If ya don't know, I pulled to re-post to play by FFn rules with the M-rating bull! It's whack as fuck but it is what is it... If my fics ever got pulled I'd be pissed and hurt, so I'd rather not wait around to see if it happens! I'm too paranoid and high strung for that shit! LOL
*** You can find NC-17 versions on my blog and TWCS. Links on my profile :-)
The Correct answer to where I worked is: Rolex (Rollexx)... Interesting times I tell ya!
"Luck (good or bad) is not as random as you think."
-Vera Nazarian
=2=
"Yo, Bella!"
I look up from the table I'm wiping down at the sound of Jacob's voice and notice he's all the way on the other side of the bar. Damn he's loud. "Yeah?"
"Someone left this for you," he says, waving a small white envelope in the air—a somewhat mischievous look in his eyes.
"Umm . . ." I look down at everything in my hand. Wet towel, spray bottle, gloves. "Can you hold onto it for me for a few?" I try and shout but it's strained. My voice just doesn't carry as much as his.
Not being able to hear me, Jacob strolls over in my direction, defeating the purpose of me telling him to hold onto the envelope for me. "Whad'ya say?"
"Never mind." I snicker, craning my neck all the way back to speak to him. Fucker's huge and just towers over me. "My hands are wet. Can you put it in my pocket for me?" He clears his throat a little uncomfortably, and it's then I realize I had unceremoniously stuck my ass out and in the air toward him.
"Oh, sorry. How about this?" I turn around to offer him my front pocket only to realize I am now thrusting my crotch at him.
Well hello, embarrassment.
"How 'bout—" he starts, letting his eyes roam over me "—this," And with a laugh, he sticks it under my arm.
"Thanks." I chuckle.
"Don't mention it. Hey by the way, good job tonight. I can tell you're more comfortable."
"Well . . ." I shrug. "I'm a little used to feeling Esme's eyes on me now."
His lips curve down into a frown, making his youthful, tan face look aged. "What are you talking about?"
"Since I was late and all that yesterday, I got a pretty clear warning not to fuck up again. She watched me all night and again tonight. I'm sure she's waiting for a slip-up so she can fire my ass."
Slowly shaking his head, he says, "Bella, Ms. Esme hardly ever stays all night. And when she does, it's not to stay out here and watch you guys. She has cameras in her office for that. If someone was watching you, it wasn't her!"
"That's . . . a really creepy way to word that sentence."
"I realized that too late," he tells me sheepishly, scrunching up his nose. "Anyway, I'm off for the night. Make sure Aro, Paul, or Quil walk you ladies out to your car when you're leaving."
"Okay." I nod, even though I have no intention of bothering the other bouncers—well, Aro doubles as a bar back, but whatever. When I look over and see a few girls coming out of the dressing rooms, I tell him, "Shouldn't be much longer now."
"Good." With another reminder to make sure we're walked to the car, Jacob leaves.
As soon as I finish wiping down the rest of my tables, I sit down at a booth and begin to count my tips while I wait for Rosalie.
I did really good last night and decent tonight, but I suspect I'd do more if I adopted Rose's 'less is more' philosophy when it came to clothes and bothered to put some make-up on my face.
Yesterday's was washed off because of sweat. Today the make-up didn't even make it on my face due to sheer laziness.
A few minutes later, Rosalie walks out with a girl I've never seen before. She's short, shorter than my 5'3"; and she's wearing jean shorts, a white tank top and her jet black hair is piled on top of her head in a lazy ponytail.
"Bella, this is Twiddler. Twiddler, Bella."
"Nice to meet 'cha," she says sweetly, voice laced with a thick accent. With a firm handshake for me and a hug for Rose, she wishes us a good night and tells Rosalie she'll be back to work tomorrow.
I'm excited for this. I want to see her trick.
"How'd you do?" Rose asks as soon as we're in the car.
My smile can't be contained. "A little over two hundred dollars."
"Nice!"
"It'll probably cost me that, plus what I made yesterday, just to fix my car. But at least I can, you know," I tell her proudly. I can look at is as 'damn, I'm going to have to spend all my money to fix my shit-box car', or realize I'm—for the first time in a while—a little lucky to actually have the money. I go for the latter.
"Well . . . if you want to hold out on the car, you know you can always use mine."
Doesn't take me long to ponder this. "That'll be helpful," I tell her. "At least until I can save a little bit more."
"Then it's settled."
I smile at her with gratitude. I'm not one to take advantage of people's kindness, or seek out help, but I'm also not one to turn it down when it's offered. It doesn't come my way often.
"Hey, can I use your phone?" Rose asks, suddenly.
I'm reaching into my purse to grab it before she finishes her sentence. "Sure. Everything okay?"
"Yeah," she chuckles. "Call this number for me." Once she's done prattling them off, she reaches her hands out and I place it in her palm. After a few seconds with the phone pressed to her ear, she shrugs and hands it back to me. "Thanks."
"Umm . . . okay?"
"I've called Emmett like twice today and he hasn't answered. I wanted to see if he'd answer if he thought it was someone else."
"Don't tell me you guys are already fighting. Didn't you just start dating like two weeks ago?"
"We are . . . and yes," she answers both of my questions.
"That's gotta be a record," I tease her. "Do I even want to know?"
"He told me to stop working at the club," she says simply.
"Ah . . . I see." If worded the right way, you can ask Rose to do just about anything. She's just such a genuinely nice person that the shirt on her back means nothing to her if she thinks someone needs it. But to tellher to do something? Yeah, no.
"Exactly," she snorts. "Will I stop working there? Of course. I'm not gonna be fifty with my tits down to here—" she touches somewhere near her hip "—before I quit. But I'm not gonna do it 'cause someone I've only been dating for a few weeks, who I also met at the club, says so. I won't do that controlling bullshit. Never again."
For a second, I allow myself to remember a time I would sooner forget. As strong and sweet as Rosalie is, she somehow got suckered into a relationship with the world's biggest douche nozzle. Royce King. She met him our senior year in high school, and after three years of what I know—even though she denies—was major abuse, she left Royce and moved here to Florida. Not a far distance from Georgia, in theory, but still a random move.
The first thing she did was walk into the strip club and ask for a job. She didn't feel like starting college, having never gone after high school because Royce was so damn demanding. And she knew, with what little self-esteem she had left, she did have a body men would literally pay for.
I remember the phone call I got from her after not hearing from her in months.
"I got a job flashing my tits four days a week," she had said in a bored tone. "And no, not for just beads." Before I could say anything, she had piped back in. "I know it's not ideal, but it's better than nothing and I really need you to be a friend on this. No judgment."
"I'm in the no judgment zone," I promised. "Just be careful."
I was glad I ended up having nothing to worry about because she was lucky it ended up being one of the more 'higher class' gentlemen's clubs, versus the nasty-ass, hole-in-the-wall, everyone's-secretly-a-prostitute ones.
"I'm starving," she grumbles, bringing my attention back to her. "What should we eat?"
Glancing at my phone, and then sliding it into my back pocket, I snicker. "It's after three in the morning. Water."
Ignoring me, she drives to a 'Miami Subs' drive-thru—ordering enough food to feed an army. Since I'm not hungry, I simply order a large Coke, which I suck down in less than two minutes. By the time we pull into the parking lot of our apartment, I almost tear the door off the hinges, needing to pee so badly.
It's a simple building, three stories and about six apartments all together with only two flights of stairs. So, thankfully, I don't piss myself before I make it to the bathroom.
I do, however, forget I put my phone in my back pocket and as soon as I slide my jeans down, I hear the unmistakable sound of metal hitting the bottom of the toilet.
"Fuck!"
Now it's time to make a decision. But before I can contemplate the sanitary options of just reaching my bare hand into the toilet, my full bladder wins out. When I'm done handling my business, I look under the bathroom sink and realize there are no gloves there. Heading into the kitchen, Rosalie almost knocks me down, her own Coke catching up to her.
As I'm looking under the kitchen sink for gloves, I hear an everyday sound that normally wouldn't affect me, but . . . "Noo!" I shout, tearing into the bathroom in an attempt to stop the demise of my phone from happening.
It's too late. I want to cry, but instead of being met with sympathy, Rose just looks over at me like I'm crazy.
"What?"
"You just flushed my phone."
((LUCK))
"One-hundred, eighty-three dollars, and fifteen cents," I grumble the next day, showing Rosalie my new phone.
"I'm so sorry, Bella," she whispers from next to me but I sigh, my grumblings not at her, per se.
"Rose, it was an accident. I'm the one who dropped it in the first place. It's not like you were looking to see if there were any stray objects in the toilet before you flushed."
"Eww! Definitely wasn't."
Laughing softly, I take my phone back and start playing with it. It's a much nicer phone than the one I had, and I actually got a deal on it, but it's just an expense I hadn't planned on, you know. And not having a phone in this day and age is kind of irresponsible. We don't have a house phone, so if anything ever happens, I'd definitely be screwed with no way of getting in touch with anyone.
"Let me buy you lunch," she offers sadly, clearly feeling way more guilty than she should. There's a good chance the phone had drowned itself beyond repair once it fell into the water, but she refuses to hear any of it. "I got some time before I have to get to work."
"Rose, it's cool. Promise." I smile at her. "I'm off tonight anyway—I don't work on Sundays, so I have plenty of time to make something. No need in spending money."
She frowns but relents as we chat a little absentmindedly about my new phone and what she plans on wearing tonight. Something about an outfit she forgot she even had until today.
"Oh, I did your laundry—"
"Rose."
"Not out of guilt," she rushes out, but I give her a skeptical look. "Okay, maybe feeling bad about the phone thing had something to do with it, but I was doing mine too."
"Fair enough. Thanks."
She bobs her head up and down. "Don't sweat it. But an envelope had fallen out of your pocket, I took it out but it's still with all your clothes.
In the hoopla of my phone taking its own life, I had forgotten all about the envelope. For some reason, I feel a sense of overexcitement mixed with nervousness come over me as I rush to my room to retrieve it.
Fishing through the hamper, I giggle when I find the, somewhat now crumpled, envelope.
"Someone left this for me," I tell Rose, walking back into the living room. "Last night, someone left this for me with Jacob."
"Oh! Open it! Open It! I bet it's a tip."
With a wide smile, I almost rip the envelope in two but I'm confused when I see inside it's just a blank card.
"That's the card they use to reserve tables at the club," Rose explains. "There's some writing on the back."
Flipping it to the other side, I notice a somewhat messy scrawl, as if someone was rushing when they wrote it.
*I Know You're New. So You Don't Know How Things Work.
But It's Customary Here To Leave Your Favorite Girl a Tip.
Yesterday You Became Mine.*
I purse my lips, turning the card over and over in my hands. "Is this a joke?" Apparently it's not 'cause when I open the actual card five $100 bills slip out.
"Holy shit!"
"Wow," Rose beams. "Looks like someone has a secret admirer."
"Yeah, but who?"
Btw ... I NEVER got tipped that much~ *snort*
~Lo
