Sometimes Quickly by Anne Laughlin

Author:Anne Laughlin [Laughlin, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626393219
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

*

She got to Halliday’s at eight and headed to the back room. She’d just come from a women’s bar in the Village where she’d fortified herself with drinks and some mildly flirtatious talk with a new bartender there.

As she reached the end of the bar, a woman stood and grabbed on to her coat sleeve. She was nearly as tall as Peg and dressed in a sleek business suit. Her green eyes bore into Peg’s questioning ones.

“You said you’d call,” the woman said. It wasn’t an accusation or complaint, just a fact. Peg tried to step back from her, but she still had hold of her arm. She didn’t have the faintest notion who she was, but she knew she wasn’t going to enjoy finding out. She smiled at the woman and gently removed her arm from her grip.

“Remind me when it was I said that to you. And remind me of your name, too. I’m absolutely terrible about those.” She tried to keep it conversational.

“You don’t remember me?” She started to look unhappy. “I’m Angie. You said my name enough times. You’d think you’d remember it.”

“I remember you, of course. I need a little help with the where and when,” Peg said.

Angie sat back on her barstool and gave Peg some breathing space. “It was last Tuesday, at Vixen’s.”

“Christ, yes. There’s no way I could forget that night, not with you.”

But she had completely forgotten it. She was in Vixen’s practically every night, every indistinguishable night. She felt her gut cave in, as she always did when people told her about what she did during a blackout. “Listen, I have to go to a party in the back. Would you write down your number again and we’ll start over?”

Angie looked unhappier still. “You said I was the best you’d ever had. Why would you blow off the best lover you’ve ever had?”

“Why indeed?” Peg said. “You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t anyway.” She was on the spot and hated being on the spot. She seemed to be less clever than she used to be at getting out of these uncomfortable run-ins with people she’d pissed off or disappointed. It seemed to be happening all the time lately. She got Angie’s number, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and hurried toward the back room.

She could hear her colleagues well before she stepped into the room. The volume was a good indicator of their level of inebriation and she gauged it to be between kind of drunk and very drunk. There was still room for more drinking. The room was too big for the crowd. It had a dozen tables, a back bar, a couple of pool tables. She saw nearly everyone from her division hanging around the back bar, including the bride-to-be and Jim Braddock, all of the admins, and three of the paralegals, including Jenna Clark, the lead trial paralegal who worked most closely with Peg on the Lanzito case. Peg was feeling the four or five beers she’d already had at Vixen’s, plus the three shots that went with them.

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