Read Out of Her Comfort Zone for Free Online

Elliot’s grasp. He wasn’t fast enough to grab her back, even with her on these pogo sticks.
    Leaning against the window for support and to get as far away from people as possible, she skirted the room. Finally, she reached the foyer and walk-ran down the hall. She passed the room set aside for the ladies and went straight on to the master bedroom. It wasn’t until she got to the bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it that she realized she’d just given up her identity to anyone who was watching her go.
    ****
    She fell against the door, and for a moment her overloaded mind went blank. Two long breaths later, the door banged and she jumped.
    “Let me in.” Elliot’s mutter sounded like a demand. Or desperation.
    “I need a shower.”
    “Let me in, Em. Now.”
    “After.”
    A thump. Elliot must have rested his forehead on the door. “Fine, after. How long?”
    How long? Forever. “Twenty minutes,” she heard herself say. “It’s a lot of makeup.”
    More voices in the hall. The party was spilling out into the private areas. She heard Elliot push off the door. “Eleven-twenty now, so eleven-forty. No more.”
    No more was right.
    Under the hottest water she could stand she scrubbed off the makeup, the sweat, the cum, the life she used to have. Everything was changed. This was impossible. She’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
    She scrub, scrub, scrubbed – and then stopped. A thought banged into her head, and she turned the water down.
    Elliot set me up. This is his idea of a joke. Put the shy girlfriend to the test. A grand experiment, a performance piece.
    And I fell for it. And I loved it. And I’d do it again.
    What have I done?
    How could she have dreamed she’d stay anonymous? She always knew people by how they walked, how they stood. Of course others would recognize her the same way.
    She sank onto the warmed tile of the shower. She was the biggest idiot in the universe. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t breathe.
    She looked at the clock. Eleven-thirty. Her throat was dry from sobbing. She was so hungry. She had ten minutes to get out of here.
    She whipped the towel around her body, drying as fast as she could. It touched her nipples and she jumped so hard she nearly slipped on the tile. She left her hair still in the ponytail from hiding it under the wig, not taking the time to brush it out.
    In the bedroom she didn’t even turn on the light, but she had to flick the overhead on in the closet. Her travel bag, complete with its TSA-approved collection of toiletries, stood at the ready as always. She popped it open and pulled everything black off hangers and out of drawers and threw it in the bag. She was out of the closet with five minutes left.
    She spent three minutes in a frantic search for her messenger bag, the one with her wallet, phone, and work deck. She found it hiding behind the closet door, and now there was no time to leave a note. She decided he deserved nothing but an e-mail. He doesn’t deserve even that.
    With less than a minute to go, she was out the bathroom’s other door, into the hallway to the spare bedroom and down the stairs to the garage. She pushed open the outside door and didn’t stop moving until she was more than two blocks away at a taxi stand on
    Market Street
    . She couldn’t remember if she’d waited for the lights at the corners or not.
    Her phone started to buzz. She pressed ignore, and dialed for Josh and Ginny’s land-line. An older lady answered, and Emily remembered the couple was on their anniversary weekend in Napa. She apologized and clicked off just as another call came in. She hit ignore on that one too, looking up and down the street. Where? Where?
    “Where to, lady?” It was the taxi driver.
    Her phone buzzed again. She remembered Elliot had its tracking code. She turned it completely off.
    “Fisherman’s Wharf.”
    Tourist Central. He’d never think to look for her there.
    ****
    The next day and night were a blur, complete with