The shower hissed in the other room. Beth sat on the edge of a disheveled bed, and groped for her sweater in the shadows. The room was dirty, stinking of stale cigarette smoke, littered with clothes, dust, and ash. He had invited her to shower with him. What was his name? Brian? Brent? She’d gotten what she’d come for, she thought with nauseous memory. She could shower at home, in a clean bathroom. She wanted, as Greta Garbo had said, to be alone.
And alone she was. Here in a filthy walk-up in Rogers Park, where she had seen a cockroach skitter across the bathroom sink earlier. Where she wondered if the noises from their frantic couplings earlier had kept the neighbors awake.
More by touch than by sight, she found her sweater on the floor, in a ball. She pulled it on, and let out a quive
