Not a Reunion

Chapter 6

Thea

As the dinner pulls to a close and people push their plates away once they're empty, the crowd starts to sparse out again. I hadn't been able to come as early as I had hoped to, but it wasn't too late. If dinner had started and I had just walked into the door, that would have been a moment that I would have never been able to be let down by.

There's a small noise of talking, and my eyes move over to the man who had been sitting across from me. Mason Katz is standing up, his hand grabbing for the plate he had eaten off of, before he is stopped by a staff member. I can see Mason telling the man that it was okay and that he could get his own plate, but the man abruptly shook his head.

Mason is about to argue again when his eyes move down to the rest of the guests that were waiting for her plate to be handled by the staff, and he swallows before nodding. There's a hint of pink on his cheeks from where he felt the slight embarrassment of causing a little moment that he had to duck his head.

I look away from the scene before I can start to think about all of the times where Mason's manners were so on point that it didn't matter if someone had told him he didn't have to do something. It didn't matter if someone had told him a billion times he didn't need to clean up after himself by putting his dishes away; he would still do it.

I cleared my throat to push away the feelings that come with thinking about the guy who I had finally seen after six years. That was a long time, and the more I thought about it, the more anger that I had pushed away a few years ago came back.

Liam wasn't able to come to the banquet as he told me, and I tried not to frown whenever I looked down at the empty chair beside me. I had felt embarrassed to go up to our secretary and tell her that I wouldn't be able to bring my fiancé, as everyone had been waiting to get a chance to meet him. Ever since they had seen me enter our office with an engagement ring on my finger, they had asked me about who it was and when they would get the chance to meet him.

I told Liam that people were asking for him, but he had been too busy to come around to my job to introduce himself. The empty chair beside me has been proving to be a further disappointment, as people have been asking of him today as well, and I have been drawing blanks. In the end, I settled on "My lovely fiancé has work," and people have been buying it.

It wasn't an entire lie anyway. Liam's job required him to spend at least an hour figuring out the problem before packing up for the day. He was in charge of data, and there was so much to have been calculated, organized, and put away that it took him time to finish it. He was at home working, which is why he wasn't able to accompany me.

I stand up from my spot and say, "I think I'm going to head out now."

"What, why?" my friend says from beside me as she tugs on my hand to stop me. I turn to her with a frown and say, "Sorry, P., I think I'd like to get home now."

"No," Particia says with a frown of her own that resembled too much of a frown as she squeezed my hand. "Come. Enjoy a few minutes at the bar with me."

I hadn't even known there was a bar around here, so as I looked around for it, Particia took the bar as an agreement with the comment she had made. She tugs on my hand as she leads me toward the bar that I found in the back of the ballroom, which I start to complain about.

"P, it wasn't an agreement."

"Come on, enjoy a few drinks. It's Friday night."

"So?"

"So, I'd like to get home and spend the night with Liam."

Patricia turns to me with a smile before she shakes her head, pushing away the seconds she had spent letting me leave. She gives me a squint and says, "You can see him this whole weekend. You should be my company this evening!"