A/N: I meant to write one chapter that fits in canonically between seasons one and two. So far I've written four, and have at least one more to go. The night of Nucky's dinner party and ball are here, and everyone from the Commodore to Rothstein to Eli has thoughts about the night's events.

January 29th, 1921

Every cell in Richard's body was telling him to turn around and walk away. He did not belong in the lobby of the Ritz; he did not belong in this dinner jacket; he should leave.

The day after Richard's invitation came, Jimmy explained that "at home" meant a ball, and that the last ball Jimmy attended ended with him crawling into Clara's room and falling asleep on the foot of her bed at seven in the morning. None of this made Richard less anxious, but what kept him moving toward the elevator was the handwritten "please come" on the back of the dinner invitation.

At first, he was alone in the elevator, but on the fifth floor, four people joined him. He recognized the three men.

"Mr. Harrow, isn't it?" Rothstein asked. "I wondered if you'd be joining us. How is the lovely Miss Thompson?"

Charlie and Meyer make eye contact. Richard clears his throat twice before he manages to answer, "she is fine."

"Yes, I'm sure she is. My dear, may I present Mr. Harrow? He works for Mr. Thompson."

"How do you do?" Carolyn said, fighting the urge to look at her husband. Richard bows slightly.

"Harrow," Luciano said from his corner.

"Hmm. Luciano. Lansky."

"Isn't this a nice occasion?" Lansky replied. "Wasn't it kind of Miss Thompson to invite us all, and won't we all have a good time?" Lansky's dearest hope was that Charlie and Clara would manage to not cause a brawl at any point during the long night ahead and that Harrow wouldn't feel the need to defend her honor.

Considering how Charlie and Harrow were eyeing each other, he wasn't placing any bets.

The elevator opened to Nucky's private hallway, where Clara stood in the doorway to the suite. Richard had to clear his throat three times out of nervousness. He'd seen her dressed up before, but nothing like this. As she greeted an older couple and moved slightly, the dress seemed to change color from light blue to green. She was wearing the gold headband and earrings from New Year's Eve and had a smile he now knew wasn't her real one.

"Miss Thompson, my wife, Carolyn," Rothstein said in his smoothest voice as he took her hand.

Carolyn Rothstein was not what Clara was expecting. Mr.Rothstein always made her feel like a bug under a microscope and somewhat reminded her of an undertaker. She expected Mrs. Rothstein to smell like Lysol and wear her hair tightly back. Mrs. Rothstein was actually warm, charming with large green eyes and dark red hair, and was wearing a sophisticated, modern deep blue velvet gown. "Thank you so much for venturing out to Atlantic City. My father is just inside the door; I know he's looking forward to meeting you."

The Rothsteins walked towards the suite, leaving Charlie and Meyer standing in front of her. "Mr. Lansky, Mr. Luciano, please call me Clara," she said in a slightly louder than usual voice as she offered Lansky her hand. Lansky smiled. Excellent cover for the fact they've met before.

"Ti prendi mezza faccia con te ovunque tu vada?" Charlie asked her with a smirk that made Clara have to fight to maintain her social smile as she seethed at his intimation that she treated Richard like a pet.

"Charlie," Lansky said in a warning voice.

"Gillian Darmody è qui. Prova a tenere i pantaloni addosso per tutti i nostri interessi?" Clara snapped back.

"Well, it's always pleasant when we get together," Meyer says, pushing on Charlie's back. "Although, Clara does have a point," he hissed into Charlie's ear; this nightmare evening would only be made worse if Charlie couldn't keep his pants on around Darmody's mother.

Richard moved in front of her, and she took his hand so that from the door, it looked like she was actually performing her social role. "Well, I'm off to a swimming start with my hostessing duties," she said with a rueful smile.

"I thought. You handled that. Well." The cheek twitch gave it away and made Clara laugh.

"Oh, so now you are going to tease me. I'm so glad you're here that it doesn't matter." The elevator door opened with another batch of guests. Clara leaned forward. "Do me a favor? Angela is already inside and doesn't have anyone to talk to."

Richard nodded and carefully let go of her hand. Mr. Thompson nodded to him but kept speaking to the Rothsteins. As he moved toward Angela, Eddie appeared at his side, handing him a bourbon with a straw.

Angela laughed when she saw the puzzled expression on the good side of Richard's face. "It's Clara. If she knows your favorite drink, she tells Eddie beforehand, and he makes it magically appear when you walk in." She lifts her glass of red wine, and motions over to Rothstein, who is being handed a china teacup. "I'm assuming that man doesn't drink alcohol."

Richard surveilled the room. Jimmy's mother, who still looked shockingly young to him, and his father, who looked shockingly old (suddenly he could hear his own father admitting he was born in 1862, and his father's shame that he was so old to marry and start a family. His father had been thirty-five when he and Emma were born. Jimmy's father had to be in his seventies, so he had already been his fifties when Jimmy was born. Suddenly, the math on Jimmy's parents' ages made him uncomfortable, and a few things Clara had said in passing suddenly made a horrifying kind of sense) stood together talking to Mayor Bader. A woman Richard assumed was Mrs. Bader. Last time he saw the new mayor, Bader was spanking a young woman in this very room. The morals of the people who now made up his life were a mystery to him.

The room grew full. Clara came in from the hallway, and Jimmy beckoned her over where he was speaking with an older man with muttonchop sideburns. They were too far away for Richard to hear them, but what he noticed most was how different they were. Over the last months, he had become slightly accustomed to Clara's society persona, and how that version of her differed from the person he knew. He was less accustomed to Jimmy's social persona. They both looked like characters out of the book Clara loaned him at Thanksgiving, This Side of Paradise. When she gave it to him, she had told him he would like it because it was all about how people fail to make connections. He couldn't remember ever saying anything like that to her, so Jimmy must have repeated what he told him. He realized he had no idea what Jimmy and Clara talked about when they were alone, and felt a little disconcerted that they must speak of him, at least sometimes.

"I forget," Angela says softly. "And then suddenly they are Prince James and Princess Clara of the Boardwalk, and I wonder how Jimmy and I ever ended up together. I mean, look at them. They don't look like the man who eats breakfast in his undershirt or the girl who can spend hours playing on the floor with Tommy."

Richard is silent because he knows precisely what Angela means. He doesn't understand why they are his friends, or what he has in common with them. They actually look golden in the carefully dim lights of the drawing-room.

"Jimmy loves you," he says simply.

"He might," Angela answers. "But he also loves this, and I don't know where I fit into this. Look at this party, Richard. Did you see the invitations? I wouldn't know how to do any of this. Clara, who does know how to do it, she doesn't love it in the same way Jimmy does. For her, it's something she has to do. An obligation of being Nucky's daughter. She'd rather be at her typewriter or eating chop suey at Canton's Tea Room. This is what Jimmy sees as his birthright. It's what he wants."

Jimmy motions for Angela, and Clara makes her way to Richard as a ruckus emerges from the hallway to Clara's room. The sound of small feet echoes through the room before Tommy throws himself at Richard's leg at full force, holding a piece of paper in his hands.

"Richard! Clara! I drew a picture!"

Clara looks for the missing maid who is supposed to be sitting with Tommy in Clara's room. At the same time, Richard carefully kneels to Tommy's level and steadies the boy's hands with his own while he studies the picture, which to Clara looks like a monster surrounded by scribbles.

"Ah. A whale. In the bathtub. Very nice." Richard says. Clara can feel her face soften as her heart turns over in her chest, looking at Richard's large hands around Tommy's tiny ones. Without thinking, she places her hand on Richard's shoulder and smiles down at Tommy herself. The Rothsteins, standing across from the tableau, catch each other's eyes.

"I wouldn't have seen it, but very nice. I like the yellow bathtub," Clara tells Tommy.

"You promised we would go to the Wheel," Tommy tells them.

"Tommy, wouldn't you like Mema and the Commodore to take you to the Ferris Wheel?" Gillian hurries across the drawing-room to put herself next to Tommy. Richard stands up to get out of her way, but Tommy holds onto his pant leg.

"No. Richard and Clara promised. At our trip," Tommy said stubbornly.

"And so we will go," Clara says lightly, "as soon as the Boardwalk opens."

"Come on, buddy," Jimmy says, grabbing Tommy around the waist and grimacing at the weight the small boy puts on his bad leg. Angela frees herself and joins her husband.

"Tommy, you shouldn't have left Clara's room," Angela chides the boy as they walk away.

Margaret announces that dinner is served after they return, and Richard is relieved that he's between Clara and Angela. He sees where everyone else is seated and thinks Clara must have arranged it. Who else would have placed Mrs. Darmody and Luciano as far apart as possible? He tries to figure out how to pull out both Angela and Clara's chairs, but the older man with the sideburns he saw speaking with Clara and Jimmy earlier pulls out Angela's for her.

"The good news is that very few people are going to eat their dinner tonight because they'll be too busy talking. The other good news is supper is much better, anyway, and I have a plan for that," Clara says softly as they move their forks around their plates and pretend to eat the lobster canapes.

"Of course, it's all foolishness," the Commodore's voice booms from Nucky's end of the table. "We should have married them off to each other."

"Unfortunately, Clara and I had no interest in being married off to each other," Jimmy says.

"Clara and Jimmy? That's ridiculous," Gillian inserts.

"That would mean Jimmy wouldn't have Angela or Tommy, and that would be a tragedy. Jimmy and I are best suited as friends," Clara says, casting a worried eye at Angela. She'd go lingerie shopping with Gillian every day for a year if the Commodore would drop dead tomorrow, she thinks. What an awful thing to say in front of Angela.

"Louis, have you not met our children? I thought they should stay in college. They are headstrong. They both left college-Jimmy for the war, Clara to work for the War Department. Hell, Clara tried to get an assignment to France. Do you think they were going to marry just because I asked?" Nucky said.

"Besides, whoever marries Clara is going to have put up with her plans. Angela at least does me the favor of letting me make my own plans."

"Funny, Jimmy," Clara says under her breath.

"Perhaps you should have kept tighter reigns on our colts, Nucky. What better way to consolidate power than marrying my son to your daughter?"

"If you wanted us to grow up and marry, we shouldn't have been raised as siblings," Clara said softly before brightening her voice and saying loudly, "Has anyone seen The Green Goddess since it opened on Broadway? I saw it in tryouts here, but I read the staging in New York is delightful."

"Yes, Arthur and I just saw it. The Booth is the perfect theater for the sets. You really feel like you are in the Himalayas..." Carolyn Rothstein begins, seeing Clara's efforts to salvage dinner.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but let me refute Clara's point," The Commodore interrupts. "It probably was a mistake to leave James to be raised by the Thompsons."

Silence falls over the table. "Well, you know what they say about Nucky," Eddie Cantor interjects, "He hasn't an enemy in the world, but his friends all hate him." The table laughs and falls back into individual conversations. Clara catches his eye in thanks. This is why you invite entertainers to dinner, Clara thinks.

When dinner finally, painfully, wound down, Clara whispered to Richard. "The men are going to go into Father's study to smoke cigars and do...whatever they do, while the ladies have coffee in the drawing-room. I need to get to Babette's in case of early arrivals. Walk me?"

Richard very seriously offers Clara his arm after she puts on a blue velvet cape, and they make their way to Babette's.

"The Commodore is just so awful. Can you imagine how Angela must have felt as her father-in-law spewed that nonsense? And he doesn't even mean it. He was just being terrible," Clara said as they walked.

Richard looked down at her. "You don't. Like him."

"I despise him, and I don't trust him." Clara stared straight ahead for a moment. "I'd never try and come between you and Jimmy," mainly, she thinks, because I don't think I'd win and I couldn't bear defeat, because then I'd lose you altogether. "But please be careful. It's not that I think my father is perfect, but the Commodore... there's no limit to his depravity. "

They walked into a Babette's transformed. Palm trees were banked in all corners, flowers decorated every available spot, the entire room smelled like oranges, and it looked like the main floor was bathed in moonlight.

"You. Did this?" Richard asks her as they stand, alone, in the middle of the dance floor.

"No. My father's money and the set designer Eddie Cantor recommended did this. I just told them I wanted it to feel like I was walking through a Florida night. Just, you know, without the bothers of bugs or humidity," Clara looks over at Richard, who is looking around the room with an inscrutable expression. "I know you don't like me like this or like this of thing," her voice falters a touch.

"I always. Like you," Richard said. "I don't. Understand this."

Clara turns, so she's facing him. "I grew up in it and don't understand it," she says with a shrug, meaning more than just the decorated ballroom. "But at the moment I'm wearing the prettiest dress I've ever owned, I'm standing here with one of my favorite people who looks quite dashing in his dinner jacket, and it looks and smells like an ideal Florida night. Right now, at this moment, I'm quite happy and content," she reaches for his hand.

Richard looks at her and tries, and fails, to speak. The orchestra strikes up in practice, and so he does the only thing he can think to do. He puts his arms around her, and they start to dance. The look on Clara's face makes him feel dizzy.

"It's not like Clara not to be standing here ready to receive," June says to Eli when they walk into the foyer of Babette's. "It's ten o'clock."

"Hello, Sheriff Thompson, Mrs. Thompson," Babette says. "Clara is in the ballroom with her friend. She's checking on the decorations." Babette is one of many people that night who will not say what she thinks, which is that Clara Thompson, whom Babette has always considered a chilly and efficient little bit of business, is swooning over her masked bodyguard on the dance floor like she just discovered that she's a warm-blooded woman and not a bloodless princess in a tower.

Eli and June walk into the ballroom, but Richard and Clara are far too focused on each other to notice them.

"Oh my goodness," June says, unsure of what else she should say.

Eli watches his niece. He always thinks of Clara as being smart but cold. As much as she and Nucky go at each other, he thinks its because they are rather alike at their core. Mabel was the only thing that softened Nucky. His face literally changed when Mabel was around. It was softer, lighter, happier.

It was precisely the way Clara looks as she dances with Harrow, like for the first time the thought has occurred to her that life more than just a chess game she's determined to win.