I spend as much time as I realistically can slathering lotion onto my skin, giving it a few minutes to soak in before I slip into a lacy, navy blue teddy, cut high at the hip and low at the tit, just like the creepy dudes like it. I finish the look with a pair of black heels, six inches high and shiny as all get out, strapped around my ankles.
Out of prepping steps and time, I grab a large tray kit and head out of the lounge, making my way up the stairs to the VIP section with my best fake smile and my saccharine customer service voice at the ready.
I realize all too late that I never actually got my table assignment, so it’s a guessing game of where I’m supposed to be tonight. There’s no way that they could expect me to work four tables up here on my own. I move through the space, poking my head into each section to find my customers, but from one to three, I come up empty – literally, there is no one up here.
Weird.
Finally reaching table four, I poke my head in, and my stomach flip flops. My breath catches in my throat and my pulse quickens.
“I was starting to think you weren’t gonna show, Sugar,” Eric drawls from his seat on the couch, arms splayed out across the back of it and his ankle crossed over his knee. “Come on, sit.”
“Areyouwhy it’s empty up here?” I laugh, tucking my tray under my arm as I move to sit next to him.
I’m nervous, sharing this space with him. On vacation, he was just...a hot, mysterious playmate. But here, he’s real. He’s an actual person that exists in the same space as me, breathing the same air, and he has such a commanding energy that it makes heat flush my chest.
Shoving down my nerves, I settle into the seat next to him. Okay, maybe settle is a little exaggerative. I tensely perch next to him on the seat. There, that’s closer.
“I told you I’d be back for you,” he answers plainly. Leaning forward, he grabs the menus sitting on the table in front of him and hands them to me. “Is it on here?”
I nod, with my heart jumping into my throat, silently pointing to the HOUSE SPECIALS list.
He wouldn’t.
Would he?
I guess I don’t really know him all that well, maybe it’s his thing. He does love to play a game of predator and prey; maybe this is an easy way for him to get exactly what that game gives him.
Power.
Control.
“Explain it to me.”
“It all depends on who’s working,” I say, pointing down the list, “I would be vodka. Crystal is red, Summer is the tequila, Ashton is the rum...so on and so forth.”
“So the prices,” he says, pursing his lips in thought.
“Half an hour of free use.”
With a nod, he reaches for my tray, plucking the sharpie from the pad of paper sitting on it and pulls the cap off with his teeth. He scribbles through the HOUSE SPECIALS on the first menu, the second, the third...until they’re all covered in thick black ink, and my heart skips at the gesture, just a little bit.
“Now that’s out of the way,” he smiles, settling back into the couch, “get whatever you want to drink and tell me what you’ve been up to since you ditched my sorry ass.”
We spend the next hour sharing a couple of bottles of really expensive champagne, laughing, and catching up as if this is the most normal thing in the world. As if I didn’t ask him to chase me down an alleyway. As if we don’t have a set of matching-in-their-own-way tattoos hidden just beneath thin layers of fabric.
As if I haven’t spent every waking minute regretting not hopping on that plane with him and leaving everything else behind.
I tell him about my newfound cosmetology school dreams, to which he replies, “What the fuck is cosmology?” And I laugh harder than I think I have in weeks.
For a while, I forget that I’m even at work. It isn’t until he strips off his leather jacket and drapes it over my shoulders that I remember that I’m sitting here in lingerie, in a club that I wish every day that I could get away from, and I know that I probably never will.
And I realize that I’m sitting way, way too intimately with him for someone who has a boyfriend.
But I don’t move. I keep my ass planted firmly in his lap, his arm draped over my shoulder sending a familiar shiver trickling up my spine.
“Eric...why did you come back?” I finally ask him.
“I told you I would.”
