The General (Professionals 4)

And then, one day, I was working as a waitress at a local restaurant.

And a man walked in.

The kind of man who didn’t belong.

The kind who had far too much money to be in my little nowhere town with an expensive suit complete with a pocket square and cufflinks, a matte, platinum watch around his wrist.

When he was seated in my section, I didn’t think thoughts like I was going to sink my claws into him, make him take me away with him into a life of luxury.

No.

I just thought how nice it would be if he left a decent tip for a change. And then I worked for it. Smiling, engaging, discussing dishes even though I knew I had refills to fetch for another table and yet another table’s food was likely dying in the window.

Sure, he was handsome. In that aristocratic way, all the right features that – when all put together – almost seemed too perfect. So handsome that he was almost ugly. But there were plenty of good-looking men in and out of the restaurant. I was just glad his check went over fifty – for one person – because it meant his tip would be decent even if he was just a typical fifteen-percent tipper.

It wasn’t until I dropped the check that I felt a sizzle at all. And only because as I pressed the little black book onto the shiny surface of the table, his hand closed around my wrist, sending an odd, unfamiliar jolt through my system, making my gaze shock up to find his gaze on me, a small smile tipping up the side of his mouth.

“What is a girl like you doing working in a place like this?”

In hindsight, I hated myself for what I thought when he said those words. Which was something to the effect of Finally, someone realizes I am not meant to be stuck here.

But I’d been a seventeen-year-old girl. And I had next to no experience with boys. So having this older, wealthy, more worldly man wanting to pay me attention, yeah, it got me fluttering, making my words stumble over each other, something that made him chuckle, a sound that moved through me like a shiver.

“What are you doing after work?”

Besides trying not to get kidnapped or raped on my walk home in the pitch black?

“Nothing,” I told him, honestly.

“What do you say I swing by and take you out for some coffee. There has to be somewhere around here that is open late.”

There was.

And despite many, many teachers lecturing us about never getting in cars with strangers, I agreed, then spent fifteen minutes after cashing out and sweeping my section in the bathroom trying to get the ponytail kink out of my hair, fixing up my makeup, trying to make my work uniform of black slacks and a black button-up-blouse less hideous. In the end, I had unbuttoned the top three buttons even though my chest area had never been all that big to begin with, and then tied the bottom part of my shirt up, revealing a teensy sliver of belly and lower back. I borrowed perfume from the hostess to get the fried food smell out of my clothes, ate enough Altoids to burn all the tastebuds on my tongue, and moved outside to wait for him to show up.

Twenty minutes later, there was a crushing feeling in my chest when the restaurant closed behind me, and he still hadn’t showed.

Stood up on my first date.

That sounded about right.

But just as the last of my coworkers pulled out of a parking lot, a car turned in. The nice kind of car. The one that didn’t groan or grumble when it was running. No, his car purred as it slowed and stopped right in front of me.

And then he did the damndest thing – that thing from movies I had seen. He climbed out, fastening his middle suit jacket button, and moving around the front of the car to open the door from me, taking my hand as I lowered myself down into the buttery soft leather seat, settling in, watching him as he moved around the hood, unfastened the button again, and slid into the driver’s seat.

He’d been the perfect gentleman to a girl who was used to boys who snapped bra straps and made up lewd songs to sing at groups of girls as they passed out front the high school.

Being with him made me feel different, made me aware that I could be that person I dreamed about. The one who got out of our town, got out of the poverty.

He didn’t make fun of me when I didn’t know the names of the artists he talked about seeing at the Met, didn’t correct me in front of the waitress when I pronounced the dishes wrong at a fancy French restaurant he took me to on our second date.