Chapter 16 #2
Among the many things that had made Lora feel like an utter ass the other day outside of the police department was her comment about not napping since she was ten.
She had written entire papers in college about the unfortunate effects of grind culture in America and how people were universally sleep-deprived to the point that it had become a cultural status symbol.
Yet here she was, spewing judgmental commentary about a practice that was not only healthy, but tied to cultural norms in the country that she was currently asking to accept her.
What kind of a person invited herself to live with someone, then got judgmental of what her host loved?
Why not walk around Italy declaring that the coffee sucked, Ferraris were ugly, and Sophia Loren was a hard six?
After Giada and Vivi left the night before, she couldn’t sleep at all.
She kept turning everything over in her head, wondering about her mother, Ivo, the money.
It felt like her entire sense of self was rolling through a storm, trying to keep itself upright and failing.
She didn’t intend to be some kind of hungover emotional ogre, raging Shrek-like while other people ducked out of her way.
That was not what she wanted to be. In fact, quite the opposite.
So, she made a plan. The next morning, she would go for a walk, come back to do some writing, and as soon as she felt even the slightest twinge of tiredness, she would go upstairs, change into pajamas, and slide into bed.
As she saw it, sleeping would take care of two issues: first, her obvious exhaustion, and second, her discomfort with taking time to rest in the middle of the day.
With any luck, she’d wake up feeling brilliant and become a convert to the napping lifestyle. And she kept her word.
The next day, after writing up a summary of a meta-analysis, she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over while her eyes got heavier and heavier.
So, she got up, got into pj’s, and got supine.
Shimmying around in the sheets to get comfortable, she placed the pillows just so and closed her eyes.
Of course people who were against napping were unlikely to have considered the effect of daylight in a bedroom with no window treatments.
Lora opened her eyes again, wondering how the hell it was suddenly so bright in there, and nothing but freshly painted white walls glared back.
She turned over onto her side and tried to cover her face with her hand, but her wrist began to cramp from the awkward position.
Pulling one of the pillows over her face, she tried to settle deeper into the bed.
She gave up after a few minutes of near suffocation and got up to see if she could find a dark scarf or shirt to wrap around her face.
She could not find anything dark that wasn’t too large or heavy until she opened up the top drawer of the bureau and spotted her black bra.
She held it up, looking at the lightly padded cups, and decided it would be worth a shot.
Back in the bed, she lay on her back and turned the bra upside down, then placed the chest band above her eyebrows so that the cups covered her eyes.
It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t half bad.
She tried to relax by making a mental list of the things she would need to buy to make this room more conducive to naps, but somewhere around silk eye mask and pedestal fan, her drowsy shopping stalled out and she settled into slumber.
Yet another mistake of the newbie napper was to forget to put the phone on “Do Not Disturb,” an error she realized when her phone both vibrated and chimed several times in a row.
She jerked awake, fumbling for the phone, which was somewhere out of reach.
Pulling it up to her face, she peeked under the cup covering her right eye and squinted.
Andrea:
Are you busy?
I’m coming by
Shoving up the bra, she texted back as fast as her fingers could go.
Lora:
Just working
Give me 5 to finish
Lora shot out of bed, yanked off her pajamas, threw on the cotton dress she’d had on earlier, then pulled the sheets back up. She was fluffing the pillows to erase all evidence of her snooze session when her phone chimed again.
Andrea:
Already walking toward you
“Shit!” she yelled, running into the bathroom.
She pulled toothpaste out of the drawer and grabbed her toothbrush.
She did a double take after glancing up at the mirror when she saw the black bra still tied around her forehead.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said again through a mouthful of minty foam.
The bra cups had left marks around her eyes from when she’d turned over and ended up mashing her face into the pillow.
She tried to rub the skin, but that only made it red.
Then she tried to fix her bangs in some way to camouflage the area, but unless she planned on greeting him looking like a sheepdog, that was not going to work.
Lora heard a knock at the door and yelled, “I’ll be right there,” though she was pretty sure there was no way he would hear her, so she lifted up her arm to do a pit check, slapped on a little extra Dove Max Protection, and ran down the stairs.