AN: I wrote this for an AU Glee RP that I used to be in, and I thought I'd post it here with some of my other things. Enjoy!
It had been the usual horrible day at work. Rachel had come in two hours early at three for the tail end of the lunch shift. She had waited on tables for hours on end and received the usual sexual advance from several different male patrons. She had gotten her foot tangled in a woman's handbag strap and ended up dropping a tray full of dirty dishes all over the floor. Not to mention the leftover pasta scraps that landed on the owner of the building Mr. Pinsiotti's head as he was enjoying his normal Sunday dinner of chicken parmesan and garlic toast. The fact that Sam had shown up to see her the second she had finished cleaning everything up didn't help her very much either.
Once Sam had left with plans to come over to her place around eleven-thirty that night, her boss, Tony Bernardino, confronted her. "Rachel, get your ass back here right now," he called to her from the doorway of the back room when she entered the kitchen. "We need to have a little discussion."
Rachel slumped in with an obvious frown on her face; these "little discussions" never went well for her. You see, Tony was a six foot four inches tall, three hundred and sixty pound man with a bad temper. He towered over Rachel with her tiny five foot two stature, and he was more than just intimidating; he wasn't afraid to rough up his employees as Rachel had witnessed many times before. Normally, he ignored her since her dad was technically his boss, but that didn't stop him from ushering Rachel into the back room every now and then. "What do you need me for, sir?" she asked keeping her eyes on the floor.
"I've been more than a little displeased with you lately, Rachel," Tony started. His anger was apparent in the tone of his voice. "Just today you broke about fifty dollars' worth of dishes, and you covered a very important patron with the scraps of someone else's meal . . ."
"My foot got caught on the strap of someone's handbag! I didn't mean . . ." Rachel started to defend herself only to be cut off by Tony's yelling.
"Let me finish!" he stopped her midsentence his voice booming out at a volume almost painful to Rachel's ears. "Now, if I were you, I would have spent ages apologizing, cleaned up the damn mess, and then gone straight back to work making sure I didn't do anything else wrong for the rest of the evening. But what did you do, Rachel?" He stopped to let her answer, but she kept her eyes trained on the floor instead. He grabbed her jaw and jerked her head up so she was facing him. "I wasn't talking to the damn wall!" he screamed in her face. "Might as well have been though. You're just as stupid. Now I wanted an answer to that question." He kept his grip on her jaw, but insisted she speak.
Rachel tried to avert her gaze from him by shutting her eyes and turning her face slightly away from him while she spoke in barely a whisper. "I took a visit from a close frie . . ." That was as far as she got before he sharply jerked her jaw so that she was facing him again. She winced from the pain he was causing her, but she refused to cry. She wouldn't let him break her. Not again.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you," he yelled spittle flying from his mouth and landing on Rachel's cheek. "And speak up! The roaches under the stove are louder than you!"
"I took a visit from a close friend," she said in a louder, less timid voice. "And I made plans to meet with him tonight after I got off work."
"Now, would you like to explain why you used the time that I pay you for to socialize with an idiot who had a retarded little grin plastered on his face the whole time he was here?" Tony's last statement set Rachel off. He could say whatever he wanted about her, abuse her, and throw her around, but he couldn't say anything about Sam.
"How dare you insult him!" she yelled grabbing his hand and ripping it away from her face. "You don't even know him! And if you did, you would realize that Sam is wonderful, and he's more of a man than a pathetic scumbag like you could ever hope to be!" She had more that she wanted to say to him, but she was cut off by a backhand to the face. She staggered backwards a little bit from the shock of the blow. One of his rings had collided with her cheek and dragged across her skin. She lifted a hand up to feel it, and there was a scratch where the stone had cut her skin. Blood droplets decorated her fingers when she pulled them away.
"Why you ignorant little whore!" Tony screamed in her face once more. "How dare you speak to me that way! Might I remind you who signs your paycheck each week?"
"Might I remind you who my father is?" Rachel hissed holding back her tears.
"I don't care who your dear old dad is," he replied. "You don't work for him; you work for me." He stopped for a moment to look at the fragile girl in front of him. She had backed herself up against the wall, and she looked so vulnerable in that moment. "You know, I could just pretend this whole conversation never happened. You could keep your job, and II could guarantee that I would completely forgive you for unjustly insulting me . . . why don't you show me why all the guys come around here looking for you? Why don't you and I do what you were planning to do with that blondie with the idiotic smile? It'll be worth your while." Tony had been walking towards Rachel while he spoke to her, and by the time he finished speaking, he was pressed up against her pinning her hips to the wall. "What do you say, Berry? You seemed to enjoy it the last time. Do we have a deal?"
Before Rachel could think about what she was doing, she kneed Tony in the crotch, and she got him as good as she possibly could. He crumpled up in a ball on the floor at her feet. "As if I would ever sleep with someone like you." She spat out her words with an anger unmatched by any other person on Earth. "I didn't have a boyfriend the last time. And last time, I was looking for a raise." She turned on her heels and started to head towards the door.
"You walk out now, and you can kiss your job goodbye," Tony winced from his position on the floor.
"And here I thought it was fucking obvious that I just quit," Rachel smirked as she headed out of the back room. "And you can bet your fat ass that my father will be hearing about this." With that, she slammed the door shut, grabbed her bag from the kitchen, and stormed out of the back entrance and into the alleyway not even bothering to change out of her work clothes. She pulled out a cigarette from her purse and lit it only making it about a block away from the restaurant before collapsing to her knees in front of another building. The cigarette dropped from her mouth on the pavement as her body started to shake violently from the sobs bursting from her body. People just walked around her on the busy streets; not a single person stopped to see what was wrong.
After a few minutes of sitting there on the sidewalk, Rachel picked herself up and started heading back towards her apartment. She whipped out her phone and scrolled through her contacts until she found the right number.
"Vinny's Laundromat and Dry Cleaning Service," the voice on the other end of the phone said when they picked up the call. "If we can't clean it no one can. How can I help you today?"
"Joey, I am not in the mood for this cover up bull shit. Put my father on the phone. Now!" she practically yelled into the phone.
Moments later, she heard another voice. "Vincenzo Rossi speaking. How can I help you?"
"Daddy, it's Rachel."
"Princess, what's wrong? You never call unless something bad is happening."
"I need you to do something for me," she said as she ducked into an empty alleyway. This was a conversation nobody else needed to here. "And I need you to not ask me any questions."
"Of course, princess. Anything for you."
"I don't care how or when you do it," she started. "But I need you to get rid of Tony Bernardino. And I need you to do it as soon as possible. I don't want the blood to be on my hands with this one."
"Consider it done, princess."