Free Hot Properties by Rafael Yglesias

calculation. I’m horrible, she decided, pressing out her cigarette and letting her legs out from under the covers, ready to head for the john.
    David appeared, his hair damp, with an orange towel around his stomach. “Good morning,” he said, obviously happy. “You don’t have to get up.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Nine.”
    “Oh. I thought it was sunrise. Can I take a shower?”
    “Of course.” He shook his head to indicate how foolish her question was. “Mi casa es su casa.”
    Patty looked blank.
    “Feel at home,” he explained.
    “How sweet.” she said, but her dry throat caught on something, and the words were rasped out.
    “I’ll make some juice,” he said, and padded on his damp feet toward the kitchen. He left tracks. Patty waited until he was behind the partition before getting out and rushing in the chill air to the bathroom. She felt she must look awful, a conclusion that the mirror confirmed while she waited for the water to get hot.
    She drenched her face with the hot spray in the shower and became more and more anxious over her appearance. She hadn’t seen a hair dryer in the bathroom. The lack of one would mean she’d look like a drowned cat over breakfast. Of course she had eyeliner and lipstick in her purse, but that was all the way over at the other end of this oak-and-plasterboard desert. She never liked to go to the man’s place for sex because of all this: the morning was the worst possible time to be separated from one’s own possessions. At her place, he could be worrying about getting into wrinkled and smelly clothes while she scrambled eggs with blow-dried hair and a freshly laundered outfit.
    When she finally felt as if her body had absorbed some moisture, she stepped out of the stall to find a glass of orange juice balanced on the edge of the sink. “Oh,” she said.
    David’s voice came from outside the bathroom: “I have to leave for work in ten minutes.”
    “Okay, I’ll hurry.”
    “No, no. The door locks when you leave, so you can stay. Relax. Make some eggs.”
    “Oh, thank you.”
    “Do you have appointments today?”
    “Appointments?” Patty said the word as if it were both exotic and unknown to her.
    “Job interviews?”
    “No.”
    “Where can I reach you?”
    That question was easily answered, but it was the job query that haunted her after David left for work. She had no job. Worse, she didn’t because she had been fired. That humiliation was three months old, but she still cringed from the shame of it, as if it were only hours old. Jobs. The thought of them left her standing paralyzed in front of the bathroom mirror for minutes on end: staring into her own eyes as if they were a stranger’s. In fact, she was blind. Her mind played over her last few weeks at Goodson Books.
    Her boss was Jerry Gelb, a big bearded man with a deep voice and little black eyes that never showed pity, love, or even an attention span. Gelb was angry all the time. Or at least in a very bad mood. But he liked Patty. He teased Patty the way she imagined an older brother would—Patty was the eldest of three; her only brother was six years her junior. Jerry called her Patsie (her nickname as a child) and would take her along on lunches with his two leading authors. They were Harold Gould (winner of two National Book Awards) and Roberta York, the formidable and ancient intellectual, who would cheer Patty up by describing her own frustrations as a secretary sixty years ago. Roberta talked about being kept late without pay, being pressured to sleep with the boss, and how she collapsed into tears when, after having rejected the boss, he would needle her mercilessly. “Things haven’t changed much,” Gelb would agree in a tone that implied he was innocent of such behavior. But Roberta’s talk didn’t stop him from screaming into Patty’s intercom when she made the mistake of letting a rejected writer through her screening of telephone calls.
    “You’re paid twelve thousand