Bluefire

Heat

The night went by faster than I thought it would after that. Well, this was probably a good thing. 

After the introduction, Saskia had come close, but not quite —she had kept at least two steps away from our group— to apologize for storming off. Being fairly ticked off at her, I didn't  dignify her with a response, instead telling Karina to handle anything coming my way for me. That seemed to bring back the scare, Kubrick-esque disposition out of Saskia and after glaring at me, she stormed off. She ended up missing the canapes and drinks that, after getting her stink-eye, didn't look so appetizing anymore to my stomach. 

While I did have enough of one to get one cup of Dr Pepper from the makeshift bar, as soon as the groups started to dissolve and people started to talk to each other I grew increasingly uneasy. 

The attention was once again on me and I didn't like that one bit. It was horrific. 

The good news was that I was able to excuse myself from Karina's group with little hassle whatsoever. The bad news was that now I was stuck at... 8:30 PM with little to do besides chilling out in my room and... oh my gosh, I was so hungry now! I really should have stolen some food from the party... then again, those were small finger foods... so they could not do much other than stave the hunger off. 

'Minibar, you numbskull!' I thought to myself, realizing that since I was staying at a suite and this was a luxury hotel, there ought to be something to eat in there. 

Might be better to check it out and raid it than go back down there and risk more embarrassing frustration. 

I returned to find no food whatsoever on the minibar. From what the receptionist told me, they were filled after the first day of stay with items you checked from a list. Since I would only be here for a day and a half and then be spirited away through Eastern Europe, the idea did not call out to me in the least, even if my guts certainly did. 

The reason was seemingly that guests would stay a night and then head to desk to complain when the morning arrived. Seems many frequent guests started complaining about it before they changed this. Since the hotel was targeted at elite customers, it kind of made sense... that it would attract a bunch of snobbish eaters with extraordinarily inflated egos and even pickier tongues...   

I did try to suppress the hunger to the best of my ability and even though I decided to focus on trying to pick something to wear tomorrow and hoping my OK App feed wasn't full of shit. 

As I put the clothes in the  couch on one end of the bedroom, I noticed the black bag sitting in the table next to the chaise (yes, the room had one of those fancy things where you faint), with the alluring lightning of the faint lamplight making it seem oddly more attractive. 

Maybe reading would take the bad thoughts off my mind... 

So I decided that those two girls might have been on to something from the very start, and took the book out of the bag, suddenly being all too aware of the two Mars bars I had gotten for complimentary reading. They weren't 'food', but they were good 'proletarian hunger killers'. 

So after discarding shoes (and socks too because I hated them), pants and changing into a comfortable sweater, I opened the door of the balcony to let the now chilly air of the harbor come in and settled with the copy of Wolfsangel in the chaise, a Mars bar in hand and another two next to me, and a glass of Pepsi, since the minibar did have ice already and I still had a bottle from of fizzyness that had followed me all the way from Doha. 

I couldn't help but snort upon looking at the clearly fanservice focused cover —two naked girls with a naked dude in between—, the kind of stuff you'd expect from mass market literature. However, upon looking at the girl with the jet black hair, I was briefly reminded of Alyx —the mysterious interloper who had an exchange with my cousin and was definitely not on good terms with her— and how she seemed to be the only person who seemed 'safe' in a sea of potential screw-ups and scary people... which unfortunately included the aforementioned cousin.