“Cassie.”
I looked up to see Sam, striding towards us from the kitchen. He had a beer in one hand and a glass of white wine in the other.
He handed the wine to me, but his eyes were on Frederick.
My stomach was suddenly a hard, tight knot of anxiety. It had been one thing for Frederick to interact with my best friend for two minutes at the mall the other day. It was another thing for them to spend an entire evening together. From the look on his face, Sam seemed to have gotten over whatever oh no he’s hot moment he’d succumbed to during their last brief meeting and was prepared to come to a final decision about whether Frederick was a creep or was trustworthy.
I fidgeted with the stem of the wine glass and inclined my head towards Frederick. “Sam, you know Frederick.”
Sam extended his hand. “Nice to see you again.”
Frederick clasped Sam’s hand in his and gave it a firm shake. “Thank you for extending us this invitation to your home. It is nice to see you again as well.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked. “Wine? Beer?”
Frederick was quiet as he pondered how to answer that. He may have studied for tonight but he and I hadn’t actually gone over small talk at parties. Which, in hindsight, was an incredibly stupid oversight on my part. I braced myself for Frederick’s answer, hoping it would be at least somewhat within the realm of normal.
“I . . . cannot decide,” Frederick eventually said. “What would you recommend?”
I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. Since joining his law firm Sam had become the world’s biggest lawyer cliché by getting into different kinds of fancy wines. He loved boring everyone else with endless details about his latest discoveries.
I gave Frederick a small nod, which I hoped conveyed That was the right thing to say. His rigid posture relaxed slightly.
“That depends on your preference. I have a bunch of different reds,” Sam said. “Do you like Malbec?”
Frederick glanced at me, his eyes a question. I gave another small, encouraging nod.
“Yes,” Frederick said with the conviction usually reserved for questions about Halloween candy preferences. “Yes, I do like red wine. Very much so. In fact, Malbec is my favorite.”
“Mine, too.” Sam grinned at him, and if I weren’t so relieved that Frederick was doing so well, I’d have laughed at how easy it was to play my friend. “Come into the kitchen and I’ll get you set up.”
Frederick stared at him like a deer caught in headlights.
“Go get a drink,” I encouraged. And then, gesturing towards Sam, I added, “Sam will make sure to get you something good.”
“Something good,” Frederick repeated, an eyebrow raised. I winced, kicking myself for not warning him ahead of time that if he went to human parties he’d be expected to walk around with a drink he wouldn’t want for most of the evening.
Once Frederick and Sam left for the kitchen I glanced around the room, trying to see if there were familiar faces. I vaguely recognized some guests from other get-togethers Sam and Scott had thrown over the years, but then I saw David—Sam and Scott’s friend who was involved with the River North Gallery art exhibition—sitting on the couch beside Sam’s sister Amelia.
My heart sped up. Professional networking was just above tooth extraction without Novocain on my list of favorite activities. Chatting with Amelia, Sam’s extremely competent and put-together sister, was only marginally more enjoyable. But David was right there, less than ten feet away, chatting with a perfectly dressed, not-a-hair-out-of-place Amelia as he sipped from his glass of Chardonnay.
It had been forty-eight hours since I’d emailed David my submission. The River North Gallery was making their decisions within the coming week. A person in charge of her life would take this opportunity to talk with him, right?
Might as well pretend I was in charge of my life and do the same.
I squared my shoulders, reminded myself that I did hard things all the time, and approached them.
“Hi,” I said.
David and Amelia looked up at me at the same time.
All at once, I remembered I wasn’t remotely in charge of my own life and this was probably a terrible mistake.
“Cassie,” Amelia said. Her tone was bright, and she smiled at me—but even over the din of the party I was reminded of how condescending she used to be whenever she deigned to speak with me back in high school. “It’s so nice to see you again.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said. I would make an effort tonight for Sam, I decided. “How have you been?”
Amelia shook her blond head and sighed, then took a sip of her white wine before setting the glass back down on the coffee table.
“Busy,” she said. “Not as busy as I’ll be in the spring, but busier than I want to be.”
I tried to think of a time when Amelia wasn’t so busy with her accounting practice that she was utterly miserable. My mind drew a blank.
“That sucks,” I said, meaning it.
Amelia shrugged. “It is what it is, I guess. It’s what I signed up for when I joined the firm. But enough about me,” she said. “Sam says you’ve been really throwing yourself into your art again.”
I nodded, too proud of what I’d been doing lately—and too cognizant of the fact that someone on the River North Gallery committee was sitting beside Amelia—to feel self-conscious.
“Yeah,” I said. “I have been. In fact—”
I was cut off from finishing my sentence by Sam—who was now rushing over to Amelia’s side with a petrified-looking Frederick in tow.
“Amelia,” he said, laughing. “You have got to talk with Cassie’s new roommate.”
Sam’s words distracted me completely from my anxiety over talking with Amelia and David, catching my attention as effectively as a record scratch in a quiet room. Alarmed, I turned to look at Frederick, whose wrist was in Sam’s iron grip.
He was staring, wild-eyed, down at his shoes.
Before I could ask what was going on, Sam turned to me and said, delighted, “You never told me Frederick was such a big Taylor Swift fan.”
I choked on my sip of wine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, once I recovered. “But . . . Taylor Swift?”
Frederick shuffled his feet awkwardly. “I . . . might have mentioned a few things I knew about Taylor Swift to some people in the kitchen.”
“A few things?” Sam laughed again and shook his head. “Don’t be so modest. Your knowledge of her 1989 era is encyclopedic.”