A Night at the Ballet - [Nathaniel and Bryony
"A pleasure, Bryony." Nathaniel smiled and brushed his lips across the knuckles of the woman’s hand before releasing it and pouring her a glass. "That is a lovely name, though one I can’t recall having heard before, even with our having both come from the coast. I hope you can forgive me if we did meet before and I have forgotten it. My head is dreadfully full of names and faces, and some of them leak out whilst others are pouring in."
He cleared his throat and passed over the glass, easing himself back in his seat thereafter. “Though, I find it hard to believe I’d forget yours.”
At her mention of the performance, his eyes passed up to the stage, watching as the various technical staff milled about around and across it, preparing for the show to continue once intermission wrapped. “If you want the truth, I haven’t been paying attention.” He snorted out a laugh, a bit harsh but edged with good humor as he sipped from his own beverage. “Horrible, I know, but these tickets belong to my father. He always has season passes to the larger cultural events. I do actually enjoy ballet, I just…” he sighed, fingers trailing through the strands of his dark hair leaving it slightly mussed in the aftermath. “I guess I’ve seen so many I can sometimes forget they aren’t just background noise. Earmarks of a life of privilege, I suppose.”
Bryony accepted the glass of scotch with a murmured “thank you,” giving it an appreciative if unschooled sniff before sipping at it lightly, reflecting that it was lucky that this was the one hard liquor she could handle without a mixer – she couldn’t handle much of it, but she had never found the taste unpleasant in the way of most other such things.
“I’m fairly sure we haven’t met,” she laughed, biting at her lower lip slightly at the tacit compliment. “I somehow have a good memory for names and a bad one for faces, but the first one is serviceable enough, and I also rather doubt I’d have forgotten, in your case.” It was the truth. Nathaniel was certainly handsome, and his looks had a slightly forbidding edge of the sort prone to snagging in one’s memory.
Her eyebrows rose at his admission, but her smile was amused. “I suspect that’s probably the case for a lot of the people in this section of the theater, but I also strongly suspect that most of them wouldn’t dream of admitting it like you just did. If the performance is background, what’s in the foreground? Or should I ask?”












