though I play the music through the speakers, I never put on my shoes. Instead, I spend the next two hours lying on the dirty floor, scrolling through my phone.
I could go see Zara at her studio, but I feel like a virus in her happy life now. Married, with a new baby, in a perfect house in the suburbs. She runs the studio effortlessly and never looks tired or complains. It’s exhausting to watch. She’s a year younger than me, and I already resent her for how much more she was handed the day a billionaire showed up on her doorstep to change her life. Where the fuck is my billionaire?
I’m being a petty bitch. She’s been trying to get me to teach a class at the studio since the incident last summer, but I don’t have the heart to tell her the last thing I want to do is fill the shoes of my dementors. Even if I never worked them to the point of exhaustion, starved them, slapped them across the backs of their legs with wooden canes when their arabesques weren’t straight, I’d still feel that abuse every day of my life.
Fuck this. I need to get out of this studio. The walls are closing in. I could use some actual food, but I’d prefer a drink instead. Changing quickly back into my dress I wore to lunch, I skip the leggings and shawl and dig a pair of high heels out of my messy locker in the storage room behind the studio.
The evening is cool as I step out into the dusk, quickly ordering an Uber as I walk toward the city center. For a moment, I feel free. She’ll think I’m still practicing, and she won’t bother checking up on me. For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-nine years old. I don’t need to check in with my mother, and I can do whatever the fuck I want, but there’s still a hint of guilt in my chest as I climb into the white SUV and head toward the nearest club so I can get drunk as fast as possible in hopes someone will strike my interest and make me feel something.
For a Saturday, the bar is quiet, but it’s only seven-thirty. After a couple dry martinis, I get a few come-ons, mostly from older men which is fine. I have nothing against a sugar daddy—worked out great for Zara, but there’s no real zing with any of them, so after short, stiff introductions, they all leave with their tails between their legs.
Finally, a group of four women sidle up to the bar next to me. They’re already drunk from presumably day drinking because they also have sunburns, but they’re still coherent enough to order.
“Oh my god, you’re gorgeous!” one of the girls announces next to me, and I feel a soft hand drift down from my shoulder to my elbow.
“Jesus, Mia, you’re cut off,” the woman next to her says. Mia is short, blonde and straight as a board, but the woman who pulls her away from me is not. And how I can tell that is the level of confidence she exhibits as she checks me out not once, but twice.
I’ve been with a woman before. It was fun, nothing serious, and right now I'm in the middle of such a dry spell fun and nothing serious sounds like exactly what I need.
Plus, dry spell is putting it lightly. Ever since my breakdown, the state of things downstairs has been far worse than dry. It’s like the whole system is dead. Even by myself with the kinkiest porn playing on my phone, I can’t seem to work out the weakest of orgasms. Nothing.
“You need a drink?” she asks, putting herself where Mia once stood.
I hold up my nearly empty martini glass. “Good timing.”
The next thirty minutes crawl by in basic pleasantries between two people who obviously want to fuck but need to know the basics first—name, status, confirmation the other person isn’t a total psychopath. Her name is Ally. She’s thirty, a retail manager, bold, tall with shoulder-length brown hair, and presumably single since she made a questionable face when I asked if she had a girlfriend. If she does, her girlfriend isn’t here tonight, so I don’t give a shit.
When she rests her arm along the back of my chair, I swivel my knees toward her. The gin is hitting me hard, and I’m feeling more bold than usual. And a good deal