luck for the night - rl.

3. trouble is okay if it's just for one night.

Distracting Mel's colleagues was a lot easier with Zoya around. She was not well on her way to being drunk, embarrassed about the underwear-related disaster that happened earlier, and still completely confused about an attractive guy in a skirt winking at her.

We walked around the room, drink in hand (Mel had been kind enough to get me some water). Mel and Zoya talked and laughed with their colleagues, doing some occasional distraction manoeuvres if She Who Must Not Be Named came up, while I only had eyes, and ears, for the band that was playing.

It was very unusual for me to be completely blown away by someone. It had happened once, maybe twice in my twenty-six years of being alive.

The first time, I was fifteen. A typical high school crush. She had been a few years older than me, and everything I wanted to be. Long, wavy hair, that perfect shade of red. One day, she'd come to school in a dress that looked like it was straight from the sixties, the next she'd wear ripped black jeans and a shirt of an obscure band no one had ever heard of. I think that's what I loved about her: how she did not care about other people's opinions, about how fluid she was: with her style, with her persona. Her smile could appear out of nowhere: big, pure, honest. I never told her how I felt, I just admired her from a distance.

The second one was a few years later. Although I'm not really sure how I felt about him, in retrospect. I was eighteen and thought I was in love. But maybe I was just happy that someone finally seemed to want to know me for who I really was. Maybe I was just hurt, alone, and confused about my life... He seemed to stabilise me, give me purpose. We moved in together way too soon, and I lost myself in taking care of him. Luckily he couldn't keep it in his pants and broke up with me because he had fallen in love with the girl he had been doing it with on the side.

Ever since then, I knew I wasn't the person for a relationship. I worked on myself for six years and finally was happy with the person I was. I was strong, independent and happy with my life alone. I did not need to be in a relationship, or be in love, to be considered lucky. I made my own luck. Or at least, I tried to.

I thought I would never feel this way anymore about someone, never would get swept into something like this, after all the growing, all the healing I had done, these past years.

But as I was looking at this stranger, I was completely dazed. He made me feel some kind of way, the way he danced around the podium, the way he sang and seemed to lose himself in the music, even if he knew no one was listening.

My eyes were glued to this man, and it was a problem. I did not even know his name.

So I pulled myself out of the trance this person, this stranger, had put me in and forced myself to focus on the conversation at hand.

"I mean, the buyer persona for this project wasn't too hard to figure out," Zoya explained to a short man with dark curly hair, who I vaguely remembered having a gin tonic with, "I just had to inspect the data of the traffic pulled to their site, and then it was quite easy to find out what path to take with the CTA."

"And from then on," Mel added, "thinking of a campaign was peanuts, and creating and pitching the content was time-consuming, but easy. When you market stuff like this," she gestured to the stage, "to a younger audience, they practically sell themselves, right?"

Everybody laughed, and I took a sip of my water. I felt really out of place in this whole conversation, standing around a table with a group of people of which half were never introduced to me, and the other half had such generic names I'd forgotten them before the last letter had rolled over their lips.

I just stood there, for a few minutes, trying to focus on the conversation, where words like 'bounce rate', 'KPI', and 'customer segmentation' were widely used. This really was not my type of discussion, but I had to hand it to Zoya, she kept the conversation clear of any personal talk, which meant no questions about Nora, which meant no pain in my best friend's eyes.