Out of Time 01 - Out of Time

unpack,” she said, desperate for something to do.
    For all her bravado about making this an adventure, she hadn’t considered this part of it. Alone in a bedroom with Simon Cross.
    She was generally comfortable around men. Working with them, playing with them, but never simply being with them. She’d grown up surrounded by men. Her mother had left her and her father when she was too young to remember. It had been just the two of them, so she tagged along wherever he went. And he went a lot of places. Not the typical American childhood, growing up in backrooms and pool halls in towns all across Texas, but she wouldn’t have traded it for anything. She’d learned an awful lot about people. How to read someone’s face when they’d drawn an inside straight. How a man’s hands told his life story. Or how the truth was easier to keep track of than a lie. But, even in all that, she hadn’t learned much about being a woman.
    She’d had relationships, but somehow there was always something eluding her, like there was a secret handshake she didn’t know. Each time a man asked her out she was surprised, flattered and a little frightened. Inevitably, her insecurities brought things to a premature end. Not that she’d been heartbroken over any of them. They were good men, most of them, but none of them had managed to force her heart to overrule her head.
    “Bloody piece of...” Simon grumbled and took off his jacket, tossing it over the back of a chair.
    She opened the suitcase and put their old clothes away in the small dresser and armoire that served as a closet. It was a silly thing to do really. She didn’t expect to be staying. But, she’d lived in hotels most of her life and the first thing she always did was unpack. It made the room hers instead of yet another place to stay.
    Simon rolled up his sleeves and hit the wooden window frame with his fist. After a few more good bangs, the window finally opened. A breeze blew into the room, but the night air wasn’t much cooler than the hotbox of their apartment.
    He turned around triumphantly, and she offered him a smile.
    “Here we are,” she said.
    Simon stared back, and the awkwardness hovered between them. They’d spent hour after hour in closer quarters than this, but then again, the office didn’t have a bed in the middle of it.
    “Yes, well,” he said and sat down in one of the two chairs that accompanied the small, round table near the window. He took out his grandfather’s watch and carefully opened it.
    Elizabeth knew Simon worked best uninterrupted and tried to find something to occupy herself. She looked around the small apartment anxious to find anything of interest. The walls were an indistinct beige and the rug a darker shade of indistinct beige, stained and tattered at the edges. She could see the ghost of earlier wallpaper, some sort of dizzying stripe hidden beneath the hastily applied paint. The room itself was no more than ten by twelve. The ceiling light, a thin brass tube jutting straight down to a chipped smoked glass shade, hung down too low.
    She made her way to the bathroom and nearly bumped into the sink when she opened the door. The fixtures were dull and rusted. The faucet arched high over the basin like a drooping branch, its constant drip leaving a dark yellow stain on the porcelain. The paint was bubbled and peeling.
    There wasn’t a showerhead, but she supposed she should be thankful they had a bathroom at all. It sure beat long walks down the hall in the middle of the night to a community bath. The bathtub was old, and she noticed a series of deep scratches gouged into the tub. What the heck could have made those? Maybe some bathtub gin, she thought with an odd thrill. Or a gangster shoot out, bullets ricocheting from a mob hit. Or not.
    She looked at her reflection in the streaked mirror. Same old Elizabeth West. Hair out of place and eyes too big for her face. She shook her head. Didn’t matter if she sprouted wings. Simon wouldn’t notice the difference.
    She went back into the bedroom and Simon was still hunched over the watch, completely oblivious to her. Some things never change. And on that depressing note, she busied herself with looking around the room again.
    The furniture was plain, but practical. The bedside lampshade was crooked. She tried to straighten it, but like everything else in the apartment it did what it wanted and apparently it wanted to be crooked. She’d stayed in worse places, but those had