Current mood:

tired

[for dr_julianna_cox and backdated to last week]
He’d bought the Mercedes seven years ago with the better part of an extravagant and wholly deserved bonus, had borne the inevitable cracks about his midlife crisis bemusedly. It was by no means a flashy car—four doors, a top that wouldn’t budge, a coat of black paint designed not to turn any heads—but it handled well and, on those occasions when Alan pressed it for speed, complied readily enough. A study in the elegance of understatement, he might have (and probably did, at one point or another, to impress one girl or another) pronounced it.

All of which served to make the journey from Boston to New York City just short of intolerable.

He left the office early, thanking the deities or demons governing baseball scheduling that the Sox had been banished to Philadelphia for the weekend, and nevertheless managed to snarl himself in traffic almost immediately. Several hours of the very worst kind of driving ensued, Alan nudging the car forward with alternating taps to the gas and brake pedals, blasting the air conditioning and fussing with the radio. Traffic thinned once he’d left Boston behind, congealed again when he reached New York. There were, of course, no parking spots available in the vicinity of Julianna’s apartment.

(Well, no legal parking spots.)

Road-weary, tie slightly askew but expectant look in place, he rapped on the door.