Dirty Rich

“Table six is asking for you again,” Rosa said, sliding past me with a tray balanced on her shoulder. “The creepy one with the wedding ring.”

I kept my eyes on the coffee I was pouring and said nothing. I already knew which man she meant. He had been coming into Rosario’s Diner every Thursday for the past month, always planting himself in my section, always leaving his number scrawled on a napkin beside a tip that was just generous enough to make me feel uncomfortable about refusing it.

“Tell him I’m busy,” I said.

“I’ve been telling him that for twenty minutes.”

“Then tell him I died.”

Rosa laughed and disappeared through the kitchen doors. I set the coffee pot down and pressed my fingers against the edge of the counter for just a moment. My feet were screaming inside my shoes. I had been on shift since six in the morning and it was nearly midnight. The fluorescent lights above me had been flickering for three hours and nobody had bothered to fix them, and the smell of grease and maple syrup had soaked so deeply into my hair that I was fairly certain I would never smell like a normal human being again.

This was my life. I had made my peace with it. Mostly.

I picked up my notepad and walked to table six with the smile I had perfected over four years of waitressing. The kind of smile that said absolutely nothing about what was happening behind my eyes.

“Can I get you anything else, sir?”

He looked up at me. Somewhere in his fifties, soft around the jaw, with the particular confidence of a man who had never been told no often enough.

“Just you,” he said.

I wrote something meaningless on my notepad. “I’ll bring you the check then.”

I turned and walked away before he could say anything else. At the counter I tore off his receipt and handed it to Rosa without a word. She looked at my face and wisely said nothing.

By the time my shift ended the city outside had turned cold and wet. October in New York had a way of arriving without warning, stripping the last warmth out of the air overnight and leaving the streets slick and unfriendly. I pulled my jacket tight around myself and started walking toward the subway.

I made it two blocks before I realized I had forgotten my phone on the counter.

I turned back. The diner was already locked, the lights inside dimmed to almost nothing. I knocked on the glass and waited but Rosa had already left through the back. I stood there for a moment with rain beginning to collect in my eyelashes and made the kind of decision that only truly exhausted people make. I would come back for it in the morning.

I turned around and nearly walked directly into the man from table six.

He had been waiting. I understood that immediately, the way you understand certain things in the dark, in your stomach before your brain even catches up.

“I thought we could talk,” he said.

“I’m going home,” I said. I kept my voice steady. I had learned early that fear was something you could not afford to show in this city.

I stepped to the side. He stepped with me.

“Come on,” he said, and his hand reached out and closed around my wrist.

Everything in me went very still. The rain was coming down harder now. The street was quiet in the particular way New York streets got at midnight, where the noise of the city felt far away and the space between two people felt enormous and dangerous all at once.

I pulled my arm back. He did not let go.

“Let me go,” I said.

“You’ve been ignoring me for weeks. I just want to talk.”

“I said let me go.”

His grip tightened and something behind his eyes shifted into something uglier, and I was already calculating distances in my head. The subway entrance two blocks away. The all night pharmacy on the corner. And then a voice came through the rain from somewhere behind me.

“She asked you to let her go.”

It was not a loud voice. It did not need to be. There was something in it that made the man from table six go completely still. I turned my head.

A man stood on the pavement a few feet away. Tall. Dark coat. The rain did not seem to bother him the way rain never bothers people who are used to the world arranging itself around them. His face was angular and unreadable and his eyes were fixed on the man holding my wrist with an expression that was almost bored. Almost.

The hand around my wrist disappeared.

“I was just leaving,” the man from table six muttered, and he walked away quickly, his footsteps swallowed by the rain.

I stood on the wet pavement and looked at the man who had spoken. He looked back at me and said nothing for a long moment. Just watched me with those calm, unreadable eyes, like he had all the time in the world and the rain was nothing more than background noise.

Then he said, “Are you alright?”

His voice was quieter now. Less commanding.

Almost human.

And I had absolutely no idea what to say.