by Holly Rayner
THREE
Five hours and nine clients later, Zoey boarded a subway train and headed for home. She took it as a good sign that this time round she had room to sit, without having her body shoved against anything. She needed every good sign she could get.
Zoey sighed deeply as she told herself that the day was finally over, and she was going to put every thought of it out of her mind. There was a date in three hours that needed her undivided attention, after all. It was going to be her first one in months, and she was determined to enjoy it.
Halfway back, Zoey spotted an adorable little girl in a pink and white dress. She couldn’t have been a day over five. Her bushy brown hair flew in all directions as she ran around her mother’s legs. Every so often, she’d grab at a pole to steady herself, or else teeter into her mother’s arms. She was peppering her mom with questions at auctioneer speeds, and the overload of cuteness swelled in Zoey’s heart. Almost before she knew it, a smile was playing on her lips, and all her problems seemed to recede to the edges of her mind.
“CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. Two for twenty,” a voice suddenly called out, and Zoey could only laugh at how spectacularly its owner had ruined the moment.
The trip back felt shorter than the one she had made that morning, and in not too long Zoey was back in Brooklyn, at the door to her apartment building, a five-story, brick affair. Zoey took the elevator straight up to the fourth floor and made a beeline for her apartment.
Inside, she went to her bedroom and began peeling off her clothes. Her room featured a wall unit on the wall opposite the door. It had a small wardrobe on each side, and a chest of drawers in the middle. A thirty-two-inch television sat on top of the drawers, and a mirror was fixed to the wall above that. To the right of the door, as Zoey came in, sat a small nightstand, and a queen-sized bed stood directly beside that.
Wearing nothing but her underwear, Zoey went to the bathroom and filled the tub with bath soap, beads, and soothing hot water. When she liked the temperature, she shed her underthings and dove in, shutting her eyes and allowing herself to relax.
For the first time that day, she felt completely at peace as the beads invigorated her body, and the water drew the tension out of it. Her disgust with her mother and hatred of her job seemed to evaporate, leaving only blissful silence. The water enveloped her like a blanket, and the longer she lay in it, the longer she wanted to stay. But Blake was meeting her at Big Tony’s in a little under two hours’ time, and she could barely remember the last time she had been on a date. That fact barely bothered her now, but Zoey knew that would change when she was out of the water.
At last, she grabbed a nearby loofah and began washing in earnest. Soon, she added the spray of the shower so that she could give her hair a thorough washing. In minutes, she emerged from her bathroom feeling refreshed, but whatever spell the bath had put her under was broken, and her stomach was working itself into knots.
Zoey was convinced she would say or do something awkward, or worse, draw a blank in the middle of a conversation. For some time now, her job at Melinda Forde had been almost her only extended daily contact with people. There, she merely had to rely on a script built on lies, but she was going to have to wing it soon and she didn’t know if she was ready.
“At least I clean up okay,” Zoey said, staring in her mirror. In her stunning sapphire dress that accented her figure and matched her eyes, she felt fairly confident that Blake was going to be blown away by her, and felt a spreading sense of hope as she called herself a cab.