Ruby got up and made her way to the condiment bar with her cup, and was soon doctoring the drink with sugar and cocoa powder. She took a preemptive sip and silently congratulated her efforts. Back at the table, she returned to the book, but soon found that her sporadic bouts of ADD were kicking in. Ruby knew for a fact that it was most definitely not the caffeine from the coffee due to years of abusing the liquid. She was well past using it to keep herself awake and alert. Her system was much too accustomed to the welcome buzz that it was now just a matter of mere survival. Without the proper dosage of caffeine in her system, Ruby just wasn’t herself.

She set the book back down, making a mental note of the page she was on. She wasn’t one to be bothered with using bookmarks. Had it been her own book, she would have simply made a small dog-ear in the upper corner of the page. But she had borrowed the book from a friend, and people can get pretty anal when it comes to dog-earing pages in their books.