Well, most meetings.
Definitely not the ones scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday, though.
Hopping into the shower, she took a quick one, knowing Josie would be here soon. Though parts of her body hummed and twitched, they weren’t getting any attention from her right now. Five minutes later she jumped out, dried off, and was dressed, combing out her hair and braiding it absentmindedly.
Bzzz.
Josie was here.
“You!” her friend shouted as she stormed through the door, headed straight for the kitchen. “You had better have caffeine!”
“How in the hell do you drink caffeine at the end of a work shift?” Laura asked, knowing the answer.
“With my mouth.”
Laura sat at the table with her cup of coffee while Josie prepared hers. The two women were about as different as could be. Where Laura was light and fair, Josie was darker, with pale skin and sharp eyes. Curves and softness abounded in Laura, whose long, curly blonde hair and bright green eyes radiated a gentle Barbie look. Josie, meanwhile, was rail thin, with a slightly pinched look that came from a general distrust of the world.
Both were fiercely loyal to each other, though, and as Josie sat down and sipped carefully, Laura was surprised to find herself deeply relieved to have company that wasn’t feline.
“You look like a bus hit you in your dreams,” Josie declared.
“Something like that,” Laura muttered, drinking so she wouldn’t have to talk.
“You want to talk about it?”
Laura waved her hand dismissively. “Same old same old. No boyfriend, unlucky in love, who would ever want me, might as well become a cat lady.” She looked pointedly at Josie. “You know the drill.”
A long, sad sigh poured out of Josie. “Yeah, I know. My own cats are at home eating anything they can out of sheer starvation. I had to work twelve hours. If I stay here much longer, they’ll break into my nightstand and start eating my lube.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I know, right? Cat hair in your lube.” Josie shuddered.
“That’s not what I meant,” Laura said flatly. “I’m sitting here worried about living the next six decades of my life without love, and you’re worried about your cats drinking your Astroglide? You’re so... romantic.”
“Practical.”
“Weird.”
Josie lifted her half-full mug in a toast. As Laura banged her mug against her friend’s, Josie said, “To truth.”
“To love.”
“To getting laid,” Josie countered.
Laura could drink to that.
And did, finishing her coffee with one eye on the clock. She had about five more minutes before she needed to head out the door for the train ride into Boston.
After checking the cats’ food and water dishes, she turned to Josie and said, “You ever have dreams so vivid it’s like you can feel them, even after you’re awake?”
“Only when I took a hit of acid back in college.” Josie squinted at her. “Why? You dropping acid before bed?”
Laura shot her a smirk. “The only drug I use is right there,” she answered, pointing to the coffee maker.
“Yeah. Me too,” Josie said with a sigh. “When did we become so boring?”
“When we became grownups.”
Josie’s eyebrows went to her hairline, eyes full of mischief. “You may be a grownup, but no one in their right mind would ever call me a grownup.”
“You’re a registered nurse who works on complex research cases, Josie. They don’t hire children to do that.”
Josie snorted. “You obviously haven’t spent enough time in hospitals. Surgeons are just emotional teenagers with the pressure of life on their hands in the operating room. Orthopedists are bone crunchers who look at a dislocated shoulder like a kid looks at a roller coaster. We’re all immature. Some of us are just better at hiding it.”
Laura nodded, swallowing and trying to calm the anxious butterflies in her stomach. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned the dreams. If she kept Josie going on this new tangent, then they could forget she ever mentioned it.
“So. Dreams,” Josie said.
Damn.
“I keep having sex dreams.”
“Join the other six billion of us.”
“You’re so supportive.”
Josie laughed. “It’s just... everyone has sex dreams. I have them. Did I ever tell you about the one I had with Abraham Lincoln? The man could do incredible things with his pinkie.”
Laura gaped at Josie. “Discussion over.”
“Aw, c’mon!”
“Not if you’re going to mock me.”
“I wasn’t mocking you! I really did have a dream about Lincoln and his magic digit! It was right after watching Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, and I—”
“Then this discussion is really over,” Laura said with a shudder.
“Now who’s being the judgmental one?” Josie said with fake offense.
Laura’s eyebrow arched. “You seriously had a dream you slept with Abraham Lincoln and you two had some ass play?”
“Yep. And he loved the strap-on I wore.”
“Oh, gross.”
“I can’t control what’s in my dreams! Not my fault!” Josie insisted.
That gave Laura pause. She had a point. None of the dreams were technically fantasies, right? They came to her, unbidden, a product of her subconscious. Laura didn’t seek out threesome porn, didn’t read romance novels about threesomes, didn’t watch movies on the topic, didn’t search it out at all.
It was just... there. In her dreams. In her bed. In her body, some sort of yearning that came out the only way it could.
While she slept.
That was comforting, in a way, and yet deeply disturbing. Why did she harbor these wishes? Dreams were manifestations of something rooted in the body, mind and heart. Bad dreams were like an exorcism, but good dreams—and make no mistake about it, these were damn good—were wish fulfillment.
She had plenty of wishes. Oh, how her wish cup runneth over. As she looked down at her chest, she thought sourly that she had plenty up top, plenty in her head, and not nearly enough in her heart.
And bed.
Josie finished her cup of coffee and checked her phone. “You’ll miss the train if you don’t get going.” She held her phone up for Laura to see the time.
“Damn. You’re right.” Grabbing her briefcase, she headed out the door, Josie on her heels. After locking the apartment up, she squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. Out the main door and on the sidewalk, she and Josie went in opposite directions, Josie to her bed and Laura to yet another day of anonymity in a cocoon of mirrored glass and concrete.
And no dream men.
Chapter 11
As she rode the elevator up to the thirty-second floor of the massive, glass-and-concrete tower that Stohlman Industries inhabited, Laura kept her eyes on her hands. Head down, crushed by bodies that pretended they weren’t touching, she lived in her head. The scent of ten different perfumes and colognes, of various hairspray brands and deodorants, and a faint whiff of sour alcohol from someone who’d overindulged last night was, oddly enough, a familiar comfort.