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dining room where no one but the caterers would go; he took my hand and looked at me with big, sad, disturbingly dark blue eyes.
    “I want to apologize to you for my lack of gallantry last night,” he said.
    “Oh.” I hesitated because I’d written off last night’s transgression by deciding that he had been too drunk to know what he was doing. I wasn’t sure now whether it was better or worse that he had been in full command of his actions and remembered them clearly.
    “And I have a little gift,” he continued, “such as it is, to make amends.” He reached into the pocket of his pistachio-colored jacket and produced a book, one of his. “Read the inscription.”
    I opened the cover to the title page and found written in a manly scrawl in black pen: “To Georgiana—May she be as gracious as she is lovely.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “You didn’t have to do this, but thank you.”
    As a waitress with an empty tray nudged past us, he put his hand to his heart and said, “It was most ungentlemanly of me to take that liberty.” He sighed and turned those startling blue eyes, now mournful, on me as he confessed, “I’ve revealed myself to be the scruffy boy from Wichita that I truly am, an interloper in this glamorous world of grace and riches—the turd in the punch bowl.”
    I had to laugh at that image—especially if I imagined Michael’s grandmother standing next to that punch bowl, crystal ladle in hand, calling for her smelling salts before she fainted.
    “Oh, Mr. Ritter, in those plaid pants you look just as preppie as the rest of them back in the living room,” I assured him.
    He looked down at his pants for a second and grinned. “They’re awful, aren’t they?”
    “Yesterday, I saw Michael’s uncle Reg in a pair that had little green whales on them. That was infinitely worse.”
    He laughed, whirled deftly to grab two cocktail glasses off a passing tray, and said as he handed one to me, “You must call me Forrest. Any girl I compromise has the right to call me by my first name.” Then he clinked his glass against mine, said, "Cheers!” and drained his drink in two swallows.
    I sipped mine more hesitantly, but it wasn’t bad, and I looked up at him for his diagnosis.
    “Whiskey sour,” he said. “You’ve graduated to the harder stuff, Miss Georgia.”
    “Maybe it will help.”
    He leaned one hip back against the little sink built into the bar and asked, “Help with what?”
    “Oh … fitting in here, I guess. This place is pretty intimidating. And I insulted the matriarch yesterday, right in front of her. I think Michael’s forgiven me, though.”
    “Ah, the matriarch. You mean old Iron Knickers Betsy?”
    I gulped out a laugh and spilled my drink so much that he took it from me, then shook his hand for a second to dry it before he decided to lick it off instead. I frowned and looked away because this seemed like such an oddly intimate gesture—I felt like I shouldn’t be witnessing it. It weirded me out, so I asked, “Iron Knickers Betsy? Is that what they call Michael’s grandmother?”
    “That’s what I call her. I think Don and the others just call her Sarge.” He gently maneuvered me closer to the bar to get out of the way of another uniformed servant. This put us deeper into the little nook, me and the sink and the rows of gleaming glasses and the famous writer of incomprehensible fiction. I felt a little dizzy all of a sudden.
    “I, um, need to get back to—”
    I gagged as Forrest Ritter’s mouth silenced mine and his tongue began pushing its way down my throat. Without thinking, I reached up my hand, still clutching his autographed book, and whacked him on the side of the head with it. He pulled back, sputtering, then spun away and roared down the hallway as I stood there trying to catch my breath without re-experiencing this awful taste of alcohol, cigarettes, and lax dental hygiene. I felt like vomiting and crying and running out of the house and straight