1. Alba #2
That hurt too, which I knew was pathetic and selfish of me.
I took a deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then squared my shoulders and walked out of the fridge. I grabbed a couple of plates on my way out of the kitchen and brought them to the hungry patrons who had ordered them, smiling like my life depended on it.
In a lot of ways, it did.
When I glanced over at the far side of my section, the old lecher had disappeared. A red-stained wine glass remained at his seat, and his companion in the cheap suit now wore a troubled frown as he leaned his chin on his palm and stared out the window at the city rushing by outside.
My first thought was that I was glad I wouldn’t have to interact with the other man again. My second was that I’d wasted all that effort resisting the urge to stab him in the eye when he wasn’t even the one who was going to pay the bill.
At least when I flirted back with them, they tended to pay me for it. This guy didn’t look like he’d bother. Cheap Suit glanced up when I stopped to clear the other man’s wine glass.
“Can I get you anything else?” I asked.
His pale blue eyes met mine, and he shook his head. “Just the bill.” His voice was pleasantly deep, and it annoyed me. Just another handsome, entitled man who lived life on easy mode.
Business lunches and bottles of wine. Money flowing through his hands like water. A devastating smile and a trail of heartbreaks behind him.
Yeah, I knew his type.
I was so tired .
“I’m sorry about that, earlier,” he said, motioning to the other side of the table, and a flash of annoyance went through me. He didn’t have to pretend to care. No one else did.
“Not your job to apologize for other people’s actions.”
He tilted his head. “Still. Not the kind of thing I like to endorse.” A sigh left his lips, and his gaze slid away from me as he said, lower, “So I guess it’s a good thing he walked.”
I arched a brow, and a scoff slipped through my best defenses. “Meeting didn’t go the way you wanted?”
I knew the moment the words came out of my mouth that my tone was way out of line. Too much sass, not enough deference. All the judgments that were supposed to be bottled up inside me had been folded in that question, barely hidden just below the surface.
Like how little I thought of him and how much I’d faked it with his lunch mate. How much he and his ilk disgusted me. How much I resented his kindness.
There went my tip.
He leaned back in his chair, the seams of that polyester suit straining at his shoulders as he stretched his arm out across the seat next to him.
His dark hair was tousled, but not in a thousand-dollar-haircut kind of way.
More like “I buzz my head every four months over the bathroom sink with clippers I bought at Walmart, and I’m due for a chop” kind of way.
He didn’t look bad . He wore it as well as a guy could. But if he was attempting to rub elbows with the kind of man who had just walked out of this lunch meeting, he had entirely the wrong look.
Not that I cared. I wasn’t part of that world, either. Not anymore.
The man looked at me, and I felt like a bug under a microscope. “You don’t seem surprised,” he noted.
“That he walked out on you and left you sulking?”
“Sulking?”
“What would you call it?” I picked up the empty bottle of wine and put it on my tray beside the other man’s glass, arching a brow at him. Cheap Suit hadn’t partaken in the wine that the old lecher ordered. He hadn’t even pretended to indulge, the fool.
“I’m not sure I like your tone,” he said, and there was a warning in his eyes.
I held the tray in one hand and planted the other on my hip. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied, and smiled.
His eyes narrowed. “It’s one thing for an investor to tell me that he’s passing on my company,” he rumbled, “but being patronized by the fucking waitress is not why I came here.”
I reared back, and the empty bottle on my tray wobbled. I grabbed the neck of it and held it in my free hand, glaring at him. “‘The fucking waitress?’” I repeated.
“Pardon me. The fucking server.”
A squeak escaped me, and my temperature went up a few degrees. I ground my teeth. “I see. You were made to feel small and now you want to turn around and do it to someone else. How utterly predictable. I guess you being my valiant defender was just an act earlier?”
He scoffed and leaned forward, eyes boring into mine. “You couldn’t wait to walk over here and point out that I got rejected.”
“Sounds like you enjoy making up stories in your head, buddy.”
“Sounds like you don’t like being called out on your shit.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. My breaths came fast and hard, and fantasies of eye-stabbing returned. My grip on the neck of the wine bottle tightened.
The man smiled and leaned back. “The bill, princess. And if you wouldn’t mind, make it quick. I need to get back to work.”
I clomped away from him, rage boiling in my gut. How dare he. How dare he!
I mashed the screen on our cash register and ripped the bill from the printer. The leather bill fold snapped closed in my hand. I glared across the dining room, ready to march back over there and?—
“Alba.”
I turned to see the front-of-house manager staring at me with narrowed eyes.
Elena was a short woman with ink-black hair and skin a few shades darker than mine.
She’d been in the service industry since she was twelve years old, and she terrified me a little.
Misbehavior was not tolerated on her watch.
Lord knew why she’d given me the job. Nothing I did was up to her standards.
I stood up a little straighter, swallowing past the constriction in my throat. “Yes?”
“Take five,” my manager said, and held her hand out for the billfold. Her head angled toward the back, where she wanted me to go.
“I’m fine,” I ground out.
“It wasn’t a suggestion.”
I bit my lip and handed her the check, then watched her walk toward my table. Then I took a deep breath and went through the swinging door into the kitchen. I ducked through the hectic space, calling, “Behind!” as I passed each of the cooks, and then pushed through the door to the back alley.
Winter wind bit at my neck and face, and I gulped down a deep breath of cold, garbage-scented air. I wanted to cry. Leaning my hands on my knees, I parked my butt against the brick wall of the restaurant and stared at the icy, gravel-encrusted ground between my feet.
I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t. I’d done enough of that, and I was sick of feeling weak.
Salvation was one phone call away; all I had to do was call my mother and tell her I was ready to kowtow to her and Dad. I was ready to admit that I’d been wrong, and I would do whatever it took to salvage our reputation in the eyes of society.
To hell with that.
They had turned their backs on me, just like James had when he realized my family’s money wasn’t in fact mine.
My dad had flung insults at me when he found out about the man I loved.
The man I’d thought loved me back. I was a worthless whore, and I’d go out and earn money like one before he let me parade myself around in front of all of New York with James.
That’s what my father had said, his face purple with rage, my mother crumbling in on herself in the corner of the room, her eyes baleful as they daggered into me.
I hadn’t played by the rules, and I’d been excised for it. Poof! Life as I knew it, gone.
I thought James would be there to help me pick up the pieces. Ha. It surprised me how naive I was, sometimes. How utterly stupid.
No, I wasn’t going to grovel. Humiliation on that level wasn’t something I was willing to endure—not again.
If I went back, what would happen? I’d be handed off to some other man to marry.
I’d make a baby or two, and smile for pictures at glitzy events.
I’d find solace in the bottle, or maybe prescription pills.
I’d be yet another too-thin, zombified woman who’d sold her integrity for a plush bed and a closet full of beautiful clothes.
I couldn’t do it. A part of me was surprised by that, as I was sure my parents had been.
But I just couldn’t spend the next several decades of my life living a vapid existence, even if it was more comfortable than this.
At least here, with my nails worn down to nubs and my body aching with every movement, I knew I was alive.
Another deep breath of fetid air, and I stood up straighter. The chill in the air pierced my thin white button-down, and I glanced sideways at the street. People and cars rushed by, oblivious to me. Oblivious to my pain.
I was going to get fired. Again. I wouldn’t be able to make my rent.
None of my friends or acquaintances from my old life spoke to me anymore—and I’d been too focused on survival to think about making any new friends this past year—so there wouldn’t even be a couch or a spare bedroom for me to crash on.
I was out in the cold, on my own, and I’d just messed up again .
Sighing, I pulled the door open. Might as well face the music. But when I made it back to the dining room, Elena just handed me the billfold from my table and looked into my eyes.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Good. You’ve got a four-top on table seventeen. The old man with the gold watch used to be a regular; treat him like it. His name is Wentworth.”
“Sure,” I said, and I peeked in the billfold, expecting a whole lot of nothing, and half looking forward to cursing Cheap Suit for the next few days. It was nice to have a target for my aggression.
Instead, a crisp, fresh, hundred-dollar bill fluttered out of the leather holder and landed between my black shoes.
Moving slowly, I picked it up and held it like it was a dead rat that I’d been charged with removing.
“Something wrong?” Elena asked, a brow arched.
“The guy on table fourteen left this…for me?”
Elena nodded.
“Did he say anything?”
“Not a word.”