Suggestions, she said. At a party like this. Maybe the problem wasn't that she was looking in the wrong places — maybe the problem was that she simply didn't know how to open her eyes. Don Juan was sure he could have found a man to take him to bed in a quarter hour flat at a place like this. Liquor was flowing, drugs were changing hands, she had her feet tucked up on the chair, the man at the next artist's station had his shirt half unbuttoned. The only thing keeping any of these people from falling into bed together was a whisper-thin line of inhibitions and the ratio of furniture to people who might be inclined to use it.

"Wait," he said, sitting up a bit straighter as a thought occurred to him. "Do you — apologies for being crass — do you not sleep with men?"

That might explain the difficulty, he supposed. Don Juan had no experience trying to sniff out the kinds of women who would sleep with other women (obviously) so maybe it was particularly challenging. And of course it could always be difficult to find a good partner, either in the sense of being physically competent or being emotionally and socially someone you didn't mind spending some time with... but it was simply not difficult to find a man eager to sleep with a woman, if your standards were marginal enough.

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MJ made this <3

Whatever she expected him to ask after apologizing for being crass, Irene absolutely hadn’t expected him to ask a question of that nature. It shocked her so much she could only let out the laugh that bubbled up in her chest. She deserved that, she really did. It was her own fault for being so vague and at a party like this - it was no wonder he had perhaps thought she wasn’t interested in men at all. She would explain to him just as soon as she stopped laughing.

It would happen any second now.

Once she was able to catch her breath, Irene shook her head. “I apologize, I should have been less oblique about it all, I suppose. I’m very much interested in men, though I suppose I understand how one could appreciate a woman’s body as well.” She gave a shrug, popping her shoulders. “I am an artist, after all, I enjoy drawing both male and female forms.”

Sighing, she stood up and took her glass, going over to the cart to make herself another drink. Perhaps she needed to be a bit more inebriated for this. “I suppose I’m separated enough from this to talk about it.” She mused. She’d certainly gone to the effort of forgetting the entire thing, only to have it resurface in the form of journals she’d kept. She poured herself another drink, making a second one for him in case he wanted it. If not, well, someone else would likely pick it up after not too long.

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Oh dear. He seemed to have stumbled upon another Big Topic. Big enough to merit making him another drink when he was only halfway through this one. Normally Don Juan was not one to encourage any sort of deep, probing conversation, but he didn't know how to extricate himself now. Maybe this was for the better, anyway... if he was engaged in a very lengthy discussion of whatever deep trauma she was about to unveil, at the very least he could be assured that no one was going to approach him and offer him opium. None of those sorts would want to risk falling into a conversation like this one promised to be. He could only hope that she didn't open up with another discussion of a grisly public suicide.

"Same," he said flippantly as he accepted the drink, determined at the very least not to ask about it even if he had resigned himself to enduring the conversation ahead. "Appreciating, I mean. Not about being an artist."

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MJ made this <3

“I suppose it’s nothing too out of the ordinary,” Irene began as she walked back to her seat and settled in. She heaved a sigh before taking a sip of her drink. “I was friends with someone long ago. I fell in love with him but didn’t have the courage to tell him until it was too late.” Was she separated from this enough to talk about it? There was a dull ache that had resurfaced in her chest, one she attempted to force to the side by taking another sip. Letting the liquid warm her throat.

“In that time he’d met and fell in love with someone else. I left the country, they got married and lived happily ever after. I came back, got attacked by dragons and…well, long story short I had my memory modified to get rid of him, but it didn’t seem to stick.” She shrugged. At least not in the way she’d intended it to. Her memories were still gone, but the journals she’d found from her ‘past’ self certainly filled her in on enough.

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Ah, that was a tried and true tale... or at least the main thrust of it was. Stories of missed opportunities and love gone unclaimed were littered across literature, either as the backdrop for a second-chance romance begun decades later or as a vehicle for philosophic naval-gazing depending on the genre. The bit about modifying memories was an unusual twist, and Don Juan's initial instinct was to be alarmed by it — but on reflection, perhaps he had on engaged in things not so very different than that? He had never done anything so permanent (or potentially permanent; hers apparently hadn't worked), but when he'd still been using he'd spent days together too high to remember anything that hurt. So maybe he didn't have much space to judge.

"Ah," he said when she had finished. This wasn't half so bad as he'd been expecting, given the subject matter earlier in the night, and it was actually fairly illuminating as to why she thought she was incapable of finding someone to take to bed. "Well, if you're only looking for him, it doesn't much matter where you've been looking," he pointed out, mildly. He had no particular stake in her love life, so if she wanted to waste her best years pining that was her business, but... well, if she was looking for suggestions, he supposed his first suggestion would be to throw out all the criteria she'd used before.

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MJ made this <3

It was a harsh reality, a pep talk that she’d given herself time and time again, and yet Irene would be lying if she said she didn’t feel some sort of anger on behalf of her former self. The hurt and loneliness conveyed in those journals was enough to convince her she might have done the right thing, but this pain, this sympathy was almost worse. She felt protective and angry and there was no where to put either of those emotions when no one in this had done anything wrong.

She’d channeled it through her artwork as long as she could, and it helped to some degree.

It still didn’t get rid of the sting of being rejected, which Irene knew she’d just have to take into her own hands. How was her next big hurdle, however the answer might have been in front of her this entire time. “You’re right of course,” She conceded with another sigh. “Which is why I’ve tried to stop looking altogether. It’s yielded some…results if you could call ‘nothing’ results.”

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Don Juan shrugged at that, his visible indifference disguising how eager he was to seize the opportunity she'd offered to lighten the mood somewhat. "I wouldn't call nothing a result. I think academia is on my side with that one," he joked. "Or at least the dictionary is." He couldn't really make any pretense towards academia of any variety, but as a Dempsey he had inherited a robust vocabulary if nothing else.

"If it's of any comfort," he said, swirling his drink pensively, "They probably didn't live happily ever after. Most married people don't." Himself included. Now that there was a court case involving Kaatjie the fact of his marriage was becoming more common knowledge than it had ever been before... but as he'd only lived with his wife a few months (and the second, bigamous wife not much longer), his practical experience in the matter mostly came from having seduced a wide array of unhappily married women.

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MJ made this <3

The fact didn’t give her much comfort (she was angry but vengefulness didn’t seem to apply here where Elias and Daffodil’s happiness was concerned; a small relief to realize that of her own character) so much as it revealed something about Mr. Dempsey that she hadn’t known about before. Brows raised, Irene sipped her drink again before indulging him in more questions, happy to shift the focus off of her own woes.

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” She hedged, shifting in her seat to tuck her feet under her as she curled up.

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He glanced up and caught the curiosity in her expression, and reacted to that more than to her words. "Oh, no one's talking about it yet," he surmised, though it was perhaps safer to assume that if they were that particular rumor hadn't reached her ears yet. He'd told his family, obviously, because they were making it part of their court case... but outside of Dean, who had already known, he didn't know that he'd specifically talked about having been married to Ana with anyone else. Maybe word hadn't gotten around yet.

"Technically I'm a widower," he said with a shrug, as though this were a status that had fallen in his lap entirely through inaction, an inherited title like youngest son which he had no part whatsoever in earning. "It doesn't change much."

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MJ made this <3

No one’s talking about it, he’d said. Irene’s head dipped slightly to the side as she looked at him, wondering what the it was that he was referring to. Would it be too impertinent to ask further? But the revelation that he was a widower, while given in a tone that suggested it was both a thing of the past and something that had lost its sting; if it had ever had one.

“Is that something you’re searching for, then?” She asked. “Results? Happily ever after, what have you?”

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