as I walked into the foyer where the fifty or so guests there were being served champagne in glittering glasses, I could imagine that I was an ice queen who'd finally found a palace. Which just goes to show quite how bad a week it had been.

There were a few people there that I knew, and a lot that I didn't. I recognised Marcie from my coding class, and a clutch of people from the film society. They were the kind of people I usually gravitated towards: the kind who were friendly enough, but not natural socialisers; the kind who always kept you at arm's-length.

But even as I smiled at a few of them, I didn't approach yet. I wanted to keep that fairytale feeling for a while longer. So armed with a glass of champagne, I wandered to the emptier side of the hall and spent a good five minutes doing nothing but stare up at the incredible light feature overhead. 

It looked like somebody had spilled a metric ton of tiny white bulbs and frozen them in what looked like a swirl of ice as they fell. Parts of the ice-glass sculpture were clear, and others were a warm yellow, which lent colour to the lights, too. I didn't even notice anyone coming up to me.

"Do you think yellow ice is like yellow snow?" a thoughtful voice said from over my shoulder. "Because someone should probably tell them before spring hits."

I didn't need to recognise the voice. I knew who I was going to find when I turned around. It made my heart sink and race all at the same time. 

"Wow," I said, to the football star. "Nobody ever mentioned you were a patron of the arts as well as a jock. I would have made more of an effort earlier."