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passing
hour.

Chapter
7
     
    It never failed. Any time he had to work, someone
always showed up the night before and got him to drinking. Last
night it had been his cousin Stephanie and her new boyfriend,
Chuck. He’d promised himself after the last meeting he had with
Teddy that he wouldn’t do that anymore, that he’d not go out and
get drunk until he knew for sure he was off the following day. He’d
tried to beg off but Stephanie had persisted. They only had a few
more days before Chuck had to return to his unit and she wanted to
show him a good time.
    As he made his way to his cubicle, the churning in
the pit of his stomach intensified. He was gonna hurl. His
breakfast was resting uneasily in the sea of vodka he’d dumped into
his gut the night before. He immediately made a u-turn and raced
from the main floor down the short hallway to the men’s room on the
right. He didn’t see the figure through the window, standing in the
snow on the bank behind the building, watching the building from
beneath the shadowy brow of his hat.
    He saw nothing at all, focused as he was on the
burning at the back of his throat that told him if he didn’t hurry,
he was gonna make a mess. If he had updated his contact information
like he should have, he’d be lying in bed right now, nursing his
hangover instead of spending the morning digging out his truck so
he could come to work. Being on your last warning sucked. Being
hung over and on your last warning was even worse than that.
    Reaching the stall, he dropped to his knees in front
of the toilet just as the first hot stream of vomit was ejected
from his mouth. It felt like his fucking guts were being sucked out
of him and he panted weakly between each bout.
    “Are you okay?” a familiar voice asked from the
doorway. It was Judy.
    Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the
fire. A couple of months earlier he and Judy had spent the night
together after she had gotten into an argument with Teddy. It was
one of those drunken evenings; he’d had nothing better to do, so
what more excuse did he need to go out and get drunk.
    Judy had come to his apartment crying about the
argument she’d had with Teddy. Outwardly Cody had been sympathetic
to her problem. But that was only an act. He’d discovered over the
few short years he’d been living alone that girls on the rebound
from a bad relationship, or those who had just stormed out of their
boyfriend’s after an argument, were the easiest to get into bed.
Judy had been no different.
    After a few I understands , and that
bastard , mixed in with a healthy dose of vodka in a glass of
orange juice, Judy’s defenses had come down and she spent the
night.
    “I’ll be all right,” he said between dry heaves. He
was pretty sure he’d just cleaned his system out. He’d recognized
the two sausage biscuits he’d had that morning, as well as the
chili he’d eaten the night before. His mom had stopped by for a
visit, and that had primed him for a night of drinking. So it
hadn’t been too hard for Stephanie to convince him to show them the
nightlife.
    Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he
crossed to the row of sinks on the opposite wall. After splashing
some cold water on his face, he looked at Judy. “Does he know?”
    “I haven’t told him yet,” she said.
    “Why?” Cody splashed some more cold water on his
face.
    “It just hasn’t come up yet.”
    “What? You have to wait for it to come up? You can’t
just tell him?”
    “It’s complicated.”
    “No shit. Does he know what happened?”
    “Are you still working here?”
    “Good point. But you need to tell him, the sooner
the better.”
    “But what if he gets mad?”
    “Don’t tell him everything. You’ve been fucking him,
right?” She nodded. “Then he doesn’t need to know what happened
between us.”
    “But what if it looks like you?”
    “That doesn’t mean a damn thing. I don’t know how
you women can tell the difference anyway. A baby is a