Throwing off the blanket, he looked down at the jeans and flannel shirt he’d worn to the club. He’d passed out before he’d had a chance to get naked, so everything was rumpled, but he was going to wear the Levi’s to work. The shirt, on the other hand, he had to save from twelve hours of construction. It was his only “good” one—which meant no paint specks, no holes, no missing buttons, and no frayed cuffs. Yet.

Jim stripped down and dumped the shirt into the leaning tower of dirty laundry by the bed. As he walked his headache into the stall shower, he was reminded of why not having a lot of furniture was a good thing. Short of his two piles of clothes, the clean and the needed-to-be-cleaned, all he had was the rattan couch that the studio had come with and a table with two chairs—all of which were mercifully out of the path to the bathroom.

He shaved fast and showered quick; then it was boxers and the Levi’s and four aspirin. Undershirt was next, followed by socks and boots. On the way to the door, he grabbed his tool belt and his work jacket.

His rental was on top of a garage-like outbuilding, and he paused at the top of the stairs, squinting so hard he bared his teeth. Goddamn…all that eye-piercing light made it seem like the sun had decided to return the Earth’s attraction and move a little closer to seal the deal.

Down the creaking wooden steps. Across the gravel drive to the cold truck. All the way with an expression like he had a spike through his foot.

As he opened the driver’s-side door, he caught a whiff of perfume and cursed. Images came back to him, all of them carnal as hell, each one of them another source of inspiration for the headache.

He was still cursing and squinting as he drove out the lane and past the white farmhouse, the owner of which was his elderly landlord, Mr. Perlmutter. No one had lived in the big place for as long as Jim had been a renter, its windows boarded up on the inside, its porch perennially empty of wicker anything.

That nobody-home routine along with the thirty days’ notice to get out were his two favorite parts about where he stayed.

On the way to work, he pulled into a gas station and bought a large coffee, a turkey sub, and a Coke. The quick mart smelled like old shoes and laundry softener, and there was a probability that the sandwich had been made last week in Turkey, but he’d been eating the same thing for the last month and was still upright in his boots, so the shit obviously wasn’t killing him.