22
I
t’s been over three years since I’d fucked a girl and my urge was strengthening with every little ass that wiggled past me on the club floor or every scarlet smile on an immaculate face. I asked Freddie to organize a girl, but the rat incident took place, and I lost my taste for it. There was nothing like dirty rats running under my feet to dampen my heat.
My ears pricked at the sound of the dinner trolley rattling down the hallway, and I lit a cigar and relaxed in my chair, waiting for her nervous knock on my office door. There was an exchange between her and Ronan, and I suppressed the impulse to listen to their conversation to ensure that they weren’t flirting or planning to meet up later. Rules were rules.
They seemed to be speaking longer than usual, and a flurry of her sweet giggle after Ronan spoke to her stirred something in me. Her laughter was genuine and cute, unlike the forced flirtatious laughter I received from the dancers and bar staff on the club floor. It’s been a while since I made a girl laugh like that, but I especially didn’t like the envy that curled in my belly at hearing their exchange.
Obviously, she liked him and he liked her, but I wasn’t sure why. Why her ? What was it about her that spurred androgen in the boys, turning their brains into mush while weakening their loyalties? But that laughter. Her laughter could uplift the darkest of days.
The trolley rattled toward my door, followed by that awkward knock. I waited a few seconds before answering because she hoped I wasn’t in.
When I heard the trolley opening, as if she were about to place the dinner on the floor, I called, “Enter.”
There was an “Oh no,” as if she was frightened by my voice, and a smile slithered across my face.
The door opened, and she clumsily pushed the trolley partially inside. “I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I couldn’t hear anyone, so I thought you weren’t here.”
“I’m always here,” I mumbled, and she looked up at the sound of my voice, but I didn’t think she heard what I said. Especially at dinnertime when my slave came along to serve me. There was nothing I liked more than being served.
I oversaw her, still searching for that feature or aspect that drew Ronan and Gunner to her, like moths to a flame. Brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a delicate neck, easy to snap. Big soulful eyes behind geeky glasses, terrified and unable to look at me, pretty pert body. Curves. I liked curves. I guess that was something alluring about her. Curves under the unflattering club uniform, white apron tied around her waist, black dress pants, and sturdy shoes.
There was something seductive about strings tied around a narrow waist, but in this case, there was another two layers of clothing underneath that I’d have to cut through if I wanted to fuck her. Which I didn’t.
She hesitated, holding the silver tray with the covered plate, shuffled slightly, waiting for me to direct her. When I didn’t direct her, she stepped forward nervously, her eyes pleading for me to tell her what to do. Finally, she took the initiative and placed the tray in front of me on the desk, where I usually like her to put it.
“I didn’t tell you to put it down here,” I teased in an assertive tone to scare the crap out of her. For fun.
I was her boss, so if she wanted to work here and continue to bring me my dinner, I would taunt her when I was in the mood.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” her little hands trembled as she shuffled forward and leaned over me to pick the tray back up again.
Her sweet perfume danced over me, intoxicating, yet tantalizing. Unfortunately, as she tried to pick the tray up, she couldn’t grasp it well, and her fingers slipped from one side, and the plate almost slid off. It was entertaining as she clumsily wrangled with the tray, while I stifled a smile.
“S-sorry,” she repeated as her cheeks burned red. “Sorry.”
I let her stand there holding the tray for a few seconds as she waited for me to tell her where to put it. Then, as if she were stupid, I said, “Here,” pointing to the desk before me. Even though she had just put it there, I made her take it away again.
Dithering for fear that I would change my mind again, she placed the tray in front of me, and again, I was gifted with a whiff of her subtle perfume. I had to muster as much strength as possible not to nestle my nose in the curve of her neck.
“You took long enough,” I snarled as she stepped away, eager to leave. “Wait.”
Her feet froze, and she turned back to face me, as the color drained from her face, going from pink cheeks to sheet white. “Is there anything else, sir?”
“Yes. Two things,” I started taking the cover off my plate. “One. If this is cold because you took a long time to pass it to me, you’ll return to the kitchen to bring me another plate.”
“Yes, sir,” her voice was so soft and shaky, but I caught a flint of irritation in her eye, a tiny taste of rebelliousness. How far did I have to push it to see the anarchy in her face and the defiance on her tongue?
“Do you have an update?” I asked her, noticing the smooth skin of her forearms that disappeared under the polo-neck kitchen uniform. Thin wrists led to twitching fingers that she cupped as soon as she noticed me looking at them.
“An update?” she was confused. It was an ugly uniform, but our members never saw the staff who wore it anyway.
“Yes, an update on whether you have any information to share,” I clarified.
“No,” she shook her head. “Honestly, all I’m hearing is work talk about work.” She stuttered on her words, and I found her so endearing. “I mean work talk about food prep, dishwasher emptying, and all that.”
“Right,” I said, picking up one of the marinated lamb chops on my plate and biting into the meat.
She added, “It’s busy and noisy, so it’s not easy overhearing conversations most of the time, unless it’s an order barked at me or someone else.”
“Fine,” I responded, swallowing the meat.
“Is it okay?” she asked me, watching me eat.
“Very good.”
“Not cold?” She seemed eager to please me, which I liked.
So, she was endearing, smelled lovely, eager to please, and let’s face it, she’d look great naked. The attributes were adding up, where I was almost starting to see what Gunner and Rinan saw in her. Almost.
I locked my gaze into her terrified eyes behind glasses. “It’s perfect.”
She exhaled in a gush as if she was holding her breath and smiled, looking relieved, and a tingle in my crotch made me flinch. No. I wasn’t traveling down that road. I was not touching a girl who was not only a staff member, but the apple in the eyes of Gunner and Ronan, and a possible enemy. Three strikes were against her, but that smile did something to me.
Dropping my eyes to seem indifferent, I told her, “You can go now.” But as she walked to the door, I had to watch her go. I had eye up that butt moving in those ugly black dress pants and I could tell she was smiling without seeing her face. She was happy that I was happy.
“Thank you,” she said breathlessly. Then she closed the door on me, and I paused to listen to the rattling trolley being wheeled to the elevator go distant, and then silence.
The silence hit me hard. Sitting in an empty space alone, eating lamb chops. I was released from one prison to create another self-imposed crate, but a crate that contained expensive whiskey, cigars, and a pretty girl who delivered my meal most evenings.
Silence.
Rejecting this descending gloom or whatever it was, I pushed my chair back, grabbed my tray, and left my office to sit in the lounge room opposite. At least I could sidetrack myself with the busyness down on the floor, and later on, the girls dancing.
I swiped for Freddie’s number to ask him to organize a girl for tonight, but I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t bear to press send and tossed my phone onto the leather seat beside me. What was going on here? You’d think after three years without sex, I’d fuck anything with a pulse, yet the yearning wasn’t there. The urge to fuck was there, but desire to go through with it wasn’t.
Maybe I needed to see a doctor or a shrink? No. I just needed a distraction. Even though there was plenty to look at on the floor, my mind focused on her, smelling and looking like a dream.
Jeezus, was I losing my fucking mind? That’s the girl Gunner and Ronan fucked. Stay away from her, if you knew what was good for you, Mikky, I told myself. Except it was fun taunting her into submission, and then that smile… changed the entire look of her face. Cute plump cheeks, twinkling eyes. Lit up an entire room. Lit up my room. She didn’t laugh, though, not the way she laughed with Ronan. Maybe I should try to make her laugh next time.
How exactly does one make a girl laugh? That was a question I had never asked in all my years of dating, because accessing women was always effortless. No need to crack jokes and go to great efforts to woo when my date was bought and paid for. A high-class whore ordered the day before at great expense, with no emotional exchange and no trouble.
The club floor was pumping as the regular members sat in their usual places, casting bets, their hard-earned cash going down the plughole, or more accurately, into the club’s bank account. Waitresses came and went from the kitchen carrying white plates loaded with the best cuisine in the city, bar staff poured drinks, and gentle jazz music played in the background that would be ramped up later on when the dance girls glided out.
I heard Ronan knock on my office door, and I alerted him that I was in the lounge room. He hovered by my door holding his phone, “I found a witness,” he announced, “to the rat dump. They want to remain anonymous, though.”
“Yeah? What did they see?” I took a bite of a marinated lamb chop while waiting for his reply.
“They wanted to be paid for it,” he added carefully.
I rolled my eyes. “So they didn’t want to tell us out of the goodness of their hearts,” I mumbled sarcastically. I was unsurprised by this submission as it was a dog-eat-dog world, and in a way, I admired it.
“I took money out of the petty cash to pay him,” Ronan told me. “It was only five hundred.”
“That’s five hundred that could be spent on wages or tokens for the tables,” I argued. “So, the witness’s account better be solid.”
“They saw a van pull up just after five AM,” Ronan dropped his eyes to read the notes on his phone. “White with a launderette logo on the side. It caught the witness’s attention because they hadn’t seen this brand of launderette working this early before. This witness works early in the morning in the delivery business. That’s all the information he was prepared to give me about his identity.”
“What was the name of the launderette?” I pressed because we could follow it up if it were a genuine business.
“The witness believed it said Six oh Six Laundry, so I looked it up, and it doesn’t exist,” he answered as if reading my mind. I kept Ronan around because he was two steps ahead of me and worth his weight in gold.
Ronan continued, “Anyway, he saw the white van pull up outside the front entrance, and it looked like someone opened the door. The witness was suspicious because our laundry was left outside as normal, and the men in the van didn’t pick it up.”
“Has our laundry been picked up?” I was concerned for five seconds because the last thing we needed was bags of dirty laundry sitting out front while our elite members walked past them.
“They weren’t there when I walked in earlier; besides, it’s Betty’s job to organize it if our laundry service failed to show,” he proclaimed. “Lastly, the witness said a man carried a cardboard box inside.”
I groaned. “Yeah, I can guess what was inside it. So, have the security cameras been checked?”
Ronan sighed. “The deeper I dig into this, the more I believe you’re right. That this was an inside job, and the witness statement confirms that.”
“Have you checked the security footage?” I insisted, since he seemed to be avoiding answering the question.
“There was no footage that confirmed what the witness said,” he responded, gritting his teeth.
“Nothing? Not even the white van?” I snarled as my shoulders tensed. “So, the witness lied. We paid five hundred for a fairytale.”
“No,” Ronan protested evenly, keeping his tone steady to avoid alarming me. “I don’t think so. I suspect it was either wiped or turned off before the van turned up.”
Fury shuddered down my spine as I gazed out across the club floor wondering who was fucking us over and why. If the witness statement was accurate, someone was inside to greet the man with the box of rats.
“How many staff have a key and know the alarm code?” I asked him.
“Us, Betty, Freddie, and the managers under them who cover on their days off,” he answered.
“What about the Red Velvet Rooms?” I pressed.
“Freddie oversees it all, and I kinda leave him to it, since he has more expertise than I in running that particular profession,” his reply was carefully worded because he was never comfortable with that side of the business. His objective was making sure the mess was cleaned up afterwards so it was spick and span for the next wealthy client to offload the note in his wallet.
Fatigue weighed down on my shoulders, knowing that someone was walking the floor right now wearing a mask of an essential worker, while betraying us.
I exhaled heavily to relax the rage burning on the inside. “You tell me, Ronan. I was in prison for the last three years, and there had to be someone out there.” I pointed my finger to the floor, “who you suspect was not who they seem.”
“Everything ran smoothly, Mikky, thanks mostly to Betty and Freddie. Any problems that arose were easily solved, and for the most part, were staffing and product issues. Not a stranger emptying a box of rats into the club,” he explained.
I trusted the guy more than anyone. Every time he visited me in prison, it was like a staff meeting in which he updated me on what was happening in the business.
“I can’t look past the timing, Ronan,” I pointed out. “This shit started after I was released from prison, so it had to be the police in an attempt to make my life hell, so I’d overreact by doing something that might get me arrested.”
Ronan pointed his thumb toward the viewing window. “Did she say anything?”
“ She ? As in Petra Black or Riley Laws, depending on what day it is,” I answered sarcastically.
“Yeah, Riley.” The tenderness in his tone urged me to glance at his face, and the goofy dude was suppressing a smirk, but I could see his fondness for her in his eyes.
“You have a one-track mind,” I poked fun at him, which prompted him to look away from me so I couldn’t see the dopey expression on his face. “And no, she said the staff talk mostly about work-related topics, which is why we pay them.”
“She gave me her new phone number earlier after her other phone was broken,” he sighed, then pressed his lips together. “You know, I just can’t get my head around her. Part of me thinks she’s so sweet and kind, yet something beneath the surface is insincere.”
I nodded in understanding. I didn’t know the girl well enough to judge her character, so I had to go by what Gunner and Ronan said about her. But there were far too many red flags to ignore.
“Gunner said her phone was bugged,” he blurted, and my eyes widened.
“Seriously?” I probed. “Who bugged it? I mean…did she know someone was tracking her?”
Ronan rubbed his jaw with the back of his fist. “It’s hard to know what’s happening because we’re getting conflicting stories.” He shuffled restlessly, and I knew he wanted to ask me something hard for him to say. “It’s also hard to gauge when I can’t get close to her.”
I snorted. “Oh, I see,” lighting my cigar and taking a strong pull, blowing the smoke out. “You want to fuck her.”
He shrugged, not denying it. “There are things spoken in bed when the girl is relaxed that aren’t spoken normally.”
I threw my head back laughing, then pointed my cigar at him. “Good try, Ronan, but rules are rules.”
“Yeah, well,” he confessed, “It was worth a try.” Returning to his office, he yelled, “I’ll just use my hand.”
“Don’t we all, mate,” I mumbled gruffly as my humor drained from my bones with every returning thought of prison and my arrest, then her —that girl who walked into my office, cheeks burning, glasses skewed, terror behind her eyes.
Gunner believed she was Annika. Ronan thought she was a spy. Yet, both longed to fuck her again as if she put a spell on them where they were unable to look at another girl ever again.
But all I saw was a pretty, shy girl who smelled like flowers and melted like butter in the palm of my hand.