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- Maeve -
Christmas parties weren’t really my thing.
Not because I have anything against Christmas. I’m not a miserable grinch. It’s parties I find insufferable.
Maybe that’s because letting my hair down doesn’t come naturally to me. Then again, neither does getting shitfaced in front of the only people whose opinions of me actually count for something. And don't even get me started on the joys of small talk, of which there are none as far as I can tell.
How is it that we’ve created a society where no one is allowed to talk about the two most urgent and impactful issues in our collective lives: politics and religion.
God forbid anyone learns something over dinner besides how much your last vet bill was and how many steps you’ve taken this week. I honestly can’t bear it.
And as everyone knows, Christmas work parties are the most evil of all because every guest is torn between getting drunk enough to feel like they’re somewhere else and staying sober enough that they don’t do anything to make their attendance at the event in any way memorable.
It’s a charade, really. A joke. Except the punchline is painfully predictable and always involves someone low on the totem pole trying to climb someone significantly higher on it.
Naïvely, I hoped this year wouldn’t be so bad.
I should’ve known better.
I should’ve known that something terrible would happen if I dated a colleague. Hell, I did know. I just looked the other way because Kurt and I were so perfect for each other on paper.
He had inoffensive hobbies that I was interested to learn about, but not so interested I posed a competitive threat. Like chess and golf and World War II trivia. He was also from a family that seemed significantly less broken than mine, though my siblings and I turned out pretty well considering we were all fifty-percent dipshit.
Best of all, he wanted a family of his own, and we were on equal footing career wise. Well, we were until two months ago when I got promoted to a position we were both gunning for, but he’d handled it admirably. He even had enough pride that he hadn’t inquired about how big my pay rise was.
All good signs.
And we’d made it a whole year. Granted, the first six months we were on and off as we tried to find our feet, like a cloud trying to form. But we had to be extra careful since we worked together. Still, I think I only had to use the word “discretion” twice: once when he made eyes at me during a meeting and once when he let his hand graze my ass in the Starbucks in our building.
Otherwise, he’d been a complete gentleman, and as hard as I tried to find them, he didn’t seem to have any obvious faults. Flaws, sure, but it’s not like I was perfect. I had days where I couldn’t find the strength to load the dishwasher or ran out of time to meal plan and had baked veggie strips for dinner.
The important thing was that he hadn’t exhibited any obvious dealbreakers, and as a result, I was starting to think maybe I could love him… In that arranged sort of way where rational people with mutually compatible long-term goals will themselves to over time.
But as I watched him flirt with the brunette caterer who barely looked old enough to attend senior prom, much less audition for the role of punchline at my consulting company’s holiday bash, my stomach sank.
I took a deep breath, reminding myself it had been a year. No way I was going to write off our relationship because of a tiny flirtation. Hell, maybe she started it, and he was only being polite. Or maybe he knew her from somewhere else. Yes, surely. That was the only way to explain the light in his eyes and the width of his smile.
The girl glanced down at the floor, her pink cheeks popping brightly against her white and black uniform.
Look away, Maeve. Look away and forget about this.
I wandered over to the nearest bar and asked for a Sprite.
“It’s open bar,” the tattooed bartender reminded me, the dark ink peeking out from under his crisp collar suggesting he’d probably rather be elsewhere, too.
“I know,” I said, offering him one of the last polite smiles from my quota. But Sprite was fine. Everyone would assume it was alcohol, anyway. Which was to say everyone would assume they were the kind of people I’d like to have a drink with. Except they weren’t. I never mixed business and pleasure.
Until Kurt.
He was talking to some of the IT guys now, who stood out for their facial hair and how uncomfortable they looked in suits. Then he turned and caught me looking at him, smiled, and excused himself.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked, his green eyes smiling behind his black hipster-esque frames.
“More than I do at the dentist, but less than I do at home in my pajamas.”
“Your pajamas have nothing on that dress,” he said, his eyes falling down the red gown I found on Rent-the-Runway.
