Page 2 of Break You

“Hey wait!”

I’d almost forgotten Cherie was even there. My mind had already raced ahead to the rest of the evening’s proceedings. Cold and clinical though it was, she knew not to expect hearts and flowers from me—that wasn’t what we were about. In fact, there was no “we” even, and that was how both of us liked it. Life was too short, and we were too young and way too gorgeous to be tied to fucking just one person.

By the time I’d registered what she was saying, it was too late. I’d already angrily wrenched the door open.

“What in the name of fucks is your goddamned problem?” Surprise flared in the door-banger’s eyes as she realized that the person she’d been yelling profanities at wasn’t another member of staff, but a guest. Rather than contrition, the surprise was quickly replaced by defiance. She pulled her shoulders back and seemed to grow several inches taller before levelling me with a steady and determined gaze.

“I need to use the bathroom. So, if you’ll excuse me...” She motioned behind me with her chin, then without asking or telling, walked into the room, much to the horror of Cherie, who was still pulling down her dress and straightening her sleek auburn hair. I guessed she’d been planning on reapplying her lipstick too, as it had now smudged onto her porcelain skin.

I personally loved the contrast of blood red against bone white, but I understood why she probably wouldn’t want to re-enter the ballroom looking like Coco the Clown. She might have been less than fastidious when it came to choosing fuckbuddies, but she was nothing if not meticulous in her personal presentation—she liked to be immaculate at all times.

Cherie pushed past the two of us—the door knocker and me—as she huffed haughtily out of the room. I’d have gone after her if I gave even half a fuck about placating her, but I didn’t. I listened to the melodious clip clop of her red-soled heels as it faded into the distance, all the while looking over my shoulder at the girl who’d interrupted us.

“This is the part where you leave, unless you’re planning on watching me pee. Which isn’t an invitation, by the way. Get out.” It might not have been an invitation, but the words, and the image they conjured up were enough to get my dick twitching, and my boner back with a vengeance. I was harder at the thought of watching a random angry chick pee than I had been the entire time I was screwing Cherie. The realization had my feet rooted to the ground, and my eyes fixed on Angry Girl.

While I contemplated that weird concept, she took the initiative.

“Okay, well, it was ‘nice’ meeting you. Ballroom’s that way.” She motioned with her chin again. “See ya.” She placed her hand on my shoulder and shoved lightly—not enough to get her arrested for assault, but enough to put me on the other side of the threshold.

I looked up just in time to see the deep-oak door close squarely in my face, with a small click of the lock.

Well, damn.

Rocky

Holy shit! What the actual fuck even was any of that?

I practically leapt across the room tearing my pants down as I went. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told the douche that I was about to pee myself, though of course at the time I’d thought I was speaking to another member of staff—one who clearly didn’t need the job as much as I did. I’d almost died when the door opened and it was an asshole guest, complete with tux that was probably worth more than the apartment I lived in. Definitely more than my car, Foxy Brown.

Damned if I was going to let him know I was worried, though. If there was one thing I’d learned early on in life, it was that showing fear, even when you felt it down to your bones, was a sure-fire way to end up dead. That level of risk didn’t apply in this scenario, but it was generally a principle I lived by regardless.

I was pissed that because I’d thought it was someone in a similar position as me, I’d revealed my hand, telling him how much I needed the greens. I was kicking myself because I shouldn’t have said anything under any circumstances. I liked to keep my business exactly that—mine.

Even worse that I’d unwittingly given some entitled douche nugget—someone who could definitely get me fired on the spot—way more personal information than I wanted anyone to have. Knowledge was power, and I never liked to give anyone any kind of power over me. Shit. My brain must have been addled by the imminent threat of soiling myself while someone used the sole staff bathroom to get their rocks off.

Not much I could do about it after the fact, though, which was why I’d kept up with the hostility once we were face-to-face. By that point I’d already committed to a certain level of rudeness before I’d seen who I was talking to, and there was no retracting the things I’d already said, short of groveling like a pathetic little servant girl.

Pride apparently came before a fall, but I’d rather go out that way—getting fired because I couldn’t hold my tongue—than fall on the mercy of one of my fellow students. Two, if you counted the Master of the Universe’s date. I didn’t, and judging by the way he didn’t give her a backward glance seconds after he’d pulled his dick out of whichever of her orifices he’d stuck it into, neither did he.

I may not have had money, breeding, power, or influence, but pride was free, and it was one of the few things I did possess in abundance. If I gave that up, I might as well just jump in front of the L and call it a day. Fuck that. So, I’d brazened it out, hoping that I wouldn’t pee myself while he stared at me like he’d seen a ghost, and that he wouldn’t go straight back to the party and report me to my supervisor. But, if he did, I’d walk out of there with my pride intact, my head held high, and my rent unpaid, while he wouldn’t give me a second’s thought after he’d downed his next drink.

I peed as quickly as I could, fixed up my uniform, and washed my hands, rushing out of the bathroom and heading back down the hall leading to the ballroom. I’d known as soon as I’d gotten the details for tonight’s gala that it couldn’t possibly end well for me. In all the years I’d been working for Network Events as casual event staff, I’d never had a gig at Heathcote University, but because the world was fucked, or at least my life was, the first time I’d been booked to work there was when I attended the very same hallowed seat of learning, meaning that I had to serve my peers.

Just fucking great.

I’d agreed to the booking weeks earlier, and it was quite normal not to find out the full details until the day of the gig, or the night before, and even after years of loyalty, it would screw me over for getting more work in the future if I’d pulled out at that late stage. I just couldn’t afford to take that risk, especially now that I wasn’t available to work as much as I used to be, due to my college commitments. Not only that, but I really needed the money to make my rent that month, so I’d taken the job, running the risk of waiting on someone I shared classes with.

I’d hoped that maybe there’d be nobody there I’d recognize, at least not students, anyway. Lecturers were a different story—I didn’t really care what they thought of me above and beyond my grades, so that wasn’t even a consideration. Either way, I decided to brazen it out, reasoning that Heathcote was a big place, and I was just one person.

Besides. I hadn’t exactly been a social butterfly in my time there to date, so the number of people I knew either by name or by face was pretty limited. That wasn’t by accident, but by design. I wasn’t there to make friends, which was a good thing, because if I was, I would have been sorely disappointed.

I had very little, if anything, in common with the majority of my peers, if I could even call them that. Pretty much everyone at Heathcote was loaded. Old money. New money. Clean money. Dirty money. It might not have been the same money, but they all had money of some kind. I was no money for generations.

I didn’t know the intricacies of who had what, and how it was acquired, and I definitely didn’t care. It was enough for me to be aware that they all had something I never had, but that being there alongside them was my ticket out of the gutter.

For them, college was a few fun-filled years to pass the time between childhood and adulthood. Getting drunk, getting high, and getting laid were top of their list of priorities. Getting grades, not so much. I was the exact opposite. I had my eyes very firmly on the prize, and anything that seemed like it might get in the way of that was of less than zero interest.

There was a lot riding on my four years at Heathcote—way too much at stake for me to toss it away having ‘fun.’ Not that any of that juvenile shit constituted fun for me anyway, but even if it did, I was too busy looking to secure the keys to my future and a one-way ticket away from my past to worry about trivialities like getting fucked in the staff bathroom at a college event.

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