The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks Read Free Book Online Page A

express your pleasure.”
    “I’m … so pleased?” I said, raising my pitch at the end so she wouldn’t miss the question mark.
    “Next time, you will express more pleasure than that,” she said, then unwrapped herself with a series of quick, sumptuous little stretches.
    When Tina isn’t doing yoga, she’s jogging. She couples those twin obsessions with an aversion to carbohydrates. It’s not a lifestyle I would recommend for everyone, but she seems to enjoy the discipline. It certainly had rather admirable effects on her physique, which she showed off with a wardrobe that tended toward the form-fitting, sleeveless, and short-hemmed side of the fashion spectrum. It led to complications in my life that didn’t exist when my editor was a pear-shaped, middle-aged Italian guy.
    “Who says I don’t already have plans tonight?” I asked.
    “What, like a hot date? Come on, I already heard you struck out with Sweet Thang.”
    “Sweet Thang” was the nickname bestowed on a former intern at the paper. She and I had engaged in a brief flirtation that never went anywhere, and it was now an entirely moot point—she had departed newspapering in favor of a job at a nonprofit in New York City, which was probably a better fit for her philanthropically oriented soul.
    I held my chin high and said, “I’ll have you know I happen to be highly sought after by a great variety of women.”
    “Who … the cougars from Montclair?”
    “Well, them, yes,” I said. “But I also happen to have caught the eye of a rather fetching younger woman.”
    Tina reached around to the back of her head and released a hair clasp, allowing a cascade of thick, brown curls to fall on her shoulders.
    “One, you’re lying,” she said. “Two, do we really have to play this game?”
    “What game?”
    “The one where you pretend you actually have a love life.”
    She had me there. My last serious relationship was now several years in my rearview mirror, and it had ended rather poorly. The lady and I had been living together at my house in Nutley—the house also ended poorly, but that’s another story—and we were entering that period in our late twenties when we spent a lot of time going to friends’ weddings. I thought we were heading in the same direction, even thought I was happy about it. Then she explained to me I wasn’t, then explicated all the reasons. The short version: she didn’t like anything about me, after all. I’m not even sure I had digested the long version by the time she was off shacking up with someone new.
    And now? I seemed to have become a rather committed bachelor. I had sporadic and nonrecurring dalliances with the opposite sex, though nothing that stuck. My life pretty much consisted of deadline (the job) and Deadline (the cat).
    “Well, okay, fair point,” I said. “I’m just not a big symphony guy.”
    “Come on, I’ll wear a dress and pretend not to notice when you stare at my legs all night.”
    “Tempting offer.”
    “Perhaps you missed the point earlier,” she said. “It’s not an offer. It’s an order.”
    *   *   *
    As promised, Tina changed into a regulation-issue Little Black Dress, one that stopped several inches above the knee. She coupled it with a dash of perfume, a thin gold choker, and four-inch heels. And it was a good thing we were leaving the building because she was starting to set off all the smoke detectors.
    We took her car—a Volvo being a better fit for the symphony than a used Malibu—and scooted across town to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a handsome brick edifice that really shines when lit up at night. Built in the late nineties, NJPAC was trumpeted as the catalyst that would bring nightlife roaring back to downtown Newark in a way not seen since the city’s long-ago heyday.
    And while those expectations had perhaps been unrealistic—they were building a concert hall, not a miracle machine—there was no disputing that the surrounding area, while still