Party Girl

Chapter Eleven

The remainder of the day was a whirlwind of activity for Hannah, a fact for which she was fiercely grateful. Immersed in meetings about podcast content, as well as organizing a list of questions she wanted answers to for the upcoming CATE Fete article, kept her from obsessing about Dalton.

And the fact that she was falling in love with him.

Oddly enough, making peace with that revelation had been easy once she’d been forced to face it, to the point where she was surprised she hadn't figured it out for herself. Then again, maybe her ignorance wasn’t that surprising. Dalton had been right; going to bed with him had brought them closer together on an emotional level she’d never experienced before. It had scared the hell out of her, so she’d jumped at the first opportunity to push him away.

Granted, being thought of as a good-time fuck was one hell of an opportunity to back off. But now that she was in the calm light of day, she could somewhat forgive him for that offensive thought since at the time he hadn’t even known her.

She wrinkled her nose at the residual sting those words—good-time fuck—left behind. Honestly, she’d thought her skin was much thicker than that. After all, she’d grown up on the internet, where all forms of trolling and bullying thrived. She thought she’d schooled herself to not let the slings and arrows hurt her.

But one careless word from Dalton, and it felt like the world was ending.

Obviously she’d been hypersensitive about the man from the beginning. That should have been another clue that she was in way too deep. From the first, she’d wanted Dalton to approve of everything in her life, and when he didn’t, she all but fainted with a ridiculous bout of Victorian-style vapors.

It was almost too embarrassing to even think about.

The thing was, his opinions mattered to her. They mattered, because she wanted him to feel the same way about her as she did about him. How had she described him to Bebe Zaiger? Perfect beyond imagining. That was how she saw him.

But, now that her so-called trust issues had prompted her to push him away after the greatest sex she’d ever had, she knew she was nowhere near perfect in his eyes.

If you can’t trust me enough to let me the fuck in, then I don’t know if I can trust you enough to keep on trying.

Maybe he was ready to give up on her, because she was the one who was the bad job who wasn’t worth the distraction.

How typical of her. She finally managed to get her head out of her ass just in time to realize she’d blown it with the one person who mattered the most.

Dalton.

Her unicorn.

Yes, she wanted to protect her autonomy, and she didn’t want to have anyone dictate what her life was supposed to be. But Chester had been right; quibbling over her role as a professional party girl when that was no longer her job was absurd. Sure, Dalton wanted her out of the party scene, but it had been her choice to move on from a job she no longer loved. She knew that.

Dalton needed to know it, too.

Just as he needed to never again think of her as a good-time fuck.

If she could just sit him down long enough to tell him all this, they’d be all set.

But at this point, would he even want to listen to what she had to say?

Minutes dripped by as Hannah became an obsessive clock-watcher, willing the clock to magically flip to quitting time. Tonight was the CATE Fete, the annual ball that had once been her ultimate white whale. Now, however, with so much riding on mending fences with Dalton, all she wanted to do was get through it so she could hunt him down and spend however long it took convincing him that he needed to give her another chance.

The anxiety building up inside somehow had the ability to bring time to a near standstill, and she almost cried in relief when five o'clock finally came. The fete didn't start for another couple hours, so she zoomed home to get gussied up in her masquerade finery. It took about an hour to get showered and changed, but Hannah approved of what she saw in her bedroom’s full-length mirror.

The floor-length sheath she’d chosen was a satiny flow of shimmering gold. The plunging V-neckline was dramatic to say the least, and it was echoed in the back with an even deeper plunge and held up by thin straps, leaving her arms bare. In keeping with the gold theme, she’d smoothed body lotion with a faint golden sheen to it over every inch of exposed skin. She then applied gold-toned makeup to play up her preferred smoky-eyed party look, and she liked that it worked both with the gold Venetian mask, and without. The last thing she did before leaving the house was grab up a gold wrap and her well-stocked work bag.

Time to go.

As a native Chicagoan, Hannah didn't need GPS to tell her where the school was. Located on the northern edge of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, the property had everything it could possibly want, from the pristine woods bordering the lake, to the sprawling urban excitement of a major city just beyond its twelve-foot-high brick walls. Several outer buildings dotted the multi-acre property, including a solarium, the dorms that she’d once tried desperately to get into, a first-class gymnasium, stables, and a boathouse. The crown jewel, however, was the original building of the school itself. The rambling Gothic Revival structure, with its wealth of ostentatious spires and its pointed, cathedral-style windows, looked like it had escaped from a madman’s fairy tale. One wing shot off to a glass-domed greenhouse, while another wing ended with a belltower that Hannah suspected was inhabited by a French-speaking hunchback. The main entrance was dominated by a massive set of wooden and ironwork doors that would have done Hogwarts proud.

As she handed her car keys over to the valet, she was only sorry she hadn’t tried harder to get into this stunning school.

“Ah, Hannah Raven. Thank you so much for coming to our little soirée this evening.” A wizened old man, no more than five feet tall and bald as a cue ball, appeared at her elbow just as she walked into the Main Hall, her jaw fairly dropping at the sight of the school’s crest set in an intricate—and probably priceless—mosaic at the center of the hall’s marble floor. “I’m Ezekiel Armistead, Assistant Headmaster and your humble tour guide for the evening. Uh...” He took out a pair of John Lennon-style glasses, put them on and peered at her through the rounded lenses. “You are Hannah Raven, correct? I’ve seen quite a few photos and videos of you, but you’ve never been quite so golden in any of those.”

“That’s probably because I’ve never dressed up like a bottle of poison before.” Intrigued, she shook his hand, all the while searching his face curiously. “Forgive me for making assumptions, Mr. Armistead, but until this moment I never would have guessed that you were an avid YouTube viewer, which is where you would have found all my videos.”

“YouTube...? Oh, goodness me, no.” He laughed, and it was such an honestly amused sound she couldn’t help but smile along with him. “I’m afraid the technology of this era has left me in the dust, my dear. But that doesn’t mean I’m not surrounded by your fans. One fan in particular, actually, and that fan asked me personally to be your guide. Now,” he gently took her elbow and guided her toward an open doorway when she would have asked for details on her so-called fan, “allow me to show you where the fete’s going to be kicked off. If we’re quick, I’m sure we can introduce you to the headmistress herself before things get too hectic.”

The moment they crossed the threshold into what Hannah could only describe as a ballroom—certainly next-level awesome, since she’d never been in a school that had an actual ballroom—she was transported into the glittering, gilded world of Romeo and Juliet. Round, linen-covered tables ringed the dance floor while a DJ worked on setting up his equipment on a raised dais. A replica of the iconic fish tank where Romeo and Juliet met was placed smack in the middle of it all, emitting a peaceful blue light while exotic fish swam lazily through the bubbles and faux seaweed. People dressed in black chef’s uniforms swarmed several banquet tables, arranging delectable-looking platters of all sorts of finger food, while a man worked at assembling a portable bar beneath a chandelier that would have looked right at home in Buckingham Palace.