The Apartment: The Complete Affair Read Free Page A

Knight’s Dance Studio.
    The first time she’d seen it she had laughed, wondering how on earth an old-fashioned dance studio stayed in business in such a small town. Even if everyone who lived in Aledo decided to learn the foxtrot, Lily had figured that they would run out of customers within a year, but somehow it seemed to be thriving.
    From what Lily had heard from her father, Mrs. Knight used to work at the high school office a long time ago, but after she retired, she spent a year remodeling the old dance studio that hadn’t been in business since the early 80s. The rumors were that she had been quite the dancer back in her youth, and had cried when she heard about it closing. Now she spent her afternoons teaching little girls how to tap dance and elderly couples how to mambo. She was in heaven.
    Passing the storefront, Lily peeked in the window like she did every day, smiling as she watched the current class of seventy-somethings shuffle along. Right before she reached the end of the building, she saw something that made her stop in her tracks. There, smack dab in the middle of the window, was a sign that hadn’t been there yesterday.
    APARTMENT FOR RENT
    SEE INSIDE
    She blinked a few times, wondering why she couldn’t move her feet. After a full thirty seconds Lily finally forced herself to keep walking, right through the gym door and straight into the locker room.
    She changed out of her scrubs quickly, throwing on her capri-length black sport pants and one of her favorite concert tees, a dark blue shirt that said
TOO MANY DICKS ON THE DANCE FLOOR
across the front repeatedly in rainbow letters. Making her way across the cardio room, Lily signed for an open treadmill and popped in her earbuds, scrolling through her playlists until she found the one labeled
Workout Songs
. She adjusted the settings on the treadmill for her target heart rate and incline, and within seconds she was humming along with the music as she ran.
    Sadly, the first song wasn’t even over before the image of the sign in the window flashed in her mind. Lily shook her head to clear her thoughts and hit the skip button on her iPod, hoping that another tune might distract her more.
    She smiled widely and started running faster when the beats of an old hip-hop song started playing, thinking that she had finally managed to focus. She was wrong. By the second verse she was wondering what the rent might be for an apartment downtown and how fast it would go. Decent apartments were hard to come by in a town so small; people kept them until death and then willed them to their family. At least that’s how it felt to Lily. She’d wanted to get the hell out of her father’s house for a long time, but she could never find anywhere decent that she could afford.
    I wonder if they allow animals
, she thought to herself.
Dammit! What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I concentrate?
    Lily turned off the treadmill, knowing with absolute certainty that if both ODB and Rob Base couldn’t get her in the mood to exercise, then nothing would.
    She stomped back to the locker room and grabbed her bag, tossing the iPod in before zipping it closed and heading outside to her car. She rarely changed again before going home, and she definitely didn’t see the point of it today since she hadn’t even broken a sweat. However, she did see the point of her jacket as soon as she stepped outside and was reminded that it was late January.
    She opened the passenger door and set her bag on the seat, fishing her jacket out and throwing it on. When she glanced back over her shoulder as she slid her arm into the sleeve, her eyes caught the sign once again.
    Deciding that there was no harm in just asking about it, Lily slammed the door shut and went inside the dance studio before she lost her nerve. The office just inside the front door was empty, so she walked down the hall until she heard what sounded like Latin music combined with a French accordion. She followed the beat farther