Free Undying Love by Nelle L'Amour Page A

before storming out of the bar.
    I finally ordered a drink, pleased that I hadn’t given Charlotte any hope for reconciliation. There was another girl working her way into my heart. The complicated, mysterious, and beautiful, Allee Adair.

EIGHT
    “W hat’s she like?” Duffy asked me first thing in the morning before we sat down to review the upcoming edition of Arts & Smarts .
    “A lot different from Charlotte. She has dark hair and lives in Queens.”
    “No, I mean in bed.”
    I rolled my eyes. Like I said, he thought with his dick. My silence gave him the answer he was seeking.
    “Find out if she has a friend.” Duffy never had any luck in the girlfriend department. The poor bastard needed to get laid before his dick withered away.
    I thanked him for covering for me yesterday and then told him to get to work. The magazine was going to press on Friday. There were tight deadlines to meet.
    As for me, getting into my work was easier said than done. I couldn’t focus. All I could think about was Allee. I felt different about her than the other girls in my past, including Charlotte. There was something about her that made me feel connected to her despite our social and cultural differences. She challenged me. Made me think. Made me laugh. Made me take stock of myself. Made me feel alive. And made me fuck like I’d never fucked before. I hardly knew her, yet I was afraid of losing her.
    With shaky fingers, I dialed the Met and, once again, asked my favorite operator to give her a message to call me back. The jovial operator, who was by now used to me calling, promised to get the message to her quickly. I hung up the phone.
    All day I waited for her to return my call. She didn’t. Damn it! Why didn’t I take down her cell phone number? I had no other way to get in touch with her.
    At six thirty, I had my work done for the day. I marched past Duffy’s desk and asked him if he wanted to go for a drink.
    “No action tonight?” he asked.
    “You overestimate me, Duffster.”
    One hour later, I was drunk as hell. Damn that girl.

NINE
    T he week went from bad to worse. The printing press malfunctioned, shorting our circulation, ultimately costing Madewell Media a shitload of money. And me, a shitload of grief from my father. Worse, Allee didn’t return my calls. No matter how many messages I’d left for her, including one that I had found her eyeglasses—she had left them behind in my loft when she’d rushed off to her massage client. Interestingly, when I had put them to my eyes to see how nearsighted she was, I’d discovered that they were pretend glasses; there was no prescription in the lenses. I was baffled by why she would wear such big, nerdy glasses when, in fact, she really didn’t need them.
    As the week progressed, a slew of negative thoughts passed through my head. They kept me kept me distracted at work when I couldn’t afford to be and tossing and turning until the wee hours of the morning, further affecting my ability to get anything done work wise. Maybe I was just a one-night stand. Or she thought I was a jerk (I’d been accused of that before). Or thought I had gone back to Charlotte. Or I wasn’t her type. Maybe Sid was more than her other boss. Or she met someone new. Or something bad happened to her.
    That was the last thought that crossed my mind on Friday. It was eight thirty in the evening; I had been working late the whole week to make up for lost time. Panic gripped me. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Grabbing my overcoat, I raced out of the office and asked Marcus to drive me as fast as he could to the Met. Thankfully, the Met was open until nine o’clock on Friday nights. I had to get there before it closed. To see if she was there.
    The mid-November night was chilly, and storm clouds threatened. My heart beat a mile a minute as we inched uptown. The bumper-to-bumper Friday night traffic was miserable. At this rate, we’d never get there in time. At Forty-Second Street and