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By Root 1074 0

got up to stretch a little. Dessert wouldn’t be served until later on, if anyone had the appetite for it then. Somehow, almost three hours had slipped by already, and since we began the dinner a little late, it was almost time for people to start getting back home. We opened another bottle of wine. As a precaution, I’d stocked my kitchen with a few extra bottles. I was glad I had, since we had just run out of the specially paired wines. We put on some livelier music and tried to get a dance party going, but nobody was into dancing much besides the four of us core supper-club members. Finally, at around midnight, I put out bowls of the amaretto ice cream that I’d made earlier that week, each one topped with caramel sauce and a crisp amaretti cookie that I’d baked that day. I ended up talking a bit with Morgan as we all stood around the kitchen, chatting about the dinner and wines and so forth. When I cornered Karol about how things were going with George, she just shrugged.

“We’re just friends, that’s all,” she explained. “There was never going to be any hope of anything else.”

“I see,” I said. I hadn’t realized that this was in fact the case all along, but it made sense. Karol wouldn’t have wanted to invite someone she wasn’t comfortable with. George was nice, but they did truly seem to be on a platonic wavelength the entire night.

George was the first guest to take off for the night, explaining that he had to work early the next morning. Kara and Thaddeus were next to go, an hour or so later. We were listening to a dance-mix CD that Lauren and François had brought along as a gift. It was a pretty good mix, and we ended up staying up late listening to it as we chatted. Lauren and François also brought rubber bouncy balls to the party, for some reason, and we all enjoyed a run at popping them around the room.

“I’m way too full to dance,” Lauren said, shaking her head when Matt tried to take her hand. “I think I might throw up if I tried to.”

“So what does SOS stand for, anyway?” François asked at one point. It was the question we were all dreading earlier on, when it was just the four core members in my apartment. But no one had prepared a good answer for it then.

“Something-or-Other Supper Club,” I quickly filled in.

“Really? That’s all,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever. We just wanted to have some friends over; you know, it’s a supper club,” Matt said. Thankfully, the topic was quickly dropped. Also, around then I remembered to put a bowl out for contributions. In all, I had spent somewhere near $200 on ingredients for the meal. I couldn’t keep track of it all, actually. I’d gone so far as to purchase ingredients I didn’t end up using—white truffle oil I thought might be nice for the goat cheese crostinis, a whole tin of caviar, only half of which was used. A whole bottle of nice, expensive amaretto liqueur to spike the ice cream with, instead of a generic, imitation-flavor brand. That, plus the wines we owed Morgan for, amounted to a loss for the four of us of $20 to $30 each. It wasn’t so bad, compared to throwing a regular dinner party without asking for contributions. But I realized how grossly I’d underestimated the cost of the night.

Morgan was the last guest to go who wasn’t a core supper-club member, at around three in the morning. Just before he left, I remembered that I needed to pay him back for all the wines. We stepped into my bedroom for a minute while I found my checkbook.

“Is that enough? Are you sure?” I said, after handing him the check.

“Yeah, that’s perfect,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Well, thanks for bringing it, and for coming,” I said.

“No problem.”

We were silent for a second. I was holding a pen that had taken me a few minutes to find. For a moment, because I had been so used to holding a thin wineglass stem, I almost forgot what it was and started to bring it to my mouth. But I stopped myself just in time.

I had to give Morgan some credit for sticking around the longest of all the invited guests. But there was something desperately unanswered in our rapport. He had his jacket in hand, ready to