The rooftop stopped being an engagement party the second our circle formed—it was less toasting the happy couple and more season premiere of The Bachelor: Narcissist Edition.
What began as polite hellos morphed into the kind of gathering that happens when women who haven't been touched since the Obama administration suddenly realize salvation has arrived in the form of me, poured into a Tom Ford tux.
Forget literature, politics, or anything resembling adult conversation—we were playing the world's oldest game: seduction, masquerading as networking.
I was the sun, and they were orbiting planets, each spinning with their own flavor of desperate gravity. Madison to my right, heiress cosplay dialed up to HBO drama levels. Charlotte, clinically fascinated like she was writing her dissertation on Male Ego in the Wild.
