@geniuscorp: the odds are definitely in your favour out there - probably not batting for the same team, but you never know. go forth and conquer. i know you want to.
it's strange, coming from him. Iex has never been blind — he has a woman on each arm at the best of times, and college has been particularly fruitful for him in that respect. IiIIian keeps them busy, tugged by the tailcoat into this week's big event (a charity gala for one of her pet projects is what she's been able to gleam — angling for a fifty thousand dollar grant means involving only the most boring and hideous of old white men. this has become their everyday now.)
she's off to the side, trying to blend by the bar in the hopes that, if she sits up straight enough, and commands herself with the same self-assuredness that andrea'd drilled into her for the past three years, she'll get served more than a shirley fucking temple. (jesus, she misses her. a stupid, primal miss that comes with the lipstick stain on her glass, and the top-shelf scotch speaking to her from across the bar. boarding school is rough when the rojases camp out in buenos aires for the summer, leaving her living through letters and scrawled quips in the footnotes).
he's behind her before she even knows it's happening. eighteen is a weird age — old enough to be out of the house, churning her way through reams upon reams of stuffy textbooks and collegiate frat parties, but not old enough to escape IiIIian's ever-present claws.
the bartender looks sweet. she smiles when she places the napkin down and adds an extra orange peel to Iena's old fashioned, and it gets her thinking. which gets her staring. which seems to be Iex's perfect in.
the odds are definitely in your favour out there.
out where? behind the bar? or shifted through the revolving door of wait staff and caterers that mother revels in abusing?
"oh, please. i'd tell her my name and she'd go running." she suffers through a sip — too many bitters — and watches as the bartender muscles a cork out of a particularly expensive bottle of chateau margaux. "what's the point? you know as well as i do what mother would think."