TDoCAJ 1: 2.1

A year out from the Arume disaster, she was surviving, if not the clichéd thriving. She was twenty-five, a management consultant at one of the boutique firms that clustered around the DC lobbying world. Her career was moving too — a couple of rungs up, a partner track murmur from her manager, and the unspoken addendum that her presence was good for the firm's diversity narrative. She didn't mind. Her work was good and she knew it, and the rest was just weather.

Outside of work, life was deliberately small. Fade and Dedi, a couple of work friendships she hadn't let deepen into anything that required maintenance. She didn't date. She'd tried twice in the first few months and felt nothing both times, which had told her what she needed to know. Her life was staid and predictable and she had worked very hard to make it so, and Dedi could call it boring all she wanted.

She'd made it a point to avoid weddings since the infamous rehearsal dinner. This one she couldn't. Harrison's daughter was getting married (his only child, no expenses spared) and Harrison was her boss's boss, a legacy partner.

She'd allotted herself thirty minutes.

The math was straightforward. Long enough to be clocked by Harrison and his wife, her boss, and the two senior partners she'd quietly been making herself useful to. Short enough to leave before the speeches.

She arrived at the venue —a Georgetown estate rented out by the sort of people who considered asking the price extremely gauche — with a sensible heel height conducive to her early exit plan.

Inside, the room was a motley of old money whites and a scattering of middle-class professionals who had absolutely been to places like this before and wanted that known. A jazz quartet in the corner was doing something genuinely lovely with Crazy in Love. She found the table her access card directed her to, recognized two colleagues, exchanged light pleasantries, and reached for the empty chair on the end.

The seat next to it was already taken.

She pulled out the chair and sat, and the oud reached her before anything else did. Cedar and dry spice and something darker underneath.

Then she saw him.

He hadn't looked over yet, which gave her a few seconds to arrange her face. She knew the moment he registered her as she reached for her place card. Pursed lips, the almost-imperceptible shift away as she set the card down, smiled at yet another colleague across the table who'd caught her eye, and settled back into her seat just as he turned fully to look at her.

Wentworth Miller's face rendered in golden caramel with dark red undertones, brown curls tapered neat at the nape. Grey eyes, flecked with black. Stormy. It was so unfair, really.

Theo. A peripheral figure from the Arume years. They'd met once, if you could call it that, at some barbecue during her sophomore year. She'd reached for the serving tongs over a pan of grilled chicken, accidentally grazing his fingers and he'd snapped at her like she'd drawn blood. She'd been about to give it back to him when Arume materialized beside them, greeting him with an easy, cordial warmth. In the fleeting times she'd seen him after that, at one event or another around the DMV, the pattern was the same: he looked at her like he found her personally offensive. She'd long since concluded he was close enough to Arume's world to have heard things. The mess had traveled further than she'd have liked.

He looked at her now the way he always had. Like something he'd stepped in.

Well, she'd spent the past year learning not to shrink from the uncomfortable, so fuck him. She ordered a glass of red from the passing hostess, made easy conversation with the colleague on her left, and when she'd run that out, she turned to him.

"Friend of the groom?”

He suppressed what seemed to be an exasperated sigh. A beat, then: “Something like that.”

She smiled. "Don't I know you?"

He blinked. "Do you?"

"I think," she said, "that you think I almost stole your chicken once, and you've had a stick up your ass about it ever since." She picked up the glass of red a waiter had slid in front of her and made a mock salute. "Cheers to getting it out someday. It must be uncomfortable."

She caught the look on his face, somewhere between incredulous and bemused, before she turned back to her colleague.

Her thirty minutes became an hour without her noticing and an hour became two before she admitted to herself that she was having a good time. The red helped, rich and dark, making conversation easier and the speeches, when they came, almost tolerable. She kept catching him at the edge of her vision. He kept looking. She didn't think much of it then. Later she would think to herself, he looked like a man at war, she just wasn't sure with who.

Hours later, the staid reception had transformed into a rumbustious after-party, several bottles of premium whiskey and brandy appearing at each table. Kiiti flagged down a waiter and asked for another bottle of the red, got halfway through it before a colleague materialized at her elbow and pulled her to the dance floor.

She felt his eyes on her back all the way to the dance floor, and lost him for a while in the music and the press of bodies between them. Then she glanced back toward the table and his seat was empty. She found him a moment later. Not dancing, not drinking, just standing at the edge of the floor, arms crossed, eyes on her, the same arrogant composure firmly in place. She had a brief fantasy of racing to grab the bottle of red she’d left on their table and dashing it all over the white shirt barely masking his muscled frame, anything to see what he looked like when he finally let the stick go.

The lead singer of the live band was deep in her Janet Jackson fantasy. His eyes tracked Kiiti's sway back and forth and she let them. And when his gaze found hers and held it, she felt the floor shift slightly under her feet. Not the wine, she thought, or not only the wine.

Ashanti had a word for this. Foolish. She was barely a year out from the Arume disaster, had spent that year carefully stomping out anything that might give another fool a foothold, and here she was on a dance floor at a wedding no less, letting a man who looked at her like that make the floor move under her feet.

That look again. Barely controlled disdain, like he couldn't have seen a creature less deserving of his regard.

She was going to get to the bottom of it tonight or her name wasn't Kiiti.