Chapter One
Becky
It’s not every day I get called in early to see the boss, in fact. I never have come to think of it.
I only met him once in person. The day I was hired not so long ago. I was so happy that day. Thought all my problems were over.
Like I’d never have to worry about money again let alone work hard another day in my life.
Ha!
I gulp hard and heavy, at the base of the spiral staircase to the boss’s office, the smell of last night’s cigar and cigarette smoke mixed with the reek of stale high end booze lingering in the Special Member’s only lounge.
Stairway to heaven. That’s what the boss likes to call it according to most of the other girls.
Ugh!
The man’s a pig, but he pays cash and I need every cent I can get if I’m gonna make my already overdue rent this month.
A college education, three years with a diploma in ‘The Arts’. Hardly what the world is crying out for right now.
Let alone a five foot, thick set girl that hides her real emotions behind a bubbly smile.
Inside I’m dying.
If I don’t flash a smile, keep every glass full and every patron of the bosses club happy, I’m better off dead.
Royally screwed.
In fact, I have a hunch if my landlord and my boss ever met, they’d get on like a large house fire. Like one of those high rise infernos.
Filled with plastic and electric vehicle batteries with Kevlar tires filling the underground garage.
The kind they can never put out.
Maybe they’re related and I just don’t know it?
Fortunately for me, my boss doesn’t have an eye for thick set, top heavy girls with wide hips and enough ass for a bench seat.
He told me as much on day one.
Nope. My job is to tend the front bar, flash my pearly whites and keep topping those drinks up until I get the cue.
The word comes via a phone call from behind the bar or a simple nod from security at the door.
Get ‘em loosened up enough and then direct them to any one of the plastic faced Barbie’s who waitress here who woo them to the gaming tables in the back.
That’s how the boss makes the real money. And I know for a fact it doesn’t flow down the food chain to the bar staff either.
Apart from knowing which door they go through, and the shape of the stick figures who lures them here, I just do my job.
Maybe it’s a promotion? Finally, a pay rise.
I’m not sure what chokes me first as I climb the last few steps, hesitating at the huge steel door before I knock. The bullshit thought or the rising staleness from the thickly carpeted lounge down below.
I don’t know how they can stand it.
Booze and smoke. I mean, choose your poison buddy. But both at once?
Yuck.
The stale smell aside, it’s a plush looking place from what I’ve seen of the Special Member’s only lounge. Thick, thick red carpeting, big everything. Like the brass banister and handrail of the solid oak steps I climb.
With chunky, gleaming tabletops. Smooth with heavy lacquer and inlaid timber patterns.
The same inlaid woodwork discreetly advertising the men’s rooms and a couple more doors so discreet they aren’t even marked private. They even look like a part of the walls.
It’s that kind of club. Not full underground, Mafioso stuff, but an illegal gambling house using a gentleman’s club as a front.
We all know it, but the need for cash keeps us quiet and smiling.
If I need to pee during a shift, I have to make do since I’m not allowed to use the guest’s bathroom. Mostly sneaking into the only other bathroom in the basement that certainly looks like it could use a woman’s touch.
But the only thing to touch it is my ass when I have to choose between pissing in private, or in the small sink behind the bar as my only other option.
No thanks. That’s just the kind of floor show the regulars would appreciate, I suspect.
The bar and ‘club’ out front are the same as the private lounge, but less intimate and with no shag pile carpet.
The room with the gaming tables? Never seen it only heard whispers from the others. Once my shift’s over and I’ve been paid I’m outta here.
I rarely get to step out from behind the heavy wooden bar anyway, but I do see my own reflection so often as I turn to fix drinks that it almost feels like there are two of me.
I wished there was.
One could sleep and the other I’d send to work.
I watch my hand shaking, hesitating before I knock.
There are two male voices, thickly muted by the door but one I recognize, the other I don’t.
It’s a deeper voice, a low gravelly one.