“I hate parties.”
Lance Bass straightened out his bow tie for the fifth time that evening as he walked alongside the girl in the simple yet stunning light blue dress. He grinned, thinking how perfect she looked in such an elegant outfit, how perfect she looked, peroid. He took hold of her hand. “Explain to my why I’m here again.”
She squeezed his hand and grinned. “You’re my dancing partner.”
“Is that why you keep me around?”
“That, and it is your house I’m staying at,” Hazel said, pulling him through the entrance of the ballroom. She glanced behind her at the nervous young man that was clearly not used to experiencing the emotion. “Justin, you shouldn’t look so obvious. Karen can smell fear.”
“Thanks for the encouragement,” he muttered sarcastically, stepping past them and ruffling her hair in the process. “You know, I think I liked it better when you barely uttered five sentences to me.”
“And I think I liked it better when you used to be man enough to stand up to a girl.”
Lance burst up laughing. “Oh man, I even felt the sting in that one.”
Justin scowled, but it quickly evaporated into a smile, then his look of fear returned. Taking a deep breath, he excused himself from the couple and took his first steps into the crowd of the ballroom. Following the flow of the guests, Hazel and Lance found their way to the dance floor. She rested her head comfortably on his shoulder and a reflexive sigh escaped her lips as they began to sway to the classical music that was coming from the live minature orchestra on the other side of the large room. She would have been content to stay like that forever, but, as it so often happens in life, a voice cut through the air, destorying her peaceful mood. That simple sound made her cring and, although the pain on her side had ceased long ago, a strange throbbing eminated from her ribs.
“Well, if it isn’t Hazel Fairchild.”
Her head lifted just as Lance had turned to see who it was. Lance immediately stopped moving, revealing that he too remembered all too well the face that smiled mockinly at them both. Neal Klien had a face that was hard too forget.
“It’s been awhile,” Neil said with an omnious tone. “You’re looking wonderful Hazel. Less…bruised, should I say?”
Hazel could feel Lance starting to move forward, and held his shoulder tenaciously. She wanted to slap that smile off of Neil’s face just as badly as Lance did, but she knew that this was his territory, that now was neither the time nor the place. Instead, she quickly shot Lance a disapproving look and grabbed his hand to pull him away.
“I’ll bump into you later,” Neil called after them, and then added, with a much lower voice, “I’ll make sure of it.”
~~
Her name was Sita Perne. Not Mrs. Richards, not the future Mrs. Richards, not J.J.’s little wife to be, just Sita Perne. Yes, the woman named Sita Perne, thought she was about ready to jump out of the window next to her in order to save herself from the arm she was forced to hold, from the congratulations she didn’t deserve or want, and just from everything that surrounded her that she suddenly found herself hating.
When Karen Cooper jumped out of nowhere, insisting she needed to talk to her, she thought she would hug Karen forever for taking her away from that man, from her future husband. What stopped her was Karen’s expression.
“What is it?” she asked when they were far enough away from J.J., next to the dance floor.
“We have a problem,” Karen said. “Actually, a couple of problems.”
“Karen, what? Tell me!”
Hesitating, she said, “Well…you see…I sort of invited Justin to the party.”
“Yes, and?” Before Karen could continue, it clicked in Sita’s mind just what Karen was hinting at, and she said, “Oh, Karen, tell me he’s not here.”
“Which one?”
“What!”
Karen cringed. “Joey or JC? I swear, I didn’t think Justin would bring them! Actually, I think it might have been Hazel that invited them, it probably had nothing to do with Justin at all! We should have a word with her later. Oh, Sita, maybe you should sit down.”
That was probably a good idea, except Sita found that she couldn’t move. “Where are they?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to avoid all three of them all night.”
“You invited Justin to my party but are trying to avoid him?”
“Well, that’s all part of the plan-"
“Stop!” Sita held her hands in the air. “No, I don’t want to hear about it.” She glanced around her, hoping to see him yet at the same time praying she wouldn’t, and then she turned back to Karen, who was also doing her own inspection of the people surrounding them. “We’re getting out of here.”
“You can’t leave! This is your engagement party!”
“No, this is J.J.’s engagement party. My presence really isn’t required.”
“Where are we going to go?”
Sita was already pushing past the guests and, sighing, Karen was quick to follow. She couldn’t breath and the lack of oxygen must have been affecting her brain, because she could hardly think. All she could do was feel her heart in her chest, threatening to explode internally, and the sudden awareness that JC was in the room. She had felt it in the duration of the party, but had promptly ignored it, because he couldn’t have been there. There was no way. Being friend’s with Karen, she should have expected anything.
“How many people are here?” Karen said behind her, as the crowd around them had grown thicker and the exit seemed to have floated farther away.
“Hurry!”
Of course, Karen just happened to be the only person wearing red that evening.
Justin Timberlake had been tracing Karen for almost half an hour, always just a few feet behind her, but somehow, she had lost him. Seeing two familiar faces, he joined his friends who stood near the wall closest to the entrance of the ballroom.
“I lost her,” he announced, grabbing a drink from the tray of a butler who had just passed by. He gulped it down and placed the glass on a nearby table. “And she calls me slick.” He glanced at JC, who leaned against the wall, silent, as expected, and then at Joey, who stood perfectly erect, his eyes glued on something across the room. Following his gaze, Justin saw the girl in the green dress. “Have you talked to her?”
Joey’s eyes wavered and he looked down. “Not yet.”
Justin nodded and then addressed the other. “Enjoying the party?”
JC shrugged and remained silent.
“Dammit!” Joey’s voice was shrill, his eyes now combing through the large ballroom with a desperate sort of urgency filling them up. “I can’t see her anymore. JC, do you see her?”
He glanced up for a second and then looked down. “No.”
Justin had joined Joey in scanning the room. “They couldn’t have just disappeared. Hell, listen to me, of course they can. They’ve done it before.” Then he caught sight of a flash of red heading quickly to the entrance and he started moving forward. “There’s the witch.”
Sita Perne, just a few feet away from the entrance, felt Karen grab her arm and hiss, “Justin’s seen me!” Stopping, she looked to the side and saw the three men heading in their direction, Justin in the lead, Joey second, JC trailing, slowly. She picked up the bottom of her dress and started to run.
The two girls were just a few feet in the nearly deserted hallway outside of the ballroom, ready to make their second great escape, when someone called out to them and they were forced to stop.
“Karen!”
They both paused with their backs to the entrance. Karen was the first to turn, smiling wickedly in response to Justin’s evil gleam in her direction. “Slick! What a pleasant surprise. Good to see you again. How have you been darling?”
Sita watched Joey emerge from the crowded room and take a stand right behind Justin, who stood ten feet away. His brown eyes caught hers, the abyss of sadness that entered them making her stomach twist in guilt and forcing her eyes down. A few seconds later she could feel JC in the hallway, standing at a distance, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t need to.
“Where were you off to this time?” Justin asked, confidently placing his hands in his pockets and leaning back on his heels. “Back home? To Sita’s? Alaska?”
Karen smirked and crossed her hands over her chest. “You know I hate the cold.”
“I haven’t been enjoying chasing you around that room.”
“I have.”
“This is all a game to you isn’t it? You’re just toying around with me. Well, you’re wasting your time, which I could care less about, but you’re wasting my time also, and I’ve had just about enough of you.”
Karen giggled. “Have you?”
“Yes,” Justin said sternly. “The only reason I came here tonight was to tell you that I’m through with you, that this time it’s really over. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you at the club, I guess I was a little shocked to see you again when I had been so blissfully free of you for two years, but I should have informed you then that I really have no interest in you whatsoever.”
Karen’s smile vanished. She shrugged and started moving past Sita, back down the hallway. “As you wish Justin.” When Sita started to follow her, Karen gave her a hard stare, telling her to stay where she was. Adamatly, Sita stayed, feeling exposed without the guard of her friend. All four of them watched Karen descend down the hallway, stopping at a door that lead into another of the various drawing rooms in the Richards mansion, and going in, looking over Justin one last time before disappearing in the room. She left the door open slightly.
Almost phsyically detaching his eyes from the door, Justin looked at Sita and said, “How have you been?”
Sita looked up, but her glance immediately went to JC. He leaned against the opposite wall, his eyes greeting hers instantly, as if he had been staring at her the entire time. “I’m ok. How about you Justin?”
But Justin didn’t answer, again glaring at the door down the hallway. Frustrated, he ran his hand through his hair and then muttered, “Damn her,” before starting towards the room Karen was in. He roughly charged into the room and closed the door behind him.
And then there was three.
Sita stayed gazing at the door, almost afraid to turn away, like the door was the only real object in a world that was unsteady and blurry and if she looked away she would fade into the rest of the background. She knew Joey waited for her to address him or at least look at him, she had no idea what JC was thinking, but she tried to block both of them out and focus on the door, hoping that maybe they would both just go away and leave her to her world of blurs.
“Sita,” Joey’s voice echoed in the distance, “Sita, what happened?”
The question was so clean and honest it made her feel dirty. She refused to look at him, but she said, “I don’t know. I had to get away.”
“From what? From me?”
“No. No, it wasn’t you at all.”
“Then what was it? And why have you come back now, engaged?”
“I have to marry J.J.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“Is that what you want?” a different voice said.
The sound finally forced her eyes from the door and she looked at JC once more. “What I want and what needs to happen are two different things.”
“No,” JC said, “They aren’t.”
“I thought you understood.”
“What?” Joey said, but the two seemed to have forgotten he was in the room.
“I do,” JC said. “I understand the past two years, but not the present. I know you love her, but how much more of your life are you going to waste away, are you going to sacrifice, in order to please someone else?”
“As much as I have to.”
“Then I guess you aren’t the person I thought you to be.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Joey asked, confusion shaping his face. “JC, what’s going on?”
JC looked at him for a long time, a glance Joey didn’t understand since it was full of compassion, of pain, like he was trying to apologize for something. “You’re one of my closest friends Joey,” he said. It was the kindest sentence JC had ever uttered to him. “There’s something you have to know.”
“No,” Sita instantly said, her skin feeling as though it were being pulled in different direction. “Stop.”
Joey looked at the girl and then slowly turned back to his friend. “What is it?”
“If you tell him I’ll hate you forever,” Sita warned. “If you say one word…”
JC’s grin was small, like a faded version of an actual smile. “Do you think it would matter either way if you hated me? Even if you told me you hated me everyday for the rest of my life, do you think that could possibly change the fact that I love you?”
It was as though the rest of the people had fallen off of the planet and nothing else remained except the three of them, being held still by the tension surrounding them that was softly electric. JC ignored Sita’s pleading glance at him and watched his friend, but Joey was looking at the girl and strangely enough, seeing her as even more perfect than she had ever been before. “All this time…” he said softly, more to himself than to either of them, “It’s been going on all this time…Is that why you left? It is, isn’t it? And that’s how you knew,” he turned to JC, “That’s how you always seemed to understand.” His face suddenly hardened as more realizations came crashing in his vision. “I don’t understand.”
“Joey.”
He looked at Sita and then took a step towards her. “Not when we were togother Sita. Tell me….not then…” But he already knew the answer. He got lost in the floor, swallowing hard, and said, “You’re marriage to J.J. has something to do with Kal, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “It’s the only…solution I could come up with.”
“None of us being with anyone we wanted,” Joey said, unable to hide the bitterness from entering his tone. “Nice solution. And you love him?”
Slowly, she nodded.
Joey swallowed again. “I see.” Now it was unbearable for him to look at either one of them. “I need to get out of here.” He started down the hallway, out of the mansion.
“Where are you going?” Sita asked, but he didn’t turn around and soon he had turned out of sight, the number in the hallway now reduced to two.
“I forgot to congratulate you.”
Sita closed her eyes. “Please don’t. Don’t you see what you just did to him?”
There was no mocking smile on his face, no feeling in his tone whatsoever. He said, “Congratulations on becoming the future Mrs. Richards.”
“My name is Sita Perne,” she said reflexively.
He moved closer to her. “I’m glad you remember who you are. I’m glad you can say your name with so much pride and conviction, because you know that name belongs to you, that behind that name is a woman who is so close to seeing exactly what the word individual means. I love Sita Perne. Nothing, not even your new title, will make me change my mind. I just wish that there was something I could do to change yours.”
“It’s not my mind that needs to be changed.”
“Yours is the only mind that should matter. What do you want Sita?”
She shook her head tiredly. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Yes you do,” said a voice behind them, and they looked back to see Kalika in a beautiful black silk dress, loose on her, making her look like a lost child caught trying on her mother’s clothes. Tears streamed down her cheeks, polluted black from her mascara, which oddly matched her and the expression on her face that was somewhere between sorrowful and determined. It was clear she had been listening in for quite some time by the dry tears that mingled in with the fresh ones. “You want him, right? And he,” her lower lip started to tremble, “He wants you.”
“Kal, you don’t have to do this,” Sita began, but her sister quickly interrupted her.
“I thought if I asked you to go you’d forget about him and move on to someone else like you’ve always done in the past. And even as the months wore on and it was clear he would never forget about you, I thought, at least I still have him, at least we had our time together in the studio.” She chuckled humorlessly. “I didn’t predict you’d come home engaged Sita. I tried not to think about you at all while you were away. It was the only way to get through it…but now you’re back and all I think about is you. You said that it wasn’t your mind that needed to change…well,my mind is changed. I can’t…keep holding onto something that was never mine. It’s ridiculous to continue on with marrying J.J. just for my sake. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself…I can barely live with myself now.”
Sita took a step towards Kalika, but her sister shot out her hand and shook her head. “Don’t say anything, please. Just call the engagement off.” Turning to JC, she said, “I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “I don’t blame you.”
She looked at Sita and shrugged, a strangely casually action for a girl used to the restrictions of her proper posture and packaged suit. “I had to try.”
“I know,” Sita said softly, and opened her mouth to say something more, but a loud crach resonated through the hallway, interrupting her. The three quickly rushed to the open, tall double doors of the ballroom and saw, in the middle of the wooden tiled dance floor, the guests crowding around something. Or someone.
“Sita!” a girl screamed.
“Hazel?” Sita called back, already throwing off her satin green heels to start sprinting through the swarms of guests, cutting a solid line through the room. Squeezing her way through, she finally reached the two men brawling on the ground, arms flailing around, while a delicate figure coated in sky blue stood off to the side, her eyes following one man, obviously searching for a chance to jump in and attack the other. The hazel eyes leaped to Sita and the girl ran to her.
“It was Neal’s fault,” Hazel said accusingly. “He was following us all night, he was purposely instigating Lance to fight him.”
Sita looked down to see Lance on top of Neal, his right fist connecting to Neal’s lower jaw. “Looks like that was the wrong move on Neal’s part.”
“Excuse me!” J.J. had pushed his way to the front of the crowd as well, just as JC was following down the path Sita had created. “What’s going on here?” J.J. asked, as if he couldn’t see for himself and needed someone to explain the scene to him. “Get off of him!” He started for the pair of men just as JC was getting a hold of Lance’s wild arms and pulling him off of Neal.
By this time Karen and Justin had appeared, Karen’s lipstick smeared on both her lips and his. Justin’s eyes grew wide as he saw Lance’s bloodied lip and angered face, and he muttered, “What’d I miss?”
“Let me go!” Lance snarled, fighting JC’s grip.
“Bring it on pretty boy!” Neal snapped back, his arms held by J.J.
“Shut up Neal,” Hazel said, glaring.
Sita walked up to JC. “Let’s get them out of here.”
“Who is that?” J.J. exclaimed, his eyes squinting at JC. “Where have I seen you before?” Then his eyes grew wide and Sita knew that the evening had gone from bad to worse. “The singer?” J.J. said, and let go of Neal, who hadn’t expected the release and fell to the floor. J.J. kept glancing from Sita to JC, his face resembling Lance’s more and more as the seconds ticked by. “What are you doing here?”
Sita glanced at JC, who stared apathetically at J.J., but she could see the blue eyes start to boil over and his own grip on Lance loosen. “Come on,” she said to him, tugging on the coat of his tux, “Let’s go.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” J.J. said.
“Party’s over,” JC said.
It only took a moment for Neal to leap off of the floor just as Lance had yanked free from JC’s weak hold on him. The four men collided into each other in a chaotic rage, and the crowd circuling them was forced to heave backwards, both Sita and Hazel flying back into various bodies. After a dizzying moment, Sita picked herself from off of the floor to see Justin had moved to try to come between J.J. and JC, while Hazel and Karen were both trying to separate Lance and Neal.
“Stay away from her!” J.J. yelled past Justin, who was pushing him back. JC stood as he had been before, although his hair was tousled and his shirt and coat slightly askew. J.J. pointed a menacing finger over Justin’s shoulder. “This is our engagement! Don’t you get it? How dare you come her!.”
Sita, after a quick search for any sight of her sister and finding nothing, stepped forward. When she opened her mouth that same hushed effect that she had owned before blessed the room. Even Lance and Neal seemed to tone themselves done considerably as the first words left the girl in green’s mouth.
“J.J.,” she began, “I hate to do this in front of your guests, your business associates, and your family, and I mean this as sincerely and as honestly as I can possibly suggest,” she paused, “This is no longer an egagement party.” The room seemed to mold together to share one giant eye that watched Sita as her hands lifted and she removed the single, beautiful ring from her finger and bent down, precisely, orderly, to place the object on the ground. Standing, she looked at J.J. once more. “We are no longer engaged.”