Cleo bustled herself through the revolving doors into the hotel lobby with more haste than class, shaking the smears of sleet from the shoulders of her dark coat and crossing her fingers that her hair wasn’t too frizzy. It had only been a short dash from the nearest tube to the venue, but, still, she wished that she’d been able to cram her umbrella into her diddy clutch bag.
Removing her damp coat and throwing it over her arm, Cleo followed the signs for the Oaklands Christmas Party through the warren of a hotel, noting that she wasn’t noticing any familiar faces. She’d been going for fashionably late, but maybe she’d veered into the offensively late bracket. She’d spent a little bit longer in the bath than she’d meant to, and far too much attention to her makeup (which, please god, had hopefully managed to stay put through the pressing fug of the tube journey and the spitting shower of sleet).
As she approached the atrium for the second-floor function area a blank-faced man in a dark suit appeared as if from nowhere and offered to take her coat and scarf to the cloakroom; Cleo gave up her damp, wintery burden gratefully. This place was even fancier than she’d anticipated. There had been talk that it would be. The headmaster’s ancient PA had finally retired that last summer, and with her went the tradition of a limp three-course turkey dinner in the little reservable area near the toilets at the pub a couple of roads away from the school. The PA’s replacement (who didn’t look like she was long out of secondary school herself…) had absolutely no interest in the fusty local, nor a mandatory novelty jumper rule. Cleo smoothed her palms against her new cocktail dress nervously. A stupid expense (particularly this close to Christmas) – but when she’d seen it in the shop she knew she had to have it. It was a soft and shiny material in rose gold which slouched forward a tad daringly off of her shoulders and hung loose across her frame, allowing it to flow over her body, catching the sheen of the lights. It felt festive and decadent and sexy (Cleo hoped that she herself would accordingly follow suit).
The broad space of the function room was lit at low-level only, but the white, silver and blue colour theme served to brighten the area. It felt more like a wedding than an office Christmas party, each round, white-clothed table sporting huge centre-pieces – oversized martini glasses filled with prickly sprigs of holly and soft, fat plumes of white feathers. Glitter-dipped laser-cut snowflakes in shades of gleaming silver, snow white and ice blue hung from the high ceiling, like something out of Frozen. Bright strands of silver lametta draped from the branches of a distastefully large real Christmas tree taking up one entire corner of the room. The standard rust-coloured hard-wearing carpeting detracted from, but didn’t ruin, the general effect.
Spying a work mate taking an artfully-angled photo of the tree, Cleo made a bee-line over to her.
“You look amazing,” Tia told her, approvingly, aiming an air-kiss in the vicinity of one cheek, then the other (events like this were weird, thought Cleo – it’s not like they greeted one another in the staff room like that). “Have you got a drink?”
“No, not yet. I’m going to pace myself. Don’t want a repeat of last year and all that!” Cleo laughed self-depreciatingly.
Tia raised one expertly-threaded eyebrow. “Well, don’t wait too long. There’s a budget behind that free bar, you know.”
Cleo double-took. “Free bar?”
“Yup. The management board has put an undisclosed sum behind the bar as a little festive bonus. You know, in lieu of us getting paid actual festive bonuses? But when it’s gone, it’s gone,” Tia shrugged, taking a generous gulp from her generously-large glass of white wine.
Cleo glanced behind her – that definitely explained the popularity of the bar area, which was already thronged with people. “Well, in that case,” she laughed. “I wouldn’t want to miss out on my bonus!”
Weighing up the merits between starting with and sticking with wine and mixing things up with a cheeky gin and tonic, Cleo approached the press of her glad-ragged colleagues, wondering ruefully if there was going to be anything left of the magical bar tab by the time she managed to get to the front and get served.
Then she saw him, at the front of the group, impeccable in a slim-fit navy suit with a silky-looking tie in a shade of lilac that a lesser man probably wouldn’t have got away with. Gray locked eyes with her. She saw him hesitate, a small exhale that hung over his lips, just for a moment. Then he rallied, gave her the international tipping hand to mouth motion that meant “do you want a drink?” Cleo beamed back as she nodded and mouthed “wine, please!”
Cleo hung back and watched as Gray’s turn at the bar arrived, watched him turn his megawatt smile on the male bartender (he just couldn’t stop himself from flirting, no matter who the recipient was, could he?). A minute or two later Gray pushed his way carefully through the queue and across to her, carrying a slender pint of Peroni in one hand and a large glass of wine in the other. Cleo took it gratefully.
“Lifesaver. Thank you.”
Gray glanced at her fully, taking her in from head to toe, sort of like he didn’t want to, but also like he couldn’t help himself. “You look nice,” he announced; Cleo tried to convince herself she’d imagined the slight grudging edge to his tone.
“You’re looking pretty sharp yourself there. Happy Christmas.” Gray accepted the proffered cheers, lightly clinking his glass against hers. Cleo took a drink, hoping it would serve to blunt the awkwardness. The wine was lovely, chilled and just the level of dryness that she liked best. (She hated that she hadn’t even had to specify.)
“Not on the amaretto, then?” Gray asked her, after a minute.
“No, not this year.” God, was it really a year since the night she’d tossed the hot and alcoholic contents of her stomach across Gray’s polyester jumper? And now they were come to this, an ill-advised crush and an iller-advised text message, and a year that had left her heart feeling a bit tossed, hot and alcoholic too.
“So, how much do you think they’ve actually coughed up and put behind the bar?” Gray asked conversationally, as his eyes continued to wander across Cleo, and she saw how he noticed her dark plum manicure, chosen to match well with her favourite winter-toned lipstick, the delicate style of the high heels she’d borrowed from Nora, impractical in this weather but gorgeous with the dress. That had always been one of her favourite things about Gray. She knew that he really noticed things, noticed her.
“Enough,” Cleo answered, vaguely. “I’m on my best behaviour tonight.”
“Oh,” Gray said mildly, before raising his pint to his lips. “Shame. You know how much I love Drunk Cleo.”
There it was – her opening. “Well, I think I’m still recovering from Nora’s hen do,” Cleo said in a jokey tone. “Deathly hungover on the Eurostar – not my finest morning.”
Gray appraised her, hopefully expertly reading between the lines of the pseudo-conversation. “Well, that’s a bridesmaid’s prerogative, I feel. Getting wasted, I mean. It’s… fair enough.”
What? What was fair enough? That she had decided to call his flirty bullshit bluff? That she fancied him (she surely couldn’t be the first secretly lovesick mate Gray had ever come across)? Or was it literally just fair enough she’d had a bit to drink on her best friend’s hen night? Arghhh!
Deciding that to back away from the conversational minefield was as dangerous as wading forward, Cleo persevered. “Yeah. It was overdue.” She took a deep breath and chickened out. “A big, blowout night like that, I mean.”
Gray continued to look at her a little more intently than she felt was strictly warranted. “Should we get back in the queue for another drink before the bar tab is closed?” he asked, after a moment.
Cleo motioned with her wine glass, meaning to illustrate that she was fully stocked up and fine, but was a little startled to see that over half of her drink was already gone. Her resolution to avoid the twin temptations that were alcohol and Gray Somers wavered appallingly. As if he sensed it, Gray twisted back towards the bar area and offered his elbow to her, like something out of a period drama. Cleo looped her free hand through it and allowed him to escort her. She felt the heaviness of his suit jacket through the slippery material of her dress and against her hip, took a moment to appreciate the fluid rhythm that their two bodies found immediately. She tried to ignore how her heart felt huge and heavy in her chest.
“This room is massive,” Gray pointed out as they crossed it, shaking his head. “It will never fill up.”
“Yeah, they must be used to much bigger functions than the Oakland Academy Chrimbo piss-up,” Cleo agreed. “Classy, plus-one, corporate affairs.”
“Isn’t that what this is?” teased Gray.
“God, can you imagine bringing a plus-one to a work thing?” Cleo shuddered dramatically.
“Well, you’re my forever favourite plus-one when it comes to professional festive indulgence, don’t forget.”
* * *
The recently divorced Head of English was having a whale of a time. Her dark lipstick had rubbed off on the rims of countless glasses of vodka tonics, leaving her with an odd, clown-like red ring around her mouth. Vodka in one hand, a slightly bedraggled sprig of mistletoe in the other, she danced from bloke to bloke demanding they plant one on her over-powdered cheek. Gray obliged politely when she targeted him, wishing her a Merry Christmas as he did so. Highly amused with herself, their sozzled colleague then proceeded to waggle the mistletoe above Cleo’s head.
Cleo startled, wondering if the old dear was after a little I-kissed-a-girl-cherry-chapstick action, before jumping almost out of her skin when Gray, quicker on the uptake, stepped forward to kiss her. His lips were warm but dry, and he landed half on her lips and half on her chin, and it was all over before she really knew it was happening. Giggling away to herself, the squiffy department head trotted off to find further victims.
Cleo couldn’t help but laugh. “Wow. I think that was my first ever kiss under the mistletoe. Thanks.”
Gray immediately coloured. “Happy to oblige,” he blustered. “Did you know that, er, mistletoe, it’s really interesting, the, er, history of it, I mean.”
Cleo smiled. She liked it when Gray got his history geek on. “Go on then.”
“Well, the ancient druids thought it was a powerful fertility symbol. The Greeks too, they used it as an aphrodisiac. But then the Victorians started hanging it up at Christmas time and all the poor old maids used to hang around underneath it all night. If they got a kiss from someone then that meant that they were going to get married the following year.”
Cleo laughed again. “Well, I guess I’m alright then,” she teased. “Phew. Good to know. I’ll just get Nora’s out of the way and then I’ll get right on with that wedding planning.” Gray coloured even further and there was a delicious little squirm of enjoyment in Cleo’s tummy at the sight of it.
The uninterested looking DJ had been setting up his decks in the opposite corner to the Christmas tree for the last twenty minutes or so and finally began to announce the start of his set over the crackly speakers. Feeling decidedly more festive, Cleo tossed back what little was left of her drink. The opening bars of Blurred Lines boomed out into the room. Cleo wondered, as she always did in this scenario, if it was anti-feminist of her to immediately crash her way to the dance floor (she vehemently hated this song whilst sober – her feelings towards the song were a reasonably useful sort of drunk barometer, actually).
Her colleagues – all keyed up on festive (and free bar) euphoria – descended on the small parquet-tiled dance floor area en masse and immediately set about dad dancing, lots of vague shuffling rhythmically from one foot to the other accompanied by plenty of pointing at the ceiling. The Head of English twirled past, a few sheets of toilet paper trailing her like a wedding train, pierced in place by her kitten heel. The usually extremely stately Head of Admissions was wearing his tie around his forehead, Rambo-style; a few alarmingly thick puffs of chest hair curled out from the now-gaping neck of his shirt. Tia was swaying on the spot, completely out of time with the beat of the song, with her eyes closed and holding her wine glass aloft over her head like it was a lighter at a festival. Cleo let one of the guys who taught P.E. spin her around, feeling her dress swim and settle, feeling silly and light and free.
Gray grabbed her hands when the DJ started playing Fairytale of New York, his palms large and warm and dry, his grip assured but gentle. He bounced with her as everyone screamed out the words to the chorus, spinning her around to face him so that she could sing the Kirsty MacColl parts of the verses to him and he could respond with the Shane MacGowan lines in turn. And Cleo thought about how she was very much in love with him, almost abstractly, like she was thinking about the heart of somebody else entirely. The thought didn’t thrill, and it didn’t hurt – it just settled into her bones like marrow, and that was that. Gray brought her in close as the song wound to an end, all instrumental, bending their elbows until suddenly they were dancing with one another, as opposed to just next to one another. And, even though she knew so much better, Cleo let her eyes flutter closed, felt her face do the universally recognised ‘kiss-me’ tilt towards his, at last giving up the ghost of resistance after a long, painful year. Finally, Gray would kiss her. And then, in the immortal words of Taylor Swift, it was going to be forever, or it was going to go down in flames. But at least it would be something.
An enthusiastically Irish-dancing colleague Riverdanced past them, catching Gray’s shoulder and jostling them; Cleo clung to the spell of the moment before, as if through sheer force of will she could prevent it from breaking. It didn’t work; Gray stepped back; his hands disengaged from hers. The track changed to something thumping; the speaker system crackled in protest. Gray smiled at her, and there was something sad around the edges of it.
I’ll get us some drinks, he mouthed over the boom and crash of the music, before making his quick getaway towards the bar area, now sadly cash only, leaving Cleo standing still in the middle of the dancefloor, like the eye in a storm of drunkenly dancing teaching staff. She felt the bubble of hope and excitement popping in her chest, the remnants fizzing against her skin. Heedless, Tia grabbed up the hands that Gray had just dropped, sweeping Cleo into a semi-waltz. Her laughter, as it always did, forced laughter from Cleo, and when Gray returned from the bar, large white wine in hand, she stepped back to allow him into their jokey box step, but she didn’t tilt her head again.