Rough Cut: Waking up in a strange place

This is an unedited first-draft selection of another e-book I'm working on. It began as a short story I had published while I was in college and has been worked on over the years (about 17 years or so; I was, um, busy? Yeah, busy.), and I'm finally getting going with that plan to turn it into a book. The book is called "Moonshine," and it involves an alcoholic radio personality, murder and maybe a werewolf. You know, the usual stuff. This is the book's tentative opening. Hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Jane needed a few moments to figure out where she was waking up at.

The only thing that jumped out at first was that, wherever she was, it was dark. She caught a light out of her left, coming through a sheer fabric. She could see enough through the fabric that the light was coming from a streetlight. The light’s glow was soft, which made it eerie against the darkness but also inviting.

Jane reached back and felt a pillow. She was in a bed. And she knew where the bed was at – the only city she knew with gas streetlights.

“Charleston,” she whispered, while rubbing her throbbing head.

Her next job was to figure out whose bed she was in.

Jane reached to her right and felt skin. Her hand moved up and down with the skin.

“Well, at least he’s not dead, whoever he is,” she thought.

With her left hand, Jane felt around on the floor. She found her trusty smartphone and checked the time. It was 4:48 a.m. She kept her phone in dim mode during what she called adult sleepovers. She learned that going full light just to look at the time either woke up her partner for the night or blinded her.

Jane slid slowly out of bed and reached out to find the wall. She found it close by. Keeping one hand on the wall – and hoping there were no pictures on it that could be knocked off – Jane tiptoed away from the bed. She had gotten good at sneaking out over the years, to the point that she knew exactly where to “throw” her clothes. She would toss them against the wall nearest her side of the bed. It made it easier to find them in the dark.

She didn’t go far along the wall before she felt her jean shorts, and then her shirt. As Jane bent over, she swallowed. She tasted gin and lime, the night’s fun-enhancer of choice. Then she recalled how nicely the cool drinks felt during the warm night, and how much funnier they made her bedmate (“George,” she whispered, remembering) seem on a night she needed a laugh.

Jane quietly dressed herself near the bedroom door. She slid her hand in her right pocket of her jean shorts and pulled out a small vial. It contained two aspirin. She always kept it on hand when she made trips like this and she knew there was a fair chance she’d wake up with a headache. She swallowed the pills, slowly opened the door, tiptoed into the hall and quietly slid the door shut behind her.

The first few times Jane did this, she’d hit herself with the door in the dark, stumble while dressing herself or close the door too loudly. But years of practice had perfected her craft. And the miscues always made for good stories for friends and family – the ones who took the stories with more humor and less judgment, anyway. Jane chuckled, thinking that her escapades were at least getting more boring and were nothing like the time she almost burned down one bedmate’s house because she fell asleep trying to cook a pizza left out from the night before. It woke up the whole neighborhood, but Jane thought the pizza tasted OK.