Desire & Blood - The Thorne Siblings

4. Deep Shit

I was in deep shit.

It was 6 p.m., Friday afternoon. TCorp party would start in one and a half hours, and it would take me about half of that time just to get there. Yet here I was, still in my underwear, glowering at my open wardrobe—a wardrobe that held lots of jeans and t-shirts but was definitely lacking in stuff to wear at a "creative black tie" event.

My mother would have something creative to wear—she kept spending the little money she had on clothes. But being like my mother, living in junk and poverty, was nothing I aspired to.

Some of my jeans were creatively torn, but I doubted that they qualified as black tie.

The shit I had navigated myself into—by refusing to buy a dress for the event—was at least hip deep.

I dropped the knee-length, flower-print summer dress I held in my hand and pulled out a pair of black pants. I might wear them with my white blouse. But they were jeans, black jeans—that wouldn't do. They fell to the floor, joining the summer dress and some other garments I had abandoned there in an unorderly heap of despair.

For the thousandth time, my eyes fell on the two-piece suit my dad had gifted when I got my first job, the one at TCorp. A dark indigo jacket and a pencil skirt of the same color. I had worn the combination no more than once or twice, refusing to acknowledge the guilt-driven generosity of my ever-absent dad.

At least it was dark, and it was not jeans. That and my white blouse might work. Kind of. But this was a party, and the dress code was creative chic—it wasn't a business meeting.

But then, I didn't plan to impress anyone. I'd show myself at the event, eat some snacks, and flee the venue before everyone got plastered.

~~~

Stenson Event Hall was the cubistic equivalent of a European gothic cathedral. A towering structure of concrete and steel erected at the city's old port. They used to build ships in it, the big cruisers. But the shipyards had gone bankrupt years ago.

The building's front had three entrances—large doors standing wide open. TCorp's employees were queuing to pass the black-suited, wired, sunshaded bouncers guarding them. I kept looking for faces I knew, but I only saw fancy-and-creative-clad strangers.

The jacket of my two-piece suit was tight around my shoulders and kept reminding me that there was nothing fancy or creative about it, except, maybe, for the silver angel I had pinned to its lapel, upside-down—a falling angel, probably having lost its flight-worthiness when seeing me dressed like this.

To make things worse, I wore sensible shoes. Which meant that their heels were broad, flat, and not higher than half an inch. And they were black, not even matching the suit's indigo. There wasn't a single female here with her feet as close to the floor as me. A bottom-dweller I was.

I clenched my teeth and decided to buy some fashionable clothes and shoes the next day. But that didn't prevent everyone from staring at me.

Or was that just in my mind?

My heart was racing. The bouncers would stop me, at best thinking I was one of the waitresses.

I steered for what I believed to be the shortest queue to the right when I saw a group of familiar faces close to the end of the central one. IT support—three men and one girl. The nutty nerds, we called them. One of them, a heavyset red-bearded bear, guffawed at something the girl had said when his colleague, Lawrence, caught my eye. He smiled and lifted a hand to greet me.

Lawrence Liang was the only person of that group I knew by name. Friendly, patient, he was the one IT supporter not instinctively blaming the user for everything that went wrong on a computer.