The Night Shift by Alex Finlay EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Alex Finlay
- Language: English
- Genre: Small Town & Rural Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
ELLA
APRIL 2015
Ella pops a Xanax as she waits for the valet to take her keys. Driving into
Manhattan always stresses her out. The frenetic confluence of cabbies ragedriving, cops jetting by with sirens blaring, pedestrians all but challenging
you to run them over as they step defiantly into the street.
What the fuck is she doing here?
Last time, she’d promised herself that it would be the last time.
A young guy in a bellhop uniform stands at her window now. She hums
down the glass.
“Checking in?” he asks. He’s in his twenties and gives her the once-over.
“No, just meeting a friend.”
He nods as if enjoying the euphemism. Sure, in that outfit, a friend.
Ella slips out of the car and palms the kid a five. She catches him stealing
a look at the bill, unimpressed.
Give her a break. She’s a therapist making $30K a year, for fuck’s sake,
not some businessman on an expense account.
Inside the marble lobby of the Carlyle hotel, she makes a beeline for the
bar. Against all sound medical judgment—she’d taken a pharmacology
class at Wellesley—she pops another tiny blue pill.
She feels eyes on her as she enters the mahogany room. Faux old-money
decor and the din of Franz Liszt from the gray-haired pianist trying not to
look defeated at the culmination of his music career.
Ella should talk. She’s barely making her half of the rent, coming into the
city so she won’t bump into one of her fiancé’s friends. Or a client from her
fledgling practice. She thinks about sixteen-year-old Layla from their
session that morning. She’s cutting herself again. Layla didn’t need to
explain why. Ella understands.
Surveying the bar, Ella snags the look of a man in an expensive suit
holding a tumbler of Scotch. They always drink Scotch. And love to talk
about it. The special barrels this, the unique region that. Beyond the Scotch
prattle, most tend to have a pale band of skin on their left ring finger. Ella
doesn’t bother to take off her engagement ring. The Scotch guys don’t care.
The man smiles at her.
He’ll do.
Ella is always surprised how easy it is. She doesn’t need Tinder when she
has this black dress.
So she goes to meet her new friend.
*
A few hours later, her phone chimes. She’s in a hotel room now, the only
light from under the door. On these frolics, she always sets the alarm for 5
a.m. It avoids awkward morning-after talk.
But it isn’t the sound of the alarm. It’s an incoming call. She extracts
herself from under Rick’s hairy arm. She wonders if that’s his real name. He
looks like a Rick. Though he probably thought she looks like a Candy.
Something sweet but bad for you. Much like her old friend, whose name
she borrowed. She always uses their names. Candy, Mandy, Katie. She has
no idea why.
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