What You Remember I Did by Janet Berliner, Janet & Tem Berliner Page B

defined shabby chic. They both wore black, of course, but it was the way they walked that set them apart–as if they had been together for so long that they were hardly two separate people anymore. I want to be like that, she thought. I want to be like that with Matt.
    The door of the club stood open. The wail of Newman's horn and the complicated percussion behind it drew her inside and she pushed her way impolitely through the SRO crowd. Matt was already there. She saw him before he saw her and she stopped to stare. The blue and violet stage lights played on his profile and turned his hair satiny. He was a beautiful man, beautiful and potentially dangerous. Newman hit and held an impossibly low note as Nan let her hands fall on his shoulders and work their way slowly down his back.
    The waitress came by and he told her, "Bring the lady a Merlot." She sipped it and thought again of her mother, knowing how much she would have loved being here and very glad she wasn't.
    They told each other they were sorry to leave after the first set, but it would have been impossible for them to stay without making a spectacle of themselves. As it was, they stopped to kiss half a dozen times on the block-and-a-half walk to his apartment, and were already partly unbuttoned and unzipped by the time he shut his door behind them and they clutched each other in a serious embrace.
    His shirt came off in the foyer. His spine was long, his shoulder blades smooth. She forced herself to wait a second or two before plunging her hands into the light fur at the small of his back. Keeping as much of their bodies pressed together as they could, they stumbled into the living room, where she bent her head and one by one took his nipples between her teeth. It was all she could do not to bite down, and he did wince, gasp, laugh in surprise.
    He started to pull off her shirt but she stopped him with a sharp, "No!" Instead she unbuckled his belt, pushing his hand away when he made as if to help her, working at the snap on his jeans until it came loose.
    "Let's go in the bedroom," he whispered, tongue playing in the whorls of her ear.
    But she pulled him down with her onto the oval braided rug and they made love there, hard and fast, both coming at once and crying out together. Before the spasms of pleasure had completely subsided she was sobbing against his chest and thinking how she would tell Tonya about this.

TRIAL
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    Maids-R-Us advertised the fact that they were fully bonded, therefore all employees were fully investigated. The truth was demand exceeded supply and the employee turnover was enormous. So what if a few of the men and women who worked for them slipped through the cracks and back under the rocks for which the county had been named.

    Sometimes they only stayed for a day, like the one who came to work in scrubs, a nurse in need of extra funds.   A lot of their elderly clients requested nurses who could help them out for a day with their meds and meals and showers and were willing to pay extra for those services. By good fortune, they had one on their list that day–the only day the nurse showed up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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    Although Nan arrived at the support group meeting fifteen minutes early, the two seats on either side of Tonya were already taken. She was annoyed at herself because she could've been here earlier and equally irritated by the fact that she was annoyed at all. Like a teenager going to a party where she knew only the hostess, she'd sat in her car in the parking lot listening to the radio and counting down the minutes, not wanting to appear too eager, but not wanting to be late. She didn't like not knowing how to behave and was nervous about what Tonya and the others would think of her, let alone about what she'd be expected to do or say in a support group for people with repressed memories of parental sexual abuse, especially since she wasn't at all convinced she was one.
    Most of all, now that she was in the room,