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“Margo, that is enough.”
She stops mid-thought. I watch the math finish behind her eyes, because Margo knows the whole sad history, knows I never once went to bed with Maksim across five entire months. Her mouth drops open. It was my first time, and it was with him.
“Lower your voice,” I hiss, “before the whole floor is doing this arithmetic alongside you.”
Against my own warning, last night comes rushing back at me. His chest slick with sweat above mine, muscles working. The thick veins roping down his forearms as he pinned my wrists. My legs hooked tight around his waist, his cock buried deep, his breath going ragged at my throat. Heat pools low in my belly, right here in the middle of my shift, and my thighs press together on their own.
“He absolutely wrecked you,” Margo concludes, triumphant and a little bit awed. “Look at your face. Look at the wrecked, ruined state of you.”
“Well…” my voice trails off.
“Say it. It was the best fuck of your life,” she says. “And for what it is worth, I’m certain you were amazing too.”
My whole face and neck go up in flames.
The floor falls silent all at once, and I know before I turn that Mr. Abernathy is standing at my station. The edge of his sad toupee sits a shade more crooked than usual today.
“Are we quite finished chatting over here?” he asks.
“Sorry, I’m back to it right now.” Margo scoots away fast.
He slaps a stack of reservation cards down on the bar. “The Kessler party of twelve, every last detail, set before service.”
I flip through them and my stomach drops. The whole booking has landed on me with an hour to spare. A changed menu. A re-set private room. A stack of split checks to reconcile before the doors open. My temple, still tender from last night, starts to throb in time with my pulse.
“Did this only just come in this morning?” I ask.
“When a client asks, it is not a request, it is an order,” he says. “Miss your deadline, and you can kiss your bonus goodbye. Now work and do it quietly.”
From two stations over, Dana’s smothered giggle carries perfectly across the room, and he doesn’t so much as glance her way. His hearing is a marvel of selective, spineless engineering.
“Understood,” I say, and he walks off looking cheated of a bigger reaction.
My phone lights up with a message from Margo.
Margo
He lets Dana run her mouth for an hour, but two sentences from us and he materializes out of thin air.
He picks on the ones who cannot bite back. That is the whole trick of the man.
We trade a single eye-roll across the bar and put our phones away.
The truth is the work has never once loved me back, whatever Abernathy makes of it. I carry trays, swallow the insults, and count tips that never quite close the gap the hospital left behind. There is no dream buried under it, no studio door with my name waiting somewhere down the line. There is only Milo, and the debt, and the next shift. For now, I bend back to the reservation book, where a party of twelve has asked, with a straight face, for a separate check for every single guest.
An hour later, neck stiff and eyes swimming, I notice Abernathy bolt from the back office and straighten his tie in the mirror behind the bottles. A runner scurries past, swapping the well liquor on the manager’s table for the top-shelf stock. Even the old bar director, a man I have laid eyes on maybe twice, emerges, smoothing his lapels as he comes.
The floor begins to hum. Someone big has arrived.
Dana whips out a compact and refreshes her lipstick. “A visitor like this decides whether any of us keep our jobs,” Margo murmurs, watching the parade file past.
The group rounds the corner, and my recognition is instant and complete. The bar director is wearing the careful, cautious smile that says he is unsure of his own footing. Abernathy is nodding along obsequiously, bobbing his head at every syllable.
The visitor is… Lev.
He stands a full head above every other man in that hallway, well past six feet, and the whole rhythm of the corridor bends itself around his unhurried, predatory stride. His dark suit pulls taut across shoulders I traced with my own two hands only hours ago. Beneath that fabric, I know, are the scars and the ink nobody in this room could begin to imagine.
What on earth is he doing here?
