The white marble cool beneath her palms and the fizzle of her third glass of champagne blossoming with electricity as it trickled behind the hollow of her throat, Gwen surveyed the pool deck below milling with bathing suit clad bodies and the midsummer-warmed Atlantic just beyond it with the resigned contempt of one for whom duty was becoming mind-numbingly old at an ever-quickening rate.
Girls in bikinis shrieked with laughter as they were careened into the chlorinated water, the cheery droll of the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” thudded through loudspeakers, and despite the way that a soft, salty breeze drifting in off the ocean cooled the July haze to what any other day would have been perfection, Gwen couldn’t help but feel on edge. There was a part of her that would never understand the Manhattanite lifestyle, even if she lived it for another twenty years - the carefully crafted facades, the galas grinding on gossip alone, the soirees where everyone pretended with a benign smile that the rest of the room wasn’t out for blood. War was war, and she’d much rather be firing down enemy lines than making small talk with the very same villains. Twisting the stem of her champagne flute between her manicured fingertips, she couldn’t help the thought that she was going to need something one hell of a lot stronger to get through the rest of this.
She was broken from her reverie, however, by the appearance of a figure in the corner of her eye, lingering beside her at the banister. Crossing an arm across her midsection and taking another careful sip of Veuve Cliquot, her gaze still trained on the turbulent blue-black waves crashing onto shoreline, she murmured measuredly more to herself than anyone else, “Tell me I’m not the only one who finds this all a bit...farcical.”