Where: Winter Banquet | Edgar Allen University Exy Court Date: Saturday, December 15th Time: 9:27 PM Status: Closed to @rosietommasi
There’s a lot of people at the banquet, just like always, bodies thick even in the huge space of the Nest’s Olympic-sized court. The dark colors, mitigated as they are with the upscale winter-themed decorations, do nothing to alleviate the sensation of weight in the building, of expectation and judgment pressing down on them from all directions. He feels it every time they’re here, when the stadium lights are at full-blast, but it’s worse when they’re dimmed for the sake of the banquet, when the seats disappear up into darkness around them. Maybe the fact that they’re going to playoffs adds to it - impossibly, they have more to prove, more to lose.
A lot of people are wearing dark colors - the Ravens are sporting copies of the same black outfits, as usual, moving like a thundercloud through the banquet - but a good amount of them aren’t. And within those, the whole spectrum of glitter and gloss and impressive fits, there’s really only one color, one dress that keeps catching his attention, a bright orange lighthouse beacon in a sea of bodies. Looking at someone has never made his chest feel this way before - like the genuine exhilaration of twisting down a slide at top speed when he was a kid, like the first time he pushed his bike over 50 mph, like the first time he read his name on a television screen. He feels yearning in his stomach like a gravity, feels the urge to touch her like an ache in his palms. Every time they put distance between them it makes the night stretch impossibly long out in front of him.
He glances up from where he’s pouring some garishly red punch into a cup - looking for her feels like scratching an itch, satisfying but somehow insufficient in the way that he knows he’s just going to want to do it again and again - and notices her mingling through the crowd. He manages to watch for just long enough that his hand slides to the side and starts spilling the punch across the table, some of it spattering across the floor. A sound at his side pulls his attention away long enough for him to realize what he’s doing, and he looks over to see Rosie standing next to him.
“My bad,” he says, pushing the cup into her hand and stretching down the table to grab a set of napkins to start mopping up the mess.