Author Games: Ace of Spades

Task One: Females

Florence French

He hadn't worn a ring when they met: that had been the first sign.

Florence French had once been a woman she now would have pitied – maybe even scorned, were she the type of person inclined to do so. She had always been pretty, of course, in a less cultivated way than she now was, and she had always had the brain she now had. But, fifteen years ago, she had reeked of something which now made her feel a wave of an emotion she thought might be disgust. It was a strange, visceral feeling, more powerful than almost any she had ever had. It resonated through her guts; it boiled in her stomach; it clawed at her throat. It was the most unpleasant thing she could remember experiencing.

She had smelled of desperation. Or at least, she thought she had. Paul had always claimed that he had never smelt it, but he had never been the most observant of men. She remembered, once, in a time when the two still bought each other presents when their anniversary came, she had forgotten to hide it and had left it on the counter; Peter had never so much as realized it was there. The look of surprise on his face had been genuine, she was sure of it. She had always had a knack for reading people, after all, and this was the one skill upon which she would wager her life, if she ever had to.

The evening they had met had been warm – or at least, it must have been; it was summer in New York, and it had been a few nights before the heat wave that hit the city. The weather hadn't mattered much, of course, when they had been standing in one of the top penthouses of the city. To this day, Florence was not quite sure how a forty-year-old man had ended up at a party filled where the oldest person might have been in their mid-twenties. She had her theories, of course: another girl he'd been doting upon, perhaps, though she must have been less pretty than her. What was she like? Florence often wondered. Was she taller than me? A brunette? What girl did I steal my husband from?

More often than not, the only answer brought forward by those questions was that she simply didn't care.

They had been in a well-lit room – she could still remember every detail of it. The carpet had been white angora, and the floors beneath it ebony; the couches leather and the paintings Degas. At the time she had been mesmerized by all the affluence of the room, and, though now she may have been desensitized to such things, she still saw the moment with the eyes of a child who's nicest belong had been a beat-up jalopy her father had once driven. The host's parents had been Upper East Side social climbers, so she had never had to want for anything. That had seemed like the perfect life to Florence. Even now, it still did. The only thing that had changed was how she wanted to achieve her goal.

Most everything else about that night, however, was fuzzy, confused by the pairing of time and alcohol, so that she could not be sure who even she had gone with. She thought it might have been a girl called Rebecca, who'd had the most dazzling eyes – or perhaps it was the other Becky, the one with the good hair. Both had been almost identical in character, and so opposite to Florence that she wondered how they had ever stayed friends as long as they had, though she supposed they were friends in that way that only teenagers or people just out of it could be; the kind that only stuck together because they used to see each other every day and now it was a mere convenience. The three had gone to high school together, and then the older two had pledge some sorority at NYU. Even then, Florence hadn't been able to remember which one it was, but she'd never forgotten to feign enthusiasm when they mentioned it.

She had been expecting her night to be dull. In fact, she had almost decided to cancel on Rebecca or Becky – whichever one it had been – when she had shown up at her door and they had left. The beginning of the night had completely failed to prove her wrong; she had spent an hour against the wall, her phone in one hand and a drink in the other, watching as people danced, everyone she might have known lost in the crowd. She had had half a mind to join them, but she'd never been particularly fond of dance floors. In a sitting room she could be the perfect hostess, as chatty as she was capable of knowing when to lay off, but once stripped of that status, she could do nothing but find another way to hide than to control the conversation.