Oh, Keep Your Shirt On - Michelle Pennington Page 0,8

door. I stared after her a moment before glancing at the paper in my hand. That was definitely a first. But as weird as it was, I tucked her number into my purse under the counter. I doubted I’d want whatever job she was offering—shoot, she could be running an escort service for all I knew. Though that was probably nonsense, since I wasn’t exactly the kind of woman they’d have a market for.

But I was intrigued enough that I kept the paper anyway.

Chapter Four

Since I didn’t come home to another party after work on Friday night, I should have been able to get to sleep easily, but I didn’t. I kept having odd dreams with Damien and Jen, the Daddy’s Princess girl, in his hot tub with me. And then the red-headed curvy chick arrived, showing off her amazing cleavage. Then everyone was staring at me and I realized that my swim top was missing.

It was one of those weird naked dreams that make you feel vulnerable and exposed, but the worst part for me was that when Dream Me looked down, I didn’t even have the A-cup boobs I had in real life. I was so flat I literally had nothing there, like a boy. And I could see my ribs.

It was a new version of an old dream where I looked like an emaciated person with more skin and bone than flesh and blood, this time with Damien looking on.

When I woke up, it was two in the morning. Afraid to dream it again, I finally crawled out to the living room and watched YouTube until my sandy eyes closed from exhaustion.

Unfortunately, the sun came through the patio door with no mercy and woke me up way before I was ready.

And that was why I avoided people and tried not to care about them. Just being around them made me care about things I didn’t want to care about and made me judge myself in ways I always swore I wouldn’t.

Ugh. I was in such a funk that I didn’t even know if spending the day in my art studio would help. In fact, I couldn’t even dig up any motivation to get off the couch.

That was, until I heard a distant roar, beep, and clang. The trash truck was coming. I’d meant to take my trash can down to the road last night, but I’d been way too exhausted. Now I was going to have to drag myself up, half dead, and sprint to get it down there in time. But being the perfectionist I was, I also felt a desperate urge to get every speck of trash out of the house and into the can first.

I listened closely and guessed that the truck was still a block away. I could do this.

In a mad dash up the stairs, I ran into the bathroom and peed because my bladder didn’t care if I missed trash day or not, then grabbed the trash bag out of there, grabbed the bigger bag out of my art studio, and ran downstairs to get the kitchen trash.

I should have paid attention to the fact that I’d gone to bed with a pair of fuzzy socks on because as soon as I hit the tile at a dead run, my feet flew out from under me and both bags of trash flew up into the air. Toilet paper tubes, tampon and pad wrappers, a toothpaste box, and an empty shampoo bottle clattered around me and mixed with the crumpled drawing paper from my art studio.

I wasn’t normally one to cuss, but I let loose a few choice words that would have made my grandpa proud. There was nothing to do but scrape my bruised body off the tile and gather it all back up again as the trash truck sounded louder and louder. It took too much precious time to wash my hands and chuck all the old take-out boxes from my fridge into the kitchen trash. The fact that almost the only food in my house was free stuff I brought home from work was depressing. The sight of a cleaned-out fridge should be a positive one, but it wasn’t. How could I have nothing but a half-gallon of sweet tea, a bottle of ketchup, and a small tub of butter on the shelves?

But I had other things to worry about right now, so I ran out the front door, straight into a wall of cold I was totally unprepared