Dammit. I couldn’t just leave the idiot alone.
I weaved my way through the crowd of raised pinkies and upturned noses and scanned the faces for Ronan’s. The ornate ceiling was painted with an angelic fresco interrupted only by the flicker of candlelight from five gold chandeliers. Pale pink velvet curtains covered tall, narrow windows on one wall, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the other doubled the glimmer of crystal goblets on white linen-covered tables, diamond necklaces on perfumed décolletage, and gleaming teeth on politely nodding faces. A harpist played in one corner and staff in long-tailed suits slipped expertly through the guests with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres held aloft.
Finding Ronan turned out to be quite easy as he was the only tall man with a boyish cowlick ruffled up at the back of his head instead of smoothed down and refined with gel and, you know, a comb.
I found Ronan holding up a server with an array of olives on a tray balanced on his shoulder as he popped a black olive on his middle finger to match the ones already on his pinkie and ring finger.
“—just snazzy, you know?” I heard him explaining to the waiter. “Ladies get jewels, but we should be able to look snazzy, too, you know?”
“Can I talk to you?” I asked, grabbing Ronan’s hand as he went for another olive.
I smiled at the server, who gladly took his leave, happy for the excuse to disappear.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re not acting like yourself.”
Ronan laughed as he examined his olive fingers in the same way a woman admires a fresh manicure.
“Of course not,” he said before craning his neck to see if he could spy where the server with the olives went.
I stared up at Ronan and then said, crossing my arms over my chest, “I don’t understand.”
Ronan checked that nobody was paying the two of us any particular attention and then sighed as he leaned down to talk to me in a low voice. “Have you really learned nothing so far?”
My eyes darted between his, trying and failing to understand. I let my silence speak for itself. Ronan scanned the crowd as he explained, “Your job isn’t to be who you are. Your job is to be who they think you are, who they want you to be. I get what I want because I’m not a threat to anyone, because they see me as an inconsequential fly, because my behaviour is always dismissed as just being ‘me’. But none of it is me; it’s just a fine-tuned construction of me.”
Ronan’s eyes found mine with a self-satisfied grin.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t like this—this—” I waved my hand about, “—this fake version of you.”
Ronan’s wide, easy smile did not flinch, but I thought I saw a sadness cross his eyes.
“What makes you think there’s a real version, love?”
I was ready to protest but found the words, whatever they had been, suddenly absent from the tip of my tongue. What if he was right? What if the Ronan I’d seen over the past week was just as much of an act as the Ronan I was presently standing in front of? How would I know? How could I know?
How could I know when, if, he was ever real?
Ronan laughed as if he was amused by his obvious victory, but I thought the sound was a little hollow, as if even he didn’t quite believe it. I stared up at him, studying his carefully constructed mask, wondering which parts I could trust. Maybe he had been wanting me to protest? Maybe he had been hoping I would disagree with him? Maybe I was just another in a long string of people to simply realise there was no real Ronan O’Hara?
Or maybe he was just manipulating me. Again.
“Look,” I started to say, only for Ronan to interrupt me with a harsh growl of, “Shite.”
His eyes were fixed on a spot in the crowd and I tried to follow his sightline to see what he was looking at. All I saw was a sea of expensive clothes, expensive jewellery, and expensive plastic surgery.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“She wasn’t supposed to be here,” Ronan said, lunging for a glass of champagne from a passing server.
“Who?”
Ronan tipped back the glass and drained it in one go.
I looked wildly at the people around me with a sort of panic as if I were watching for the flash of a grey fin on a choppy sea.
“Ronan, who? Who are you talking about?”
Ronan grinned almost manically down at me. “Nobody, nobody,” he said. “Just the woman I’m supposed to marry.”
Delaney
I was busy coughing, eyes streaming, lungs burning and face flaring cherry-red, as the woman who Ronan was supposed to marry emerged from the crowd like goddamn Venus from her scallop shell to a chorus of angels’ trumpets. All she was missing was a gust of heavenly wind gently caressing her golden curls that cascaded around her bare shoulders. Ronan pounded mercilessly on my back as the woman came to a stop in front of us with a perfectly arched eyebrow.
“She swallowed an oyster wrong,” he said to the woman as I gasped for air.
Through my wavering, tear-filled vision I could see she wasn’t watching me as I tried to catch my breath, but instead had her attention fixed on Ronan.
“Does she need medical attention, Rowie?” the woman asked.
“Rowie?” I asked Ronan. “Who the fu—”
Ronan interrupted me with two painful thumps on my back.
“Anna,” Ronan said to the woman. “This is Ms Delaney Evans. Delaney, please let me introduce you to Ms Anna Moore.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said with a sore throat.
I extended a hand as Anna’s eyes finally slid reluctantly to me. Instead of taking my hand she reached into her sleek pocketbook, held elegantly at her side, and plucked a silk hankie from inside to drape over my fingers.
“Your mascara has bled,” she said with a sweet smile that didn’t touch her cold blue eyes.
I took the hankie, blushing as I felt like a child told to clean up after eating her SpaghettiOs. Anna turned her chin curtly away from me as if to communicate clearly that it was the grown-ups’ time to talk.
“Rowie, I see my absence from your life has delivered quite predictable results,” she said, giving Ronan a thorough examination from head to toe. “You look positively dreadful.”
Ronan sucked the olive demonstrably from his middle finger. “I see you look exactly the same, Anna,” he said in return while grabbing two champagne glasses: one for her and one for him. “But then again, doesn’t plastic always?”
Anna laughed over the lip of her glass while her deep sapphire nails tightened on the long crystal stem.
“You know there’s nothing plastic about me,” Anna replied, smiling easily. “You know intimately, in fact.”
It was obvious that I was quite forgotten as I swiped at my running mascara.
“Umm, is that better?” I asked in a meek voice that I hardly recognised as my own.
Ronan thought it was a game to act like someone else amongst the upper echelons of society; I wish I had that luxury. I was transformed into someone else, someone quieter, someone weaker, someone more timid, and it was entirely against my will. Ms Anna Moore, with her polished speech and refined posture and dignified air, intimidated me. Worst of all was that Ronan seemed to treat her as something he never treated me: an equal. Sure, they sparred, but I never got the impression that Anna had to swing up, only out.