Street Lights Part 3 (fiction)

She artfully arranged herself and her various bags in the elevator and glanced up as a well dressed, perfectly coiffed woman stepped onto the elevator, wafting a sweet swath of perfume in with her. The woman gave her an insincere smile that she felt was slightly tinged with pity. She resolved to buy a pair of high heels and to don eye makeup from time to time.
She stared at the woman’s erect back, scrutinizing her perfect auburn hair which was shot through with russet and had a soft, natural wave to it, trying to discover split ends. There appeared to be none. Intuitively she knew that this woman wore expensive lingerie under her classic, stylish clothes, even if she wasn’t meeting up with her lover. She struggled to remember if she had managed to pull on a halfway decent pair of panties this morning, or if she would appear before Thomas, resplendent in the underwear that almost reached her belly button that she had bought at Costco because they were three for nine bucks.
With a muted ding, the elevator doors slid open and the woman in front of her glided serenely out, turning left. As she too was turning left she made a show of rearranging her bags (actually, the strap of her overnight bag was digging rather painfully into her shoulder) to allow the woman to get to her intended destination without her following, like some gawky, second rate sidekick. Straightening up, she turned left too, went around the corner and saw the woman standing in front of Thomas’s door. Evidently she has just knocked, as the door opened and an arm – Thomas’s arm – reached from inside the apartment to clasp itself around the woman’s slender waist and pull her in. The woman gave a coy, throaty laugh.
She stood transfixed, quite sure that the woman had entered an apartment that was not Thomas’, and yet she knew it was. She retreated back towards the elevators and let the grocery bags and her overnight bag slide out of her clutches, to be deposited in a noisy jumble on the carpeted floor.
In a bit of a daze she took out her cell phone and called Thomas. She heard his cell phone ringing from the confines of his apartment and the dull murmur of a conversation before he answered.
“Hey,” he greeted her. “What’s up?”
Had she not seen this strange woman enter his apartment she would have thought he sounded like he did everything other day, but now she could detect a slight stress, a bit of a quaver in his voice. A thought flitted through her mind: how many times had he answered her call in a similar circumstance and she had not detected something untoward in his voice? He had never given her a reason not to trust him, and so she had implicitly trusted him.
“Oh, nothing,” she said airily, surprising herself. “I got off work a little bit early so I’m heading over to your place now, is that okay?”
There was a brief silence and she fantasized she could see beads of sweat forming on his brow. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe he had been doing this so long that a lengthy history of near-misses had accumulated. Perhaps he had it down to a fine science. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Are you just leaving now or… how far away are you?”
“I should be there in about ten minutes,” she said firmly.
“Okay, great – I’ll see you then,” he replied, not sounding at all happy, but trying desperately to.
She snapped her phone shut, leaned against the lavishly wallpapered wall, and trained her eyes on his apartment door.